A major renewable energy purchase and a pair of clean-energy business reports indicate economic strength in the Clean Tech sector despite the Trump administration’s retreat from climate action.
On Monday, global investment firm Brookfield announced a $1.7 billion purchase of renewable energy assets from energy company National Grid, which serves parts of New York and New England.
Industry analysts viewed the purchase as a vote of confidence in U.S. renewable energy, and a Brookfield spokesperson told Newsweek via email that National Grid Renewables “fits squarely in our strategy” to acquire more renewable energy developers.
Brookfield will take over utility-scale solar and onshore wind farms as well as battery storage facilities. According to National Grid, the renewables in place and under construction can produce 3.1 gigawatts of power. (A gigawatt is one billion watts of electricity.)
In a quarterly earnings call on January 31, Brookfield CEO Connor Teskey said the coming growth in electricity demand in the U.S. makes renewables a good bet regardless of President Donald Trump‘s actions to undercut climate action.
“While the renewable sector has traded down in the public markets on weaker sentiment stemming from the new U.S. administration’s announced executive orders and potential policy changes for renewables, the simple fact is that the fundamentals for energy have never been better,” Teskey said.
Teskey said renewable energy can be deployed quickly to meet power demand from the technology sector, which requires massive amounts of energy for new data centers.
“The low-cost renewable technologies that we have built our business on are the cheapest form of electricity production and are seeing greater demand than ever before,” he said.
Teskey said Brookfield has focused on the most mature clean-energy technology and thus avoided the ones most dependent on government subsidies and support, such as offshore wind.
Brookfield has struck other similar clean-energy deals recently with clean-energy developer Urban Grid and Deriva, formerly Duke Energy’s renewable energy company.
Brookfield’s purchase from National Grid comes on the heels of two reports showing robust growth in renewable energy in the past year and strong returns for investors who put their money into Clean Tech companies.
Last Wednesday, the Business Council for Sustainable Energy and BloombergNEF published their annual Sustainable Energy in America Factbook, which showed a record number of clean-power deals in 2024.
The report identified 183 deals for clean-power purchases last year, with most of them paid for by tech companies looking for low-carbon options to power the growth of AI data centers. Solar and energy storage projects last year made up more than two-thirds of the new power capacity seeking connection to the grid last year.
Even before those developments come online, the combined output of wind, solar, hydropower and other clean-energy sources provided 24 percent of U.S. electricity generation last year, the report found.
Another report released last week by the shareholder advocacy group As You Sow and the sustainable economy research organization Corporate Knights identified the world’s top 200 Clean Tech companies and measured their economic performance.
Corporate Knights CEO Toby Heaps said in a press call that the Clean200 list was launched in 2016 partly to offer an alternative for investors who didn’t want their money going toward fossil fuel companies.
Since then, Heaps said, “clean-energy stocks generated more than double the returns of fossil fuel stocks.”
According to the report, the Clean200 companies generated a total return of 190.9 percent, whereas an index of fossil fuel companies showed earnings of 76.7 percent.
Put another way, an investor who put $10,000 into those 200 clean companies in 2016 would today have $29,090. The same money put into fossil fuel companies would now be $17,670.
Shahbano Soomro, the deputy head of policy and advocacy for the investment company Impax, also joined the Corporate Knights press call. Soomro said there is not just one clean-energy transition underway but several that are transforming a range of sectors regardless of the Trump administration’s hostility.
“It’s important to bear in mind, given that current political rhetoric is turning against the potential economic gains of climate action, that the economic reality remains the same,” Soomro said. “Businesses are having to adapt, and there are huge opportunities for companies offering solutions.”
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