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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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On Lava Ridge’s cancellation, Northeast pipelines, and fresh Puerto Rico chaos
Current conditions: A potential tropical storm is barreling toward Georgia and the Carolina coast • The Northeastern U.S. is facing poor air quality due to Canadian wildfire smoke, with the air quality index surging past 135 in Binghamton, New York • South Africa is facing severe thunderstorms in Limpopo, Mpumalanga, and Gauteng.
In an historic first last month, U.S. regulators gave tentative approval to restart the Palisades nuclear station in Michigan. If everything goes according to plan, the plant will become the country’s first atomic facility to come back online after permanently shutting down in 2022. Now a second such project has entered the pipeline. Iowa’s only nuclear plant, Duane Arnold Energy Center, closed down in 2020. The plant’s owner, NextEra Energy, had planned to build a solar farm. But the company has now filed a request with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission seeking to reclaim the interconnection rights that the Duane Arnold plant had passed onto the solar project, World Nuclear News reported Wednesday.
It’s not the only project that could come back online. Last September, Microsoft put up $15 billion to reopen the working reactor of Constellation Energy’s Three Mile Island plant. As my colleague Katie Brigham wrote yesterday, dealmaking is surging across the entire industry, from uranium enrichers to small modular reactor developers. “This year is by far the biggest year in terms of nuclear deals that has occurred, probably, since the 70s,” Adam Stein, the director of nuclear innovation at The Breakthrough Institute, told her.
The Department of the Interior yanked the Biden-era approval of the Lava Ridge Wind Project, a planned 231-turbine farm covering more than 57,000 acres in Idaho. The Biden administration had given the project its final green light last December. The following month, Idaho Governor Brad Little signed an executive order directing all state agencies to work with the new Trump administration to reverse the approval. “Under President Donald Trump’s bold leadership, the Department is putting the brakes on deficient, unreliable energy and putting the American people first,” Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said in a statement announcing the change. “By reversing the Biden administration’s thoughtless approval of the Lava Ridge Wind Project, we are protecting tens of thousands of acres from harmful wind policy while shielding the interests of rural Idaho communities.”
The reversal is part of a broader crackdown on wind and solar that has escalated since the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Just last week, the Interior Department ordered officials to weed out pro-renewables policies and rescinded the designation for offshore wind projects. Heatmap’s Jael Holzman has more on the Trump administration’s all-out effort to squelch the industry.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin vowed to revive a gas pipeline project abandoned amid pushback in 2020. In an op-ed in The Boston Globe, Zeldin blamed New York for blocking the Constitution Pipeline and making the Northeast dependent on imported gas. “States should not block critical energy infrastructure in the name of climate change, as New York’s former governor did. And states like New York should not have veto authority to dictate energy policy for, and increase energy costs of, other states,” he wrote. “New England should come together to support American energy infrastructure, including the Constitution Pipeline project, to provide much-needed grid stability, create jobs, and reduce energy prices across the region for American families who have suffered long enough.”
Despite Zeldin’s adversarial tone, New York’s current governor, Kathy Hochul, has already shown her willingness to work with the Trump administration to restart gas pipeline development. When Hochul met with President Donald Trump in May to defend the Empire Wind project, she also expressed support for building new gas pipelines in the state, Burgum said on X. The growth in the nation’s appetite for gas-fired power isn’t slowing. German infrastructure giant Siemens Energy set a new record for gas turbine orders this week.
A protester waves a pro-independence flag in San Juan, Puerto Rico.Angel Valentin/Getty Images
Trump this week fired five of the eight members of the fiscal oversight board Congress put in charge of Puerto Rico’s finances, thrusting the most populous U.S. territory into fresh chaos amid hurricane season. All five of the appointees were Democrats. Puerto Rico went into bankruptcy in 2016 after accruing more than $120 billion in debt between unfunded pension obligations and bonds. As a territory, the island fell under the jurisdiction of Congress, which passed the PROMESA Act, establishing the board whose members the White House appointed and giving the panel supreme power over how Puerto Rico’s elected government spent money. The following year, Hurricane María decimated the island’s power grid. The board, pejoratively referred to by many Puerto Ricans as la junta, oversaw the privatization of the territory’s power system, granting control over the grid to LUMA Energy and the generating plants to the gas company New Fortress Energy.
Both of those electricity deals are now facing fresh scrutiny. Governor Jenniffer González-Colón, a Republican ally of Trump, canceled a $20 billion liquified natural gas contract with New Fortress, and has promised to initiate the process to end LUMA’s deal. Whomever Trump appoints to the board could help shape those outcomes. The Department of Homeland Security, meanwhile, just reassigned dozens of Federal Emergency Management Agency staffers to focus on deportations instead of storm readiness.
The cargo company that delivers most of Hawaii’s cars has suspended shipments of electric vehicles to the state over fears of battery fires. Honolulu-based Matson told its customers in mid-July that the move was “effective immediately,” E&E News reported. The ban includes all “used or new EVs and plug-in hybrid vehicles,” the company said.
The move is part of what my colleague Jael has described as a spreading nationwide panic over the risk batteries pose following the Moss Landing battery fire in January, even though the San Francisco-area facility was something of a “technological outlier.”
New research into how the invasive South American apple snail regrows its eyes could set the stage for a human ocular breakthrough. Researchers at the University of California, Davis, found that immediately after amputation, the snails had about 9,000 genes that were expressed at different rates compared to normal adult snail eyes. “If we find a set of genes that are important for eye regeneration, and these genes are also present in vertebrates, in theory we could activate them to enable eye regeneration in humans,” Alice Accorsi, the assistant professor of molecular and cellular biology who authored the study, said in a statement.
Whichever way you cut it, this has been an absolute banner year for nuclear deals in the U.S. It doesn’t much matter the metric — the amount of venture funding flowing to nuclear startups, the number of announcements regarding planned reactor restarts and upgrades, gigawatts of new construction added to the pipeline — it’s basically all peaking. Stock prices are up across all major publicly traded nuclear companies this year, in some cases by over 100%.
“This year is by far the biggest year in terms of nuclear deals that has occurred, probably, since the 70s,” Adam Stein, the director of nuclear innovation at The Breakthrough Institute, told me. “It’s spanning the gamut from bringing a 40-year-old reactor back to things that have not even been proven scientifically yet.”
To name just a few announcements from this year: planning for a 4.4-gigawatt nuclear power complex is now underway in Texas; South Carolina’s state-owned utility is seeking buyers to restart construction on two partially built AP1000 reactors; New York governor Kathy Hochul is looking to build a new reactor in upstate New York; The Tennessee Valley Authority submitted a construction permit for a small modular reactor; Google signed a power purchase agreement with Commonwealth Fusion Systems; and another fusion company, Helion Energy, raised a whopping $425 million round of venture capital. On top of all that there’s the Palisades nuclear power plant in Michigan, which is targeted to restart by year’s end, bringing 800 megawatts of new nuclear power online.
Heading into the second Trump term, there were plenty of indications that the administration would support this technology with increasingly bipartisan appeal. So it wasn’t exactly a surprise that while the One Big Beautiful Bill eviscerated tax credits for solar and wind, it preserved them for both existing and new nuclear facilities. Now that this support is assured, Stein expects the nuclear announcements to keep rolling in. “We might have seen more deals earlier this year if there wasn’t uncertainty about what was going to happen with tax credits. But now that that’s resolved, I expect to hear more later this year,” he told me.
How much of this is, I asked him, is due to data centers and their seemingly insatiable demand for clean, firm power? “Most of it,” he said simply. By way of example, he pointed out how data center load growth has changed the outlooks for two small modular reactor companies in particular. “NuScale has been trying to find their first project for a long time now, after they had to cancel their [Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems] project. Kairos didn’t have a clear buyer for its first-of-a-kind, even though it was building two test reactors,” Stein explained. “Then all of a sudden, they all had additional deals in the works because of data center demand.”
Last year, Kairos inked a 500-megawatt deal with Google to meet the hyperscaler’s growing data center needs, while this year, Texas A&M selected the company — along with three others — to build a reactor at the university’s research and development campus. And while NuScale infamously canceled its first project in 2023 due to rising costs, this year it received approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a new and improved reactor design. Now the company’s CEO, John Hopkins, told Reuters that NuScale is in talks to deploy its tech with five unnamed “tier one hyperscalers.” Its stock is up more than 150% on the year.
That’s a big turnaround for a company that, less than two years ago, was widely considered a cautionary tale — and it’s not the only one in the industry with this type of comeback story. Right before NuScale’s project failed, another nuclear company, X-energy, announced that it would no longer go public due to “challenging market conditions” and “peer company trading performance.” But while X-energy still has yet to IPO, it appears to be doing just fine. In February, the company announced the close of a $700 million Series C follow-on round, coming on the heels of Amazon’s strategic investment last year.
“I think every company has their stories about how things are changing,” Seth Grae, CEO of the advanced nuclear fuel company Lightbridge, told me. Things have moved a lot faster, Grae said, since Trump released a series of executive orders aimed at accelerating nuclear energy deployment. “Just since May, we’ve received this highly enriched uranium [from the Department of Energy], made these fuel samples, got them qualified already at Idaho National Lab. We expect they’ll be in the reactor this year. Grae told me. “Things didn’t used to happen that fast in nuclear.”
Trump’s plans to fast track nuclear development have also raised serious concerns, however, as critics worry that acceleration could lead to laxer safety standards The executive orders call for, among other things, cutting staff at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, just as the industry enters a period of intense activity. In June, the President fired one of the agency’s commissioners, Christopher Hanson, without cause. Another commissioner, Annie Caputo, resigned in July.
But right now, the nuclear industry is mostly basking in optimism. Grae credits the government’s strong support for the surge in nuclear stocks — Lightbridge’s own stock price has jumped 180% this year, while another nuclear fuel company, Centrus Energy, is up even more. The small modular reactor company Oklo is up 285% for the year, on the heels of last year’s 12-gigawatt non-binding deal with the data center company Switch — one of the largest corporate clean power agreements to date.
Last year’s slew of deals involving Oklo, X-energy, and Kairos show that the sector’s momentum had been building well before Trump took office. By 2023, the writing was already on the wall in terms of data center load growth, as grid planners began to predict a sharp rise in electricity demand after over a decade of stagnation. But when I asked Erik Funkhauser of the Good Energy Collective whether the prior two years compared with this one, he concurred with Stein. “Nope,” he told me. “We’re seeing capital infusion at a really, really high pace, as high of a pace as the company’s suppliers can keep up with on projects.”
Still, the party may not go on forever. “I see a potential for a Valley of Death,” Stein told me, similar to what many startups go through when they’re trying to raise later-stage funding rounds.
“If things don’t start to actually move forward with real progress, either getting licenses or building prototypes on time, then all of that investment will be pulled back.” That’s what the U.S. saw during the last so-called “nuclear renaissance” in the late 2000s, he explained, when a rash of large reactors were proposed with only two actually reaching completion.
These were the notorious Vogtle reactors 3 and 4 in Georgia, which finally came online in 2023 and 2024 respectively, running billions over budget and years behind schedule. In order for this latest round of nuclear enthusiasm to avoid the same fate, Stein told me it’s critical that leading projects demonstrate enough early success to maintain developer confidence in the economic and technical viability of new — and old — nuclear technologies.
That being said, the sector will inevitably contract. “Back when we saw this last scale-up, there were three designs that were really competing for attention, and now there are 75. So we’re going to see a lot of failures,” Stein said. The question for venture investors, he told me, is “how many failures of startups that you didn’t invest in are you willing to tolerate before you start to think the whole segment has trouble?”
The second main way this could all fall to pieces, he told me, is if “somebody tries to move too fast,” and that recklessness leads to “either a bankruptcy or an accident or something like that that will send ripples or shock waves through the whole sector.”
Indeed, a metaphorical or literal meltdown in the sector could put a quick halt to this year’s frenzied momentum. But within the next few years, as these announced projects begin to line up their licenses and come online — or fall apart— we’ll soon see whether this latest nuclear revival is a true turning point or just another bubble.
On the Senate’s climate whip, green cement deals, and a U.S. uranium revival.
Current conditions: Flash flooding strikes the Southeastern U.S. • Monsoon rains unleash landslides in southern China • A heat dome is bringing temperatures of up to 107 degrees Fahrenheit to France, Italy, and the Balkans.
An August 5 chart showing last month's record electricity demand peaks.EIA
The United States’ demand for electricity broke records twice last month. Air conditioners cranking on hot days, combined with surging demand from data centers, pushed the peak in the Lower 48 states to a high of 758,053 megawatts on July 28, between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. EST, data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Hourly Electric Grid Monitor shows. The following day, peak demand set another record, hitting 759,180 megawatts. That’s nearly 2% above the previous record set on July 15, 2024.
The EIA predicted demand to grow by more than 2% per year between 2025 and 2026. Forecasts are even higher in areas with large data centers and factories underway, such as Texas and northern Virginia. The milestone comes as the Trump administration cracks down on solar and wind energy, two of the fastest-growing and quicker-to-build sources of new generation. On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that the Environmental Protection Agency is moving to eliminate $7 billion in spending on grants for solar energy, though when Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo asked the agency, it said only that, “With the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill, EPA is working to ensure Congressional intent is fully implemented in accordance with the law.”
Senator Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, locked down enough votes on Tuesday to replace Illinois Senator Dick Durbin as the Democrats’ whip in the chamber. Durbin, who is retiring next year, has served in the Senate Democrats’ No. 2 position since 2005. In his endorsement on Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York called Schatz “a close friend and one of my most valued allies.”
Schatz crusaded for the Inflation Reduction Act and told Heatmap he supported last year’s failed bipartisan permitting reform deal, even as progressive greens campaigned against its giveaways to fossil fuels. In a Shift Key podcast interview with my colleague Robinson Meyer and his co-host, Princeton professor Jesse Jenkins, in February, Schatz pitched a big tent for climate action. “We all have to hang together. It’s the American Clean Power Association. It’s the energy company that does both clean and fossil energy. It’s the transmission and distribution companies. It’s the manufacturers. It’s labor. It’s Wall Street. It’s K Street. Everyone has to hang together and say, not only is this good for business, but there’s something that is foundationally worse for business than any individual policy decision.”
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The Trump administration may be clawing back funding for cleaning up heavy industry, but Big Tech is still inking deals. On Monday, Amazon agreed to buy low-carbon cement from the startup Brimstone. Then on Tuesday, the data center developer STACK Infrastructure announced the completion of “a pilot pour” of green cement from rival startup Sublime. The moves highlight the growing demand for cleaner industrial materials amid increased scrutiny of the energy and pollution linked to server farms.
America’s uranium enrichment went out of business in the early 2000s after the Clinton-era megatons-to-megawatts program essentially ceded the industry to cheap Russian imports made from disassembled atomic weapons. Since banning imports from Russia last year, the U.S. has been ramping up funding for nuclear fuel again, especially as the industry looks to build new types of reactors that rely on fuel other than the low-enriched uranium that virtually all the country’s operating 94 commercial reactors use. On Monday, the Department of Energy announced its first pilot project for advanced nuclear fuels, giving the startup Standard Nuclear the first federal deal. On Tuesday, the agency signed a $1.5 billion deal to restore the so-called Atomic City on the 100-acre parcel of federal land at the former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plan in Kentucky.
The Trump administration gave permission to the National Weather Service to hire up to 450 meteorologists, hydrologists, and radar technicians after sweeping cuts from the Department of Government Efficiency, CNN’s Andrew Freedman reported. The agency, which was partly blamed for its warnings going unheeded ahead of the deadly Texas floods last month, also received an exemption from the federal hiring freeze.
The move came the same day as a federal judge blocked the administration from diverting billions of dollars in Federal Emergency Management Agency funding for disaster resilience and flood mitigation. The injunction warned FEMA against spending the money on anything else.
Beyond Meat is finally getting beyond meat. The company plans to shed the flesh reference in its name this week as it launches its new Beyond Ground product that promises more protein than ground beef. “With this launch,” Fast Company’s Clint Rainey reported, “Beyond Meat is becoming merely Beyond and turning its focus away from only mimicking animal proteins to letting plant-based proteins speak for themselves. The radical move is cultural, agricultural, and financial.”