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Numbers from the first full year of the Inflation Reduction Act are in.
The Biden administration has struggled to convince Americans that it has done much of anything to improve the economy. Despite a strong labor market, low unemployment, and steady GDP growth, a recent Gallup poll found that 70% of Americans believe the economy is “getting worse.” As recently as three months ago, about half the country was under the impression that unemployment is at a 50-year high, despite the true rate being at a nearly 50-year low, according to a poll conducted for The Guardian. Prior to the Democratic National Convention earlier this month, poll results from ABC News and the Washington Post showed voters had more faith in Donald Trump to steward the economy than they did in Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.
A new report published Wednesday is perhaps one of the current administration’s last opportunities to prove that Biden’s — and, by extension, Harris’ — policies to stimulate the U.S. economy with investments in clean energy are working. The U.S. Department of Energy’s annual Energy and Employment report, a compendium of information on employment and job growth across the many energy-related sectors of the economy, contains hundreds of data points on which job areas grew, which shrank, and by how much in 2023. There is also a 300-plus page addendum with data on every state, illustrating which industries are taking off where. As the Deputy Secretary of Energy David Turk said on a press call this week, it is the “best snapshot we have of who works in the energy field and what jobs they’re performing.”
The snapshot shows that policies like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act are indeed turning the massive ship that is the energy economy, and doing so in a way that creates good jobs, albeit slowly, and in fits and starts. Here are three themes from the data that stuck out.
The report highlights major growth in clean energy jobs, which it defines as those relating to “net-zero emissions aligned technologies.” That includes renewable energy, nuclear, non-fossil energy efficiency, zero emissions vehicles, and carbon capture, utilization, and storage. In 2023, these fields accounted for more than half — 56% — of new jobs in the energy sector as a whole. The total number of clean energy jobs grew 4.2% last year, which is double the rate of job growth in the rest of the energy industry as well as in the economy at large. It’s also up from 3.9% the year before.
One of the fastest growing fields was low-emissions vehicles, which added nearly 25,000 jobs last year, with the majority of them (17,000) in battery electric vehicles. EV charging jobs also saw a major increase of 25%, although the field is still small, employing fewer than 3,000 people. Roles on renewable energy projects also expanded significantly, accounting for 79% of net new employment in electric power generation, including more than 18,000 new jobs in solar.
There’s a flipside to these numbers. Although we added more clean energy jobs than fossil fuel energy jobs last year, the latter still accounted for 44% of new employment. In other words, it looks like fossil fuel-related energy fields are not just standing still, they are growing. In some cases, this may not be the full story — for example, jobs working on gasoline and diesel vehicles grew more than those working on EVs in absolute terms, adding more than 39,000 positions last year. Many of those were likely maintenance and repair jobs, however, which saw more growth overall than manufacturing.
But in other sectors, the numbers are trending in the other direction. Coal power jobs declined, but at a lower rate than in 2022. Coal mining jobs, on the other hand, increased by 3.4%, which is more than three times what employers anticipated when the DOE surveyed them last year. Now these employers are predicting coal mining jobs will grow again by more than 9% this year. As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin has reported, coal plant retirements have slowed due to concerns about grid reliability and soaring electricity demand.
White House National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi acknowledged the opposing trends during the press conference, noting that President Biden has worked to bring down gas prices and to “have the supplies that we need to run the economy” even as he pursues economy-wide decarbonization. “I think what you see in the jobs report is a reflection of the commitment to pursue energy and climate security, to manage our short term needs and the long term imperative,” he said.
The unionization rate for clean energy jobs surpassed that of the energy sector as a whole last year for the first time, with 12.4% of clean energy workers represented by a union, compared to 11% in the entire energy sector. The report attributes the rise to an overall increase in construction and utility employment — two industries that already have high union density.
My own recent reporting found that the labor provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act seem to be working to improve the quality of clean energy jobs and expand opportunities for union labor. Union leaders told me they are seeing more opportunities in renewables — particularly in solar — than before, and that their apprenticeship programs are growing.
That may be contributing to another trend identified by the new report: Employers in all energy fields reported that it was not as difficult to find workers as they said it was the year before.
“We're really encouraged by the high rates of unionization in clean energy,” Betony Jones, the director of the Office of Energy Jobs, said on the press call this week, “because good jobs attract workers, and better jobs attract better workers. The data show that employers are having an easier time finding qualified workers, so these two things go hand in hand.”
Many of the gains have been in clean energy construction, jobs that are inherently short-term. But Jones pushed back on that distinction. “The construction activity that's being driven by BIL and IRA and private sector investments across the country is expected to continue for decades,” she said. “So while workers might move from project to project, there is continuity of that work in order for workers to make a career in that industry.”
Unions have also made some inroads in manufacturing. Earlier this year, the United Auto Workers ratified a contract with Ultium Cells to produce EV batteries in Ohio. And earlier this month, the United Steelworkers Union reached a neutrality agreement with Convalt Energy, a solar manufacturer planning to open a new factory in New York. That means the company has agreed not to interfere with workers’ efforts to unionize.
When I was reporting on the shortage of residential electricians in the country a few years ago, I was shocked to learn that women made up less than 2% of the field. But the issue is not unique to electricians, and its effects aren’t limited to women. Clean energy jobs — and energy jobs more generally — are largely performed by white men. Despite many new efforts going on around the country to diversify the workforce, not much progress has been made.
Women held just 26% of energy jobs last year, despite making up 47% of the national workforce. When new jobs came along, an even smaller proportion, 17%, were filled by women. That’s way worse than the previous year, when half of new energy jobs were filled by women. Black workers are also particularly underrepresented in the energy sector, holding just 9% of energy jobs compared to 13% of the job market as a whole.
Other underrepresented groups were able to gain more market share. Hispanic and Latino workers filled about a third of new energy jobs and now make up 18% of the sector, compared with 19% of the national workforce.
Cynthia Finley, the vice president for workforce and strategic innovation at the Interstate Renewable Energy Council, told me that increasing diversity in the energy workforce requires a two-pronged approach — helping employers understand how to find workers from other demographics, but also bringing awareness about these jobs to a more diverse population. As more money from the Inflation Reduction Act — such as the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund that will be rolling out over the next year — flows to communities for clean energy, her group aims to seize the opportunity.
“Our hope is to be in those same underrepresented communities that the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund attempts to serve,” she said, “and to bring the career awareness and the outreach and exploration about these jobs and connect them to quality training and education at the same time. So not only are we getting homes that are more energy efficient, but the workforce comes from these same communities as well.”
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With the federal electric vehicle tax credit now gone, automakers like Ford and Hyundai have to find other ways to make their electric cars affordable.
We finally know what Tesla means by an “affordable” electric vehicle. On Tuesday, the electric automaker revealed the stripped-down, less-fancy “Standard” version of its best-selling Model Y crossover and Model 3 sedan. These EVs will sell for several thousand dollars less than the existing versions, which are now rebranded as “Premium.”
These slightly cheaper Ys and 3s aren’t exactly the $25,000 baby Tesla that many fans and investors have anticipated for years. But the announcement is an indication of where the electric vehicle market in the United States may be headed now that the $7,500 federal tax credit for purchasing an EV is dead and gone. Automakers have spent the past few months rejiggering their lineups and slashing prices as much as they can to make sure sales don’t crater without the federal incentive.
The impending end of the tax credit on September 30 helped propel Tesla to record sales numbers in the third quarter of 2025. It was a stark reversal from months of disappointing sales stemming from factors like increased competition and Elon Musk’s political antics that alienated potential buyers. Money talks, of course; Tesla sent me a blitz of emails to make sure I didn’t forget what a good deal I could get before September’s end. But now, with the deadline passed, Musk’s company needed a new shot in the arm to stop sales from falling off a cliff.
The budget Teslas are, indeed, lesser vehicles. They have simpler headlights, less power, and less range than the now-Premium versions. They even come in fewer colors. But the prices — $40,000 for a Model Y Standard and $37,000 for a Model 3 Standard — effectively mirror what those cars would have cost if the tax credit were still in place. In other words, you can still buy a Tesla in the $35,000 to $40,000 range. It just won’t be as good a Tesla as you used to be able to get for the money.
The tax credit deadline had looked like one that would demarcate two distinct EV eras, with October 1 acting as the beginning of new, less-affordable time. But it turns out things aren’t quite so black and white. Lots of automakers are experimenting with ways to soften the financial blow for those who still want to get into an EV. After all, there’s always a loophole.
For example, as the September tax credit deadline approached, Reuters reported on a scheme orchestrated by Ford and General Motors to allow the American car giants to keep the good times going by buying their own cars. It goes like this: Before the September 30 deadline, the financing arms of these big corporations began the process of purchasing a host of their own vehicles from their dealerships. By making the down payment before the end of September, Ford and GM qualified these vehicles for the federal tax benefit. (They even checked with the IRS to make sure this plot was legitimate, Reuters said.) They plan to pass on the savings by leasing those vehicles back to everyday Americans.
According to Car and Driver, a number of citizens did something similar to what the corporations devised — that is, some buyers made their first payments on EVs that won’t be delivered to them for weeks or months in order to qualify for the tax break. These shenanigans are for the short term, though. Ford and GM could pre-purchase only so many of their own vehicles, and Ford said this deal effectively extends the tax credit only another quarter, through the end of December.
The bigger question is whether the automakers can — or will — simply cut prices on their EVs to make the loss of federal incentives sting a little less.
That’s the plan at Hyundai. The Korean giant has announced an enormous price cut on its successful Ioniq 5, one that more than makes up for the vanishing federal incentive. The most basic version of that car will fall from $42,600 to $35,000, putting it on par with the Chevy Equinox EV that’s been a hit at that price. Fancier versions of the Ioniq 5 will fall by more than $9,000 for the 2026 model year. Hyundai and its partner Kia are offering some of the best October lease deals, too.
Other car companies have begun to follow suit. BMW will simply offer a $7,500 discount on its electric models for those who take delivery by the end of October. Stellantis, the parent company of Jeep, Chrysler, Dodge, Ram, and others, will do the same for electric sales through the end of the year. No word yet on what happens after these deals expire.
Incentives like the federal tax credit for EVs aren’t meant to last forever, of course. In theory, their purpose is to lift up a new technology until it can compete at scale with the tech that has been around forever.
Whether electric cars have reached that point is a contentious question. Ford has only just announced a roadmap to overhaul its entire EV production system in order to stop losing billions on electric vehicles. Hyundai’s EVs are profitable — or, at least they were before the Trump administration began monkeying with tax incentives and tariffs. A batch of more affordable EVs are on the way, though the ever-changing map of tariffs makes it unclear exactly how much they’ll cost when they finally arrive.
The short-term picture may well be that electric cars continue to be a loss leader for some automakers still trying to find their footing in the space. Whether their shareholders will tolerate this long enough for the margins to become sustainable — well, that’s the real question.
Current conditions: In the Atlantic, the tropical storm that could, as it develops, take the name Jerry is making its way westward toward the U.S. • In the Pacific, Hurricane Priscilla strengthened into a Category 2 storm en route to Arizona and the Southwest • China broke an October temperature record with thermometers surging near 104 degrees Fahrenheit in the southeastern province of Fujian.
The Department of Energy appears poised to revoke awards to two major Direct Air Capture Hubs funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in Louisiana and Texas, Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo reported Tuesday. She got her hands on an internal agency project list that designated nearly $24 billion worth of grants as “terminated,” including Occidental Petroleum’s South Texas DAC Hub and Louisiana's Project Cypress, a joint venture between the DAC startups Heirloom and Climeworks. An Energy Department spokesperson told Emily that he was “unable to verify” the list of canceled grants and said that “no further determinations have been made at this time other than those previously announced,”referring to the canceled grants the department announced last week. Christoph Gebald, the CEO of Climeworks, acknowledged “market rumors” in an email, but said that the company is “prepared for all scenarios.” Heirloom’s head of policy, Vikrum Aiyer, said the company wasn’t aware of any decision the Energy Department had yet made.
While the list floated last week showed the Trump administration’s plans to cancel the two regional hydrogen hubs on the West Coast, the new list indicated that the Energy Department planned to rescind grants for all seven hubs, Emily reported. “If the program is dismantled, it could undermine the development of the domestic hydrogen industry,” Rachel Starr, the senior U.S. policy manager for hydrogen and transportation at Clean Air Task Force told her. “The U.S. will risk its leadership position on the global stage, both in terms of exporting a variety of transportation fuels that rely on hydrogen as a feedstock and in terms of technological development as other countries continue to fund and make progress on a variety of hydrogen production pathways and end uses.”
Remember the Tesla announcement I teased in yesterday’s newsletter? The predictions proved half right: The electric automaker did, indeed, release a cheaper version of its midsize SUV, the Model Y, with a starting price just $10 shy of $40,000. Rather than a new Roadster or potential vacuum cleaner, as the cryptic videos the company posted on CEO Elon Musk’s social media site hinted, the second announcement was a cheaper version of the Model 3, already the lower-end sedan offering. Starting at $36,990, InsideEVs called it “one of the most affordable cars Tesla has ever sold, and the cheapest in 2025.” But it’s still a far cry from Musk’s erstwhile promise to roll out a Tesla for less than $30,000.
That may be part of why the company is losing market share. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported, Tesla’s slice of the U.S. electric vehicle sales sank to its lowest-ever level in August despite Americans’ record scramble to use the federal tax credits before the September 30 deadline President Donald Trump’s new tax law set. General Motors, which sold more electric vehicles in the third quarter of this year than in all of 2024, offers the cheapest battery-powered passenger vehicle on the market today, the Chevrolet Equinox, which starts at $35,100.
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Trump’s pledge to revive the United States’ declining coal industry was always a gamble — even though, as Matthew reported in July, global coal demand is rising. Three separate stories published Tuesday show just how stacked the odds are against a major resurgence:
As you may recall from two consecutive newsletters last month, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said “permitting reform” was “the biggest remaining thing” in the administration’s agenda. Yet Republican leaders in Congress expressed skepticism about tacking energy policy into the next reconciliation bill. This week, however, Utah Senator Mike Lee, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, called for a legislative overhaul of the National Environmental Policy Act. On Monday, the pro-development social media account Yimbyland — short for Yes In My Back Yard — posted on X: “Reminder that we built the Golden Gate Bridge in 4.5 years. Today, we wouldn’t even be able to finish the environmental review in 4.5 years.” In response, Lee said: “It’s time for NEPA reform. And permitting reform more broadly.”
Last month, a bipartisan permitting reform bill got a hearing in the House of Representatives. But that was before the government shutdown. And sources familiar with Democrats’ thinking have in recent months suggested to me that the administration’s gutting of so many clean energy policies has left Republicans with little to bargain with ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
Soon-to-be Japanese prime minister Sanae Takaichi.Yuichi Yamazaki - Pool/Getty Images
On Saturday, Japan’s long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party elected its former economic minister, Sanae Takaichi, as its new leader, putting her one step away from becoming the country’s first woman prime minister. Under previous administrations, Japan was already on track to restart the reactors idled after the 2011 Fukushima disaster. But Takaichi, a hardline conservative and nationalist who also vowed to re-militarize the nation, has pushed to speed up deployment of new reactors and technologies such as fusion in hopes of making the country 100% self-sufficient on energy.
“She wants energy security over climate ambition, nuclear over renewables, and national industry over global corporations,” Mika Ohbayashi, director at the pro-clean-energy Renewable Energy Institute, told Bloomberg. Shares of nuclear reactor operators surged by nearly 7% on Monday on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, while renewable energy developers’ stock prices dropped by as much as 15%
Researchers at the United Arab Emirates’ University of Sharjah just outlined a new method to transform spent coffee grounds and a commonly used type of plastic used in packaging into a form of activated carbon that can be used for chemical engineering, food processing, and water and air treatments. By repurposing the waste, it avoids carbon emitting from landfills into the atmosphere and reduces the need for new sources of carbon for industrial processes. “What begins with a Starbucks coffee cup and a discarded plastic water bottle can become a powerful tool in the fight against climate change through the production of activated carbon,” Dr. Haif Aljomard, lead inventor of the newly patented technology, said in a press release.
Last week’s Energy Department grant cancellations included funding for a backup energy system at Valley Children’s Hospital in Madera, California
When the Department of Energy canceled more than 321 grants in an act of apparent retribution against Democrats over the government shutdown, Russ Vought, President Trump’s budget czar, declared that the money represented “Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left's climate agenda.”
At least one of the grants zeroed out last week, however, was supposed to help keep the lights on at a children’s hospital.
The $29 million grant was intended to build a 3.3-megawatt long-duration energy storage system at Valley Children’s Hospital, a large pediatric hospital in Madera, California. The system would “power critical hospital operations during outage events,” such as when the California grid shuts down to avoid starting wildfires, according to project documents.
“The U.S. Department of Energy’s cancellation of funding for [the] long-duration energy storage demonstration grant is disappointing,” Zara Arboleda, a spokesperson for the hospital, told me.
Valley Children’s Hospital is a 358-bed hospital that says it serves more than 1.3 million children across California’s Central Valley. It has 116 neonatal intensive care unit beds and nationally ranked specialties in pediatric neurology, orthopedics, and lung surgery, among others.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright has characterized the more than $7.5 billion in grants canceled last week as part of an ongoing review of financial awards made by the Biden administration. But the timing of the cancellations — and Vought’s gleeful tweets about them — suggests a more vindictive purpose. Republican lawmakers and President Trump himself threatened to unleash Vought as a kind of rogue budget cutter before the federal government shut down last week.
“We don’t control what he’s going to do,” Senator John Thune told Politico last week. “I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut,” Trump posted on the same day.
Up until this year, canceling funding that is already under contract with a private party would have been thought to be straightforwardly illegal under federal law. But the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has allowed the Trump administration to act with previously unimaginable freedom while it considers ruling on similar cases.
Faraday Microgrids, the contractor that was due to receive the funding, is already building a microgrid for the hospital. The proposed backup power system — which the grant stipulated should be “non-lithium-ion” — was supposed to be funded by the Energy Department’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, with the goal of finding new ways of storing electricity without using lithium-ion batteries, and was meant to work in concert with that new microgrid and snap on in times of high stress.
That microgrid project is still moving forward, Arboleda, the hospital’s spokesperson, told me. “Valley Children’s Hospital continues to build and soon will operate its microgrid announced in 2023 to ensure our facilities have access to reliable and sustainable energy every minute of every day for our patients and our care providers,” she added. That grid will contain some storage, but not the long-term storage system discussed in the official plan.
Faraday Microgrids, formerly known as Charge Bliss, didn’t respond to a request for comment, but its website touts its ability to secure grants and other government funding for energy projects.
In a statement, a spokesman for the Energy Department said that the grant was canceled because the project wasn’t feasible. “Following an in-depth review of the financial award, it was determined, among other reasons, that the viability of the project was not adequate to warrant further disbursements,” Ben Dietderich, a spokesman for the Energy Department, told me.
The children’s hospital, at least, is in good company. On Tuesday, a Trump administration document obtained by Heatmap News suggested the Energy Department is moving to kill bipartisan-backed funding for two direct air capture hubs in Texas and Louisiana. And although California has lost the most grants of any state, the Energy Department has also sought to terminate funding for new factories and industrial facilities across Republican-governed states.
Editor’s note: This story initially misstated the number of neonatal intensive care unit beds at Valley Children’s Hospital. It has been corrected.