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Whatever happens to the Inflation Reduction Act, high interest rates could still hurt.
The Federal Reserve’s interest rate cuts were supposed to be a bonanza for the clean energy business. Renewables, with their high upfront costs compared to their costs of operating (the “fuel” — i.e. the wind and the sun — is free), are especially sensitive to the cost of borrowing money. When rates go up, it becomes more difficult for projects to hit the profitability targets necessary to lure investors without jacking up prices for customers beyond the realm of the possible. When rates comes down — which the Fed has been working on doing since September — suddenly those investments start to look a lot more appealing.
But there’s more to financing costs than the Fed. There’s also the president.
While much of the focus on Donald Trump’s electoral victory has been trying to discern what a Republican trifecta could do to the Inflation Reduction Act, Trump’s effect on the bond market may be just as important. We may still living in James Carville’s world, where the bond market can “intimidate everybody.” And it’s rearing its head against the president-reelect.
Since Trump came to be seen as the likely winner in the months before election day, yields on U.S. government debt — that is, the returns bondholders and issuers have to offer to entice investors — began to shoot up. Interpreting moves in the bond market is always tricky, but many market commentators interpreted the recent run-up as at least in part a reaction to Trump, whether they thought he was going to juice economic growth or stoke inflation, or some combination of the two.
“If Trump is proposing a broadly inflationary high-tariff, low-tax agenda, anyone expecting inflation is looking for a higher return,” explained Advait Arun, a climate and infrastructure finance analyst at the Center for Public Enterprise.
Each of these policies — high tariffs and low taxes — could have an inflationary effect. Tariffs could lead to higher consumer prices (especially the kind of broad-based tariffs Trump has proposed) while tax cuts act as stimulus by keeping more cash in the economy. Combined with higher defense spending and a reduced labor force if Trump follows through on his plan for mass deportations, the whole policy agenda could wind up reversing some of the progress the economy has made recovering from the high inflation of the immediate post-COVID period, or at least make it so the Federal Reserve sees no further need to cut interest rates.
“Tariffs, especially if universally placed on all imports, is broadly viewed as an inflationary policy, which may pose a risk to the outlook for lower interest rates,” Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Perocco wrote in a note to clients. “All else equal, higher rates are seen as a headwind for the renewable energy sector due to higher financing costs.”
Yields on the 10-year Treasury note, a widely used benchmark throughout the global economy, were sitting at around 3.6% in mid-September when the Fed began cutting rates, but had risen to 4.36% the week before the election. Yields shot up again last week after Trump’s win, which confirmed the market’s suspicion that his inflationary plans will be realized. Today they’re around 4.43% and rising.
“Interest rates are moving higher in much the same way they did when he won in 2016,” aid Skanda Amarnath, executive director of Employ America told me. “There’s a Trump trade people do — the dollar gets stronger, interest rates are higher.” These policies may be “more stimulative to the economy on some level,” and in turn, “maybe this means the Fed is more cautious about lowering interest rates.”
The market certainly seems to think Trump will run the economy hot. Expectations for where the federal funds rate could end up by the end of 2025 have risen from 3% in September to about 3.8%, Gautam Jain, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. Several analysts have scaled back their forecasts for the number of future Federal Reserve rate cuts next after the Fed lowered rates by another quarter percentage point last week. Yields on two-year Treasury notes, which are considered to be highly sensitive to expectations of Federal Reserve action, have risen from 3.55% in mid-September to 4.34% today, the highest level since July.
And sustained high rates mean sustained high costs for renewable energy companies. Jain had previously estimated that a 2 percentage point drop in the cost of debt would lower offshore wind costs by as much as $10 per megawatt-hour and utility-scale solar by as much as $12 per megawatt-hour, which would help make them more competitive even in the absence of federal subsidies. If the cost of capital stays high, that potential boost goes away.
“For renewables, they are more capital intensive, so they are more impacted” by rising rates, Jain told me. “The headwind will hurt them more.”
Bipartisan budget watchdogs have been skeptical of Trump’s policies, typically projecting larger deficit increases than would have arisen from the policy agenda of Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. That said, not everyone is worried.
The hedge-fund investor Scott Bessent, widely tipped to be Trump’s pick for Treasury Secretary, has been promoting a “3-3-3” plan — deficits reduced to 3% of gross domestic product from around 7% currently by the end of Trump’s term; annual growth kicked up to 3% from around 2.8% today; and oil production increased by 3 million barrels, all of which could allow the Federal Reserve to bring down rates.
Trump “understands financial markets and the bond markets. He would not want deficits to get out of control,” Stephen Miran, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and former Trump Treasury official told me. “There's a lot of focus to rein that in.”
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A conversation with Scott Cockerham of Latham and Watkins.
This week’s conversation is with Scott Cockerham, a partner with the law firm Latham and Watkins whose expertise I sought to help me best understand the Treasury Department’s recent guidance on the federal solar and wind tax credits. We focused on something you’ve probably been thinking about a lot: how to qualify for the “start construction” part of the new tax regime, which is the primary hurdle for anyone still in the thicket of a fight with local opposition.
The following is our chat lightly edited for clarity. Enjoy.
So can you explain what we’re looking at here with the guidance and its approach to what it considers the beginning of construction?
One of the reasons for the guidance was a distinction in the final version of the bill that treated wind and solar differently for purposes of tax credit phase-outs. They landed on those types of assets being placed in service by the end of 2027, or construction having to begin within 12 months of enactment – by July 4th, 2026. But as part of the final package, the Trump administration promised the House Freedom Caucus members they would tighten up what it means to ‘start construction’ for solar and wind assets in particular.
In terms of changes, probably the biggest difference is that for projects over 1.5 megawatts of output, you can no longer use a “5% safe harbor” to qualify projects. The 5% safe harbor was a construct in prior start of construction guidance saying you could begin construction by incurring 5% of your project cost. That will no longer be available for larger projects. Residential projects and other smaller solar projects will still have that available to them. But that is probably the biggest change.
The other avenue to start construction is called the “physical work test,” which requires the commencement of physical work of a significant nature. The work can either be performed on-site or it can be performed off-site by a vendor. The new guidance largely parrotted those rules from prior guidance and in many cases transferred the concepts word-for-word. So on the physical work side, not much changed.
Significantly, there’s another aspect of these rules that say you have to continue work once you start. It’s like asking if you really ran a race if you didn’t keep going to the finish line. Helpfully, the new guidance retains an old rule saying that you’re assumed to have worked continuously if you place in service within four calendar years after the year work began. So if you begin in 2025 you have until the end of 2029 to place in service without having to prove continuous work. There had been rumors about that four-year window being shortened, so the fact that it was retained is very helpful to project pipelines.
The other major point I’d highlight is that the effective date of the new guidance is September 2. There’s still a limited window between now and then to continue to access the old rules. This also provides greater certainty for developers who attempted to start construction under the old rules after July 4, 2025. They can be confident that what they did still works assuming it was consistent with the prior guidance.
On the construction start – what kinds of projects would’ve maybe opted to use the 5% cost metric before?
Generally speaking it has mostly been distributed generation and residential solar projects. On the utility scale side it had recently tended to be projects buying domestic modules where there might have been an angle to access the domestic content tax credit bonus as well.
For larger projects, the 5% test can be quite expensive. If you’re a 200-megawatt project, 5% of your project is not nothing – that actually can be quite high. I would say probably the majority of utility scale projects in recent years had relied on the manufacturing of transformers as the primary strategy.
So now that option is not available to utility scale projects anymore?
The domestic content bonus is still available, but prior to September 2 you can procure modules for a large project and potentially both begin construction and qualify for the domestic content bonus at the same time. Beginning September 2 the module procurement wouldn’t help that same project begin construction.
Okay, so help me understand what kinds of work will developers need to do in order to pass the physical work test here?
A lot of it is market-driven by preferences from tax equity investors and tax credit buyers and their tax counsel. Over the last 8 years or so transformer manufacturing has become quite popular. I expect that to continue to be an avenue people will pursue. Another avenue we see quite often is on-site physical work, so for a wind project for example that can involve digging foundations for your wind turbines, covering them with concrete slabs, and doing work for something called string roads – roads that go between your turbines primarily for operations and maintenance. On the solar side, it would be similar kinds of on-site work: foundation work, road work, driving piles, putting things up at the site.
One of the things that is more difficult about the physical work test as opposed to the 5% test is that it is subjective. I always tell people that more work is always better. In the first instance it’s likely up to whatever your financing party thinks is enough and that’s going to be a project-specific determination, typically.
Okay, and how much will permitting be a factor in passing the physical work test?
It depends. It can certainly affect on-site work if you don’t have access to the site yet. That is obviously problematic.
But it wouldn’t prevent you from doing an off-site physical work strategy. That would involve procuring a non-inventory item like a transformer for the project. So there are still different things you can do depending on the facts.
What’s your ultimate takeaway on the Treasury guidance overall?
It certainly makes beginning construction on wind and solar more difficult, but I think the overall reaction that I and others in the market have mostly had is that the guidance came out much better than people feared. There were a lot of rumors going around about things that could have been really problematic, but for the most part, other than the 5% test option going away, the sense is that not a whole lot changed. This is a positive result on the development side.
And more of the week’s most important news around renewable energy conflicts.
1. Carroll County, Arkansas – The head of an influential national right-wing advocacy group is now targeting a wind project in Arkansas, seeking federal intervention to block something that looked like it would be built.
2. Suffolk County, New York – EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin this week endorsed efforts by activists on Long Island to oppose energy storage in their neighborhoods.
3. Multiple counties, Indiana – This has been a very bad week for renewables in the Sooner state.
4. Brunswick County, North Carolina – Duke Energy is pouring cold water on anyone still interested in developing offshore wind off the coast of North Carolina.
5. Bell County, Texas – We have a solar transmission stand-off brewing in Texas, of all places.
Is there going to be a flight out of Nevada?
Donald Trump’s renewables permitting freeze is prompting solar companies to find an escape hatch from Nevada.
As I previously reported, the Interior Department has all but halted new approvals for solar and wind projects on federal lands. It was entirely unclear how that would affect transmission out west, including in the solar-friendly Nevada desert where major lines were in progress to help power both communities and a growing number of data centers. Shortly after the pause, I took notice of the fact that regulators quietly delayed the timetable by at least two weeks for a key line – the northern portion of NV Energy’s Greenlink project – that had been expected to connect to a litany of solar facilities. Interior told me it still planned to complete the project in September, but it also confirmed that projects specifically necessary for connecting solar onto the grid would face “enhanced” reviews.
Well, we have the latest update in this saga. It turns out NV Energy has actually been beseeching the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to let solar projects previously planned for Greenlink bail from the interconnection queue without penalty. And the solar industry is now backing them up.
In a July 28 filing submitted after Interior began politically reviewing all renewables projects, NV Energy requested FERC provide a short-term penalty waiver to companies who may elect to leave the interconnection queue because their projects are no longer viable. Typically, companies are subject to financial penalties for withdrawals from the queue, a policy intended to keep developers from hogging a place in line with a risky project they might never build. Now, at least in the eyes of this key power company, it seems Trump’s pause has made that the case for far too many projects.
“It is important that non-viable projects be terminated or withdrawn so that the queue and any required restudies be updated as quickly as possible,” stated the filing, which was first reported by Utility Dive earlier this week. NV Energy also believes there is concern customers may seek to have their deals for power expected from these projects terminated under “force majeure" clauses, and so “the purpose of this waiver request is thus to both clear the queue to the extent possible and avoid unneeded disputes.”
On Monday, the Solar Energy Industries Association endorsed the request in a filing to the commission made in partnership with regional renewable trade group Interwest Energy Alliance. The support statement referenced both the recent de facto repeal of IRA credits as well as the permitting freeze, stating it now “appears that federal agency review staff are unsure how to proceed on solar projects.” This even includes projects on private lands, a concern first raised by Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo, a Republican, after the permitting freeze came into effect.
The groups all but stated they anticipate companies will pull the plug on solar projects in Nevada, proclaiming that by granting the waiver, “it will encourage projects facing uncertainty due to recent legislation and federal action to exit the process sooner and without penalty, creating more certainty for the remaining projects.”
How this reads to me: Energy developers are understandably trying to figure out how to skate away from this increasingly risky situation as cleanly as they can. It’s anybody’s guess if FERC is willing to show lenience toward these developers.