The Federal Reserve cut interest rates at its third straight meeting — but don’t expect as many cuts next year.
The Fed indicated that it expects only two quarter-point reductions in 2025, down from the four it had forecast in September, when it began its rate-cutting cycle. The news will likely overshadow any relief over lower rates for renewables developers, who have been counting on future cuts to ensure the profitability of their projects.
Since renewables like wind and solar have essentially no “fuel” costs compared to fossil fuel projects like gas-fired power plants, a higher portion of their overall costs must come from borrowed money, not from revenues the project itself produces. This makes the projects much more sensitive to borrowing costs.
The Energy Information Administration has projected that solar capacity will grow by 19.5% in 2025 and that wind capacity will increase by 6%. Wind projects, especially offshore wind projects, could be imperiled by higher interest rates and higher borrowing costs. The energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie has estimated that a 2 percentage point increase in interest rates causes the price of energy produced by renewables to go up 20%.
Further pressure from inflation could also increase the cost of building out renewables. Several major offshore wind projects — such as New Jersey’s Ocean Wind 1 and 2, which were cancelled last year — have had to have their contracts renegotiated or even thrown out due to unexpected cost increases.
And despite the Federal Reserve interest rate cuts in the last quarter of the year, market interest rates have actually been drifting up in the past few months. Trump’s victory supercharged the stock market with promises of deregulation and general euphoria around tech stocks like Nvidia and Tesla (and crypto) and raised the possibility of higher inflation, with a potential combination of tax cuts, some spending increases, and tariffs.
Some analysts thought that even the Fed’s new rate-cutting forecast was too loose considering the economic data that has been arriving in recent months. “We have a hard time squaring them up against the economic forecasts, which show higher near-term growth, higher near-term inflation, and lower near-term unemployment,” Jefferies analyst Thomas Simons wrote in a note to clients Wednesday.
The new rate-cutting forecasts “amount to a message that the FOMC will tolerate above-target inflation for even longer than they previously indicated,” Simons wrote.
But what the market is focused on is that there may be fewer rate cuts than expected, not that there maybe should have been zero.
Over the past three months, the yield on the 10-year Treasury bond, an often-used benchmark for borrowing costs, has risen from around 3.7% to 4.5%, including a substantial jump following the Fed’s Wednesday announcement. Longer-term interest rates have risen “quite a bit since September,” Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell said in a press conference Wednesday.
The iShares Global Clean Energy ETF, which tracks a basket of clean energy stocks, fell immediately following the Fed’s rate cut announcement; it fell around 3% today and is down 26% on the year, while broader stock market indices also fell, with the S&P 500 declining just under 3% today
Powell said that both the cut and the new, more restrictive forecast indicate that the Fed is “in a new phase in the process,” and that “from this point forward, it’s appropriate to move cautiously and look for progress on inflation.”
