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On the controversial subsidies, battery production, and India's extreme weather
Current conditions: Temperatures are about 30 degrees higher in the Plains and Midwest than what’s seasonally normal • Northern Vietnam is enduring a severe cold spell • High winds from Storm Pia helped the U.K. set a new record for wind energy generation in just 30 minutes.
The Biden administration today unveiled strict rules governing the tax credits for clean hydrogen production, reports Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer. Hydrogen produces no climate pollution when burned, and could potentially replace fossil fuels in many sectors if scaled up responsibly. Under the Inflation Reduction Act, a company can get up to $3 for each kilogram of hydrogen made with clean electricity that it produces and sells. But to qualify for the subsidy, would-be hydrogen producers will have to demonstrate that they used clean, zero-carbon electricity to power their electrolyzers, the energy-hungry machines that pull hydrogen out of water or other molecules. Defining clean electricity has proven to be an enormous challenge and the subject of one of the biggest fights around the law. Under the new rules, electricity used to produce hydrogen must:
Some industry groups allege the new rules could stunt the field in its infancy. Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Wally Adeyemo was effusive about the new rules’ benefits. “We’ve developed a structure that will drive innovation and create good-paying jobs in this emerging industry while strengthening our energy security and reducing emissions in hard-to-transition sectors of the economy,” he told reporters.
New analysis from the Environmental Defense Fund, provided exclusively to Heatmap, suggests that U.S. battery production is going really well. The data shows American battery manufacturers around the country — many of them automakers — have announced over 1,000 gigawatt hours of U.S. battery production that’s slated to come online by 2028, far outpacing projected demand.
EDF
As Heatmap’s Neel Dhanesha explains, this matters because the Inflation Reduction Act stipulates that, in order to be eligible for tax credits, electric vehicle components can’t be made by a country on the U.S.’s “foreign entities of concern” list. That rules out batteries made in China. Without an increase in American battery manufacturing, we run the risk of Americans being either unwilling or unable to pay for the EVs that we’d need to hit strict new EPA vehicle emissions standards.
Let’s stick with EVs for a moment: The U.S. Treasury today announced that more than 7,000 car dealers have registered with the IRS Energy Credits Online portal. Many electric vehicles are eligible for sizable federal tax credits, and this portal, unveiled last month, helps streamline the crediting process by allowing dealers to apply the credit as a kind of discount at the point of sale. If the dealer is registered on the portal, they can submit the sales information to the IRS and receive payment for the value of the credits within 72 hours.
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India is testing ways of incorporating artificial intelligence into weather forecasting to better prepare for extreme weather events, Reutersreports. The India Meteorological Department already uses supercomputers for weather models but “an AI model doesn't require the high cost involved in running a supercomputer,” Saurabh Rathore, an assistant professor at Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi, says. “You can even run it out of a good quality desktop.” The Centre for Science and Environment estimates that India saw almost one weather disaster per day this year, and that these events, exacerbated by global warming, have killed nearly 3,000 people. The U.K.’s Met Office is also exploring AI models that could forecast extreme weather events.
Centre for Science and Environment
Indonesia will start fining companies that own palm oil plantations in areas designated as forests. Palm oil is widely used in foods, cosmetics, cleaning agents, and other products, and palm oil plantations are a huge culprit in deforestation and habitat loss, especially in Indonesia, which is the world’s biggest palm oil producer and exporter. Last month the country identified nearly 500,000 acres of plantations in forest areas, which will be handed over to the state and turned back into forests.
Researchers at the California Academy of Sciences discovered 153 new animal, plant, and fungi species in 2023, including 66 spiders, 13 sea stars, 12 geckos, one scorpion, and one legless skink.
Jessica Hullinger is a freelance writer and editor who likes to think deeply about climate science and sustainability. She previously served as Global Deputy Editor for The Week, and her writing has been featured in publications including Fast Company, Popular Science, and Fortune. Jessica is originally from Indiana but lives in London.
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There’s a whole clean energy revolution happening — yes, even in Pennsylvania.
Fracking is just about the last thing Kamala Harris wants to talk about right now, which may be understandable. In a CNN interview last week — her first major sit-down since becoming the Democratic Party’s official nominee for president — she changed her earlier campaign position on whether the technique used to extract oil and natural gas should be banned. Cries of “Flip-flopper!” are a staple of shallow campaign coverage. The issue is a bit complicated, and could prove awkward in at least one battleground state. And she’d rather spend her limited time attacking Donald Trump on abortion and other issues where she has a clearer advantage.
But when the fracking issue comes up again — and it will — Harris has a great story to tell, one that most Americans are probably unaware of. There’s a green energy revolution underway, but rather than celebrate it, Harris and many other Democratic politicians tend to tiptoe around the issue, apparently terrified that a single infelicitous sentence could turn the supposedly large numbers of pro-fossil fuel voters against them.
We saw that dynamic in action on CNN, when interviewer Dana Bash homed right in on the fact that, running in the presidential primaries in 2020, Harris said she favored a ban on fracking. “Fracking, as you know, is a pretty big issue, particularly in your must-win state of Pennsylvania,” Bash said. “Do you still want to ban fracking?” Like almost every political reporter, Bash has no interest in the benefits and problems fracking presents, or whether banning it is a good or bad idea. The point is to zing Harris for her apparent flip-flop and speculate on whether it will move votes in one of the few swing states.
Harris was determined to allay the concerns of any pro-fracking voters tuning in. “I would not ban fracking,” she said. “As vice president, I did not ban fracking. As president, I will not ban fracking.” Loud and clear!
She did go on to argue that a fracking ban is unnecessary because the Inflation Reduction Act is creating large numbers of green energy jobs, so “we can grow and we can increase a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking.” To the casual viewer, it probably seemed like a perfectly good answer, but it was also somewhat beside the point. The reason many would like to ban fracking isn’t that it holds back the creation of green jobs. It’s that it entrenches our reliance on fossil fuels and creates environmental and health problems in the areas where it is deployed.
Of course, all those considerations — jobs, the environment, and where we’re getting our energy now and in the future — are interrelated. Which is why there is an opportunity for Harris to use that question to focus voters’ attention on the transformation now taking place.
With one party saying the only thing that matters in energy is drilling for more fossil fuels and the other telling people not to worry because they won’t stop us drilling for more fossil fuels, how many Americans know about the dramatic increase in renewable energy, especially solar, that is now underway? According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, nearly 50 gigawatts of solar power will be added to the grid this year, accounting for 59% of all new electricity generation:
Wind and solar now generate more electricity than coal. Even more remarkable is how inexpensive solar power has become. Since 1990, the price per kilowatt hour of a solar panel has dropped by 98%, and solar has become the least expensive type of new energy to generate. With all the innovation taking place in the renewable energy world — a good deal of it spurred by the investments made by the Biden administration — energy prices are likely to keep coming down as more and more of our power is generated by renewables.
This is a triumphant story of human ingenuity, thoughtful government action, and the operation of the free market. Harris could use it to describe a glorious future of power that is cheap, clean, and nearly limitless, one she is trying to create and Trump is trying to impede. Given that “We won’t go back” is one of her campaign slogans, it would seem like a perfect fit for her. But like many Democrats, she seems wary of saying anything that might spook the relatively small number of people whose livelihoods depend on fracking.
Consider Pennsylvania, the only swing state where this issue is supposed to matter. From the discussion in the political press, you might think the state’s voters are almost unanimous in their devotion to fracking, but that’s just not true. Even there, the public is closely divided on the issue: Some polls have found majorities of Pennsylvanians opposed to fracking, while others show them split down the middle. And while Pennsylvania produces a lot of natural gas that way, the number of people who actually work in fracking in the state is extremely modest, in the low five figures. Yet the assumption of news coverage is that the contrast between the Biden administration’s emphasis on clean energy and Trump’s opposite “Drill, baby, drill” approach can only redound to Trump’s benefit; as one Wall Street Journalarticle in April was headlined, “A Pennsylvania Fracking Boom Weighs on Biden’s Re-Election Chances.” The Pennsylvanians who are opposed to fracking because of its environmental impacts — or simply see it as something their state no longer needs — are shoved to the periphery of that kind of coverage.
So what if the next time she is asked about why she changed her mind about a fracking ban, Harris took the opportunity to explain to people what the future of energy is actually going to look like, and why it’s so encouraging? She’ll have to do that over the objection (or at the very least the indifference) of the reporters covering her campaign, who neither know nor care about the substance of the climate issue or energy policy. But she should do it anyway. Not only would it be right on the merits, it might even be good politics.
Introducing a new Heatmap Plus newsletter focused on the battles around renewable energy projects
Welcome to The Fight, I’m your punk rock climate journalist host Jael Holzman. I’ve dedicated my entire career in journalism to understanding how and why people oppose projects crucial to decarbonization. Now, every week, I’ll be delivering must-read exclusive scoops and analysis on the local battles and national trends shaping the future of climate action as part of Heatmap Plus, a new side of the site launching today that will go even deeper into the projects, politics, and people shaping the energy transition.
As part of Heatmap Plus, you’ll get high-level analysis of our proprietary polling and forecasting data, in-depth case studies exploring why projects succeed or fail, exclusive interviews with leading policymakers, developers, and activist groups, and my weekly newsletter — The Fight — that will offer a comprehensive weekly snapshot of the battles being waged over renewable energy projects across the country, plus a lot of original reporting.
A little bit about me: For years, I reported on the transition by writing about mining – one of the dirtiest businesses central to renewable energy, vehicle electrification, and industrial decarbonization. As I covered those topics, it was evident that climate activists, policymakers, and investors alike were all quietly torn up by the reality that building things meant some pretty shocking knock-on effects for the environment and society. I also found the threat of those consequences became a useful tool for shaping public opinion against the energy transition, a practice best described as “trade-off denial.”
Earlier this year, I joined Heatmap after being approached with an opportunity: how would I like to investigate conflicts over individual renewables and battery projects in places where a hollowed-out local media left no reporters available to ask the tough questions? On top of that, I’d get to take a wide-angle lens, sussing out what national policy trends, forces, and industries were driving opposition and the hurdles to projects getting built. I could give Heatmap readers all the information they’d need, project by project, accompanied by exclusive data and regular Q&A sessions with readers.
So after months of investigating various projects and their opponents, I’m excited to debut the first edition of The Fight. I’ve got to tell you, these stories might bother you. In our inaugural send, for example, you’ll hear about how a fight against a California battery storage project might impact permitting nationwide, the ways a few activists can manipulate emotional fears to create real roadblocks to construction, and the wide gulf between what regulators and developers want versus the individuals most likely to sue to stop a project.
This won’t always be fun — in fact, sometimes it might be a bummer. But over the span of this newsletter, by talking to all sides involved and providing an airing of grievances, it’s my hope we’ll use well-intentioned journalism to inform you on how the things we need to ditch fossil fuels can be built faster and get community buy-in.
This newsletter will go out exclusively to subscribers of Heatmap Plus. If you want to get it, you can join Plus here — for a limited time, you can take $50 off by using the code FIGHTLAUNCH at checkout.
But enough small talk. Let’s get started.
New data provided exclusively to Heatmap shows just how complicated it is to get money where it needs to go.
By the numbers, a new federal program designed to give low-income communities access to renewable energy looks like a smashing success. According to data provided exclusively to Heatmap, in its first year, the Low-Income Communities Bonus Credit Program steered nearly 50,000 solar projects to low-income communities and tribal lands, which are together expected to produce more than $270 million in annual energy savings.
But those topline numbers don’t say anything about who will actually see the savings, or how much the projects will benefit households that have historically been left behind. In reality, the majority of the projects — about 98% — were allocated funding simply for being located in low-income communities, with no hard requirement to deliver energy or financial savings to low-income residents.
A closer look at the data reveals a more complicated success story. While the program did make some clear strides in bridging the solar inequality gap, other factors — including the language in the law that created it — are also holding it back.
The Low-Income Communities Bonus Credit Program came out of the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022. Though the goal is to increase solar access for low-income households, it’s not actually a tax credit for low income households. It’s for small wind and solar developers — and beginning in 2025, developers of other types of clean energy — whose projects meet certain criteria.
The law caps the total amount of energy the program can support at 1.8 gigawatts per year, and developers have to apply and get their project approved in order to claim funds. To be eligible, a project must produce less than 5 megawatts of power and fall under one of four categories: It must be located in a low-income community, be built on Indian land, be part of an affordable housing development, or distribute at least half its power (and guaranteed bill savings) to low-income households. The first two categories qualify for a 10% credit; the second two, which stipulate that at least some financial benefits go to low-income residents, qualify for 20%. In both cases, the credit can be stacked on top of the baseline 30% tax credit for clean energy projects that meet labor standards, meaning it could slash the cost of building a small solar or wind farm in half.
Each of these provisions has the potential to address at least some of the barriers disadvantaged communities face in accessing clean energy. Low-income homeowners may not have the money for a down payment for rooftop solar or the credit to find financing, for instance. But by giving developers a tax credit for projects located in low-income communities, solar leasing programs, in which homeowners lease panels from a third party in exchange for energy bill savings, now have an incentive to expand into these neighborhoods, and potentially offer lower lease rates. The program helped fund nearly 48,000 residential solar projects in the first year.
Tribal lands, meanwhile, account for more than 5% of solar generation potential in the U.S., but are still a largely untapped resource, for reasons including lack of representation in utility regulatory processes, complex land ownership structures, and limited tribal staff capacity. The program gives outside developers additional incentive to work through the challenges, and it also earmarks funds for tribe-owned development. Crucially, the IRA also opened the door for tribes, as well as other tax-exempt entities, to utilize clean energy incentives and receive a direct payment equal to the tax credits. The program supported 96 solar projects on tribal lands in the first year.
The third category attempts to overcome the famous “split incentive” problem for low-income renters whose landlords have little reason to spend money on a solar project that primarily benefits tenants. The program helped finance 805 solar projects on low-income residential buildings, where the developers are required to distribute at least 50% of the energy savings equitably among tenants.
Lastly, while renters in some states can subscribe to community solar projects, which offer utility bill credits in exchange for a small subscription fee, the subscriptions can be scooped up by wealthier customers if there’s no low-income requirement. The program sponsored 319 community solar projects where at least half the capacity had to go to low-income residents and offer at least 20% off their bills.
U.S. Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Wally Adeyemo declared the program a success. “These investments are already lowering costs, protecting families from energy price spikes, and creating new opportunities in our clean energy future,” he said.
Despite overwhelming demand during the four-month application period, however, the program ended up with capacity to spare. Although applications totaled more than 7 gigawatts, ultimately, the Department approved just over 49,000 projects equal to about 1.4 gigawatts, or roughly enough to power 200,000 average households. All of it was solar.
The gap between applications and awarded projects has to do with the program’s design. The Treasury divided the 1.8 gigawatt cap between the four categories, setting maximum amounts that could be awarded for each one. Within the four categories, the awards were further divided, with half set aside for applicants that met additional ownership or geographic criteria, such as tribal-owned companies, tax-exempt entities, or projects sited in areas with especially high energy costs relative to incomes.
For example, 200 megawatts were earmarked for Indian lands, with half reserved for applicants meeting those additional criteria, but only 40 megawatts were awarded. The fourth category, meanwhile, which was designed to encourage community solar development, was oversubscribed.
Since tax data is confidential, the Treasury Department could not share much detail about these projects, including where, exactly, they were, who developed them, or who will benefit from them. A map overview shows a concentration of awards across the sunbelt, with Illinois, New York, Maine, Massachusetts, and Puerto Rico also seeing a lot of uptake.
IRS, RAAS, Statistics of Income, August 2024
I reached out to more than a dozen nonprofits, tribal organizations, and other groups who advocate for or develop clean energy projects benefiting low-income communities to find examples of what the program was actually funding. The first person I was connected with was Richard Best, the director of capital projects and planning for Seattle Public Schools, who got a 10% tax credit for solar arrays on two new schools under construction in low-income neighborhoods. While the school system already planned to put solar on these schools, Best said the tax credits helped offset increased construction costs due to supply chain interruptions, preventing them from having to make compromises on design elements like classroom size.
“It's not insignificant,” he told me. “The solar array at Rainier Beach High School is in excess of a million dollars — just the rooftop solar array. That's $400,000 [in tax credits]. So these are significant dollars that we're receiving, and we're very appreciative.”
Jody Lincoln, an affordable housing development officer for the nonprofit ACTION-Housing in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, got a 10% tax credit to add solar to a former YMCA that the group recently converted to a 74-unit apartment building. The single room occupancy rental units serve men who are coming out of homelessness or incarceration. Lincoln told me the building operates “in the gray,” and that any cost saving measures they can make, including the energy savings from the solar array, enable it to continue to operate as affordable housing. When I asked if they could have built the solar project without access to the IRA’s tax credits, she didn’t hesitate: “No.”
These two examples show the program has potential to deliver benefits to low-income communities, even in cases where the energy savings aren’t going directly to low-income residents.
I also spoke with Alexandra Wyatt, the managing policy director and counsel at the nonprofit solar company Grid Alternatives. She told me Grid partnered with for-profit solar developers, such as the national solar company SunRun, who were approved for the tax credit bonus for rooftop solar lease projects on low-income single-family homes. In these cases, Grid helped pull together other sources of funding like state incentives for projects in disadvantaged communities to pre-pay the leases so that the homeowners could more fully benefit from the energy bill savings.
It’s unlikely that all of the nearly 48,000 residential rooftop solar projects in low-income communities that were approved for the credit in the first year had such virtuous outcomes. It’s also possible that projects installed on wealthier homeowners’ roofs in gentrifying neighborhoods were subsidized. In an email to me, a Treasury spokesperson said the Department recognizes that “simply being in a low-income community does not mean low-income households are being served,” and that it was required by statute to include this category. It was still the agency’s decision, however, to allocate such a large portion of the awards, 700 megawatts, to this category — a decision that some public comments on the program disagreed with.
Wyatt applauded the Treasury and the Department of Energy, which oversees the application process, for doing “an admirable job on a tight timeframe with a challenging program design handed to them by Congress.” She’s especially frustrated by the 1.8 gigawatt cap, which none of the other renewable energy tax credits have, and which changes it into a competitive grant that’s more burdensome both for developers and for the agencies. It adds an element of uncertainty to project finance, she said, since developers have to wait to see if their application for the credit was approved.
Wendolyn Holland, the senior advisor for policy, tax and government relations at the Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy told me there was tons of interest among indigenous communities and tribal clean energy developers in taking advantage of the IRA programs, but it wasn’t really happening. Holland cited challenges for tribes reaching the stage of “commercial readiness” required to apply for federal funding. Tribal developers have also said they are limited by the lack of transmission on tribal lands. When I asked the Treasury about the paltry number of projects on Indian Lands, a spokesperson said it was not for lack of trying. The Department and other federal agencies have conducted webinars and other forms of outreach, they said, through which they’ve heard that many tribes are struggling to access capital for energy projects, and that development on Indian lands has “unique challenges due to the history of allotment of Indian lands and status of some land as federal trust land.”
Holland is optimistic that things will change — in December, Biden issued an executive order committing to making it easier for tribes to access federal funding. The Alliance also recently petitioned the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to address barriers for tribal energy development in its new rules that are supposed to get more transmission built.
The unallocated capacity from 2023 was carried over to the next year’s round of funding, so it wasn’t lost. But a dashboard tracking the second year of the program looks like it's following a similar pattern. While the community solar-oriented category, which was increased to allow for 900 megawatts, is nearly filled up, the tribal Lands category, which kept its 200 megawatt cap, has received applications to develop less than a sixth of that.
Wyatt said that so far, she does think the bonus credit has been successful in spurring good projects that might not otherwise have happened. Still, it will probably take a few years before it will be possible to assess how well it’s working. The good news is, as long as it doesn’t get repealed, the program could run for up to eight more years, leaving plenty of time to improve things. It’s already set to change in one key way. Beginning in 2025, it becomes tech-neutral, meaning that developers of small hydroelectric, geothermal heating or power, or nuclear projects, will be able to apply. (When asked why no wind projects were approved to date, a spokesperson for the Treasury said taxpayer privacy rules meant it couldn’t comment on applications, but they added that wind projects tend to be larger than 5 megawatts and take longer to develop.)
One thing is for sure, despite the heavy administrative burden of screening tens of thousands of applications, the agencies involved are clearly committed to implementing the program.
“I’m definitely pleased that they managed to get the program up and running as quickly as they did,” Wyatt told me. “I mean, it's kind of lightning speed for the IRS.”