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The new rules are complicated. Here’s how to make sense of them if you’re shopping for an electric vehicle.
The Department of Treasury published new rules last year that will determine which new electric vehicles, purchased for personal use, will qualify for a $7,500 tax credit. They went into effect on April 18, 2023, and last for the next decade or so.
These new tax credit rules are complicated. The list of cars that qualify for the new tax credit can change from year to year — and even month to month. Many buyers in the EV market might have a few questions, including: Should I buy that new car now, or should I wait? Which cars qualify for the current tax credit, and which ones will earn the new one?
This is Heatmap’s guide to the new tax credit, why it matters, and what to keep in mind as you go EV shopping.
If you’re an ordinary American buying a brand-new EV to run errands and pick up the kids, these new rules apply to you. They will determine which cars you can get a federally funded discount on.
If you’re not buying a new car for personal use — because you’re getting it for your business, say, or because you’re buying a used EV — these new rules don’t apply to you. But you may qualify for other new subsidies. We get into those below.
And even if you are in that first category, you may discover it’s much cheaper to lease a new EV instead of buying it outright. We get into why below, too.
They completely change how the United States approaches the EV industry.
During the Bush and Obama administrations, the U.S. was focused mostly on getting automakers to begin to experiment with EVs. So it discounted the first 200,000 or so electric vehicles that each manufacturer sold by up to $7,500. If a company had cumulatively sold more than that number over time, as Tesla and General Motors eventually did, then the discount expired. By 2022, that had led to a peculiar situation where foreign automakers, such as Hyundai, could use the subsidy, while some of the largest American automakers couldn’t.
Now, U.S. policy is focused on two goals: (1) building up a domestic supply chain for EVs and (2) getting more EVs on the road. So the tax break is completely uncapped — any automaker can use it as many times as possible if they meet the criteria.
But many new requirements apply: Only cars that undergo final assembly in North America will qualify for any of the tax credit. Then, cars with a battery that was more than 50% made in North America will qualify for a $3,750 subsidy. And cars where at least 40% of the “critical minerals” used come from the U.S. or a country with whom we have a free-trade agreement will qualify for another $3,750 subsidy.
Those percentage-based requirements will ramp up over time. By 2029, for instance, 100% of a car’s battery and battery components must be made in North America.
Because Congress said so. The Inflation Reduction Act, which Democratic majorities in the House and Senate passed last year, mandated this change to the EV tax credit as part of its broad expansion of American climate policy.
Initially, fewer EVs will receive a subsidy under the new rules, Biden officials say. On a press call with reporters, a senior Treasury official argued that more cars will eventually qualify under the new rules than qualified under the old ones.
This year, at least 15 car or light trucks will receive some or all of the credit. Only some of those vehicles will qualify for the full $7,500 tax credit; some will qualify for a partial $3,750 tax credit. Here is the full list of qualifying models, along with the amount of the tax credit that they will earn:
• Audi Q5 TFSI e Quattro PHEV ($3,750)
• Cadillac LYRIQ ($7,500)
• Chevrolet Bolt ($7,500)
• Chevrolet Bolt EUV ($7,500)
• Chrysler Pacifica PHEV ($7,500)
• Ford Escape Plug-in Hybrid ($3,750)
• Ford F-150 Lightning, Standard & Extended Range ($7,500)
• Jeep Wrangler PHEV 4xe ($3,750)
• Jeep Grand Cherokee PHEV 4xe ($3,750)
• Lincoln Corsair Grand Touring ($3,750)
• Rivian R1S, Dual Large & Quad Large ($3,750)
• Rivian R1T, Dual Large, Dual Max, & Quad Large ($3,750)
• Tesla Model X Long Range ($7,500)
• Tesla Model 3 Performance ($7,500)
• Tesla Model 3 Long Range AWD ($3,500)
• Tesla Model Y AWD, Rear-Wheel Drive, & Performance ($7,500)
• Volkswagen ID.4 AWD PRO, PRO, S, & Standard ($7,500)
Some vehicles that earned the full tax credit in 2023, such as the Ford Mustang Mach E, don’t qualify for any benefit as of January 2, 2024.
Yes. A few examples: The Hummer EV, which costs more than $110,000 a piece, won’t qualify for either the new or old tax credit — it’s too expensive. And the Polestar 2 won’t qualify because it’s assembled in China.
Yes. Starting this year, the U.S. is preventing cars that receive too much manufacturing input from a “foreign entity of concern” — that is, China — from qualifying for any of the tax credit. This has reduced the number of vehicles that qualify for the $7,500 bonus.
This year, the government will also allow buyers to refund their EV tax credit at the dealership. That means buyers can now get up to a $7,500 discount at the moment when they buy their car instead of waiting until they file their taxes in the following year.
Yes. A married couple must have an adjusted gross income of less than $300,000 a year, and a single filer must have an AGI of less than $150,000 a year, to qualify for any aspect of the subsidy. A head-of-household must have an income of less than $225,000 a year.
Yes. Under the proposed rule, cars must have an MSRP below $55,000 to qualify for the credit. Vans, pickup trucks, and SUVs must have an MSRP below $80,000.
Yes. The Inflation Reduction Act also included a new $7,500 tax credit for EVs used for any commercial purpose. The Treasury Department is expected to interpret that provision to cover leasing, but it hasn’t announced the guidelines for that rule yet, so we don’t know for sure.
But the provision will probably tilt new EV drivers toward leasing their car rather than buying it outright, because the dealer should — emphasis on should — offer relative discounts on leasing vehicles as compared to buying them.
Yes. There’s also a new $4,000 tax credit for buying a used EV that costs $25,000 or less. It went into effect on January 1, 2023, so you can go ahead and use it today.
But note that it has even stricter income limits: Married couples can only take advantage of it if they make $150,000 or less, and other filers if they make $75,000 or less.
Here’s the list of cars that qualified for the $7,500 tax credit before April 18, 2023, according to the Department of Energy.
• Audi Q5 TFSI e Quattro (PHEV)
• BMW 330e *
• BMW X5 xDrive45e**
• Cadillac Lyriq
• Chevrolet Bolt
• Chevrolet Bolt EUV
• Chevrolet Silverado EV
• Chrysler Pacifica PHEV
• Ford E-Transit
• Ford Escape Plug-In Hybrid *
• Ford F-150 Lightning
• Ford Mustang Mach-E
• Genesis Electrified GV70
• Jeep Grand Cherokee 4xe
• Jeep Wrangler 4xe
• Lincoln Aviator Grand Touring *
• Lincoln Corsair Grand Touring *
• Nissan Leaf
• Nissan Leaf (S, SL, SV, and Plus models)
• Rivian R1S
• Rivian R1T
• Tesla Model 3 Long Range
• Tesla Model 3 Performance
• Tesla Model 3 RWD
• Tesla Model Y All-Wheel Drive
• Tesla Model Y Long Range
• Tesla Model Y Performance
• Volkswagen ID.4
• Volkswagen ID.4 AWD, Pro, and S models
• Volvo S60 PHEV *
• Volvo S60 Extended Range
• Volvo S60 T8 Recharge (Extended Range)
* These cars don’t qualify for the full $7,500 subsidy, although they all receive at least a $5,400 tax credit.
** Only some BMW X5 xDrive45e vehicles qualify — it depends where the car was made. Check the VIN or ask the dealership to confirm it was made in North America before buying.
This story was originally published on March 31, 2023. It was last updated on March 5, 2024, at 10:00 a.m. ET.
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On the Senate’s climate whip, green cement deals, and a U.S. uranium revival.
Current conditions: Flash flooding strikes the Southeastern U.S. • Monsoon rains unleash landslides in southern China • A heat dome is bringing temperatures of up to 107 degrees Fahrenheit to France, Italy, and the Balkans.
An August 5 chart showing last month's record electricity demand peaks.EIA
The United States’ demand for electricity broke records twice last month. Air conditioners cranking on hot days, combined with surging demand from data centers, pushed the peak in the Lower 48 states to a high of 758,053 megawatts on July 28, between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. EST, data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Hourly Electric Grid Monitor shows. The following day, peak demand set another record, hitting 759,180 megawatts. That’s nearly 2% above the previous record set on July 15, 2024.
The EIA predicted demand to grow by more than 2% per year between 2025 and 2026. Forecasts are even higher in areas with large data centers and factories underway, such as Texas and northern Virginia. The milestone comes as the Trump administration cracks down on solar and wind energy, two of the fastest-growing and quicker-to-build sources of new generation. On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that the Environmental Protection Agency is moving to eliminate $7 billion in spending on grants for solar energy, though when Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo asked the agency, it said only that, “With the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill, EPA is working to ensure Congressional intent is fully implemented in accordance with the law.”
Senator Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, locked down enough votes on Tuesday to replace Illinois Senator Dick Durbin as the Democrats’ whip in the chamber. Durbin, who is retiring next year, has served in the Senate Democrats’ No. 2 position since 2005. In his endorsement on Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York called Schatz “a close friend and one of my most valued allies.”
Schatz crusaded for the Inflation Reduction Act and told Heatmap he supported last year’s failed bipartisan permitting reform deal, even as progressive greens campaigned against its giveaways to fossil fuels. In a Shift Key podcast interview with my colleague Robinson Meyer and his co-host, Princeton professor Jesse Jenkins, in February, Schatz pitched a big tent for climate action. “We all have to hang together. It’s the American Clean Power Association. It’s the energy company that does both clean and fossil energy. It’s the transmission and distribution companies. It’s the manufacturers. It’s labor. It’s Wall Street. It’s K Street. Everyone has to hang together and say, not only is this good for business, but there’s something that is foundationally worse for business than any individual policy decision.”
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The Trump administration may be clawing back funding for cleaning up heavy industry, but Big Tech is still inking deals. On Monday, Amazon agreed to buy low-carbon cement from the startup Brimstone. Then on Tuesday, the data center developer STACK Infrastructure announced the completion of “a pilot pour” of green cement from rival startup Sublime. The moves highlight the growing demand for cleaner industrial materials amid increased scrutiny of the energy and pollution linked to server farms.
America’s uranium enrichment went out of business in the early 2000s after the Clinton-era megatons-to-megawatts program essentially ceded the industry to cheap Russian imports made from disassembled atomic weapons. Since banning imports from Russia last year, the U.S. has been ramping up funding for nuclear fuel again, especially as the industry looks to build new types of reactors that rely on fuel other than the low-enriched uranium that virtually all the country’s operating 94 commercial reactors use. On Monday, the Department of Energy announced its first pilot project for advanced nuclear fuels, giving the startup Standard Nuclear the first federal deal. On Tuesday, the agency signed a $1.5 billion deal to restore the so-called Atomic City on the 100-acre parcel of federal land at the former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plan in Kentucky.
The Trump administration gave permission to the National Weather Service to hire up to 450 meteorologists, hydrologists, and radar technicians after sweeping cuts from the Department of Government Efficiency, CNN’s Andrew Freedman reported. The agency, which was partly blamed for its warnings going unheeded ahead of the deadly Texas floods last month, also received an exemption from the federal hiring freeze.
The move came the same day as a federal judge blocked the administration from diverting billions of dollars in Federal Emergency Management Agency funding for disaster resilience and flood mitigation. The injunction warned FEMA against spending the money on anything else.
Beyond Meat is finally getting beyond meat. The company plans to shed the flesh reference in its name this week as it launches its new Beyond Ground product that promises more protein than ground beef. “With this launch,” Fast Company’s Clint Rainey reported, “Beyond Meat is becoming merely Beyond and turning its focus away from only mimicking animal proteins to letting plant-based proteins speak for themselves. The radical move is cultural, agricultural, and financial.”
Rob and Jesse talk through the proposed overturning of the EPA’s “endangerment finding” on greenhouse gases with Harvard Law School’s Jody Freeman.
The Trump administration has formally declared that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are not dangerous pollutants. If the president gets his way, then the Environmental Protection Agency may soon surrender any ability to regulate heat-trapping pollution from cars and trucks, power plants, and factories — in ways that a future Democratic president potentially could not reverse.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, we discuss whether Trump’s EPA gambit will work, the arguments that the administration is using, and what it could mean for the future of U.S. climate and energy policy. We’re joined by Jody Freeman, the Archibald Cox Professor of Law at Harvard and the director of Harvard’s environmental and energy law program. She was an architect of the Obama administration’s landmark deal with automakers to accept carbon dioxide regulations.
Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: I just want to make a related question, which is, you can actually say some of the sentences in the DOE report — you can believe tornadoes don’t show any influence from climate change and still believe heatwaves do, and still believe extreme rainfall events do. In fact, you could believe the cost of heat waves getting worse could justify the entire regulatory edifice.
Jody Freeman: What I love about you, Rob, right now, is you’re kind of incensed about little points that might individually sort of be right, maybe each one separately, but none of it adds up to even a chink in the armor. Right? And what’ll have to happen is the scientific community writ large, en masse, is going to have to come back and say, even if one or two or three of these sentences could possibly, plausibly be actually accurate, it does nothing to change the overwhelming —
Jesse Jenkins: It doesn’t matter.
Freeman: Right. What I think is happening is we’re all getting poked and distracted and tweaked into outrage over science, when in fact, the first argument they’re making is the one where they could actually attract some judges and justices to say, Oh wait, maybe you have a little more discretion here to set a threshold level. You know, Maybe it matters that you’re saying nothing we do here in the U.S. will make a difference in the end to global warming, and maybe that is a reason you don’t want to regulate. Hmm, maybe we’ll accept that reason. And that’s what we need, I think, to be more concerned about.
Jenkins: You’re saying, don’t get distracted by the fight over the climate science. That fight is very clear. It’s this legal argument that this isn’t an air pollutant because it’s not a local air pollutant, it mixes globally with all the other CO2, and we can’t, you know, each class of cars is a tiny contributor to that, and so we shouldn’t worry about it —
Freeman: And much of this is a replay, or a rehash of arguments that the George W. Bush administration lost in Massachusetts vs. EPA. So a lot of this is like, let’s take another run at the Supreme Court.
Mentioned:
The EPA Says Carbon Pollution Isn’t Dangerous. What Comes Next?
The EPA on its reconsideration of the endangerment finding
Jody’s story on the change: Trump’s EPA proposes to end the U.S. fight against climate change
Jesse’s upshift (and accompanying video); Rob’s sort of upshift.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
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Join clean energy leaders at RE+ 25, September 8–11 in Las Vegas. Explore opportunities to meet rising energy demand with the latest in solar, storage, EVs, and more at North America’s largest energy event. Save 20% with code HEATMAP20 at re-plus.com.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
Since July 4, the federal government has escalated its assault on wind development to previously unimaginable heights.
The Trump administration is widening its efforts to restrict wind power, proposing new nationwide land use restrictions and laying what some say is the groundwork for targeting wind facilities under construction or even operation.
Since Trump re-entered the White House, his administration has halted wind energy leasing, stopped approving wind projects on federal land or in federal waters, and blocked wind developers from getting permits for interactions with protected birds, putting operators that harm a bald eagle or endangered hawk at risk of steep federal fines or jail time.
For the most part, however, projects either under construction or already operating have been spared. With a handful of exceptions — the Lava Ridge wind farm in Idaho, the Atlantic Shores development off the coast of New Jersey and the Empire Wind project in the New York Bight — most projects with advanced timelines appeared to be safe.
But that was then. In the past week, a series of Trump administration actions has presented fresh threats to wind developers seeking everyday sign-offs for things that have never before presented a potential problem. Renewables developers and their supporters say the rush of actions is intended to further curtail investment in wind after Congress earlier this summer drastically curtailed tax breaks for wind and solar.
“I don’t think they even care if it’ll stand judicial review,” Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, executive director of the Western Environmental Law Center, told me. “It’s just going to chill anyone with limited capital from going to [an] agency.”
First up: The Transportation Department last Tuesday declared that it would now call for a national 1.2-mile property setback — that is, a mandatory distance requirement — for all wind facilities near railroads and highways.
When it announced the move, the DOT claimed it had “recently discovered” that the Biden administration had “overruled a safety recommendation for dozens of wind energy projects” related to radio frequencies near transportation corridors, suggesting the federal government would soon be stepping in to rectify the purported situation. To try and support this claim, the agency released a pair of Biden-era letters from a DOT spectrum policy office related to Prairie Heritage, a Pattern Energy wind project in Illinois, one recommending action due to radio issues and a subsequent analysis that no longer raised concerns.
Citing these, the DOT stated that political officials had overruled the concerns of safety experts and called on Congress to investigate. It also suggested that “33 projects have been uncovered where the original safety recommendation was rescinded.” DOT couldn’t be reached for comment in time for publication. Pattern Energy declined to comment.
Buried in this announcement was another reveal: DOT said that it would instruct the Federal Aviation Administration to “thoroughly evaluate proposed wind turbines to ensure they do not pose a danger to aviation” — a signal that a once-routine FAA height clearance required for almost every wind turbine could now become a hurdle for the entire sector.
At the same time, the Department of the Interior unveiled a twin set of secretarial orders that went beyond even its edict of just the week before, requiring that all permits for wind and solar go through high-level political screening.
First, also on Tuesday, the department released a mega-order claiming the Biden administration “chose to misapply” the law in approving offshore wind projects and calling on nearly every branch of the agency to review “any regulations, guidance, policies, and practices” related to a host of actions that occur before and after a project receives its final record of decision, including right-of-way authorizations, land use plan amendments and revisions, and environmental and wildlife permit and analyses. Among its many directives, the order instructed Interior staff to prepare a report on fully-approved offshore wind projects that may have impacts on “military readiness.” It also directed the agency’s top lawyer to review all “pending litigation” against a wind or solar project approval and identify cases where the agency could withdraw or rescind it.
Then came Friday. As I scooped for Heatmap, Interior will no longer permit a wind project on federal land if it would produce less energy per acre than a coal, gas, or nuclear facility at the same site. This happens to be a metric where wind typically performs worse than its more conventional counterparts; that being the case, this order could amount to a targeted and de facto ban on wind on federal property.
Taken in sum, it’s difficult not to read this series of orders as a message to the entire wind industry: Avoid the federal government at all costs, if you can help it.
What does the future of wind development look like in the U.S. if you have to work around the feds at every turn? “It’s a good question,” John Hensley, senior vice president for markets and policy analysis at the American Clean Power Association, told me this afternoon. The challenge is that “as we see more and more of these crop up, it becomes more and more difficult to move these projects forward — and, somewhat equally important, it becomes difficult to find the financing to develop these projects.”
“If the financing community is unwilling to take on that risk then the money dries up and these projects have a lower likelihood of happening,” Hensley said, adding: “We haven’t reached the threshold where all activity has ground to a stop, but it certainly has pushed companies to re-evaluate their portfolios and think about where they do have this regulatory risk, and it pushes the financing community to do the same. It’s just putting more barriers in place to move these projects forward.”
Anti-wind activists, meanwhile, see these orders as a map to the anti-renewables Holy Grail: forcibly decommissioning projects that are already in service.
On the same day as the mega-order, the coastal vacation town of Nantucket, Massachusetts, threatened legal action against Vineyard Wind, the offshore wind project that experienced a construction catastrophe during the middle of last year’s high tourist season, sending part of a turbine blade and shards of fiberglass into the waters just offshore. The facility is still partially under construction, but is already sending electrons to the grid. Less than 24 hours later, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative legal group tied to other lawsuits against offshore wind projects, filed a petition to the Interior Department requesting that it reconsider prior permits for Vineyard Wind and halt operations.
David Stevenson, a former Trump adviser who now works with the offshore wind opponent Caesar Rodney Institute, told me he thinks the Interior order laid out a pathway to reconsider approvals. “Many of us who have been plaintiffs in various lawsuits have suggested to the Secretary of the Interior that there are flaws, and the flaws are spelled out in the lawsuits to the permit process.”
Nick Krakoff, a senior attorney with the pro-climate action Conservation Law Foundation, had an identical view to Stevenson’s. “I’m certainly not aware of this ever being done before,” he told me, noting that the Biden administration paused new oil and gas leases but didn’t do a “systematic review” of a sector to find “ways to potentially undo prior permitting decisions.”
Democrats in Congress have finally started speaking up about this. Last week four Democrats — led by Martin Heinrich, the top Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee — sent a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum arguing that the secretarial orders would delay any decision related to renewable energy in general, “no matter how routine.” A Democratic staffer on the committee, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the letter, told me privately that “fear is where this is headed.”
“They’re just building a record that will ultimately allow them to not approve future projects, and potentially deny projects that have already been approved,” the staffer said. ”They have all these new hoops they have to go through, and if they’re saying these things aren’t in the public interest, it’s not hard to see where they are going.”