Vince Faherty

New Jersey’s latest move isn’t just about bill credits – it’s about modernizing how utilities earn revenue and how the grid operates. By pushing forward virtual power plants and demand-side changes, the state is starting to shift utilities away from the legacy model of growing revenue by building more infrastructure and selling more energy towards a model that rewards efficiency, flexibility, and reliability. That’s exactly what we need as electricity demand grows and the system becomes more complex. Virtual power plants, storage, and smarter load management help utilities (and communities) get the most out of their existing infrastructure. This kind of policy direction is far more important than any temporary rate freeze or bill credit. It’s an example of how policy and innovation continue to shape the evolution of our energy system and moves us towards a world where utilities and communities are pulling in the same direction. https://lnkd.in/gJYdmngT #EnergyPolicy #GridReliability #EnergyInnovation #CleanEnergy

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The WBCSD Electrification Brief reinforces a vital point: electrifying industrial heat—particularly below 500°C—is not just feasible, it’s essential for decarbonization. Yet, barriers like grid constraints, integration complexity, and high-temperature demands remain. HEATEN, we’re tackling these exact challenges with high-temperature heat pumps (HTHPs) capable of delivering process heat up to 200°C and beyond—unlocking electrification potential across industries such as chemical manufacturing, food and beverage, pulp and paper, and district heating. Our systems harness waste heat and renewable electricity to deliver thermal energy with a Coefficient of Performance (COP) > 3.0, enabling up to 80% energy savings and significant CO₂ reductions compared to gas boilers. Just as the brief highlights, successful integration hinges on smart process adaptation, stakeholder alignment, and reliable engineering—areas where HEATEN brings proven value. Read the full WBCSD brief here: https://lnkd.in/dDeJvSn7 #IndustrialHeat #Decarbonization #HeatPumps #EnergyEfficiency #RenewableHeat #SustainableIndustry #Electrification #NetZeroIndustry

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So PJM capacity prices hit the price cap again, which was a surprise to no one who has been observing the market. As we've written about extensively, the only solution to the cost problem while also getting new supply online is to channel revenues to new entry without providing revenues to the rest of the supply stack. A few notes: * To those talking about extending the price caps: you fundamentally cannot implement a price cap below the cost of new entry and then ask why new entry isn't coming into the market * To those listening to what the IPP and generation associations are saying: they have a clear incentive to keep capacity prices high, so you need to read their comments through that lens. * To those assessing the future revenue potential of generation assets in PJM: you need to be aware that it is politically untenable for prices to rise to the cost of new entry and stay there. * To those blaming datacenters: load growth was coming and this was going to happen no matter what...datacenters just accelerated the underlying reality. Even with sufficient new supply to meet demand, capacity prices STILL have to rise to the level needed to support the new supply. SUMMARIZING: high capacity prices are both necessary to incentivize new generation and unavoidable in an era of load growth. And it is politically unpalatable to allow prices to stay high, but economically impossible for them to stay low. The only solution is to provide direct financial support to new entry outside of the capacity market. https://lnkd.in/gXKXe4Ck

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PJM released the results of its annual capacity bidding process yesterday and the results were, as expected, higher energy prices. The final numbers came in at $329.17 per megawatt day, a 22% increase over 2024 which was an 800% increase from 2023. PJM is also slated to retire 15-30% of its generation between now at 2035 meaning the problem will only get worse if something doesn’t give. h/t Grid Status for the chart More from me here: https://lnkd.in/gR6iQTTB #energy #datacenters #ai

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Devon Energy goal was clear: advance credible, measurement-informed reporting while reducing internal lift. As a founding member of the Highwood Emissions Management #Emissions Intelligence Steering Committee (EISC), Devon helped shape Highwoods’s Emissions Intelligence Plattform (EIP) — and adopted EIP’s integrated measurement and inventory work flow. #greeolecules

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UK's energy marketplace scaleup Piclo facilitates National Grid's energy diversification efforts in Massachusetts. Piclo's platform allows energy assets to be shared, managing demand, costs and carbon footprint. https://loom.ly/4Ur-dr0

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Growing up in the energy world of the ‘80s as an aramco kid, I saw firsthand how industry legacy shapes our future. Today, I’m thrilled to announce a DCTAV strategic partnership with Young Professionals in Energy DC to pay that legacy forward. We’ve officially partnered to bridge the gap between DC’s seasoned energy giants and the next generation of innovators. This is about more than networking—it’s about the exchange of trusted relationships to lead the global energy transition. Whether you are a senior leader looking to give back or an emerging professional ready to lead: We need you. Let’s go DC! 👇 Comment "MENTOR" below, and I’ll send you the details! #EnergyTransition #DCTech #Mentorship #AramcoKids #Innovation #YPDC #DCTAV DC Tech & Venture Coalition (DCTAV) Young Professionals in Energy DC The Synergos Fund

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🚨 The “Big Beautiful Bill” just passed—and it could be the most consequential climate rollback in U.S. history. ⚡️ Wind and solar tax credits are set to phase out years earlier, threatening over 70% of planned clean energy projects. 🚘 EV and battery incentives are being slashed, stalling adoption and investment. 🛢️ Fossil fuels, LNG, and permitting reforms are prioritized, reversing much of the momentum from the Inflation Reduction Act. 📉 An estimated 330,000 clean energy jobs could be at risk, while U.S. competitiveness in climate tech may falter just as global rivals double down. In this rapidly shifting landscape, evaluating what is ahead of the industry would be very critical. 🔔 Join Us for an Exclusive Webinar | July 8 @ 6:30 PM PST Navigating Clean Energy Funding: Insights from Former DOE Leadership 🔔 Vectors Capital is thrilled to host a 30-minute power session + live Q&A with Victor Scott Kane, Former Deputy Director of Commercialization at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Whether you're a climate founder, corporate innovator, or investor, this is your chance to hear directly from DOE leadership on how to strategically position for upcoming funding opportunities and policy shifts. 🎯 What You’ll Learn: ✅ Insider tips on DOE funding strategy ✅ Navigating grants, cooperative agreements & prize competitions ✅ Practical guidance for successful applications ✅ Implications of the new Senate bill for innovation, investment & industry partnerships 🗓️ Tuesday, July 8 🕡 6:30 PM PST 📍 Virtual | Zoom link upon registration 👉 Register Now: https://shorturl.at/cgBIf Let’s unpack what’s next for the climate innovation ecosystem—together. #climatetech #policy #DOE #energytransition #cleantech #venturecapital #grants #non-dilutivefunding #cleanenergy #webinar #BigBeautifulBill

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How do we meet the demand growth challenge in the US? More power plants obviously, but another part of the solution is making the grid smarter at the distribution level. Budderfly is doing that now by creating “virtual power plants” through active management of its portfolio of commercial demand, benefitting its customers and the grid at the same time.

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As electricity demand in the US continues to grow—primarily due to data centers, new manufacturing, and electrification—we must find ways to accommodate this increasing demand. A new report from the Clean Energy States Alliance (CESA), “Load Growth: What States Are Doing to Accommodate Increasing Electric Demand," surveys the causes of electricity load growth and outlines what states are doing to meet the challenge. State actions include increasing new generation, delaying the retirement of legacy generators, exploring new generation technologies, expanding transmission capacity, developing demand-side solutions, and taking steps to mitigate cost impacts on customers. https://lnkd.in/gjmUbPcV

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🚀 Thrilled to lead Ayr Energy's seed round as they reimagine the backbone of tomorrow’s power grid. As the world electrifies—driven by AI, data centers, EV adoption, and renewable energy—the demand for transformers, switch gears, and other critical grid equipment is skyrocketing. Yet, global supply chains are strained, with transformer prices up 40–60% and lead times stretching more than 3x since 2021. This is exactly the bottleneck Ayr is solving: building a resilient, cross-border supply chain from India to the U.S., unlocking underutilized manufacturing capacity, and pairing it with world-class engineering talent. What excites us most is the team. Anirudh Reddy, Rahul Arora, and Yashashvi Takallapalli bring a rare mix of technical depth, global execution experience, and commercial acumen—from stints at Eaton, Ather, Zetwerk, Stem, McKinsey, and InMobi. Together, they’re building the infrastructure essential to enable the next era of electrification. At General Catalyst, we see Ayr as a powerful example of our Global Resilience thesis: solving for critical supply chain gaps while creating scalable, high-quality industrial capacity rooted in India. Congratulations to the Ayr Energy team—we’re proud to be on this journey with you and can’t wait to see the impact you’ll create in powering the world’s future. ⚡ cc: Neeraj Arora Siddhi Kasliwal Paul Kwan

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Weekly Grid Watch Update: July 30, 2025 1. Distributed Solar & Storage Scaling Fast California and New Jersey are leading with record-setting rooftop solar projects—630 MW across warehouse rooftops and growing long-duration storage deployments. Utilities see distributed assets as a resilience and congestion management tool, not just generation. 2. AI Accelerating Grid Connections ISOs like MISO and PJM are deploying AI to cut renewable interconnection study timelines from years to months. This could unlock thousands of MW of stalled projects by 2026, signaling a tipping point in grid modernization. 3. Transmission Buildout Lagging Despite demand, only 322 miles of high-voltage transmission were added in 2024. DOE’s loan cancellation for Grain Belt Express highlights regulatory hurdles, even as federal goals call for 5,000+ miles annually. Utilities are watching for new private financing and regional compacts. 4. AMI 2.0 + Grid Edge Upgrades Utilities face a decision: extend the life of aging AMI systems or invest in next-gen metering platforms. The shift is toward meters as grid-edge intelligence nodes, feeding outage, load, and DER data directly to operations. 5. Reliability Margins Under Pressure NYISO and other operators are raising concerns as fossil retirements outpace renewable integration. Calls are growing for transitional strategies—including repowering select fossil assets and leveraging DER dispatch—to keep reserve margins stable. ⸻ Smart grid evolution continues to be a balance of technology acceleration, infrastructure gaps, and reliability safeguards. Each week shows how quickly utilities are moving from strategy to execution. #WeeklyGridWatch

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Excited to announce Carbon DC We believe that within 10 years, DC electrical infrastructure will be common in most new buildings as properties, vehicles, and more efficient heating and cooling systems are developed and integrated with batteries and connected to both traditional grid and renewable energy such as solar. https://lnkd.in/g3R4a3x6

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How does a guaranteed return on equity of 10% impact utility decisions and incentives to build out the grid the "old" way (more generation, more transmission, more distribution) vs. invest in cheaper, inherently more reliable, and deflationary technologies like demand response, load shifting, and other grid edge solutions? A few weeks ago I was sitting down with a former retail power executive and this topic came up, and it sent me a down a bit of a rabbit hole. Could you calculate the true cost of equity for utilities? Is that number less than 10%? And, if yes, could you use basic finance principles to show how the 120+ year anachronism of forcing rate-payers to give utilities this outsized return directly incentivizes outdated CapEx-first approaches to load growth? AND, would a true cost of equity inherently lead to optimal capital allocation, focusing on profitability? As I was doing this analysis, Dan Gearino of Inside Climate News wrote this excellent article explaining the core elements of this thesis (https://lnkd.in/gzJyNZtW) so I'll skip the qualitative discussion and jump to the analysis. So: WHAT IS THE TRUE COST OF EQUITY FOR UTILITIES? Cost of equity for can be calculated using the Capital Asset Pricing Model, which states that Cost of Equity = Risk free rate + Beta*Equity Risk Premium In other words, what rate of return do I require as an equity investor in order to hold the incremental risk of an equity above the risk free rate? I did this calc over a 30 year time horizon, to match the time horizon of a typical utility investment, so: Risk free rate = Yield on 30 year US treasury = ~3.2% 30 year market return = average return of S&P 500 over 30 years = 8% Equity risk premium = 8.0%-3.2% = 4.8% To calculate Beta for utilities I compared daily returns of the the Dow Jones Utilities Index (DJUSUT) vs. daily returns of the S&P500 going back to ~30 years. Unsurprisingly, Utilities are less volatile than the S&P, so utilities have a beta of about 0.68 over the period, meaning they are less risky to hold, so you require a lower rate of return for holding their equity vs. the overall market. So what is the true cost of equity for utilities today? 4.8% + 0.68*(8.0%-3.2%)=6.5% 6.5% is the cost of equity for utilities today; but if you extend this analysis back to 30 years, the average cost of equity for utilities is even LOWER, averaging 5.8%. (Btw, this lines up perfectly with the 6% Mark Ellis references in the above article) That means utilities are getting an EXCESS RETURN OF 4.2 PERCENT on every dollar of equity they spend building more infrastructure! That excess return is being paid by customer ("rate payers") who's utility bills are legally inflated to ensure this return to utilities. There's a lot more to unpack here, which I'll have to do in future posts, but for now you can access the analysis here if you're curious: https://lnkd.in/gfkvS9sK Michael Lee Doug Lewin Feyijimi Adegbohun, PhD Seyi Fabode

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The DOE funding pullback is clarifying for climate tech investments, not catastrophic. The Department of Energy's decision to return over $13 billion in unobligated clean-energy funds has spooked founders who built capital strategies around grant timelines. Reality check: this is a policy reprioritization toward fewer discretionary grants and longer timelines, not a sector shutdown. What hasn't changed: projects with real economics still get funded. The Loan Programs Office continues approving disbursements for revenue-generating projects—manufacturing scale-up, grid infrastructure, nuclear restarts. DOE's Mine of the Future initiative and critical minerals programs remain active, supporting technologies that secure domestic supply chains. At MFV Partners, we stayed disciplined while others chased 2021-2023 IRA momentum. Those bets are struggling now. We focused on energy deep tech that works without subsidy dependency—solutions that pencil out regardless of administration. Our portfolio reflects this: Conifer builds rare-earth-free powertrains using ferrite magnets, directly addressing supply-chain bottlenecks while improving power density and enabling cleaner HVAC and mobility applications. SUN Mobility operates battery-swapping infrastructure for commercial fleets across India, Africa, and Southeast Asia—accelerating EV adoption in emerging markets while delivering ROI through better asset utilization. We have several other companies in stealth building similar economics-first solutions that drive real climate impact. What founders should do now: Use grants to derisk R&D where available, but build your scale path around customer pilots and project finance. Treat supply-chain resilience as a product feature. Prove the economics: predictable throughput, demonstrated reliability, and numbers that work with conservative assumptions. The fundamentals haven't changed. Electrification and grid modernization are productivity upgrades—lower costs, higher availability, better payback. That's where capital flows, regardless of headlines. We're continuing to invest actively in energy and electrification deep tech. If you're building solutions with strong unit economics that accelerate the energy transition, reach out. https://lnkd.in/gUfdzRXH https://lnkd.in/gNGm9zyM

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SNE Research projects North America's Energy Storage System (ESS) demand to remain structurally robust, driven by grid-scale deployments and increasing AI data-center power needs. Despite strong demand, SNE's analysis indicates that supply constraints will lead to a temporary market contraction from 2025–2027. This is partly due to regulatory restrictions and supply limitations impacting Chinese battery imports, which supplied approximately 65 GWh to North America in 2024, leading to delays or cancellations of many projects from 2025. Consequently, SNE anticipates a significant shift in supply composition, with Korean battery makers' share of the North America ESS market potentially rising to approximately 87% by 2027 as localized capacity increases. The transition to LFP chemistry and prismatic form factors, preferred for ESS, is expected to be gradual as Korean manufacturers adapt existing EV-oriented production lines. SNE estimates that locally produced ESS container systems will reach comparable costs to imports from 2026, with cost advantages widening thereafter.

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The New England Clean Energy Connect (NECEC) line is now officially delivering clean electricity to our grid! The Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities played a key regulatory role through its review and approval of the contracts and settlements, helping to enable this major clean energy investment that supports grid reliability, advances climate goals, and will deliver $50 million each year in savings on electric bills. More here: https://lnkd.in/eG9EKydD

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