By Robert Bradley Jr.
“Many [green] philanthropists who are willing to step up are looking around and saying, ‘DOE is stepping back and Catalyst doesn’t exist. I can’t solve this on my own.’” – Lara Pierpoint, Trellis Climate at Prime Coalition (below)
For decades, energy realists have explained why the stock energy created by the sun — fossil fuels — are inherently more economical than the dilute, intermittent flow from the sun. The concept of energy density has been explained ceaselessly in articles and books by Vaclav Smil. Political Economy 101 — markets pick winners, leaving losers for government — also comes into play as experimental technologies enabled by special government favor face the political winds of change.
Evidence? Start with the recent demise of the rooftop solar industry and the EV industry here in the U.S. Reference also the synthetic fuel programs of the 1970s, and before. Nuclear projects that were either never completed or came in far over budget (Summer Plant; Plant Vogtle III and IV) apply.
And now, a major fund for “green” energy projects has announced the end of its program after Phase I’s failure. The termination of Breakthrough Energy’s Catalyst arm for financing “first-of-a-kind projects is a ‘huge blow’ for cleantech,” reported Latitude Media (February 18, 2026). Author Catherine Boudreau explained:
Breakthrough Energy has decided to cease new investments from Catalyst, its first-of-a-kind project finance arm, marking the latest setback for climate tech start ups trying to scale up in an already difficult market.
“The fact that Catalyst is disappearing is a huge blow,” said Lara Pierpoint, managing director for Trellis Climate at Prime Coalition, which deploys philanthropic capital to early-stage climate tech, in an interview with Latitude Media. “There isn’t a replacement for what Catalyst was doing.”
“The Bill Gates-backed fund launched in 2021 with about $1.5 billion in capital,” Boudreau continued.
That’s far more cash than most specialized project finance funds, all dedicated to a single purpose: carrying nascent green technologies from pilot phase to their first commercial project, a financing gap known as the Valley of Death because so many startups flounder when it comes to commercializing a technology that they’ve successfully demonstrated in the lab.
Catalyst’s “blended finance” model raised capital from philanthropy, corporations, and governments, and was aimed at derisking projects viewed as too risky by larger, institutional infrastructure investors.
The program is ending at 10 percent of plan.
Catalyst set a goal to mobilize a total of $15 billion in project finance for technologies like green hydrogen, sustainable aviation fuel, direct air capture, long-duration energy storage, and low-carbon cement and steel. Now that the fund is suspending new investments, it will likely fall short of that goal — right at the same time that the Trump administration has canceled billions of dollars in loans and grants for climate tech projects.
What now? The parties are putting a happy face on a large philanthropic malinvestment.
“With the initial portfolio established, Catalyst has transitioned from evaluating new funding opportunities to managing and supporting its existing companies,” Breakthrough Energy said in a statement to Latitude Media.
“We are actively working with our partners to gather lessons learned and case studies from Catalyst’s groundbreaking work, and in the months to come will have more to say about how we apply those lessons to the long-term challenge of funding and deploying new energy infrastructure.”
The group’s head, Mario Fernandez, has been terminated along with other Catalyst staff. (The funding loss and layoffs have not been disclosed.) But Fernandez was all optimism last year about what it took to get a grant:
There is such a rigid criteria for infrastructure investors. You have to have a long-term track record for the technology. You have to have hours of operation. You have to have a really solid EPC scheme to build it. You have to have a long-term contract and you have to be able to not only invest in a small one-off project, but you have to be able to invest hundreds of millions of dollars from that fund into that technology.
But uneconomic is uneconomic. And politically correct is not what is used to be.
Gates Realism Under Trump II
A decade ago (2016), philanthropists worth $170 billion, with Gates at the helm, announced big plans for “green” investing. But reality has kicked in. According to Boudreau:
… the parent organization Breakthrough Energy has shifted dramatically. In early 2025, the group disbanded its climate policy teams in the U.S. and Europe. And in October, Gates penned a highly controversial letter arguing that some climate finance was “diverting money and attention” from efforts that could have more impact on preventing human suffering, like global health work in poor countries.
Trump accelerated this moment of truth by cancelling hundreds of awards in the billions of dollars for “green” projects (direct air capture; ‘green’ hydrogen, DAC, distributed energy and the ‘virtual power plant’, and methane reduction programs.
Boudreau ended by quoting Lara Pierpoint, head of the nonprofit Trellis Climate at Prime Coalition, whose mission is to “empower donors to advance untapped climate solutions with speed and scale.”
Pierpoint said that the withdrawal of funding from DOE, coupled with Catalyst ceasing fundraising, will inevitably have ripple effects for her work with philanthropists. Her clients want to invest in technologies with a plausible path to success that will make an impact on slowing climate change. That is becoming harder now that two major avenues for project finance have dried up.
“Many philanthropists who are willing to step up are looking around and saying, ‘DOE is stepping back and Catalyst doesn’t exist. I can’t solve this on my own,’” Pierpoint said.
Just another milestone in the retreat and demise of the “energy transition” that many on the free-market side predicted decades ago. [1] Vindication, however, is small consolation for the massive waste and misdirection of resources from a consumer-first free market.
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[1] See my 1997 study for the Cato Institute, “Renewable Energy: Not Cheap, Not ‘Green’“. Reviews on this policy analysis on its 15th anniversary (2012) were made by Jon Boone and Tom Tanton and myself.
