This Week in Cleantech examines mounting financial concerns around AI-driven data center growth, changing state policies that reduce rooftop solar compensation, China's continued dominance in battery storage, and encouraging trends in state clean energy permitting. Associated Press reporter Alexa St. John joins the show to discuss how automakers are turning electric vehicles into backup power sources and future grid assets through vehicle-to-home and vehicle-to-grid technology. The episode concludes with the Cleantecher of the Week, recognizing Bright Saver's affordable balcony solar initiative.
Hey everybody, welcome to another edition of This Week in cleantech, your favorite 15-minute-ish roundup of the biggest stories in climate and clean energy each week. Today is Friday, July 24, 2026. We've got a returning guest on the horn. We had our producer look up when this was way back in 2024. The Before Times. That's back when Alexa St. John was last on this show. She joins us from my old stomping grounds in the Mitten via the Associated Press, talking about a story that we want you to read. She'll be on the show in just a few minutes.
Right now, you're stuck with the two of us knuckleheads. I'm Factor This Content Director Paul Gerke, joined by cleantech commentator Mike Casey of Tigercomm.
Mike, how are you?
I'm good, buddy. I'm good. Hey, I just want to say a lot of people in our professional circles are having health problems or are losing parents. So, not to name anybody or put them on the spot, but if you're in our audience and you're going through something like that, we just wish you well because none of those things are very fun.
And also, a friend of ours, Rebecca Holmes, announced the start of her new firm, Benu, on LinkedIn. She doesn't compete with us, but it's cool. You should check it out.
Paul Gerke, it's good to see you.
Thanks for bringing us up a little bit from the down note. While I definitely sympathize, my heart is with anybody going through hard things. I try to deliver energy off the top.
Anyway, we're taking up too much time with nonsense. We appreciate hearing from you guys. If you've got a story or two cents to share, you can find us at TWIC@Tigercomm.com.
Mike, as always, five stories locked and loaded. What's number one this week?
All right. Rashmi Basu and Owen McCarthy from Bloomberg. "Data Center Trouble Stokes Industry's Fears of Coming Distress."
Paul Gerke, it seems like three times a week there's a national outlet doing a story about people hating data centers.
A new survey from consulting firm AlixPartners finds the data center industry is bracing for a wave of financial distress. They talked to about 400 respondents. Sixty-eight percent said they expect distressed situations in the industry to increase over the next year or so, up from 66% in 2025.
AlixPartners says it's not one bad input that's causing pessimism. It's rising energy costs and cash flow, falling compute prices hitting balance sheets at the same time, labor shortages, and equipment logjams. Skilled trades like electricians and plumbers are especially hard to find these days.
Mike, your thoughts?
Absolutely. This was an interesting piece because it breaks some significant new ground. It says this is not just balance sheets or community disapproval.
Money is still pouring into the sector. Three hundred thirty-four billion dollars in bonds and loans have been issued this year alone to fund AI infrastructure, already blowing past all of 2025's $185 billion.
But there are cracks. Amazon's record $25 billion bond sale saw only a modest oversubscription and a cool reception in the secondary market. Prime Data Centers also postponed its own bond sale.
AlixPartners says the small neocloud operators are the most exposed, and the ones that survive will be those building a viable business by selling directly to enterprise clients at scale.
Our second story this week, Francesca Perry from The New York Times: "Why States Are Making It Harder to Save Money with Solar Panels."
More than a third of U.S. states have changed the rules over the last decade to let utilities pay homeowners less for the solar energy they send back to the grid.
Under old-school net metering, homeowners get credited at the same retail rate they pay for power, often 10 to 30-plus cents per kilowatt-hour.
Under the new net billing model, utilities pay for that extra power at just two to 10 cents.
Arkansas made that switch in 2024, cutting roughly $500 a year off the savings for a typical solar household, though homeowners who already had panels were grandfathered in.
Utilities argue the shift is fair since solar households still rely on the same poles and wires as everyone else but pay less toward grid upkeep.
Rooftop solar advocates point out that people who produce their own power strain the grid less. There is a strong counterargument to the utilities' position.
Paul, what do you think?
Yeah, fair enough. It's a saturation and timing problem.
The more solar you have, especially in high-saturation states like California, the less value midday solar brings to the grid.
California abruptly ended net metering a couple of years ago, and the solar industry started to crater before showing some signs of life recently.
Illinois phased out its version over three years and barely made headlines.
That timing problem is also why batteries are booming. In California, the share of new solar installs paired with a battery has soared since net metering ended. In Hawaii, where net metering has been gone for years, almost every solar system now comes with a battery.
We're seeing that on the grid deployment side too. Batteries are the real game changer. It's not the excess solar generation—it's what you do once the sun goes down during peak demand.
Batteries aren't cheap. Trump ended the federal battery tax credit last year, so homeowners are largely on their own to make the economics work.
On the grid-scale side, though, those tax credits extend into the 2030s thanks to the IRA.
Yeah, Raphael Huang from The Wall Street Journal. "The Key to Solar and Wind Power Is Battery Storage, and China Is Dominating."
Paul.
Oh, it's another episode about how China's whooping our butts, huh, Mike?
Five years ago, China's grid-scale battery storage was under 4 gigawatts. Want to guess what it is today?
You're looking at the same piece of paper I am, so you know the number. I do not.
One hundred fifty-five gigawatts. Beijing is targeting 300 by 2030. They'll get there in 2029 and celebrate the achievement.
That buildout is what lets China go so hard on solar and wind. Those two renewable technologies now account for almost a quarter of the country's power mix, and storage banks all that extra sun and wind for when the grid really needs it.
Chinese companies aren't just building at home. The world's top 10 storage battery cell makers are all Chinese. Together, they hold about 90% of the global market.
Even Tesla's Megapack business runs through that supply chain. Its Shanghai plant sources cells from CATL for markets outside the U.S.
Mike, your thoughts?
We're a distant second. The U.S. has about 57 gigawatts of storage right now. Wood Mackenzie thinks it could hit 200 gigawatts within five years.
China also dominates the processing of lithium, cobalt, and graphite that go into these batteries. Beijing has been tightening export limits on top of that since 2023.
Trump's tariffs and tax bill are starting to change that math. Storage projects with Chinese components no longer qualify for tax credits, and Wood Mackenzie's Ziang Zhang says that's the only thing slowing China's march toward even more market share in the U.S.
I gotta say, though, Mike...
Yeah, go ahead.
Here's the problem with the current approach. Wishing away the clean energy transition does not stop it from happening globally.
We should be clear that U.S. policymakers are choosing to hand the energy technologies of tomorrow away right now.
Yeah, they're already handed away. Catastrophically stupid.
There's a little bit of "I want my cake and I want to eat it too" in all of this.
When you don't control the feedstock for these supply chains, let alone having to use Chinese products further up the chain, you've already handed them the keys.
Without the lithium, the cobalt, the graphite, the refineries, the smelting, the glass production, without all the things we just don't do in this country anymore, ultimately all roads lead to Rome.
And in this instance, Rome is China.
Look up how many massive cities are in China sometime when you're bored. It's going to blow your mind.
Jeff St. John at Canary Media. "State Legislators Are Getting Better at Clean Energy Permitting Policy."
Tell me about it, Mike.
A new tally from the Siting Solutions Project looked at more than 200 state bills across more than 40 states this year.
The picture is a lot better than 2025's wave of restrictive siting laws.
Out of 86 bills that would have made it harder to permit solar, wind, and battery projects, only one became law: a scaled-back Utah measure limiting tax credits for solar on certain farmland.
Last year, 10 restrictive bills passed across six states.
AI-driven demand growth plus the affordability crunch means legislators, even in red states, are looking for the fastest, cheapest way to add power to the grid, and that's solar, wind, and batteries.
Strong echoes of the cleantech bull case. Folks like Shawn Qu, Kevin Smith, Dan Shugar, and Steve Vassallo are all saying this. It seems like reality is catching up here.
Broad coalitions of developers, industry groups, and even agricultural and labor interests have been showing up to block restrictive bills.
Paul?
Siting Solutions notes the strongest wins came in Illinois, Oregon, Virginia, and Washington, but they're still mostly counted as "minor improvements to the status quo" rather than major structural changes.
For example, Virginia's law doesn't force localities to approve solar projects, but it does ban community-wide bans and requires local governments to explain their reasoning to state legislators.
Even red states are getting involved.
Oklahoma set new decommissioning standards for old solar and battery sites, though its governor had to pocket-veto a separate bill that would have stripped solar's property tax benefits.
It's still a lot easier to block a clean energy project than to pass a law that helps one get built, Mike.
And federal permitting freezes are still hanging over close to 100 gigawatts of projects, no matter what the states decide to do.
Returning guest Alexa St. John from the Associated Press.
"Need Backup Power? Automakers Want You to Look No Further Than the Vehicles in Your Driveway."
Alexa, first, welcome back. It's been a couple of years. We're really glad to have you back on the show.
For those who have not read the story, what is the big takeaway?
Well, thanks for having me again. It's amazing that it's been two years already.
The big takeaway is really to think about the vehicle that you have in your driveway, your garage, or the vehicle you're thinking about purchasing as an asset during power outages and, eventually, as an asset to support the electrical grid.
Okay. We've talked about these sorts of programs before, Baltimore Gas and Electric having the first EV-to-grid pilot.
What exactly is different now? What has evolved over the last little bit that's enabled automakers to really tap into those big, powerful batteries? They're way bigger and stronger than Tesla Powerwalls, for example.
Yeah. I think what's been so interesting over the past couple of years is that we're at this interesting point with EV policy in the U.S.
Automakers are sitting on billions of dollars of investment in electrification and the energy space, and they're trying to figure out how to channel that investment while we're at this sort of standstill.
So it makes sense for them to look toward the home energy management business as a place to play.
Of course, for them, that can suggest to consumers just how much of an asset owning an EV or a plug-in hybrid could be.
I think it's sort of multifold now, this approach that automakers are taking, and we're still in the early days.
The automakers I spoke with for the story said that as well.
It's making progress, and more and more consumers, not many yet but more and more, are starting to think about the potential of the vehicle.
Alexa, you have to tell me if this is too much of a stretch, but as I've read stories like yours and others that talk about what EVs can unlock in terms of grid flexibility, it's almost like this is a new form of net metering.
Do you think that's a fair comparison, and where does it stop being a legitimate parallel?
Yeah, I'd probably have to think about that some more, but bigger picture, given how early we are, there's still a lot to be sorted out.
For now, I think the biggest potential is in vehicle-to-home.
We're not quite at the full extent of what vehicle-to-grid will look like, so there are probably a lot of questions still to be answered.
If you look at basic support for your home, something like vehicle-to-home technology, whether it's in Ford's vehicles or some of the other vehicles I mentioned in the story, can be incredibly valuable during power outage situations, which we're seeing more and more frequently.
We had terrible outages in Detroit just over the Fourth of July weekend.
On its own, that sounds like a pretty big selling point, but I think it's still pretty early to say just how far this goes.
Paul, you're a fellow Detroiter. Did you want to close with the last question?
Yeah, I'll take that one.
Mike, my question about all of this is how the consumer buys in.
Is it like a cable situation? I know bidirectionality has been a bit of a technological roadblock, but it sounds like, based on your story, that's largely been solved and there are more solutions available for the consumer.
How easy is it for people who don't want to think about power, much less backup power, to actually utilize the tool sitting in their garage?
Yeah. Well, I think that's going to remain a big issue for the automakers.
To them, they want to put out these announcements saying, "This is easy. Just plug in your car."
That's not really the case.
You do have to think about the meter connection, a cable, making sure it connects appropriately to your vehicle in a way that's safe and in a way that's not sending power back to the grid when we don't want it to.
There's a lot to be said there.
Think of how much education has had to happen with plug-in hybrids, hybrids, and EVs. We're still in that educational phase, let alone asking people to think about that big car in their driveway as a giant battery.
I think there will still be a lot that's challenging for automakers to communicate, especially if they want customers to think of them as energy businesses and not just companies that sell vehicles.
I think it will be tough, and then, obviously, they'll still have to work with utilities to make sure everything is compatible.
There's a long way to go there as well.
It's absolutely fascinating.
Boy, I've got four more questions to ask, but we're about out of time.
Paul, we need to go to our Cleantecher of the Week.
All right. This week's Cleantecher of the Week is Kora Stricker, co-founder of Bright Saver, a nonprofit that just started selling zero-markup plug-in balcony solar kits.
You may have heard about those. They're all over the news lately.
They start at about $300, and shipping to 47 states kicks off in August.
Kora said nonprofits are often willing to absorb some financial losses in the short term because the mission is to get solar into the hands of more people so they can lower energy bills and carbon pollution over the long term.
Congratulations to Kora Stricker, our Cleantecher of the Week.
I love balcony solar. I think it's so totally cool.
Mike, thanks for joining us on this episode of This Week in cleantech.
You're going all villainous again.
Yeah, I like to bring it around full circle. I'm the bad guy again.
Thanks to Alexa St. John for coming back and putting up with us for another episode.
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You can also read every article we talked about each week. There are links in the episode description as well as in the post where this lives on Factorthis.com.
Have a good one, everybody. Be good.