Scoop: Palmetto Solar Is Buying ‘The Cool Down’

The clean energy company Palmetto is buying The Cool Down, a climate and sustainability news site known for its lifestyle focus and how-to guides.

The North Carolina-based Palmetto, which leases solar panels, batteries, heat pumps, and other electrified technology to consumers, has been expanding fast in recent months. The acquisition marks the company’s first foray into the media business.

“By bringing our companies together, we’re pairing trusted consumer education with real, accessible energy solutions. Together we intend to empower households to take control of their energy future and benefit from the transition that’s already underway,” Chris Kemper, the founder and CEO of Palmetto, said in a statement.

Neither side disclosed a purchase price. But Dave Finocchio, the company’s cofounder and CEO, told me that he considered the deal “a successful outcome for us.” Finocchio was a cofounder and CEO of Bleacher Report, the popular sports news site now owned by Warner Bros. Discovery.

The Cool Down launched in 2021 and raised a $5.7 million seed round the following summer led by Upfront Ventures. Bill Simmons, the prominent podcaster and founder of the sports and culture website The Ringer, was an angel investor.

Although many news sites cover sustainability issues (including, full disclosure, this one), The Cool Down aimed to set itself apart by bringing in a larger and more mainstream audience and building an online marketplace with product recommendations where consumers could buy heat pumps, induction stoves, and smaller eco-friendly products like deodorant.

The site has averaged 35 million to 40 million users a month in recent months, Finocchio told me. Over time, the site has found that consumers are particularly interested in “saving money long-term by doing upgrades,” such as by buying rooftop solar panels or a new heating and cooling system, Finnochio said.

Those big appliances drive an outsize share of a household’s energy use — and its carbon footprint, he said. But they can’t be shopped for like a normal consumer product, and they can’t easily be sold through the kind of marketplace that The Cool Down once envisioned.

“It’s great if someone wants to switch from paper towels to Swedish dish cloths — I don’t want to put down anyone’s positive steps,” Finocchio said. But “there are more steps to installing an HVAC or putting a heat pump in your home … than simply buying a product over Amazon that just arrives at your house,” he said.

As a part of Palmetto, The Cool Down hopes to be able to provide consumers with more support to make that kind of switch, Finocchio said. The news site already refers readers to Palmetto’s solar leasing program, describing it as a way consumers can “get solar panels without buying them.”

“We’ve had a partnership in place for over a year, and Chris’s vision for essentially disrupting how homeowners think about energy and residential — and making it more accessible for the average person who is able to make a financial commitment to lease solar or lease HVAC — lined up really well with our mission to help make these bigger clean lifestyle decisions,” Finocchio said.

The Cool Down will maintain its editorial independence after the sale, he added, although Palmetto will have access to its data on sustainability trends.

The Cool Down’s cofounders included Finocchio and Anna Robertson, a former executive at ABC and Yahoo News.

The acquisition adds to a team that has expanded aggressively despite a chilling policy environment created by the Trump administration. Social Capital — a venture capital firm led by Chamath Palihapitiya, the host of the All In podcast and a major Trump fundraiser — made its single largest investment ever in Palmetto, and Palihapitiya sits on its board of directors. (He has endorsed the company to his roughly 1.9 million X followers, casting it as a way consumers can avoid the AI boom’s higher power prices.)

Palmetto also recently hired Neil Chatterjee, who led the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission during Trump’s first term, as its head of government affairs.

The company raised $1.2 billion last year. Will it use that cash to build up its journalistic presence? Jess Appelgren, the company’s vice president of communications, told me that the company had no interest in entering the media business.