You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
Here’s where the Biden administration’s climate spending has gone so far.
All across the United States, grant money from the Inflation Reduction Act has begun to flow.
There’s more than $100 million for protecting the Pacific Ocean’s salmon and steelhead fisheries.
Hundreds of millions more to plant urban canopies in Atlanta, Phoenix, and dozens of other cities.
$1 billion for two new weather research ships for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and tens of millions for mapping the best “fuel breaks” — roads, rivers, and other natural features that will slow wildfires in Colorado, Wyoming, and other states.
The Biden administration has begun the gargantuan work of spending down the more than $110 billion in grant funding in the new climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act. It is in a race to spend as much of the money as it can in the next year — before a potential change of administration in 2025 and before climate change gets any worse.
Sign up to receive updates on Heatmap’s database of federal climate spending:
That effort is about 10% complete. The government has disbursed about $11.8 billion in grants, rebates, and other funding in law, according to an analysis conducted by Heatmap.
The spending is expected to pick up in the next year as the administration accelerates its efforts to get money out the door.
The grants are not the only source of funding from the climate law. The IRA contains three new pots of money: grants and rebates, new loans from the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, and tax credits for clean energy.
The tax credits are the bill’s centerpiece and largest source of funding in the law. They are meant to incentivize people and businesses to switch to clean energy and other climate-friendly technologies. Although they could eventually disburse more than $1 trillion into the economy, according to a Goldman Sachs estimate, we do not yet have public data on their takeup.
The Loan Programs Office, meanwhile, has sent out more than $13 billion in loans to help build new electric-vehicle and battery plants since the law’s passage.
Grants and rebates make up the IRA’s third plank — and one of the largest portions of publicly available funding from the law. They are our first glance at how the law is working.
So far, most of the $11.5 billion in IRA funding already awarded by the Biden administration have gone to pre-existing federal programs or to expand government capacity. The money has decarbonized federal buildings, for instance, or been spent to hire more conservation scientists.
You can see that in the agency that has sent out more IRA-funded grants than any other: the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which has disbursed nearly $3.4 billion from the law this year. That money has largely funded pre-existing agricultural programs, such as the Conservation Stewardship Program, that have now been rewritten to boost “climate-smart agriculture.”
The law’s second-largest tranche of money has gone to the U.S. Postal Service to buy electric delivery vehicles. Although that money has been transferred to the agency, most of it remains unspent. The Postal Service plans to buy 66,000 electric vehicles through 2028 as it moves to an all-electric fleet.
Another $2.4 billion has gone to the Energy Department, which has used the funding to upgrade national labs, including in Idaho, Oregon, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania.
By comparison, the government has sent out relatively little money from new programs established by the IRA.
That is most evident from the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA has yet to start making grants from its $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, for instance, a multi-purpose fund which will eventually help capitalize dozens of green banks and provide loans to cut the cost of rooftop solar.
The EPA has also yet to disburse money from its new programs to reduce air pollution from ports, cut methane emissions from oil-and-gas infrastructure, and help environmental-justice organizations.
The IRA also provided nearly $10 billion to the USDA to help rural electric cooperatives decarbonize their power plants; that money has yet to flow as well.
In a statement, the White House said that it had launched about two-thirds of the grant and rebate programs in the IRA, totaling more than $70 billion. (In other words, it may have opened up applications to receive funding from those programs, but not yet awarded any money from them.)
“It's a pace we’re proud of, especially since many programs in the Inflation Reduction Act are being set up from scratch,” Michael Kikukawa, a White Housethe spokesman, said. “These programs are investing in communities, creating good-paying jobs in the clean energy economy, and tackling the climate crisis in every corner of the country.”
Advocates said that the pace of funding would likely pick up over the next few years.
“Given that we have spent the past year working with the Biden administration standing up these grant programs, it’s really not surprising at all that we haven’t seen the eventual pace this bill will reach in the first year,” Holly Burke, communications director for Evergreen, a nonprofit that fights for and advises on federal climate policy, told me. “It does leave us the challenge of running in 2024 on a bill that has only begun to deliver on its promise.”
Among Democrats, some concern persists that the government is not spending the funding fast enough.
Perhaps the easiest place to see this worry is in Democrats’ growing anxiety about the IRA’s home-upgrade rebates, which are administered by the Department of Energy.
These programs are meant to help Americans buy climate-friendly appliances — such as heat pumps, induction stoves, and smart breaker boxes — as well as insulate and weatherize their homes. Last month, dozens of Democratic lawmakers wrote to the Energy Department, asking for a faster rollout of the program.
Democrats love these programs, which rank among the law’s most consumer-facing policies. When President Joe Biden signed the IRA last year, he mentioned these rebate programs before any other policy.
The IRA was “about showing … the American people that democracy still works in America,” Biden said at the time. “It’s going to offer working families thousands of dollars in savings by providing them rebates to buy new and efficient appliances, weatherize their homes.”
But the rebate programs have taken longer to implement than Democrats once hoped. There are two rebate programs in the IRA — one focused on efficiency and weatherization, the other on electrification — and the rules governing them have yet to be finalized by a Department of Energy office. Even though states will eventually administer those rebate programs, few states have received funding even to start up their programs.
At this point, most states will probably launch their rebate programs around the middle of next year, Andy Frank, the chief executive of Sealed, a home-retrofit company, told me.
Some states might lag beyond that. In Georgia, state officials have warned they are aiming to launch by September 30, 2024, at the latest.
Companies, too, are starting to get nervous about the slower pace. Because consumers know that the rebates are on the way, they’re delaying buying new appliances or updating their home insulation, Arch Rao, the chief executive of Span, which makes a new kind of circuit-breaker panel, told me.
That caution is hurting contractors and other installers at exactly the moment that they should be staffing up and preparing for a surge in demand.
“Homeowners are saying, ‘Wait, if rebates are going to be imminently available, then we’re going to wait to decarbonize.’ But contractors can’t plan for that,” Rao said, who was previously a head of product at Tesla. “Supply and demand are being built, but coordination between the two isn’t happening.”
“The Department of Energy is laser focused on cutting costs for working families and businesses through the historic consumer rebates program made available by President Biden’s Investing in America agenda,” Charisma Troiano, a Department of Energy spokeswoman, told me.
“We are working with states to help them move as fast as they are ready to, and look forward to continuing the work of helping American families keep more money in their pockets with an energy efficient and electrified home.”
At least one other IRA rebate program is meant to solve some of these problems: a $200 million program meant to train home contractors to install heat pumps and other home efficiency measures. The program will start awarding grants on November 1.
Sign up to receive updates on Heatmap’s database of federal climate spending:
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
A conversation with Mary King, a vice president handling venture strategy at Aligned Capital
Today’s conversation is with Mary King, a vice president handling venture strategy at Aligned Capital, which has invested in developers like Summit Ridge and Brightnight. I reached out to Mary as a part of the broader range of conversations I’ve had with industry professionals since it has become clear Republicans in Congress will be taking a chainsaw to the Inflation Reduction Act. I wanted to ask her about investment philosophies in this trying time and how the landscape for putting capital into renewable energy has shifted. But Mary’s quite open with her view: these technologies aren’t going anywhere.
The following conversation has been lightly edited and abridged for clarity.
How do you approach working in this field given all the macro uncertainties?
It’s a really fair question. One, macro uncertainties aside, when you look at the levelized cost of energy report Lazard releases it is clear that there are forms of clean energy that are by far the cheapest to deploy. There are all kinds of reasons to do decarbonizing projects that aren’t clean energy generation: storage, resiliency, energy efficiency – this is massively cost saving. Like, a lot of the methane industry [exists] because there’s value in not leaking methane. There’s all sorts of stuff you can do that you don’t need policy incentives for.
That said, the policy questions are unavoidable. You can’t really ignore them and I don’t want to say they don’t matter to the industry – they do. It’s just, my belief in this being an investable asset class and incredibly important from a humanity perspective is unwavering. That’s the perspective I’ve been taking. This maybe isn’t going to be the most fun market, investing in decarbonizing things, but the sense of purpose and the belief in the underlying drivers of the industry outweigh that.
With respect to clean energy development, and the investment class working in development, how have things changed since January and the introduction of these bills that would pare back the IRA?
Both investors and companies are worried. There’s a lot more political and policy engagement. We’re seeing a lot of firms and organizations getting involved. I think companies are really trying to find ways to structure around the incentives. Companies and developers, I think everybody is trying to – for lack of a better term – future-proof themselves against the worst eventuality.
One of the things I’ve been personally thinking about is that the way developers generally make money is, you have a financier that’s going to buy a project from them, and the financier is going to have a certain investment rate of return, or IRR. So ITC [investment tax credit] or no ITC, that IRR is going to be the same. And the developer captures the difference.
My guess – and I’m not incredibly confident yet – but I think the industry just focuses on being less ITC dependent. Finding the projects that are juicier regardless of the ITC.
The other thing is that as drafts come out for what we’re expecting to see, it’s gone from bad to terrible to a little bit better. We’ll see what else happens as we see other iterations.
How are you evaluating companies and projects differently today, compared to how you were maybe before it was clear the IRA would be targeted?
Let’s say that we’re looking at a project developer and they have a series of projects. Right now we’re thinking about a few things. First, what assets are these? It’s not all ITC and PTC. A lot of it is other credits. Going through and asking, how at risk are these credits? And then, once we know how at risk those credits are we apply it at a project level.
This also raises a question of whether you’re going to be able to find as many projects. Is there going to be as much demand if you’re not able to get to an IRR? Is the industry going to pay that?
What gives you optimism in this moment?
I’ll just look at the levelized cost of energy and looking at the unsubsidized tables say these are the projects that make sense and will still get built. Utility-scale solar? Really attractive. Some of these next-gen geothermal projects, I think those are going to be cost effective.
The other thing is that the cost of battery storage is just declining so rapidly and it’s continuing to decline. We are as a country expected to compare the current price of these technologies in perpetuity to the current price of oil and gas, which is challenging and where the technologies have not changed materially. So we’re not going to see the cost decline we’re going to see in renewables.
And more news around renewable energy conflicts.
1. Nantucket County, Massachusetts – The SouthCoast offshore wind project will be forced to abandon its existing power purchase agreements with Massachusetts and Rhode Island if the Trump administration’s wind permitting freeze continues, according to court filings submitted last week.
2. Tippacanoe County, Indiana – This county has now passed a full solar moratorium but is looking at grandfathering one large utility-scale project: RWE and Geenex’s Rainbow Trout solar farm.
3. Columbia County, Wisconsin – An Alliant wind farm named after this county is facing its own pushback as the developer begins the state permitting process and is seeking community buy-in through public info hearings.
4. Washington County, Arkansas – It turns out even mere exploration for a wind project out in this stretch of northwest Arkansas can get you in trouble with locals.
5. Wagoner County, Oklahoma – A large NextEra solar project has been blocked by county officials despite support from some Republican politicians in the Sooner state.
6. Skagit County, Washington – If you’re looking for a ray of developer sunshine on a cloudy day, look no further than this Washington State county that’s bucking opposition to a BESS facility.
7. Orange County, California – A progressive Democratic congressman is now opposing a large battery storage project in his district and talking about battery fire risks, the latest sign of a populist revolt in California against BESS facilities.
Permitting delays and missed deadlines are bedeviling solar developers and activist groups alike. What’s going on?
It’s no longer possible to say the Trump administration is moving solar projects along as one of the nation’s largest solar farms is being quietly delayed and even observers fighting the project aren’t sure why.
Months ago, it looked like Trump was going to start greenlighting large-scale solar with an emphasis out West. Agency spokespeople told me Trump’s 60-day pause on permitting solar projects had been lifted and then the Bureau of Land Management formally approved its first utility-scale project under this administration, Leeward Renewable Energy’s Elisabeth solar project in Arizona, and BLM also unveiled other solar projects it “reasonably” expected would be developed in the area surrounding Elisabeth.
But the biggest indicator of Trump’s thinking on solar out west was Esmeralda 7, a compilation of solar project proposals in western Nevada from NextEra, Invenergy, Arevia, ConnectGen, and other developers that would, if constructed, produce at least 6 gigawatts of power. My colleague Matthew Zeitlin was first to report that BLM officials updated the timetable for fully permitting the expansive project to say it would complete its environmental review by late April and be completely finished with the federal bureaucratic process by mid-July. BLM told Matthew that the final environmental impact statement – the official study completing the environmental review – would be published “in the coming days or week or so.”
More than two months later, it’s crickets from BLM on Esmeralda 7. BLM never released the study that its website as of today still says should’ve come out in late April. I asked BLM for comment on this and a spokesperson simply told me the agency “does not have any updates to share on this project at this time.”
This state of quiet stasis is not unique to Esmeralda; for example, Leeward has yet to receive a final environmental impact statement for its 700 mega-watt Copper Rays solar project in Nevada’s Pahrump Valley that BLM records state was to be published in early May. Earlier this month, BLM updated the project timeline for another Nevada solar project – EDF’s Bonanza – to say it would come out imminently, too, but nothing’s been released.
Delays happen in the federal government and timelines aren’t always met. But on its face, it is hard for stakeholders I speak with out in Nevada to take these months-long stutters as simply good faith bureaucratic hold-ups. And it’s even making work fighting solar for activists out in the desert much more confusing.
For Shaaron Netherton, executive director of the conservation group Friends of the Nevada Wilderness, these solar project permitting delays mean an uncertain future. Friends of the Nevada Wilderness is a volunteer group of ecology protection activists that is opposing Esmeralda 7 and filed its first lawsuit against Greenlink West, a transmission project that will connect the massive solar constellation to the energy grid. Netherton told me her group may sue against the approval of Esmeralda 7… but that the next phase of their battle against the project is a hazy unknown.
“It’s just kind of a black hole,” she told me of the Esmeralda 7 permitting process. “We will litigate Esmeralda 7 if we have to, and we were hoping that with this administration there would be a little bit of a pause. There may be. That’s still up in the air.”
I’d like to note that Netherton’s organization has different reasons for opposition than I normally write about in The Fight. Instead of concerns about property values or conspiracies about battery fires, her organization and a multitude of other desert ecosystem advocates are trying to avoid a future where large industries of any type harm or damage one of the nation’s most biodiverse and undeveloped areas.
This concern for nature has historically motivated environmental activism. But it’s also precisely the sort of advocacy that Trump officials have opposed tooth-and-nail, dating back to the president’s previous term, when advocates successfully opposed his rewrite of Endangered Species Act regulations. This reason – a motivation to hippie-punch, so to speak – is a reason why I hardly expect species protection to be enough of a concern to stop solar projects in their tracks under Trump, at least for now. There’s also the whole “energy dominance” thing, though Trump has been wishy-washy on adhering to that goal.
Patrick Donnelly, great basin director at the Center for Biological Diversity, agrees that this is a period of confusion but not necessarily an end to solar permitting on BLM land.
“[Solar] is moving a lot slower than it was six months ago, when it was coming at a breakneck pace,” said Patrick Donnelly of the Center for Biological Diversity. “How much of that is ideological versus 15-20% of the agencies taking early retirement and utter chaos inside the agencies? I’m not sure. But my feeling is it’s less ideological. I really don’t think Trump’s going to just start saying no to these energy projects.”