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Obvious Ventures’ Andrew Beebe and Generate Capital’s Scott Jacobs reflect on the past, present, and future of climate tech.
Climate tech investors have a lot to take stock of at the end of 2024. The macroeconomic environment is shaky and investment in the space is down, but there’s plenty of cash reserves lying in wait. Artificial intelligence and its attendant data center power demand may or may not be the downfall of a future clean electric grid. And in case you missed it, Donald Trump was elected once more, this time drawing the world’s most successful — and notorious — climate tech CEO into his fold.
This week I spoke with two veterans of the industry about all these trends and more — Andrew Beebe, managing director of the venture capital firm Obvious Ventures, which has over $1 billion in assets under management, and Scott Jacobs, co-founder and CEO of the comparably huge sustainable infrastructure investment firm Generate Capital, which has raised over $10 billion to date. And while Beebe sounded jazzed about the year to come, Jacobs struck a more downbeat note as he delved into the difficult realities that climate companies are facing.
Beebe reflected positively on 2024 as a whole, though he is historically both an optimist and a contrarian. Venture funds spent this year accumulating capital, a.k.a. “dry powder,” although that doesn’t mean investment into climate tech companies has actually increased.
“Those investors are now going to be very prudent and judicious with their capital,” Beebe told me, emphasizing that we’re likely already seeing the impact of this circumspect approach. Climate tech investment has declined sharply from its peak in 2021 and 2022, when many experts believe the market was running too hot. Though he didn’t have the numbers on hand to back it up, Beebe told me he suspects investors are sitting on more cash now than they were three years ago.
Jacobs, on the other hand, sounded passionate but weary as he mulled over the past year. “This year is a lot like the 10 years we’ve been in business in many ways, which is tough,” he told me. Based on numbers alone, Generate had a successful 2024, raising $1.5 billion from institutional investors and $1.2 billion in flexible loans while making $2 billion in investments. But Jacobs emphasized that the type of flexible, large-scale infrastructure funding that Generate specializes in is always going to be a grind. As he explained to me, getting limited partners to invest in Generate for the long-haul has been a perpetual challenge and the capital costs of running the firm are high, thanks partly to the labor needs of operating and maintaining infrastructure projects.
Jacobs didn’t say this year was any more challenging than normal, simply that Generate’s fundamental model is an all-too-necessary but heavy lift. While a typical VC like Obvious might fund a series of early-stage companies in exchange for equity that could pay off big in a few years, Generate’s paradigm is much more hands on, as it involves owning and operating many of the projects it finances, raising so-called “permanent capital” from LPs that allows it to manage assets indefinitely, and deploying a variety of customized project financing options for its partners.
“I think we’re all very comfortable with the grittiness that is necessary to be sustainable infrastructure investors and operators, but it does tire you out,” Jacobs said. And he doesn’t see an end to the noble slog.
Ultimately though, Jacobs doesn’t think that Generate and its partners are particularly at risk in this uncertain political and economic moment. A policy outlook that the firm published last month stated, “We do not expect the funding environment for sustainable infrastructure projects to be imperiled now that the market is experiencing more headwinds. Rather, we anticipate a flight to quality.” But Jacobs is far more pessimistic about the rest of the climate tech ecosystem. Like many investors that I’ve talked with lately, Jacobs referenced a famous Warren Buffett quote to characterize this moment: “You don’t find out who’s been swimming naked until the tide goes out.”
With investors pulling back and startups taking longer to raise growth funding, Jacobs thinks lots of companies will soon find themselves exposed, even if they don’t know it yet. “I continue to be surprised by the optimism bias in our space,” he told me. While he understands that optimism is “inherent to survival” when standing up companies that aim to address the climate crisis, he thinks many of his peers are ignoring clear negative signals.
“It’s less about the election and more just about the last three years of performance and the last three years of capital flows,” Jacobs said. That is, while another Trump term will likely bode poorly for many startups and investors, climate tech companies are also facing a series of unrelated headwinds that have contributed to falling investment and fewer exit events, including inflation,high interest rates, geopolitical instability, and China’s flooding of the market with cheap tech.
“Northvolt’s bankruptcy, I think, is the first big shoe to drop,” Jacobs told me. “But there could be as many as a dozen more of those that are really high profile climate tech flame-outs that make it seem like we learned no lessons from the first big flame-out” of the early 2010s, of which Solyndra is the most infamous example. That bubble burst as investors failed to grasp the complexity and longer timelines associated with climate tech and backed technologies that lacked a clear path to commercial viability or profitability. This time around, Jacobs told me, “It’s going to be really hard to separate the signal from the noise. And the noise will be very negative.”
Beebe, unsurprisingly, had a more optimistic take on the year to come. As we chatted about how the Trump and Elon Musk duo is prioritizing (at least rhetorically) cutting through red tape to deploy energy projects more expeditiously, a potential upside of the new administration, Beebe jumped in with an even riskier prediction.
“I think that we will see a meaningful number of Republicans in the Senate and the House start to champion climate solutions and sort of attempt to make climate resiliency and fighting climate change more of a Republican issue,” he told me. Like many an optimist before him, Beebe cited the letter signed by 18 Republicans from the House of Representatives asking speaker Mike Johnson to preserve the Inflation Reduction Act’s energy tax credits as evidence that Republicans are getting on board with the energy transition, although a number of the signatories have since lost their jobs.
“Nixon created the EPA. Teddy Roosevelt was a real conservationist. They’re called the conservatives — they like to conserve things, including natural resources. And that has been a hallmark for at least a century — a century-and-a-half — of that party,” Beebe explained. When pro-Trump investors such as Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz use terms like “American dynamism,” what he hears “through the fog machines of those kinds of phrases” is a discussion about American competitiveness, which inherently includes a strong, sustainability-oriented energy policy.
Nuclear fission, in particular, looks like a prime target for investment, Beebe told me. He has been happily surprised to see the upswell in bipartisan support for the re-opening and buildout of new reactors, categorizing Microsoft’s effort to restart Three Mile Island as a “watershed event of 2024.” Now, Obvious is open to funding small modular reactors and next-generation nuclear fission tech, which it hadn’t considered before.
If you are feeling emotionally torn after all this, well, same. There were of course points of more neutral overlap between the two investors — both think the power demands of AI simultaneously pose a daunting challenge and a major opportunity to drive deployment of clean, firm energy, and both agree that the climate tech world will soldier on, buoyed by state and local support, regardless of what happens in the White House.
But ultimately, are we poised for a grueling year of climate tech contraction and insolvency? Or a year where investors wisely deploy capital in an environment of emerging bipartisan consensus? Perhaps some of both? As Jacobs told me, regardless of what investors think, the next year, four years, and beyond will be driven first and foremost by customer demand for decarbonization, resilience, and cost savings.
“That is what drives the transition. It’s not financiers who drive it. It’s not technologists who drive it. It’s not even policy makers who drive it. It’s people who want something, they have a problem to solve. And if we solve that problem for them, we tend to get paid.”
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Europeans have enjoyed it for years. Now, through careful state interventions and creative salesmanship from startups, Americans are close to having their turn.
For U.S. consumers, going solar is usually a major undertaking, involving tens of thousands of dollars, months of logistics, a slew of financing options, and ever-changing incentives.
But in Germany, upwards of a million customers — homeowners and renters alike — are simply plugging in small, affordable solar arrays to standard power outlets. These small systems are, by law, 800 watts or less, a fraction of the size of a typical rooftop solar system in the U.S. Often called “balcony solar,” these panels can live essentially anywhere with sufficient sunlight: on balconies or patios, or mounted on exterior walls or flat rooftops.
But while governments across the EU have simplified regulations to make installation a quick, DIY process, and utility approval little more than a formality — unleashing a wave of consumer demand in the process — the U.S. has so far failed to follow suit. Here, utility regulations prohibit customers from feeding power back into the grid without a formal interconnection agreement, a process that involves lots of time and paperwork.
Utilities in the U.S. want to account for all electricity sources on the grid, since theoretically, even small plug-in systems could have a cumulative impact on local voltage and power quality, whereas in Germany, for example, this is less of a concern. There, plug-in solar-specific policy caps these systems’ generating capacity, and the grid and metering infrastructure has been more extensively modernized to handle distributed energy generation.
Now, however, there are a number of domestic plug-in solar startups finding creative ways to navigate the constraints of the U.S. market. One of them, the nonprofit Bright Saver, announced on Wednesday that it’s raised $500,000 in new funding from TrueVentures.org and a handful of individual backers. The company gets around power export regulations by selling panels with very low wattage. “So we’re talking 200- or 220-watt systems that never backfeed to the grid, because we think close to every typical household will consume that electricity immediately, simply with the refrigerator,” Cora Stryker, the company’s co-founder, told me.
The San Francisco-based startup has sold a couple dozen systems already and has a waitlist of about 1,500 people, Stryker said. So far, she told me, the majority of this “early adoption crowd” is mainly interested in reducing their own emissions. “We think that’ll change over time,” she said. “The mass adoption in Germany has been driven not by that climate-conscious crowd, but really people who want to save money. “
The main drawback to Bright Saver’s approach, however, is also what makes it possible in the first place: the panels’ incredibly small size, which can’t come close to covering a home’s full power needs. So while the upfront cost of a 200-watt panel is small — $399 at the moment — a customer’s energy savings will also be tiny — potentially on the order of just a few bucks per month. Depending on the location, the savings will eclipse the total cost in about five to 10 years, Stryker told me.
That might not be enticing enough to convince a critical mass of customers to jump onboard the small-scale solar train. But Stryker thinks that getting these products out into the world will help catalyze the type of curiosity and interest that can dovetail into policy change. “Selling product in the next year or two is a small revenue stream for us, but it’s also our theory of change,” she told me. “These need to get out there in order for people to know they even exist.”
Much of Bright Saver’s work involves advocating for easing plug-in solar regulations, which is already starting to happen, bit by bit. In March, the Utah state legislature unanimously passed a bill creating a new category for “small portable solar generation devices” under 1,200 watts, exempting them from interconnection requirements. Stryker told me that Utah’s governor was inspired to introduce the bill after reading a story in The New York Times about balcony solar’s success in Germany.
Now more states, including Vermont, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, are expressing interest in similar legislation. If just a few more get onboard, Stryker told me that would be a critical tipping point. “We’ve had conversations with manufacturers and investors who tell us straight up, they’re not coming to the U.S. market because they see only one state where they’re not going to run into these regulatory concerns,” she said. “They tell us privately, five to seven more states and they’re in. So that’s a key threshold for us.”
But one veteran of the plug-in solar market, Craftstrom, isn’t betting on this happening. The company has been selling 400- to 800-watt systems in Europe since 2017, and expanded into the U.S. a few years later, targeting markets where electricity prices are highest, like California and the Northeast. To deal with domestic regulations, the company patented a new type of meter to be placed inside electric panels that blocks excess power from flowing back into the grid. This prevention mechanism also allows the company to sell larger systems — up to 2,000 watts — in the U.S..
Craftstrom’s chief revenue officer, Ken Hutchings, thinks this type of system is critical for grid safety in the U.S., where distribution networks tend to be older and less standardized than in Europe, and not necessarily built for two-way power flow. This opens up utilities to a good deal of legal liability in the case of equipment failures.
While Hutchings wouldn’t necessarily be surprised to see other states following Utah’s lead, he’s skeptical that the U.S. will become a haven for plug-in solar anytime soon — or even that it’s a good idea. “There’s no risk to one or two guys pushing power back into the grid,” he told me. “But when you have thousands and thousands of people doing it, tens of thousands, and the electric company is not sure who’s doing it, I think that’s where the issue lies.”
Thus far, Craftstrom has sold about 4,000 units in the U.S., with about 500 of those orders coming in the past month alone, Hutchings told me. He attributed the sudden uptick largely to a rush of customers trying to qualify for home energy efficiency tax credits — which he said Craftstrom’s systems are eligible for — before they expire at year’s end.
Craftstrom’s domestic prices are still more expensive than what its own customers in Europe can expect to pay for similar systems due to the extra hardware costs that come along with the specialized meters, as well as the fact that installing these products is not a DIY operation. That means Utah customers should now enjoy the same price relief, since the new state law lifts the grid restrictions that the rest of the U.S. faces. These days, Craftstrom’s more complex hardware plus the cost of labor “just about doubles the cost from what you’re able to get in Utah,” Stryker told me.
Bright Saver sold Craftstrom’s systems when it first started out earlier this year, but chose to discontinue this offering as it “didn’t serve our vision of making this accessible to everyone through cost and self-installation,” Stryker told me. Instead, the organization is focusing on policy changes that will make cheap self-install systems in the 800-watt range feasible in more states. And that means getting legislators onboard with some degree of deregulation, something Stryker acknowledges “has often been a dirty word” in the environmental movement.
“In this case, we need these regulations to get out of the way. They’re outdated. They’re artifacts,” she told me, referring to the requirement that small plug-in systems sign utility interconnection agreements. “I see it as a purple narrative, one that can appeal to values across the political spectrum — energy independence, energy affordability, renters’ rights.”
Of course, Stryker isn’t advocating for complete anarchy in the space. Grid stability is still a concern, and she said that Bright Saver is involved in discussions with regulators and standard-setting bodies to determine acceptable wattage thresholds. Countries that have embraced balcony solar in Europe have “impeccable” safety records, Stryker told me, enabling Germany to raise its wattage limit from 600 to 800 watts at the beginning of last year.
There are still some logistics to work out though. As the recent Utah law is written, plug-in solar arrays must comply with product standards from Underwriters Laboratories, a safety certification body. And while this organization has standards covering the individual components of plug-in solar systems, it has yet to create a systems-level standard. Depending on whom you ask, that might mean all domestic companies in the space are operating in a bit of a regulatory gray area at the moment.
Stryker told me she expects these system-wide standards to be released soon though, ideally in tandem with more bills like the one passed in Utah. “We think it’s a no-brainer.”
On Alaska’s permitting overhaul, HALEU winners, and Heatmap’s Climate 101
Current conditions: Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas brace for up to a foot of rain • Tropical Storm Juliette, still located well west of Mexico, is moving northward and bringing rain to parts of Southern California • Heat and dryness are raising the risk of wildfire in South Africa.
The Trump administration has started the process to roll back logging protections from more than 44 million acres of national forest land. On Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins proposed undoing a 25-year-old rule that banned building roads or harvesting timber on federally controlled forest land, much of which is located in Alaska. “Today marks a critical step forward in President Trump’s commitment to restoring local decision-making to federal land managers to empower them to do what’s necessary to protect America’s forests and communities from devastating destruction from fires,” Rollins said in a statement. “This administration is dedicated to removing burdensome, outdated, one-size-fits-all regulations that not only put people and livelihoods at risk but also stifle economic growth in rural America.”
Environmental groups slammed the proposal for jeopardizing wildlife habitats and putting waterways at risk. “Communities depend on clear water filtered by roadless areas, animals depend on the unfragmented habitat that can only exist where there are no roads, and anglers depend on clean water in the streams where trout and salmon swim,” Ellen Montgomery, the director of Environment America’s great outdoors campaign, said in a press release. “We cannot let these essential forests be carved up by roads, obliterated by chainsaws, and contaminated by mines.”
Heatmap’s new Climate 101 series aims, as Heatmap deputy editor Jillian Goodman explained, to be “a primer on some of the key technologies of the energy transition.” That includes “everything from what makes silicon a perfect material for solar panels (and computer chips), to what’s going on inside a lithium-ion battery, to the difference between advanced and enhanced geothermal.”
This might be especially helpful for those still trying to find their way into the climate conversation, but we hope there’s something here for everyone. For instance, did you know that contemporary readers might have understood Don Quixote’s “tilting at windmills” to be an expression of NIMBYism? Well, now you do!
The federal Permitting Council signed a first-of-a-kind memorandum of understanding to work together with Alaska’s government to streamline permitting on critical infrastructure projects across the state. First established in 2015, the agency was designed to improve transparency and speed up the greenlighting of infrastructure approvals. But it had yet to forge such a close pact with an individual state. “Our team is ready to work with Governor Dunleavy to bring Alaska back into the energy spotlight, ending the neglect of the Biden Administration and bringing Alaska’s incredible natural resources to the rest of the world,” Emily Domenech, the Permitting Council’s executive director, said in a statement.
Domenech — a former staffer for House Speakers Kevin McCarthy and Mike Johnson who went on to serve as a senior vice president at Boundary Stone, a firm founded by alumni of the Obama-era Department of Energy — acted as something of a Republican sage for the clean energy industry. In an interview with Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin after last November’s election, she urged the industry to forge closer relationships with members of the current congressional majority. “If you ask Republicans to be for or against the IRA as a whole, they’ll be against it,” Domenech said, “But Republicans think about energy as a regional issue. So instead of forcing this one size fits all approach, IRA advocates would be smart to give people room to support only the policies that make the most sense for their state or region.”
The Department of Energy selected another three companies to receive a special kind of nuclear fuel from its growing stockpile. HALEU — pronounced HAY-loo, an acronym for high assay low enriched uranium — is a reactor fuel enriched up to four times as much as traditional reactor fuel. The fuel is needed for all kinds of novel reactor designs, particularly those that use coolants other than water. Until recently, however, Russia’s state-owned Rosatom had enjoyed a virtual monopoly over its global supply. The Biden administration set aside billions for HALEU production. In April, the Trump administration selected five companies to receive some of the government-procured supply, including Westinghouse, Bill Gates’ TerraPower, and the Google-backed Kairos Power. Now the agency has picked another three:
Two firefighters battling the Bear Gulch fire on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula were arrested by federal law enforcement Wednesday. The reason for the arrests is unclear, according to the Seattle Times. Over three hours, federal agents from Border Patrol carried out an “operation on the fire,” demanding identification from members of two private contractor crews who were among the 400 firefighters battling Washington state’s largest active blaze. The Incident Management Team from the National Interagency Fire Center suggested that the action did not interfere with the efforts to tamp down the flames.
The American West is primed for wildfires right now. Following a lull in June and July, Heatmap’s Jeva Lange wrote that “the forecast for the Pacific Northwest for ‘Dirty August’ and ‘Snaptember,’ historically the two worst months of the year in the region for wildfires,” was full of warning signs, including low precipitation and abnormally high temperatures.
Living, gnawing weedwackers.Vesper Energy
The 1.36 million solar panels at Vesper Energy’s Hornet Solar farm in Swisher County, Texas, one of the United States' largest single-phase solar projects, were overgrown with vegetation. So naturally, the company brought in sheep. More than 2,000 white, wooly ovines arrived this month and were allowed to roam the facility’s six square miles. “As Texas continues to lead the nation in solar energy growth, solar grazing highlights how innovation can support rural economies, preserve farmland, and strengthen the state’s reliable energy future,” Vesper said.
Here at Heatmap, we write a lot about decarbonization — that is, the process of transitioning the global economy away from fossil fuels and toward long-term sustainable technologies for generating energy. What we don’t usually write about is what those technologies actually do. Sure, solar panels convert energy from the sun into electricity — but how, exactly? Why do wind turbines have to be that tall? What’s the difference between carbon capture, carbon offsets, and carbon removal, and why does it matter?
So today, we’re bringing you Climate 101, a primer on some of the key technologies of the energy transition. In this series, we’ll cover everything from what makes silicon a perfect material for solar panels (and computer chips), to what’s going on inside a lithium-ion battery, to the difference between advanced and enhanced geothermal.
There’s something here for everyone, whether you’re already an industry expert or merely climate curious. For instance, did you know that contemporary 17th century readers might have understood Don Quixote’s famous “tilting at windmills” to be an expression of NIMYBism? I sure didn’t! But I do now that I’ve read Jeva Lange’s 101 guide to wind energy.
That said, I’d like to extend an especial welcome to those who’ve come here feeling lost in the climate conversation and looking for a way to make sense of it. All of us at Heatmap have been there at some point or another, and we know how confusing — even scary — it can be. The constant drumbeat of news about heatwaves and floods and net-zero this and parts per million that is a lot to take in. We hope this information will help you start to see the bigger picture — because the sooner you do, the sooner you can join the transition, yourself.
Without further ado, here’s your Climate 101 syllabus:
Once you feel ready to go deeper, here are some more Heatmap stories to check out: