Noreva on Clean Energy Investment Risks Amid Political Upheaval

What the Energy Risk coverage examined

The article looked at why utilities, independent power producers, and asset owners are finding clean energy investment decisions harder than at any point in recent years, and whether the pullback in public commitments translates into a pullback in capital. It documented the environment with the following figures (Energy Risk, Oct. 20, 2025):

• Roughly $7.5 billion in US government funding for environmental projects was canceled in early October 2025 as part of the federal government shutdown.
• Some $22 billion in clean energy projects was canceled in the first half of 2025, against just under $2 billion canceled, closed, or downsized across the whole of 2024 (E2, via Energy Risk).
• The International Energy Agency revised down its US renewable energy growth forecast for 2025-30 by 50%, with the global forecast down 5% from the prior October’s report.
• Against that, in 2024 91% of all newly commissioned utility-scale renewable projects delivered electricity at a lower cost than the cheapest new fossil-fired alternative (IRENA, via Energy Risk).
• Data centers are expected to double their electricity consumption to 945 TWh by 2030, slightly more than the electricity currently consumed by Japan.

The piece also covered the closure of the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, departures from the Science Based Targets Initiative, and what it called widespread “greenhushing,” with discussion of environmental issues on S&P 500 earnings calls down 76% versus three years earlier (Bloomberg Green analysis of Q1 2025, via Energy Risk). Alongside Noreva, the article quoted Clean Energy Services, Abaxx Technologies, MN8 Energy, Sylvera, SparkChange, the Clean Energy Buyers Association, and Resources for the Future.

Gardett’s first observation was about behavior rather than policy. Deployment had held up better than the headlines implied: “I’ve been impressed with the degree to which people have continued to invest and deploy into this volatility, I think that speaks to the energy shortage overall from a more global context.”

His explanation for that resilience is the part worth sitting with, because it reframes what the tax credits were actually doing: “Around 90% of what was already in the pipeline [in the US] was renewable, largely for reasons of economy and technology, rather than regulatory reasons.”

He told Energy Risk that a recent Noreva analysis of the Inflation Reduction Act versus the One Big Beautiful Bill Act showed the latter’s cancellation of tax credits for renewables making very little overall difference to the market. The shape of the impact, in his account, is a dip rather than a break: “There are certainly specific projects that are being impacted and we do see an air pocket in the late 2020s and early 2030s during which the previously steady climb in renewables deployment [pauses], but then it essentially continues to ascend.”

Why an air pocket prices differently from a reversal

The distinction between a pause and a reversal is not rhetorical. It determines the shape of the curve, and the two shapes imply opposite positions.

If tax credit repeal permanently suppresses renewable build, then long-dated REC supply stays scarce, prices stay structurally elevated, and thermal generation holds value indefinitely. If instead there is an air pocket in the late 2020s and early 2030s followed by a resumed climb, the curve has a hump: tight supply through the pause, then loosening as deployment recovers. A REC contract written across that boundary is priced very differently under each assumption, and so is a merchant thermal asset whose value depends on how long the gap persists.

That is the layer Noreva works in. Environmental attribute forecasting across compliance and voluntary REC markets, carbon, and LCFS has to resolve exactly this question of timing and depth, not just direction. Gardett’s point that roughly 90% of the pipeline was already renewable on economics and technology is the analytical basis for treating the pause as bounded: if the driver was never primarily the credit, removing the credit shifts the timeline rather than the destination.

It also sets up a tension the Energy Risk piece surfaced elsewhere. Data center load is expected to double to 945 TWh by 2030, arriving precisely during the air pocket. Demand growing into a deployment pause is a supply-demand configuration that shows up in power and capacity prices before it shows up in policy commentary.