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A practical guide to using the climate law to get cheaper solar panels, heat pumps, and more.
Today marks the one year anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act, the biggest investment in tackling climate change the United States has ever made. The law consists of dozens of subsidies to help individuals, households, and businesses adopt clean energy technologies. Many of these solutions will also help people save money on their energy bills, reduce pollution, and improve their resilience to disasters.
But understanding how much funding is available for what, and how to get it, can be pretty confusing. Many Americans are not even aware that these programs exist. A poll conducted by The Washington Post and the University of Maryland in late July found that about 66% of Americans say they have heard “little” or “nothing at all” about the law’s incentives for installing rooftop solar panels, and 77% have heard little or nothing about subsidies for heat pumps. This tracks similar polling that Heatmap conducted last winter, suggesting not much has changed since then.
Below is Heatmap’s guide to the IRA’s incentives for cutting your carbon footprint at home. If you haven’t heard much about how the IRA can help you decarbonize your life, this guide is for you. If you have heard about the available subsidies, but aren’t sure how much they are worth or where to begin, I’ll walk you through it. (And if you’re looking for information about the electric vehicle tax credit, my colleague at Heatmap Robinson Meyer has you covered with this buyer’s guide.)
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There’s funding for almost every solution you can think of to make your home more energy efficient and reduce your fossil fuel use, whether you want to install solar panels, insulate your attic, replace your windows, or buy electric appliances. If you need new wiring or an electrical panel upgrade before you can get heat pumps or solar panels, there’s some money available for that, too.
The IRA created two types of incentives for home energy efficiency improvements: Unlimited tax credits that will lower the amount you owe when you file your taxes, and $8.8 billion in rebates that function as up-front discounts or post-installation refunds on equipment and services.
The tax credits are available now, but the rebates are not. The latter will be administered by states, which must apply for funding and create programs before the money can go out. The Biden administration began accepting applications at the end of July and expects states to begin rolling out their programs later this year or early next.
The home tax credits are available to everyone that owes taxes. The rebates, however, will have income restrictions (more on this later).
“The Inflation Reduction Act is not a limited time offer,” according to Ari Matusiak, the CEO of the nonprofit advocacy group Rewiring America. The rebate programs will only be available until the money runs out, but, again, none of them have started yet. Meanwhile, there’s no limit on how many people can claim the tax credits, and they’ll be available for at least the next decade. That means you don’t need to rush and replace your hot water heater if you have one that works fine. But when it does break down, you’ll have help paying for a replacement.
You might want to hold off on buying new appliances or getting insulation — basically any improvements inside your house. There are tax credits available for a lot of this stuff right now, but you’ll likely be able to stack them with rebates in the future.
However, if you’re thinking of installing solar panels on your roof or getting a backup battery system, there’s no need to wait. The rebates will not cover those technologies.
A few other caveats: There’s a good chance your state, city, or utility already offers rebates or other incentives for many of these solutions. Check with your state’s energy office or your utility to find out what’s available. Also, it can take months to get quotes and line up contractors to get this kind of work done. If you want to be ready when the rebates hit, it’s probably a good idea to do some of the legwork now.
If you do nothing else this year, consider getting a professional home energy audit. This will cost several hundred dollars, depending on where you live, but you’ll be able to get 30% off or up to $150 back under the IRA’s home improvement tax credit. Doing an audit will help you figure out which solutions will give you the biggest bang for your buck, and how to prioritize them once more funding becomes available. The auditor might even be able to explain all of the existing local rebate programs you’re eligible for.
The Internal Revenue Service will allow you to work with any home energy auditor until the end of this year, but beginning in 2024, you must hire an auditor with specific qualifications in order to claim the credit.
Let’s start with what’s inside your home. In addition to an energy audit, the Energy Efficiency Home Improvement Credit offers consumers 30% off the cost (after any other subsidies, and excluding labor) of Energy Star-rated windows and doors, insulation, and air sealing.
There’s a maximum amount you can claim for each type of equipment each year:
$600 for windows
$500 for doors
$1,200 for air sealing and insulation
The Energy Efficiency Home Improvement Credit also covers heat pumps, heat pump water heaters, and electrical panel upgrades, including the cost of installation for those systems. You can get:
$2,000 for heat pumps
$600 for a new electrical panel
Yes, homeowners can only claim up to $3,200 per year under this program until 2032.
Also, one downside to the Energy Efficiency Home Improvement Credit is that it does not carry over. If you spend enough on efficiency to qualify for the full $3,200 in a given year, but you only owe the federal government $2,000 for the year, your bill will go to zero and you will miss out on the remaining $1,200 credit. So it could be worth your while to spread the work out.
The other big consumer-oriented tax credit, the Residential Clean Energy Credit, offers homeowners 30% off the cost of solar panels and solar water heaters. It also covers battery systems, which store energy from the grid or from your solar panels that you can use when there’s a blackout, or sell back to your utility when the grid needs more power.
The subsidy has no limits, so if you spend $35,000 on solar panels and battery storage, including labor, you’ll be eligible for the full 30% refund, or $10,500. The credit can also be rolled over, so if your tax liability that year is only $5,000, you’ll be able to claim more of it the following year, and continue doing so until you’ve received the full value.
Geothermal heating systems are also covered under this credit. (Geothermal heat pumps work similarly to regular heat pumps, but they use the ground as a source and sink for heat, rather than the ambient air.)
Here’s what we know right now. The IRA funded two rebate programs. One, known as the Home Energy Performance-Based Whole House Rebates, will provide discounts to homeowners and landlords based on the amount of energy a home upgrade is predicted to save.
Congress did not specify which energy-saving measures qualify — that’s something state energy offices will decide when they design their programs. But it did cap the total amount each household could receive, based on income. For example, if your household earns under 80% of the area median income, and you make improvements that cut your energy use by 35%, you’ll be eligible for up to $8,000. If your household earns more than that, you can get up to $4,000.
There’s also the High-Efficiency Electric Home Rebate Program, which will provide discounts on specific electric appliances like heat pumps, an induction stove, and an electric clothes dryer, as well as a new electrical panel and wiring. Individual households can get up to $14,000 in discounts under this program, although there are caps on how much is available for each piece of equipment. This money will only be available to low- and moderate-income households, or those earning under 150% of the area median income.
Renters with a household income below 150% of the area median income qualify for rebates on appliances that they should be able to install without permission from their landlords, and that they can take with them if they move. For example, portable appliances like tabletop induction burners, clothes dryers, and window-unit heat pumps are all eligible for rebates.
It’s also worth noting that there is a lot of funding available for multifamily building owners. If you have a good relationship with your landlord, you might want to talk to them about the opportunity to make lasting investments in their property. Under the performance-based rebates program, apartment building owners can get up to $400,000 for energy efficiency projects.
For the most part, yes. But the calculus gets tricky when it comes to heat pumps.
Experts generally agree that no matter where you live, switching from an oil or propane-burning heating system or electric resistance heaters to heat pumps will lower your energy bills. Not so if you’re switching over from natural gas.
Electric heat pumps are three to four times more efficient than natural gas heating systems, but electricity is so much more expensive than gas in some parts of the country that switching from gas to a heat pump can increase your overall bills a bit. Especially if you also electrify your water heater, stove, and clothes dryer.
That being said, Rewiring America estimates that switching from gas to a heat pump will lower bills for about 60% of households. Many utilities offer tools that will help you calculate your bills if you make the switch.
The good news is that all the measures I’ve discussed in this article are expected to cut carbon emissions and pollution, even if most of your region’s electricity still comes from fossil fuels. For some, that might be worth the monthly premium.
Tax Credit #1 offers 30% off the cost of energy audits, windows, doors, insulation, air sealing, heat pumps, electrical panels, with a $3200-per-year allowance and individual item limits.
Tax Credit #2 offers 30% off the cost of solar panels, solar water heaters, batteries, and geothermal heating systems.
Rebate Program #1 will offer discounts on whole-home efficiency upgrades depending on how much they reduce your energy use, with an $8,000 cap for lower-income families and a $4,000 cap for everyone else.
Rebate Program #2 is only for low- and moderate- income households, and will offer discounts on specific electric appliances, with a $14,000 cap.
Read more about the Inflation Reduction Act:
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The political marriage of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the EV mogul and world’s richest man, has significantly changed the outlook for what the Trump administration might mean for energy policy, decarbonization, and the rule of law.
Musk has taken over numerous offices responsible for crucial functions within the federal government, including the Office of Personnel Management at the White House. Musk has snatched control of the federal government’s payments system, and he and his team have illegally tried to use it to block payments to federal programs, according to CNN and The New York Times. Conservative budget experts say that such a move violates the Constitution, which grants sole control over the power of the purse to Congress.
What’s the issue? The problem here is not primarily that Musk is unelected — there are lots of powerful people in every administration who are not elected (though few have ever had as many conflicts of interest as Musk, the CEO of the world’s most valuable automaker in Tesla and the holder of many government contracts via the rocket company SpaceX and satellite internet provider Starlink). Nor would it be a problem if Musk were merely trying to modernize the government’s IT systems.
The problem is that Musk has used his control of a technical system — the software that the government uses to send more than a billion payments a year — to assert effective control over federal programs and policies. This is why Musk trying to shut off payments that have been appropriated by Congress matters: He is in essence saying that because he can do something with the software, he may do it.
The issue is that the government can do many things that it broadly does not do because they are illegal.
But Trump and Musk together are now testing the limits of the law.
The Trump administration is operating on a legal theory that the president can simply decide not to spend money that has been appropriated by Congress. Key officials in the Trump administration argue that Congress sets a ceiling, but not a floor, when it appropriates federal funding. It also believes that the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which Congress passed during the Nixon administration, is unconstitutional.
I find it hard to believe that the Supreme Court — which last year severely limited the executive branch’s ability to interpret congressional laws which create and govern agencies — agrees with Trump that the president can ignore those same laws when they govern federal spending. But the Court has reached shocking decisions on Trump’s behalf before.
Trump’s team seems to be trying to make this legal theory central to how his entire administration works. Impoundment underpinned the White House’s attempt last month to block all outgoing federal grants and loans, which briefly threw the government into chaos before it was blocked by a judge and ultimately rescinded.
Musk’s ploy, seemingly, is to move so fast that these legal and constitutional questions become moot. If he can close a federal agency’s offices, put its workers on leave, and cut off funding to its programs, then perhaps it won’t matter what a judge says about impoundment itself. And if Musk can control the tap of public money, turning it on and off at will, then he can usurp the operation of the United States government.
In the world of climate and energy, Musk’s prominence — and the lack of precedent for his situation — raises important questions for businesses and policy makers. Here is what we do not know about Musk today:
In 2010, the federal government issued a $465 million loan to Tesla so that it could build a factory in California for its Model S sedan.
In recent years, the government has made similar deals, lending tens of billions of dollars to other companies that make electric vehicles or that mine and refine critical minerals.
Last month, the Biden administration closed a $6.57 billion loan to Rivian, the electric truck maker, so that it could build a new factory in Georgia.
Some of these new borrowers, including Rivian and legacy automakers like Ford, compete with Tesla. It is still unclear whether Musk will be able to use his control of the federal government’s checkbook to cut off some loans and allow others to proceed. Doing so would ultimately stifle competition in the EV sector, benefitting Tesla, where Musk remains CEO.
The White House said this week that Trump is allowing Musk to police his own conflicts of interest.
In December, Musk called for Congress to “get rid” of the clean energy tax credits created by the Inflation Reduction Act.
Most tax credits are claimed by companies against what they owe on their taxes, meaning that they result in negative revenue to the government. But the IRA created a new kind of credit — a so-called “direct payment” — that allowed states, schools, churches, tribes, and other entities without federal tax liability to claim money for installing clean energy or buying electric vehicles.
Those payments — and any other tax refunds — ultimately run through the Treasury Department’s computer systems. It remains unclear whether Musk can use control of the federal government’s checkbook to block the payout of these payments.
One of Musk’s initiatives, the U.S. DOGE Service, is housed at the General Services Administration, or GSA.
The GSA is the government’s internal landlord and facilities manager — it owns, builds, and manages federal office space. It also operates parts of the federal vehicle fleet.
Under the Biden administration, it undertook a number of energy sustainability and efficiency initiatives. Some of these programs were canceled by President Trump’s initial set of executive orders, but the full scope of Musk’s authority in the agency remains unclear.
Last year, the U.S. military was investigating whether Elon Musk complied with the rules of his security clearance, according to The New York Times.
At the time, Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, had already declined to pursue the highest level security clearance for Musk, in part because of reports around his open drug use and contact with foreign leaders, according to The Wall Street Journal. Musk is reported to hold a “Top Secret” clearance.
The Journal has also previously reported that Musk conducted secret conversations with Vladimir Putin and that Musk’s drug use worries Tesla and SpaceX executives.
Tesla has deep ties in China. It achieved record sales in China last year, although its market share has fallen as Chinese EV companies have out-competed its aging vehicle line-up. Tesla is reportedly opening a new factory in Shanghai this month. Musk has also staked out public positions that favor the Chinese Community Party’s views. In 2022, he suggested that Taiwan could become a “special administrative zone” of the People’s Republic of China.
It’s unclear how these commitments might affect his work for the U.S. government.
Three tactics from Erin Burns, executive director of Carbon180, on how the industry can use this time wisely.
Erin Burns has been here before. The executive director of Carbon180, a carbon removal research and policy nonprofit, joined the organization as its first policy director in 2018, partway through Donald Trump’s first term as president. It was under that administration that she helped win the first ever dedicated federal research and development funding for carbon removal, a modest $60 million in 2019.
It’s a very different world today than it was then, so she wasn’t exactly here. There’s now billions of dollars in federal funding appropriated to pull carbon from the atmosphere — not just for research and development, but also for building commercial-scale projects and purchasing carbon removal services. At the same time, this new Trump administration is moving more quickly and aggressively than the last one to undo anything resembling climate policy, and future attempts to re-allocate some of that money are not out of the question.
I recently spoke to Burns about how she’s looking to make progress on carbon removal under these circumstances. Here are my big takeaways from the conversation.
It’s not yet clear how the Trump administration or new Congress is going to act on existing carbon removal programs. Although the industry has a history of receiving bipartisan support and federally-funded carbon removal projects are happening in Republican states and districts, that doesn’t mean these programs are safe. “The rollback of certain policies are not ultimately going to be about how people feel about direct air capture or carbon removal,” Burns told me. “It’s going to be a broader ideology around the role of a place like the Department of Energy, and what kinds of supports the federal government should provide.”
With that in mind, Burns’ motto is “the best defense is a good offense.” That means working with the congresspeople who supported the direct air capture hubs to highlight why the government should continue investing in them. It also involves working with labor unions with members in heavy industry who see the jobs potential. It’s time to double down on a more expansive argument for the benefits of these projects, she said. “There are additional benefits to every carbon removal pathway. We should always be talking about them. Climate’s not going to be the argument that gets you those really durable political coalitions.”
Playing offense also means planning for the next opening. The reason the Biden administration made so much progress on carbon removal, Burns said, is that advocates like her spent two years under the Trump administration meeting weekly, developing policy and “socializing” it, so that it was “ready to go.” As policy enactment in Washington slows down, advocates will have more capacity to sit down and develop the next wave of ideas. To Burns, that means thinking about a more tailored, ground-up approach.
“To be honest, we don’t really have carbon removal policy in the United States,” Burns told me. “We have direct air capture policy, and even that is, like, point-source carbon capture policy that’s been tweaked to fit direct air capture.” An example is the 45Q tax credit, which was originally created to support projects that capture carbon from the smokestacks of coal plants, but was expanded to support direct air capture projects as well.
But carbon removal is not just direct air capture — it’s also planting trees and grinding rocks, activities that likely require different policies and supports than big air-sucking machines to scale up. Leveraging all that to its fullest extent will require a more expansive policy regime.
“Let’s start from scratch,” Burns said. “Start to grapple with the fundamental nature of carbon removal as a unique thing that isn’t going to be deployed only with the policies that we’ve used to deploy technologies like solar. Because carbon removal is not going to create electricity, for example. It’s not just about making it cheap enough that there’s going to be this market force. Making it cheaper is great, but you also have to think about the other barriers.”
Before coming to Carbon180, Burns worked at the center-left think tank Third Way on carbon capture and nuclear energy policy. While she was there, Trump proposed dramatically slashing the Department of Energy’s budget for energy efficiency and renewable energy research and eliminating the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, which supports the early development of technologies that are too risky for private investment.
“You can get some unusual bedfellows together when you have an administration that’s trying to cut, say, all of the Department of Energy,” Burns said. Instead of renewable developers and nuclear power companies and carbon removal startups all fighting for a piece of the pie, there’s incentive to come together and “make sure the pie still exists.”
It’s not just about preserving funding. The carbon removal industry also needs to be making inroads with adjacent industries because they have common interests. Direct air capture facilities need renewable energy to operate. and right now the future of renewable energy is under major threat. Similarly, direct air capture projects need the Environmental Protection Agency to be well-staffed enough to continue permitting carbon sequestration wells — a process that was slow to start but starting to pick up at the end of Biden’s term. “I think there’s value in us thinking about what it means to not just defend carbon removal, but defend all of this climate infrastructure that is going to be necessary for us to be successful.”
In her past work on carbon capture, Burns grew familiar with a divide between players who were genuinely trying to fight climate change and those for whom carbon capture was just a line in their advertising budget. In her view, the carbon removal industry has been different, with most companies genuinely trying to do the right thing for the climate. It’s an open question as to whether that might change in this new political environment, she said.
Under the Biden administration, the Department of Energy was staffed with some of the leading carbon removal experts in the country. Now there may be less pressure on companies to have high standards for measuring, reporting, and verifying carbon removal outcomes — meaning more of an opening to fudge the truth of how much benefit their projects are providing.
The Trump administration is also scaling back the size of agencies’ staff and removing requirements for companies that receive financial assistance to do things like ensure that the communities hosting their projects also benefit from them. Burns said the onus is on organizations like Carbon180 and on corporate carbon removal buyers to maintain high standards not just for measurement, but also for community engagement. “If you care about deploying CDR, you need to care about local support for those projects,” she said.
For one, community opposition can shut down a project. But also, bringing benefits to host communities helps build political support for carbon removal that can lead to more federal aid down the line. “Those are keys for long-term success.”
A conversation with Peter Bonner, senior fellow for the Federation of American Scientists
This week’s Q&A is with Peter Bonner, senior fellow for the Federation of American Scientists. I reached out to Peter because this week, as I was breaking stories about chaos in renewables permitting, his organization released a report he helped author that details how technology and hiring challenges are real bottlenecks in the federal environmental review process. We talked about this report, which was the culmination of 18 months of research and involved detailed interviews with federal permitting staff.
The following interview was lightly edited for clarity.
Okay so walk me through why you did this report.
The reason for doing the report was to look at, why is permitting a bottleneck? What are some things that can improve the effectiveness and the efficiency of permitting to get permits done better and faster?
Depending on the type of permitting project and where the infrastructure is getting built, permitting could be very, very difficult, or it could go more easily. It depends on the number of stakeholders involved. It depends on the type of permitting project it is. But it also depends on each agency doing permitting somewhat differently, and leaning on different types of technology to enable them to do permitting better.
One agency may have one configuration of a permitting team and in another agency, that configuration of a permitting team may be quite different, sometimes independent of the type of permitting project they’re talking about. So there’s a need for greater consistency in how those teams are built, and also the skill and talent that goes into those teams and how they work with contractors to get the permits done.
In addition, each agency is leaning on their own types of technologies on case management and how to run the permitting project instead of there being consistency around the technologies they use as well.
What went into this report?
There were a couple pieces to it. One is a set of pretty extensive interviews with permitting program managers, hiring managers, and HR specialists who were bringing people into agencies to help with permitting functions and programs. We also did significant extensive research into the permitting process and what technologies permitting teams were using to document and guide their work in adherence to regulations. So a lot of it was primary research working directly with the agencies and the people who were on the ground doing the permitting.
How much of the backlog in permitting is Congress? Or is it just the executive branch?
Clarity in the laws and regulations that guide permitting – there’s still work there to be done. But our focus was less on laws and regulations and more around, how are permitting teams actually getting the work done? What talent do they need on those teams? What technologies can they use to support their work?
So you’re telling me a big issue might really be the government’s load bearing infrastructure, so to speak. Is it really just the back-end? The pipes?
A decent amount of it is the pipes and getting the right people in place.
The permitting workforce has been wanting for people and skillsets even before the increase in infrastructure spending over the past few years. You’re looking at a workforce that did not have enough people to do the job before this influx of projects came in.
It therefore depended on bringing in people and contracting people to do that work as well. And in the hiring process, we found significant delays in recruiting for permitting talent..
What we found was a lot of delays due to the bureaucracy around hiring that I think is well-documented in other places [in government]. Doing more, clear skills-based assessments up-front when you’re evaluating people for jobs so that highly qualified people then make it to the list that you can hire from. Making sure people get through the background check process properly. There’s lots of things that delay getting people on board faster and also reaching out and recruiting the right sorts of folks.
To what extent do you think your recommendations here on the pipes, so to speak, will have an audience with this administration? I’m particularly curious given all the headlines we’re seeing about staff reductions in the federal government.
It’s hard to project that and there’s a lot of clarity that needs still to come in terms of how this administration is viewing supporting permitting teams and the agencies to make sure that they can do their jobs better. The real answers to that are still to come.
I think there’s a lot of change going on in the permitting regulatory environment, the regulations. There’s also executive orders, legal decisions that have come down lately. We’re in a dynamic, changing situation.
My hope is that the administration would recognize that, take a look at the report we have and take a look at investing in the right people and the right technologies.