Clean Power’s Missing Middle: Why Early Projects Stall

Clean power innovation is advancing rapidly, yet many promising projects stall long before becoming operating assets. This presentation examines the “missing middle” between technology readiness and infrastructure deployment, where early-stage clean energy projects struggle to reach market due to misalignment between market rules, financing expectations, and risk frameworks. Drawing on experience supporting more than 50 revenue-generating clean energy companies across the United States, as well as project development and power-sector reform work in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, this talk highlights patterns that consistently delay market entry across diverse market contexts.

While regulatory structures differ, the challenges are strikingly similar: systems designed for scale and incumbency are applied too early in the project lifecycle, slowing interconnection, complicating early offtake discussions, and inflating development costs. This presentation reframes early-stage project development as a market-design challenge rather than a technology problem and offers actionable insights for developers, utilities, financiers, and regulators seeking to accelerate deployment, improve capital efficiency, and strengthen grid resilience. Addressing this missing middle is essential to scaling clean power at the pace ACP members are working to achieve.