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The nonprofit laid off 36 employees, or 28% of its headcount.
The Trump administration’s funding freeze has hit the leading electrification nonprofit Rewiring America, which announced Thursday that it will be cutting its workforce by 28%, or 36 employees. In a letter to the team, the organization’s cofounder and CEO Ari Matusiak placed the blame squarely on the Trump administration’s attempts to claw back billions in funding allocated through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
“The volatility we face is not something we created: it is being directed at us,” Matusiak wrote in his public letter to employees. Along with a group of four other housing, climate, and community organizations, collectively known as Power Forward Communities, Rewiring America was the recipient of a $2 billion GGRF grant last April to help decarbonize American homes.
Now, the future of that funding is being held up in court. GGRF funds have been frozen since mid-February as Lee Zeldin’s Environmental Protection Agency has tried to rescind $20 billion of the program’s $27 billion total funding, an effort that a federal judge blocked in March. While that judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, called the EPA’s actions “arbitrary and capricious,” for now the money remains locked up in a Citibank account. This has wreaked havoc on organizations such as Rewiring America, which structured projects and staffing decisions around the grants.
“Since February, we have been unable to access our competitively and lawfully awarded grant dollars,” Matusiak wrote in a LinkedIn post on Thursday. “We have been the subject of baseless and defamatory attacks. We are facing purposeful volatility designed to prevent us from fulfilling our obligations and from delivering lower energy costs and cheaper electricity to millions of American households across the country.”
Matusiak wrote that while “Rewiring America is not going anywhere,” the organization is planning to address said volatility by tightening its focus on working with states to lower electricity costs, building a digital marketplace for households to access electric upgrades, and courting investment from third parties such as hyperscale cloud service providers, utilities, and manufacturers. Matusiak also said Rewiring America will be restructured “into a tighter formation,” such that it can continue to operate even if the GGRF funding never comes through.
Power Forward Communities is also continuing to fight for its money in court. Right there with it are the Climate United Fund and the Coalition for Green Capital, which were awarded nearly $7 billion and $5 billion, respectively, through the GGRF.
What specific teams within Rewiring America are being hit by these layoffs isn’t yet clear, though presumably everyone let go has already been notified. As the announcement went live Thursday afternoon, it stated that employees “will receive an email within the next few minutes informing you of whether your role has been impacted.”
“These are volatile and challenging times,” Matusiak wrote on LinkedIn. “It remains on all of us to create a better world we can all share. More so than ever.”
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The company managed to put a positive spin on tariffs.
The residential solar company Sunrun is, like much of the rest of the clean energy business, getting hit by tariffs. The company told investors in its first quarter earnings report Tuesday that about half its supply of solar modules comes from overseas, and thus is subject to import taxes. It’s trying to secure more modules domestically “as availability increases,” Sunrun said, but “costs are higher and availability limited near-term.”
“We do not directly import any solar equipment from China, although producers in China are important for various upstream components used by our suppliers,” Sunrun chief executive Mary Powell said on the call, indicating that having an entirely-China-free supply chain is likely impossible in the renewable energy industry.
Hardware makes up about a third of the company’s costs, according to Powell. “This cost will increase from tariffs,” she said, although some advance purchasing done before the end of last year will help mitigate that. All told, tariffs could lower the company’s cash generation by $100 million to $200 million, chief financial officer Danny Abajian said.
But — and here’s where things get interesting — the company also offered a positive spin on tariffs.
In a slide presentation to investors, the company said that “sustained, severe tariffs may drive the country to a recession.” Sounds bad, right?
But no, not for Sunrun. A recession could mean “lower long term interest rates,” which, since the company relies heavily on securitizing solar leases and benefits from lower interest rates, could round in the company’s favor.
In its annual report released in February, the company mentioned that “higher rates increase our cost of capital and decrease the amount of capital available to us to finance the deployment of new solar energy systems.” On Wednesday, the company estimated that a 10% tariff, which is the baseline rate in the Trump “Liberation Day” tariffs, could be offset with a half percentage point decline in the company’s cost of capital, although it didn’t provide any further details behind the calculation.
Even in the absence of interest rate relief, a recession could still be okay for Sunrun.
“Historically, recessions have driven more demand for our products,” the company said in its presentation, arguing that because their solar systems offer savings compared to utility rates, they become more attractive when households get more money conscious.
Sunrun shares are up almost 10% today, as the company showed more growth than expected.
For what it’s worth, the much-ballyhooed decline in long-term interest rates as a result of Trump’s tariffs hasn’t actually happened, at least not yet. The Federal Reserve on Wednesday decided to keep the federal funds rate at 4.5%, the third time in a row the board of governors have chosen to maintain the status quo. The yield on 10-year treasuries, often used as a benchmark for interest rates, is up slightly since “Liberation Day” on April 2 and sits today at 4.34%, compared to 4.19% before Trump’s tariffs announcements.
Meta and Microsoft both confirmed plans to invest heavily in AI infrastructure.
Big Tech said this week that it’s going full steam ahead with building out data centers, and the power industry loves it. Since Microsoft and Meta reported their earnings for the beginning of the year on Wednesday, including announcements either reaffirming their guidance on capital expenditures or even increasing it, power sector stocks have jumped.
Shares of Vistra, which has a fleet of power plants including nuclear, natural gas, coal, and renewables, are up almost 7% in early afternoon trading. Constellation, one of the largest nuclear producers in the country, is up 8%. GE Vernova, which makes in-demand gas turbines, is up 4%. Chip designer Nvidia’s shares are up 4%.
Microsoft, which has been dogged byanalyst and media reports that it’s canceling some data center builds or slowing down its overall pace of deployment, reaffirmed its previousguidance that it would spend around $80 billion on data centers for its fiscal year. The affirmed guidance, Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities wrote in a note to clients, came “put to rest” the earlier chatter.
Meta, meanwhile, raised its guidance for capital expenditures from a range of $60 billion to $65 billion to at least $64 billion and as much as $72 billion.
Looking at these hyperscalers, as well as the data center company CoreWeave, Morgan Stanley estimates 38% annual growth in capital expenditures for cloud computing in 2025, to $392 billion — a $29 billion or 7 percentage point jump from its estimate a month ago. This increased spending will be a “boost to AI capex/power enablers.”
These companies, which make up the larger artificial intelligence supplier complex, were some of the most affected by Donald Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs announcements, as energy production ishighly sensitive to the global macroeconomy. (Not to mention power plants and power plant suppliers are themselvesoften major purchasers of foreign goods and commodities.) GE Vernova, for example, told investors last month that it would take a several hundred million hit thanks to tariffs.
But in the topsy turvy world of post “Liberation Day” markets, these companies’ investors are optimistic about the future again.
Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella told analysts on the company’s earnings call that “we will be short power” when it comes to building out data centers, and that “I need power in specific places so that we can either lease or build at the pace at which we want.”
How that power will be provided is one of the key questions of the energy transition.
Big tech companies tend to have some kind of commitment to using renewable or low-carbon power, and are among the country’s largest voluntary purchasers of non-carbon-emitting power. Microsoft, for example,is helping pay for the planned restart of one unit of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant by agreeing to buy its power output.
There is a tight market for all sorts of power equipment right now, especially gas turbines, which will remain in short supply well into the back end of this decade based on current production plans. Renewable developers such as NextEra argue that solar, wind, and batteries make the most sense to quickly meet the needs of power-hungry data center developers and utilities because of how quickly and cheaply they can be built.“We should be thinking about renewables and battery storage as a critical bridge to when other technology is ready at scale, like new gas-fired plants,” NextEra chief executive John Ketchum said on an earnings call late last month, reversing the typical line that natural gas can serve as a “bridge fuel” to a low carbon future. “Gas turbines are in short supply and in high demand.”
In the meantime, load growth from data centers could push up power prices across the board. So even if you can’t build a new gas plant anytime soon, the one you’re operating that’s powering a data center right now is as good as gold.
The AI-powered startup aims to provide home-level monitoring and data to utilities.
In theory at least, an electrified household could play a key role in helping stabilize the grid of the future, alleviating times of peak electricity demand by providing power back to the grid and giving utilities timely warnings about hardware that may be failing. But devices used to measure and monitor power demand today, such as smart meters, aren’t advanced enough to do this type of orchestrated power management and fault detection at a granular level — thus leaving both financial and grid efficiency savings on the table.
Enter Utilidata, which just raised a $60 million Series C funding round to get its artificial intelligence-powered software module into smart meters and other pieces of grid infrastructure. This module acts as the brains of a device, and can provide utilities with localized insights into things like electricity usage levels, the operations of distributed energy resources such as home solar and batteries, anomalies in voltage data, and hardware faults. By forecasting surges or lulls in electricity demand, Utilidata can optimize power flow, and by predicting when and where faults are likely to occur, it empowers utilities to strategically upgrade their grid infrastructure, or at least come up with contingency plans before things fail.
The company’s AI system enables all of this analysis to happen at the grid edge — the point at which the electricity system enters a customer’s home — as opposed to in a centralized cloud, which reduces bandwidth needs and allows for immediate responses.
“There's enough capability at that node to optimize multiple complex decisions and create a better holistic outcome for the customer on the grid,” Utilidata CEO Josh Brumberger told me. The company did a trial recently with the Electricity Power Research Institute that showed promising cost savings and reduced grid strain. “We were able to reduce the customer’s bill by 12.5% and shave peak [usage] by 25%,” he told me.
Utilidata’s series C was led by the clean energy investor Renown Capital Partners, with support from strategic investors such as the electricity infrastructure company Quanta and Nvidia, which Utilidata partnered with to create its AI platform.
It will still be a while before Utilidata-powered smart meters allow for automated load management down to the household level, Brumberger told me, calling this the “Holy Grail” of grid operations. That’s because making load adjustments across interconnected systems is a complex task that needs to be perfectly coordinated, often with strict regulatory oversight and opt-in from participating customers. Utilities are famously cautious about adopting new technologies such as this one, as a mishap leading to a blackout can have catastrophic consequences.
A nearer term use case, Brumberger explained, would be detecting local power glitches more quickly, or forecasting when these failures might occur. For example, a new electric vehicle in the neighborhood could potentially overload local electrical distribution equipment. Utilidata could allow the utility to replace the equipment before anything goes wrong, thus enhancing grid resiliency. Insights such as this, Brumberger said, are “going to have value immediately.”
Already Utilidata has partnered with Aclara, a large manufacturer of smart meters, to install its AI module. One day, Brumberger told me, he wants to see the tech in other grid infrastructure such as transformers, EV chargers, or automatic circuit breakers known as reclosers.
Naturally, Brumberger is also excited about the potential of integrating Utilidata’s technology into data centers, telling me he sees opportunities to deploy the company’s AI modules “at the server level, at the rack level, and at the row level, all the way up to that interconnection point,” in order to help data centers run more efficiently. As the AI boom drives data center electricity demand through the roof, Utilidata is a classic example of AI helping to ameliorate the very problem it’s created.
“Every watt of energy that does not go towards compute because it's either lost or is going towards cooling is a wasted watt,” Brumberger told me. “And so the more granular and distributed your visibility and controls are, the more efficient and valuable a system you'll have.”