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It’s useful for more than just decarbonization.
Now that President Donald Trump has been officially inaugurated and issued his barrage of executive orders celebrating fossil fuels and shelving climate technologies such as wind energy and electric vehicles, climate tech startups are in a pickle. Federal funding can play a critical role in helping companies scale up and build out first-of-a-kind projects and facilities. So how to work with a government hostile to one of these startups’ core value propositions: aiding in the energy transition?
Talk of clean tech and electrification may be out of vogue, but its utility is not. The potential of many of these companies goes beyond mitigating climate change and into the realm of energy security and resilience — something the Department of Defense is well aware of.
The White House’s climate webpage has gone dark; the Department of Defense’s climate resilience portal lasted a little longer, but that’s now down, too. Once upon a time, though, the site read, “The changing climate is one of many threat multipliers to National Security, which adds complexity to Department of Defense decisions.” That’s a major reason why this agency can’t stop, won’t stop funding climate technologies. Another reason is that many technologies that happen to be good for the planet might also simply be the best tool for the job, meaning the DOD need not utter the word “climate” at all when justifying its decision to deploy new solutions.
“The Defense Department, so far in our experience, has framed things largely in terms of alternative benefits that our technology can have, such as fuel supply chain redundancy and reliability,” Ted McKlveen, co-founder and CEO of the hydrogen storage company Verne, told me. Verne received a $250,000 Small Business Innovation Research grant from the Army last May to work on the development of hydrogen vehicles.
Cindy Taff, CEO of the next-generation geothermal startup Sage Geosystems, told me something similar. “What the military likes to talk about is energy resilience,” she said, though she has heard the DOD tout the climate benefits of her company’s tech, too. Sage currently has multiple DOD engagements, including feasibility studies with both the Army and Navy and a $1.9 million grant to build a demonstration project for the Air Force.
That’s not to say it’s clear what the Department of Defense’s funding priorities under Trump will be. When I contacted the DOD in mid-December to request an interview for this story, a spokesperson initially told me they would help connect me to the right person. But as Trump’s inauguration drew nearer, I got a message saying the agency would have to hold off until it got more guidance, as “it remains to be seen in the next few weeks what direction the new administration is going.”
Regardless of how the priorities shake out, practically every climate-focused company and venture capitalist I talk to emphasizes that their companies will only succeed if they can make or invest in products that can compete on economics and/or quality alone, sans government support. That was true even before a second Trump turn in the White House started to look like an inevitability, and this new administration will at least partially reveal which companies can do that. But while everybody aims to be independent of federal support, they might not actually need to say goodbye to that funding stream, so long as they can tout their economic and performance benefits to the right customers.
Take Pyka, for example. When Michael Norcia co-founded the autonomous electric aircraft company in 2017, the ultimate goal was to design a passenger plane. “We want that to be our legacy, but we were also very, very realistic about the challenges associated with actually doing that,” he told me. So when the DOD took an interest in the company’s commercial cargo planes and their potential ability to deliver supplies in contested environments, the startup jumped at the opportunity, delivering its first aircraft to AFWERX, the innovation arm of the Department of the Air Force, early last year. Interest from such a lucrative government customer helped the company to close its $40 million Series B round in September.
Of course, the decarbonization benefits of electrifying military cargo delivery would be huge. But unsurprisingly, Norcia told me that the DOD primarily frames the opportunity in terms of the capabilities of all-electric or hybrid-electric planes, which could take a variety of fuels, operate quietly, and give off minimal heat, making them more difficult to detect via thermal imaging. Plus, the more equipment is electrified the better, “in terms of having them be able to operate in a highly contested environment, where moving fuel around maybe is not feasible,” Norcia explained. Not to mention the fact that if a manned aircraft is shot down, people die, meaning that in a counterfactual sense, Pyka’s tech is saving lives.
Verne’s North Star is also decarbonization. And given that the military is the world’s largest oil consumer, McKlveen was excited to partner with the Army to put its hydrogen storage tech to use in medium and heavy-duty vehicles. The company stores hydrogen (ideally green hydrogen, produced via renewables-powered electrolysis) at high density as a cold, compressed gas, making it possible to build hydrogen vehicles with greater range and lower cost than has traditionally been done. Similar to Pyka, the Army is enthused that these vehicles would be difficult for adversaries to detect, as they’re quiet and give off little heat. Likewise, McKlveen told me that hydrogen power could replace the Army’s notoriously noisy generators.
While Verne has also partnered with the Department of Energy and its R&D arm, ARPA-E, McKlveen said that working with the DOD has been unique in a few ways. “The key difference is the DOD is a customer and a grant provider. So they can say both what their needs are as a potential customer and represent a potential customer,” he explained. This, along with the agency’s clear, phased approach that it puts companies through, helps bring a level of transparency to the whole process, from pilot to full-fledged military implementation, that McKlveen appreciates.
And lest we forget, “they also have a very large budget,” he told me. For fiscal year 2025, the DOD has requested $849.8 billion, while the DOE, by comparison, has requested a mere $51.4 billion.
“I find military people to be get-it-done type of people,” Taff of Sage Geosystems told me. “So I think that helps to create a sense of urgency and also push things along a lot faster than you would see with maybe other organizations.” Sage uses drilling technologies adopted from the oil and gas industry to access heat for clean electricity production across a wide variety of geographies. This is an especially attractive option for the DOD as the majority of geothermal infrastructure is underground, and thus well protected from attack. And unlike other renewables, this tech can provide 24/7 energy no matter the weather conditions. So it’s no surprise that the military is pouring money into this sector, pursuing partnerships with other big names in the geothermal space such as Fervo Energy and Eavor.
Electric planes, hydrogen, and geothermal all felt intuitively justifiable to me from a defense standpoint, but I was more surprised to learn that the DOD has gotten into the alternative proteins, a.k.a. “fake meat”, industry. Though meat substitutes won’t power tankers or keep the lights on, the Defense Department’s $1.4 million grant to The Better Meat Co. is intended to strengthen the American supply chain. China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs views lab-grown meat as critical to its five-year agricultural plan. “So we don’t want to have the United States be importing clean protein in the way that we’re currently dependent on Asia for our semiconductors and photovoltaics,” Paul Shapiro, the company’s CEO, told me.
The Better Meat Co. produces a protein called Rhiza that’s derived from microscopic fungi, which it then sells as an ingredient to other companies to make either 100% animal-free meat or a meat blend. “This isn’t an alternative protein program. It’s a domestic biomanufacturing program,” Shapiro told me when I asked if military funding for meat substitutes could be at risk under Trump. Looking at some of the other companies that got grants through the same program, he said, “it’s literally like bio manufacturing things for military planes and jet lubricants and chemical catalysts for bullets.” That is, probably not Republican targets for defunding. “It’s clearly solely about wanting the U.S. to be a leader in biomanufacturing for the products that the world is going to depend on in the future.”
The DOD also sees promise in numerous other clean energy technologies, including nuclear microreactors for their portability and ability to provide off-grid energy in remote locations and alternate battery chemistries that could help the U.S. move away from a dependence on Chinese-produced lithium-ion batteries.
But despite the deep well of funding and pragmatic approach to deployment that the Department of Defense offers, agreeing to work with the DOD isn’t always an obvious choice. Many fear their company’s tech could be used in ways and in wars that they oppose. In 2018, for example, thousands of Google employees signed a letter opposing the company’s participation in Project Maven, a partnership with the Pentagon that uses artificial intelligence to improve the accuracy of drone strikes. Supporters of the project said it would lead to fewer civilian deaths, while protestors argued that Google “should not be in the business of war.” Google did not renew the contract. More recently, employees at Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have signed petitions opposing their company’s provision of cloud computing and AI services to the Israeli government.
Norcia noted that most, but not all of his employees were neutral to positive when it came to working with the Air Force, while “for a small minority of the company, it unfortunately was not something that they really wanted to devote their life to.” While he understands that perspective, Norcia does believe that Pyka’s work with the DOD is a net positive for the world. “If you assume wars are going to keep happening — which, unfortunately, I think is the reality — I’d rather have it be the case that they’re more of a robot war than a human war,” he told me. And at the end of the day, passenger planes are still the goal.
As for his team at Verne, McKlveen told me everybody was on board. “The Defense Department has led to some of the biggest innovations of the last century, whether that’s the internet or GPS. And our team knows that.” Plus, even if the DOD doesn’t talk much about the climate benefits of sustainability-focused tech, that doesn’t negate them. A 2019 study revealed that the Pentagon purchases an average of 100 million barrels of oil per year, so from that perspective, “it’s hard to find a bigger customer that we can address,” McKlveen told me.
Norcia agreed. “I think the gains of your impact get turned way up if you’re doing work with the DOD,” he said, “as opposed to, you know, building an app that makes something incrementally more efficient or more addictive.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that DOD’s climate resilience portal has been taken down.
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Tax credit transferability is a wonky concept, but it’s been a superpower for clean energy developers.
One of the most powerful innovations in the Inflation Reduction Act was a new vehicle to finance clean energy projects. In addition to expanding the nation’s tax credits for climate-friendly projects, Congress gave developers freedom to sell these credits for cash. If a battery factory couldn’t take full advantage of the tax credits itself, it could transfer them to someone else who could.
Now, Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee have proposed getting rid of this “transferability” provision as part of a larger overhaul of the tax credits. A draft bill published on Monday would end the practice starting in 2028.
Nixing transferability isn’t the bill’s most damaging blow to clean energy — new sourcing requirements for the tax credits and deadlines that block early-stage projects pose a bigger threat. But the ripple effects from the change would permeate all aspects of the clean energy economy. At a minimum, it would make energy more expensive by making the tax credits harder to monetize. It would also all but shut nuclear plants out of the subsidies altogether.
Prior to the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, if renewable energy developers with low tax liability wanted to monetize existing tax credits, they had to seek partnerships with tax equity investors. The investor, usually a major bank, would provide upfront capital for a project in exchange for partial ownership and a claim to its tax benefits. These were complicated deals that involved extensive legal review and the formation of new limited liability corporations, and therefore weren’t a viable option for smaller projects like community solar farms.
When the 2022 climate law introduced transferability across all the clean energy tax credits, it simplified project finance and channeled new capital into the clean energy economy. Suddenly, developers for all kinds of clean energy projects could simply sell their tax credits for cash on the open market to anyone that wanted to buy them, without ceding any ownership. The tax credit marketplace Crux estimated that a total of $30 billion in transfers took place last year, only about 30% of which were traditional tax equity deals. In the past, tax equity transfers have topped out at around $20 billion per year.
Schneider Electric, which has long helped corporate clients make power purchase agreements, now facilitates tax credit transfers, as well. The company recently announced that it had closed 18 deals worth $1.7 billion in tax credit transfers since late 2023. The buyers were all new to the market — none had directly financed clean energy before the IRA, Erin Decker, the senior director of renewable energy and carbon advisory services, told me.
It turns out, buying clean energy tax credits is a win-win for brands with sustainability commitments, which can reduce their tax liability while also helping to reduce emissions. Some companies have even used the savings they got through the tax credits to fund decarbonization efforts within their own operations, Decker said.
By simplifying project finance, and creating more competition for tax credit sales, transferability also made developing renewable energy projects cheaper. Developers of wind and solar farms have been able to secure upwards of 95 cents on the dollar for transferred tax credits, compared to just 85 to 90 cents for tax equity transactions. The savings go directly to utility customers.
“State regulators require electric companies to pass the benefits of tax credits through to customers in the form of lower rates,” the Edison Electric Institute wrote in a policy brief on the provision. “If transferability were repealed, electric companies once again would rely on big banks to invest in tax equity transactions, ultimately reducing the value of the credit that flows directly through to customers.”
Many of the companies that can’t count on tax equity deals will still have other options under the GOP proposal. Tax-exempt entities, like rural electric cooperatives and community solar nonprofits, can use “elective pay,” another IRA innovation that allows them to claim the credits as a direct cash payment from the IRS. For-profit companies developing carbon capture and advanced manufacturing projects also have the option to use elective pay for the first five years they operate. All of this raises questions about whether axing transferability would furnish the government with meaningful savings to offset Trump’s tax cuts.
But the bigger danger for Trump would be his nuclear agenda. Prior to the IRA, low power prices meant that many nuclear operators couldn’t afford to extend the licenses on their existing plants, even ones that had many years of useful life left in them. The IRA created a new tax credit for existing nuclear plants that made it economical for operators to invest in keeping these online, and even helped bring some, like the Palisades plant in Michigan, back from the dead.
This wouldn’t have worked without transferability, Benton Arnett, the senior director of markets and policy at the Nuclear Energy Institute, told me. Going forward, finding a tax equity partner would be nearly impossible because of the unique rules governing nuclear plants. Federal regulations require that the owners of a nuclear power plant be listed on its license, so bringing on a new owner means doing a license amendment — a headache-inducing process that banks simply don’t want to take on. “We’ve had members reach out to tax equity groups in the past and there was very little interest,” Arnett said
While a few plant owners might have enough tax appetite to benefit from credits directly, most have depreciating assets on their books that greatly reduce their liability. “Without transferability, for many of our members, it’s very difficult for them to actually monetize those credits,” said Arnett. “In a way, nuclear is disproportionately impacted by removing that ability to transfer.”
In February, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright declared that “the long-awaited American nuclear renaissance must launch during President Trump’s administration.” But so far on Trump’s watch, between the proposed loss of transferability and early phase-out of nuclear tax credits, plus cuts to loan programs at the Department of Energy, we’ve only seen policies that would kill the nuclear renaissance.
On Trump’s Gulf trip, budget negotiations, and a uranium mine
Current conditions: Highs in Dallas, San Antonio, and Austin could break 100 degrees Fahrenheit on Wednesday afternoon, with ERCOT anticipating demand could approach August 2023’s all-time high of 85,500 megawatts • Governor Tim Walz has called in the National Guard to respond to three fires in northern Minnesota that have burned 20,000 acres and are still 0% contained• The coldest place in the world right now is the South Pole of Antarctica, which could drop to -70 degrees tomorrow.
Win McNamee/Getty Images
The White House on Tuesday announced a $600 billion investment commitment from Saudi Arabia during President Trump’s trip to the Gulf. In exchange, the U.S. offered Riyadh “the largest defense cooperation agreement” Washington has ever made, with an arms package worth nearly $142 billion, Reuters reports. The deals announced so far by the White House total just $283 billion, although the administration told The New York Times that more would be forthcoming.
Among the known commitments in the health and tech sectors, the U.S. also reached a number of energy deals with Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company, Aramco, which agreed to a $3.4 billion expansion of the Motive refinery in Texas “to integrate chemicals production,” OilPrice.com reports. Aramco additionally signed “a memorandum of understanding with [the U.S. utility] Sempra to receive about 6.2 million tons per year of LNG.” (Aramco is responsible for over 4% of the planet’s CO2 emissions, according to the think tank InfluenceMap, and would be the fourth largest polluter after China, the U.S., and India, if it were its own country.) Additionally, Saudi company DataVolt committed to invest $20 billion in AI data centers and energy infrastructure in the U.S.
Senate Republicans are reportedly putting the brakes on the House Ways and Means Committee’s proposal to overhaul the nation’s clean energy tax credits and effectively kill the Inflation Reduction Act. “[S]ome Senate Republicans say abruptly cutting off credits and changing key provisions that help fund projects more quickly could stifle investments in energy technologies needed to meet growing power demand, and lead to job losses for manufacturing and electricity projects in their states and districts,” Politico reports. North Dakota’s Republican Senator John Hoeven, for one, characterized the Ways and Means’ plan as a “starting point,” with “some change” expected before agreement is reached.
As my colleague Emily Pontecorvo reported earlier this week, the House proposal “appears to amount to a back-door full repeal” of the IRA, including cutting the EV tax credit, moving up the phase-out of tech-neutral clean power, and eliminating credits for energy efficiency, heat pumps, and solar. But as she noted then, “there’s a lot that could change before we get to a final budget” — especially if Republican senators follow through on their words.
The Interior Department plans to expedite permitting for a uranium mine in Utah, conducting an environmental assessment that typically takes a year in just 14 days, The New York Times reports. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the fast-track addressed the “alarming energy emergency because of the prior administration’s Climate Extremist policies.” Notably, Burgum also recently issued a stop-work order on Equinor’s fully permitted Empire Wind offshore wind project, claiming the project’s permitting process had been rushed under former President Joe Biden. That process took nearly four years, according to BloomberNEF.
Critics of the Velvet-Wood project in San Juan County, Utah, said the Interior Department is leaving no opportunity for public comment, and that there are concerns about radioactive waste from the mining activities. Uranium is a fuel in nuclear power plants, and its extraction falls under President Trump’s recent executive order to address the so-called “national energy emergency.”
Clean energy investment saw a second quarterly decline at the start of 2025, but nevertheless accounted for 4.7% of total private investment in structures, equipment, and durable consumer goods in the first quarter of the year, a new report by the Rhodium Group’s Clean Investment Monitor found. Among some of its other notable findings:
You can read the full report here.
A Dutch environmental group is suing oil giant Shell, arguing that the company is in violation of a court order to make an “appropriate contribution” to the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement, France 24 reports. Amsterdam-based Milieudefensie previously won an historic precedent against Royal Dutch Shell in 2021, with the court ruling the company had to cut its carbon emissions by 45% of 2019 levels by 2030 because its investments in oil and gas were “endangering human rights and lives.” Shell appealed the decision, moved its headquarters to London, and dropped “Royal Dutch” from its name; subsequently, a Dutch appeals court sided with Shell and reversed the 45% emissions reduction target, while still insisting the company had a responsibility to lower its emissions, Inside Climate News reports.
Now, Milieudefensie is suing, claiming Shell is in breach of its obligation to reduce emissions due to its “continued investment in new oil and gas fields and its inadequate climate policy for the period 2030 to 2050.” Sjoukje van Oosterhout, a lead researcher on the Shell case for Milieudefensie, said in a press conference, “The impact of this case could really be enormous. Science is clear, crystal clear, and the ruling of the appeals court was also clear. Every new field is one too many. That’s why we have this case today.”
AstraZeneca
UK regulators this week approved the use of AstraZeneca’s new medical inhaler, which uses a propellant with 99.9% lower global warming potential than those currently in use. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has estimated that the discharge and leakage of planet-warming hydrofluoroalkane propellants from inhalers was responsible for 2.5 million metric tons of CO2 equivalents in 2020, or about the same emissions as 550,000 passenger vehicles driven for one year.
Tuesday’s encouraging inflation data concealed an ominous warning sign.
The Trump administration’s policy of increased natural gas exports abroad, plus increased industrial and artificial intelligence investment at home, plus cuts to green energy tax credits could add up to more energy price volatility for Americans.
On Monday, the House Ways and Means Committee unveiled its plan for deep cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act, including early expiration dates and restrictions on the core clean energy tax credits that would effectively gut America’s signature climate law.
But Tuesday’s good news about inflation also contained a troubling omen for electricity prices.
Overall, prices are rising at their slowest rate in years. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that overall prices have risen 2.3% in the past year, the slowest annual increase since February 2021. But electricity prices were up 0.8% just in the past month, and were up 3.6% over last year.
This is likely due in part to rising natural gas prices, as natural gas provides the better part of American electricity generation.
The benchmark Henry Hub spot price for natural gas was $3.26 per million British thermal unit last week,according to the latest Energy Information Administration data — around twice the price of a year ago. And there’s reason to think prices for both gas and electricity will continue to rise, or at least be vulnerable to spikes, explained Skanda Amarnath, the executive director of Employ America.
European demand for liquified natural gas has been high recently, which helps pull the American natural gas price closer to a global price, as Europe is a major buyer of U.S. LNG.
During the early years of the shale boom in the 2010s, before the United States had built much natural gas export capacity (the first LNG shipment from the continental United States left Louisiana in early 2016, believe it or not), American natural gas consumers benefited from “true natural gas abundance,” Amarnath told me. “We had this abundance of natural gas and no way for it to get out.”
Those days are now over. The Trump administration has been promoting LNG exports from day one to a gas-hungry global economy. “We’re not the only country that wants natural gas, and LNG always pays a premium,” Amarnath said.
In March, Western European gas imports hit their highest level since 2017, according to Bloomberg. And there’s reason to expect LNG exports will continue at that pace, or even pick up. One of the Trump administration’s first energy policy actions was to reverse the Biden-era pause on permitting new LNG terminals, and Secretary of Energy Chris Wright has issued a number of approvals and permits for new LNG export terminals since.
The EIA last week bumped up its forecast for natural gas prices for this year and next, citing both higher domestic natural gas demand and higher exports than initially expected. And those are in addition to all the structural factors in the United States pulling on electricity demand — and therefore natural gas demand — including the rise in data center development and the boom in new manufacturing.
But we’re in the era of “drill, baby, drill,” right? So all that new demand will be met with more supply? Not so fast.
Increased production of oil overseas — pushed for by Trump — is playing havoc with the economics of America’s oil and gas companies, which are starting tolevel off or even decrease production. The threat of an economic slowdown induced by Trump’s tariffs also influenced some of those decisions, though that fear may have eased with the U.S.-China trade deal announced on Monday.
While it’s the price of oil that largely determines investment decisions for these companies, a consequence can be fluctuations in natural gas production. That’s because much of America’s natural gas comes out of oil wells, so when oil wells go unexploited, natural gas stays in the ground, too.
“A drop in crude oil prices over the past three months has reduced our expectations for U.S. crude oil production growth, and we now expect less associated natural gas production than we did in January,” the EIA wrote last week.
“Together, these factors mean we expect natural gas prices will be higher in order to incentivize production and keep markets balanced.”
At the same time, Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration look to choke off policy support for a boom in renewables investment with their planned dismantling of the Inflation Reduction Act. This means a less diversified grid that will be more reliant on natural gas, Amarnath explained.
When natural gas prices spike, “it’s very useful to have non-gas sources of supply,” Amarnath told me. The alternative fuel can be anything as long as it’s not fossil. It can be solar, it can be wind, it can be nuclear — all three of which would be hammered by the IRA cuts.
What these sources of power do — besides reduce greenhouse gas emissions — is diversify the grid, so that America’s electricity consumers are “not held hostage to what Asian or European LNG buyers want to pay,” Amarnath said.
“The less you rely on a fuel source for electricity, the more stable you are from a price spike. And we’re more at risk now.”