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.
The Past
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.
The Future
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.
The Present
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.”
Courtesy of Harbinger
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