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The challenges of long-duration energy storage have inspired some creative solutions.
Imagine a battery. Maybe you envision popping one into a fading flashlight or a dead remote controller. Perhaps you consider the little icon on the top of your phone or laptop screen, precariously dipping into the red while you search for a charger. Or you might picture the powerful battery pack inside your electric vehicle, helping to make gas stations obsolete.
These minor to major electrochemical marvels are fine, but the opportunity space for energy storage is so, so much larger — and weirder. Water moving between two reservoirs is a classic un-classic battery, but compressed air stored in a cavern, raising and lowering heavy blocks, even freezing water or heating up rocks can also all be batteries. And these methods of energy storage have the potential to be enormously helpful where standard lithium-ion batteries fall short — namely for long-duration energy storage and large-scale heating and cooling applications.
Lithium-ion batteries still dominate the market, Kevin Shang, a senior research analyst at energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie, told me. But “over the next 10 years, we do see more and more long-duration energy storage coming into play.” Typical lithium-ion batteries can provide only about four hours of continual power, occasionally reaching up to eight — though that’s an economic constraint rather than a technical one. Generally speaking, it’s too pricey for lithium-ion to meet longer-duration needs in today’s market. So as states and countries get real about their clean energy targets and install more wind and solar generation, they need some way to ensure their grids’ reliability when the weather’s not cooperating or demand is peaking.
“There’s a need for something that can substitute for natural gas,” Logan Goldie-Scot, director of market research at the sustainable infrastructure investment firm Generate Capital told me. Almost no one believes lithium-ion batteries will be a viable alternative. “And so then it is an open question of whether that role will be filled by long-duration energy storage, by green hydrogen, or by clean firm power” like nuclear or geothermal, he said.
There are some novel battery chemistries and configurations out there, from Form Energy’s iron-air batteries to flow batteries that store their electrolytes in separate tanks to zinc-based batteries. But there are also numerous more creative, non-chemical, not-what-you-might-consider-a-battery batteries vying for a role in the long-duration storage market.
Founded back in 2010, Toronto-based Hydrostor has been pursuing “advanced compressed air energy storage” for a while now. Essentially, the system uses off-peak, surplus, or renewable grid energy to compress air and pump it into a water-filled cavern, displacing that water to the surface. Then when energy is needed, it releases the water back into the cavern, pushing the air upward to mix with stored heat, which turns a turbine and produces electricity.
“Everybody has talked about long-duration storage for probably the past five years or so. The markets have not been there to pay for it at all. And that’s starting to change,” Jon Norman, Hydrostor’s president, told me.
Part of Hydrostor’s pitch is that its tech is a “proven pathway,” as it involves simply integrating and repurposing preexisting systems and technologies to produce energy. It’s also cheaper than lithium-ion storage, with no performance degradation over a project’s lifetime. Major investors are buying it — the company raised $250 million from Goldman Sachs in 2022, to be paid out in tranches tied to project milestones. At the time, it was one of the largest investments ever made in long-duration energy storage.
The company has operated a small 1.75 megawatt facility in Canada since 2019, but now with Goldman’s help it’s scaling significantly, developing a 500 megawatt grid-scale project in California in partnership with a community choice aggregator, as well as a 200 megawatt microgrid project in a remote town in New South Wales, Australia.
“Our bread and butter application is serving the needs of grids and utilities that are managing capacity and keeping the lights on all the time,” Norman told me. The company’s projects under development are designed to deliver eight hours of energy. “That’s what the market’s calling for right now,” Norman said, though theoretically Hydrostor could handle multi-day storage.
Standard lithium-ion batteries have shown that they can be economical in the eight-hour range too, though. Back in 2020, a coalition of community choice aggregators in California requested bids for long-duration storage projects with at least eight hours of capacity. While Hydrostor and numerous other startups threw their hats in the ring, the coalition ultimately selected a standard lithium-ion battery project for development.
While this could be viewed as a hit to more nascent technologies, Hydrostor said the process ultimately led to the company’s 25-year, 200 megawatt offtake contract with Central Coast Community Energy, which will purchase power from the company’s 500 megawatt project in California’s Central Valley, set to come online in 2030. But that long lead time could be one of the main reasons why Hydrostor didn’t win the coalition’s bid in the first place.
“When you consider the very pertinent needs for energy storage systems today in California and yesterday, a technology that is not due to come online for another six years – I don’t think you’re even yet at the cost comparison conversation,” Goldie-Scot told me, in reference to Hydrostor’s timeline. “It’s just, how soon can some of these companies deliver a project?” Generate recently acquired esVolta, a prominent developer of lithium-ion battery storage projects.
But ultimately, Norman says he doesn’t really view Hydrostor as in competition with lithium-ion. “We would even add [traditional] batteries to our system if we wanted to provide really fast response times,” he told me. He says the use cases are just different, and that he has faith that compressed air storage will eventually prove to be the superior option for grid-scale, long-duration applications.
Another company taking inspiration from pumped storage hydropower is Energy Vault. Founded in 2017, the Swiss company is pursuing a “gravity-based” system that can store up to 24 hours of energy. While the design of its system has shifted over the years, the basic concept has remained the same: Using excess grid energy to lift heavy blocks (initially via cranes, now via specialized elevators), and then lowering those blocks to spin a turbine when there’s energy demand.
The company raised $110 million from Softbank Vision Fund in 2019, but failed to find an immediate market for its tech. “When we founded the company, we started thinking long-duration was going to be required much more quickly, and hence the focus on gravity,” Rob Piconi, Energy Vault’s CEO, told me.
But instead of waiting around for the long-duration market to boom, the company went public via SPAC in early 2022 and reinvented itself. Now it makes much of its revenue selling the sort of traditional lithium-ion energy storage systems that it once sought to replace, and has made moves into the green hydrogen space, too.
“The near term difficulty for many of these long-duration storage companies is that we’re still relatively early on in the scaling of lithium-ion,” Goldie-Scot, told me, noting that prices for Chinese-made batteries have plunged in the past year. Generate usually only invests in tech that’s well-proven and ready to scale up. So while lithium-ion alternatives will look more and more attractive as the world moves toward full decarbonization, in the interim, “there’s a gap between that longer term need and where the market is today.”
Piconi agrees. “If you look at storage deployments 95% to 98% of them are all this shorter duration type of storage right now, because that’s where the market is,” he said, though he added that he’s seeing demand pick up, especially in places like California that are investing heavily in storage.
All that’s to say the company hasn’t given up on its foundational concept — its first commercial-scale gravity energy storage system was recently connected to the grid in China, and the company has broken ground on a second facility in the country as well. These facilities provide four hours of energy storage duration, which lithium-ion batteries can also easily achieve — but the selling point, Piconi says, is that unlike lithium-ion, gravity storage systems don’t catch fire, rely on critical minerals, or degrade over time. And once the market demands it, Energy Vault can provide power for much longer.
Still, the upfront costs of Energy Vault’s system can be daunting for risk-averse utilities. So in an effort to lower prices, the company recently unveiled a series of new gravity storage prototypes that leverage either existing slopes or multi-purpose skyscrapers. They were designed in partnership with the architecture and engineering firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the company behind the world’s tallest building.
The market may not have been ready five years ago, Piconi told me. But “in 12 to 24 months, we’re going to start to see gravity pop up,” he projected.
But wait, there’s more. Perhaps one of the best use cases for lithium-ion alternatives is in onsite, direct heating and cooling applications. That’s what the Israeli company Nostromo Energy is focused on, aiming to provide cleaner, cheaper air conditioning for large buildings like offices, school campuses, hotels, and data centers.
The company uses off-peak or surplus renewable energy to freeze water, storing it for later use in modular cells. Then, as temperatures rise and air conditioning turns on, that frozen water will cool down the building without the need for energy-intensive chillers, which commercial buildings normally rely upon. The system can be configured to discharge energy for two-and-a-half all the way up to 10 hours.
“Because air conditioning is roughly half of the electricity consumption of a building, we can provide that half from stored energy. And that’s overall a huge relief on the grid,” Nostromo’s CEO Yoram Ashery told me.
While a lot of (my) attention has been focused on how thermal batteries can help decarbonize heat-intensive industrial processes, and much has been written about the benefits of electric heat pumps over gas-powered heating, cooling is sometimes overlooked. That’s at least partially because air conditioning is already electrified.
But as more of our vehicles, appliances, and systems go electric, strain on the grid is poised to increase, especially during times of peak energy demand in the late afternoon and evening as people return home from the office before the sun goes down. Nostromo’s system can help shift that load by charging either midday (when solar is abundant) or at night (when wind is peaking), and discharging as demand for AC ramps throughout the afternoon.
Goldie-Scot said thermal storage technologies like this “offer something that some of the other technologies that are purely power-focused cannot. But they are still competing against relatively cheap natural gas.”
The upfront cost of the system, $2 to $3 million, is also nothing to sneeze at. But Ashery says it will fully pay for itself after just five years, as building owners stand to see significant savings on their electricity bills by shifting their demand to off-peak hours.
While one could theoretically power a building’s AC system using large lithium-ion-batteries, “it’s a problem to put big lithium batteries inside buildings,” Ashery told me. That’s due to the fire risk, which could impact insurance premiums for businesses, as well as space issues — these batteries would need to be container-sized to run an HVAC system. “That’s why only 1% of energy storage currently goes into commercial/industrial buildings,” Ashery wrote in a follow up email.
Shang told me that he sees so-called “behind the meter” applications like this as promising early markets for long-duration storage tech, especially given that utilities are “pretty cautious to adopt these technologies on a large scale.” But ultimately, he believes that policy is what’s really going to jumpstart this market.
“For long-duration storage, it may look years ahead, but actually the future is now,” he said. Because some of these new systems take longer to design and build, Shang told me, “you have to invest now. For the policies, you have to be ready now to support the development of these [long-duration energy storage] technologies.”
The Biden administration is certainly trying. All energy storage tech — thermal, compressed air, gravity, and lithium-ion — stands to benefit from generous IRA tax credits, which will cover 30% of a project’s cost, assuming it meets certain labor standards. Additional savings can accrue if a project meets domestic content requirements or is sited in a qualifying “energy community,” such as a low-income area that derives significant revenue from fossil fuel production.
The Department of Energy’s ultimate goal is to reduce the cost of grid-scale long-duration energy storage by 90% this decade (with “long” defined as 10-plus hours). And last year, the DOE announced $325 million in funding for 15 long-duration demonstration projects.
So while the market might not be quite ripe yet for funky, alternative approaches to long-duration storage, support like this is going to be necessary to ensure that these technologies are proven, cost-effective and available as the grid decarbonizes and the need crystallizes.
“There is not currently a system-wide way of valuing long-duration energy storage while competing against gas, but there are customers and utilities that have shown a willingness, especially with federal and state support, to invest in these technologies,” Goldie-Scot said. “That I think is giving us the first real inkling of the role that the long-duration can play in this market.”
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The EV-maker is now a culture war totem, plus some AI.
During Alan Greenspan’s decade-plus run leading the Federal Reserve, investors and the financial media were convinced that there was a “Greenspan put” underlying the stock market. The basic idea was that if the markets fell too much or too sharply, the Fed would intervene and put a floor on prices analogous to a “put” option on a stock, which allows an investor to sell a stock at a specific price, even if it’s currently selling for less. The existence of this put — which was, to be clear, never a stated policy — was thought to push stock prices up, as it gave investors more confidence that their assets could only fall so far.
While current Fed Chair Jerome Powell would be loath to comment on a specific volatile security, we may be seeing the emergence of a kind of sociopolitical put for Tesla, one coming from the White House and conservative media instead of the Federal Reserve.
The company’s high-flying stock shed over $100 billion of value on Monday, falling around 15% and leaving the price down around 50% from its previous all-time high. While the market as a whole also swooned, especially high-value technology companies like Nvidia and Meta, Tesla was the worst hit. Analysts attributed the particularly steep fall to concerns that CEO Elon Musk was spending too much time in Washington, and that the politicization of the brand had made it toxic to buyers in Europe and among liberals in the United States.
Then the cavalry came in. Sean Hannity told his Fox News audience that he had bought a Model S, while President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that “I’m going to buy a brand new Tesla tomorrow morning as a show of confidence and support for Elon Musk, a truly great American.” By this afternoon, Trump had turned the White House lawn into a sales floor for Musk’s electric vehicles. Tesla shares closed the day up almost 4%, while the market overall closed down after Trump and his advisors’ furious whiplash policy pronouncements on tariffs.
Whether the Tesla put succeeds remains to be seen. The stock is still well, well below its all-time highs, but it may confirm a new way to understand Tesla — not as a company that sells electric vehicles to people concerned about climate change, but rather as a conservative culture war totem that has also made sizable investments in artificial intelligence and robotics.
When Musk bought Twitter and devoted more of his time, energy, money, and public pronouncements to right wing politics, some observers thought that maybe he could lift the dreadful image of electric vehicles among Trump voters. But when Pew did a survey on public attitudes towards electric vehicles back in 2023, it found that “Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, younger adults, and people living in urban areas are among the most likely to say they would consider purchasing an EV” — hardly a broad swathe of Trump’s America. More than two-thirds of Republicans surveyed said they weren’t interested in buying an electric car, compared to 30% of Democrats.
On the campaign trail, Trump regularly lambasted EVs, although by the end of the campaign, as Musk’s support became more voluminous, he’s lightened up a bit. In any case, the Biden administration’s pro-electric-vehicle policies were an early target for the Trump administration, and the consumer subsidies for EVs passed under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act are widely considered to be one of the softest targets for repeal.
But newer data shows that the tide may be turning, not so much for electric vehicles, but likely for Tesla itself.
The Wall Street Journalreported survey data last week showing that only 13% of Democrats would consider buying a Tesla, down from 23% from August of 2023, while 26% of Republicans would consider buying a Tesla, up from 15%. Vehicle registration data cited by the Journal suggested a shift in new Tesla purchases from liberal urban areas such as New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, towards more conservative-friendly metropolises like Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, and Miami.
At the same time, many Tesla investors appear to be mostly seeing through the gyrations in the famously volatile stock and relatively unconcerned about month-to-month or quarter-to-quarter sales data. After all, even after the epic fall in Tesla’s stock price, the company is still worth over $700 billion, more than Toyota, General Motors, and Ford combined, each of which sells several times more cars per year than Tesla.
Many investors simply do not view Tesla as a luxury or mass market automaker, instead seeing it as an artificial intelligence and robotics company. When I speak to individual Tesla shareholders, they’re always telling me how great Full Self-Driving is, not how many cars they expect the company to sell in August. In many cases, Musk has made Tesla stockholders a lot of money, so they’re willing to cut him tremendous slack and generally believe that he has the future figured out.
Longtime Tesla investor Ron Baron, who bought hundreds of millions of dollars worth of shares from 2014 to 2016, told CNBC Tuesday morning, that Musk “believes that digitization [and] autonomy is going to be driving the future. And he thinks we’re … on the verge of having an era of incredible abundance.”Baron also committed that he hasn’t, won’t, and will never sell. “I’m the last in, I’ll be the last out. So I won’t sell a single share personally until I sell all the shares for clients, and that’s what I’ve done.”
Wedbush Securities’ Dan Ives, one of the biggest Tesla bulls on the street, has told clients that he expects Tesla’s valuation to exceed $2 trillion, and that its self-driving and robotics business “will represent 90% of the valuation.”
Another longtime Tesla bull, Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas, told clients in a note Monday that Tesla remained a “Top Pick,” and that his price target was still $430, compared to the stock’s $230.58 close price on the day. His bull case, he said, was $800, which would give the company a valuation over $2.5 trillion.
When the stock lags, Jonas wrote, investors see Tesla as a car company. “In December with the stock testing $500/share, the prevailing sentiment was that the company is an AI ‘winner’ with untapped exposure to embodied AI expressions such as humanoid robotics,” Jonas wrote. “Today with the stock down 50% our investor conversations are focused on management distraction, brand degradation and lost auto sales.”
In a note to clients Tuesday, Ives beseeched Musk to “step up as CEO,” and lamented that there has been “little to no sign of Musk at any Tesla factory or manufacturing facility the last two months.” But his bullishness for Tesla was undaunted. He argued that the scheduled launch of unsupervised Full Self-Driving in June “kicks off the autonomous era at Tesla that we value at $1 trillion alone on a sum-of-the-parts valuation.”
“Autonomous will be the biggest transformation to the auto industry in modern day history,” Ives wrote, “and in our view Tesla will own the autonomous market in the U.S. and globally.”
The most effective put of all may not be anything Trump says or does, but rather investors’ optimism about the future — as long as it’s Elon Musk’s future.
The uncertainty created by Trump’s erratic policymaking could not have come at a worse time for the industry.
This is the second story in a Heatmap series on the “green freeze” under Trump.
Climate tech investment rode to record highs during the Biden administration, supercharged by a surge in ESG investing and net-zero commitments, the passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act, and at least initially, low interest rates. Though the market had already dropped somewhat from its recent peak, climate tech investors told me that the Trump administration is now shepherding in a detrimental overcorrection. The president’s fossil fuel-friendly rhetoric, dubiously legal IIJA and IRA funding freezes, and aggressive tariffs, have left climate tech startups in the worst possible place: a state of deep uncertainty.
“Uncertainty is the enemy of economic progress,” Andrew Beebe, managing director at Obvious Ventures, told me.
The lack of clarity is understandably causing investors to throw on the brakes. “We’ve talked internally about, let’s be a little bit more cautious, let’s be a little more judicious with our dollars right now,” Gabriel Kra, co-founder at the climate tech firm Prelude Ventures, told me. “We’re not out in the market, but I would think this would be a really tough time to try and go out and raise a new fund.”
This reluctance comes at a particularly bad time for climate tech startups, many of which are now reaching a point where they are ready to scale up and build first-of-a-kind infrastructure projects and factories. That takes serious capital, the kind that wasn’t as necessary during Trump’s first term, or even much of Biden’s, when many of these companies were in a more nascent research and development or proof-of-concept stage.
I also heard from investors that the pace of Trump’s actions and the extent of the economic upheaval across every sector feels unique this time around. “We’re entering a pretty different economic construct,” Beebe told me, citing the swirling unknowns around how Trump’s policies will impact economic indicators such as inflation and interest rates. “We haven’t seen this kind of economic warfare in decades,” he said.
Even before Trump took office, it was notoriously difficult for climate companies to raise funding in the so-called “missing middle,” when startups are too mature for early-stage venture capital but not mature enough for traditional infrastructure investors to take a bet on them. This is exactly the point at which government support — say, a loan guarantee from the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office or a grant from the DOE’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations — could be most useful in helping a company prove its commercial viability.
But now that Trump has frozen funding — even some that’s been contractually obligated — companies are left with fewer options than ever to reach scale.
One investor who wished to remain anonymous in order to speak more openly told me that “a lot of the missing middle companies are living in a dicier world.” A 2023 white paper on “capital imbalances in the energy transition” from S2G Investments, a firm that supports both early-stage and growth-stage companies, found that from 2017 to 2022, only 20% of climate capital flowed toward companies at this critical inflection point, while 43% went to early-stage companies and 37% towards established technologies. For companies at this precarious growth stage, a funding delay on the order of months could be the difference between life and death, the investor added. Many of these companies may also be reliant on debt financing, they explained. “Unless they’ve been extremely disciplined, they could run into a situation where they’re just not able to service that debt.”
The months or even years that it could take for Trump’s rash funding rescission to wind through the courts will end up killing some companies, Beebe told me. “And unfortunately, that’s what people on the other side of this debate would like, is just to litigate and escalate. And even if they ultimately lose, they’ve won, because startups just don’t have the balance sheets that big companies would,” he explained.
Kra’s Prelude Ventures has a number of prominent companies in its portfolio that have benefitted from DOE grants. This includes Electric Hydrogen, which received a $43.3 million DOE grant to scale electrolyzer manufacturing; Form Energy, which received $150 million to help build a long-duration battery storage manufacturing plant; Boston Metal, which was awarded $50 million for a green steel facility; and Heirloom, which is a part of the $600 million Project Cypress Direct Air Capture hub. DOE funding is often doled out in tranches, with some usually provided upfront and further payments tied to specific project milestones. So even if a grant has officially been awarded, that doesn’t mean all of the funding has been disbursed, giving the Trump administration an opening to break government contracts and claw it back.
Kra told me that a few of his firm’s companies were on the verge of securing government funding before Trump took office, or have a project in the works that is now on hold. “We and the board are working closely with those companies to figure out what to do,” he told me. “If the mandates or supports aren’t there for that company, you’ve got to figure out how to make that cash last a bunch longer so you can still meet some commercially meaningful milestones.”
In this environment, Kra said his firm will be taking a closer look at companies that claim they will be able to attract federal funds. “Let’s make sure we understand what they can do without that non-dilutive capital, without those grants, without that project level support,” he told me, noting that “several” companies in his portfolio will also be impacted by Trump’s ever-changing tariffs on imports from Canada, Mexico, and China. Prelude Ventures is working with its portfolio companies to figure how to “smooth out the hit,” Kra told me later via email, but inevitably the tariffs “will affect the prices consumers pay in the short and long run.”
While investors can’t avoid the impacts of all government policies and impulses, the growth-stage firm G2 Venture Partners has long tried to inoculate itself against the vicissitudes of government financing. “None of our companies actually have any exposure to DOE loans,” Brook Porter, a partner and co-founder at G2, told me in an email, nor have they received government grants. If you add up the revenue from all of the companies in G2’s portfolio, which is made up mainly of sustainability-focused startups, only about 3% “has any exposure to the IRA,” Porter told me. So even if the law’s generous clean energy tax credits are slashed or the programs it supports are left to languish, G2’s companies will likely soldier on.
Then there are the venture capitalists themselves. Many of the investors I spoke with emphasized that not all firms will have the ability or will to weather this storm. “I definitely believe many generalist funds who dabbled in climate will pull back,” Beebe told me. Porter agreed. “The generalists are much more interested in AI, then I think in climate,” he said. It’s not as if there’s been a rash of generalist investors announcing pullbacks, though Kra told me he knows of “a couple of firms” that are rethinking their climate investment strategies, potentially opting to fold these investments under an umbrella category such as “hard tech” instead of highlighting a sectoral focus on energy or climate, specifically.
Last month, the investment firm Coatue, which has about $70 billion in assets under management, raised around $250 million for a climate-focused fund, showing it’s not all doom and gloom for the generalists’ climate ambitions. But Porter told me this is exactly the type of large firm he wouldexpect to back out soon, citing Tiger Global Management and Softbank as others that started investing heavily during climate tech’s boom years from 2020 to 2022 that he could imagine winding down that line of business.
Strategic investors such as oil companies have also been quick to dial back their clean energy ambitions and refocus their sights on the fossil fuels championed by the Trump administration. “Corporate venture is very cyclical,” Beebe told me, explaining that large companies tend to make venture investments when they have excess budget or when a sector looks hot, but tighten the purse strings during periods of uncertainty.
But Cody Simms, a managing partner at the climate tech investment firm MCJ, told me that at the moment, he actually sees the corporate venture ecosystem as “quite strong and quite active.” The firm’s investments include the low-carbon cement company Sublime Systems, which last year got strategic backing from two of the world’s largest building materials companies, and the methane capture company Windfall Bio, which has received strategic funding from Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund. Simms noted that this momentum could represent an overexuberance among corporations who just recently stood up their climate-focused venture arms, and “we’ll see if it continues into the next few years.”
Notably, Sublime and Windfall Bio both also have millions in DOE grants, and another of MCJ’s portfolio companies, bio-based chemicals maker Solugen, has a “conditional commitment” from the LPO for a loan guarantee of over $200 million. Since that money isn’t yet obligated, there’s a good chance it might never actually materialize, which could stall construction on the company’s in-progress biomanufacturing facility.
Simms told me that the main thing he’s encouraging MCJ’s portfolio companies to do at this stage is to contact their local representatives — not to advocate for climate action in general, but rather “to push on the very specific tax credit that they are planning to use and to talk about how it creates jobs locally in their districts.”
Getting startups to shift the narrative away from decarbonization and climate and toward their multitudinous co-benefits — from energy security to supply chain resilience — is of course a strategy many are already deploying to one degree or another. And investors were quick to remind me that the landscape may not be quite as bleak as it appears.
“We’ve made more investments, and we have a pipeline of more attractive investments now than we have in the last couple of years,” Porter told me. That’s because in spite of whatever havoc the Trump administration is wreaking, a lot of climate tech companies are reaching a critical juncture that could position the sector overall for “a record number of IPOs this year and next,” Porter said. The question is, “will these macro uncertainties — political, economic, financial uncertainty — hold companies back from going public?”
As with so many economic downturns and periods of instability, investors also see this as a moment for the true blue startups and venture capitalists to prove their worth and business acumen in an environment that’s working against them. “Now we have the hardcore founders, the people who really are driven by building economically viable, long-term, massively impactful companies, and the investors who understand the markets very well, coming together around clean business models that aren’t dependent on swinging from one subsidy vine to the next subsidy vine,” Beebe told me.
“There is no opportunity that’s an absolute no, even in this current situation, across the entire space,” the anonymous climate tech investor told me. “And so this might be one of the most important points — I won’t say a high point, necessarily — but it might be a moment of truth that the energy transition needs to embrace.”
On the energy secretary’s keynote, Ontario’s electricity surcharge, and record solar power
Current conditions: Critical fire weather returns to New Mexico and Texas and will remain through Saturday • Sharks have been spotted in flooded canals along Australia’s Gold Coast after Cyclone Alfred dropped more than two feet of rain • A tanker carrying jet fuel is still burning after it collided with a cargo ship in the North Sea yesterday. The ship was transporting toxic chemicals that could devastate ecosystems along England’s northeast coast.
In a keynote speech at the energy industry’s annual CERAWeek conference, Energy Secretary Chris Wright told executives and policymakers that the Trump administration sees climate change as “a side effect of building the modern world,” and said that “everything in life involves trade-offs." He pledged to “end the Biden administration’s irrational, quasi-religious policies on climate change” and insisted he’s not a climate change denier, but rather a “climate realist.” According toThe New York Times, “Mr. Wright’s speech was greeted with enthusiastic applause.” Wright also reportedly told fossil fuel bosses he intended to speed up permitting for their projects.
Other things overheard at Day 1 of CERAWeek:
The premier of Canada’s Ontario province announced he is hiking fees on electricity exported to the U.S. by 25%, escalating the trade war kicked off by President Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods, including a 10% tariff on Canadian energy resources. The decision could affect prices in Minnesota, New York, and Michigan, which get some of their electricity from the province. Ontario Premier Doug Ford estimated the surcharge will add about $70 to the monthly bills of affected customers. “I will not hesitate to increase this charge,” Ford said. “If the United States escalates, I will not hesitate to shut the electricity off completely.” The U.S. tariffs went into effect on March 4. Trump issued another 30-day pause just days later, but Ford said Ontario “will not relent” until the threat of tariffs is gone for good.
There was a lot of news from the White House yesterday that relates to climate and the energy transition. Here’s a quick rundown:
The EPA cancelled hundreds of environmental justice grants: EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency nixed 400 grants across environmental justice programs and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs worth $1.7 billion. Zeldin said this round of cuts “was our biggest yet.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy rescinded Biden memos about infrastructure projects: The two memos encouraged states to prioritize climate change resilience in infrastructure projects funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and to include under-represented groups when planning projects.
The military ended funding for climate studies: This one technically broke on Friday. The Department of Defense is scrapping its funding for social science research, which covers climate change studies. In a post on X, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said DOD “does not do climate change crap. We do training and war fighting.”
Meanwhile, a second nonprofit – the Coalition for Green Capital – filed a lawsuit against Citibank over climate grant money awarded under the Inflation Reduction Act but frozen by Zeldin’s EPA. Climate United filed a similar lawsuit (but targeting the EPA, as well as Citibank) on Saturday.
A new report from the Princeton ZERO Lab’s REPEAT Project examines the potential consequences of the Trump administration’s plans to kill existing EV tax credits and repeal EPA tailpipe regulations. It finds that, compared to a scenario in which the current policies are kept in place:
“In other words, killing the IRA tax credits for EVs will decimate the nascent renaissance in vehicle and battery manufacturing investment and employment we’re currently seeing play out across the United States,” said Jesse Jenkins, an assistant professor and expert in energy systems engineering and policy at Princeton University and head of the REPEAT Project. (Jenkins is also the co-host of Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast.)
REPEAT Project
The U.S. installed nearly 50 gigawatts of new solar power capacity last year, up 21% from 2023, according to a new report from the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Wood Mackenzie. That’s a record, and the largest annual grid capacity increase from any energy technology in the U.S. in more than 20 years. Combined with storage, solar represents 84% of all new grid capacity added in 2024.
SEIA and Wood Mackenzie
Last year was “the year of materialization of the IRA,” with supply chains becoming more resilient and interest from utilities and corporate buyers growing. Installations are expected to remain steady this year, with little growth, because of policy uncertainty. Total U.S. solar capacity is expected to reach 739 GW by 2035, but this depends on policy. The worst case scenario shows a 130 GW decline in deployment through 2035, which would represent $250 billion in lost investments.
“Last year’s record-level of installations was aided by several solar policies and credits within the Inflation Reduction Act that helped drive interest in the solar market,” said Sylvia Levya Martinez, a principal analyst of North America utility-scale solar for Wood Mackenzie. “We still have many challenges ahead, including unprecedented load growth on the power grid. If many of these policies were eliminated or significantly altered, it would be very detrimental to the industry’s continued growth.”
Tesla shares plunged yesterday by 15%, marking the company’s worst day on the market since 2020 and erasing its post-election stock bump.