A conversation between Bill Nussey (Atlanta Business Hall of Famer, author of Freeing Energy, and Partner at Tech Square Ventures) and VECKTA co-founders Gareth Evans and Dan Roberts.
Key Reflections on 2024
Q: What are your main reflections from 2024 in terms of any breakout or big impactful outcomes?
Bill Nussey: Georgia became the largest recipient of the IRA and the most active state in the country in terms of building out clean tech manufacturing. This is a state that’s got a lot of right-wing conservative leadership, and I love the fact that when it comes down to business, let’s just put aside any questions about climate and let’s just do some business. The political battles over clean tech are in Washington D.C. Other than that, people are essentially saying, ‘Let’s just go do some business, let’s make money, let’s build businesses.’ When you take away all the baloney around it, it’s just the best business option there is.
Dan Roberts: Now that we’ve gotten through the election cycle, whether you like the outcome or not, we can have a bit of closure, we can have a bit of certainty moving into the next four years. There was so much postponement of decision-making because of the uncertainty around the election and the changes to come. Now that it’s been put to bed, we can forge ahead. We can have a bit of predictability as we move into the new year.
Gareth Evans: We saw vacancy rates of commercial properties go from 12% during the early 2000s to more than 20% in 2024. Under the economic conditions of high inflation and high interest rates, suddenly businesses realize that to differentiate and deliver the services and opportunities to their customer base, they have to do something different. More and more businesses realize that cost management, cost optimization, and having something unique and different to sell as a brand into the market was super critical.
Predictions for 2025
Q: What are the major energy trends we should watch for in 2025?
Bill Nussey: I think geothermal is going to ascend to the proper attention and cost economics that it deserves. The amount of money that’s flowed into nuclear from venture capital is a thousand times more than geothermal. But I think geothermal from a technical point of view, a cost waste management point of view is a substantially simpler business. 2025 is the year that distributed energy—microgrids, solar, battery—starts to shift from a novel idea that nerds talk about to something that just makes sense.
Dan Roberts: Grid hardening will be the number one priority on utilities’ minds with a close second being keeping up with demand and bringing on more generation. Maintenance and improving the existing infrastructure is not sexy, but I think it’s going to be within the boardrooms of utilities as the thing that they’re going to think about most. Even if you’re bringing megawatts or gigawatts more worth of energy online within your grid, if you can’t get it from point A to point B because the grid infrastructure is too old and it’s not prepared to handle the changing weather patterns, then it doesn’t matter how much more generation you bring online.
Gareth Evans: For me, the megatrend this year will be batteries taking center stage both behind and in front of the meter due to the advancement of technology and the drop in prices. A recent study showed that after 10 years of EV use, batteries typically retain over 80% of their capacity. I think this year we’re going to see and hear a lot more new chemistries and a lot less about critical materials. Maybe sodium-ion technologies and others come to the forefront.
Political and Market Dynamics
Q: How will political changes impact the energy sector in 2025?
Bill Nussey: I think the IRA is going to survive more intact than some people are worried about because the absolute number of jobs that will be destroyed if the IRA gets pulled is pretty large and many exist in red states. The political blowback, the political benefit of taking an axe is attractive to some people, but the blowback of actually doing it is pretty high. When Trump first came into office the first time, I think a lot of people were worried that he would cut out the ITC and the PTC, and he did not.
Dan Roberts: In the new administration, there’s more of a shift towards back towards fossil fuels. What that’s going to do, though, is create this overwhelming groundswell of private companies adopting clean energy. Now there’s no longer this ‘Oh, the government is going to drive the policies, and we’re just gonna kind of follow their lead.’ They’re all going to kind of look at themselves in the mirror and say, ‘Well, I need to step up.’ And the private companies are going to step up even more than they have been in the past.
Contrarian Views
Q: What are some contrarian predictions for 2025?
Bill Nussey: I think that sometime this year the whole nuclear energy renaissance is going to fizzle if not pop. The amount of venture capital and other risk capital that’s flowed into the creation of both fission-based nuclear solutions and fusion-based nuclear solutions is stunning. If you can invent a new type of nuclear reactor, the engineer in many of us gets excited because it’s just so cool. But realize that if you’re pushing a new SMR or a fusion reactor, you are talking about tapping into the most fundamental physics of the universe. Why would that ever be cheap? Not a single problem that we talk about today—AI power drains, EV energy requirements, climate change—will be solved in a timely fashion by nuclear.
Gareth Evans: My contrarian view is that as a society we push back against AI and robots and we get sick of hanging out with our laptop screens and we start craving some interaction and attention. We’ll see a mass build-out of really sustainable, enjoyable social gathering areas, and workspaces. There will be EV chargers, there’ll be solar battery powered and people will come flooding back for that at scale. I think we’re starting to get to that point of mental health and challenging tech and everything becoming AI.
Dan Roberts: Very few companies outside of the very cash-rich tech companies that have net zero targets are going to do decarbonization projects that are at cost parity or more, especially from an energy perspective. The majority of companies are always going to look at projects that bring down their costs. No matter how much they’re beating the sustainability and the decarbonization drums, there still has to be strong economics in the projects that get greenlit outside of the Microsofts and the Googles.
Summary
The energy landscape is at a fascinating inflection point in 2025. As the conversation highlights, we’re moving beyond theoretical discussions about clean energy to practical implementation that makes business sense regardless of political stance.
The economic case is becoming increasingly clear. As Dan pointed out, even companies with ambitious sustainability goals are sticking to energy projects that improve their bottom line – and finding plenty of opportunities with compelling 4 to 5-year paybacks. With grid infrastructure costs, such as transmission and distribution, causing utility rates to rise businesses have a strong incentive to take control of their energy supply.
For property owners and businesses, the growing popularity of energy-as-a-service models, as predicted by Gareth, means accessing these benefits no longer requires large upfront capital investments. Companies can now subscribe to energy services much like they do with software, removing traditional barriers to adoption while maintaining cost control and sustainability benefits. Bill pointed out that the financing landscape has matured significantly. Years of experience with solar and battery installations have increased lender confidence, leading to more affordable financing options that make the as-a-service model more viable than it was a decade ago.
The convergence of falling battery costs (projected to drop 50% by 2026), maturing technologies, and increasing grid challenges is creating what Bill describes as a “sea change in awareness, acceptance, and perhaps excitement.” This isn’t just about environmental benefits – it’s about businesses gaining competitive advantages through energy independence and cost control.
The message is clear: waiting on the sidelines is becoming riskier for companies than taking action. We’re moving from a time when early adopters worried about risking their careers by pursuing distributed energy solutions to a point where executives will soon have to explain why they haven’t acted. For businesses looking to maintain their competitive edge and control their costs in an increasingly complex energy landscape, 2025 may be the year to move from planning to action.
