Plus: Building Waymo’s electric robotaxi future; Trump’s EPA is killing Energy Star
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Ithas been a gloomy period for clean energy-oriented fundraising since the Trump Administration kicked off in January–and proceeded to gut U.S. climate science and regulations while announcing plans to undo a range of federal programs incentivizing the shift away from greenhouse gas-spewing fossil fuels to noncarbon energy sources. But now Aligned Climate Capital, a cleantech fund managing a $2 billion portfolio, just raised $240 million for its latest solar power fund, topping its $200 million goal.
‘The whole flow of capital to reinvest in funds has been slower, across the board. That’s not just climate funds,” Aligned Climate CEO Peter Davidson told Forbes. “But obviously climate funds, because of what’s happening at the national level, [investors] are just kind of reluctant to commit funds.”
Among the reasons this funding round topped its target by 20% was because of the “community” solar it backs–smaller solar farms of up to 10 megawatts of generation capacity that help supply local power systems without the grid connection headaches that bigger utility-scale projects face. And though it has some solar systems in California, many of its projects are concentrated in places that might not immediately seem like a hotbed of solar activity, such as Maine, New Hampshire and Delaware.
“Overwhelmingly, we’re community solar power plant owners and operators,” said Davidson, director of the Energy Department’s Loan Program Office during the Obama Administration and a former Morgan Stanley investment banker. “We build them. We have our whole team that oversees construction, and we do operations and management, and we’re running green power plants. By the time we purchase them, they’re fully de-risked. We know the revenue so we have a very good sense when we transact exactly what the return of the assets is going to be. We’ve been doing this for 10 years, and so we have a very good network of developers we work with.”
In a time in which federal policy is shifting from renewables to promoting increased oil and gas extraction, the key to successful clean energy efforts is simple: ensure that the projects are moneymakers.
The Big Read
Inside The Waymo Factory Building An Electric Robotaxi Future
Step outside the main terminal at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport to the rideshare zone on a hot spring day and you’ll catch a glimpse of a fast-approaching future: driverless Waymo robotaxis queueing alongside human-driven Ubers and Lyfts to take waiting passengers to their next destination. The service just launched in Austin and continues to expand in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Silicon Valley, but Phoenix has been its home turf for years, kicking off paid public rides there in 2020. And now, the region that helped perfect the AI-enabled tech has quietly become Waymo’s robotaxi production hub.
About 20 minutes east of Phoenix’s airport in Mesa, Arizona, is a 239,000-square-foot factory that opened in October. Every day, it churns out several battery-powered, white Jaguar I-PACE electric SUVs loaded up with the company’s custom-designed computer, cameras, radar and laser lidar sensors on a single production line. But the plan is to dramatically scale up the pace and automate output to keep up with growth plans, said Kent Yiu, Waymo’s head of vehicle manufacturing, who previously managed production operations for Apple and General Motors.
“We looked at our five-year projection and said, ‘Okay, to meet that, this facility will certainly need to be capable of doing tens of thousands per year,’” Yiu told Forbes. “We have the capability, the capacity here to support that growth.”
The production scale is small compared to traditional auto plants that make hundreds of thousands of vehicles a year. But the 1,500 robotaxis Waymo has provide more than 250,000 paid rides a week or about 24 a day per vehicle, vastly more use than personal cars and trucks that are driven only a few times a day. And by the time the Mesa factory gets 10,000 Waymos on the road, the fleet could be booking 250,000 rides a day. That’s well over 1.5 million a week. At that scale, Waymo’s annual revenue could jump to $2 billion, up from a Forbes estimate of $100 million last year. The company declined to comment on those estimates.
Read more here
Hot Topic
Dr. Steven Cohen, with Columbia University’s Climate School, on the Trump Administration’s elimination of “Energy Star” appliance labels
EPA appears to be ending Energy Star, a voluntary energy efficiency program. Any idea why?
No. It’s been around for a long time. Go to an electronics or appliance store and it’s just part of the packaging.
I’m assuming that some non-governmental people put this plan together. I don’t really understand some of these decisions. They’re taking relatively non-controversial programs and ending them for no reason whatsoever.
This seems particularly odd since Energy Star saves people money by letting them see how much electricity a product uses.
Yes. The same is true of listing miles per gallon on a car. You might be against regulating a fleet’s mile per gallon average, but wouldn’t you want to know what you were buying and how much it’s going to cost to run it?
This seems to come from an extreme conservative movement that just doesn’t think the federal government should be doing anything. And the problem with that is our competition, especially China. Every successful economy is a mixed economy. You need capitalism for a whole lot of reasons, but the government has a role to play. But some elements want to eliminate as much of that as they can.
Energy Star has been around so long it’s become a product label like organic, something many consumers look for. Isn’t the designation beneficial for manufacturers?
Yes, I don’t think there’s any real industry opposition to having that information listed on a product. So it’s just sort of this gratuitous stuff going on right now that doesn’t make any sense.
Part of the value of Energy Star was that the government did the testing to certify the energy use of products. Having a third party do that is a useful thing.
What Else We’re Reading
NOAA’s billion-dollar climate disaster database is going dark. There are many ways to ignore climate reality. One of the most effective is to stop measuring it (Forbes)
California and 15 other states sued the Trump administration, saying the federal government was illegally withholding billions of dollars awarded to states for building electric-vehicle charging stations (Reuters)
Republicans in the U.S. House are likely to kill a consumer tax credit for electric vehicles, according to Speaker Mike Johnson (Bloomberg)
Across America, big cities are sinking. A major reason is too much groundwater is being pumped out, new research shows, threatening buildings and infrastructure nationwide (New York Times)
The Interior Department ends air-quality monitoring at all national parks. The program collected data on the levels of harmful air pollutants at the 63 national parks in the United States (Washington Post)
For real energy dominance, we need the IRA. Former Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm argues that if Trump wants to achieve his goals, preserving Biden’s manufacturing incentives is the only way (Heatmap)
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