Two separate investment deals this week show how rising fuel prices and a burdened electric grid are boosting the economics of alternatives to conventional energy.
Behind-the-meter power won a $1 billion vote of confidence from oilfield giant Halliburton and global investment firm Blackstone through an equity infusion in distributed energy company VoltaGrid.
A day later, clean energy developer Ameresco spun off its biofuels business into a new company, Neogenyx Fuels, backed by a $400 million investment from sustainable infrastructure investor HASI.
VoltaGrid positions for data center demand
With its capital boost, VoltaGrid plans to scale its efforts to serve the energy-hungry data center market with natural-gas microgrids. Like several other microgrid developers, VoltaGrid is offering onsite energy as a temporary or permanent alternative to grid service.
The Texas-based company is also pursuing new industrial customers, who are finding it increasingly difficult to secure grid connections as data centers overwhelm the queues. (See The Factory Boom Is Real—Until You Try to Plug It In)
The investment includes a $775 million primary capital raise and a $225 million secondary purchase from existing investors. VoltaGrid has also signed a deal to acquire Propell Energy Technology, a supplier of a high-inertia modular generation platform system developed for AI data centers.
Sam Tabar, CEO of AI infrastructure company WhiteFiber, said the VoltaGrid deal comes as the AI industry becomes increasingly aware of the value of reliable power.
“What Blackstone and Halliburton recognized is that power reliability has become a financing variable,” said Taber, former head of capital strategy at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
“As AI shifts from model training into real-world deployment, power demand becomes more continuous and persistent,” he said. “Nvidia and others have pointed to next-generation reasoning models requiring materially higher compute intensity than traditional inference workloads.
He added that natural gas microgrids “provide a controllable baseline that operators and investors can reliably plan around, especially in markets where grid capacity remains constrained or uncertain.”
The VoltaGrid transactions are subject to customary closing conditions, with a view to a mid-2026 closing.
Why Ameresco is expanding its RNG play
Predominantly a clean power developer, Ameresco has also been active in renewable fuels since 2008. Its latest expansion comes as the Massachusetts company sees growing global demand for renewable natural gas and other low-carbon fuels amid rising concerns about energy security, grid reliability and industrial decarbonization.
In an upcoming Energy Changemakers podcast, Michael Bakas — a longtime Ameresco executive who now leads the newly formed Neogenyx Fuels — describes how renewable natural gas has evolved from a niche fuel used largely for power generation and thermal applications into a rapidly growing transportation fuel. RNG accounted for 94% of all on-road fuel used in U.S. natural gas vehicles in 2025. It is also emerging as a feedstock for green hydrogen production and as a maritime fuel.
“In the next five years, I think this will be one of the tools that will provide energy security, provide a great export product, and create many jobs across the US,” Bakas said.
Ameresco is rolling its existing biofuels operations into Neogenyx Fuels and will retain a 70% ownership stake in the new company, while sustainable infrastructure investor HASI will hold the remaining 30%.
Of the $400 million HASI has committed, $100 million will be distributed directly to Ameresco, valuing the joint venture at $1.8 billion post-money.
