BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, historically a supporter of green energy initiatives, acknowledged that wind and solar alone “can’t reliably keep the lights on” without “major breakthroughs in storage” and wrote that it’s necessary to be “clear-eyed about our energy mix” in his annual chairman’s letter to investors on Monday.
Fink supported the transition to green energy in the past and heads BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management company, which has pushed for Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG). Fink said in 2023 that he would no longer use the term ESG due to its political connotation, though he’s “not ashamed” of the term and believes in “conscious capitalism.” Fink praised nuclear power and raised doubts Monday regarding the reliability of solar and wind energy alone due to storage issues in his annual chairman’s letter.
“We need energy pragmatism. That starts with fixing the slow, broken permitting processes in the U.S. and Europe. But it also means being clear-eyed about our energy mix,” Fink wrote in the letter. “Most new infrastructure investments have been flowing into renewables. But without major breakthroughs in storage, wind and solar alone can’t reliably keep the lights on.”
“In the near term, more than half the electricity powering data centers must come from dispatchable sources. Otherwise, the air conditioning will shut off, the servers will overheat, and the data centers will shut down,” Fink said. “Where does dispatchable power come from? One source is nuclear.”
In the letter, Fink points out that more nuclear power plants have been shut down than built in the U.S. over the past 55 years and lays out the benefits to nuclear energy. “Today’s nuclear isn’t the old model of massive plants with the ominous cooling towers,” he continued. “Small modular reactors (SMRs) are everything old nuclear wasn’t — cheaper to build, safer to run, and you can build them anywhere.”
In 2020, Fink’s letter to CEOs was focused on the fight against climate change. His 2024 chairman’s letter also called for “energy pragmatism,” though it noted that countries were increasingly installing renewables “with wind and solar power,” as it was “now cheaper in many places than fossil-fuel-generated electricity.” Fink noted that pursuing these energy sources was “also a major way to address climate change.”
“We follow our clients’ mandates,” Fink wrote in the 2024 letter. “BlackRock has more than $300 billion invested in traditional energy firms on behalf of our clients. Of that $300 billion, more than half – $170 billion – is in the U.S. We invest in these energy companies for one simple reason: It’s our clients’ money. If they want to invest in hydrocarbons, we give them every opportunity to do it – the same way we invest roughly $138 billion in energy transition strategies for our clients.”
Fink’s 2025 letter did not mention climate change, though it noted that China’s push for nuclear energy demonstrates that “they see decarbonization as a way to own the future of industry.”
House Republicans sent letters to BlackRock and other asset management companies in 2023 to address concerns that their ESG efforts violated federal antitrust laws. Lawmakers wrote at the time that the companies appeared to have colluded “to reach net zero emissions by 2050 or sooner across all assets under management.” BlackRock exited the Net Zero Asset Managers (NZAM) initiative in January of this year.
BlackRock did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment in time for publication.
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