How Roi-driven Decision-making Creates More Resilient Out…

Contributed by Zvi Alon, CEO of Tigo Energy

Towards the end of 2025, I was invited to speak at the Dynasty Partners Conference in Dubai. The event brought together business leaders, investors, philanthropists, policymakers, and innovators from around the world. This group came together to review how the region approaches innovation, develops human capital, and promotes peace. Once there, I noticed a strong d belief that commerce and philanthropy can help build a better future. This was not surprising to me, but I did find it interesting how differently business and philanthropy are approached.  

In business, these leaders demand performance, accountability, and measurable returns. But in philanthropy and environmental efforts, that same level of discipline is not always applied. Even highly successful businesspeople sometimes rely more on good intentions than on clear metrics and outcomes. 

In both philanthropy and clean energy, funding has historically been driven by emotion, urgency, or political momentum. Those motivations are understandable and often well-intentioned. But they can also create blind spots. When resources flow freely without rigorous accountability, inefficiencies can sneak in, grow, and even persist unnoticed.  

The lesson I’ve learned through decades of experience in my roles is that philanthropy and renewable energy benefit when funding decisions are grounded in measurable return on investment rather than sentiment alone. 

Guilt-Driven Funding can Obscure Fragility 

For years, government subsidies and incentive programs played an essential role in accelerating adoption, especially in solar. Of course, the most recent memory is the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act. But even further back, then President George W. Bush signed the Energy Policy Act in 2005, introducing the Solar Investment Tax Credit, and former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006 signed the 1 Million Solar Roofs Initiative – the list goes on. Those policies helped technologies mature, supply chains scale, and created markets. But as incentives became embedded, they also created a dependency that sometimes masked structural weaknesses in business models, operational practices, and system performance. The difficult reality is that, over time, well-intentioned support can create a dependency that masks structural weaknesses, much guilt-driven philanthropy can obscure inefficiency. 

Subsidies can be powerful catalysts, but they are not the stuff of strong foundations. A business, or an industry, built entirely on external support is vulnerable by definition. When policies change, funding tightens, or markets shift, that fragility manifests in instability. 

We saw this clearly in 2025 as subsidies tightened across multiple markets. Yet demand for clean energy did not disappear. In fact, it continued to grow as data centers, transportation electrification, and global energy needs expanded. What changed most was the margin for inefficiency. Companies that relied on incentives to paper over operational gaps struggled. Those built on performance struggled much less. But both sides of this coin are reflected in different contexts, and different reporting. 

This contrast explains why the same year produced both contraction and progress. The nonpartisan group E2, which tracks the intersection of the economy and environment, reported that companies in the U.S. abandoned more than $32 billion in clean energy investments and nearly 40,000 jobs in 2025, compared to just $12 billion in new investment and 19,000 newly announced jobs. An internal watchdog group in the Department of Energy is also now looking into the termination of $7.6 billion in clean energy grants. 

But why is it that we still also saw big wins in clean energy in the past year? Even during periods of uncertainty, reports continue to project an optimistic long-term future for solar. In fact, reports also indicated that solar technology maintained its position as the most cost-competitive power generation source throughout 2025. Additionally, notable news outlets report that the of new utility-scale capacity additions this year was largely dominated by clean energy.  

The philanthropic world has experienced something similar. I’ve seen how guilt, often well-meaning and deeply human, can influence giving decisions in ways that unintentionally obscure how effectively resources are allocated. Charitable organizations often operate under intense pressure to act quickly and compassionately, leaving little time or room for hard questions about cost-effectiveness, transparency, or measurable results.  

This, I believe, can all be explained simply through the true impact: whether in serving communities or deploying clean energy infrastructure, business requires transparency, data, and accountability. Without those elements, funding becomes noise rather than signal. 

Performance as the Common Denominator 

Philanthropy and renewable energy converge most clearly around one principle: performance matters. In both cases, capital is finite, expectations are high, and the consequences of inefficiency can be fatal to the endeavor. 

In clean energy, that same logic still applies and shows up in tangible ways: energy yield, system uptime, operational costs, and long-term reliability. Improving these metrics is about ensuring that clean energy systems deliver on their promise over decades, not just during incentive windows. 

In my own work in solar, this thinking led to a framework focused on reliability, transparency, and customer-first performance across the value chain. While every company articulates it differently, the underlying idea is that systems that perform consistently are the ones that scale sustainably. 

As renewables become more mainstream, quality and service become nonnegotiable. The market no longer rewards the cheapest solution alone; it rewards the most dependable one. Systems must perform as expected, be monitored intelligently, and adapt over time. 

For Dynasty-level philanthropists, donated capital is expected to produce impact per dollar, scale effectively, and sustain results over time. Philanthropic funding, when treated as an investment rather than an emotional response, demands clear metrics, governance, and accountability. The desired outcomes may be ‘soft,’ but requirements to achieve them remain ‘hard.’ 

Building What Lasts 

Across both the commercial and philanthropic worlds, capital must be treated with respect. Whether it comes from taxpayers, investors, or donors, its application carries significant responsibility. The organizations that thrive will be those that pair ambition with discipline and mission with measurement. 

Philanthropic institutions that apply business rigor, demanding transparency, measuring outcomes, and scaling what works, create leverage and legacies far beyond initial gifts. Similarly, clean energy companies that prioritize performance and accountability build systems that endure long after incentives programs meet their sunsets. 

If we want clean energy and the institutions that support it to endure, we must move beyond sentiment and toward performance. Not because incentives are inherently bad, but because long-term impact requires results that stand the test of time, on their own. 

---

About the author

Zvi Alon is the CEO and Chairman of Tigo Energy, Inc. In Silicon Valley, he has had a successful business career over the last 30 years as an executive, partner, and advisor to various venture capital groups in high tech, clean tech, and real estate. Internationally, he has served as chairman, chief executive, president, and founder of several companies – two of which IPO’ed into the public market: NetManage in the US and NetVision in Israel. Most of his investment activities have been focused in the US, Israel, and China with worldwide beneficiaries.