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The Gist
The Gist is the monthly newsletter of The Ad Hoc Group that covers everything at the intersection of climate tech and policy. Subscribe at the link here to have The Gist mailed to your inbox each month.
The Ad Hoc Gist: The Rise (and Fall) of Distributed Data Centers
The opposition to big data centers transcends party loyalty and raises a new question. Where will all the compute go?
This month’s Gist looks at one emerging answer: putting distributed data centers in underutilized commercial buildings. I argue that utilities and regulators should take action before the market gets too far ahead of them — and that developers should avoid making the same mistake twice.
The Ad Hoc Gist: Carbon Removal Hits the Brakes
Carbon removal is in another difficult cycle. Investment has slowed, policy support in the U.S. has evaporated, and big buyers like Microsoft are reevaluating their commitment.
For this month’s Gist, Ad Hoc’s Max Tuttman spoke with Neil Renninger, a longtime climate-tech entrepreneur and investor to unpack the meaning of this moment. Neil co-founded Amyris and later founded Ample Carbon, which aims to convert retiring coal plants into carbon-negative power facilities, but is now pressing pause.
The Ad Hoc Gist: Google Plans to Unlock Grid Capacity. Will Regulators Let Them?
Can data centers become part of the solution to the grid constraints they’re helping create?
That’s the premise behind Google’s latest work on distributed energy resources
— from batteries and demand response to energy efficiency.
Ellen Zuckerman discusses why Google is investing in these resources, whether they can meaningfully free up grid capacity, and what regulators need to do to make these models work at scale.
White Papers
The Ad Hoc Group, in partnership with other industry thought leaders, publishes white papers that take a deep dive into the complex issues facing the energy industry and our clients.
Behavioral Economics and the Human Dimension of Prepaid Utility Service
In this white paper, published in August 2026, Exceleron and the Ad Hoc Group examine prepaid electric service as a mechanism for energy efficiency through the lens of behavioral economics, exploring how it can advance residential affordability and persistent energy conservation at a time of rising electricity costs.
Synthesizing evidence from established U.S. and international programs, we find that prepay implementations have been associated with persistent residential energy savings of roughly 4% to 17%, and we interpret these outcomes through five behavioral principles: customer agency, cognitive bandwidth, loss aversion, price salience, and operant conditioning. Drawing on a detailed case study of the Orlando Utilities Commission’s program, we also explore how modern prepay designs are evolving into human-centered platforms — integrating non-disconnect models, usage disaggregation, and gamification to provide customers with additional agency over their energy usage and improve their utility experience.
Ample Carbon: Lessons Learned From the Shifting U.S. BECCS Landscape from 2023-2026
Ample Carbon was founded in 2023 to convert the U.S. retiring coal fleet into a source of durable carbon dioxide removal (CDR) by retrofitting coal plants into bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) facilities. In this white paper, published in August 2026, Ample Carbon and the Ad Hoc Group explore how market conditions have shifted over the past 2-3 years, what Ample has learned, and what the company has built along the way. We categorize the changes across four dimensions: the U.S. power utility landscape, the market for durable carbon removal, the biomass supply chain, and federal policy and funding. We also outline the technical and market progress Ample has made in identifying potential retrofit targets and derisking remaining technical challenges related to feedstock choice.
Bridging the Load Gap: A Collaborative Path for Utilities, Hyperscalers and Customers
In this white paper, published in January 2026, the Alliance to Save Energy and the Ad Hoc Group explore whether a collaborative model – one in which a large load funds incremental, utility-directed demand-side management (DSM) investments that include both demand response (DR) and energy efficiency (EE) programs – could unlock new capacity, reduce pressure on infrastructure timelines, and support improved affordability and resilience for customers.
Blog
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People as Moat – Ad Hoc Expands into Search
In climate tech, we talk a lot about, well, technology. But talk with most CEOs and they’ll share that the hardest part of their job is figuring out how to hire and retain the right people. In my experience, a company’s ability to hire and effectively onboard the right people is what differentiates successful businesses from those that falter. Because, as a CEO, you can have a great vision, but if you don’t have the right people, you can’t execute it.
Press
Anti-China Fervor Casts a Dark Cloud Over Solar and U.S. Climate Goals
In Congress, there is sudden bipartisan momentum to reinstitute tariffs on Chinese components. The U.S. solar industry is alarmed.
Silicon Valley Bank Collapse Could Slow the Transition to Clean Energy
The bank cast a wide shadow over climate tech, with half the start-ups in the sector doing business with it.
The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank has created new challenges not just for the nation’s banking system, but also for the Biden administration’s climate agenda, following a harrowing weekend in which many major clean tech companies faced insolvency.
Investors Putting Billions Into Climate Tech Don’t Plan to Stop
Bill Gates is worried about a dark period ahead for the global economy. “We’re going to go through a winter period for a number of years,” he warned a room full of go-getting green entrepreneurs last week, lamenting at a TechCrunch event that their success had come up against bad timing.
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