You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
In a new estimate, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory says the U.S. is on track for a major milestone.
America’s electricity grid may be only eight years away from hitting a major decarbonization milestone, according to a new federal report.
On Wednesday, researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory published a new forecast about what the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law could mean for the country’s power grid. They find that the grid could hit a crucial target — generating 80% of its electricity without burning fossil fuels — by the end of the decade.
Under some of the lab’s scenarios, the American grid could, by 2030, generate 90% of its electricity without burning carbon.
That is more than double today’s share, and it would make America’s power grid one of the cleanest in the world. Climate pollution from the power sector could plunge to 84% below its 2005 levels, when U.S. carbon pollution reached an all-time high.
The report is the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s first analysis of the two laws’ effects. Although NREL is funded by the Department of Energy, it is operated independently of the federal government.
In one sense, the report’s biggest finding isn’t so shocking. The two laws — which Energy Department staffers lovingly call “Uncle IRA and Uncle BIL” — have always stood to transform the power sector more than other parts of the economy. “NREL’s analysis aligns fairly well with other independent assessments of the impact of federal policies passed by the last Congress,” Jesse Jenkins, a Princeton professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, told me.
Last year, Jenkins’s research group estimated that the IRA and BIL would produce a 75 to 77% zero-carbon grid by 2030. That estimate is slightly below NREL’s estimate because the Princeton researchers forecast that Americans will adopt electric cars and other climate tech more quickly, causing the country’s demand for electricity to grow and forcing natural-gas power plants to meet the gap.
But the new NREL estimate is a reminder of just how significant the two laws are for the climate. Over the next eight years, the American electricity grid will change as much as it has in the past two decades. And the rapid decarbonization of the American grid was not a foregone conclusion, but driven entirely by policy. As recently as 19 months ago, U.S. power sector emissions were expected to plateau after 2025. Now they will plunge through the end of the decade.
The forecast contains a few more findings worth drawing out.
First, it looks at whether America’s ongoing struggle to build new transmission lines and other large-scale energy infrastructure could imperil the grid’s transformation. Its results are mixed but not catastrophic. Under its most transmission-constrained scenario, a little more than a fifth of the IRA’s potential carbon-pollution cuts to the power sector would fail to materialize. At the absolute low end, this would produce a grid that’s 71% clean in 2030 — still much better than today. Yet it lags the high-end estimate: If the U.S. passed optimal policy, and technology costs fell faster than expected, then the grid could become 90% zero-carbon by 2030.
Second, it looks at the IRA’s less discussed conventional environmental benefits — which are substantial. Coal and natural-gas power plants release a slew of toxic air pollutants, including tiny shards of soot and particulate matter known as PM2.5 because they measure less than 2.5 microns across. PM2.5 is so small that it wreaks havoc in the body, inflaming and damaging heart, lung, and brain tissue. But over the next decade, as coal and gas plants close to make way for new renewable and nuclear facilities, PM2.5 will subside.
Thanks to the climate and infrastructure laws, fewer Americans will suffer heart attacks, lung disease, and asthma attacks, the report finds. By 2030, the law could avert 11,000 to 18,000 early deaths, the analysis finds.
And that points to the final finding: The IRA and the infrastructure law will save society perhaps more than a trillion dollars — in ways that will and won’t ever show up on a traditional balance sheet. The two laws’ subsidies, first, will reduce electricity costs for people and businesses, saving $50 to $115 billion in this decade alone. Second, the health effects mentioned above could save $120 to $190 billion in health-care costs. But most impressive is NREL’s estimate of the laws’ benefits to the climate, as measured in dollars. In its view, the IRA and BIL could avert enough carbon emissions that they could save $880 billion in climate damages.
These suggest that even if the highest estimates of the IRA’s cost to the government come to pass, the law will more than pay for itself through its benefits to the climate alone.
Much could still go wrong in either law’s implementation, of course. But for now, research continues to suggest that some of the summer’s lofty predictions were not inaccurate. The IRA and the bipartisan infrastructure law, while imperfect, stand to turbocharge the transformation of the American energy system. The climate era is upon us.
Get the best of Heatmap directly in your inbox every weekday:
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
A conversation with Mike Hall of Anza.
This week’s conversation is with Mike Hall, CEO of the solar and battery storage data company Anza. I rang him because, in my book, the more insights into the ways renewables companies are responding to the war on the Inflation Reduction Act, the better.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s jump in!
How much do we know about developers’ reactions to the anti-IRA bill that was passed out of the House last week?
So it’s only been a few days. What I can tell you is there’s a lot of surprise about what came out of the House. Industries mobilized in trying to improve the bill from here and I think a lot of the industry is hopeful because, for many reasons, the bill doesn’t seem to make sense for the country. Not just the renewable energy industry. There’s hope that the voices in Congress — House members and senators — who already understand the impact of this on the economy will in the coming weeks understand how bad this is.
I spoke to a tax attorney last week that her clients had been preparing for a worst case scenario like this and preparing contingency plans of some kind. Have you seen anything so far to indicate people have been preparing for a worst case scenario?
Yeah. There’s a subset of the market that has prepared and already executed plans.
In Q4 [of 2024] and Q1 [of this year] with a number of companies to procure material from projects in order to safe harbor those projects. What that means is, typically if you commence construction by a certain date, the date on which you commence construction is the date you lock in tax credit eligibility, and we worked with companies to help them meet that criteria. It hedged them on a number of fronts. I don’t think most of them thought we’d get what came out of the House but there were a lot of concerns about stepdowns for the credit.
After Trump was elected, there were also companies who wanted to hedge against tariffs so they bought equipment ahead of that, too. We were helping companies do deals the night before Liberation Day. There was a lot of activity.
We saw less after April 2nd because the trade landscape has been changing so quickly that it’s been hard for people to act but now we’re seeing people act again to try and hit that commencement milestone.
It’s not lost on me that there’s an irony here – the attempts to erode these credits might lead to a rush of projects moving faster, actually. Is that your sense?
There’s a slug of projects that would get accelerated and in fact just having this bill come out of the House is already going to accelerate a number of projects. But there’s limits to what you can do there. The bill also has a placed-in-service criteria and really problematic language with regard to the “foreign entity of concern” provisions.
Are you seeing any increase in opposition against solar projects? And is that the biggest hurdle you see to meeting that “placed-in-service” requirement?
What I have here is qualitative, not quantitative, but I was in the development business for 20 years, and what I have seen qualitatively is that it is increasingly harder to develop projects. Local opposition is one of the headwinds. Interconnection is another really big one and that’s the biggest concern I have with regards to the “placed-in-service” requirement. Most of these large projects, even if you overcome the NIMBY issues, and you get your permitting, and you do everything else you need to do, you get your permits and construction… In the end if you’re talking about projects at scale, there is a requirement that utilities do work. And there’s no requirement that utilities do that work on time [to meet that deadline]. This is a risk they need to manage.
And more of the week’s top news in renewable energy conflicts.
1. Columbia County, New York – A Hecate Energy solar project in upstate New York blessed by Governor Kathy Hochul is now getting local blowback.
2. Sussex County, Delaware – The battle between a Bethany Beach landowner and a major offshore wind project came to a head earlier this week after Delaware regulators decided to comply with a massive government records request.
3. Fayette County, Pennsylvania – A Bollinger Solar project in rural Pennsylvania that was approved last year now faces fresh local opposition.
4. Cleveland County, North Carolina – Brookcliff Solar has settled with a county that was legally challenging the developer over the validity of its permits, reaching what by all appearances is an amicable resolution.
5. Adams County, Illinois – The solar project in Quincy, Illinois, we told you about last week has been rejected by the city’s planning commission.
6. Pierce County, Wisconsin – AES’ Isabelle Creek solar project is facing new issues as the developer seeks to actually talk more to residents on the ground.
7. Austin County, Texas – We have a couple of fresh battery storage wars to report this week, including a danger alert in this rural Texas county west of Houston.
8. Esmeralda County, Nevada – The Trump administration this week approved the final proposed plan for NV Energy’s Greenlink North, a massive transmission line that will help the state expand its renewable energy capacity.
9. Merced County, California – The Moss Landing battery fire is having aftershocks in Merced County as residents seek to undo progress made on Longroad’s Zeta battery project south of Los Banos.
Anti-solar activists in agricultural areas get a powerful new ally.
The Trump administration is joining the war against solar projects on farmland, offering anti-solar activists on the ground a powerful ally against developers across the country.
In a report released last week, President Trump’s Agriculture Department took aim at solar and stated competition with “solar development on productive farmland” was creating a “considerable barrier” for farmers trying to acquire land. The USDA also stated it would disincentivize “the use of federal funding” for solar “through prioritization points and regulatory action,” which a spokesperson – Emily Cannon – later clarified in an email to me this week will include reconfiguring the agency’s Rural Energy for America loan and grant program. Cannon declined to give a time-table for the new regulation, stating that the agency “will have more information when the updates are ready to be published.”
“Farmland should be for agricultural production, not solar production,” Cannon wrote – a statement also made in the USDA report.
REAP is a program created in 2008 that exists to help fund renewable energy and sustainability projects at the level of individual farms and has been seen as a potential tool for not only building more solar but also more trust in agriculturally-focused communities. It’s without question that retooling REAP to actively disincentivize awardees from building solar on farmland could have a chilling effect, at least amongst those who receive money from the program or wish to in the future. This comes after Trump officials temporarily froze money promised to farmers, too.
As we’ve previously written in The Fight, agricultural interests can at times present as much a threat to the future of solar energy as any oil-funded dark money group, if not more so. Conflicts over solar production on farmland make up a large portion of the total projects I cover in The Fight every week, and it is one of the most frequently cited reasons for opposition against individual renewables projects. (Agricultural workforces are one of the most important signals for renewable energy opposition in Heatmap Pro’s modeling data as well.) I wrote shortly after Trump’s inauguration that I wondered when – not if – he would adopt this position.
It’s unclear what exactly led USDA to dive headlong into the “No Solar on Farmland” campaign, aside from its growing popularity in conservative political circles, but there is reason to believe farming interests may have played a role. USDA has stated the report was the product of discussions with farming groups and an industry roundtable. In addition, per lobbying disclosures, at least one agricultural group – the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau – advocated earlier this year for “congressional action and/or executive orders” to “balance renewable and conventional sources of energy” through “limit[ing] solar on productive farmland.” (The Pennsylvania Farm Bureau denied this in an email to me earlier this week.)
There’s also reason to believe some key stakeholders were caught off-guard or weren’t looped in on the matter.
American Farmland Trust has been trying to cultivate common ground between farmers, solar companies, and various agencies at all levels of government over the future of development. But when asked about this report, the nonprofit told me it couldn’t speak on the matter because it was still trying to suss out what was going on.
“AFT is meeting with the Trump administration to learn more about what they are planning in terms of policy and programs to implement this concept,” AFT media relations associate Michael Shulman told me.