You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
On the first night of climate week, I headed over to a happy hour hosted by a bunch of progressive climate advocacy nonprofits, including Climate Cabinet, Data for Progress, and Evergreen Collaborative. The event was called “Progress No Matter What,” and the theme was states’ ability to advance climate action regardless of national politics.
On the packed back patio of a beer garden on the Lower East Side, a handful of speakers took turns climbing atop a picnic bench to address the boisterous crowd. State and federal officials celebrated the billions of dollars flowing to states to decarbonize and pressed attendees not to ignore the down-ballot climate champions running for office in November. Then, to close things out, White House Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi got up. Over the past year, I’ve heard Zaidi deliver the same impassioned but rehearsed preamble on press call after press call reminding us of President Biden’s climate accomplishments during his term. But here, Zaidi let loose. He said the Wall Street Journal had published a story that morning that started with the line “Climate optimism is fading.” He didn’t think so. “This is popular shit!” he declared, of efforts to fight climate change while reducing pollution, and the audience erupted in cheers. — Emily Pontecorvo
Last weekend, I attended the U.S. premiere of The Here Now Project at the inaugural Climate Film Festival — and was totally wowed. The 75-minute documentary is unnarrated and composed entirely of archival cell phone videos, vlogs, and news clips that were shot during climate disasters in 2021, ranging from the Texas power crisis that left almost 250 people dead after a February cold snap to the “sea snot” that covered Turkey’s Sea of Marmara over that summer.
While it’s harrowing to see all the footage back-to-back — and to learn about disasters I hadn’t paid close attention to at the time, like the subway flooding in Zhengzhou or the dust storms in Brazil — I was even more struck by the seemingly universal urge people have to document the way extreme weather upends their lives, even when those lives are quite immediately at risk.
The movie’s power lies in echoes and patterns of human nature, from our curiosity to our horror to our powerful compassion and self-sacrifice. I spoke to the filmmakers, Greg Jacobs and Jon Siskel, for my article about the Climate Film Festival last week, and Jacobs told me they hope to make The Here Now Project an ongoing chronicle of climate change in the style of Michael Apted’s famous Up series; I very much hope they will succeed. — Jeva Lange
At several events this week related to carbon dioxide removal, the conversation turned again and again to the challenge of finance and the scarcity of buyers. During a marine carbon removal panel on Monday, for instance, James Lindsay, the director of investments at the philanthropic Builders Initiative described the tension between simultaneously trying to raise capital for a given carbon removal approach while also trying to prove that it’s safe and actually works. While there are a few buyers, like the Frontier Climate initiative, that accept these conditions and are willing to support nascent approaches that may or may not work out, making one big deal with Frontier doesn’t provide the consistent cash flow that a startup needs to progress, he said.
Later that day, at a mini-conference hosted by the direct air capture company Climeworks, CEO Christoph Gebald declared that the industry simply cannot rely on voluntary purchases if it is going to scale. “We need to transition to regulated markets,” he said. Josh Becker, a California State Senator gave a brief presentation on a bill he introduced this year, SB 308, to do just that. It was a “government-enabled, market led” policy that would have required corporate polluters to begin paying for carbon removal. The bill “died a mysterious death,” he said, but he plans to try again in 2025.
The event closed out with a panel on “the economic opportunity of carbon removal in the U.S.,” and yet the talk once again turned to the economic obstacles. “Demand is an existential challenge,” Giana Amador, executive director of the Carbon Removal Alliance, said. “If we want deployment beyond these 1,000- to 10,000-ton facilities, we need a demand signal that is robust, steady, resilient, growing, in order to make sure these companies can raise the private and public sector funding they need.” — Emily
While most of the energy developers, technologists, and investors I spoke to and/or heard speak this week were excited about artificial intelligence as a way to bring forward demand for clean electrons, there was one interesting note of caution from Katie Rae, chief executive of Engine Ventures, the investment firm that has backed Commonwealth Fusion Systems and the long-duration battery company Form Energy. “The government has to think about it: Are the people going to get energy? Or are the hyperscalers going to get energy? The pitchforks can come.” — Matthew Zeitlin
On Tuesday morning, I stopped by “Geothermal House,” a day-long event and installation at the Hall des Lumières near City Hall. It’s a former bank building that now hosts “immersive experiences,” which essentially amount to wandering around a room decorated with floor to ceiling projections of art, like the paintings of Chagall. This time, however, the room was made up to bring you miles deep within the Earth’s crust.
The VR lounge at Geothermal House.Emily Pontecorvo
The event was put on by Project InnerSpace, a nonprofit dedicated to transferring skills and knowledge from the oil and gas industry to scale geothermal energy. “This is the first time geothermal has shown up at NY Climate Week,” the group’s executive director, Jamie Beard, declared at the start of a series of panels held in the central hall. Unfortunately, the talks were nearly impossible to hear in the cavernous marble room, but I spent some time wandering around, watching the animated projections of geothermal power plants and hit up the “VR lounge,” which offered a much more convincing immersive experience and taught me about the difference between “enhanced” and “advanced” geothermal.
The event also had some of the best swag I saw at Climate Week, including a station where you could 3D print your face onto “the core of the Earth.” Jeva was accurate when she compared the resulting object to a Ferrero Rocher. — Emily
Two members of the Jean Charles Choctaw Nation — which is considered to be one of the first communities in the U.S. to be displaced by climate change — spoke at an event on Wednesday hosted by EarthRights International. They emphasized the way the state of Louisiana failed to keep the tribe intact during the relocation effort, with Chief Deme Naquin and Tribal Secretary Chantel Comardelle explaining that while their own story is one marked by failure, they hope other communities will be able to learn from it. After all, it’s not just a house or neighborhood that you lose to something like coastal erosion; it’s also the stories and memories of the place you’d called home. “We probably weren’t the first” community to be displaced by climate change, Chief Deme told the room, “but we’re definitely not the last.” — Jeva
And over in D.C., during “National Clean Energy Week,” a more industry-focused panel-ganza, the cofounder and chief executive of the most important company in energy was sharing his thoughts on the sector. That would be Nvidia's Jensen Huang, the head of the company that designs the chips that power many artificial intelligence models and applications.
During his one-hour chat with former Education Secretary Margaret Spellings at the Bipartisan Policy Center on Friday, Huang focused mostly on what good AI could do for energy and grid efficiency, including weather simulation and designing smart grids. While it's true, Huang said, “that AI does take energy,” AI-trained models can predict weather and climate “tens of thousands of times more energy efficiently” than supercomputers. But he was also straightforward about the intense energy demands of training artificial intelligence models.
“These data centers could consume, today, maybe 100 megawatts. In the future it will be 10, 20 times more than that.” To reduce strain on the grid, these data centers could be located “where the energy” is located, Huang suggested. “The AI doesn't care where it goes to school.” And like a student, “it’s okay” if it sometimes has to “take a nap” when the sun’s not out. — Matthew
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
As bad as previous drafts of the reconciliation bill have been, this one is worse.
Senate Republicans are in the final stages of passing their budget reconciliation megabill — which suddenly includes a new tax on solar and wind projects that has sent many in the industry into full-blown crisis mode.
The proposed tax was tucked inside the latest text of the Senate reconciliation bill, released late Friday night, and would levy a first-of-its-kind penalty on all solar and wind projects tied to the quantity of materials they source from companies with ties to China or other countries designated as adversaries by the U.S. government. Industry representatives are still processing the legislative language, but some fear it would kick in for certain developers as soon as the date of its enactment. Taken together with other factors both in the bill and not, including permitting timelines and Trump’s tariffs, this tax could indefinitely undermine renewables development in America.
On Saturday, as legislators began to digest the new text, Senator Brian Schatz declared on X not once, not twice, but three times that with the new penalty, this bill would on its own “kill” the U.S. solar energy industry, leading to energy shortages and raising costs across the board. "I promise you,” he wrote, “this bill is worse than you think.”
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, a staunch advocate for climate policy, said in a statement to Heatmap that the tax will help China and hurt American families, “all so Republican oil and gas donors can make even bigger profits. This isn’t policy; it’s pay-off.”
Without this new tax, energy companies might’ve quietly swallowed the bitter pill of losing the incentives established in the Inflation Reduction Act. In the weeks since the first version of this legislation was introduced in the House, I’ve interviewed numerous renewables developers, tax attorneys, and cleantech investors, who have emphasized the resilience of the industry given rising energy demand and explained that there would still be many ways for projects currently under development to qualify for the credits before they’d be phased out. The history of renewable energy tax credits in the U.S. is full of of phase-outs and restarts. The industry’s been at least somewhere like this before.
But the withdrawal of incentives is one thing. A targeted federal tax that could increase development costs by up to 20% that is levied over longstanding supply chain relationships that will take not years but rather decades to rebuild is another.
The American Council on Renewable Energy said in a statement that the latest iteration of the bill “effectively takes both wind and solar electric supply off the table, at a time when there is $300 billion of investments underway, and this generation is among the only source of electricity that will help to reduce costs and keep the lights on through the early 2030s.” The North America’s Building Trades Unions issued a statement after the text’s release calling it the “biggest job-killing bill in the history of this county” and adding that that “simply put, it is the equivalent of terminating more than 1,000 Keystone XL pipeline projects.”
“I think it’s impossible to overstate how this new version of the bill makes the House bill look moderate by comparison,” Andrew Reagan, president of Clean Energy 4 America, told me in an exasperated tone over the phone Saturday afternoon. “The hope as I see it is that as the full impact of how devastating this proposal would be for every state in the country comes into play, as this comes to the floor, Senate Republicans who claim to care about this issue come to [Majority Leader John] Thune and ask to amend this.”
The tax would apply to new solar and wind construction and be calculated based on the degree to which a project exceeds statutory limits for materials sourced from “foreign entities of concern,” i.e. Russia, North Korea, Iran, and most especially China. Solar projects would have to pay a 50% tax on the value of the overage, and wind projects would pay 30%.
Here’s a simplified example to illustrate how it would work: Say you are developing a solar project that will begin operating in 2028, and the total cost of all of your material inputs is $100,000. The new law would require that at least 50% of the value of all of your materials come from entities disconnected from Chinese companies and investment (the statutory limit for 2028), but your project is only able to achieve 40%. The extra $10,000 dollars you paid to companies with ties to China would be subject to the 50% solar tax, adding $5,000 to the total cost of your project. And this doesn’t even touch the new expense of capturing and reporting all of this supply chain data for the federal government.
The rules for how developers would actually calculate the value of their various material inputs will be subject to the Treasury’s interpretation and guidance, so it is impossible to determine how harshly this tax would fall on any individual solar or wind energy facility. Even so, Rhodium Group has estimated that it would increase project costs overall by 10% to 20% — a whopping total to eat on top of losing key tax credits.
This penalty for sourcing linked to China dates back to the IRA’s consumer electric vehicle tax credit. As I was first to report years ago for E&E News, Senator Joe Manchin successfully limited the credit’s scope by requiring qualifying cars to be made with an increasing percentage of materials from the U.S. or a country with a free trade agreement and mandating that materials could not come from a foreign entity of concern. This tactic mostly failed to reshore mineral supply chains as quickly Manchin had hoped it would, but it did ensure that relatively few vehicles qualified.
This anti-foreigner approach to energy policy has now been taken up by Republicans in Congress to erode the IRA overall. As my colleagues Emily Pontecorvo and Matthew Zeitlin have explained, the Senate legislation would deny tax credits to companies that have supply chains with any ties to China, which many say would effectively stop them from qualifying for the credits.
This specific policy approach is something I’ve previously dubbed the GOP’s “anti-China trap” for renewable energy. Now, on top of cutting off companies from tax credits, this trap will catch them for failing to reinvent their supply chains overnight with little if any warning. Of course, reshoring these supply chains will also be more difficult because of other provisions in the bill that would erode and eliminate advanced manufacturing tax incentives originally designed to encourage companies to make more of these components at home.
The only silver lining here is that the fight isn’t over. It wouldn’t surprise me to see a senator try to get rid of this tax as the bill moves through the amendment process on the Senate floor.
I expect some sort of intervention here because there appears to be momentum from powerful entities outside of Congress to get rid of this tax. Reviews of this piece of the bill are so bad, it has put the American Clean Power and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on the same side as pro-fossil “philosopher” Alex Epstein, who is also calling on senators to oppose the tax.
“I just learned about the excise tax and it’s definitely not something I would support,” he posted to X yesterday, adding he’d rather they focus on removing the tax credits instead of creating a new cost. “I stand for energy freedom, always, in every situation,” he added in a separate post defending his opposition.
Elsewhere on X yesterday, Elon Musk spent hours (on his birthday, no less) going after the Senate bill, reposting energy wonks’ rants about the bill and its tax on renewables, including from Jesse Jenkins, the host of Heatmap’s very own Shift Key podcast.
So, okay, but will Musk, Epstein or any of these other critics convince at least one senator to force a successful vote on getting rid of the tax? That’s really the only way it can go away, because it’s very likely the Senate will force the House to pass whatever it passes.
I talked to Jenkins hours after Musk reposted him and filled up his replies. Like the iconoclastic billionaire, he told me he thinks this legislation is worse than anything congressional Republicans had released before it. A big reason for that is indeed the excise tax, a completely new idea that hadn’t been in any other previous draft of the bill or debated in committee, which he sees as a “obviously, deliberatively punitive attack on the wind and solar industry for what appears to be purely ideological reasons.”
“It’s going to kill hundreds of billions of dollars in investment and hundreds of gigawatts of new supply that would otherwise help us meet rapidly growing electricity demand. So, yeah, higher energy prices, less jobs, less investment in American energy production, and less confidence in the American business environment,” Jenkins said. “No one is asking for this.”
Debate on the bill is expected to begin later today, and the amendment process will stretch into Monday morning at least.
Additional reporting by Emily Pontecorvo
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include a statement from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.
A little-noticed provision would make the payment option used by tax-exempt groups all but impossible to claim.
A little-noticed provision in the Senate tax bill will sabotage the efforts of tribes, rural electric cooperatives, and public power authorities to develop local affordable energy projects by striking a section of the Inflation Reduction Act that enabled tax-exempt groups to claim the clean energy tax credits as direct cash payments from the Treasury.
The IRA included strict domestic sourcing requirements beginning in 2026 for groups utilizing this “direct pay” option on projects larger than 1 megawatt. But the law also created exceptions for cases where domestic components were not available in sufficient quantity or quality, or would increase costs by more than 25%. The Senate bill would get rid of these exceptions.
“It just makes it unlikely for those projects to go forward — or more likely for those projects to go forward with a private developer, instead of with a public utility or a tribe or a rural co-op,” Grace Henley, a tax attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, told me. “And so they don’t really do anything to increase the amount of domestic material that would be used, they just hurt the projects that are seeking to invest in clean energy infrastructure for these communities to lower costs.”
Public power and tribal energy advocates warn that without the exceptions, energy development will become impossible for their constituents.
Wind and solar projects being developed by these groups are already threatened by the bill’s rapid phase-out of wind and solar tax credits and its complex rules related to using materials from China. Chèri Smith, the executive director of the Alliance for Tribal Energy, told me that Tribes face longer development timelines than the average private developer. “We have multiple stages of approval that are unique to tribal energy development,” she told me, including lengthy internal consultation processes. The changes to direct pay will put these projects further out of reach, she said.
The Alliance provides free energy development consulting services to more than 100 Tribes. Smith sent me a list of projects in Alaska Native villages, Arizona, California, and Oregon that could be killed by the tax credit changes. “Alaska Native villages face some of the highest energy costs in the country,” she said, largely due to their reliance on diesel generators. Just over a third of the Hopi Tribe in Arizona lacks access to electricity, but now multiple microgrid projects meant to close the gap are at risk. Many of the projects on the list are also doubly threatened by grant cancellations and the repeal of the Tribal Energy Loan Guarantee Program.
“The bill is particularly harmful to Tribal Nations, pulling the rug out from under projects that would strengthen their energy sovereignty and power local communities,” Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich, Ron Wyden, and Brian Schatz wrote in a joint statement on Thursday. “Together, the Tribal Energy Loan Guarantee Program and our Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits have cleared pathways and removed significant barriers for Tribes to finance and build their own resilient energy infrastructure.”
The American Public Power Association is also sounding the alarm. John Godfrey, the group’s senior government relations director, told me that in addition to wind and solar, municipal utilities and rural electric co-ops are also considering nuclear and hydropower projects. For example, Energy Northwest, a consortium of 29 public utilities in Washington State, has plans to retrofit the Columbia Generating Station nuclear plant to increase its power output. It’s also in early stages to deploy four small, modular nuclear reactors. As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote a few days ago, the governor of New York has also tasked the New York Power Authority with developing a new nuclear plant in the state.
Nuclear and hydropower “are technologies where often there is not a U.S. source, but there is a good trading partner source — Canada, Germany, Japan,” Godfrey said. By tightening the domestic sourcing requirements for direct pay, the bill would “hinder the very technologies that there’s generally a bipartisan consensus we need to be developing.”
Public utilities and electric co-ops, which serve close to 30% of electric customers in the U.S., are also unfairly singled out by the provision, he said. “If my public power utility wants to develop a project and they need a Canadian turbine, they can’t get any credit. But if a taxable corporation down the street develops exactly the same project, they can.”
“If the purpose is to encourage hydropower, that’s not a good use of resources,” he said.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that the domestic sourcing requirements in the IRA applied to projects larger than 1 megawatt.
Senate Republicans tucked a carveout into their reconciliation bill that would allow at least one lucky renewable energy project to qualify for a major Inflation Reduction Act tax credit even after the law is all but repealed.
The only problem is, it’s near impossible to be sure right now who may actually benefit from this giveaway — and the mystery is driving me up the wall. I feel like Charlie Day in that episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, stringing documents together and ranting like a lunatic.
The Senate bill would phase out the tech-neutral production tax credit starting next year and completely eliminate it by the start of 2028. For the past week and a half, I have been trying to solve the riddle of an exemption tucked into the language that would allow a wind or solar facility that is “part of a single project” to continue to take advantage of the tech-neutral production tax credit as it exists today, which means it would not begin to phase out until 2034.
To qualify for the exemption a project must, according to the Senate text, meet two conditions: It must produce more than 1 gigawatt of electricity, and be sited on federal lands where a “right-of-way grant or lease” had been given by the Bureau of Land Managementbefore June 16, which is the date the text was released.
Only a handful of projects in the U.S. could possibly fit that criteria. But every time I think I’ve identified one that will actually qualify, I learn a new fact that, to me, takes it out of the running.
Here’s why my head hurts so much: A renewables facility that would benefit from this language needs to be sited at least partially on federal lands. But because Trump isn’t issuing new right-of-way approvals or leases to most renewables projects right now, it likely had to get its right-of-way or its lease before he entered office. (The June 16 language feels like a bit of a red herring. Nothing that fits the other definitions has received these documents since the start of Trump 2.0.)
Then there’s another factor: The only projects that would benefit from this language are ones that haven't started construction yet. Even if a project doesn’t have all of its permits for federal land use, its developer can build stuff like roads on any connected private lands and technically meet the deadline to start construction laid out in the new legislation. The construction start date is what counts — it doesn’t matter whether a project is placed in service and provides power to the grid years later, as long as it began construction before that deadline.
Taken together, all this means that a project that would benefit from this language probably has to be sited on federal lands and hold permits already … but for some reason can’t start construction to qualify for the program.
When I first started hunting for an answer, many people — including renewables advocates, anti-wind activists, and even some Senate staff in conversations with me — speculated that the language was a giveaway to two wind projects under construction in Wyoming, Chokecherry and Sierra Madre, which together make up what would likely be the largest wind farm in the U.S. if completed. These two projects are largely sited on federal lands and received all their approvals before Trump entered office.
I understand why people are pointing at Chokecherry and Sierra Madre. They are not expected to be online before 2029, and the House version of the bill would have locked them out of the production tax credit because it added a requirement that projects be “placed in service” — i.e. actively providing power to the grid — by around that same period. Any slippage in construction might have really hurt their finances. They’re also backed by a powerful billionaire, GOP donor and live entertainment power-broker Phil Anschutz, a man who made his initial fortune partially from fossil fuels.
Except … my colleagues and I are still not convinced. That’s because it is not clear that these two projects are at any actual risk of losing the production tax credit. They have been actively under construction for a long time, and the Senate bill killed the House’s “placed in service” requirement.
Another project floated is the Lava Ridge wind farm in Idaho, which was fully permitted under Biden, is largely sited on federal lands, and would produce more power than necessary to qualify for the exception. Hypothetically, this project would be a great candidate for being a beneficiary of the bill because Trump banned work on the project via executive order amid opposition from Idaho politicians, making a carveout to get more time a worthwhile endeavor.
Except … Senate Finance Chair Mike Crapo, the lead author of the pertinent section of the Senate reconciliation bill, was one of those Idaho politicians who pushed Trump to kill Lava Ridge. Why would he give a tax break to a project he wanted dead?
Then there was my personal best guess for the beneficiary: Esmeralda 7, an expansive set of proposed solar farms in the Nevada desert that, as proposed, would produce more than 5 gigawatts of power and is largely sited on federal land. Construction can’t begin until Esmeralda 7 gets its federal approvals, and the Trump administration was expected to complete that work by mid-summer.
Except … I reported last week that the permitting process for Esmeralda 7 is now indefinitely stalled. The project is at best still months away from getting its right-of-way approvals from the Trump administration, which recently pushed back timelines for finishing reviews of other large Nevada solar projects, too.
Ultimately, it will be difficult to glean who the lobbyist giveaway here is for unless the legislators who wrote it disclose their intentions. I reached out to the communications director for Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee to try and find out, but so far I’ve gotten crickets.
It may be that this language is revised and that future changes lay out the true beneficiary. Sometimes lawmakers will put the wrong date or word into a bill and they’ll edit it on the floor before a vote, chalking it up to a drafting error.
If senators decide to add back the “placed in service” requirement to capitulate to the House, this would easily be the Chokecherry-Sierra Madre giveaway. If Republicans were to shift forward the deadline for getting a right-of-way, Esmeralda 7 would qualify. Or maybe they could change some secret third thing and a different project I hadn’t considered will be revealed as the mastermind in the shadows.
Until then, I’ll be in my basement poring over more maps and going slowly insane.
Additional reporting was provided by Emily Pontecorvo.