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An arcane tax policy is about to reshape America’s energy economy.
How do you prove your electricity is clean? This deceptively simple question is at the heart of an all-out war raging among environmental groups, academics, and energy companies over a new tax credit for the production of clean hydrogen.
At stake, most immediately, is billions of dollars in subsidies and the success and integrity of a nascent climate solution. But the question is so foundational to the energy transition that the answer could also reverberate through the U.S. economy for decades to come. And by a fluke — or by the limitations of the current political system — Janet Yellen’s Treasury Department has been tasked with setting the precedent.
“This is not just a hydrogen debate, at its very core,” Nathan Iyer, a senior associate at the clean energy research nonprofit RMI, told me. “This is the first round of a much larger, era-defining question.”
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To see why, it’s crucial to understand what all the hydrogen hubbub is about in the first place.
Hydrogen is a key plank in the Biden administration’s climate strategy, as it has the potential to replace fossil fuels in a number of industries, including steelmaking, shipping, aviation, and fertilizer production. But today, most hydrogen is made from natural gas in a carbon-intensive process, so first it has to become cheaper to make it in cleaner ways.
The Treasury Department got involved because the Inflation Reduction Act, which Biden signed last summer, created a generous tax credit to make these other, cleaner ways of producing hydrogen more competitive. One method, called electrolysis, involves splitting hydrogen off of water molecules using electricity. The process is emissions-free, as long as the electricity comes from a carbon-free source. Companies will be able to earn up to $3 for every kilogram of hydrogen produced this way. But before anyone can claim the credit, the Treasury has to write rules for what counts as clean electricity.
This is a more fraught question than it might sound. If a hydrogen plant wants to use power from the electric grid rather than build its own, dedicated supply, there’s no easy way to trace where the electrons it’s using originated. And the grid is still largely fed by fossil fuels.
The solution is to allow grid-connected projects to “book” clean energy by signing contracts with wind or solar or geothermal plants that serve the grid, and then “claim” the use of that energy to the Treasury. Many industries voluntarily use these sort of “book and claim” deals in order to advertise to customers that they are “powered by clean energy.”
But one influential Princeton study found that hydrogen production from electrolysis is so energy-intensive that in order to be sure that it has a low carbon footprint, these deals should follow three guidelines: The “booked” clean energy should be generated locally, from a recently-built power plant, and matched to the hydrogen facility’s operations on an hourly basis. Otherwise, you might have a hydrogen plant in New Mexico “buying” energy from a wind farm in Texas that’s already been operating for half a decade. Or you might have that same plant buy lots of local solar power, but then keep operating at night. In either case, a natural gas plant will likely have to ramp up to meet the real-time energy demand.
Without these guardrails, the authors warn, the Treasury could end up directing billions of taxpayer dollars to facilities that emit twice as much carbon as those making hydrogen from natural gas today.
Many hydrogen companies want the Treasury to instead adopt more of an “A for effort” kind of approach. They argue that the point of the tax credit is to launch a new industry, and that onerous rules could kill it before it has a chance to get off the ground.
In fact, there’s so much money on the line that the Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Industry Association has been flooding the public with ads in newspapers and on streaming and podcast services delivering a cryptic warning that “additionality” — the requirement to buy energy from new power plants — was threatening to “set America back.” Others, like the energy company NextEra, are lobbying against the hourly requirement.
While companies tussle with environmental groups and others over what’s at stake for hydrogen, the Treasury’s decision will have implications far beyond any one project, company, or even industry. That’s because the emissions risks described in the Princeton paper are not unique to clean hydrogen.
Automotive, paper and pulp, and food and beverage are just a few examples of other industries with large energy needs that use heat from natural gas boilers but could eventually switch to industrial electric heat pumps or thermal batteries. There are also emerging technologies that hardly exist yet, like machines that remove carbon from the atmosphere, that could be essential to curbing climate change, but will consume lots of electricity.
If we don’t decarbonize the grid in tandem, these solutions could do more harm than good. But whether or not it should be the responsibility of individual companies to do that is a question that will keep coming up. Unlike Europe, the U.S. has no national renewable energy standard or other policy working in the background, forcing the grid to get greener over time no matter how much electricity demand grows.
Legacy industries are unlikely to switch to electricity voluntarily, let alone build clean power sources while they do it. These shifts will require subsidies that make them profitable or regulations that obligate them. And designing those subsidies and regulations will require making the same call that the Treasury is being asked to make right now.
“In that broader sense, these clean hydrogen rules are a real opportunity,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School. “It's important to get this right.”
The decision could also have international trade implications. Europe has already finalized its own rules for what constitutes clean hydrogen, and they essentially mirror the three guidelines recommended by the Princeton paper, but phase them in to give companies time to figure out how to comply. A weaker set of rules in the U.S. could tarnish the reputation of U.S. hydrogen in global markets.
“We are going to want to have a single global market,” said Jason Grumet, the CEO of the trade group American Clean Power during a panel on Monday about the tax credit debate. His organization wants the Treasury to adopt similar rules to Europe, but phase them in much more slowly. He argued that some companies would still choose to follow Europe’s timeline in order to have access to that market.
The market in question is not just a market for clean hydrogen, per se. The stuff isn’t an end in itself but a building block for decarbonizing a wide range of other products: clean steel, carbon-free fertilizer, replacements for jet fuel, to name a few.
That won’t just matter for exports to Europe, but business opportunities at home. The Biden administration’s “Buy Clean” initiative requires the government to prioritize buying “low-carbon, made in America construction materials.” But if the foundation of these “clean” products is built on faulty carbon accounting it could undermine the whole program.
“Over time, there will be increasing incentives to use low-carbon materials and products because of policies like Buy Clean,” said Rebecca Dell, senior director of the industry program at the Climateworks Foundation. “But the further down the supply chain you go, the harder it is to enforce regulations on the inputs and processes at the top. So it’s worth getting [the hydrogen tax credit] right on its own merits.”
The tax credit rules could also set off a negative feedback loop within the power sector itself. The Environmental Protection Agency recently proposed new regulations to reduce emissions from power plants, including the option to let them burn a blend of natural gas and hydrogen. But if making hydrogen requires burning a lot of natural gas in the first place, the benefits could cancel out.
A senior spokesperson for the Treasury did not respond to a question about whether the department was considering any of these broader implications in devising the rules, instead replying that it was “engaging with a range of stakeholders, the Department of Energy, and other federal partners” and “focused on providing clarity to businesses as soon as possible and ensuring this incentive advances the goals of increasing energy security and combating climate change.”
Wagner, of Columbia, compared the situation to the federal renewable fuel standard, a subsidy for ethanol that Congress created ostensibly to reduce emissions from transportation. But recent analyses have found the policy has done more harm than good for the climate. Nonetheless, the EPA recently re-upped the policy for three more years. Once a policy is in place, it’s pretty hard to tighten it later, Wagner told me.
“What we are trying to do by getting the rules for clean hydrogen right from the beginning is to avoid a reckoning later.”
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For now, at least, the math simply doesn’t work. Enter the EREV.
American EVs are caught in a size conundrum.
Over the past three decades, U.S. drivers decided they want tall, roomy crossovers and pickup trucks rather than coupes and sedans. These popular big vehicles looked like the obvious place to electrify as the car companies made their uneasy first moves away from combustion. But hefty vehicles and batteries don’t mix: It takes much, much larger batteries to push long, heavy, aerodynamically unfriendly SUVs and trucks down the road, which can make the prices of the EV versions spiral out of control.
Now, as the car industry confronts a confusing new era under Trump, signals of change are afoot. Although a typical EV that uses only a rechargeable battery for its power makes sense for smaller, more efficient cars with lower energy demands, that might not be the way the industry tries to electrify its biggest models anymore.
The predicament at Ford is particularly telling. The Detroit giant was an early EV adopter compared to its rivals, rolling out the Mustang Mach-E at the end of 2020 and the Ford F-150 Lightning, an electrified version of the best-selling vehicle in America, in 2022. These vehicles sell: Mustang Mach-E was the No. 3 EV in the United States in 2024, trailing only Tesla’s big two. The Lightning pickup came in No. 6.
Yet Ford is in an EV crisis. The 33,510 Lightning trucks it sold last year amount to less than 5% of the 730,000-plus tally for the ordinary F-150. With those sales stacked up against enormous costs needed to invest in EV and battery manufacturing, the brand’s EV division has been losing billions of dollars per year. Amid this struggle, Ford continues to shift its EV plans and hasn’t introduced a new EV to the market in three years. During this time, rival GM has begun to crank out Blazer and Equinox EVs, and now says its EV group is profitable, at least on a heavily qualified basis.
As CEO Jim Farley admitted during an earnings call on Wednesday, Ford simply can’t make the math work out when it comes to big EVs. The F-150 Lightning starts at $63,000 thanks in large part to the enormous battery it requires. Even then, the base version gets just 230 miles of range — a figure that, like with all EVs, drops quickly in extreme weather, when going uphill, or when towing. Combine those technical problems and high prices with the cultural resistance to EVs among many pickup drivers and the result is the continually rough state of the EV truck market.
It sounds like Ford no longer believes pure electric is the answer for its biggest vehicles. Instead, Farley announced a plan to pivot to extended-range electric vehicle (or EREV) versions of its pickup trucks and large SUVs later in the decade.
EREVs are having a moment. These vehicles use a large battery to power the electric motors that push the wheels, just like an EV does. They also carry an onboard gas engine that acts as a generator, recharging the battery when it gets low and greatly increasing the vehicle’s range between refueling stops. EREVs are big in China. They got a burst of hype in America when Ram promised its upcoming Ramcharger EREV pickup truck would achieve nearly 700 miles of combined range. Scout Motors, the brand behind the boxy International Scout icon of the 1960s and 70s, is returning to the U.S. under Volkswagen ownership and finding a groundswell of enthusiasm for its promised EREV SUV.
The EREV setup makes a lot of sense for heavy-duty rides. Ramcharger, for example, will come with a 92 kilowatt-hour battery that can charge via plug and should deliver around 145 miles of electric range. The size of the pickup truck means it can also accommodate a V6 engine and a gas tank large enough to stretch the Ramcharger’s overall range to 690 miles. It is, effectively, a plug-in hybrid on steroids, with a battery big enough to accomplish nearly any daily driving on electricity and enough backup gasoline to tow anything and go anywhere.
Using that trusty V6 to generate electricity isn’t nearly as energy-efficient as charging and discharging a battery. But as a backup that kicks in only after 100-plus miles of electric driving, it’s certainly a better climate option than a gas-only pickup or a traditional hybrid. The setup is also ideally suited for what drivers of heavy duty vehicles need (or, at least, what they think they need): efficient local driving with no range anxiety. And it’s similar enough to the comfortable plug-and-go paradigm that an extended-range EV should seem less alien to the pickup owner.
Ford’s big pivot looks like a sign of the times. The brand still plans to build EVs at the smaller end of its range; its skunkwords experimental team is hard at work on Ford’s long-running attempt to build an electric vehicle in the $30,000 range. If Ford could make EVs at a price at least reasonably competitive with entry-level combustion cars, then many buyers might go electric for pure pragmatic terms, seeing the EV as a better economic bet in the long run. Electric-only makes sense here.
But at the big end, that’s not the case. As Bloombergreports on Ford’s EV trouble, most buyers in the U.S. show “no willingness to pay a premium” for an electric vehicle over a gas one or a hybrid. Facing the prospect of the $7,500 EV tax credit disappearing under Trump, plus the specter of tariffs driving up auto production costs, and the task of selling Americans an expensive electric-only pickup truck or giant SUV goes from fraught to extremely difficult.
As much as the industry has coalesced around the pure EV as the best way to green the car industry, this sort of bifurcation — EV for smaller vehicles, EREV for big ones — could be the best way forward. Especially if the Ramcharger or EREV Ford F-150 is what it takes to convince a quorum of pickup truck drivers to ditch their gas-only trucks.
Current conditions: People in Sydney, Australia, were told to stay inside after an intense rainstorm caused major flooding • Temperatures today will be between 25 and 40 degrees Fahrenheit below average across the northern Rockies and High Plains • It’s drizzly in Paris, where world leaders are gathering to discuss artificial intelligence policy.
Well, today was supposed to be the deadline for new and improved climate plans to be submitted by countries committed to the Paris Agreement. These plans – known as nationally determined contributions – outline emissions targets through 2030 and explain how countries plan to reach those targets. Everyone has known about the looming deadline for two years, yet Carbon Briefreports that just 10 of the 195 members of the Paris Agreement have submitted their NDCs. “Countries missing the deadline represent 83% of global emissions and nearly 80% of the world’s economy,” according to Carbon Brief. Last week UN climate chief Simon Stiell struck a lenient tone, saying the plans need to be in by September “at the latest,” which would be ahead of COP30 in November. The U.S. submitted its new NDC well ahead of the deadline, but this was before President Trump took office, and has more or less been disregarded.
Many of the country’s largest pension funds are falling short of their obligations to protect members’ investments by failing to address climate change risks in their proxy voting. That’s according to new analysis from the Sierra Club, which analyzed 32 of the largest and most influential state and local pension systems in the U.S. Collectively, these funds have more than $3.8 trillion in assets under management. Proxy voting is when pensions vote on behalf of shareholders at companies’ annual meetings, weighing in on various corporate policies and initiatives. In the case of climate change, this might be things like nudging a company to disclose greenhouse gas emissions, or better yet, reduce emissions by creating transition plans.
This report looked at funds’ recent proxy voting records and voting guidelines, which pension staff use to guide their voting decisions. The funds were then graded from A (“industry leaders”) to F (“industry laggards”). Just one fund, the Massachusetts Pension Reserves Investment Management (MassPRIM), received an “A” grade; the majority received either “D” or “F” grades. Others didn’t disclose their voting records at all. “To ensure they can meet their obligations to protect retirees’ hard-earned money for decades to come, pensions must strengthen their proxy voting strategies to hold corporate polluters accountable and support climate progress,” said Allie Lindstrom, a senior strategist with the Sierra Club.
Football fans in Los Angeles watching last night’s Super Bowl may have seen an ad warning about the growing climate crisis. The regional spot was made by Science Moms, a nonpartisan group of climate scientists who are also mothers. The “By the Time” ad shows a montage of young girls growing into adults, and warns that climate change is rapidly altering the world today’s children will inherit. “Our window to act on climate change is like watching them grow up,” the voiceover says. “We blink, and we miss it.” It also encourages viewers to donate to LA wildfire victims. A Science Moms spokesperson toldADWEEK they expected some 11 million people to see the ad, and that focus group testing showed a 25% increase in support for climate action among viewers. The New York Timesincluded the ad in its lineup of best Super Bowl commercials, saying it was “a little clunky and sanctimonious in its execution but unimpeachable in its sentiments.”
General Motors will reportedly stop selling the gas-powered Chevy Blazer in North America after this year because the company wants its plant in Ramos Arizpe, Mexico, to produce only electric vehicles. The move, first reported by GM Authority, means “GM will no longer offer an internal combustion two-row midsize crossover in North America.” If you have your heart set on a Blazer, you can always get the electric version.
In case you missed it: Airbus has delayed its big plan to unveil a hydrogen-powered aircraft by 2035, citing the challenges of “developing a hydrogen ecosystem — including infrastructure, production, distribution and regulatory frameworks.” The company has been trying to develop a short-range hydrogen plane since 2020, and has touted hydrogen as key to helping curb the aviation industry’s emissions. It didn’t give an updated timeline for the project.
“If Michael Pollan’s basic dietary guidance is ‘eat food, not too much, mostly plants,’ then the Burgum-Wright energy policy might be, ‘produce energy, as much as you can, mostly fossil fuels.’”
–Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin on the new era of Trump’s energy czars
Chris Wright and Doug Burgum started their reign this week by amplifying the president and beating back Biden-era policies.
The Trump administration’s two most senior energy officials, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum and Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, are both confirmed and in office as of this week, and they have started to lay out their vision for how their agencies will carry out Donald Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda.
Where the Biden administration sought to advance traditional Democratic policy around public lands (namely, to expand, conserve, and preserve them) while also boosting the development of renewable energy, Burgum and Wright have laid out something of the inverse approach: Maximize the production of domestic energy and minerals, with a focus on fossil fuels, and to the extent non-fossil fuels are a priority, they should be “baseload” or “firm” power sources like nuclear, hydropower, or geothermal.
If Michael Pollan’s basic dietary guidance is “eat food, not too much, mostly plants,” then the Burgum-Wright energy policy might be, “produce energy, as much as you can, mostly fossil fuels.”
Burgum and Wright each laid out his philosophy in the form of secretarial orders, the agency equivalent of an executive order.
“Our focus must be on advancing innovation to improve energy and critical minerals identification, permitting, leasing, development, production, transportation, refining, distribution, exporting, and generation capacity of the United States to provide a reliable, diversified, growing, and affordable supply of energy for our Nation,” reads Burgum’s “Unleashing American Energy” order.
“The Department will bring a renewed focus to growing baseload and dispatchable generation to reliably meet growing demand,”reads Wright’s first secretarial order.
Burgum’s orders are largely Interior-specific elaborations of Trump’s early round of executive orders. In “Addressing the National Energy Emergency,” Burgum echoes Trump’s executive order declaring — you guessed it — a national energy emergency, calling for the department to “identify the emergency authorities available to them, as well as all other legal authorities, to facilitate the identification, permitting, leasing, development, production, transportation, refining, distribution, exporting, and generation of domestic energy resources and critical minerals.” He also criticizes the Biden administration for having “driven our Nation into a national emergency, where a precariously inadequate and intermittent energy supply, and an increasingly unreliable grid, require swift and decisive action.”
In another order, “Unleashing American Energy,” which follows a similarly titled executive order, Burgum cites the Trump administration’s call for deregulation to allow more extraction of energy commodities and energy production: “By removing such regulations, America's natural resources can be unleashed to restore American prosperity. Our focus must be on advancing innovation to improve energy and critical minerals identification, permitting, leasing, development, production, transportation, refining, distribution, exporting, and generation capacity of the United States to provide a reliable, diversified, growing, and affordable supply of energy for our Nation.”
The order calls for the Interior department to examine a number of Biden-era guidelines and rules, including 2024’s public lands rule, formally known as Conservation and Landscape Health, which went into effect last June. The rule put landscape preservation on a similar plane to energy development, mining, logging, or grazing among uses for public lands, and was opposed by a number of interest groups, including the ranching and energy industries.
It’s not just public lands that will be more open to fossil fuel exploration and extraction, it’s also the seas. Burgum issued an order following on Trump’s attempt to roll back restrictions on offshore drilling, notifying the department that “all Biden [outer continental shelf] withdrawals of the OCS for oil and gas leasing have been revoked.”
Two other orders were primarily deregulatory. One implemented the Trump guideline that “for each new regulation that they propose to promulgate, they shall identify at least 10 existing Department regulations to be eliminated.” And the other followed on Trump’s order opening up Alaska to more mining and energy extraction, which, among other actions, revoked a 2021 order cancelling oil and gas leases in the Alaska National Wildfire Reserve and reinstated a Secretary’s Order issued by then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinkein 2017 opening up Alaska for more oil activity, which itself reversed a 2013 order limiting oil and gas development.
While Burgum’s orders focus on the energy potential beneath the ground and the sea, Wright’s first secretarial order is a celebration of energy writ large, consistent with his often articulated views on the subject. “Energy is the essential ingredient that enables everything we do. A highly energized society can bring health, wealth, and opportunity for all,” he writes.
The document starts by talking down net-zero goals, saying that “net-zero policies raise energy costs for American families and businesses, threaten the reliability of our energy system, and undermine our energy and national security.”
“Going forward,” it says, “the Department’s goal will be to unleash the great abundance of American energy required to power modern life and to achieve a durable state of American energy dominance.”
In Wright’s version of the “energy emergency” order, he commits the department to “identify[ing] and exercise[ing] all lawful authorities to strengthen the nation’s grid, including the backbone of the grid, our transmission system,” in order to deal with the “current and anticipated load growth on our nation’s electric utilities.” He also says the department will focus on “baseload and dispatchable generation to reliably meet growing demand” — i.e. natural gas, along with some geothermal, hydropower, and nuclear.
In keeping with the president’s hostility or indifference toward the most widespread forms of renewable energy generation, Wright writes that the DOE will focus its substantial research and development efforts on “affordable, reliable, and secure energy technologies, including fossil fuels, advanced nuclear, geothermal, and hydropower,” and specifically calls out the Department’s fusion research for focus: “The Department must also prioritize true technological breakthroughs — such as nuclear fusion, high-performance computing, quantum computing.”
Wright refers to the energy department’s considerable research on renewables through its network of national laboratories only via implication, with an eye toward containing the funding demands of such work. “The Department will comprehensively review its R&D portfolio,” the order says. “As part of that review, the Department will rigorously enforce project milestones to ensure that taxpayer resources are allocated appropriately and cost-effectively consistent with the law.” Not mentioned at all was the department’s Loan Programs Office, which the Biden administration fortified by means of the Inflation Reduction Act. Bloomberg News reported that the department is looking to roll back some of the office’s loan guarantees to ensure that its funding awards “are consistent with President Trump’s executive orders and priorities.”
One area where there may be consistency between the Biden and Trump energy departments is in support for nuclear power.
Throughout the order, nuclear energy gets called out for praise and attention, while other forms of non-carbon-emitting energy go unmentioned. “The long-awaited American nuclear renaissance must launch during President Trump’s administration. As global energy demand continues to grow, America must lead the commercialization of affordable and abundant nuclear energy. As such, the Department will work diligently and creatively to enable the rapid deployment and export of next-generation nuclear technology,” Wright writes.
Like Burgum, Wright takes a dim view of Biden-era regulatory initiatives, committing the department to reviewing proposals for liquefied natural gas terminals and promising a “comprehensive review of the DOE Appliance Standards Program.” Scrapping or overhauling appliance efficiency rules, like other envisioned Trump policies, would also help bolster demand for energy writ large.
The orders, while consistent with Trump’s broad directives on energy policy, do not match the vitriol and dismissiveness towards renewables that Trump himself employs. But that may be cold comfort to climate advocates and renewables developers. In Burgum’s and Wright’s philosophy, renewables have been given pride of place in government policies, effectively holding down fossil fuel resources — and that is going to change.
In one order, Burgum directs the department to ensure that its policies do not “bias government or private-sector decision making in favor of renewable energy projects as compared to oil, gas, or other mineral resource projects.” And neither he nor Wright appears to see little role for the fastest growing sources of generation — solar — in American “energy dominance.”
That is also in keeping with what Trump has been doing to achieve his energy priorities, as opposed to what he’s been saying about “unleashing American energy.” During the chaotic first few weeks of this administration, federal officials do not appear to have been treating fossil fuel and renewables equally so much as they have been scrambling to comply with executive orders by obstructing renewable permitting and then reversing themselves (unless, of course, it’s offshore wind).
As Trump’s energy policy finds its feet, we’ll find out if energy dominance is really just fossil fuel dominance.