Tom Steyer is remarkably sanguine, even amid the Trump administration’s attempts to slow the energy transition.
“You can’t revoke the laws of economics,” said the long-time investor. “The politicians can say whatever they want, but the people do what’s cheapest and best for them.”
This faith in economics led Steyer to co-found the investment firm Galvanize Climate Solutions, which has a multi-part strategy focused on venture and growth, global equities, and real estate. Steyer is one of the company’s three co-executive chairs; longtime investor Katie Hall and former secretary of state John Kerry are the other two. Galvanize has invested in companies including enhanced geothermal company Fervo Energy, the U.K. energy giant Octopus Energy, and the emissions reporting platform Watershed.
Galvanize represents a return to Steyer’s roots, who became a billionaire as a hedge fund manager, but retired in 2012 to focus on activism, including his nationwide campaign to impeach President Donald Trump. In 2020, he ran for president, entering the Democratic race with what he described at the time as the only climate action plan that would address the crisis with sufficient urgency. He ultimately dropped out after the South Carolina primary and endorsed the eventual winner, President Joe Biden.
But now, he seems to have largely set aside politics as a primary avenue for change. There is no talk of a second impeachment campaign for the second Trump administration; this time around Steyer is focused instead on economics and the technological progress of clean energy.
“Energy, it’s a commodity,” he said. “What it costs is absolutely critical.” And in this commodity market, he added, economic realities prevail over political rhetoric.
The Trump administration, of course, is doing its best to disrupt these economic realities, instituting tariffs and relaxing regulations for fossil fuel plants. For instance, just last week the Environmental Protection Agency offered power plants a way to avoid clean air rules: send an email that sticks to a provided template, and President Trump himself will consider waiving requirements on a case-by-case basis. Those regulations, put in place by the Biden administration, aim to reduce emissions of chemicals like mercury that can have devastating health impacts.
Steyer, however, dismissed concerns that subsidies for oil and gas could dramatically change market dynamics. Demand for oil, he said, is fairly inelastic: “You’re not going to drive to work twice.” And natural gas is primarily used for electricity, and therefore has to compete against renewables that are swiftly dropping in price. Even in Texas, one of the country’s capitals of oil and gas production, developers are increasingly telling regulators that the economic case for new gas plants isn’t there. At the same time, the state is setting records for solar and storage deployment.
Steyer’s biggest concern, however, is pace. While 90% of the world’s new electricity generation is renewable, he said existing fossil fuel plants simply aren’t being retired fast enough. And consequently, global emissions are increasing — even as renewables set records.
The technologies with promise
This moment of political upheaval intersects with unanticipated load growth, driven in part by artificial intelligence, as well as electrification and the onshoring of manufacturing. And meeting that demand will require technology — some that already exists, and some that is still in development.
Steyer has funded two separate clean energy centers at Stanford University, where he went to school: one focused on policy and finance, and another focused on technology research and development. And the projects coming out of the latter program, he said, are “kind of amazing.”
“When you think about what drives American business on a broader scale, it’s new technologies,” he said. “You never really know exactly which of these technologies is going to be the one that explodes, but I can tell you that we see technologies that are disruptive, where they’re a tenth as expensive as what exists now, and clean.”
But many of the ones that could be transformative, Steyer acknowledged, are already up and running. For instance, he places a lot of stock in grid enhancing technologies such as dynamic line rating to address load growth — not by building tons of new generation, but by making the most of the existing grid. He pointed to a LineVision-AES case study that increased capacity on the lines by over 50%, for just $45,000 per mile. (Reconductoring, which is another option for improving the existing grid, typically costs more like $590,000 per mile.)
Asked if the lack of permitting reform legislation — which could help get more generation and transmission built more quickly — keeps him up at night, Steyer said relying on potential legislation is a holdover from an earlier age of politics.
“We can’t wait for a 1980 solution,” he said. “That will take years.” But, he reemphasized, developing new technology that delivers or stores energy in better or new ways is “what America does.”
And Steyer places particular faith in battery improvements. While he expects improvements in lithium-ion batteries, he also has an eye on new battery chemistries. “I definitely believe that batteries are going to have a couple of new revolutions in the next decade,” he said. “I think there will be far longer-duration batteries; I think that’s inevitable.”
New battery technology, he expects, will “change the nature of baseload for renewables.”
And for the problem of fossil fuel facilities not being retired fast enough? Steyer said carbon sequestration technologies work “way better than people understand,” and could be implemented at scale more quickly than the timeline for retiring existing fossil fuel infrastructure.
Ultimately, he sees the energy transition as fundamentally “a huge business revolution,” where technologies are being developed, and competing, at a global scale. And — speaking in the month in which Trump imposed tariffs on key competitors and promised to impose more — Steyer argued that that competition should be embraced, and that it would be an error to try to “ring fence” the country.
“The countries that do the best are the countries that actually produce things, that create things, that do things,” he said. “We are not a society that is going to do well by having a bunch of stuff under the ground.”
