🌿 Friday's Climate Infra Brief — April 17, 2026

Renewables just beat natural gas on the US grid for the first time. In March, solar, wind, and hydro combined to produce more electricity than gas across an entire month — a milestone most forecasters didn't expect until 2028 (woo-hoo!).

This week's brief is a short add-on to the previous issue: two roads to 1 MW of compute.

FERC announced it will finalize rules by June governing how large loads — overwhelmingly data centers — interconnect. The same week, the EIA confirmed it's building the first mandatory national survey of data center energy use, with pilot surveys already running in Texas, Washington, and Northern Virginia. And Georgia Power's regulator approved a "bring your own generation" program that lets large customers site their own clean energy behind the meter. Three separate federal and state actions in ten days, all orbiting the same question: the American grid has a bouncer problem.

The generation side is working. Solar alone added more capacity in the last twelve months than any other source in US history. It is just a cheaper and faster way to produce power. But generation without interconnection is just hardware in a field. PJM's large-load interconnection mechanism, the template other RTOs are watching, won't be fully operational until 2027 at earliest. Meanwhile, a coalition of twelve utilities — Entergy, Xcel, Ameren, OG&E, and others — filed a complaint asking FERC to waive competitive bidding requirements for major transmission projects in MISO and SPP. Their argument: the process adds months to timelines when the grid needs builds measured in weeks. The counterargument, from independent transmission developers, is obvious — waiving competition is how ratepayers overpay by billions. Both sides are right about the problem. Neither has an answer.

This is where the capital is flowing. Critical Loop, an LA-based startup, just closed a $26M Series A to deploy modular microgrids that promise to cut industrial grid connections from years to days, led by Conifer Infrastructure Partners. It seems a reasonable bet on onsite power if you have been following Bloom Energy’s stock price (NYSE: BE). Span partnered with Nvidia to develop XFRA, a distributed compute network running Blackwell GPUs in residential homes equipped with smart panels and batteries, with a 100-node proof of concept planned for Q3. Georgia Power's BYOG program is essentially a regulatory admission that vertically integrated utilities can't build generation fast enough to satisfy demand. The capital markets are routing around the bottleneck before regulators finish designing the on-ramp.

The supply chain is getting its own parallel buildout, which warrants a separate article on its own!


---

**Sources**

- EIA: Renewables surpassed natural gas in March 2026 electricity generation
- FERC: Large-load interconnection rulemaking timeline (June 2026)
- EIA: National data center energy use survey (pilot in TX, WA, NoVA)
- Georgia Power: BYOG (Bring Your Own Generation) program approval
- MISO/SPP: Twelve-utility coalition FERC complaint on competitive bidding waivers
- Critical Loop: $26M Series A (Conifer Infrastructure Partners lead)
- Span × Nvidia: XFRA distributed compute network announcement
- US-Australia Critical Minerals Pact: $3.5B commitment
- DOE: $500M for domestic critical minerals processing & battery recycling
- DOE: $69M funding opportunity for geothermal lithium extraction
- Sora Fuel: $14.6M raise (Spero Ventures, Inspired Capital)
- Origis Energy: $118M tax equity (RBC Community Investments, 65MW/100MWh Kern County)
- Rivian × Redwood Materials: Second-life battery storage partnership