硅谷银行-2025年气候技术的未来（英）

April 2025FUTURE OF CLIMATE TECH 202523Letter from the Authors4Macro9Capital14Company Operations17AI, Electricity and the Grid21ExitsThe climate tech ecosystem is generally healthy. The slower-funding environment has pushed companies to focus on capital efficiency and manage burn, which is ultimately healthier than the unbridled burn we witnessed in late 2021 and early 2022. Signs of growth are emerging, with trailing 12- month venture investment increasing, company formation remaining strong and early-stage activity still relatively vibrant.”There is no getting around it, US climate policy is weaker today. The Trump administration has pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement, fired EPA scientists, defunded the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association and initiated executive orders pausing climate-related Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) funding. As a result of the changes, cost-effective climate technology must play a larger role to make up for the vacuum of weaker policy. Adoption of climate technology and solutions will increasingly rely on economic imperatives.Climate change isn’t a future event; it is happening today. We don’t just see the warming climate in esoteric graphs but feel it in our communities: severe fires burning neighborhoods in the West, more frequent hurricanes in the Southeast and heat waves in Europe. We are paying a high economic price. The number of billion dollar-plus disaster events has increased five-fold since the 1990s when adjusted for inflation.Existing climate technologies are expanding. Wind and solar are growing faster than any other generation source. Solar added nearly 600 GW of installed capacity in 2024, up from just 250 GW in 2022. US storage saw a 33% increase in deployments between 2023 and 2024. Wind and solar are still the cheapest levelized cost of energy (LCOE), despite seeing slight increases.The success of those innovations not only serves as a foundation for new climate technologies, but also shows the potential for current emerging technologies. While venture capital (VC) investment in climate tech is well off its peak in 2021, it remains strong and in line with 2020 levels. Some companies face liquidity challenges as capital is tougher to raise, but on the whole, the ecosystem is generally healthy and the long-term outlook is good. The slower-funding environment has pushed companies to focus on capital efficiency and manage burn, which is ultimately healthier than the unbridled burn we witnessed in late 2021 and early 2022. Signs of growth are emerging, with trailing 12-month (TTM) venture investment increasing, company formation remaining strong and early-stage activity still vibrant. VC investment is a crucial part of new technology formation in climate. According to BNEF,1 annual investment in the energy transition has doubled since 2020 and exceeded $2T in 2024. Of that, VC investment in US climate tech was $20B last year. That investment drives innovations that improve energy storage, crea