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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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The foreign entities of concern rules in the One Big Beautiful Bill would place gigantic new burdens on developers.
Trump campaigned on cutting red tape for energy development. At the start of his second term, he signed an executive order titled, “Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation,” promising to kill 10 regulations for each new one he enacted.
The order deems federal regulations an “ever-expanding morass” that “imposes massive costs on the lives of millions of Americans, creates a substantial restraint on our economic growth and ability to build and innovate, and hampers our global competitiveness.” It goes on to say that these regulations “are often difficult for the average person or business to understand,” that they are so complicated that they ultimately increase the cost of compliance, as well as the risks of non-compliance.
Reading this now, the passage echoes the comments I’ve heard from industry groups and tax law experts describing the incredibly complex foreign entities of concern rules that Congress — with the full-throated backing of the Trump administration — is about to impose on clean energy projects and manufacturers. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, wind and solar, as well as utility-scale energy storage, geothermal, nuclear, and all kinds of manufacturing projects will have to abide by restrictions on their Chinese material inputs and contractual or financial ties with Chinese entities in order to qualify for tax credits.
“Foreign entity of concern” is a U.S. government term referring to entities that are “owned by, controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction or direction of” any of four countries — Russia, Iran, North Korea, and most importantly for clean energy technology, China.
Trump’s tax bill requires companies to meet increasingly strict limits on the amount of material from China they use in their projects and products. A battery factory starting production next year, for example, would have to ensure that 60% of the value of the materials that make up its products have no connection to China. By 2030, the threshold would rise to 85%. The bill lays out similar benchmarks and timelines for clean electricity projects, as well as other kinds of manufacturing.
But how companies should calculate these percentages is not self-evident. The bill also forbids companies from collecting the tax credits if they have business relationships with “specified foreign entities” or “foreign-influenced entities,” terms with complicated definitions that will likely require guidance from the Treasury for companies to be sure they pass the test.
Regulatory uncertainty could stifle development until further guidance is released, but how long that takes will depend on if and when the Trump administration prioritizes getting it done. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act contains a lot of other new tax-related provisions that were central to the Trump campaign, including a tax exemption for tips, which are likely much higher on the department’s to-do list.
Tax credit implementation was a top priority for the Biden administration, and even with much higher staffing levels than the department currently has, it took the Treasury 18 months to publish initial guidance on foreign entities of concern rules for the Inflation Reduction Act’s electric vehicle tax credit. “These things are so unbelievably complicated,” Rachel McCleery, a former senior advisor at the Treasury under Biden, told me.
McCleery questioned whether larger, publicly-owned companies would be able to proceed with major investments in things like battery manufacturing plants until that guidance is out. She gave the example of a company planning to pump out 100,000 batteries per year and claim the per-kilowatt-hour advanced manufacturing tax credit. “That’s going to look like a pretty big number in claims, so you have to be able to confidently and assuredly tell your shareholder, Yep, we’re good, we qualify, and that requires a certification” by a tax counsel, she said. To McCleery, there’s an open question as to whether any tax counsel “would even provide a tax opinion for publicly-traded companies to claim credits of this size without guidance.”
John Cornwell, the director of policy at the Good Energy Collective, which conducts research and advocacy for nuclear power, echoed McCleery’s concerns. “Without very clear guidelines from the Treasury and IRS, until those guidelines are in place, that is going to restrict financing and investment,” Cornwell told me.
Understanding what the law requires will be the first challenge. But following it will involve tracking down supply chain data that may not exist, finding alternative suppliers that may not be able to fill the demand, and establishing extensive documentation of the origins of components sourced through webs of suppliers, sub-suppliers, and materials processors.
The Good Energy Institute put out an issue brief this week describing the myriad hurdles nuclear developers will face in trying to adhere to the tax credit rules. Nuclear plants contain thousands of components, and documenting the origin of everything from “steam generators to smaller items like specialized fasteners, gaskets, and electronic components will introduce substantial and costly administrative burdens,” it says. Additionally the critical minerals used in nuclear projects “often pass through multiple processing stages across different countries before final assembly,” and there are no established industry standards for supply chain documentation.
Beyond the documentation headache, even just finding the materials could be an issue. China dominates the market for specialized nuclear-grade materials manufacturing and precision component fabrication, the report says, and alternative suppliers are likely to charge premiums. Establishing new supply chains will take years, but Trump’s bill will begin enforcing the sourcing rules in 2026. The rules will prove even more difficult for companies trying to build first-of-a-kind advanced nuclear projects, as those rely on more highly specialized supply chains dominated by China.
These challenges may be surmountable, but that will depend, again, on what the Treasury decides, and when. The Department’s guidance could limit the types of components companies have to account for and simplify the documentation process, or it could not. But while companies wait for certainty, they may also be racking up interest. “The longer there are delays, that can have a substantial risk of project success,” Cornwell said.
And companies don’t have forever. Each of the credits comes with a phase-out schedule. Wind manufacturers can only claim the credits until 2028. Other manufacturers have until 2030. Credits for clean power projects will start to phase down in 2034. “Given the fact that a lot of these credits start lapsing in the next few years, there’s a very good chance that, because guidance has not yet come out, you’re actually looking at a much smaller time frame than than what is listed in the bill,” Skip Estes, the government affairs director for Securing America’s Energy Future, or SAFE, told me.
Another issue SAFE has raised is that the way these rules are set up, the foreign sourcing requirements will get more expensive and difficult to comply with as the value of the tax credits goes down. “Our concern is that that’s going to encourage companies to forego the credit altogether and just continue buying from the lowest common denominator, which is typically a Chinese state-owned or -influenced monopoly,” Estes said.
McCleery had another prediction — the regulations will be so burdensome that companies will simply set up shop elsewhere. “I think every industry will certainly be rethinking their future U.S. investments, right? They’ll go overseas, they’ll go to Canada, which dumped a ton of carrots and sticks into industry after we passed the IRA,” she said.
“The irony is that Republicans have historically been the party of deregulation, creating business friendly environments. This is completely opposite, right?”
On the budget debate, MethaneSAT’s untimely demise, and Nvidia
Current conditions: The northwestern U.S. faces “above average significant wildfire potential” for July • A month’s worth of rain fell over just 12 hours in China’s Hubei province, forcing evacuations • The top floor of the Eiffel Tower is closed today due to extreme heat.
The Senate finally passed its version of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act Tuesday morning, sending the tax package back to the House in hopes of delivering it to Trump by the July 4 holiday. The excise tax on renewables that had been stuffed into the bill over the weekend was removed after Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska struck a deal with the Senate leadership designed to secure her vote. In her piece examining exactly what’s in the bill, Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo explains that even without the excise tax, the bill would “gum up the works for clean energy projects across the spectrum due to new phase-out schedules for tax credits and fast-approaching deadlines to meet complex foreign sourcing rules.” Debate on the legislation begins on the House floor today. House Speaker Mike Johnson has said he doesn’t like the legislation, and a handful of other Republicans have already signaled they won’t vote for it.
The Environmental Protection Agency this week sent the White House a proposal that is expected to severely weaken the federal government’s ability to rein in planet-warming pollution. Details of the proposal, titled “Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding and Motor Vehicle Reconsideration,” aren’t clear yet, but EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has reportedly been urging the Trump administration to repeal the 2009 “endangerment finding,” which explicitly identified greenhouse gases as a public health threat and gave the EPA the authority to regulate them. Striking down that finding would “free EPA from the legal obligation to regulate climate pollution from most sources, including power plants, cars and trucks, and virtually any other source,” wrote Alex Guillén at Politico. The title of the proposal suggests it aims to roll back EPA tailpipe emissions standards, as well.
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So long, MethaneSAT, we hardly knew ye. The Environmental Defense Fund said Tuesday that it had lost contact with its $88 million methane-detecting satellite, and that the spacecraft was “likely not recoverable.” The team is still trying to figure out exactly what happened. MethaneSAT launched into orbit last March and was collecting data about methane pollution from global fossil fuel infrastructure. “Thanks to MethaneSAT, we have gained critical insight about the distribution and volume of methane being released from oil and gas production areas,” EDF said. “We have also developed an unprecedented capability to interpret the measurements from space and translate them into volumes of methane released. This capacity will be valuable to other missions.“ The good news is that MethaneSAT was far from the only methane-tracking satellite in orbit.
Nvidia is backing a D.C.-based startup called Emerald AI that “enables AI data centers to flexibly adjust their power consumption from the electricity grid on demand.” Its goal is to make the grid more reliable while still meeting the growing energy demands of AI computing. The startup emerged from stealth this week with a $24.5 million seed round led by Radical Ventures and including funding from Nvidia. Emerald AI’s platform “acts as a smart mediator between the grid and a data center,” Nvidia explains. A field test of the software during a grid stress event in Phoenix, Arizona, demonstrated a 25% reduction in the energy consumption of AI workloads over three hours. “Renewable energy, which is intermittent and variable, is easier to add to a grid if that grid has lots of shock absorbers that can shift with changes in power supply,” said Ayse Coskun, Emerald AI’s chief scientist and a professor at Boston University. “Data centers can become some of those shock absorbers.”
In case you missed it: California Governor Gavin Newsom on Monday rolled back the state’s landmark Environmental Quality Act. The law, which had been in place since 1970, required environmental reviews for construction projects and had become a target for those looking to alleviate the state’s housing crisis. The change “means most urban developers will no longer have to study, predict, and mitigate the ways that new housing might affect local traffic, air pollution, flora and fauna, noise levels, groundwater quality, and objects of historic or archeological significance,” explainedCal Matters. On the other hand, it could also mean that much-needed housing projects get approved more quickly.
Tesla is expected to report its Q2 deliveries today, and analysts are projecting a year-over-year drop somewhere from 11% to 13%.
Jesse teaches Rob the basics of energy, power, and what it all has to do with the grid.
What is the difference between energy and power? How does the power grid work? And what’s the difference between a megawatt and a megawatt-hour?
On this week’s episode, we answer those questions and many, many more. This is the start of a new series: Shift Key Summer School. It’s a series of introductory “lecture conversations” meant to cover the basics of energy and the power grid for listeners of every experience level and background. In less than an hour, we try to get you up to speed on how to think about energy, power, horsepower, volts, amps, and what uses (approximately) 1 watt-hour, 1 kilowatt-hour, 1 megawatt-hour, and 1 gigawatt-hour.
Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, 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:
Jesse Jenkins: Let’s start with the joule. The joule is the SI unit for both work and energy. And the basic definition of energy is the ability to do work — not work in a job, but like work in the physics sense, meaning we are moving or displacing an object around. So a joule is defined as 1 newton-meter, among other things. It has an electrical equivalent, too. A newton is a unit of force, and force is accelerating a mass, from basic physics, over some distance in this case. So 1 meter of distance.
So we can break that down further, right? And we can describe the newton as 1 kilogram accelerated at 1 meter per second, squared. And then the work part is over a distance of one meter. So that kind of gives us a sense of something you feel. A kilogram, right, that’s 2.2 pounds. I don’t know, it’s like … I’m trying to think of something in my life that weighs a kilogram. Rob, can you think of something? A couple pounds of food, I guess. A liter of water weighs a kilogram by definition, as well. So if you’ve got like a liter bottle of soda, there’s your kilogram.
Then I want to move it over a meter. So I have a distance I’m displacing it. And then the question is, how fast do I want to do that? How quickly do I want to accelerate that movement? And that’s the acceleration part. And so from there, you kind of get a physical sense of this. If something requires more energy, if I’m moving more mass around, or if I’m moving that mass over a longer distance — 1 meter versus 100 meters versus a kilometer, right? — or if I want to accelerate that mass faster over that distance, so zero to 60 in three seconds versus zero to 60 in 10 seconds in your car, that’s going to take more energy.
Robinson Meyer: I am looking up what weighs … Oh, here we go: A 13-inch MacBook Air weighs about, a little more than a kilogram.
Jenkins: So your laptop. If you want to throw your laptop over a meter, accelerating at a pace of 1 meter per second, squared …
Meyer: That’s about a joule.
Jenkins: … that’s about a joule.
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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.