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Good morning and happy Friday,
To pretty much no one’s surprise, the federal government shut down at 12:01 am Wednesday, furloughing an estimated 750,000 workers and prompting threats of mass layoffs. Politico reports that during the shutdown, permitting for coal, oil and gas activities on federal lands managed by Interior will continue, but “permitting for renewable projects in federal waters? Not so much.”
Meanwhile, the Department of Energy moved to terminate 321 grants supporting 223 projects — cutting more than $7.5 billion in clean energy funding — even as private capital surges: BlackRock-owned Global Infrastructure Partners is reportedly in talks to buy AES for more than $38 billion, in what could be one of the largest infrastructure takeovers of all time.
On the policy front, Democrats are toying with reclaiming “all of the above” as a slogan and floating the “Cheap Energy Act” to reverse renewable rollbacks — though “assigning blame is complicated.” And
the latest FERC report shows solar and wind accounted for 90% of new capacity in the first seven months of 2025. But, it also found that the U.S. added more coal capacity (18 GW) than wind (16 GW) in July, “bucking a trend” of coal retirements.
Finally, ACP has launched PowerVotes, an online platform to strengthen grassroots advocacy for clean energy.
Read on for more.
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When the Cloud Meets the Crowd
Last week’s Must Read focused on pushback against energy storage projects; this week, we’re taking a closer look at pushback against data centers. Heatmap notes the irony that wind and solar projects were looking to AI-driven data centers as a source of demand growth, only to find that data centers themselves are facing the same types of opposition encountered by some clean energy projects. Here’s some scuttlebutt:
The “wave of rejections” against data centers is “eerily similar” to what clean energy developers encounter all too often these days, and includes “packed hearings, Facebook organizing, and complaints about prime farmland and a disappearing way of life.”
Bloomberg reports that while McKinsey estimates global investment in data centers “could hit $7 trillion by 2030,” in the U.S., infrastructure for data centers is running into zoning law hurdles. Regulatory reform is needed as “traditional real estate legal frameworks buckle under the pressure of the unprecedented speed of the land grab for data centers.”
- In May of this year, a report from Data Center Watch, a research firm, found that $18 billion in projects have been canceled outright, and another $46 billion delayed as data center opposition spreads, noting that “there are at least 142 activist groups across 24 states organizing to block data center construction and expansion.”
⚡️ The Takeaway
Maybe Chat GPT can help. As with renewable energy, theoretical support for data centers is high: a survey in February found that 93% of Americans support data center development, although support drops to just 35% for projects “in their hometown.” Further, angst over data centers is bipartisan – the Data Center Watch study found that among elected officials in districts where large data center projects were proposed, 55% of Republicans and 45% of Democrats were opposed; while Democrats often cite environmental concerns and Republicans focus on tax breaks,
issues like power consumption and grid reliability were shared across party lines. A Heatmap survey last month found that only 44% of Americans would welcome a data center nearby, making them less popular than clean energy projects.
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Valley of Opportunity
A powerhouse group of climate investors has launched the All Aboard Coalition, a $300 million fund designed to help climate tech startups overcome the notorious “valley of death” – the funding gap between early-stage support and large-scale commercialization. The fund brings together more than a dozen major venture capital and private equity firms, including
Breakthrough Energy Ventures (backed by Bill Gates), Khosla Ventures, DCVC, Clean Energy Ventures, and others. Here’s what’s afoot:
The coalition will focus on scaling carbon removal, green hydrogen, and long-duration energy storage technologies critical to decarbonization, supporting capital-intensive “first-of-a-kind” plants and facilities – typically the most difficult and expensive phase in a clean energy company’s growth.
With federal support waning under the current administration, one of the fund’s biggest goals is to signal quality and credibility to tell the broader market – including institutional and generalist investors – that a company is commercially viable.
- The fund will co-invest alongside member firms, writing checks of up to $45 million, with an average investment of $30 million across roughly 10 companies, and access to a broader $60 billion investor network – which could help unlock much larger follow-on financing, accelerating timelines for demonstration and deployment.
⚡️ The Takeaway
Go big or go home. The coalition is led by entrepreneur and investor Chris Anderson, the former head of TED Talks, and he’s setting his sights high. “You’ve got a crazy situation where there’s hundreds of billions of dollars sitting on the sidelines, supposedly to fund the transition, but waiting for companies and opportunities that have been proven commercially viable...the fundamental idea here is that you can solve a problem like this by collaborating.” Anderson continues, “Once proven, this needs to become a multibillion-dollar effort. We want to get 10 companies off to the races and prove that this model is amazing and then scale it.”
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Fusion Continues to Heat Up
Dispatch readers know that fusion promises massive amounts of clean power – as in, a single ton of the hydrogen isotope deuterium (one possible fusion fuel) contains as much energy as 29 billion tons of coal.
And as we’ve been reporting over recent months, what once seemed like a “someday” technology is increasingly looking like a not-so-far-off possibility. Startups like Helion (backed by OpenAI’s Sam Altman) and Commonwealth Fusion Systems (spun out of MIT) have announced aggressive timelines for delivering fusion power to the grid, attracting billions in investments and prompting big utilities to start betting on it.
Helion has a deal with Microsoft targeting 2028, and CFS is aiming for the early 2030s with a 400-MW plant in partnership with Dominion. Type One Energy and TVA also aim to bring a 350-MW plant online in the mid-2030s, using a former coal plant site and local manufacturing infrastructure.
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One thing that’s clear is there’s no standard approach – companies are differentiating based on reactor size, scalability, and infrastructure footprint. For example, Helion is pushing a pulsed, non-ignition fusion model that skips the traditional steam cycle, potentially cutting capital costs and complexity. For its part, CFS’s use of superconducting magnets and molten salt blankets points toward scalable, modular plant designs with cogeneration or energy storage potential.
Many experts still warn that it could take 15-30 years to make fusion viable and affordable at scale. But there’s no doubt it’s becoming a serious part of the clean energy conversation.
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Thanks for diving into the Developer Dispatch with us.
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Building American power requires a powerful team.
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