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On Crux’s growth, Tesla’s slow ‘death,’ and a carbon storage warning
Current conditions: In the Pacific, Hurricane Kiko has strengthened into a Category 2 storm, and is on track to reach “major storm” status • In the Atlantic, moisture is moving into an area with a lot of dry air, posing a “high risk” of developing into a tropical storm • Northern India is facing intense monsoon winds and deadly landslides.
The White House has taken what The New York Times described as “the extraordinary step” of ordering half a dozen agencies to draft plans to thwart the country’s offshore wind industry. Helming the effort are White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. While the assault on the wind industry has largely taken place at the Department of the Interior, the departments of Transportation and Commerce joined the effort in the past two weeks, as this newsletter reported yesterday. Now the Trump administration is tapping in even more agencies, including those that traditionally have little jurisdiction over marine energy production. The Department of Health and Human Services has begun a study into whether wind turbines emit electromagnetic fields that could damage human health. The Department of Defense, meanwhile, is probing whether the projects pose a risk to national security. “We’re all working together on this issue,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, said during a cabinet meeting last week.
Heatmap’s Jael Holzman has been following the administration’s increasingly outlandish efforts to squelch wind projects in her newsletter, The Fight. Last week, discussing the potential redesignation of incidental bird deaths as purposeful under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, she wrote, “It’s worth acknowledging just how bonkers this notion is on first blush.” The move would make operating a wind farm effectively illegal, depriving numerous states of a major source of electricity. “Even I, someone who has broken quite a few eye-popping stories about Trump’s war on renewables, struggle to process the idea of the government truly going there,” she said.
Until earlier this year, clean-energy finance startup Crux was a digital marketplace exclusively for buying and selling tax credits made available by the Inflation Reduction Act. When Republicans in Congress threatened to eliminate tax credit transferability in March, however, the company moved into debt financing, a market that CEO Alfred Johnson told Heatmap’s Katie Brigham was seven times bigger. Now, in an exclusive interview Katie published yesterday, Crux said it’s expanding yet again into the tax and preferred equity markets. “The tax equity market was a $20 billion market before the IRA, and is now a $32 billion to $35 billion market,” Johnson told Katie, citing numbers from the company’s forthcoming mid-year market intelligence report. That’s a 10% to 20% increase over last year. Crux’s overall goal is to make itself a one-stop shop for project financing.
Australian rooftop solar is roughly half the price of Americans pay. Tesla
Tesla’s energy division released a new white paper warning that U.S. regulations were imposing “death by a thousand cuts” on the rooftop solar industry. In a post on LinkedIn, Tesla’s senior director of residential solar Colby Hastings said the “regulatory landscape slows progress, and we need more than one rule change to solve this.”
“Solar insiders have long lamented that residential deployments in the U.S. are too expensive compared to overseas. With the passage of the OBBB and tax credits expiring, it is imperative that we take a hard look at how the industry will navigate the next decade,” she wrote. “We must ensure that consumers have competitive choices for energy. This means affordable solar and storage at home.” Among the changes she proposed were enacting national code standards “that simplify rules, keep pace with hardware innovation, and limit regional variation.” She also called for reducing tariff on imported components to lower the cost of hardware. “Bottom line — we see an opportunity to cut ~40% from the cost stack, reducing average solar + storage installation from > $5/W today to ~$3/W.”
More than 85 climate scientists signed onto a line-by-line critique of the Department of Energy’s recent report sowing doubt over the severity and causes of rising global temperatures. The analysis pointed out that the federal report was written by a “tiny team of hand-picked contrarians” known for “often writing outside their areas of expertise.” The controversial government study had “no peer review of transparency,” they wrote, “unlike legitimate assessments,” and relied on “cherry-picked evidence and miscitations” to reach a “predetermined outcome.”
It’s far from the only criticism Secretary of Energy Chris Wright is attracting. In a Tuesday post on X, Wright claimed that “if you wrapped the entire planet in a solar panel, you would only be producing 20% of global energy,” arguing that “one of the biggest mistakes politicians can make is equating the ELECTRICITY with ENERGY!” A community note X users appended to the agency chief’s post pointed out that this wildly undercounted the potential to capture energy from the sun, which covers the planet in enough solar potential to meet “3,000x global energy use.” Yet even that failed to capture how “funny and sad” Wright’s “silly and unsophisticated” post really was, said electricity analyst David Fishman. In particular, Fishman noted, Wright seemed to underestimate how much total energy usage worldwide could be converted to electricity. “That's thinking like a guy who spent his whole career drilling for gas, but never learned much about physics, electricity, industry, or energy systems,” he wrote. “Really not what you want to see from someone in such a position.”
The amount of carbon emissions that the world can safely store is just a 10th of industry estimates, according to a Bloomberg writeup of a new study in the journal Nature. Researchers at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and Imperial College London found “a prudent global limit” of around 1.46 trillion tons of CO2 that can be safely stored in geologic formations. That’s “almost 10 times smaller than estimates proposed by industry that have not considered risks to people and the environment.” Utilizing all the practical areas to store carbon would curb global warming by 0.7 degrees Celsius, compared to industry estimates of 6 degrees Celsius or higher.
Cooling data centers consumes a huge amount of electricity, and nearly half of that energy is lost as low-temperature waste heat that’s simply vented into the air. But a new study from Rice University found a way to close the loops and channel that heat into more electricity. “There’s an invisible river of warm air flowing out of data centers,” Laura Schaefer, the chair of the mechanical engineering program at Rice and co-author of the paper, said in a press release. “Our question was: Can we nudge that heat to a slightly higher temperature with sunlight and convert a lot more of it into electricity? The answer is yes, and it’s economically compelling.”
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On the need for geoengineering, Britain’s retreat, and Biden’s energy chief
Current conditions: Hurricane Gabrielle has strengthened into a Category 4 storm in the Atlantic, bringing hurricane conditions to the Azores before losing wind intensity over Europe • Heavy rains are whipping the eastern U.S. • Typhoon Ragasa downed more than 10,000 trees in Yangjiang, in southern China, before moving on toward Vietnam.
The White House Office of Management and Budget directed federal agencies to prepare to reduce personnel during a potential government shutdown, targeting employees who work for programs that are not legally required to continue, Politico reported Wednesday, citing a memo from the agency.
As Heatmap’s Jeva Lange warned in May, the Trump administration’s cuts to the federal civil service mean “it may never be the same again,” which could have serious consequences for the government’s response to an unpredictable disaster such as a tsunami. Already the administration has hollowed out entire teams, such as the one in charge of carbon removal policy, as our colleague Katie Brigham wrote in February, shortly after the president took office. And Latitude Media reported on Wednesday, the Department of Energy has issued a $50 million request for proposals from outside counsel to help with the day-to-day work of the agency.
At the Heatmap House event at New York Climate Week on Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer kicked things off by calling out President Donald Trump’s efforts to “kill solar, wind, batteries, EVs and all climate friendly technologies while propping up fossil fuels, Big Oil, and polluting technologies that hurt our communities and our growth.” The born and raised Brooklynite praised his home state. “New York remains the climate leader,” he said, but warned that the current administration was pushing to roll back the progress the state had made.
Yet as Heatmap’s Charu Sinha wrote in her recap of the event, “many of the panelists remained cautiously optimistic about the future of decarbonization in the U.S.” Climate tech investors Tom Steyer and Dawn Lippert charted a path forward for decarbonization technology even in an antagonistic political environment, while PG&E’s Carla Peterman made a case for how data centers could eventually lower energy costs. You can read about all these talks and more here.
Nearly 100 scientists, including President Joe Biden’s chief climate science adviser, signed onto a letter Wednesday endorsing more federal research into geoengineering, the broad category of technologies to mitigate the effects of climate change that includes the controversial proposal to inject sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to reflect the sun’s heat back into space. In an open letter, the researchers said “it is very unlikely that current” climate goals “will keep the global mean temperature below the Paris Agreement target” of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial averages. The world has already warmed by more than 1 degree Celsius.
Earlier this month, a paper in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers argued against even researching technologies that could temporarily cool the planet while humanity worked to cut planet-heating emissions. But Phil Duffy, Biden’s former climate adviser, said in a statement to Heatmap that the paper “opposes research … that might help protect or restore the polar regions.” He went on via email, “As the climate crisis accelerates, we all agree that we need to rapidly scale up mitigation efforts. But the stakes are too high not to also investigate other possible solutions.”
President Trump and Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Leon Neal/Getty Images
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer plans to skip the United Nations annual climate summit in Brazil in November, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday. He will do so despite criticizing his predecessor Rishi Sunak a few years ago for a “failure of leadership” after the conservative leader declined to attend the annual confab. One leader in the ruling Labour party said there was a “big fight inside the government” between officials pushing Starmer to attend the event those “wanting him to focus on domestic issues.”
Polls show approval for Starmer among the lowest of any leaders in the West. But he has recently pushed for more clean energy, including signing onto a series of nuclear power deals with the U.S.
The Tennessee Valley Authority has assumed the role of the nation’s testbed for new nuclear fission technologies, agreeing to build what are likely to be the nation’s first small modular reactors, including the debut fourth-generation units that use a coolant other than water. Now the federally-owned utility is getting into fusion. On Wednesday, the TVA inked a deal with fusion startup Type One Energy to develop a 350-megawatt plant “using the company’s stellarator fusion technology.” The deal, first brokered last week but reported Tuesday in World Nuclear News, promises to deploy the technology “once it is commercially ready.” It also follows the announcement just a few days ago of a major offtake agreement for fusion leader Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which will sell $1 billion of electricity to oil giant Eni.
Climate change is good news for foreign fish. A new study in Nature found that warming rivers have brought about the introduction of new invasive species. This, the researchers wrote, shows “an increase in biodiversity associated with improvement of water in many European rivers since the late twentieth century.”
It all happened today at Heatmap House, part of New York Climate Week.
If you’ll allow us to toot our own horn for a moment, Heatmap House — our first-ever daylong series of panels with the most influential voices in climate, clean energy, and sustainability, part of New York Climate Week — had everything. Senator Chuck Schumer kicked things off with an emphatic call to action for climate advocates at the top of the day. Then a series of industry leaders in clean energy manufacturing gave us a forecast for the future of American decarbonization, followed by investors and technologists including Tom Steyer and Dawn Lippert telling us how exactly we might find the funding for that future.
Here’s a quick recap, in case you weren’t able to make it out to New York City for the event. Our first session of the day, “The Big (Green) Apple,” centered on New York’s efforts to future-proof the state. Schumer began the day with what my colleague Katie Brigham described as a “rousing condemnation of the Trump administration’s climate policies and a call to action for climate advocates everywhere.”
“New York remains the climate leader, but Donald Trump is doing everything in his power to kill solar, wind, batteries, EVs and all climate friendly technologies while propping up fossil fuels, Big Oil, and polluting technologies that hurt our communities and our growth,” Schumer said.
Among the various sessions that followed, Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo spoke with Uchenna Bright, a commissioner on the New York State Public Service Commission, about New York’s evolving energy system and how to keep it affordable for New Yorkers. Later, Emily spoke with Elijah Hutchinson of the NYC Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice about the city’s specific climate goals, and how those are inextricably tied with advancing equality for all the city’s residents.
Justin E. Driscoll, the president and CEO of the New York Power Authority, which sponsored the session, highlighted how the public power utility is modernizing through grid enhancing technologies, a.k.a. GETs. He also touched on the utility's newest mission, courtesy of Governor Kathy Hochul, to launch at least 1 gigawatt of new nuclear capacity upstate.
Other speakers from the morning session included Andrew Bowman, CEO of Jupiter Power, and Jon Powers, co-founder of CleanCapital, who spoke with Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin about the nuts and bolts of power generation. Meanwhile Ben Furnas, executive director at Transportation Alternatives, emphasized the importance of clean, efficient ways of getting around the city in conversation with executive editor Robinson Meyer.
Our midday session, “Built to Scale,” was a lesson in pragmatism. Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, along with other clean energy voices including Ricardo Falu, chief operating officer at AES, argued that the global fight to decarbonize is going on with or without the United States. “It is best for people to operate under the assumption that the United States, at least for the next three years, will be a destructive force on collective climate action,” Schatz said to Rob.
Falu, whose company has succeeded in getting clean energy projects off the ground abroad, concurred. “In Chile, we pay 12 cents for a solar panel. Here in the U.S., it’s 36 to 37 [cents]. Why is that?” he said in conversation with Emily. “In many other countries, you don’t need incentives for renewables. They are competitive.”
But many of the panelists remained cautiously optimistic about the future of decarbonization in the U.S. These included Jake Oster of Amazon, who told Katie that energy efficiency is at the forefront of Amazon’s data center growth efforts. Carla Peterman, chief sustainability officer of PG&E, told my colleague Matthew Zeitlin that she was confident data center demand will eventually bring down electricity rates for consumers. Other speakers highlighted the need for clarity from lawmakers in order for clean energy projects to advance, including Julien Dumoulin-Smith of Jefferies, who talked to Matthew about the clean energy financing equation.
Jeff Tolnar, president of Shoals Technology Group, which sponsored the midday session, shared a similar sentiment. "Tariffs — I'm not the best speller in the world, but it has become a four-letter word," he said. "In April, our supply chain team did a fantastic job, and then a month later there's a change and then a month later, another change, and then there's a tweet. It causes chaos in the supply chain."
Our final session of the night, “Up Next in Climate Tech,” focused on the future of climate tech investment. Climate investor and philanthropist Tom Steyer sat down with Rob to discuss what needs to happen for climate innovation to finally achieve deployment. Steyer is confident that a “huge, powerful wave” is still driving renewable energy.
“For the people who never look at the numbers, for the people who don’t pay attention to actual investment decisions, costs, profit margins, you can say whatever you want. But I’ll tell you this: The rig count is down 10% to 20% in 2025 in America,” Steyer said.
Dawn Lippert, CEO of Elemental Impact and founding partner of Earthshot Ventures, then talked with Rob about the biggest potential challenge facing renewables deployment, even in the face of such unstoppability — that is, “bankability,” otherwise known as the “missing middle” in climate tech investment.
“It takes quite a lot of capital, and there’s no one to hand it out on the financial infrastructure side. They’re not ready for infrastructure investors. They’re definitely not ready for banks,” Lippert said.
Moreover, in the midst of rapid load growth, "there's massive gaps in capacity," added Jon Norman, president of Hydrostar, the sponsor of our last session of the day. "That's really tricky. That requires investment."
Rounding out our last session were Christian Anderson, co-founder of the carbon accounting platform Watershed, and Rick Needham, chief commercial officer of Commonwealth Fusion, who discussed what makes a climate tech unicorn with Katie. Sublime Systems CEO Leah Ellis, whose company makes low-carbon cement, and Microsoft’s Katie Ross, talked with Emily about how their companies are partnering up to produce low-carbon cement.
The bottom line? Circumstances for clean energy deployment may be particularly tough at the moment, but there are thousands of creative people finding innovative ways to reach our decarbonized future.
The current policy environment “doesn’t mean that collective climate action can’t continue,” said Schatz. “It doesn’t mean that American companies, American governors, American nonprofits, American journalists, can’t be part of this whole movement to solve this generational challenge.”
At Heatmap House’s third session of the day, “Up Next in Climate Tech,” investors Tom Steyer and Dawn Lippert chart a path forward for the clean energy economy.
Tom Steyer is still riding the wave.
The climate investor and philanthropist told the audience at Heatmap House’s third session of the day, “Up Next in Climate Tech,” that he started his investment firm Galvanize in 2021 because “there’s a huge, powerful wave behind us.” And now, after the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the Trump administration’s regulatory assault on renewables? “Does any of that change? No, it’s better,” Steyer said.
Steyer was skeptical that the oil and gas industry could ultimately compete with clear energy, even with the current administration’s support.
“For the people who never look at the numbers, for the people who don’t pay attention to actual investment decisions, costs, profit margins, you can say whatever you want. But I’ll tell you this: The rig count is down 10% to 20% in 2025 in America. That’s a statement about future profitability” of the oil industry Steyer said, pointing to declining domestic drilling.
For Steyer, the math is simple. A huge portion of demand for oil comes from the transportation sector, and the movement towards electric vehicles is “unstoppable.”
“We’re talking about a commodity with a worldwide price where we’re the biggest producers of oil in the world,” Steyer said. He noted that the U.S. is also the “high-cost producer” compared to countries like Saudi Arabia, which can produce oil more cheaply than in the U.S. shale patch.
So if there’s such a huge market opportunity for clean energy businesses, can they get funded? That’s the challenge fellow investor Dawn Lippert is trying to solve. Lippert is the founder and chief executive of Elemental, a non-profit climate investment firm, and a founding partner of Earthshot Ventures, a venture capital firm. The trick she’s trying to perfect is to attract investors beyond the specialized, earlier stage investor group that typically seeds decarbonization, who can fund actual, steel-in-the-ground projects.
“We are trying to finance the energy transition with venture capital,” referring to the broader financing community. “It’s a total mistake.”
Venture capital has catalyzed “a huge wave of technology, invention, and technologies that are really working,” Lippert added. What’s happening now is that those companies are “trying to deploy, they’re trying to build their first plants, trying to build their second plants. It takes quite a lot of capital, and there’s no one to hand it out on the financial infrastructure side. They’re not ready for infrastructure investors. They’re definitely not ready for banks.”
This problem of “bankability,” or the “missing middle,” has bedeviled the climate tech sector for years, as technologically innovative energy projects struggle to get funding from infrastructure investors who want projects that can produce predictable cash flows, not risky venture-stage experiments.
Elemental developed an investment vehicle called a D-SAFE — a.k.a. a Development Simple Agreement for Future Equity — to help solve this problem. The D-SAFE is an investment agreement that can unlock future investment by pointing investment directly at development costs. “A development SAFE says, I’m going to give you dollars, and I’m going to get those dollars back when you hit specific milestones,” Lippert said.
So far, Elemental has done nine D-SAFEs. “We’re trying to create much simpler financial infrastructure so that financial innovation can catch up to where technology innovation is, and we can stop slowing things down,” Lippert said.
The challenge for American climate technology and infrastructure companies will be to compete with state-supported Chinese businesses, Lippert said. “China actually does have a very methodical way of putting a ton of state capital into these companies to get them all the way through. We don’t have that in this country, so we have to be much more creative and make sure that companies where technology is working are not falling into a scale gap just because we can’t get our act together.”