The past several months have brought another wave of reminders that a changing climate is affecting communities and straining infrastructure around the world. Record heat stretched across Europe, and wildfires raged in France, Spain and Canada, threatening lives, homes, and livelihoods. In India, extreme heat is becoming a structural drag on GDP growth. And last month’s devastating flash flood in the Himalayas highlighted the risk to glaciers and mountain slopes from global warming. Closer to home, electricity demand is surging and utility bills are rising, putting pressure on households.

 

The need to address these challenges is urgent. With federal support for climate and clean energy priorities uncertain, private and philanthropic capital play an important role. Policy matters, even in areas that may not immediately look like climate issues. For instance, vast sums of money are flowing into U.S. elections from entities whose priorities may differ from those of American families, especially when it comes to energy affordability and the economy. We were pleased when more than 70 members of Congress joined a dozen senators this summer to reintroduce the Get Foreign Money Out of U.S. Elections Act. This bill closes a campaign finance loophole that allows foreign investors, including foreign shareholders of U.S. oil and gas companies, to participate in our elections.

 

This momentum is timely as we head toward the November midterms. The choices voters make this fall will shape energy and climate policy, as well as the broader economic and regulatory environment important to long-term investors.

 

Even amid uncertainty, we’re energized by the progress happening on the ground, with entrepreneurs developing new technologies, investors helping scale solutions, and cities adapting infrastructure. This work was on full display last week during Climate Week NYC when investors, entrepreneurs, and philanthropists gathered to discuss how to build a low-carbon economy and accelerate climate innovation. We’re pleased to highlight some of the climate-related work we’re supporting in this newsletter.

 

- Liesel and Ian

As capital flows to large climate funds, Blue Haven sees opportunity elsewhere. Hari Joy, Managing Director of Private Investments, explains why our family office is backing smaller, specialist managers targeting parts of the market that larger funds overlook.

 

There’s an understandable tendency for investors to gravitate toward established climate funds with track records and significant assets under management. But larger funds have to write bigger checks, which can confine them to the same later-stage deals in a handful of sectors. When that much capital converges on a concentrated set of assets, entry multiples climb and underwriting assumptions stretch to keep pace. Meanwhile, emerging managers and smaller, specialist funds with sector expertise can get overlooked. That’s where we see an opportunity.

 

At Blue Haven, we've spent more than a decade exploring solutions that decarbonize industries, build efficiency and resilience, and generate financial returns alongside impact, working through direct and select fund investments. That experience has shown us just how broad—and specialized—the climate opportunity set can be, spanning areas from grid software and industrial decarbonization to climate adaptation in agriculture. It also led us to a strategy that backs specialist and emerging managers through a combined general partner (GP) stake and limited partner (LP) commitment, giving us access to talent and technical expertise that would be difficult to build in-house. While we're early in deploying capital in this new part of the portfolio, the strategy builds on the work that got us here.

 

Investing in the manager, not just the fund

 

We keep the portfolio deliberately concentrated so we can work closely with a small number of managers. A GP stake deepens that relationship, as we've seen in our long-standing work with Generate Capital and CrossBoundary. By aligning us with the manager's economics across the funds a firm raises, a GP stake broadens the conversation from individual investments to how the firm itself is being built.

 

That long-term partnership can be especially valuable in a firm’s early years, when fund administration, compliance, technology, and a team must be in place well before management fees can fully support them—and when a founding partner's own capital is usually locked into the fund commitment. A GP stake allows us to support managers through that critical period and participate in the firm’s growth over its full lifecycle.

 

So, what do we look for in a manager? Specialization alone isn’t enough. Whether we’re considering an LP investment or a GP stake, we look for several things:

• A genuine sourcing edge. Can the manager find and access compelling investments that others can’t? Many fund managers point to their networks, but a network alone isn’t an edge. The question we like to ask is: “Everyone has a network. How is yours different?”

• Technical depth. Climate investing can require specialized knowledge. We look for scientists, engineers, or PhD-level experts involved in sourcing and diligence, particularly where understanding technology is essential to underwriting the business.

• Impact rigor. We expect a concrete view of impact that influences investment decisions, not just frameworks that sit alongside the investment process. However, that doesn’t mean a manager needs to call itself an impact fund. We care much less about the label than what happens when an investment decision gets made.

• Commercial and policy expertise. Our experience investing in companies, including our energy-access work in sub-Saharan Africa, has reinforced that the best technology doesn't necessarily result in the best investment. Distribution, affordability, and unit economics matter just as much as technological performance. If a climate business depends on a subsidy or regulatory regime, that risk needs to be part of underwriting. Macro environments change, and the best managers understand the fundamentals that can withstand that volatility.

 

Opportunities hiding in plain sight

 

Climate investors sometimes chase whatever technology is generating headlines. But some of the opportunities we find most interesting aren’t glamorous: HVAC and heat pumps in buildings, process heat and cooling in heavy industry, and the software utilities use to forecast and dispatch grid load. These are massive existing systems where innovation may mean a more efficient unit, a smarter control system, or a financing model that gets proven technology deployed at scale.

 

Cooling is a good example. Extreme heat is turning access to cooling into a health question as much as a climate one. Demand often peaks when the grid is most strained. Better equipment and systems can cut emissions, ease pressure on the grid, and help keep people safe. That intersection is important to how we think about climate. We don’t treat it as a silo: Climate overlaps with public health, housing, and financial services, and investments driven by health or affordability can produce climate benefits as well. Those connections can point us toward opportunities others aren't considering.

 

We don't aim to be the smartest people in every corner of climate. We do need to know where our edge is, where someone else's expertise complements ours, and where we can be a useful partner for long-term impact.

 

— Hari Joy

LOOKING BEYOND D.C.

For clean-energy investors, there’s no shortage of opportunities to put capital to work. These days, a significant leverage point lies in statehouses, state legislative campaigns, and policy debates.

 

Outside D.C., a well-placed contribution of $50,000 or less in a competitive state race or clean-energy campaign can shift outcomes in ways that national giving rarely does, says Ryan Werder, Executive Director of Energy Action Fund (EAF). “Leverage at the state and local level can be striking,” Ryan says, pointing to how political decisions shape how solar, wind, and storage are built.

 

In addition to EAF’s work providing strategic alignment and funding coordination among climate groups, it recently launched the Aligned Money Program (AMP), an information service that unites clean energy advocates, climate investors, and donors by pinpointing electoral and clean-energy campaigns where added capital could make a meaningful difference.

 

Through quarterly briefings and real-time alerts, the AMP program flags a range of issues to its membership community, including clean-energy infrastructure and utility affordability. A recent initiative supported lobbyists helping to unlock clean-energy funding in Florida. The team also let AMP members know how a timely infusion of $425,000 could tip the outcomes of affordability initiatives in Louisiana and Michigan. “The speed of advocacy and the speed of giving need to work at the speed of politics,” Ryan says.

 

EAF, which organizes hundreds of grantees across dozens of campaigns, has the expertise, relationships, and policy knowledge that many investors and donors don’t have the capacity to build. AMP draws on those insights and EAF’s institutional knowledge and experience in grantmaking to help members make informed political and advocacy investments. Members deploy capital directly to vetted campaigns doing the work, while EAF supplies the sourcing and diligence to guide members’ giving. Though joining AMP is free, many of its members contribute at least $25,000 a year to clean-energy initiatives.

 

As one of AMP’s first partners, Blue Haven has seen how this intelligence works in real time. In Virginia, where data centers are driving up electricity demand and raising the stakes on how new power is provided, the AMP program helped us identify legislative races that mattered most in the state ahead of the 2025 elections. We directed a five-figure commitment toward electoral efforts there. Last November, priority districts were defended and flipped, expanding the clean-energy majority in the legislature and advancing legislation to lower electricity costs, modernize the grid, and expand solar and storage deployment. That campaign was among 32 wins for EAF funders across 22 states last year.

 

Ryan’s message is one we take to heart: Politics isn't separate from the market we’re investing in. It’s shaping that market right now. As voters push back on high energy costs, the leaders elected in the next few years and clean-energy campaigns will determine what gets built, where, and how fast. “We want clean-energy investors and donors to be an active part of that conversation,” Ryan says. Learn more about AMP here.

THE POWER OF PERSISTENT ADVOCACY

Big policy changes don’t happen overnight. Our partner, Energy for Growth Hub, a think tank focused on energy access, spent seven years building evidence and relationships to end bans on nuclear energy at some of the world’s largest development banks including the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank. It’s a powerful example of policy’s multiplier effect:

 

The team built rigorous evidence base for nuclear power, advocated relentlessly, and assembled coalitions publicly and behind closed doors. The result is a wider lane for emerging economies to explore next-generation nuclear technologies, with each bank moving at its own pace, as they work to meet demand for reliable power. Read more about their efforts here.