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Seventy-eight percent of Americans say they would pay more to buy a U.S.-made EV over a similar Chinese model. Here's why that's significant for Biden's climate law.
Consider for a moment that you are deciding between two electric cars for purchase.
The first is a name-brand American-made EV.
The second is almost identical — same range, same features, same reviews — but it is $5,000 cheaper than the first vehicle, and it is made in China.
Which would you choose?
When asked a nearly identical version of this question last month, nearly four out of every five Americans — some 78% of adults — said that they would buy the more expensive, U.S.-made car, new results from the Heatmap Climate Poll have found. Only 22% of adults said that they would choose the less expensive Chinese vehicle.
The results, which arrive as the Biden administration is finalizing rules that will govern new electric-car subsidies, suggest that many Americans are willing to support costly measures to boost a home-grown EV industry. And it offers some of the first evidence that Americans — who have long told pollsters that they want to buy U.S.-made products, but that they won’t pay extra for them — may be changing their views and buying habits in light of geopolitics.
The result “highlights the opportunity under the [Inflation Reduction Act] that not only Biden has, but the broader U.S. automotive sector has,” Corey Cantor, a senior associate for electric vehicles at BloombergNEF, a clean-energy analysis group, told me. The Inflation Reduction Act, which Congress passed last year, contains what analysts have estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks for companies that manufacture EVs or their batteries in the United States.
The poll adds ballast to one of the law’s central ideas: that Americans would support policy to boost U.S. domestic industry as much — or more — than they would back a more straightforward decarbonization measure. “It sounds like the IRA’s theory — or Joe Manchin’s theory, or Biden’s theory — is really well supported by the American public,” Cantor said, referencing the two Democrats most often credited with the bill’s design.
The EV question united Americans across party, gender, race, age, and ideological lines. Among people who voted for Trump in 2020, 83% said that they would choose the American car; 76% of Biden voters agreed. More than 80% of white, Black, and Asian Americans each picked the domestic model. So did similar majorities of older and younger Americans, men and women, Democrats and Republicans, and college graduates and those without a college degree.
Even among prospective EV buyers — presumably the most cost-sensitive cohort — 75% said that they would choose the pricier, U.S.-made car. The Heatmap Climate Poll, a scientific survey of 1,000 American adults in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, was conducted by the Benenson Strategy Group and Heatmap News during a five-day period last month.
An opinion poll is not a guarantee of consumer behavior. But in the past, Americans have generally said they would choose U.S.-made products only if they cost about as much as foreign-made goods. In 2016, an Associated Press-GFK poll found that while about 75% of Americans wanted to buy U.S.-made products, only about 30% were willing to pay more for them. According to a Boston Consulting Group analysis, Americans tend to be willing to pay about 5% more for a domestic-made product, The Washington Post has reported. With the average price of a new car approaching $50,000, Americans now seem to say that they will pay more than double that to avoid a Chinese-made electric vehicle.
For now, that preference probably has bigger political implications than consumer ones. Although China makes more EVs than any other country and dominates global market share, relatively few Chinese-made vehicles make their way to the United States. The American government has imposed high tariffs on Chinese-made EVs and EV parts — including key minerals used in electronics such as lithium, cobalt, and cadmium — since 2018.
Probably the highest-profile Chinese-made EV now sold in the United States is the Polestar 2, a well-reviewed, roughly $50,000 sedan that gets 300 miles of range. Although Polestar is headquartered in Sweden and associated with Volvo, it is controlled by Li Shufu, a Chinese billionaire and the founder of the Zhejiang Geely Holding Group, China’s seventh-largest carmaker. Geely also owns Volvo, so some of Volvo’s electric cars — such as the XC40 Recharge, a small SUV — use the same underlying “platform,” or shared set of design and engineering components, as Geely’s cars.
But aspects of this arrangement are changing. Polestar has said that its next car, the Polestar 3 — an $83,000 SUV due to go on sale later this year — will be made in Ridgeville, South Carolina.
Chinese-made EVs have been welcomed more warmly elsewhere in the world. The five most popular EVs in Australia are all made in China. BYD, a Chinese firm that is by some measures already the world’s largest EV maker, sells cars there and across northern Europe; it plans to expand to the U.K., Japan, and Mexico this year. So do Geely and Nio, another Chinese automaker. And some American firms are deepening their China ties: Tesla’s Shanghai plant is the company’s largest factory worldwide.
“European consumers have been fairly favorable” to Chinese EVs, Cantor said. “The response has been more like, This is a cool car, they’re a cool company. There’s a more complicated geopolitical relationship for any Chinese company to come into the American market.”
Dan Wang, a technology analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics, an economic-research firm based in Beijing, said that Americans may not be ready for how different these Made-in-China EVs will initially feel. “It’s not clear that the mindset [that Chinese automakers] bring from the Chinese market — featuring greater phone connectivity and a richer infotainment experience for the rider — meets the taste of Americans,” he told me.
That said, the poll question may be unrealistic about China’s ability to make cost-efficient EVs in the American market. In addition to the high tariffs, the federal government will soon provide subsidies of up to $7,500 to EVs that meet strict U.S.-made standards; it is due to announce that program’s details later this week.
Even beyond EVs, a large majority of Americans seemed to back the IRA’s broad, industry-forward approach when it was described to them in neutral terms, the poll found. Asked to choose from a list of pro-climate policies, just under half of Americans said that they would support a carbon tax. But 69% said that they wanted the government to invest “in technologies that greatly reduce greenhouse-gas emissions,” such as renewables or carbon removal. Essentially the same share said they supported requiring businesses to buy a certain share of their energy from renewable or zero-carbon sources.
Perhaps above all, the poll hints at Americans’ deepening skepticism of what was once one of the central bargains in its global trade agreements: that the U.S. should accept less domestic manufacturing in exchange for cheaper consumer prices. Americans — at least when asked hypothetically and about their own pocketbooks — don’t seem as willing to make that exchange anymore. Will they make the same decision at the dealership? The answer will matter to more than just the auto industry.
The Heatmap Climate Poll of 1,000 American adults was conducted via online panels by Benenson Strategy Group from Feb. 15 to 20, 2023. The survey included interviews with Americans in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.02 percentage points. You can read more about the topline results here.
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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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If the Senate reconciliation bill gets enacted as written, you’ve got about 92 days left to seal the deal.
If you were thinking about buying or leasing an electric vehicle at some point, you should probably get on it like, right now. Because while it is not guaranteed that the House will approve the budget reconciliation bill that cleared the Senate Tuesday, it is highly likely. Assuming the bill as it’s currently written becomes law, EV tax credits will be gone as of October 1.
The Senate bill guts the subsidies for consumer purchases of electric vehicles, a longstanding goal of the Trump administration. Specifically, it would scrap the 30D tax credit by September 30 of this year, a harsher cut-off than the version of the bill that passed the House, which would have axed the credit by the end of 2025 except for automakers that had sold fewer than 200,000 electric vehicles. The credit as it exists now is worth up to $7,500 for cars with an MSRP below $55,000 (and trucks and sports utility vehicles under $80,000), and, under the Inflation Reduction Act, would have lasted through the end of 2032. The Senate bill also axes the $4,000 used EV tax credit at the end of September.
“Long story short, the credits under the current legislation are only going to be on the books through the end of September,” Corey Cantor, the research director of the Zero Emission Transportation Association, told me. “Now is definitely a good time, if you’re interested in an EV, to look at the market.”
The Senate applied the same strict timeline to credits for clean commercial vehicles, both new and used. For home EV chargers, the tax credit will now expire at the end of June next year.
While EVs were on the road well before the 2022 passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, what the new tax credit did was help build out a truly domestic electric vehicle market, Cantor said. “You have a bunch of refreshed EV models from major automakers,” Cantor told me, including “more affordable models in different segments, and many of them qualify for the credit.”
These include cars produceddomestically by Kia,Hyundai, and Chevrolet. But of course, the biggest winner from the credit is Tesla, whose Model Y was the best-selling car in the world in 2023.
Tesla shares were down over 5.5% in Tuesday afternoon trading, though not just because of Congress. JPMorgan also released an analyst report Monday arguing that the decline in sales seen in the first quarter would accelerate in the second quarter. President Trump, with whom Tesla CEO Elon Musk had an extremely public falling out last month, suggested on social media Monday night that the government efficiency department Musk himself formerly led should “take a good, hard, look” at the subsidies Musk receives across his many businesses. Trump also said that he would “take a look” at Musk’s United States citizenship in response to reporters’ questions about it.
Cantor told me that he expects a surge of consumer attention to the EV market if the bill passes in its current form. “You’ve seen more customers pull their purchase ahead” when subsidies cut-offs are imminent, he said.
But overall, the end of the subsidy is likely to reduce EV sales from their previously expected levels.
Harvard researchers have estimated that the termination of the EV tax credit “would cut the EV share of new vehicle sales in 2030 by 6.0 percentage points,” from 48% of new sales by 2030 to 42%. Combined with other Trump initiatives such as terminating the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program for publicly funded chargers (currently being litigated) and eliminating California’s waiver under the Clean Air Act that allowed it to set tighter vehicle emissions standards, the share of new car sales that are electric could fall to 32% in 2030.
But not all government support for electric vehicles will end by October 1, even if the bill gets the president’s signature in its current form.
“It’s important for consumers to know there are many states that offer subsidies, such as New York, and Colorado,” Cantor told me. That also goes for California, New Jersey, Nevada, and New Mexico. You can find the full list here.
Editor’s note: This story has been edited to include a higher cost limit for trucks and SUVs.
Excise tax is out, foreign sourcing rules are in.
After more than three days of stops and starts on the Senate floor, Congress’ upper chamber 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, as promised.
An amendment brought by Senators Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska that would have more gradually phased down the tax credits for wind and solar rather than abruptly cutting them off was never brought to the floor. Instead, Murkowski struck a deal with the Senate leadership designed to secure her vote that accomplished some of her other priorities, including funding for rural hospitals, while also killing an excise tax on renewables that had only just been stuffed into the bill over the weekend.
The new tax on wind and solar would have driven up development costs by as much as 20% — a prospect that industry groups said would “kill” investment altogether. But even without the tax, the Senate’s 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. While more projects will likely be built under this version than the previous one, the basic outcomes haven’t changed: higher energy costs, project delays, lost jobs, and ceding leadership in artificial intelligence and manufacturing to China.
"This bill will hit Americans hard, terminating credits that have helped families lower their energy and transportation costs, shrinking demand for American-made advanced energy technologies, and squeezing new domestic energy production at a time of rising demand and prices,” Heather O’Neill, the CEO and president of the trade group Advanced Energy United, said in a statement Tuesday. “The advanced energy industry will endure, but the downstream effects of these rollbacks and punitive policies will be felt by American families and businesses for years to come.”
Here’s what’s in the final Senate bill.
The final Senate bill bifurcates the previously technology-neutral tax credits for clean electricity into two categories with entirely different rules and timelines — wind and solar versus everything else.
Tax credits for wind and solar farms would end abruptly with no phase-out period, but the bill includes a significant safe harbor for projects that are already under construction or close to breaking ground. As long as a project starts construction within 12 months of the bill’s passage, it will be able to claim the tax credits as originally laid out in the Inflation Reduction Act. All other projects must be “placed in service,” i.e. begin operating, by the start of 2028 to qualify.
That means if Trump signs the bill into law on July 4, wind and solar developers will have until July 4 of 2026 to “start construction.” Otherwise, they will have less than a year and a half to bring their projects online and still qualify for the credits.
Meanwhile, all other sources of zero-emissions electricity, including batteries, advanced nuclear, geothermal, and hydropower, will be able to continue claiming the tax credits for nearly a decade. The credits would start phasing down for projects that start construction in 2034 and terminate in 2036.
While there are some potential wins in the bill for clean energy development, many of the safe harbored projects will still be subject to complex foreign sourcing rules that may prove too much of a burden to meet.
The bill requires that any zero-emissions electricity or advanced manufacturing project that starts construction after December of this year abide by strict new “foreign entities of concern,” or FEOC rules in order to be eligible for tax credits. The rules penalize companies for having financial or material connections to people or businesses 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.
As with the text that came out of the Senate Finance committee, the text in the final bill would phase in supply chain restrictions, requiring project developers and manufacturers to use fewer and fewer Chinese-sourced inputs over time. For clean electricity projects starting construction next year, 40% of the value of the materials used in the project must be free of ties to a FEOC. By 2030, the threshold would rise to 60%. Energy storage facilities are subject to a more aggressive timeline and would be required to prove that 55% of the project materials are non-FEOC in 2026, rising to 75% by 2030. Each covered advanced manufacturing technology gets its own specific FEOC benchmarks.
Unlike the text from the Finance Committee, however, the final text includes a clear exception for developers who already have procurement contracts in place prior to the bill’s enactment. If a solar developer has already signed a contract to get its cells from a Chinese company, for example, it could exempt that cost from the calculation. That would make it easier for companies further along in the development process to comply with the eligibility rules.
That said, these materials sourcing rules come on top of strict ownership and licensing rules likely to block more than 100 existing and planned solar and battery factories with partial Chinese ownership or licensing deals with Chinese firms from receiving the tax credits, per a BloombergNEF analysis I reported on previously.
Once again, the details of how any of this will work — and whether it will, in fact, be “workable” — will depend heavily on guidance written by the Treasury department. That not only gives the Trump administration significant discretion over the rules, it also assumes that the Treasury department, which is now severely understaffed after Trump’s efficiency department cleaned house earlier this year, will actually have the bandwidth to write them. Without Treasury guidance, developers may not have the cost certainty they need to continue moving forward on projects.
Up until today, the Senate and House looked poised to destroy the business model for companies like Sunrun that lease rooftop solar installations to homeowners and businesses by cutting them off from the investment tax credit, which can bring down the cost of a solar array by as much as 70%. The final Senate bill, however, got rid of this provision and replaced it with a much more narrow version.
Now, the only “leasing” schemes that are barred from claiming tax credits are those for solar water heaters and small wind installations. Companies that lease solar panels, batteries, fuel cells, and geothermal heating equipment are still eligible. SunRun’s stock jumped nearly 10% on Tuesday.
Other than the new FEOC rules, which will have truly existential consequences for a great many projects, there aren’t many changes to the advanced manufacturing tax credit, or 45X, than in previous versions of the bill. The OBBBA would create a new phase-out schedule for critical mineral producers claiming the tax credit that begins in 2031. Previously, critical minerals were set to be eligible indefinitely. It would also terminate the credit for wind energy components early, in 2028.
One significant change from the Senate Finance text is that the bill would allow vertically integrated companies to stack the tax credit for multiple components.
But perhaps the biggest change, which was introduced last weekend, is a twisted new definition of “critical mineral” that allows metallurgical coal — the type of coal used in steelmaking — to qualify for the tax credit. As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote, most of the metallurgical coal the U.S. produces is exported, meaning this subsidy will mostly help other countries produce cheaper steel.
It looks like the hydrogen industry’s intense lobbying efforts finally paid off: The final Senate bill is the first text we’ve seen since this process began in May that would extend the lifespan of the tax credit for clean hydrogen production. Now, projects that begin construction before January 1, 2028 will still qualify for the credit. This is shorter than the Inflation Reduction Act’s 2033 cut-off, but much longer than the end-of-year cliff earlier versions of the bill would have imposed.
The tax credits for electric vehicles and energy efficiency building improvements would end almost immediately. Consumers will have to purchase or lease a new or used EV before September 30, 2025, in order to benefit. There would be a slightly longer lead time to get an EV charger installed, but that credit (30C) would expire on June 30, 2026.
Meanwhile, energy efficiency upgrades such as installing a heat pump or better-insulated windows and doors would have to be completed by the end of this year in order to qualify. Same goes for self-financed rooftop solar. The tax credit for newly built energy efficiency homes would expire on June 30, 2026.
The bill would make similar changes to the carbon sequestration (45Q) and clean fuels (45Z) tax credits as previous versions, boosting the credit amount for carbon capture projects that do enhanced oil recovery, and extending the clean fuels credit to corn ethanol producers.
The House Rules Committee met on Tuesday afternoon shortly after the Senate vote to deliberate on whether to send it to the House floor, and is still debating as of press time. As of this writing, Rules members Ralph Norman and Chip Roy have said they’ll vote against it.