Net Zero

1. Brookfield still bullish
2. Generate’s consolidation play
3. Africa solar shortfall
4. Carbon capture hard sell
5. New trade normal

Nvidia’s prediction for AI’s energy tipping point.

Apologies for the late delivery today folks, Climate Week indulgences are catching up with me. If I had to pick one takeaway from this week, it’s that the energy transition is still gaining steam even though it’s out of favor in the White House.

Between all the executives I spoke with this week, across a wide range of industries, I didn’t meet anyone completely scrapping their sustainability plans. It might be that I’m stuck in an echo chamber. But I actually think a moment like this, where climate action is politically unpopular, is when the reality of the transition becomes most clear: When there’s less incentive for greenwashing, I’m more inclined to take execs at their word.

US President Donald Trump stuck to his usual script on the issue: “If you don’t get away from the green energy scam, your country is going to fail,” he said during his UN speech on Tuesday. What you’ll read below is a wide range of rebuttals to that argument, including from one of the world’s biggest private investors. But if the private sector is forging ahead, the lack of climate leadership from the US seems to be rubbing off on other governments: Emissions plans released this week by China and other countries looked like a letdown. “We cannot sugarcoat it: These new climate plans do not put us anywhere near on track for a safe future,” Ani Dasgupta, CEO of the World Resources Institute, said.

Brookfield still bullish

One of the world’s biggest private equity investors believes US renewable energy projects remain both a lucrative investment opportunity and the most important energy solution for data centers, despite growing opposition from the Trump administration. Natalie Adomait, chief operating officer of the renewable power group at Brookfield Asset Management, said the firm’s recent $3 billion deal with Google to provide power from hydroelectric dams for data centers is just one small part of its 200-gigawatt pipeline of new clean energy and storage projects. Private equity has become a critical source of capital for large-scale renewables, which firms like Brookfield view as a low-risk, dependable source of long-term income. “Everyone has to ask about affordability, and renewables are by far the most cost-effective,” she said at Semafor’s Nights of Net Zero event on Tuesday evening. “If we want to continue to meet growing electricity demand, you can’t stop renewables.”

Generate’s consolidation play

A leading clean energy finance firm anticipates a wave of consolidation coming for that industry, which it plans to be on deck to profit from. In his first interview since being tapped as CEO of Generate Capital this month, David Crane, formerly a senior official in the Biden administration Energy Department, said that one downside to the clean energy boom unleashed by the Inflation Reduction Act was that a lot of investment poured into project developers “that weren’t quite ready for prime time and didn’t handle scaling up as well as they could have.”

Utility-scale solar, in particular, remains a highly fragmented industry, he said, with the top 20 owner-operators controlling less than half of existing and under-construction assets. A smaller number of larger companies would be better able to function effectively, especially as federal support in the US dries up, he said. And Generate sees a lucrative opportunity in financing industry consolidation, President Bill Sonneborn told Semafor. But Crane downplayed rumors that Generate is heading for its own public offering soon: “IPOs are best done into positive sentiment, and right now the market isn’t craving green stories.”

Africa solar shortfall

A combination of solar and batteries is the fastest and cheapest way to provide more low-income households in African countries with electricity, but most private financial institutions are still averse to investing in clean energy projects on the continent, a group of leading experts told Semafor. Speaking at Semafor’s Next 3 Billion event on Wednesday, Carol Koech, vice president for Africa at the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet, said better coordination was needed between energy companies, philanthropies, and development banks to put together the financing for energy access projects across Africa that commercial banks view as too risky. And more African governments need to streamline their power market regulations to reduce costs and red tape for power projects, she added. Jacqueline Novogratz, CEO of the nonprofit venture capital firm Acumen, said many banks are waiting to see more proof that clean energy projects in Africa can be profitable. In the meantime, it’s up to philanthropies to cover much of the gap. “Climate finance isn’t scarce, it’s scared,” she said. “And that’s a planetary-level market failure that impacts all of us.”

Carbon capture hard sell

Number of carbon-capture systems sold by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in the past twelve months. Tech companies and industrial factories have expressed interest in carbon capture as a way to meet their decarbonization goals while continuing to use gas, Takajiro Ishikawa, CEO of MHI America, told Semafor, and carbon capture was one of the few climate technologies to see its tax credits preserved by the Trump administration. MHI, which is better known for manufacturing carbon-intensive hardware like gas turbines, is collaborating with ExxonMobil on cutting-edge carbon capture tech. But it continues to be too expensive for many of MHI’s customers, he said, making sales hard to pin down: “When you do all the calculations, wow, this is not yet there,” he said.

New trade normal

Trade restrictions are likely to be the new normal in US politics even after President Donald Trump leaves office, senior energy executives said during Climate Week in New York. The country’s energy transition has been thrown off kilter by Trump’s withdrawal of tax incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act alongside levies on imports that have together raised the cost of renewables deployment. Still, “coming from Michigan, tariffs are not all bad,” Jennifer Granholm, energy secretary under President Joe Biden, acknowledged to reporters. Where a future Democratic administration would differ with the Trump White House, she predicted, would be in pairing those tariffs with tax incentives.

And companies such as EDP, the Iberian utility and renewables firm, have in recent years begun domesticating their supply chains when working in the US market. The firm began making the shift during the Biden administration in order to “mitigate risk” against supply chain disruptions, the company’s Chief Financial Officer Rui Teixeira said, acknowledging the US had made a “strategic decision” largely across party lines to push for a reshoring of manufacturing even if it resulted in higher-cost goods. “It goes beyond the tariff discussion,” he said in an interview.

—Prashant Rao

New Energy

• China’s emissions could decline by 2030 if Beijing mobilizes $2.5 trillion in green investments over the next five years.
• The end of government subsidies for solar in the US is fast approaching, but The Washington Post argues that it could help address the factors that have made installation two to three times more expensive in the US than in other developed countries.

Fossil Fuels

• China vowed to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 7% to 10% by 2035 in a video address to a climate summit in New York.

Finance

• Brazil is working to form a coalition with countries such as the EU and China to unify global carbon markets ahead of hosting this year’s COP30 climate summit.

Politics & Policy

• It’s hard to assess which group, country, or topic was most berated by Donald Trump during his UN speech, but climate is certainly up there: After calling climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” Trump went further by labeling immigrants and green energy a “double-tailed monster.”
• Electricity costs in the US rose at more than twice the rate of overall inflation over the past year, making them a “major political issue.”

Minerals & Mining

• The Trump administration is in talks with the developer of a lithium mine in Nevada to take a stake in the business — Washington’s latest move to get more involved in the mining sector.

COP30

• UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is skipping this year’s COP30 in Brazil even after he described former PM Richi Sunak’s absence a few years ago a “failure of leadership,” the Financial Times reported.