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The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is one signature away from becoming law and drastically changing the economics of renewables development in the U.S. That doesn’t mean decarbonization is over, experts told Heatmap, but it certainly doesn’t help.
What do we do now?
That’s the question people across the climate change and clean energy communities are asking themselves now that Congress has passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which would slash most of the tax credits and subsidies for clean energy established under the Inflation Reduction Act.
Preliminary data from Princeton University’s REPEAT Project (led by Heatmap contributor Jesse Jenkins) forecasts that said bill will have a dramatic effect on the deployment of clean energy in the U.S., including reducing new solar and wind capacity additions by almost over 40 gigawatts over the next five years, and by about 300 gigawatts over the next 10. That would be enough to power 150 of Meta’s largest planned data centers by 2035.
But clean energy development will hardly grind to a halt. While much of the bill’s implementation is in question, the bill as written allows for several more years of tax credit eligibility for wind and solar projects and another year to qualify for them by starting construction. Nuclear, geothermal, and batteries can claim tax credits into the 2030s.
Shares in NextEra, which has one of the largest clean energy development businesses, have risen slightly this year and are down just 6% since the 2024 election. Shares in First Solar, the American solar manufacturer, are up substantially Thursday from a day prior and are about flat for the year, which may be a sign of investors’ belief that buyer demand for solar panels will persist — or optimism that the OBBBA’s punishing foreign entity of concern requirements will drive developers into the company’s arms.
Partisan reversals are hardly new to climate policy. The first Trump administration gleefully pulled the rug from under the Obama administration’s power plant emissions rules, and the second has been thorough so far in its assault on Biden’s attempt to replace them, along with tailpipe emissions standards and mileage standards for vehicles, and of course, the IRA.
Even so, there are ways the U.S. can reduce the volatility for businesses that are caught in the undertow. “Over the past 10 to 20 years, climate advocates have focused very heavily on D.C. as the driver of climate action and, to a lesser extent, California as a back-stop,” Hannah Safford, who was director for transportation and resilience in the Biden White House and is now associate director of climate and environment at the Federation of American Scientists, told Heatmap. “Pursuing a top down approach — some of that has worked, a lot of it hasn’t.”
In today’s environment, especially, where recognition of the need for action on climate change is so politically one-sided, it “makes sense for subnational, non-regulatory forces and market forces to drive progress,” Safford said. As an example, she pointed to the fall in emissions from the power sector since the late 2000s, despite no power plant emissions rule ever actually being in force.
“That tells you something about the capacity to deliver progress on outcomes you want,” she said.
Still, industry groups worry that after the wild swing between the 2022 IRA and the 2025 OBBBA, the U.S. has done permanent damage to its reputation as a business-friendly environment. Since continued swings at the federal level may be inevitable, building back that trust and creating certainty is “about finding ballasts,” Harry Godfrey, the managing director for Advanced Energy United’s federal priorities team, told Heatmap.
The first ballast groups like AEU will be looking to shore up is state policy. “States have to step up and take a leadership role,” he said, particularly in the areas that were gutted by Trump’s tax bill — residential energy efficiency and electrification, transportation and electric vehicles, and transmission.
State support could come in the form of tax credits, but that’s not the only tool that would create more certainty for businesses — considering the budget cuts states will face as a result of Trump’s tax bill, it also might not be an option. But a lot can be accomplished through legislative action, executive action, regulatory reform, and utility ratemaking, Godfrey said. He cited new virtual power plant pilot programs in Virginia and Colorado, which will require further regulatory work to “to get that market right.”
A lot of work can be done within states, as well, to make their deployment of clean energy more efficient and faster. Tyler Norris, a fellow at Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment, pointed to Texas’ “connect and manage” model for connecting renewables to the grid, which allows projects to come online much more quickly than in the rest of the country. That’s because the state’s electricity market, ERCOT, does a much more limited study of what grid upgrades are needed to connect a project to the grid, and is generally more tolerant of curtailing generation (i.e. not letting power get to the grid at certain times) than other markets.
“As Texas continues to outpace other markets in generator and load interconnections, even in the absence of renewable tax credits, it seems increasingly plausible that developers and policymakers may conclude that deeper reform is needed to the non-ERCOT electricity markets,” Norris told Heatmap in an email.
At the federal level, there’s still a chance for, yes, bipartisan permitting reform, which could accelerate the buildout of all kinds of energy projects by shortening their development timelines and helping bring down costs, Xan Fishman, senior managing director of the energy program at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told Heatmap. “Whether you care about energy and costs and affordability and reliability or you care about emissions, the next priority should be permitting reform,” he said.
And Godfrey hasn’t given up on tax credits as a viable tool at the federal level, either. “If you told me in mid-November what this bill would look like today, while I’d still be like, Ugh, that hurts, and that hurts, and that hurts, I would say I would have expected more rollbacks. I would have expected deeper cuts,” he told Heatmap. Ultimately, many of the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax credits will stick around in some form, although we’ve yet to see how hard the new foreign sourcing requirements will hit prospective projects.
While many observers ruefully predicted that the letter-writing moderate Republicans in the House and Senate would fold and support whatever their respective majorities came up with — which they did, with the sole exception of Pennsylvania Republican Brian Fitzpatrick — the bill also evolved over time with input from those in the GOP who are not openly hostile to the clean energy industry.
“You are already seeing people take real risk on the Republican side pushing for clean energy,” Safford said, pointing to Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski, who opposed the new excise tax on wind and solar added to the Senate bill, which earned her vote after it was removed.
Some damage has already been done, however. Canceled clean energy investments adds up to $23 billion so far this year, compared to just $3 billion in all of 2024, according to the decarbonization think tank RMI. And that’s before OBBBA hits Trump’s desk.
The start-and-stop nature of the Inflation Reduction Act may lead some companies, states, local government and nonprofits to become leery of engaging with a big federal government climate policy again.
“People are going to be nervous about it for sure,” Safford said. “The climate policy of the future has to be polycentric. Even if you have the political opportunity to make a big swing again, people will be pretty gun shy. You will need to pursue a polycentric approach.”
But to Godfrey, all the back and forth over the tax credits, plus the fact that Republicans stood up to defend them in the 11th hour, indicates that there is a broader bipartisan consensus emerging around using them as a tool for certain energy and domestic manufacturing goals. A future administration should think about refinements that will create more enduring policy but not set out in a totally new direction, he said.
Albert Gore, the executive director of the Zero Emission Transportation Association, was similarly optimistic that tax credits or similar incentives could work again in the future — especially as more people gain experience with electric vehicles, batteries, and other advanced clean energy technologies in their daily lives. “The question is, how do you generate sufficient political will to implement that and defend it?” he told Heatmap. “And that depends on how big of an economic impact does it have, and what does it mean to the American people?”
Ultimately, Fishman said, the subsidy on-off switch is the risk that comes with doing major policy on a strictly partisan basis.
“There was a lot of value in these 10-year timelines [for tax credits in the IRA] in terms of business certainty, instead of one- or two- year extensions,” Fishman told Heatmap. “The downside that came with that is that it became affiliated with one party. It was seen as a partisan effort, and it took something that was bipartisan and put a partisan sheen on it.”
The fight for tax credits may also not be over yet. Before passage of the IRA, tax credits for wind and solar were often extended in a herky-jerky bipartisan fashion, where Democrats who supported clean energy in general and Republicans who supported it in their districts could team up to extend them.
“You can see a world where we have more action on clean energy tax credits to enhance, extend and expand them in a future congress,” Fishman told Heatmap. “The starting point for Republican leadership, it seemed, was completely eliminating the tax credits in this bill. That’s not what they ended up doing.”
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When Congress rescinded unobligated funds from the historic climate law, it inadvertently answered a question climate advocates have been asking for months.
The Biden administration left office without ever disclosing how much of the historic climate funding from the Inflation Reduction Act it had spent.
Politico reached out to every federal agency in November in an attempt to answer that question and could only conclude that it was a “big mystery.” The administration had announced awards for about 67% of the $145.4 billion in grants created by the IRA, the outlet found, but the amount that had been obligated — meaning legally committed and therefore, at least in theory, protected — remained largely unknown.
That continued to be true right up until the legislative process for Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. In addition to overhauling the IRA’s clean energy tax credits, Republicans in Congress rescinded the unobligated funds from 47 of the law’s more than 80 climate and environmental programs. According to scores from the Congressional Budget Office, $31.7 billion of the $93.4 billion for those programs, or about 34%, was left.
That means the Biden administration spent or contracted out about two-thirds of the funding from these programs. The data puts into focus what the ultimate effects and outcomes of the Inflation Reduction Act will be over the coming decades — or rather, what they could be, if the Trump administration upholds existing contracts. Whether the administration must honor these agreements is the subject of several ongoing lawsuits.
But we can see, for example, that the Environmental Protection Agency, which had the largest appropriation from the IRA of any agency, obligated the vast majority of that money to states, tribes, nonprofits, and other beneficiaries. Billions of dollars to monitor and address air pollution in low-income communities and at schools, to phase down planet-warming refrigerants and transition to next-generation technologies, and to help states build out and implement their climate action plans should theoretically be flowing into the economy, so long as the contracts are ultimately honored. The entirety of the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund was obligated, and while the EPA has attempted to claw back roughly $20 billion of that — a process that has been held up in the courts — the $7 billion set aside for a low-income solar program called Solar For All is actively funding new projects around the country.
The agency under Biden was less successful in standing up a series of programs designed to advance greenhouse gas emissions reporting. Initiatives to improve the labeling systems for low-carbon construction materials and to standardize corporate emissions reporting never really got off the ground.
The Department of Agriculture was also an efficient spender. While the data shows it had obligated only about $7 billion of the more than $18 billion allocated for climate-focused conservation programs, only $10 billion of the funding was actually available for the department to use by the time Biden left office. On the one hand, that means it awarded 70% of the available funds. On the other, that means Congress has now evaporated a whopping $11 billion that could have been disbursed.
The Forest Service, which is under the USDA, also deployed more than $2 billion, or about 93% of its funding for National Forest restoration, urban forestry, and climate mitigation grants for private forest owners.
There are limitations to the data. It shows that the Department of Energy only spent about 39% of its funding, but because the Budget Office did not break out the rescissions by program, we can’t see how far along the agency got with each one, or how much of each was clawed back. The data can also be somewhat misleading, as several of the programs provide loans and loan guarantees, while the OBBB only rescinded “credit subsidies,” i.e. money to cover the costs of this lending service. In other words, this doesn’t tell us much about how much Biden’s Loan Programs Office accomplished. But in this case the office’s website helps fill out the picture: It lists 23 active loans that were made after the IRA passed, worth nearly $58 billion. (The IRA appropriated about $11.7 billion in credit subsidies to the Loan Programs Office.)
I also put together a list of programs that Congress did not rescind, as they show which IRA creations the GOP either deemed worthwhile or too depleted, a.k.a. obligated, to be worth the effort. Several big-ticket items jump out. As I’ve previously written, two rebate programs for home efficiency improvements remain intact, although most of the $8.8 billion in funding is currently paused. Drought mitigation, water access, and tribal electrification and climate resilience grants were also untouched. A $3 billion EPA program to reduce air pollution at ports made it through the gambit after an initial House draft of the OBBB had proposed killing it.
Republicans in Congress also preserved a nearly $10 billion program to help rural electric cooperatives invest in clean energy and energy efficiency. Rural coops disproportionately rely on coal-fired power plants, burdening their members with higher energy prices and dirtier air. While the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association is a major advocate for coal power and has applauded Trump’s moves to boost it, the group also championed the rural clean energy program, with its CEO telling E&E News last fall that the program was oversubscribed and that “there is an appetite for investing in clean energy.”
To be sure, the question of whether and to what extent the Trump administration will disburse previously obligated funds or continue to spend down the remaining programs is a big one. But the supposition that the OBBB “killed” the IRA is also not really accurate. Between obligated funds and the programs that weren’t rescinded, more than $105 billion could still flow into the economy to fight climate change.
Unlike just about every other car sales event, this one has a real — congressionally mandated — end date.
Car salespeople, like all salespeople, love to project a sense of urgency. You know the familiar seasonal rhythm of the TV commercial: Toyotathon is on now — but hurry in, because these deals won’t last. The end of the discount is, of course, an arbitrary deadline invented to juice that month’s sales figures; there’ll be another sale soon.
But in the electric vehicle market there’s about to be a fire sale, and this time it really is a race against the clock.
Federal incentives for EVs and EV equipment were critically endangered the moment Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election. Now, with the passage of the omnibus budget reconciliation bill on the Fourth of July, they have a hard expiration date. Most importantly, the $7,500 federal tax credit for an EV purchase is dead after September 30. Drivers who might want to go electric and dealerships and car companies eager to unload EVs are suddenly in a furor to get deals done before the calendar turns to October.
The impending end of the tax credit has already become a sales pitch. Tesla, faced with sagging sales numbers thanks in part to Elon Musk’s misadventures in the Trump administration, has been sending a steady slog of emails trying to convince me to replace my just-paid-off Model 3 with another one. The brand didn’t take long to turn the impending EV gloom into a short-term sales opportunity. “Order soon to get your $7,500,” declared an email blast sent just days after Trump signed the bill.
On Reddit, the general manager of a Mississippi dealership posted to the community devoted to the Ioniq 9, Hyundai’s new three-row all-electric SUV, to appeal to anyone who might be interested in one of the three models that just appeared on their lot. It’s an unusual strategy, a local dealer seeking out a nationwide group of enthusiasts just to move a trio of vehicles. But it’s not hard to see the economic writing on the wall.
The Ioniq 9 is a cool and capable vehicle, but one that starts at $59,000 in its most basic form and quickly rises into the $60,000s and $70,000s with fancier versions. Even with the discount, the Ioniq 9 costs far more than many of the more affordable gas-powered three-row crossovers. And now the vehicle has come down with a serious case of unlucky timing, with deliveries beginning this summer just ahead of the incentive’s disappearance. As of October 1, the EV could become an albatross that nobody in suburban Memphis wants to drive off the lot.
Over the past year, Ford has offered the Ford Power Promise, an excellent deal that throws in a free home charger plus the cost of installation to anyone who buys a new EV. That deal was supposed to expire this summer. But the Detroit giant has extended its offer until — surprise — Sept. 30, in the hopes of enticing a wave of buyers while the getting is good.
This isn’t the first time EV-makers have been through such a deadline crunch. When the $7,500 federal tax credit for EV purchases first started in 2010, the law was written so that the benefit phased out over time once a car company passed a particular sales threshold. By the time I bought my EV in the spring of 2019, for example, Tesla had already sold so many vehicles that its tax credit was halved from $7,500 to $3,750. We had to rush to take delivery in the last few days of June as the benefit was slated to fall again, to $1,875, on July 1, before it disappeared completely in 2020.
The Inflation Reduction Act passed under President Biden not only reinstated the $7,500 credit but also took away the gradual decline of the benefit; it was supposed to stick around, in full, until 2032. But despite Trump’s on-again, off-again bromance with Elon Musk, the president followed through on his long-term antagonistic rhetoric against EVs by repealing the benefit as part of this month’s disastrous big bill.
Trump, despite his best efforts, won’t kill the EV. The electric horse has simply left the barn — the world has come too far and seen too much of what electrification has to offer to turn back just because the current U.S. president wants it to. But the end of the EV tax credit (until a different regime comes into power, at least) seriously imperils the economic math that allowed EV sales to rise steadily over the past few years.
As a result, now might be the best time for a long time to buy or lease an electric vehicle, with remarkably low lease payments to be found on great EVs like the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Chevy Equinox. Once the tax breaks are gone, lease deals (which got lots of drivers into EVs without them having to worry about long-term ownership questions) are likely to grow less enticing. EVs that would have been cost-competitive with gasoline counterparts when the tax credits taken into account suddenly aren’t.
Plenty of drivers will continue to choose electric even at a premium price because it’s a better product, sure. But hopes of reaching many more budget-first buyers have taken a serious hit. It could be a dream summer to buy an EV, but we’re all going to wake up when September ends.
On the NRC, energy in Pennsylvania, and Meta AI
Current conditions: Air quality alerts will remain in place in Chicago through Tuesday evening due to smoke from Canadian wildfires • There is a high risk of a tropical depression forming in the Gulf this week • The rain is clearing on the eastern seaboard after 2.64 inches fell in New York’s Central Park on Monday, breaking the record for July 14 set in 1908.
The Trump administration is putting pressure on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to “rubber stamp” all new reactors, Politico reports based on conversations with three people at the May meeting where the expectation was relayed. The directive to the NRC’s top staff came from Adam Blake, a representative of the Department of Government Efficiency, who apparently used the term “rubber stamp” specifically to describe the function of the independent agency. NRC’s “secondary assessment” of the safety of new nuclear projects would be a “foregone conclusion” following approval by the Department of Energy or the Pentagon, NRC officials were made to believe, per Politico.
A spokesperson for the NRC pointed to President Trump’s recent executive order aiming to quadruple U.S. nuclear power by 2050 in response to Politico’s reporting. Skeptics, however, have expressed concern over the White House’s influence on the NRC, which is meant to operate independently, as well as potential safety lapses that might result from the 18-month deadline for reviewing new reactors established in the order.
President Trump and Republican Senator Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania will announce a $70 million “AI and energy investment” in the Keystone State at the inaugural Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit today in Pittsburgh. The event is meant to focus on the development of emerging energy technologies. Organizers said that more than 60 CEOs, including executives from ExxonMobil, Chevron, BlackRock, and Palantir, will be in attendance at the event hosted by Carnegie Mellon University. BlackRock is expected to announce a $25 billion investment in a “data-center and energy infrastructure development in Northeast Pennsylvania, along with a joint venture for increased power generation” at the event, Axios reports.
Ahead of the summit, critics slammed the event as a “moral failure,” with student protests expected throughout the day. Paulina Jaramillo, a professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon, wrote on Bluesky that the summit was a “slap in the face to real clean energy researchers,” and that there is “nothing innovative about propping up the fossil fuel industry.” “History will judge institutions that chose short-term gain over moral clarity during this critical moment for climate action and scientific integrity,” she went on.
On Monday, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed on Threads that the company aims to become “the first lab to bring a 1GW+ supercluster online” — an ambitious goal that will require the extensive development of new gas infrastructure, my colleague Matthew Zeitlin reports. The first gigawatt-level project, an Ohio data center called Prometheus, will be powered by Meta’s own natural gas infrastructure, with the natural gas company Williams reportedly building two 200-megawatt facilities for the project in Ohio. The buildout for Prometheus is in addition to another Meta project in Northeast Louisiana, Hyperion, that Zuckerberg said Monday could eventually be as large as 5 gigawatts. “To get a sense of the scale we’re talking about, a new, large nuclear reactor has about a gigawatt of capacity, while a newly built natural gas plant could supply only around 500 megawatts,” Matthew writes. Read his full report here.
BYD
Electric vehicle sales are currently on track to outpace gasoline car sales in China this year, Bloomberg reports. In the first six months of 2025, new battery-electric, plug-in hybrid, and extended-range electric cars accounted for 5.5 million vehicles sold in the country (compared to 5.4 million sales of new gasoline cars), and are projected to top 16 million before the end of December — both of which put EVs a hair over their combustion-powered competitors.
By contrast, battery-electric cars only accounted for 28% of new-car sales in China last year, per the nation’s Passenger Car Association. But “sales this year have been spurred by the extension of a trade-in subsidy” as well as the nation’s expansive electrified lineup, including “several budget options” like BYD’s Seagull, Bloomberg writes. “China is the only large market where EVs are on average cheaper to buy than comparable combustion cars,” BloombergNEF reported last month.
Window heat pumps are an extremely promising answer to the conundrum of decarbonizing large apartment buildings, a new report by the nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy has found. Previously, research on heat pumps had primarily focused on their advantages for single-family homes, while the process of retrofitting larger steam- and hot-water-heated apartment buildings remained difficult and expensive, my colleague Emily Pontecorvo explains. But while apartment residents used to have to wait for their building to either install a large central heat pump system for the whole structure, or else rely on a more involved “mini-split” system, newer technologies like window heat pumps proved to be one of the most cost-effective solutions in ACEEE’s report with an average installation cost of $9,300 per apartment. “That’s significantly higher than the estimated $1,200 per apartment cost of a new boiler, but much lower than the $14,000 to $20,000 per apartment price tag of the other heat pump variations,” Emily writes, adding that the report also found window heat pumps may be “the cheapest to operate, with a life cycle cost of about $14,500, compared to $22,000 to $30,000 for boilers using biodiesel or biogas or other heat pump options.” Read Emily’s full report here.
California was powered by two-thirds clean energy in 2023 — the latest year data is available — making it the “largest economy in the world to achieve this milestone,” Governor Gavin Newsom’s office announced this week.