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Battery makers and investors pivot from EVs to grid storage for renewable energy in Europe. In early May, Norwegian battery cell producer Morrow Batteries filed for bankruptcy. A year earlier, it was Sweden’s Northvolt. Some 17 European battery production projects have been cancelled or delayed. Slower than expected EV sales and competition from low-cost Chinese and Korean suppliers has dimmed Europe’s hopes of building a homegrown industry to supply batteries for electric vehicles. But the economics are different in another corner of the battery market – for stationary storage systems for renewable energy from wind and solar. In Europe, billions of dollars of fresh investment are flowing to European battery makers for systems that can store excess energy and release it when intermittent sources are not producing. “If you have cheap generation, like you have in the Nordics with hydro or with wind, or in Spain with solar, if you put a battery next to it, it’s a great economic case,” Wiebe Visser of Dutch impact investing platform Carbon Equity told ImpactAlpha. “It's not only energy independence, it's also just pure economics.”
P. Terry’s Burger Stand converts to worker-ownership through an employee ownership trust. It was Patrick Terry’s childhood dream to own a burger stand. He and his wife Kathy opened one on a corner in Austin, Texas in 2005. Two decades later, that stand has grown into a fast-food chain with 38 locations that employ 1,800 workers in the Lone Star State. Now, it is owned by those workers. The decision to sell the company to their workers was Kathy’s dream, Patrick Terry told ImpactAlpha. “It’s been a labor of love for her. She’s been working on this for years to pick the right form of ownership.” With support from Common Trust, the Terrys set up an employee ownership trust, or EOT, that will hold the ownership shares of P. Terry’s employees. The trust will share 5% of the company’s profits with longtime employees this year. “Too often, the people who create the value are the last to share in it. We wanted to do something different,” Kathy Terry said. “We also wanted our team to feel ownership now — not someday. That’s why the profit-sharing plan matters so much to us.” P. Terry’s plans to grow the profit-sharing plan to 20% of the chain’s annual income over time.
Style or substance? What an AI analysis of 90 funds suggests about impact reporting. Impact funds have long struggled to produce reports that are useful to allocators and comparable across managers. Dalberg and Impact Frontiers are using AI – with humans-in-the-loop – to sift through the noise. Their analysis of 90 funds suggests that many funds are better at presenting their impact than they are at managing it. In a guest post on ImpactAlpha, Dalberg’s Kusi Hornberger shares key findings, as well as common traits shared by successful funds. One insight: Nearly a third of the funds analyzed scored almost as well as top performers on strategy and disclosure, but lagged badly on measurement and governance, earning them the label of ‘Marketer.’ “An LLM’s total lack of communal context means it cannot read between the lines or give a fund credit for unwritten, cultural conventions,” writes Hornberger. Instead, the analysis stripped away “polished SDG graphics, and aspirational intent,” exposing gaps in impact management practices. Of the funds analyzed, nearly half failed to disclose negative impacts or trade-offs. Only one in five employed independent verification.
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Greetings, Agents of Impact! 🚀 Get the ImpactAlpha Edge. A warm welcome to Impact Engine, RevUp, Nexus for Development, Rho Impact and the …
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Over two decades, the New Markets Tax Credit has deployed $66.6 billion into distressed American communities, financed more than 8,000 businesses, and supported …
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