Fortune says climate VC fundraising is headed for its worst year since 2015, and the headline’s second half calls that “the best thing that could happen to climate tech.” I can’t read past the headline, so I don’t know their argument. But the same morning BloombergNEF raised its U.S. storage forecast by 30%, to 213.9 GW by 2030, and Google said it will grow its battery virtual power plant with Voltus in PJM by a factor of ten.

Those two stories look like they contradict each other until you ask who is writing the checks. Venture capital funds a bet that a technology might work. Nobody is betting on lithium batteries anymore. A data center operator who can’t get a grid connection will pay for a battery the way it pays for a transformer, as a line item needed to ship the product. The Google deal even comes with a phrase I liked from the Voltus CEO last week, “bring your own capacity,” which is how a customer talks when the utility has stopped being the answer. Maybe the fund managers aren’t wrong to retreat. Maybe the interesting part of the sector just graduated to a different balance sheet.

The small story in the pile is Mon Power asking FERC to unwind $145M of losses from Winter Storm Fern, and PJM calling it a “fishing expedition.” The trade groups say they sympathize but can’t rerun a market months later. Everyone agrees someone should have been protected from that storm. Nobody wants to be the someone who absorbs the cost afterward, and I suspect that’s what a lot of the batteries are really for.

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