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Spinning turbines have it, but solar panels don’t.
Spain and Portugal are still recovering from Monday’s region-wide blackout. The cause remains unknown, but already a debate has broken out over whether grids like Spain’s, which has a well-above-average proportion of renewables, are more at risk of large-scale disruptions.
At the time of the blackout, Spain’s grid had little “inertia,” which renewables opponents have seized on as a reason to blame carbon-free electricity for the breakdown. If the electricity system as a whole is a dance of electrons choreographed by the laws of electromagnetism, then inertia is the system’s brute force Newtonian backup. In a fossil fuel-powered grid, inertia comes from spinning metal — think a gas turbine — and it can give the whole system a little extra boost if another generator drops off the grid.
Solar panels, however, don’t spin. Instead, they produce direct current that needs to be converted by an inverter into alternating current at the grid’s frequency.
“If a power plant goes out, that frequency starts to drop a little bit because there’s an imbalance in the power between supply and demand, and inertia provides a little bit of extra power,” Bri-Mathias Hodge, an electrical and energy engineering professor at the University of Colorado and a former chief scientist at the nearby National Renewable Energy Laboratory, explained to me. Inertia, he said, “just gives a little bit more wiggle room in the system, so that if there are big changes, you can sort of ride through them.”
Of course, blackouts happen on grids dominated by fossil fuels — the 2003 Northeast Blackout in the U.S and Canada, for example, which plunged several states and tens of millions of people into darkness. Even on renewable-heavy grids, blackouts can still come down to failures of fossil fuel systems, as with Texas’ Winter Storm Uri in 2021, when the natural gas distribution system froze up. Much of the state had no electricity for several days amidst freezing temperatures, and over 200 people died.
But Bloomberg’s Javier Blas was nevertheless fair to the Iberian blackout when he bestowed on it the sobriquet, “The first big blackout of the green electricity era.”
Spain has been especially aggressive in decarbonizing its power grid and there’s some initial evidence that the first generators to turn off were solar power. “We started to see oscillations between the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of the European power grid, and this generally means that there’s a power imbalance — somebody’s trying to export power that they can’t, or import power that they can’t because of the limits on the lines,” Hodge told me. “The reason why people have gone on to say that this is a solar issue is because where they’ve seen some of those oscillations and where they saw some of the events starting, there are a couple large solar plants in that part of southwestern Spain.”
While Spanish grid and government officials will likely take months to investigate the failure, we already know that Spain and Portugal are relatively isolated from the rest of the European grid and rely heavily on renewables, especially solar and wind. Portugal has in the past gone several days in a row generating 100% of its power from renewables; Spain, meanwhile, was boasting of its 100% renewable generation just weeks before the blackout.
Last week, Spanish solar produced over 20,000 megawatts of power, comprising more than 60% of the country’s resource mix. Spain’s seven remaining nuclear reactors — which still provide about a fifth of its electric power — are scheduled to shut down over the next decade (though officials have indicated they might be open to extending their life), while its minimal coal generation is scheduled to be retired this year.
“Spain and Portugal have been relatively early adopters of wind and solar power. The Iberian Peninsula is actually relatively weakly connected to the rest of Europe through France. And so that’s one of the tricky parts here — it’s not as well integrated just because of the geography,” Hodge said.
The disturbances on the grid started on the Spain-France interconnection, but a European power official told The New York Times that transmission issues typically don’t lead to cascading blackouts unless there’s some major disturbance in supply or demand as well, such as a power plant going offline.
Spain’s grid had issues before Monday’s blackout that can be fairly attributed to its reliance on renewables. It often has to curtail solar power production because the grid gets congested when particularly sunny parts of the country where there’s large amounts of solar generation are churning out power that can’t be transmitted to the rest of the country. Spain has also occasionally experienced negative prices for electricity, and is using European Investment Bank funds to help support the expansion of pumped-hydro storage in order to store power when prices go down.
On Monday afternoon, however, solar power dropped from around 18,000 megawatts to 8,000, Reuters reported. At the time the blackout began, the grid was overwhelmingly powered by renewables. Spanish grid operator Red Electrica said it was able to pinpoint two large-scale losses of solar power in the southwestern part of the country, according to Reuters.
That a renewables-heavy grid might struggle with maintaining reliability thanks to low inertia is no surprise. Researchers have been studying the issue for decades.
In Texas — which, like Spain, has a high level of renewable generation and is isolated from the greater continental grid — the energy market ERCOT has been monitoring inertia since 2013, when wind generation sometimes got to 30% of total generation, and in 2016 started real-time monitoring of inertia in its control room.
That real time monitoring is necessary because traditionally, grid inertia is just thought of as an inherent quality of the system, not something that has to be actively ensured and bolstered, Hodge said.
As renewables build up on grids, Hodge told me, operators should prepare by having their inverters be what’s known as “grid-forming” instead of “grid-following.”
“Right now, in the power system, almost all of the wind, solar, battery plants, all the inverter-based generation, they just look to the grid for a signal. If the grid is producing at 60 Hertz, then they want to produce 60 Hertz. If it’s producing at 59.9, then they try to match that,” Hodge said. This works when you have relatively low amounts of [renewable generation]. But when [renewables] start to become the majority of the generation, you need somebody else to provide that strong signal for everybody else to follow. And that’s sort of what grid-forming inverters do,” he said.
Grid-forming inverters could hold back some power from the grid to provide an inertia-like boost when needed. Right now, the only sizable grid outfitted with this technology, Hodge said, is the Hawaiian island of Kauai, which has a population of around 75,000. Spain, by contrast, is home to nearly 50 million.
The other key technology for grid-forming inverters to provide stability to a power system is batteries. “Batteries are actually the perfect solution for this because if you have a battery system there, you know most of the time it’s not producing or charging and totally full output or input. So the vast majority of time you’re going to have some room to sort of move on in either direction,” Hodge said.
But this requires both technology and market structures that incentivize and allow batteries to always be ready to provide that instantaneous response.
“The entire stability paradigm of the power grid was built around this idea of synchronous machines,” Hodge told me. “And we’re moving toward one that’s more based on the inverters, but we’re not there yet. We have to fix the car while we’re driving it. We can’t turn off the grid for a couple years and figure everything out.”
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Investing in red states doesn’t make defying Trump any safer.
In the end, it was what the letters didn’t say.
For months — since well before the 2024 election — when asked about the future health and safety of the clean energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act, advocates and industry folks would point to the 20 or so House Republicans (sometimes more, sometimes fewer) who would sign on to public statements urging their colleagues to preserve at least some of the law. Better not to pull out the rug from business investment, they argued. Especially not investment in their districts.
These letters were “reassuring to a lot of folks in clean energy and climate communities,” Chris Moyer, the founder of Echo Communications and a former staffer for longtime Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, told me.
“I never felt reassured,” Moyer added.
Plenty of people did, though. The home solar company Sunrun, for instance, told investors in a presentation earlier this monththat a “growing number of Republicans in Congress — including 39 overall House members and four Senators — publicly support maintaining energy tax credits through various letters over the past few months.” The company added that “we expect a range of draft proposals to be issued, possibly including draconian scenarios, but we expect any extreme proposals will be moderated as they progress.”
Instead, the draft language got progressively worse for the residential solar industry, with the version that passed the House Thursday morning knocking billions of dollars off the sector, as tax credits were further squeezed to help make room for other priorities that truly posed an existential threat to the bill’s passage.
What Sunrun and others appear to have failed to notice — or at least publicly acknowledge — is that while these representatives wanted to see tax credits preserved, they never specified what they would do if their wishes were disregarded. Unlike the handful of Republicans who threatened to tank the bill over expanding the deduction for state and local taxes (each of whom signed one of the tax credit letters, at some point), or the Freedom Caucus, who tend to vote no on any major fiscal bill that doesn’t contain sizable spending cuts (so, until now, every budget bill), the tax credit Republicans never threatened to kill the bill entirely.
Ultimately, the only Republicans to outright oppose the bill did so because it didn’t cut the deficit enough. All of the House Republicans who signed letters or statements in support of clean energy tax credits voted yes on the legislation, with a single exception: New York’s Andrew Garbarino, who reportedly slept through the roll call. (He later said he would have voted for it had he been awake.)
“The coalition of interests effectively persuaded Republican members that tax credits were driving investment in their districts and states,” Pavan Venkatakrishnan, an infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress, told me in a text message. “Where advocates fell short was in convincing them that preserving energy tax credits — especially for mature technologies Republicans often view skeptically — should take precedence over preventing Medicaid cuts or addressing parochial concerns like SALT.”
The Inflation Reduction Act itself was, after all, advanced on a party-line basis, as was Biden’s 2021 American Rescue Plan. Combined, those two bills received a single Democratic no vote and no Republican yes votes.
In the end, Moyer said, Republican House members in the current Congress were under immense political pressure to support what is likely to be the sole major piece of legislation advanced this year by President Trump — one that contained a number of provisions, especially on SALT, that they agreed with.
“There are major consequences for individual house members who vote against the president’s agenda,” Moyer said. “They made a calculation. They knew they were going to take heat either way. They would rather take heat from clean energy folks and people affected by the projects.”
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
White House officials and outside analysts frequently touted job creation linked to IRA investments in Republican House districts and states as a tangible benefit of the law that would make it politically impossible to overturn, even as Congress and the White House turned over.
“President’s Biden’s policies are leading to more than 330,000 new clean energy jobs already created, more than half of which are in Republican-held districts,” White House communications director Ben LaBolt told reporters last year, previewing a speech President Biden would give on climate change.
Even after Biden had been defeated, White House climate advisor Ali Zaidi told Bloomberg that “we have grown the political consensus around the Inflation Reduction Act through its execution,” citing one of the House Republican letters in support of the clean energy tax credits.
One former Biden White House climate official told me that having projects in Republican districts was thought by the IRA’s crafters to make the bill more politically sustainable — but only so much.
“A [freaking] battery factory is not going to save democracy,” the official told me, referencing more ambitious claims that the tax credits could lead to more Democratic electoral victories. (The official asked to remain anonymous in order not to jeopardize their current professional prospects.) Instead, “it was supposed to make it slightly harder for Republicans to overturn the subsidies.”
Congresspeople worried about jobs weren’t supposed to be the only things that would preserve the bill, either, the official added. Clean energy and energy-dependent sectors, they thought, should be able to effectively advocate for themselves.
To the extent that business interests were able to win a hearing with House Republicans, they were older, more traditionally conservative industries such as nuclear, manufacturing, agriculture, and oil and gas.The biofuels industry (i.e. liquid Big Agriculture) won an extension of its tax credit, 45Z. The oil and gas industry’s favored measure, the 45Q tax credit for carbon sequestration, was minimally fettered. Nuclear power was the one sector whose treatment notably improved between the initial draft from the House’s tax-writing committee and the version voted on Thursday. Advanced nuclear facilities can still claim tax credits if they start construction by 2029, while other clean energy projects have to start construction within 60 days of the bill’s passage and be in service by the end of 2028.
“I think these outcomes are unsurprising. In places where folks consistently engaged, things were protected,” a Republican lobbyist told me, referring to manufacturing, biofuels, and nuclear power, requesting anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. “But assuming a project in a district would guarantee a no vote on a large package was always a mistake.”
“The relative success of nuclear is a testament to the importance of having strong champions — predictable but notable show of political might,” a second Republican lobbyist told me, who was also not allowed to speak publicly about the bill.
But all hope isn’t lost yet. The Senate still has to pass something that the House will agree with. Some senators had made noises about how nuclear, hydropower, and geothermal were treated in the initial language.
“Budget reconciliation is, first and foremost, a fiscal exercise,” Venkatakrishnan told me. “Energy tax credits offer a path of least resistance for hitting lawmakers’ fiscal targets. As the Senate takes up this bill, the case must be made that the marginal $100 billion to $200 billion in cuts seriously jeopardizes grid reliability and energy innovation.” Whether that will be enough to generate meaningful opposition in the Senate, however, is the $600 billion question.
A loophole created by the House Ways and Means text disappeared in the final bill.
Early this morning, the House of Representatives launched a full-frontal assault on the residential solar business model. The new language in the budget reconciliation bill to extend the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed Thursday included even tighter restrictions on the tech-neutral investment tax credits claimed by businesses like Sunrun when they lease solar systems to residential buyers.
While the earlier language from the Ways and Means committee eliminated the 25D tax credit for those who purchased home solar systems after the end of this year (it was originally supposed to run through 2034), the new language says that no credit “shall be allowed under this section for any investment during the taxable year” (emphasis mine) if the entity claiming the tax credit “rents or leases such property to a third party during such taxable year” and “the lessee would qualify for a credit under section 25D with respect to such property if the lessee owned such property.”
This is how you kill a business model in legislative text.
“Expect shares of solar companies to take a significant step back,” Jefferies analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith wrote in a note to clients Thursday morning, calling the exclusion “scathing.” Investors are “losing the now false sense of security that we had 'seen the worst' of it with the initial House draft.”
Joseph Osha, an analyst for Guggenheim, agrees. “Considering the fact that ~70% of the residential solar industry is now supported by third-party (e.g. lease or PPA) financing arrangements, the new language is disastrous for the residential solar industry,” he wrote in a note to clients. “We believe the near-term implications are very negative for Sunrun, Enphase, and SolarEdge.”
Shares of Sunrun are down 37.5% in mid-day trading, wiping off almost $1 billion worth of value for its shareholders. The company did not respond to a request for comment. Shares of fellow residential solar inverter and systems Enphase are down 20%, while residential solar technology company SolarEdge’s shares are down 24.5%.
“Families will lose the freedom to control their energy costs,” Abigail Ross Hopper, chief executive of the Solar Energy Industries Association, said in a statement, in reference to the last-minute alteration to the investment tax credit.
When the House Ways and Means Committee released the initial language getting rid of 25D by the end of this year but keeping a limited version of the investment tax credit, analysts noted that Sunrun was an unexpected winner from the bill. It typically markets its solar products as leases or power purchase agreements, not outright sales of the system.
The reversal, Dumoulin-Smith wrote, “comes as a surprise especially considering how favorable the initial markup was” to the Sunrun business model.
“Our core solar service offerings are provided through our lease and power purchase agreements,” the company said in its 2024 annual report. “While customers have the option to purchase a solar energy system outright from us, most of our customers choose to buy solar as a service from us through our Customer Agreements without the significant upfront investment of purchasing a solar energy system.”
The new bill, Dumoulin-Smith writes is “‘leveling the playing field’ by targeting all future residential solar originations, whether leased or owned.” The bill is “negative to Sunrun with intentional targeting of the sector.
Last year, Sunrun generated over $700 million from transferring investment tax credits from its solar and storage projects. The company said that it had $117 million of “incentives revenue” in 2024, which includes the tax credits, out of around $1.4 billion in total revenue.
But the tax credits play a far larger role in the business than just how they’re recognized on the company’s earnings statements. The company raises investment funds to help finance the projects, where investors get payments from customers as well as monetized tax credits. Fund investors “can receive attractive after-tax returns from our investment funds due to their ability to utilize Commercial ITCs,” the company said in its report. Conversely, the financing “enables us to offer attractive pricing to our customers for the energy generated by the solar energy system on their homes.”
Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Perocco wrote to clients that “this is a noteworthy change for the residential solar industry, and Sunrun in particular, which dominates the residential solar [third-party owned] market and has recognized ITC credits under 48E.”
Current conditions: A late-season nor’easter could bring minor flooding to the Boston area• It’s clear and sunny today in Erbil, Iraq, where the country’s first entirely off-grid, solar-powered village is now operating • Thursday will finally bring a break from severe storms in the U.S., which has seen 280 tornadoes more than the historical average this year.
1. House GOP passes reconciliation bill after late-night tweaks to clean energy tax credits
The House passed the sweeping “big, beautiful” tax bill early Thursday morning in a 215-214 vote, mostly along party lines. Republican Representatives Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Warren Davidson of Ohio voted no, while House Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris of Maryland voted “present;” two additional Republicans didn’t vote.
The bill will effectively kill the Inflation Reduction Act, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has written — although the Wednesday night manager’s amendment included some tweaks to how, exactly, as well as a few concessions to moderates. Updates include:
The bill now heads to the Senate — where more negotiations will almost certainly follow — with Republicans aiming to have it on President Trump’s desk by July 4.
2. FEMA cancels 4-year strategic plan, axing focus on ‘climate resilience’
The combative new acting administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, David Richardson, rescinded the organization’s four-year strategic plan on Wednesday, per Wired. Though the document, which was set to expire at the end of 2026, does not address specific procedures for given disasters, it does lay out goals and objectives for the agency, including “lead whole of community in climate resilience” and “install equality as a foundation of emergency management.” In axing the strategic plan, Richardson told staff that the document “contains goals and objectives that bear no connection to FEMA accomplishing its mission.”
A FEMA employee who spoke with Wired stressed that while rescinding the plan does not have immediate operational impacts, it can still have “big downstream effects.” Another characterized the move by the administration as symbolic: “There are very real changes that have been made that touch on [equity and climate change] that are more important than the document itself.”
3. Energy Department redirects Puerto Rican rooftop solar investment to upkeep of fossil fuel plants
The U.S. federal government is redirecting a $365 million investment in rooftop solar power in Puerto Rico to instead maintain the island’s fossil fuel-powered grid, the Department of Energy announced Wednesday. The award, which dates to the Biden administration, was intended to provide stable power to Puerto Ricans, who have become accustomed to blackouts due to damaged and outdated infrastructure. The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority declared bankruptcy in 2017, and a barrage of major hurricanes — most notably 2017’s Hurricane Maria — have destabilized the island’s grid, Reuters reports.
In Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s statement, he said the funds will go toward “dispatching baseload generation units, supporting vegetation control to protect transmission lines, and upgrading aging infrastructure.” But Javier Rúa Jovet, a public policy director for Puerto Rico’s Solar and Energy Storage Association, added to The Associated Press that “There is nothing faster and better than solar batteries.”
4. EDF, Shell, and others to collaborate on hydrogen emission tracker
The Environmental Defense Fund announced Wednesday that it is launching an international research initiative to track hydrogen emissions from North American and European facilities, in partnership with Shell, TotalEnergies, Air Products, and Air Liquide, as well as other academic and technology partners. Hydrogen is an indirect greenhouse gas that, through chemical reactions, can affect the lifetime and abundances of planet-warming gases like methane and ozone. Despite being a “leak-prone gas,” hydrogen emissions have been poorly studied.
“As hydrogen becomes an increasingly important part of the energy system, developing a robust, data-driven understanding of its emissions is essential to supporting informed decisions and guiding future investments in the sector,” Steven Hamburg, the chief scientist and senior vice president of EDF, said in a statement. Notably, EDF took a similar approach to tracking methane over a decade ago and ultimately exposed that emissions were “a far greater threat” than official government estimates suggested.
5. The best-selling SUV in America will now be available only as a hybrid
Toyota
The bestselling SUV in America, the Toyota RAV4, will be available only as a hybrid beginning with the 2026 model, Car and Driver reports. The car will be available both as a conventional hybrid and as a plug-in that works with CCS-compatible DC fast chargers, meaning “owners can quickly fill up its battery during long road trips” to minimize their fossil fuel mileage, The Verge adds. The RAV4 will also beat the Prius for electric range, hitting up to 50 miles before its gas engine kicks in.
Toyota’s move might not come as a complete surprise given that the automaker already introduced a hybrid-only lineup for its Camry. But given the popularity of the RAV4, Car and Driver notes that “if you ever wondered whether or not hybrids have entered the mainstream yet, perhaps this could be a tipping point.”
Nathan Hurner/USFWS
The Fish Lake Valley tui chub, a small minnow threatened by farming and mining activity, could become the first species to be listed as endangered under the second Trump administration.