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Almost every day, Donald Trump attacks clean energy and climate action. He assails electric vehicles, offshore wind, and calls climate change a hoax. He’s also up a little bit in the polls.
Everyone in and out of the clean energy and environmental movement knows this. So why, over two days at a conference hosted by the American Council on Renewable Energy this week, did clean energy bankers, investors, lawyers, and operators seem pretty optimistic about much of the Inflation Reduction Act and other Biden energy policies surviving into 2025 and beyond?
Pretty simply: Because there’s a lot of money being made — including in Republican-controlled states.
“Money is money,” Gina McCarthy, the former Environmental Protection Agency director and White House climate advisor, said during an on-stage interview. “Honestly, who is going to pull the plug on the investments from the Inflation Reduction Act without huge blowback from each of the individual states and governors?”
“I’ve been telling my clients that it’s very unlikely that we’re going to see substantial changes,” Mona Dajani, a partner at Baker Botts, told me. “There’s a lot of clean energy in traditionally Republican states. So do I see anything very material happening? No, I don’t. I think it’d be very unlikely”
It’s not surprising that lawyers and investment bankers would be optimistic about the Inflation Reduction Act. Much of the bill’s spending is channeled through tax credits, which require lawyers and investment bankers to arrange and write up deals between developers and investors.
Whether this optimistic consensus will bear out in 2025 remains to be seen (obviously), but that it exists at all in the present is a testament to a deliberate strategy. The legislation, along with the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, gave a wide cross section of industries, and regions a stake in the energy transition.
Even if it wouldn’t make these various elected officials and business leaders Democrats — Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, for instance, seems to be opening a new battery plant every week and is not supporting Biden’s reelection — it may turn them into supporters of climate policy, or at least give them a second thought about killing it.
At the core of the IRA are tax credits that, while they will soon be “technology neutral,” will still largely benefit and are modeled on tax credits for wind and solar. Those credits, the Production Tax Credit and the Investment Tax Credit, are decades old, and have historically been affirmatively extended under both Democratic and Republican presidents when the status quo would have meant their demise. To undo them under a second Trump administration would require Congress and the White House to agree affirmatively to toss them out.
“When I look at the composition of Congress, even with a new administration, I think it will be difficult to repeal it,” said Mit Buchanan, managing director of energy investment at JPMorgan Chase, speaking of the IRA during a panel at the conference. “There’s been good support on both sides of aisle in respect to renewable energy in red and blue states. Job creation means a lot.”
Texas and Florida are two of the standouts in clean energy investment, with Texas surpassing California in deploying utility-scale solar and leading the leading the country in wind generation. Florida, meanwhile, has the third-most solar installed among U.S. states.
Between the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, though, there’s spending that goes beyond wind and solar, including subsidies for oil industry darlings like carbon capture and sequestration, as well as hydrogen energy development.
“Carbon sequestration and hydrogen brings in industries that were traditionally hostile to renewables,” said Jordan Newman, a managing director and renewables investment banker at Wells Fargo, at the conference. A number of carbon sequestration infrastructure projects have popped up in Republican-voting states, including a carbon dioxide pipeline project in Iowa, while the sizable planned investments in hydrogen include a hub in Houston, of which Chevron and ExxonMobil are partners.
But the Biden administration and regulatory agencies run by Biden appointees are certainly acting as if large swaths of the administration’s climate policy are at risk. The Treasury Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission have put out a flurry of rules and guidance before self-imposed deadlines at the end of this year and to attempt to front-run the ability of a Republican Congress and White House to undo regulations through the Congressional Review Act.
“Our mission and what we continue to do is seek to get as much of the guidance done right and done effectively on the most reasonable timeframe that we can, and we’ll continue to do that all the way through the end of this year,” Ethan Zindler, climate counselor at the Treasury Department, told the audience.
Even if much of the energy tax credits and subsidies for specific technologies like hydrogen and carbon sequestration could survive a change in administration, other parts of the IRA may be at greater risk, especially wind and especially especially offshore wind, for which Trump seems to have a special distaste.
“Offshore wind is challenging,” Meghan Schultz, the chief financial officer of Invenergy, which won a contract for an offshore wind project off the coast of New Jersey earlier this year, said on a panel.
She previewed a message for a potential second Trump administration, focusing on the industrial and job benefits of offshore wind: “If he were to be elected, it will be important that we’re working as an industry to educate this administration on the value these projects will bring, in clean energy and job creation and infrastructure.”
No matter what happens, business people tend towards the optimistic. Said Thomas de Swardt, chief commercial officer at D.E. Shaw Renewable Investments: “If it happens, we’ll sit around table and talk about how we restructure and reprice deals.”
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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.”