As the buoyancy drained out of the tech sector last year, leading to almost 100,000 job cuts in the U.S., cleantech looked like a bright spot. Investors pumped some $59 billion into climate technology companies in 2022, more than the year before, across 1,182 deals tracked by researchers at BloombergNEF.
The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, on which the dust is just settling after a white-knuckle weekend, is throwing a wrench into that outlook. It’s the first major headwind to blow against a boom in climate-tech investing that was capped off by incentives in the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act last year. SVB was known as a climate bank — one that lent big to renewable energy companies, specialized in small solar projects and by its own accounting served more than 1,550 customers doing climate and sustainability work.
Clean-energy developers with smaller projects received a welcome reception from SVB that they didn't get at Manhattan-based giants like Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase & Co., said Pol Lezcano, BloombergNEF’s lead U.S. solar analyst.