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Tariffs and the loss of Inflation Reduction Act incentives could realign new power pricing, according to Morgan Stanley.
If you’re putting new power onto the grid right now, the cheapest option is likely solar. Thanks to years of declining equipment costs, generous federal subsidies, and voluntary renewables buyers like big technology companies, much of America’s planned future electricity generation is solar (along with battery storage). Of the 63 gigawatts planned to be added to the grid this year, the Energy Information Administration has estimated that solar will make up about half of it, while solar and storage collectively will make up over 80%.
While there’s no one single price for a megawatt-hour of any given power generation source, a good place to start are estimates from the financial advisory firm Lazard of the levelized cost of energy, which is supposed to allow comparisons between different generation sources. When Lazard put out its updated figures last summer, the average cost of utility solar was $61 per megawatt-hour. For a combined cycle natural gas plant, the most common type of gas generation, the average cost was $76.
But that math may be endangered, according to a new analysis by Morgan Stanley — to the point where solar could lose its competitive cost advantage with new natural gas.
“The cost of power generation is moving higher. The impact of tariffs and potential changes to subsidy support (i.e., IRA) will likely have an inflationary impact on the cost of power,” the analysts wrote to clients.
The team of analysts looked at the impact of both tariffs and the possible reduction or cessation of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits on utility-scale solar costs. According to Morgan Stanley’s figures, about half of the capital expenditure for a utility-scale solar project comes from the hardware, which is mostly the cost of the panels.
While some panels are produced in the United States, there are still significant imports from Southeast Asia, which currently face preliminary tariffs as high as several hundred percent. Those should become permanent later this month when the Department of Commerce completes its investigation into “dumping” by Chinese solar companies that have set up shop in the region.
The imports of these solar panels — some $10 billion in 2024, according to Tim Brightbill, a lawyer for a coalition of domestic solar manufacturers who are pursuing the anti-dumping case — “undercut and really drove down prices in the U.S. solar market,” Brightbill told a group of reporters Thursday. “It forced U.S. producers to significantly reduce their prices,” he said. “The industry was sort of pushed into a cost price squeeze.”
Those days are likely over. Instead, a variety of economic and political factors look to force prices up instead of down for new renewable power.
In a world where capital expenditure for solar projects goes up 5% to 10% — a range the analysts called “reasonably plausible” based on how much solar panels make up of the cost of a project — the Morgan Stanley analysts estimate that to maintain an industry standard investor return in the low-teens, power purchase agreements prices would have to rise to $52 to $57 per megawatt-hour, up from $49 to $54. “In a scenario where tariffs hold and IRA tax credits are eliminated,” the analysts write, those prices might go up as high as $73.
Those PPA prices could seriously degrade the advantage solar has over new natural gas generation, the Morgan Stanley analysts found, despite natural gas seeing its own cost pressures.
For one, there’s the shortage of gas turbines that’s causing higher equipment prices, bringing capital expenditures for a new gas plant up by around 75% in the last few years, the analysts said. Natural gas will also face its own hurdles from tariffs.
After penciling all that out, the Morgan Stanley analysts project that industry standard returns would require PPA prices of about $75 to $80 for natural gas.
You may notice how close that is to the pessimistic forecast on solar pricing.
“While current power market prices are not at levels that would support a new-build of natural gas turbines impacted by a tariff, we believe the co-location opportunity is still viable as a mid-to-high $70/MWh PPA price is still well within the willingness-to-pay for data center customers,” the Morgan Stanley analysts wrote. In other words, data centers that need a lot of power and don’t particularly care about carbon emissions or supporting renewables could end up procuring new gas.
That seems to track what we’re seeing out in the world. In January, Chevron and the investment firm Engine No. 1 announced a joint venture to deploy GE Vernova turbines on site to power data centers.
Natural gas pipeline giant Kinder Morgan’s executive chairman Richard Kinder told analysts Wednesday during the company’s quarterly earnings call that the company had seen a “nice uptick” in demand, “driven in part by the surge in AI and data centers.” The company’s natural gas pipelines president Sital Mody told analysts that Kinder Morgan is “actively pursuing opportunities to provide supply to ultimately feed these upcoming data centers,” and its chief executive Kimberley Dang called out Arizona as a potential market for gas-powered data centers.
So far this year, despite the threat of IRA repeal and protectionist tariffs hanging over the industry (not to mention “Liberation Day” tariffs on inputs like steel), prices paid for solar power have held steady, according to data from LevelTen, a power purchase agreement marketplace.
“Despite policy uncertainty, clean energy deals are moving forward at high volume,” Zach Starsia, LevelTen’s energy marketplace senior director, told me in an email. “There’s more certainty for projects expected to reach [commercial operation] in the next 12 to 16 months. It’s the longer-term, early-stage projects that are two to three years out where cost predictability becomes more difficult. Buyers are acting now to secure favorable pricing and access before tariffs and policy shifts begin to tighten market conditions,” Starsia said.
The company attributed the steady prices to the sector “finding itself on firmer footing following a long period of pandemic-era supply chain woes and an array of policy headwinds,” according to a LevelTen market analysis. While new and scheduled tariffs “are certainly a cause for concern,” the analysis said, the market is “well-attuned” to them due to the long history of solar tariffs since 2012.
“We expect upward pressure on PPA prices through 2025, particularly in technologies and regions exposed to tariffs and supply chain risk,” Starsia said. But he also wrote, perhaps optimistically, “The window is still open for prepared buyers to secure strong deals before price shifts fully take hold.”
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Add it to the evidence that China’s greenhouse gas emissions may be peaking, if they haven’t already.
Exactly where China is in its energy transition remains somewhat fuzzy. Has the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases already hit peak emissions? Will it in 2025? That remains to be seen. But its import data for this year suggests an economy that’s in a rapid transition.
According to government trade data, in the first fourth months of this year, China imported $12.1 billion of coal, $100.4 billion of crude oil, and $18 billion of natural gas. In terms of value, that’s a 27% year over year decline in coal, a 8.5% decline in oil, and a 15.7% decline in natural gas. In terms of volume, it was a 5.3% decline, a slight 0.5% increase, and a 9.2% decline, respectively.
“Fossil fuel demand still trends down,” Lauri Myllyvirta, the co-founder of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, wrote on X in response to the news.
Morgan Stanley analysts predicted Friday in a note to clients that this “weak downstream demand” for coal in China would “continue to hinder coal import volume.”
Another piece of China’s emissions and coal usage puzzle came from Indonesia, which is a major coal exporter. Citing data from trade data service Kpler, Reuters reported Friday that Indonesia’s thermal coal exports “have dropped to their lowest in three years” thanks to “weak demand in China and India,” the world’s two biggest coal importers. Indonesia’s thermal coal exports dropped 12% annually to 150 million tons in the first third of the year, Reuters reported.
China’s official goal is to hit peak emissions by 2030 and reach “carbon neutrality” by 2060. The country’s electricity grid is largely fueled by coal (with hydropower coming in at number two), as is its prolific production of steel and cement, which is energy and, specifically, coal-intensive. For a few years in the 2010s, more cement was poured in China than in the whole 20th century in the United States. China also accounts for about half of the world’s steel production.
At the same time, China’s electricity demand growth is being largely met by renewables, implying that China can expand its economy without its economy-wide, annual emissions going up. This is in part due to a massive deployment of renewables. In 2023, China installed enough non-carbon-emitting electricity generation to meet the total electricity demand of all of France.
China’s productive capacity has shifted in a way that’s less carbon intensive, experts on the Chinese energy system and economy have told Heatmap. The economy isshifting more toward manufacturing and away from the steel-and-cement intensive breakneck urbanization of the past few decades, thanks to a dramatically slowing homebuilding sector.
Chinese urban residential construction was using almost 300 million tons of steel per year at its peak in 2019, according to research by the Reserve Bank of Australia, about a third of the country’s total steel usage. (Steel consumption for residential construction would fall by about half by 2023.) By contrast, the whole United States economy consumes less than 100 million tons of steel per year.
To the extent the overall Chinese economy slows down due to the trade war with the United States, coal usage — and thus greenhouse gas emissions — would slow as well. Although that hasn’t happened yet — China also released export data on Friday that showed sustained growth, in spite of the tariff barriers thrown up by the Trump administration.
All of the awesome earth-moving and none of the planet- or lung-harming emissions.
Construction is a dirty business, literally and figuratively. Mud and gunk and tar come with the territory for those who erect buildings and pave roads for a living. And the industrial machines that provide the muscle for the task run on hulking diesel engines that spew carbon and soot as they work.
Heavy equipment feels like an unlikely place to use all-electric power in order to ditch fossil fuels. The sheer size and intense workload of a loader or excavator means it has enormous energy needs. Yet the era of electric construction equipment has begun, with companies such as Volvo, Komatsu, and Bobcat all now marketing electric dirt movers and diggers. One big reason why: Full-size machines create the opportunity to make construction projects quieter and cleaner — a potentially huge benefit for those that happen in dense areas around lots of people.
Volvo, for example, appeared at last week’s Advanced Clean Transportation Expo in Anaheim, California, primarily to tout its efforts to reduce emissions in the trucking industry via hydrogen-powered semis, electric trucks, and technological refinements to reduce pollution such as nitrous oxide from traditional diesel. But the Swedish brand also trotted out its clean power dirt movers.
The L120 electric loader that is now taking reservations has a lifting capacity of 6 metric tons on pure electric power, making it useful for job sites such as recycling centers and ports. To see such a beast in person — and displayed on pristine convention-center carpet as if it were this year’s Ford Mustang, no less — is an odd and humbling experience that elicits a little-boy level of glee at beholding a big machine. Its bucket, large enough to carry a basketball team, seems to exist on a scale that is too big for battery power, yet Volvo claims the L120 can match the performance of its diesel brethren.
Volvo also brought an electric excavator, the machine used for shoveling out huge bucketfuls of earth. The EC230 Electric is based on the diesel-powered machine of the same name, but with a stack of batteries adding up to 450 kilowatt-hours of capacity and 650 volts of power give the excavator seven to eight hours of runtime on clean electric power.
“Going to the 600-volt battery packs with similar power density that we’re using in [semi] trucks allowed us to take that into the larger construction equipment,” Keith Brandis, VP of policy and regulatory affairs for Volvo North America, told me. “A big breakthrough for us was making sure that the duty cycle — the vibration, the harshness, the temperature extremes — was proven. We have coolant that runs throughout that battery pack, so we precondition the temperatures for very cold starts as well as during very hot temperatures.”
Indeed, the two big boys on display in Anaheim expand Volvo’s lineup of electric construction machines up to seven. The new full-size offerings also take battery power up to a scale needed for serious projects, where it could cut the noise and pollution that emanate from a site. Volvo says its e-machines are already at work on the restoration project in New York City’s Battery Park, at the southern end of Manhattan, where the local government made quiet and clean construction equipment a priority.
Volvo is not alone in this space. Komatsu builds a slate of electric excavators in a variety of sizes leading up to the 20-ton PC210LCE, which the Japanese brand introduced in 2023.
At the smaller end, Bobcat now builds battery-powered mini-loaders and compact excavators. Caterpillar made an EV dump truck a couple of years ago, and more heavy-duty electric machines for industries like mining are on the way.
Although electric loaders and excavators have begun to match the capability of their combustion-powered cousins and have reached a battery runtime that spans a full workday, Volvo and other heavy equipment manufacturers face a few hurdles in convincing more construction companies to go electric. Just like with passenger cars, there is the matter of price. Battery-powered equipment costs more up front, so companies must be convinced that the savings they’ll reap via reduced fuel and maintenance costs will make the electric equipment less expensive in the long run.
And just like with passenger cars, incentives play an outsized role in affordability. Brandis noted that municipalities often have fixed budgets for equipment replacement, which is inconvenient when clean, electric equipment costs substantially more. “We typically rely on purchase incentives or infrastructure incentives, grants, or vouchers that are available,” he said, such as California’s HVIP voucher for zero-emission heavy equipment.
Then there is the construction version of range anxiety, simply ensuring there is enough electricity at any job site to recharge a division of electric loaders. At locations where sufficient electrical infrastructure is already in place, Volvo is helping electric buyers install switchgears, meters, and EV chargers built to talk to the big machines. “It eliminates one other problem point for the customer because we’ve already proven that the operability is there with the equipment,” Brandis told me.
The problem with construction, however, is that sometimes it takes place in remote locations far from easy connections. At ACT, Ray Gallant of Volvo construction equipment said this is the point at which the power has to come to the customer. Volvo recently acquired the battery production business of Proterra, which, among other things, would help the corporation develop battery electric storage solutions that it could deploy remotely — at a far-flung job site, say.
“When we’re in remote sites, we have to take the electrons to the electric machines,” he said.
The lawmakers from opposite parties discussed the Inflation Reduction Act and working together to pass legislation at Heatmap’s Energy Entrepreneurship 2025 event.
Will Republicans’ reconciliation bill successfully gut the Inflation Reduction Act?
A Democratic and Republican senator speaking last week at Heatmap’s Energy Entrepreneurship 2025 event predicted that it will not.
A proposal effectively killing the IRA “wouldn’t make it through the House,” Senator John Curtis of Utah, a Republican, said flatly at the event.
“If you believe that democracy does follow representation, those House members from those states are going to fight like hell to maintain those credits,” Senator John Hickenlooper, a Democrat of Colorado, agreed. He argued that 70% of the credits and benefits in Biden’s flagship climate law go to red states.
“I think you’re going to find enough Republicans push back on the value of these credits that there will be a thoughtful discussion and very careful review of each one. And as you know from the number of people that have spoken up on this, I think we’re in a good place, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be pushed and poked and prodded,” Curtis added, referencing the Republican signatories of letters sent to party leaders urging the preservation of the credits. Curtis and Hickenlooper both were optimistic about the chances of the credits surviving the budget reconciliation underway.
Consensus, not compromise, was the name of the game at Heatmap’s D.C. Climate Week event, which saw Heatmap executive editor Robinson Meyer sit down with the senators to discuss their approach to climate policy and bipartisan collaboration.
Robinson Meyer, Senator John Curtis, and Senator John Hickenlooper.Taylor Mickal Photography,
Curtis and Hickenlooper have worked together on the Co-Location Energy Act, which ensures that wind and solar projects can be developed on land already leased for other types of energy projects, and the Fix Our Forests Act, which emphasizes wildfire mitigation and forest health.
Thursday’s discussion also touched on working with the Trump administration on climate and energy policy. Curtis revealed that he spoke to all of Donald Trump’s nominees, including Chris Wright, about his work in the House on the Conservative Climate Caucus. “They all knew about it, and they all supported it,” he noted, adding that EPA administrator Lee Zeldin was a member of the Caucus when he served in the House.
“I think it's very important for me, for Coloradans, for me to have Chris Wright's cell phone number and be able to talk to him,” Hickenlooper stated, emphasizing that he’s willing to work with the Trump administration to achieve Colorado’s climate goals.
The Co-Location Energy Act was “common sense,” according to Curtis. The act was introduced back in December by himself and Congressman Mike Levin, a Democrat from California. “Two thirds of [Utah] is owned by the federal government, and if you say that’s off the table for development, that’s a huge problem,” he said.
Fix Our Forests, which passed the House in January after being introduced by Congressmen Scott Peters, a Democrat from California and Bruce Westerman, a Republican of Arizona, “is a case study in how we can get things done,” Curtis noted. The key to speaking to conservatives about climate change, he said, is avoiding divisive language, comparing the wrong approach to a coercive time-share presentation. “The salesman says to you, ‘do you love your kids?’ and you feel like you're backed into a corner,” he explained. “I think the way we approach this oftentimes puts Republicans on the defensive.”
Hickenlooper agreed, “You never persuade someone to change their mind about something that really matters by telling them why they’re wrong and why you’re right.”