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Ten years ago, if you were a hotshot senior advisor in the Obama administration, odds are good you exited the revolving door of the White House straight into a job in Big Tech. But there’s a new career trajectory that’s looking pretty good these days: federal government to climate tech. Since the latter Obama years and increasingly with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act two years ago, former government employees are popping up at some of the most important companies and venture capital firms in the climate ecosystem.
That’s a testament to how far we’ve come since clean tech 1.0 in the 2010s, when Solyndra’s bankruptcy was blowing up headlines and the shale revolution was starting to derail renewable energy investment. As a more durable market started to rise from the ashes, a growing number of industry experts jumped into government to help fuel the revival — and then often back into industry to take advantage of a more favorable policy environment and an increased focus on corporate sustainability.
Alfred Johnson, co-founder and CEO of the tax credit marketplace Crux, told me that after growing up in D.C. but moving to Stanford for college, he was surprised to hear folks in Silicon Valley talking about government and private industry as if they had completely “mismatched objectives.” Prior to starting Crux, Johnson served as deputy chief of staff at the Department of the Treasury, his second stint at the agency during a career that’s taken him from campaigning for Obama to Blackrock, to founding his first startup, Mobilize, a platform that used to recruit volunteers for Democratic Party campaign events and progressive causes.
“The perspective that I’ve always had is that government and the private sector are fundamentally intertwined, and always have been,” Johnson told me. Crux itself demonstrates this public-private synergy: Not only did the IRA unleash an abundance of clean energy tax credits, it also made them much easier to trade — transactions Crux facilitates.
“If our goal is to mobilize trillions of dollars of investment into the clean energy transition,” Varun Sivaram, a senior fellow for energy and climate at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me, “the people holding the reins of power should absolutely not be the people who have never been in an investment committee room making a financial decision on a project.” Prior to his latest gig, Sivaram worked as an executive at Orsted, which he joined after a stint in the White House as the managing director for clean energy and innovation and a senior advisor to John Kerry, the administration’s climate envoy.
“After the IRA, I said, look, we’ve passed this extraordinary legislation. I would now love to help be at a company that can use this amazing public policy and build clean energy as fast as possible,” he told me. At Orsted he helped lead the internal R&D and artificial intelligence teams and founded Orsted Ventures, which has invested in Crux. Sivaram was also on the committee that decided to pull out of two offshore wind projects in New Jersey, resulting in a $4 billion impairment for the company. “I sometimes feel like Forrest Gump. I have had this front row seat to a lot of very important things,” Sivaram told me.
A lot of the recent revolving door activity can also be traced to the renewed vigor of the once-nearly-dormant Loan Programs Office, part of the Department of Energy, which the IRA imbued with $400 billion to guarantee loans to emerging energy technologies. LPO became a political football thanks to Solyndra, which received a loan guarantee from the office of more than $500 million. After Jigar Shah took the helm in 2021, he tripled the agency’s staff, bringing with him a cohort of private industry experts and advisors, many of whom held contract positions for about a year or two before moving back into industry to pursue other ventures in the climate tech and energy world.
Climate tech investment firms have also become a popular landing spot for former government talent. David Danielson, now a managing director at Breakthrough Energy Ventures, co-founded ARPA-E and worked in the Department of Energy in the second Obama administration. Jenny Gao, a vice president at Energy Impact Partners, went there fresh off a position in the DOE’s Office of Technology Transitions. And Clay Dumas, a partner at Lowercarbon Capital, worked in the Obama White House as the chief of staff and a senior advisor for the White House Office of Digital Strategy.
And then there’s Overture, a climate tech VC founded by former Obama staffers, which aims to help climate tech founders take advantage of government programs and navigate regulatory complexity. “In some ways, campaigns are startups — you start small with a big idea,” Michael O’Neil, one of Overture’s co-founders and partners, told me. “We used to say in the White House, How do you make the room bigger? How do you get more minds and more talent involved to make better decisions?” Now they ask the same questions to help founders build out their technologies. Overture announced the close of its first $60 million fund earlier this year.
It’s not just climate-specific companies and investors who are benefiting — big tech companies still attract plenty of former government employees, although the locus of that energy is now concentrated on corporate sustainability and decarbonization efforts. Lisa Jackson, VP of environment, policy, and social initiatives at Apple, served as the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under Obama. Melanie Nakagawa, the chief sustainability officer at Microsoft, previously worked as a climate advisor to Biden’s National Security Council, while Google’s director of climate and energy research, Ali Douraghy, came straight from the DOE.
Tech industry efforts to run operations with clean energy and back emerging climate solutions have also had an undeniably positive impact — most notably Frontier’s commitment to purchasing over $1 billion of carbon removal credits has catalyzed demand in the nascent industry. This initiative, led by the payments platform Stripe and co-founded by Alphabet, Meta, Shopify, and McKinsey, is also powered by a former government employee, Jane Flegal, who worked in the Biden White House as the senior director for industrial emissions.
While it’s true that the traditional off ramps for former government employees remain — the financial sector also still looms large, Sivaram told me — what’s new is that “there’s now actual money in starting your own company, in working at a venture fund,” he said And this, he believes, is how it should be.
“You want people who understand the nuances of the federal government and the IRA in order to effectively run companies that take advantage of the IRA. It is no secret that the government wanted companies to basically take this money. So many of us made this move.”
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And more on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects in Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.
1. St. Croix County, Wisconsin - Solar opponents in this county see themselves as the front line in the fight over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” law and its repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.
2. Barren County, Kentucky - How much wood could a Wood Duck solar farm chuck if it didn’t get approved in the first place? We may be about to find out.
3. Iberia Parish, Louisiana - Another potential proxy battle over IRA tax credits is going down in Louisiana, where residents are calling to extend a solar moratorium that is about to expire so projects can’t start construction.
4. Baltimore County, Maryland – The fight over a transmission line in Maryland could have lasting impacts for renewable energy across the country.
5. Worcester County, Maryland – Elsewhere in Maryland, the MarWin offshore wind project appears to have landed in the crosshairs of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.
6. Clark County, Ohio - Consider me wishing Invenergy good luck getting a new solar farm permitted in Ohio.
7. Searcy County, Arkansas - An anti-wind state legislator has gone and posted a slide deck that RWE provided to county officials, ginning up fresh uproar against potential wind development.
Talking local development moratoria with Heatmap’s own Charlie Clynes.
This week’s conversation is special: I chatted with Charlie Clynes, Heatmap Pro®’s very own in-house researcher. Charlie just released a herculean project tracking all of the nation’s county-level moratoria and restrictive ordinances attacking renewable energy. The conclusion? Essentially a fifth of the country is now either closed off to solar and wind entirely or much harder to build. I decided to chat with him about the work so you could hear about why it’s an important report you should most definitely read.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
Tell me about the project you embarked on here.
Heatmap’s research team set out last June to call every county in the United States that had zoning authority, and we asked them if they’ve passed ordinances to restrict renewable energy, or if they have renewable energy projects in their communities that have been opposed. There’s specific criteria we’ve used to determine if an ordinance is restrictive, but by and large, it’s pretty easy to tell once a county sends you an ordinance if it is going to restrict development or not.
The vast majority of counties responded, and this has been a process that’s allowed us to gather an extraordinary amount of data about whether counties have been restricting wind, solar and other renewables. The topline conclusion is that restrictions are much worse than previously accounted for. I mean, 605 counties now have some type of restriction on renewable energy — setbacks that make it really hard to build wind or solar, moratoriums that outright ban wind and solar. Then there’s 182 municipality laws where counties don’t have zoning jurisdiction.
We’re seeing this pretty much everywhere throughout the country. No place is safe except for states who put in laws preventing jurisdictions from passing restrictions — and even then, renewable energy companies are facing uphill battles in getting to a point in the process where the state will step in and overrule a county restriction. It’s bad.
Getting into the nitty-gritty, what has changed in the past few years? We’ve known these numbers were increasing, but what do you think accounts for the status we’re in now?
One is we’re seeing a high number of renewables coming into communities. But I think attitudes started changing too, especially in places that have been fairly saturated with renewable energy like Virginia, where solar’s been a presence for more than a decade now. There have been enough projects where people have bad experiences that color their opinion of the industry as a whole.
There’s also a few narratives that have taken shape. One is this idea solar is eating up prime farmland, or that it’ll erode the rural character of that area. Another big one is the environment, especially with wind on bird deaths, even though the number of birds killed by wind sounds big until you compare it to other sources.
There are so many developers and so many projects in so many places of the world that there are examples where either something goes wrong with a project or a developer doesn’t follow best practices. I think those have a lot more staying power in the public perception of renewable energy than the many successful projects that go without a hiccup and don’t bother people.
Are people saying no outright to renewable energy? Or is this saying yes with some form of reasonable restrictions?
It depends on where you look and how much solar there is in a community.
One thing I’ve seen in Virginia, for example, is counties setting caps on the total acreage solar can occupy, and those will be only 20 acres above the solar already built, so it’s effectively blocking solar. In places that are more sparsely populated, you tend to see restrictive setbacks that have the effect of outright banning wind — mile-long setbacks are often insurmountable for developers. Or there’ll be regulations to constrict the scale of a project quite a bit but don’t ban the technologies outright.
What in your research gives you hope?
States that have administrations determined to build out renewables have started to override these local restrictions: Michigan, Illinois, Washington, California, a few others. This is almost certainly going to have an impact.
I think the other thing is there are places in red states that have had very good experiences with renewable energy by and large. Texas, despite having the most wind generation in the nation, has not seen nearly as much opposition to wind, solar, and battery storage. It’s owing to the fact people in Texas generally are inclined to support energy projects in general and have seen wind and solar bring money into these small communities that otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of attention.
The birthplace of electricity has more recently been known more for smokestacks and traffic jams than world-changing energy breakthroughs. But that could be about to change.
Why New Jersey? I’ll admit, that’s what I was wondering as my S.U.V. took a Sopranos-adjacent route from midtown Manhattan to an industrial park in Kearny, the Newark suburb bounded by the Passaic River to the west and a landfill to the east, where the holy grail of energy may soon be forged.
I was visiting the nuclear fusion company Thea Energy, which is in the process of designing a stellarator, a kind of torqued donut — French crullers were mentioned several times by Thea cofounder and chief executive Brian Berzin during my time there — that, with the help of 450 magnets and about 15 megawatts of power, could one day hold plasma in place, thereby creating the conditions for the same nuclear reaction that powers the stars to happen here on Earth.
The New Jersey facility was, to my eyes, part tech startup and part laboratory, with rows of desks in an open office and then, once the requisite eye-safety equipment was applied, a laboratory and small-scale manufacturing site.
There were workers winding high-temperature superconductor tape using what can only be described as an oversized VCR-like device named “Zeus” (Greek mythology is the company’s primary motif; the eventual fusion device will be called “Eos,” the goddess of dawn, while Thea is the goddess of light) to make the magnets that could one day make up the stellarator.
We walked past a precision cutting device known as a CNC machine for milling parts on site. Berzin was particularly proud of Thea’s ability to quickly iterate this part of the manufacturing process. A year ago, “when we wanted a new piece of stainless steel in that very specific configuration, we sent out engineering drawings to a third party — sometimes in the United States, sometimes abroad — for them to mill that piece of metal.”
That process “takes a couple of weeks, and then they send it back to you. Sometimes it’s not perfect — you have to get rid of a burr. The quality control is all over the place.” By milling on-site, Thea engineers can make parts and components faster and figure out more quickly what they actually need.
The last stop on the tour was the Canis, a kind of aluminum gougère held up by spindly legs that contained within it an array of nine magnets, with each magnet connected to 50 sensors that could dynamically control and adjust for any errors or misalignments in the magnetic fields. These mass-manufactured magnets could eventually allow the stellarator to be something more like a standard off-the-line product than a finnicky, boutique, one-of-a-kind science project that can only be installed and monitored by plasma physics PhDs.
“We can use very basic manufacturing technologies,” Berzin said. “Here we’re sitting in New Jersey right now. Things are built by local trade laborers, unionized laborers. As much as I love PhDs, power plants are not built by people that have PhDs from MIT or Harvard.”
The facility had a well-worn aura of frugality, a virtue rarely associated with fusion research, which is famous for international consortia taking decades and billions of dollars to come up with working devices, if they ever do. Last year, the team behind the ITER fusion reactor, whose history stretches back to 1985, announced that operation would be delayed until the mid-2030s, a nine-year setback that will likely tack on another €5 billion (around $5.8 billion) to the total cost of over €20 billion.
By contrast, Berzin told me, “when investors and stakeholders come to visit our labs, the one reaction that occurs frequently is, Wow, you’ve done all of this with only $20 million?”
Thea’s primary competitors in the booming private fusion industry, which has attracted over $7 billion in private investment globally, can be found outside Boston, where Commonwealth Fusion Systems spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or north of Seattle, where Sam Altman-backed Helion is located, well known centers of scientific research and technology businesses.
Some of these competitors are incredibly well funded, especially CFS, which has raised around $2 billion — a substantial portion of all money raised by fusion companies everywhere.
Thea, by contrast, has raised around $30 million all told, with $20 million coming in a Series A backed by Prelude Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, and other venture investors.
Berzin attributed this cost efficiency in part to the company’s heavy use of software in design and operations, which is a “more scalable, more cost-efficient thing,” he told me. “We’ve been able to go very far with our Series A compared to our peers,” which he credits to a “pretty gritty mindset.”
And yet still I wondered: Why North Jersey, an area better known for turnpikes, swamps, and pharmaceutical companies? “New York, New Jersey, the greater New York City area, I think notoriously within the investor-VC-tech community, is seen as being behind the ball,” Berzin said.
“I'm really proud to be here in the tri-state area. You have some great industries, people move to New York City to be in the center of the universe for one of many fields, and that has been something we've been able to leverage. All these different skill-sets and engineering talent pools weren't necessarily in fusion before,” Berzin said. “Control systems, optimization, manufacturing — these people exist within the New York City area.”
Northern New Jersey itself is something of an energy crossroads. It lies between two centers of fusion research — the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, where the stellarator was first dreamed up and from which Thea itself was spun out, and Columbia University, which has its own fusion and plasma physics research programs.
Northern New Jersey is also centrally located within PJM Interconnection, the United States’s largest electricity market. Northern New Jersey is also centrally located within PJM Interconnection, the United States’s largest electricity market. While there isn’t yet a site for Thea to actually install their system in a power plant, executives did point to brownfield sites such as a decommissioned coal plant in Jersey City, which already has interconnection with the grid.
Not for nothing, New Jersey has been a center for electricity innovation for just about as long as there’s been a commercial market for electricity. Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park lab was located about 20 miles south of Thea. The company’s co-founder David Gates is a winner of the Edison Patent Award for the stellarator work at the Princeton lab.
Plus, “I live in New York City,” Berzin added. “It’s the center of the universe.”
If you can make fusion happen here — or at least across the Hudson from here — you might be able to make it happen anywhere.