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Workers at EmPower Solar joined the United Auto Workers. Then management furloughed nearly half of them.
President Biden’s pitch to get the American public behind the transition to clean energy is that it will bring good-paying, high-quality jobs — union jobs. But so far, that’s been more true in some areas than others.
When Daniel Lozano first got hired at EmPower Solar, a rooftop solar installation company on Long Island last April, he thought he had landed a pretty sweet gig. He was 24, with a background in electrical work and construction, and was attracted by the company’s summer schedule of four tens — four-day work weeks, ten hours per day.
But soon it became clear the job wasn’t as ideal as it seemed. Extreme pressure from management to finish installations as quickly as possible was wearing people down. Workers felt overworked and underpaid. An opaque bonus system and frequent firing and hiring created an atmosphere of anxiety. Vacation requests took months to approve. Lozano grew especially frustrated that his manager kept delaying his scheduled performance review — and therefore his prospects for a raise.
All the while, Lozano watched as the UPS Teamsters and the United Auto Workers were waging historic campaigns to try to increase pay for their workers. Inspired by their success, he began trying to organize at EmPower.
“We don't want to be treated like dogs that are just pushed and pushed and pushed and then let go like used rags,” he told me. “We can make this a good place to work.”
The number of solar workers represented by a union has been creeping up over the last decade, reaching about 10.5% of the workforce in 2022, according to the most recent National Solar Jobs Census. By comparison, about 16% of autoworkers and about 48% of electric power line workers were members of a union that year, according to the Union Membership and Coverage Database, which is built on federal data.
But most union clean energy work is on big commercial projects like utility-scale solar farms, where developers have to pay prevailing wages, use apprentices, or enter into project labor agreements in order to qualify for state and federal subsidies. Union representation is much more unusual in residential work like rooftop solar, where rebates and tax credits typically have no labor requirements.
Residential construction is a fragmented industry, with lots of small businesses that employ only a handful of people. In some ways, EmPower stands out in this field. The company has a staff of more than 100 and offers full benefits like paid time off, health insurance, and a 401k retirement plan. But many of the complaints workers had about EmPower are common in the industry. A 2020 report by the California Workforce Development Board, for example, says that rooftop solar and energy efficiency jobs there “are characterized by low wages” and “lack of career ladders.”
The primary union for solar workers to date has been the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. But Lozano thought the group seemed stagnant — its leadership wasn’t out there the way that Shawn Fain, the progressive UAW president, was, fighting for its workers in the national spotlight, Lozano said. So instead, in September, he went to see if his local UAW chapter would represent EmPower workers. They agreed. Next, Lozano began gathering support from his coworkers and soon had enough to schedule an official vote with the National Labor Relations Board.
The company’s leadership did not welcome the organizing effort. In the weeks leading up to the vote, EmPower hired National Labor Relations Advocates, a strategy firm that promises, “within 24 hours of being retained,” to “arm you with the tools you need and bring our experience and 96% success rate in keeping our clients union-free.” According to Lozano and other workers, management began visiting job sites with coffee and donuts and asking about their concerns. They said the company was a family, and that any issues they had would be resolved more slowly with a union, not faster.
The workers weren’t convinced. On December 22, EmPower’s installers and service technicians voted 29 to 16 in favor of unionizing.
One week later, on the Friday before the new year, the company notified 21 workers — including Lozano — that they were being put on unpaid leave, some for more than a year. Michael DiGiuseppe, the vice president of UAW Local 259, accused the company of illegally retaliating against the unionization effort and filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board.
“One week out, we wanted to find collaborative bargaining priorities, and instead of doing that, they went out and laid off 21 guys,” DiGiuseppe told me.
EmPower said it furloughed the workers because business typically slows down in the winter, and the company took a particularly hard hit in 2023 due to soaring interest rates and inflation. (It is continuing to provide health insurance for those who were furloughed.) But regardless of whether the layoffs were retaliatory, they still violated the National Labor Relations Act, according to DiGiuseppe. Once workers have voted to unionize, an employer is not allowed to make any changes to the covered workers’ terms or conditions without notifying and negotiating with the union, even if the changes are pure business decisions. “At a minimum, they should have communicated with us that they were laying off workers,” DiGiuseppe said.
I spoke with three other field workers from EmPower, in addition to Lozano, who had been with the company for several years, and had also been furloughed. When I asked why they wanted to unionize, the workers, who requested not to be named, echoed many of Lozano’s grievances. They described an atmosphere of pressure to work fast, even in riskier situations, such as when they were installing panels on steeply pitched roofs or working with electrical equipment in the rain. They didn’t like that they were blamed, yelled at, and sometimes docked pay when things broke or went wrong. Many of their complaints were around compensation, including not being paid for travel time or for taking on additional responsibilities. One of the workers, like Lozano, was frustrated by performance review delays that left no clear pathway to a raise. Another described how the company awarded bonuses to workers based on their speed and adherence to safety protocols, but said the scoring system was mysterious and seemed to be inconsistent from job to job.
In general, the workers told me, they liked their jobs at EmPower and wanted to stay there, but were seeking more transparency, accountability, and standardization.
David Schieren, the CEO of EmPower and chairman of the New York State Solar Energy Industry Association, rejected the workers’ characterization of the company. When I asked about the pressure to work quickly, Schieren said this was the nature of running a customer-centric business. “We have one boss,” he told me. “The boss is the consumer. They tell us, do we want to work with this company or not? Are they happy or are they not?”
If workers were uncomfortable with the pace, Schieren went on, then maybe this wasn’t the right job for them. “We are hungry, we do efficient work, we’re productive,” he said. “So that’s what I think we promote here at EmPower. I think that a lot of employees feel that they thrive in that environment. Is everybody right for a highly productive company? I don't know, maybe some people don't want that.”
Schieren said the company had a track record of upward mobility, including promoting 20 field team members to leadership in recent years, and that workers had an average tenure with the company of more than 5 years. He declined to weigh in on whether he supported having a union at his company. When I asked whether he thought unionization threatened the business, he said no.
There is research showing that paying solar workers prevailing wages does not significantly increase the cost of solar. But there’s another calculus to consider in all of this, beyond the economics of any one company or technology. Proponents of unionization — including those in the federal government — say that making sure clean energy jobs are good jobs is essential to building the political will to address the climate crisis.
As we enter the next stage of the transition, where climate solutions like electric vehicles and wind turbines are becoming increasingly politicized and one bad power outage can invite endless litigation over the reliability of renewables, clean energy companies may want workers on their side.
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Rob and Jesse digest the Ways and Means budget bill live on air, alongside former Treasury advisor Luke Bassett.
The fight over the Inflation Reduction Act has arrived. After months of discussion, the Republican majority in the House is now beginning to write, review, and argue about its plans to transform the climate law’s energy tax provisions.
We wanted to record a show about how to follow that battle. But then — halfway through recording that episode — the Republican-controlled House Ways and Means Committee dropped the first draft of its proposal to gut the IRA, and we had to review it on-air.
We were joined by Luke Bassett, a former senior advisor for domestic climate policy at the U.S. Treasury Department and a former senior staff member at the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. We chatted about the major steps in the reconciliation process, what to watch next, and what to look for in the new GOP draft. Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Jesse Jenkins: Let’s come back to this as a negotiation. This is the first salvo from the House. What does this tell you about where we go from here? Is this a floor? Could it get worse? Is it likely to get better as the lobbying kicks off in earnest by various industries threatened by these changes, and they try to peel things back? What do you think happens next?
Luke Bassett: If you run with the horror movie analogy here, this is scary. I think a lot of people, especially in any energy startups or folks who have been penciling out deals, to start really lining up new projects — or even folks looking for a new EV to buy are suddenly going to have to totally rethink what the next few years look like.
And, you know, whether or not they want to build a factory, buy a car, or have to switch from an electric heat pump to a whale oil burning stove. Who knows? That said, there are champions for each of these in very different ways in the Senate. There are lobbyists who —
Jenkins: — in the House, too.
Bassett: Exactly. There will be lobbyists weighing in. And I think it matters to really think through … I think we’ve been faced with gigantic uncertainty since January. And there’s a part where companies all across the energy sector are looking at this text as we speak and thinking, whoa, I didn’t sign up for this. And to combine this with tariffs, to combine it with the cuts to other federal programs in the other committees’ jurisdictions, it is just a nearly impossible outlook for building new projects. And I bet a bunch of people, CEOs and otherwise, are thinking, I wish Joe Manchin were back in the Senate. But you know, it is what it is.
Robinson Meyer: I will say that it could get worse from here because they will be negotiating with the House Freedom Caucus and with various other conservative House members. And they’ll also be negotiating against the president’s wishes, which is that this move and get done as soon as possible. And so when I talked to Senator John Curtis, Republican of Utah, who’s a supporter of the IRA, or wants to see it extended in large part, and I asked him questions like, what happens if Republicans really go to work in the House on the IRA and then it gets sent to the Senate? One dynamic we’ve already seen during this Congress is that te House Republican Caucus in this Congress is unusually functional and unusually strategic, and has been unusually good at passing relatively extreme and aggressive policy and then jamming the Senate with it.
And unlike what has happened in the past, which is the House Republican Caucus can’t really do anything, so the Senate passes a far more moderate policy, sends it to the House and dares the House to shut things down. This time the House, if folks remember back in March, the House passed a fairly aggressive budget and kicked it to the Senate and then dared the Senate to shut down the government, and ultimately the Senate decided to keep the government open.
I asked Curtis what happens if they do the same with the IRA. What happens if they really go to task on the IRA? They pass fairly aggressive cuts to it and they send it to the Senate. And his answer was, well, I don’t think the House is going to do that. I don’t think a bill that really savages the IRA could pass the House.
We’ll see, but I just don’t think there’s any floor here. I think there’s no floor for how bad this gets. And I think I just don’t, you know … Before we went into the administration, there was a lot of confidence that the Trump administration and the new Republican majority and the Congress was not going to do anything to substantially make the business environment worse. We’ve discovered there does seem to be a degree of tariffs that will make them squeal and pull back, but we actually haven’t found that in legislature yet.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
The Ways and Means Committee released its proposed budget language, and it’s not pretty for clean energy.
The House Ways and Means Committee, which oversees tax policy, released its initial proposal to overhaul the nation’s clean energy tax credits on Monday afternoon. These are separate and in addition to the extensive cuts to Inflation Reduction Act grant programs proposed by the Energy and Commerce Committee, Transportation Committee, and Natural Resources Committee in the past few weeks.
Here’s a rundown of the tax credit proposal, which, at first glance, appears to amount to a back-door full repeal of the climate law. There’s a lot that could change before we get to a final budget, let alone have a text head to the Senate. We’ll have more analysis on what these changes would mean in the days and weeks to come.
The text proposes ending the tax credit for new EVs (that is, 30D) on December 31, 2025 — with one exception. The credit would remain in effect for one year, through the end of 2026, for vehicles produced by automakers that have sold fewer than 200,000 tax credit-qualified cars between 2010 and the end of this year. That means that no Teslas would qualify for the tax credit next year, as the company has sold far more than 200,000 tax credit-eligible vehicles. A new entrant to EVs, like Honda with its Prologue model, will likely still qualify.
The committee also proposes ending the tax credit for used EVs (25E) and commercial EVs (45W) by the end of this year. This would effectively end the “leasing loophole” that allowed Americans to redeem the tax credit on vehicles that didn’t qualify for 30D because they didn’t meet domestic content requirements, meaning consumers could get discounts on leases of a wide range of makes and models.
Lastly, the draft proposes terminating the tax credit for residential EV chargers (30C) at the end of this year.
The GOP has proposed an early phase-out of the technology-neutral production and investment tax credits, which subsidize zero-emissions power generation projects including wind, solar, energy storage, advanced nuclear, and geothermal. It also proposed significant changes for the years they remain in effect.
Currently, new clean electricity projects can earn a 2.75 cents for every kilowatt-hour they produce for the first 10 years under section 45Y of the tax code. Alternatively, project developers can get a 30% investment tax credit (48E) on new projects. The Inflation Reduction Act scheduled both of these programs to phase out beginning in 2032, and expire at the end of 2035. It included a major caveat, however: that this phase-out would only happen if greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. power generation fell below 25% of 2022 levels. Otherwise, the tax credits would be maintained at their initial amounts until this target was met.
Under the GOP proposal, both credits would start to phase down in 2029, and new projects would no longer be eligible for either credit beginning in 2032. The proposal also cuts out a key provision that would have grandfathered many more projects into the tax credit. Under current law, a project only has to start construction within a certain year to qualify for that year’s tax credit amount. The draft text changes this, requiring a project to be “placed in service” before 2032 in order to qualify.
A separate tax credit for existing nuclear power generation (45U) would also phase down on the same timeline, despite Trump and other Republicans’ interest in boosting nuclear energy.
“Transferability” supercharged the nation’s clean energy tax credits by allowing project developers with low tax liability to sell their credits to another entity that stood to benefit from them. Previously, developers could only monetize their unusable tax credits through complicated tax equity deals.
Recipients of a wide range of tax credits, including those for clean manufacturing, clean fuels, carbon capture, nuclear power, and hydrogen, can all take advantage of transferability. The provision channeled new capital into the climate economy as corporations looking to reduce their tax liability began scooping up tax credits, indirectly helping to finance clean energy projects. It also helped lower the cost of wind and solar, as developers could earn a premium on tax credits compared to what they got for tax equity transfers, because the whole transaction was cheaper to do.
The proposal would get rid of this option across all of the tax credits beginning in 2028.
The proposal would also impose new sourcing requirements across all of the tax credits, prohibiting developers from using components, subcomponents, or critical minerals sourced from “foreign entities of concern,” a term that applies to companies based in China, Russia, North Korea, or Iran. The consequences would be huge, as China dominates global markets for refined lithium, cobalt, graphite, and rare earths — key materials used in clean energy technologies.
The draft text would also terminate the clean manufacturing credit (45X) in 2032 — one year earlier than under existing law. Wind energy components such as blades, towers, and gearboxes would lose their eligibility sooner, in 2028.
The text proposes repealing three tax credits for residential energy efficiency improvements at the end of 2025. Starting next year, homeowners would no longer be able to claim the Energy Efficiency Home Improvement Credit (25C), which provides up to $3,200 per year for home energy audits, energy-saving windows and doors, air sealing and insulation, heat pumps, and new electrical panels.
It also proposes killing the Residential Clean Energy Credit (25D), which offered homeowners 30% off the cost of solar panels and battery systems to store energy from those solar panels. This credit also subsidizes geothermal home heating systems.
Both of these tax credits have existed in some form since the Energy Policy Act of 2005.
The third credit that would end this year is an up to $5,000 subsidy for contractors who construct new, energy efficient homes (45L).
The proposal would not repeal the energy efficiency tax deduction for improvements made to commercial buildings (179D).
The Inflation Reduction Act created a technology-neutral tax credit for low-carbon transportation fuels, like sustainable aviation fuel and biodiesel (45Z). It operates on a sliding scale, depending on how carbon-intensive the fuel is. The credit is set to expire after 2027, however the GOP proposal would extend it for four years, through the end of 2031.
That said, it would also make a significant change to how the credit is calculated, making it much easier for projects with questionable emissions benefits to qualify. Under the Biden administration, the Treasury Department issued rules that said producers had to account for the emissions tied to indirect land use changes resulting from fuel production. That meant that corn ethanol producers, for example, had to account for the expansion of croplands resulting from the increase of biofuel production and use — which would, in most cases, disqualify corn ethanol from claiming the tax credit. But under the GOP proposal, producers would explicitly not have to account for indirect land use changes.
The GOP proposal would deal a rapid and ruthless death blow to the 45V clean hydrogen production tax credit, requiring developers to begin construction before the end of this year if they want to claim it.
Other than ending transferability, the text makes no changes to the 45Q carbon capture and sequestration tax credit.
Most of the tax credits have provisions that allow project developers to qualify for higher amounts if they pay prevailing wages, hire apprentices, build in a qualified “energy community” or a low-income community, or use a certain percentage of domestically-produced materials. This initial draft from the GOP would not change any of those provisions.
The Energy and Commerce Committee dropped its budget proposal Sunday night.
Republicans on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce unveiled their draft budget proposal Sunday night, which features widespread cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act and other clean energy and environment programs.
The legislative language is part of the House’s reconciliation package, an emerging tax and spending bill that will seek to extend much of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, with reduced spending on the IRA and Medicaid helping to balance the budgetary scales.
The Energy and Commerce committee covers energy and environmental programs, while the Ways and Means Committee has jurisdiction over the core tax credits of the IRA that power much of America’s non-carbon power generation. Ways and Means has yet to release its draft budget proposal, which will be another major shoe to drop.
The core way the Energy and Commerce proposal generates budgetary savings is by proposing “rescissions” to existing programs, whereby unspent money would be yanked away.
The language also includes provisions to auction electromagnetic spectrum, as well as changes to Medicaid.Overall, the Congressional Budget Office told the committee, the recommendations would “reduce deficits by more than $880 billion” from 2025 to 2034, which was the target the committee was instructed to hit. The Sierra Club estimated that the cuts specifically to programs designed to help decarbonize heavy industry would add up to $1.6 billion.
The proposed rescissions would affect a number of energy financing and grant programs, including:
And that’s just the “energy” cuts. The language also includes a number of cuts to environmental programs, including:
Lastly, the proposal would also repeal federal tailpipe emission standards starting in the 2027 model year. These rules, which were finalized just last year, would have provided a major boost to the electric vehicle industry, perhaps pushing EV sales to over half of all new car sales by the beginning of the next decade. The language also repeals the latest gas-mileage standards, which were released last year and would have applied to the 2027 through 2031 model years, eventually bumping up miles-per-gallon industry-wide to over 50 by the 2031 model year.