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New guidance on the Inflation Reduction Act’s “foreign entities of concern” provision didn’t do much to clarify things.
If you’re in the market for a new car and considering cashing in on the $7,500 federal tax credit for an electric vehicle, I have good news. Also bad news.
The good news is, starting January 1, the credit will be a lot easier to claim. You won’t need to meet a certain level of tax liability to qualify or wait for your tax refund. You can transfer the credit to the dealership and take $7,500 off the sticker price right then and there.
The bad news is that suddenly, nobody knows which — if any — EVs will qualify. On Friday, the Biden administration proposed additional guidelines limiting where the components in eligible EVs are allowed to come from. Those guidelines won’t be finalized until early next year. But all signs indicate that the list of qualifying vehicles is set to shrink.
These changes aren’t coming out of nowhere — they’re part of the way the EV tax credit in the Inflation Reduction Act was designed. Over time, the law phases in additional rules that ask more of automakers in terms of onshoring their production and supply chains and minimizing their reliance on China. Beginning in 2024, if a vehicle contains any battery components that were manufactured or assembled by what’s known as a “foreign entity of concern,” it will no longer meet the requirements for the tax credit. Beginning in 2025, the same rule applies to vehicles containing critical minerals that were extracted or processed by a foreign entity of concern.
What, exactly, is a foreign entity of concern? Under U.S. law, the term applies to a company that is “owned by, controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction or direction of” North Korea, Russia, Iran, or, yes, China. But what constitutes ownership or control is somewhat fuzzy.
“The implications are enormous because right now, it seems as if every battery that's going into an electric vehicle has some material ties to China,” Jay Turner, a professor of environmental studies at Wellesley College and author of a book on the history of batteries, told me.
In the proposal published Friday, the Biden administration recommended three criteria for interpreting the rule that it hopes will further strengthen American manufacturing of EV components and help diversify supply chains:
1. If the company producing the battery component or mineral is headquartered or incorporated in China, or if the relevant production activities occur in China, the vehicle will not qualify for an IRA tax credit.
2. If China has a 25% or more voting interest, board control, or equity interest in the company producing the component or mineral, the vehicle will not qualify.
3. If a company licenses or contracts with a Chinese firm, and the license entitles the Chinese firm to “exercise effective control” over production, the vehicle will not qualify.
This is a strict interpretation that’s likely to knock some vehicles off the eligibility list. But in a series of meetings with reporters on Wednesday, officials from the Department of the Treasury and Department of Energy said they didn’t know which or how many vehicles would be affected. “Part of the goal here is to put out this rule, and then the auto companies are going to come back to us,” said Wally Adeyomo, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury. “And then we will know which cars qualify.”
Automakers and EV experts have been anxiously awaiting guidance on the IRA’s foreign entities of concern provision. Adeyomo stressed that companies have been aware that these new rules would be coming ever since the law passed and have been making investments to ensure “that their cars would be able to qualify for this over the long term.”
Though it’s hard to fact check that claim, according to an EV supply chain database maintained by Turner and his students, at least 19 battery component factories have been announced in the U.S. and Canada since the passage of the IRA; none are yet operating, but automakers also have the option to buy components from U.S. trade partners. A report on the EV supply chain published by the International Energy Agency in 2022 notes that while China dominates cell component production, controlling 70% of capacity for cathodes and 85% of anodes, Japan and South Korea also had “considerable shares of the supply chain.”
Turner said it was conceivable that there will be models that qualify for the first phase of the rule beginning in January, which only applies to these battery components, but he was skeptical automakers would be able to continue qualifying in 2025, when the limits on critical minerals go into effect. “The further you get up the supply chain, the greater the exposure is to China,” he said. “It's not because China's got all of the critical minerals. It's that China has the processing facilities to turn those minerals into highly refined materials that are needed for the batteries.”
John Podesta, senior advisor to the president on clean energy innovation, said that Biden is “rewriting that story.” Officials pointed to a recent report from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which found that the Salton Sea region in California has enough mineable lithium to support more than 375 million batteries for EVs. Turner’s database shows at least a dozen projects planned, rumored, or under construction to process minerals including lithium, cobalt, and graphite.
The guidance also raises questions about a $3.5 billion factory that Ford is building in Michigan to bring the production of safer, cheaper EV batteries to the U.S. The company is licensing technology from the Chinese company CATL, the world’s largest battery manufacturer, to produce batteries made of lithium, iron, and phosphate — which are more abundant than the cobalt and nickel used in the dominant batteries on the market. But the deal has come under scrutiny from House Republicans, who accuse CATL of having business ties to mining companies that use forced labor. Ford put construction on hold in September.
When asked about CATL, Deputy Secretary of Energy David Turk said the agency has not evaluated any individual company’s situation, but that they designed the licensing guidance to ”get at who has effective control in these kinds of situations.“
That could mean Ford is off the hook. Months ago, analysts told The Washington Post that the Chinese company will have little control over the Ford plant’s daily operations. “The way they structured this deal, they are keeping CATL at arm’s length as much as possible,” Sam Abuelsamid, head of e-mobility research at Guidehouse Insights, said.
The Biden administration is attempting to race forward on two sets of goals that are somewhat at odds with each other: speeding adoption of EVs while shifting their production away from China, thereby stimulating domestic industry and creating domestic jobs. When I spoke to Jane Nakano, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, earlier this week, she said that if the Biden administration went with a strict 25% threshold for ownership, it could really accelerate automakers’ efforts to diversify sourcing away from China. “But that will take some time,” she added. “In the immediate future, many of the companies may simply try to compete without being able to access the consumer tax credit.”
Turner said that the question is not whether automakers can compete with low-cost EVs produced in China, but rather whether they can put out EVs that are cheaper than conventional cars on the market here.
“Once you get to the point that EVs are cheaper and we have a robust enough charging network that people aren't worried about running out of juice, I think that'll be the tipping point,” he said.
I should note that if you’re interested in this purely as a prospective consumer of an EV, the only thing you need to know is that your options to take advantage of the tax credit might be more limited come January. However, there is one weird trick to get around this and have a lot more options: Leasing. None of the rules around sourcing, assembly, or ownership apply to leased vehicles.
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The agency provided a list to the Sierra Club, which in turn provided the list to Heatmap.
Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency remain closed-lipped about which grants they’ve canceled. Earlier this week, however, the office provided a written list to the Sierra Club in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, which begins to shed light on some of the agency’s actions.
The document shows 49 individual grants that were either “canceled” or prevented from being awarded from January 20 through March 7, which is the day the public information office conducted its search in response to the FOIA request. The grants’ total cumulative value is more than $230 million, although some $30 million appears to have already been paid out to recipients.
The numbers don’t quite line up with what the agency has said publicly. The EPA published three press releases between Trump’s inauguration and March 7, announcing that it had canceled a total of 42 grants and “saved” Americans roughly $227 million. In its first such announcement on February 14, the agency said it was canceling a $50 million grant to the Climate Justice Alliance, but the only grant to that organization on the FOIA spreadsheet is listed at $12 million. To make matters more confusing, there are only $185 million worth of EPA grant cuts listed on the Department of Government Efficiency’s website from the same time period. (Zeldin later announced more than 400 additional grant terminations on March 10.)
Nonetheless, the document gives a clearer picture of which grants Administrator Lee Zeldin has targeted. Nearly half of the canceled grants are related to environmental justice initiatives, which is not surprising, given the Trump administration’s directives to root out these types of programs. But nearly as many were funding research into lower-carbon construction materials and better product labeling to prevent greenwashing.
Here’s the full list of grants, by program:
A few more details and observations from this list:
In the original FOIA request, Sierra Club had asked for a lot more information, including communications between EPA and the grant recipients, and explanations for why the grants — which in many cases involved binding contracts between the government and recipients — were being terminated. In its response, EPA said it was still working on the rest of the request and expected to issue a complete response by April 12.
Defenders of the Inflation Reduction Act have hit on what they hope will be a persuasive argument for why it should stay.
With the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and its tax credits for building and producing clean energy hanging in the balance, the law’s supporters have increasingly turned to dollars-and-cents arguments in favor of its preservation. Since the election, industry and research groups have put out a handful of reports making the broad argument that in addition to higher greenhouse gas emissions, taking away these tax credits would mean higher electricity bills.
The American Clean Power Association put out a report in December, authored by the consulting firm ICF, arguing that “energy tax credits will drive $1.9 trillion in growth, creating 13.7 million jobs and delivering 4x return on investment.”
The Solar Energy Industries Association followed that up last month with a letter citing an analysis by Aurora Energy Research, which found that undoing the tax credits for wind, solar, and storage would reduce clean energy deployment by 237 gigawatts through 2040 and cost nearly 100,000 jobs, all while raising bills by hundreds of dollars in Texas and New York. (Other groups, including the conservative environmental group ConservAmerica and the Clean Energy Buyers Association have commissioned similar research and come up with similar results.)
And just this week, Energy Innovation, a clean energy research group that had previously published widely cited research arguing that clean energy deployment was not linked to the run-up in retail electricity prices, published a report that found repealing the Inflation Reduction Act would “increase cumulative household energy costs by $32 billion” over the next decade, among other economic impacts.
The tax credits “make clean energy even more economic than it already is, particularly for developers,” explained Energy Innovation senior director Robbie Orvis. “When you add more of those technologies, you bring down the electricity cost significantly,” he said.
Historically, the price of fossil fuels like natural gas and coal have set the wholesale price for electricity. With renewables, however, the operating costs associated with procuring those fuels go away. The fewer of those you have, “the lower the price drops,” Orvis said. Without the tax credits to support the growth and deployment of renewables, the analysis found that annual energy costs per U.S. household would go up some $48 annually by 2030, and $68 by 2035.
These arguments come at a time when retail electricity prices in much of the country have grown substantially. Since December 2019, average retail electricity prices have risen from about $0.13 per kilowatt-hour to almost $0.18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Massachusetts and California, rates are over $0.30 a kilowatt-hour, according to the Energy Information Administration. As Energy Innovation researchers have pointed out, states with higher renewable penetration sometimes have higher rates, including California, but often do not, as in South Dakota, where 77% of its electricity comes from renewables.
Retail electricity prices are not solely determined by fuel costs Distribution costs for maintaining the whole electrical system are also a factor. In California, for example,it’s these costs that have driven a spike in rates, as utilities have had to harden their grids against wildfires. Across the whole country, utilities have had to ramp up capital investment in grid equipment as it’s aged, driving up distribution costs, a 2024 Energy Innovation report argued.
A similar analysis by Aurora Energy Research (the one cited by SEIA) that just looked at investment and production tax credits for wind, solar, and batteries found that if they were removed, electricity bills would increase hundreds of dollars per year on average, and by as much as $40 per month in New York and $29 per month in Texas.
One reason the bill impact could be so high, Aurora’s Martin Anderson told me, is that states with aggressive goals for decarbonizing the electricity sector would still have to procure clean energy in a world where its deployment would have gotten more expensive. New York is targetinga target for getting 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, while Minnesota has a goal for its utilities to sell 55% clean electricity by 2035 and could see its average cost increase by $22 a month. Some of these states may have to resort to purchasing renewable energy certificates to make up the difference as new generation projects in the state become less attractive.
Bills in Texas, on the other hand, would likely go up because wind and solar investment would slow down, meaning that Texans’ large-scale energy consumption would be increasingly met with fossil fuels (Texas has a Renewable Portfolio Standard that it has long since surpassed).
This emphasis from industry and advocacy groups on the dollars and cents of clean energy policy is hardly new — when the House of Representatives passed the (doomed) Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill in 2009, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told the House, “Remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.”
More recently, when Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich and Tim Kaine hosted a press conference to press their case for preserving the Inflation Reduction Act, the email that landed in reporters’ inboxes read “Heinrich, Kaine Host Press Conference on Trump’s War on Affordable, American-Made Energy.”
“Trump’s war on the Inflation Reduction Act will kill American jobs, raise costs on families, weaken our economic competitiveness, and erode American global energy dominance,” Heinrich told me in an emailed statement. “Trump should end his destructive crusade on affordable energy and start putting the interests of working people first.”
That the impacts and benefits of the IRA are spread between blue and red states speaks to the political calculation of clean energy proponents, hoping that a bill that subsidized solar panels in Texas, battery factories in Georgia, and battery storage in Southern California could bring about a bipartisan alliance to keep it alive. While Congressional Republicans will be scouring the budget for every last dollar to help fund an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a group of House Republicans have gone on the record in defense of the IRA’s tax credits.
“There's been so much research on the emissions impact of the IRA over the past few years, but there's been comparatively less research on the economic benefits and the household energy benefits,” Orvis said. “And I think that one thing that's become evident in the last year or so is that household energy costs — inflation, fossil fuel prices — those do seem to be more top of mind for Americans.”
Opinion modeling from Heatmap Pro shows that lower utility bills is the number one perceived benefit of renewables in much of the country. The only counties where it isn’t the number one perceived benefit are known for being extremely wealthy, extremely crunchy, or both: Boulder and Denver in Colorado; Multnomah (a.k.a. Portland) in Oregon; Arlington in Virginia; and Chittenden in Vermont.
On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.