All 24 Energy & Climate posts we have indexed from venture capital blogs and newsletters, plus the highest-scoring pieces of the past year and the people who write about it most.
Bell Labs achieved epochal breakthroughs because it combined patient capital from AT&T's monopoly rents, a concrete mission with bottomless technical depth, and direct manufacturing scale—conditions that modern antitrust, capital markets, and VC structures have made illegal. Recreating such institutions requires "synthetic rent" without the predatory monopoly, a structural puzzle we've largely abandoned.
Industrial batteries solve a critical timing problem for data centers: by shaving peak demand, they reduce grid interconnection wait times from ~5 years to months, accelerating buildout while existing grid capacity absorbs 76 GW of new load. Real regulatory tailwind and economics make this a durable bridge solution.
AI models trained on multiple sensor streams can reconstruct missing or slow diagnostic readings in fusion reactors—and surprisingly, they're generating novel physical measurements no instrument could ever make, enabling validation of theories previously impossible to test.
The Trump administration's rebranded Department of Energy loan office (EDF) published its first strategic plan through 2030, shifting from innovation-focused lending to capacity, reliability, and energy dominance. Nuclear and geothermal clear the bar; hydrogen, offshore wind, and emissions-reduction projects no longer qualify.
AI model companies are becoming compute factories: selling inference at high margins to fund training of progressively cheaper, more efficient models. Anthropic's path from −94% to 40–50% gross margins per megawatt shows the model—profit from serving customers funds the R&D flywheel.
Data-center opposition has surged to 75% of Americans, not because of AI skepticism but because communities reject bearing infrastructure costs while corporations capture all benefits. The industry must restructure local bargains—funding grid upgrades, guaranteeing tax revenue, and sharing upside—or face widespread construction bans.
AI infrastructure exhibits classic bullwhip dynamics: demand shocks in GPUs cascade through memory, CPUs, and storage with multi-year lags, locking in higher costs at each stage and risking severe overcapacity when software revenues fail to justify $20B/GW data center buildouts.
ETF themes have dramatically shifted from clean energy and healthcare (2020) to AI, nuclear, space, and defense (2026); data centers are now a major economic driver reshaping regional employment and wages, while AI token consumption is increasingly dominated by agents using cached prompts—a shift with ripple effects across automation tools.
Climate Tech VC (10) · Not Boring (7) · My Climate Journey (3) · Tomasz Tunguz (3) · A16Z (3) · Equal Ventures (2) · Conor Witt (2) · Chamath Palihapitiya (2) · Lowercarbon (2) · Greylock News (1)
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