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On Last Energy’s milestone, California CCS, and RFK Jr. vs. microplastics
On a California chem leak, solar manufacturing, and BHP’s climate retreat
With both temperatures and electricity prices rising, many who are using less energy are still paying more, according to data from the Electricity Price Hub.
Two new reports out this week create a seemingly contradictory portrait of the country’s energy transition progress.
Two clean energy reports out this week offer seemingly contradictory snapshots of domestic solar and battery manufacturing. One, released Wednesday by the Rhodium Group’s Clean Investment Monitor, shows a distinct decline in investment going into U.S. factories to make more of these technologies. The other, released today by the trade group American Clean Power Association, shows staggering recent growth in production capacity.
So which is it? Is U.S. clean energy manufacturing booming or busting?
Maybe both.
The U.S. is suddenly producing more solar and batteries than ever before — enough to meet current domestic demand — so it makes sense that investment in new factories is starting to slow. At the same time, there’s a lot of room for growth in producing the upstream components that go into these technologies, but the U.S. is no longer as attractive a place to set up shop as it was over the past four years.
The U.S. saw 30 new utility-scale solar factories and 30 new battery factories come online last year alone, according to ACP. The country now has the capacity to meet average domestic demand for storage systems through 2030, and can produce enough solar panels to satisfy demand two times over.
In both industries, nearly all of that capacity has been added since 2022, when the Inflation Reduction Act created new subsidies for domestic manufacturing. The advanced manufacturing production tax credit incentivized not just solar and battery factories, but also all the production of components that go into these technologies, including solar and battery cells, polysilicon, wafers, and anodes. On top of these direct subsidies, the IRA generated demand for U.S.-made products by granting bonus tax credits for utility-scale solar and battery projects built with domestically produced parts.
“The policy definitely laid the right foundation for a lot of this investment to take place,” John Hensley, ACP’s senior vice president of markets and policy analysis, told me.
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act has changed the environment, however. The utility-scale wind and solar tax credits were supposed to apply through at least 2033, but now projects have to start construction by July 4, 2026 — just over a month from now — in order to claim them. Any of those projects that got started this year will also have to adhere to complex new sourcing rules prohibiting Chinese-made materials.
Now, dollars flowing into new U.S. solar factories appears to be on the decline. Investment fell 22% between the fourth quarter of last year and the first of 2026. Battery manufacturing investment dropped by 16%.
The reason investment is declining is not entirely because of OBBBA — it’s partly a function of the fact that a lot of the projects announced immediately after the IRA passed are entering operations, Hannah Hess, director of climate and energy at the Rhodium Group, told me.
Rhodium’s Clean Investment Monitor tracks two metrics, announcements and investment. Announcements are when a company says it’s building a new factory or expanding an existing one, usually with some kind of projected cost. Investments are an estimate of the actual dollars spent during a given quarter on facility construction, calculated based on the total project budget and the expected amount of time it will take to complete after breaking ground.
According to Rhodium’s data, the peak period for new solar manufacturing project announcements was the second half of 2022 through the first quarter of 2025. During that time, announcements averaged more than $2 billion per quarter. New solar factories announced this past quarter, by contrast, fell to about $350 million.
Since it can take a while to get steel in the ground, the peak period for investment was slightly later, with $13.5 billion invested between the second quarter of 2023 and the third quarter of 2025.
“What we were seeing in that post-IRA period was huge, almost unconstrained growth in that sector, and that’s not happening anymore,” Hess said.
Most of this growth occurred all the way downstream, at the final product assembly level — i.e. factories making solar and battery modules that still had to import many of the components that went into them. This was the “lowest hanging fruit” to bring to the U.S., Hensley, of ACP, told me, as the final assembly is the least technologically challenging part of the supply chain.
“These supply chains have momentum as they get going,” he said, “so as you establish those far downstream component manufacturing, you start to recruit all of the upstream manufacturing.” In other words, a solar cell manufacturer is far more likely to build in the U.S. if there’s a robust local market of module factories to buy the cells.
There’s evidence that’s still happening in spite of changes to the tax credit structure. The ACP report says that three solar cell factories came online between 2024 and today — one per year. If all of the additional factories that have been announced are built by 2030, the U.S. will have nearly enough capacity to meet all of its own demand for solar with domestic cells. Battery cell capacity is growing even faster, with three factories as of the end of 2025 and seven more expected to be complete by the end of this year, which will produce more than enough units to meet average annual demand.
It’s the next step up on the supply chain that spells trouble. For solar, that’s ingots and wafers, followed by polysilicon. Today, the only producer of ingots and wafers in the U.S. is a company called Corning. It produces enough to meet about 25% of current domestic solar cell production, but cell production will more than quadruple by the end of this year compared to last year, according to ACP. Similarly, we produce enough polysilicon to meet Corning’s current needs, but not enough to meet anticipated cell demand. The announced projects in the pipeline will not add much on either front.
For batteries, it’s the anodes and cathodes. There’s currently one factory in California producing cathodes and at least one more under construction, but as there is nothing else in the pipeline, the ACP report expects cell manufacturers to rely on imported cathodes for the foreseeable future. Anodes are the one bright spot — there’s one factory producing what’s known as active anode material factory in the U.S., and four more anticipated by the end of this year. Together, they have the potential to meet demand by 2028, according to ACP.
The question now is whether that snowball effect kicked off by the IRA will continue. “A lot has changed about the outlook for future demand after the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed,” Hess said. “We have seen some more project cancellations and pauses in construction recently.”
Most recently, a company called Maxeon Solar Technologies canceled a $1 billion cell and module factory in New Mexico. The company had been “fighting for its life” since 2024, according to Canary Media. It’s also majority owned by a Chinese state-owned company. The OBBBA was likely the nail in the coffin, as it penalizes solar developers who source panels from companies with Chinese ownership.
OBBBA also shortened the timeline for the wind and solar tax credits, while the Trump administration’s hostility to wind and solar permitting has made it more difficult for projects to get built before the credits expire. Hensley said the Trump administration’s hostility toward clean energy has added a lot of risk into the system, complicating final investment decisions for manufacturers.
On the flip side, tariffs have the potential to help some domestic producers. Duties on imports from countries such as Cambodia, India, and Vietnam, all major manufacturers of solar panels, “have made their exports to the U.S. almost prohibitive,” Lara Hayim, the head of solar research at BloombergNEF, told me in an email. “This sort of policy framework could continue to provide some protection for domestic manufacturers,” she said, but there are still plenty of countries with low enough tariffs that they will continue to serve the U.S. and compete with domestic manufacturers.
Hensley said that the Trump administration’s tariffs were a double edged sword. They can help domestic manufacturers, but not if they make all of the inputs into the product more expensive.
“That’s a problem with these blanket type of tariffs that aren’t really fine-tuned to target the behavior that you’d like to see,” he told me. “I think we’re seeing a lot of that push and pull and tension in the system at the moment.”
Between Trump’s tariffs and the OBBBA, there’s no doubt that the manufacturing boom sparked by the IRA is slowing. But Hensley is optimistic that the progress will continue. “We haven’t attracted all of the supply chain yet. It’s still a work in progress, but so far the signs are quite good.”
Mounting evidence shows that Republican voters are rapidly turning against artificial intelligence.
The data center backlash is causing a crisis of faith amongst American conservatives over land use, energy abundance, and corporate regulation. The Republican Party — not to mention the politics of AI infrastructure — may never be the same.
In the last week, I’ve seen a surge of Republican politicians pushing to temporarily ban data centers in conservative states. In South Carolina, Representative Nancy Mace, a leading GOP gubernatorial primary candidate, called for a statewide moratorium on new data centers. In Texas, the sitting agriculture commissioner Sid Miller proposed the same for the Lone Star State. Ditto in North Dakota where the idea got backing from a GOP primary candidate for a Public Service Commission seat.
I also witnessed a wave of anti-data center sentiment bursting forth online over the last few weeks. Major figures in the online right like Matt Walsh and Tucker Carlson have been posting videos lambasting the pace and practices of the data center boom, joined by a flood of commentary on YouTube and conservative video platforms like Rumble. On X and Facebook, the right has split into factions with figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene siding with activists while other pundits and personalities play data center defense, mocking critics as misinformed and antithetical to free market conservatism.
“Right now, frankly, anti-AI politics, anti-data center politics, that’s working for some people in some campaigns,” right-wing pundit Scott Jennings said Wednesday on his Salem News Channel show in a discussion with Republican Senator Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania, one of the biggest AI boosters in Congress.
Conservative and GOP-aligned political and policy advisers told me all of this ruckus is a lagging indicator for genuine anger amongst their voters. “It’s a collision between the Republicans’ traditional pro-business identity and a new populist identity,” Chris Wilson, CEO of political data firm EyesOver, told me in an interview Wednesday. “The old Republican consensus would’ve been pretty straightforward. The challenge is you have this emerging Republican electorate asking who owns this? Who is consuming it? Who is it going to benefit?” Wilson previously founded GOP polling firm WPA Intelligence.
It’s all in the data, pun intended. On Friday, GOP pollster Frank Luntz posted about this anxiety over data center development spreading to “regions led by both Democrats and Republicans.” Luntz pointed to a new Gallup poll confirming a trendline we reported in February using Heatmap Pro data: Opposition to data centers in GOP areas rose more than 300% over the previous six months.
Other recent data points make it obvious Trump Country is turning against data centers, such as in New Jersey, where a Stockton University poll found nearly half of Republican voters would support a data center ban “in the town where they live.” Meanwhile, new analysis out of Houston University in Texas found roughly 45% of Republicans in that city’s metro area would oppose a data center within a mile of their home.
Let’s be honest, here — those are approaching offshore wind-levels of abysmal support.
“The fact the polling has changed so negatively so quickly has shown there is very real concern, very real worry about what these data centers are doing and how they affect a region,” said Will Reinhart, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Reinhart admitted that with the way winds are blowing, there may be a “very real” possibility that a major 2028 Republican candidate for president supports a national data center moratorium. The fact Florida Governor and 2024 candidate Ron DeSantis has been so critical of data center development “is a bellwether.”
“I would imagine there’s going to be more support for [moratoria], especially as energy prices are going to continue to rise. To me it feels like this is coming. What this portends for a larger electorate is you’ll have a push and pull. You’ll have some regions that want to see development and know they can benefit from a data center. Some regions are going to say no, we don’t want this.”
This level of profound opposition threatens to disrupt what was once Republican political consensus behind land use policy and energy development. Plainly, even once catnip for the GOP like a fossil-friendly permitting approach could face political hurdles in the future if Republican voters don’t want pipelines to power the largest driver of new energy demand.
Perhaps it’s understandable then why so many figures on the Right are coming to defend data centers. The leading counterargument? Data center opponents are agitators armed with misinformation and backed by foreign governments trying to undermine American dominance in artificial intelligence. Pro-AI advocates are seizing on the idea, as is Shark Tank magnate Kevin O’Leary (with lackluster results). Conservative energy pundits in D.C. are asking GOP lawmakers to investigate whether foreign funding is playing a role in the backlash. It’s even endorsed by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who said last week at a conference in Alaska that some of the opposition was funded by “foreign-sourced dark money.”
“I worry about us on the Build Baby Build where we’re still running into this thing where there are some states that are literally passing bans on AI data centers,” Burgum said, “and it’s not organic and local.”
When it comes to swaying skeptical members of the public, blaming outsiders for local conflicts over energy and tech infrastructure development is unlikely to work. The past is very much prologue here; some Republicans have long argued — with scant evidence — that foreign adversaries and wealthy Europeans are quietly puppeteering the American environmental movement. But we’ve never seen the national discourse ever pick up the topic, really. Meanwhile, we all know this strategy never really worked when defending solar farms from opposition in rural areas.
Republican energy politics strategist Chris Johnson told me that ironically, the solar and wind fights of recent years laid the groundwork for openness to conspiracies about technology as well as “muscle memory built for NIMBYism, to fight against anything.”
“There has to be this much more empathetic effort to meet people where they’re at,” Johnson said, adding he believes the conflicts over solar and farmland became an example of a “mistake” that wound up undermining other GOP priorities.
“The overemphasis on solar’s land use and the imagery of farmland being taken by solar panels like a scene out of Blade Runner, that is not helpful when you’re now seeing an environment with such tremendous growth in energy demand,” he told me. “I think it was a mistake for folks on the right to go so hard against some technologies we clearly need right now.”
All this being said, all hope is not lost for the right-coded AI and data center optimists out there.
David Blackmon, a longtime lobbyist for oil and gas based in Texas who writes about energy for The Daily Caller, told me how this backlash reminded him of the fracking boom of the 2010s. Perhaps famously to those in oil and gas, scares about water and air pollution from fracking were plentiful throughout that era, typified by the film Gasland — specifically a viral segment from the film involving flammable water from a faucet. The fracking boom ran through rural and often conservative-leaning towns and counties, and Blackmon remembers companies were “pretty close to losing our license to operate” in major parts of the shale patch “because of the ham-handed way we handled communications and public outreach.”
“This pretense that all the opposition to their projects is somehow bussed in from other places, or amounts to astroturf, is the down-playing of real, valid public concerns that are raised related to their projects,” he said. “The data center industry, at least in a few high profile cases, has really made a mess of things. It’s a lack of understanding of the industry. The case hasn’t been effectively made at a national level, or a local level. Why is this big industrial complex being plopped down?”
Blackmon and many others in conservative political circles believe the pathway to regenerating support for data centers rests in effectively communicating local benefits. The Rainey Center, another right-leaning D.C. organization, shared new polling with me that shows educating voters about policies like President Trump’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge makes them overall more likely to support AI data centers. “The public isn’t opposed to data centers, they’re opposed to paying for them on their power bill,” Hunt told me. “The industry’s social license is being written right now.”
This is also how some Republican AI and data center optimists in Congress seem to think.
Speaking with Scott Jennings on his show Wednesday, Dave McCormick expressed his belief data centers can be “economic engines.” But he, too, stressed that data center developers should fulfill a “covenant” with the communities hosting them.
“When these data centers come to town, they need to bring more energy than they use. So they should lower energy prices, not raise them. They need to have water recycled so it’s a closed-loop system. They need to make commitments on what they’re going to bring to the tax base. They need to promise to use local workers. I think if that covenant is in place most communities are going to opt in,” McCormick said. “But there’s a lot of disinformation, a lot of lies out there about it. And frankly the Chinese are behind a lot of it, Scott. ”
So where does this leave us? I believe we’ll see more Republican-led counties, states, and congressional offices back restrictions of some kind on data centers, as well as new rules and regulations on the burgeoning sector’s energy and water impacts. Whether the GOP’s traditionally business-friendly orthodoxy is permanently fissured by the data center backlash is yet to be determined. But we might be about to see a Republican race to a populist top on this issue — or bottom, depending on where you’re sitting.
“If they’re just pro data centers, that’s a problem,” Wilson, the GOP pollster, told me. “If they’re pro-AI, that idea is still politically safe, and it’s safer than being anti-growth or anti-technology. You don’t want to be perceived that way as a Republican.” Republican voters will still be supportive of AI competitiveness, beating China, domestic infrastructure, and lower energy bills, he said. But they’ll be skeptical of taxpayer subsidies for data centers, straining on energy and water supplies, secrecy around data center deals, or use of eminent domain.
“Vulnerabilty emerges when support for data centers is perceived as support for big corporate interests over local control,” Wilson concluded.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct Wilson’s title.
