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For the first time, the Energy Department is charting how to build new industries from scratch — and preserve America’s energy advantage.
The Biden administration took a major step forward on Tuesday to answering one of the biggest outstanding questions about its climate policy: So, uh, how are you planning on doing all this?
The answer took the form of a new series of reports, running to hundreds of pages in total, that provide the most detailed look yet at how now-experimental energy technologies can be rapidly scaled to meet the needs of the American economy. These reports, dubbed “the Pathways to Commercial Liftoff,” focus on three technologies that will be crucial to decarbonization: clean hydrogen, long-duration energy storage, and advanced nuclear reactors. Another report on capturing and storing carbon pollution is due soon.
The reports, which were written by 13 authors from across the Department of Energy, suggest that that agency has taken a more active role in carrying out the goals of the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act, which together encompass most of President Biden’s legislative climate policy. The department says that it will update the reports every year, potentially creating a living library that will describe — in meticulous detail — the obstacles to creating a cleaner energy future.
“What we’re trying to provide is a sort of stake in the ground,” Melissa Klembara, an author of the report and the director of portfolio strategy at the Department of Energy’s office of clean-energy demonstrations, told me. “What is our vision? What does the private sector need to believe to co-invest? What is it going to take to achieve market lift-off?”
Perhaps above all, the documents underscore the scale — and the difficulty — of the task that the Biden administration has set for itself. The United States is trying to do something with little precedent. Over the next 10 years, the government will spend hundreds of billions of dollars in line with the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act. This influx aims to transform the chemical substrate of the $23 trillion American economy. Today, the burning of fossil fuels — ancient sunlight rendered dense and combustible by time and geology — generates 79% of the country’s energy today; the Biden administration has committed to slashing that share by 2030 and essentially bringing it to zero by 2050.
It plans to do that through what has been widely termed “industrial strategy” — policy that aims to grow a specific part of the economy or develop a new type of technology. But what exactly the Biden administration’s strategy is has remained frustratingly vague. While much of the IRA’s spending will go to uncapped tax credits, the government is also tasked with making tens of billions of dollars of targeted investments to push sectors to decarbonize faster. (In hydrogen alone, for instance, the government can spend up to $25.8 billion on these investments.)
Where will those investments go? Scholars believe that successful industrial policy must generally be tailored to the needs of the industries in question: You can’t grow the telecommunications sector, for example, by building railroads and digging canals. Industrial policy, in other words, is about the specifics. So to spend that money well, policy makers must first get to know the industries they want to help — and then they must spot, in advance, the problems and bottlenecks that will prevent that industry from flourishing.
That’s what these reports are trying to do. They are the most detailed guide yet to how the Biden administration plans to conduct industrial policy for the most advanced — and the most fledgling — energy technologies in its arsenal.
Each of the technologies in the reports could be important in some way to fighting climate change: Nuclear reactors could provide a stable, always-on source of zero-carbon electricity; long-term energy storage will help the lights stay on when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing; and hydrogen will help decarbonize industrial activities — such as making steel, fertilizer, and chemicals; or powering cargo ships and long-haul trucks — that now depend on fossil fuels.
The reports were written after dozens of conversations with private companies and technical experts, Klembara said. The hydrogen report alone involved more than 60 discussions, about half of which were with “capital allocators” — companies, investment managers, and venture capitalists who will decide whether to invest in the sector.
“What we’re really trying to capture with these reports is, what is that common fact base so that we can have that dialogue with the private sector on the path to commercial liftoff,” she said. Then the government “can better understand, too, where [we] can leverage our investments to buy down those risks.”
These problems can be remarkably straightforward: They are the kind of oh-yes-that-seems-obvious issues that arise from starting an industry from scratch. In hydrogen, for instance, the report identifies two big up-and-coming problems: First, hydrogen producers still don’t have good ways to move or store hydrogen once they make it; second, a stable commodity market for hydrogen doesn’t exist. In other words, even if you make clean hydrogen, you won’t necessarily have anyone to sell it to, and even if you do, you might not have any way to get it to them cheaply. (The cost of moving hydrogen often equals the cost of producing it, the study finds.)
Those are problems that, by comparison, the natural-gas industry has solved: Gas drillers can rely on the country’s existing network of pipelines, trucks, storage tanks, and vast salt caverns to move and store gas to where it’s needed; and they can take their gas to the Henry Hub, a de facto national spot market in the fossil fuel, to sell it. If hydrogen is eventually to replace natural gas, it must develop its own version of these networks.
These reports also show how the government is thinking through its own role as a steward of economic growth.
In some ways, they show that the Biden administration — or at least the Energy Department — is becoming more comfortable with America’s distinctive approach to industrial policy. While industrial policy in other countries, such as Germany or Japan, tends to be led by the government or by government-aligned institutions, America has always relied more on the enthusiastic participation — or at least the begrudging acquiescence — of private companies. These reports detail what companies need in order to easily participate in the country’s clean-energy future. (That the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. — the ne plus ultra of American management advice — contributed to the report only drives home its country of origin.)
In that light, the reports are an argument that there’s still work to be done in these sectors — and that the government specifically needs to do it. In the past, American industrial policy hasn’t only relied on companies; it’s taken hold only when lawmakers and officials believed that the market has failed in some crucial way and that private companies cannot manage that failure. These reports — which, again, were written in consultation with the private sector — basically consist of the authors saying: Look at this market failure! Now look at this one! And this one! None of these problems will fix themselves.
But in other ways they may show something else — that America is finally learning how other countries conduct successful industrial policy and copying part of the playbook. As I’ve written before, industrial-policy agencies in Taiwan and South Korea play a key information-gathering role in their national economies: They focus economic activity not only by handing out funding or issuing regulations, but by publishing a common road map that all companies can work from. That’s what the government has done here — and by promising to update these reports on an annual basis, that’s what it’s seemingly going to do going forward.
And crucially, the Department of Energy is going to do the updating. That department has emerged as perhaps the lead actor of America’s industrial policy. That makes sense — it is the agency, after all, with the in-house bank, the national labs, and the technical expertise — but it wasn’t a given; the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Commerce, or even the Department of the Treasury might have stepped in. But at the same time, the agency’s new role — and its importance to the government — is somewhat unstable. If the current set of officials were to leave the Energy Department, it’s not clear to me that their replacements would take up these important government functions.
Finally, it’s just a recognition of how weird America’s task is. Although Biden’s economic and climate policies are often categorized as “industrial policy,” they really consist of two different things. In some sectors, such as solar-panel manufacturing, the United States is trying to catch up to China and other low-cost East Asian manufacturers. This is “classic” industrial policy, and it has a long history: Germany, Japan, and South Korea were each able to understand and then match America’s early dominance in making internal-combustion cars, for instance. But in other sectors, the United States is trying to do something subtler than catch up. In hydrogen production or advanced nuclear power, the United States is trying to retain its early technological advantage and turn its head start on R&D and basic science into a fully fledged domestic manufacturing industry that will generate hundreds of thousands of jobs. America isn’t trying to reach the bleeding edge of technology; it’s already there, and it’s trying to push that edge forward as quickly as possible.
That’s the challenge that these reports are responding to, Jonas Nahm, a professor of energy, resources, and environment at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, told me. “This is how you do industrial policy at the technological frontier,” he said. Now we’ll see if the government can follow through.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article misstated a statistic about fossil fuel energy use. It has been corrected. We regret the error.
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Revisiting a favorite episode with guest Kate Marvel.
Shift Key is off this week for Memorial Day, so we’re re-running one of our favorite episodes from the past. With Republicans in the White House and Congress now halfway to effectively repealing the Inflation Reduction Act, the United States’ signature climate law, we thought now might be a good moment to remind ourselves why emissions reductions matter in the first place.
To that end, we’re resurfacing our chat from November with Kate Marvel, an associate research scientist at Columbia University and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. At the time, Trump had just been reelected to the presidency, casting a pall over the annual United Nations climate conference, which was then occurring in Azerbaijan. Soon after, he fulfilled his promise to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, with its goal of restraining global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels.
In this episode, we talk with Kate about why every 10th of a degree matters in the fight against climate change, the difference between tipping points and destabilizing feedback loops, and how to think about climate change in a disappointing time. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
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:
Robinson Meyer: I want to dive into tipping points for a second. Are there particular tipping points that are really frightening to you? Because sometimes it feels like that phrase gets used for almost two different things: There are some tipping points where once we start them … these are physical effects in the climate system that once we start, we won’t be able to really reverse them, and I think the Atlantic Meridional Overturning [Circulation] is the classic example, and we should probably explain what that is.
But then there are other tipping points, sometimes, where it’s like once you start them, they don’t only have this cascading physical effect that’s irreversible, but they have a cascading effect on the carbon cycle.
Kate Marvel: Yeah, no, I mean, they all freak me out quite a lot for different reasons. Your point that we use, at least colloquially, tipping points to refer to a lot of bad stuff deserves a little bit more attention — I personally see tipping points getting confused with feedback loops and runaway greenhouse effect.
So, a feedback process is when global warming affects things that exist on the globe, which themselves feed back onto that global warming. So a classic example of a feedback process is ice melt. Ice is super shiny. It’s very reflective. It turns back sunlight that would otherwise fall on the planet and warm it. And we know — you know, science is very solid on this — that when it gets hot, ice melts.
Jesse Jenkins: That’s a good one. Yeah, we’re clear on that.
Marvel: So when ice melts, you take something that used to be shiny and reflective, and now you’ve got darker ocean or darker ground underneath, and so you’re no longer turning back that sunlight. It’s getting absorbed, and that itself feeds back to the warming. That makes the warming worse. So that is an example of what scientists call — and this is the worst terminology in all of science — we call it a ‘positive feedback.’ Because when normal people hear positive feedback, they’re like, Oh, I’m doing a great job. But when scientists say ‘positive feedback,’ we mean ‘destabilizing process that is making warming worse and might lead to catastrophe.’ So I’ll try to say destabilizing feedback and stabilizing feedback, but catch me out on it if I say positive and negative.
So there are a lot of these feedback processes that we understand pretty well. We know that warmer air holds more water vapor — that’s why we’re seeing more intense, extreme downpours. And we know that water vapor is itself a greenhouse gas. So when the planet gets warmer, you’ve got more water vapor in the atmosphere, which itself is trapping more of the heat coming up from the planet. That is an example of a destabilizing feedback.
So there’s a lot of these feedback processes that we understand fairly well. And then there’s some processes that we are not completely baffled by, but we haven’t really nailed down as much. So that’s why clouds are a huge wild card. A lot of the reason we don’t know exactly how hot it’s going to get is we don’t know what clouds are going to do. We don’t know how clouds are going to reorganize themselves. We don’t know if we’re going to get more of this one type of cloud, less of this other type, if they’re going to get more reflective, more absorbent, whatever. Clouds are really complicated, and that’s a feedback process that we don’t necessarily understand.
But feedback processes are already happening in the climate system right now. They are going on as we speak. That makes them different from something like a tipping point. A tipping point is generally defined as something that we break that we can’t fix on any timescale that’s relevant to us. So an example of a tipping point is the disintegration of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. It turns out that once you break an ice sheet, it’s relatively really hard to make a new one. We can’t just rock up in Antarctica with, you know, freezer guns or whatever Arnold Schwarzenegger had in the Batman movie. We can’t do that. That’s not real. Once we break the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, it’s going to be broken for the rest of our lives, and our children’s lives, and our grandchildren’s lives.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
It’s not just what they say over the next few weeks — it’s when they say it.
When the Senate returns from recess next week, it will have Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill” to contend with. There’s no doubt the chamber will try to make changes to the omnibus plan to extend and expand Trump’s tax cuts that passed the House last week. The president even told reporters over the weekend that senators should “make the changes they want to make,” and that some of the changes “maybe are something I’d agree with, to be honest.”
Whether those changes include salvaging the nation’s clean energy tax credits will likely depend on a small group of Republican senators who have criticized the House’s near-total gutting of the subsidies and how much they are willing to fight to undo it.
The bill that passed the House would outright eliminate consumer tax credits for electric vehicles, rooftop solar, and both energy efficiency renovations and new energy-efficient homes. It would also kill the clean hydrogen tax credit at the end of this year and give most zero-carbon power plants, including wind, solar, and geothermal, an end-of-year deadline to start construction, among many other damaging provisions.
To date, at least eight Senate Republicans have spoken out against at least some of these changes, but none of them have tied their vote to the issue. The pressure to stick with your party is “enormous” when your vote is the difference between a bill’s success or failure, Josh Freed, the senior vice president for climate and energy at Third Way, told me. “As we saw in the House, the biggest question is whether any Republican Senator, when push comes to shove, has any willingness to try to stop this bill in order to defend energy tax credits.”
Pay attention to what they say over the next few weeks — and when they say it. It’s one thing to speak out when everything’s still up in the air. It’s quite another to keep talking when votes are on the line.
When the budget fight was first heating up in April, four senators led by Lisa Murkowski of Alaska sent a letter to Majority Leader John Thune warning that repealing the tax credits “would create uncertainty, jeopardizing capital allocation, long-term project planning, and job creation in the energy sector and across our broader economy.” The three co-authors were Thom Tillis of North Carolina, John Curtis of Utah, and Jerry Moran of Kansas.
Last week, after the House modified its proposal to phase out the tax credits more aggressively, Murkowski told Politico the Senate was “obviously going to be looking at” the provisions “as well as the final product, and kind of seeing where we start our conversation.” The moderate Republican has a history of supporting environmental policy, and has already broken with her party on at least one vote this year. In February, she was the only Republican who voted in favor of a Democrat-led effort to reinstate 5,500 federal public lands employees that had been fired by the Department of Government Efficiency. (The legislation failed.) Murkowski has also gone her own way to support more efficient energy codes, loans for electric vehicle manufacturers, and the impeachment of President Trump over the January 6 insurrection. But she did not vote for the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, and if you look at her overall voting record, these occasions of deviating from the party line have been rare.
Tillis, who is a member of the Finance Committee and will therefore be directly involved in writing the tax credit portion of the bill, has made more specific comments. He said he would push to wind down the tax credits more slowly to give businesses more time to prepare. “We have a lot of work that we need to do on the timeline and scope of the production and investment tax credits,” he told Politico in the same article.
While Tillis does not have the same kind of track record as Murkowski, he’s up for re-election next year, and his state has a lot to lose. Some 34 clean energy projects worth $20 billion in investment and tied to more than 17,000 jobs came to North Carolina because of the tax credits, according to the advocacy group Climate Power. Toyota invested in an EV battery manufacturing plant and just started production last month. Several EV charger manufacturers are setting up shop in the state. Siemens Energy is building a factory to make large power transformers, equipment that is essential to expanding the grid and is currently in very tight supply.
Curtis has also continued to rally around the tax credits. He attended a press conference for Fluence, an energy storage company, back in Utah where he told the Deseret News on Tuesday that the House’s changes to the subsidies were “a problem for the future” of energy. “And I think if I have anything to say about it, I’ll make sure that we’re taking into account our energy future,” he said.
When it became clear that the House was considering changes that would effectively repeal the clean energy tax credits in the IRA, Senators Kevin Cramer and John Hoeven of North Dakota, and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia chimed in to voice their concerns. Cramer criticized new deadlines the House proposed for ending the tax credits, telling Politico that “it’s too short for truly new technologies. We’ll have to change that. I don’t think it’s fair to treat an emerging technology the same as a 30-year-old technology.”
After the bill passed the House, Jon Husted of Ohio decided it was time to speak up. “You have companies that have already made investments, made commitments,” he told the outlet NOTUS. “Supply chains have been built around them, and we need to phase that out more slowly. I think that they deserve to have at least five years of that credit.” Like Tillis, Husted has an election coming up — and 35 clean energy projects in his state to protect.
The D.C. insiders I spoke to mentioned a few other powerful senators who could play a role in the debate who’ve been mum on the IRA so far. Thune, of South Dakota, has a history of being friendly toward tax credits for wind energy, and was honored by the American Council on Renewable Energy for his support for renewable energy in 2019. Lindsey Graham, chair of the Budget Committee, has also long been a sometimes-ally for climate action in the Senate. His home state of South Carolina has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the tax credits, with some 43 projects and 22,000 jobs at risk.
Susan Collins also came up repeatedly as one to watch, despite her not saying much of anything publicly about the tax credit changes yet. Collins is up for re-election next year, and while the IRA hasn’t spurred much manufacturing in Maine, it has driven a clean energy boom. The Maine Climate Labor Council, a coalition of unions, estimates there are 145 utility-scale clean energy projects that are either operating or in development that could be eligible for the tax credits. The state has also made a big energy efficiency push in recent years, with the tax credits supporting the expansion of efficiency jobs.
Then there are the potential spoilers. Republicans can only afford to lose three votes on the bill in order to send it back to the House and ultimately to the President’s desk, and the party has already split into a number of factions looking for various tweaks. Some, like Josh Hawley of Missouri, oppose the legislation’s deep cuts to Medicaid. Meanwhile, fiscal conservatives like Ron Johnson of Wisconsin have said they will push to reduce spending even more.
In the House, defenders of the tax credits ultimately cared more about raising the limit on the state and local tax deduction than fighting for clean energy subsidies. We could see a similar dynamic play out in the Senate, where Murkowski and Collins have also expressed concern about cuts to Medicaid. The Senate also can’t afford to change the bill so much that it will lose support in the House, so any changes will have to be surgical. The calculation will be, “What is the smallest thing that the authors of the bill can give these folks to fall back into line so that it is relatively easy to both pass the Senate and then get back through the House?” Freed explained.
Cramer, for his part, is not coming to the rescue for wind and solar, but he may be able to revive support for other forms of clean energy. The North Dakota Senator wrote a letter to Republican leaders in early May railing against the “indefinite entitlement” given to energy sources that depend on the wind and sun, and arguing that the tax credits should prioritize electricity generators on the basis of “reliability,” so as to encourage “geothermal, hydropower, coal and natural gas with carbon capture, and nuclear without excluding wind and solar.”
Capito has barely made a fuss about the energy credits, but she and Cramer will be the ones to watch to see how the Senate deals with the bill’s provision to repeal the Environmental Protection Agency’s greenhouse gas limits for vehicles, as both sit on the Environment and Public Works Committee, of which Capito is the chair. The repeal may not be allowed under the Senate’s rules for budget reconciliation, as it doesn’t have a direct effect on the federal budget. The Senate Parliamentarian hasn’t yet weighed in, but a negative ruling did not stop the two Republicans from leading the fight to revoke waivers granted to California that allowed it to set pollution limits on cars and trucks.
In the end, if any of these Senators wants to take a stand for big changes to the tax credits, they are going to need at least three colleagues to stick it out with them. A more likely outcome, Freed told me, is for them to attempt some smaller adjustments.
“Hopefully they can make it better, but they’re also under enormous pressure to not deviate too significantly from what the House wrote,” he said. “We just need to go in clear-eyed that it's going to be difficult.”
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article misidentified one of the signatories of the letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune. It’s been corrected. We regret the error.
Current conditions: Southern Spain will endure multiple days over 100 degrees Fahrenheit this week • Nearly 4 inches of rain could fall in parts of southwestern China on Tuesday • It will be almost 90 degrees in New Orleans again today after high temperatures triggered widespread brownouts in the region over the weekend.
President Trump signed four executive orders Friday designed to accelerate the build-out of nuclear power in the U.S. The orders specifically call on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to speed up its approval of new reactors; relax radiation exposure limits; explore using federal lands and military bases as potential reactor sites; and grow the nation’s nuclear energy capacity from approximately 100 gigawatts in 2024 to 400 gigawatts by 2050. The orders also describe putting 10 new large reactors into construction no later than 2030 with the support of the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office — including having at least one operational reactor at a domestic military base no later than September 2028. “Mark this day on your calendar,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said at the signing on Friday, per The New York Times. “This is going to turn the clock back on over 50 years of overregulation.”
At the same time, the administration’s ambitious goals come against a backdrop of reduced “personnel and funding for the NRC and the Department of Energy, along with weakening the NRC’s independence and global credibility,” Jennifer T. Gordon, the director of the Nuclear Energy Policy Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center, writes — all of which will “make it challenging to realize the full potential of the U.S. nuclear energy industry.”
EPA
The Environmental Protection Agency is poised to propose that greenhouse gases emitted from fossil fuel-burning power plants “do not contribute significantly to dangerous pollution” or climate change, The New York Times reported Saturday, based on a review of an internal draft of the document. The EPA’s rationale in the proposal is that the emissions from the sector are small enough that their elimination would have no impact on public health — although according to the agency’s own accounting in 2022, the power sector is the second biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the country, behind only transportation.
The move by the EPA, while in keeping with the Trump administration’s deregulatory ambitions, also serves to justify its pending proposal to “repeal all greenhouse gas emissions standards for fossil fuel-fired power plants,” including coal-powered units. Previously, the agency had argued that Biden-era restrictions on coal- and gas-fired plants could prevent up to 1,200 deaths and 1,900 cases of asthma per year.
BYD
BYD announced steep discounts on 22 of its electric and plug-in hybrid models between now and the end of June, with some price cuts as big as 34%, Bloomberg reports. The company’s cheapest car, the Seagull hatchback, is down to just $7,780, while the Seal hybrid sedan saw the steepest discount of more than $7,000, to a mere $14,270. Shares of BYD closed down 8.6% after the announcement.
BYD’s cuts aim to boost customer demand, with Citi analysts anticipating the discounts could increase dealership foot traffic by 30% to 40% week on week. But the analysts also appeared skeptical that the move by BYD would be hugely beneficial to the company in its price war with rival EV automaker, noting “competition remains relatively mild.”
South Africa has proposed a liquified natural gas trade package with the United States, following a contentious meeting between President Cyril Ramaphosa and President Trump last week, Reuters reports. The deal would see South Africa import 75 to 100 petajoules of LNG annually from the U.S. over a 10-year period. Though South Africa currently does not have an LNG import terminal, the government plans to build one at the Port of Richards Bay, with the first phase going online by 2027, in order to lessen its reliance on the dwindling supply via pipeline from Mozambique. The U.S. will reportedly also help South Africa explore fracking opportunities within South Africa; the Karoo region of the country is believed to hold shale reserves, though drilling has been held off due to concerns about contaminating the water supply.
The trade package additionally includes an agreement for South Africa to avoid paying a duty on imports of cars, steel, and aluminum. According to Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, who shared details of the deal, it will amount to $900 million to $1.2 billion in trade per year.
President Trump on Friday urged the United Kingdom to “stop with the costly and unsightly windmills and incentivize modernized drilling in the North Sea, where large amounts of oil lay waiting to be taken,” the Associated Press reports. Trump specifically cited Aberdeen as a potential hub for the “century of drilling left” — the same Scottish city where his Trump International Golf Links golf course is located, and where he unsuccessfully opposed the building of 11 offshore turbines before he became president. Despite Trump’s frequent complaints that turbines are eyesores, the BBC reported this weekend that wind farms have become an “unusual” and “surprisingly popular” tourist attraction in the UK.
Four former Volkswagen executives were found guilty of fraud in Germany on Monday for their role in the 2015 “dieselgate” emissions test cheating scandal.