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Biden’s Secretary of Energy argues that if Trump wants to achieve his goals, preserving his predecessor’s manufacturing incentives is the only way.
What if — despite the news — America is in fact the world’s most promising country to invest in right now? What if now is actually the best time to build a manufacturing facility in the U.S., particularly for the new energy economy? What if hundreds of communities could be rejoicing in fresh opportunities to work in future-facing industries?
And what if the reason comes down to the combined efforts of Joe Biden and Donald Trump?
I’ve always said that to reshore and rebuild manufacturing in America, we have to play two parts offense and one part defense. The Inflation Reduction Act, which Biden signed into law in 2022, is the biggest offensive play the U.S. has ever made, with tax credits and incentives that are unleashing a clean energy arms race right here at home. Tariffs can be defense, provided they’re phased in and negotiated smartly to allow for U.S. supply chains to develop.
We now face a choice: Abandon our offensive strategy by gutting those IRA tax incentives, or play to win by building on the work we did during the Biden administration. It’s that simple — to achieve true energy dominance, America needs the IRA. And then over the next three years the Trump administration will have the honor of cutting the ribbon on all those new factories.
But the time is urgent. Congress is debating the federal budget over the next few weeks, and the fate of the IRA — and all of those factories and jobs — hangs in the balance.
The fact is, the IRA is working. When I was Secretary of Energy, the department partnered with businesses on over 500 new energy projects, from hydrogen hubs to nuclear power supply chains. Syrah Technologies is scaling up graphite refining in Louisiana. Lithium Americas just snagged a more than $2.2 billion loan to tap Thacker Pass in Nevada. Qcells opened the first major U.S. solar panel factory since the IRA became law. Fifty gigawatts of solar module capacity have been announced just this year.
This isn’t a blue-state fever dream. As you have no doubt heard, red states are raking in 85% of the investment and 68% of the jobs. Georgia, Texas, South Carolina, North Carolina — these places aren’t debating the IRA, they’re building it. In steel. In solar. In wages. In futures. That’s not “someday.” That’s happening now in the Heartland, in manufacturing towns, in places that haven’t heard the word booming in decades.
That’s how you build dominance — by making the U.S. the place where the world’s energy future gets manufactured. By making the U.S. irresistible for energy investment.
This isn’t just about being “green.” It’s about geopolitics. It’s about making sure the electrons that power our homes, our tanks, and our data centers come from American soil, not authoritarian states. China currently dominates clean energy supply chains — 70% of battery manufacturing, 80% of solar cell production, almost 100% of critical mineral processing. That’s not coincidence; it’s strategy.
The IRA isn’t just correcting a trade imbalance — it’s rewriting the global energy map. Whether or not you believe in climate change, the rest of the world is buying and building the products to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which will become a $34 trillion global market by 2050. Without the IRA, we lose our shot to beat China and the EU in innovation. We lose those jobs. We lose low-cost energy. And we give away the opportunity to power artificial intelligence-driven growth with American electrons.
And let’s talk about AI for a second, because data centers are now part of national security. In 2024, the U.S. used 45% of the world’s data center power. That number’s going to double by 2030. Our AI doesn’t run on hopes and vibes — it runs on power. And if it’s not our power, we’re exposed. We lose data centers to countries that are eager to power the AI economy, and we lose our national security right along with it.
The IRA makes that energy surge possible, and quickly. It’s catalyzing the hundreds of gigawatts of clean power slated to be added to the grid over the next three years.
Since the IRA passed, DOE counted over 950 factory and project announcements, promising almost 800,000 jobs by 2030. A recent Rhodium Group report showed that the IRA has more than tripled investment in solar, wind, batteries, and electric vehicle manufacturing since its passage, triggering a U.S. manufacturing boom. But in Q1 2025, due to the uncertainty over tax credits and tariffs, almost $7 billion of that investment has been canceled — the highest quarterly cancellation rate on record. Freyr Battery killed plans to build a $2.6 billion battery cell manufacturing plant in Georgia. In Arizona, Kore Power scrapped its gigafactory. Dominance shrivels when policy is weak.
Repealing the tax credits would raise electric bills on working families by 7% to 10%. That’s $6 billion out of the pockets of American families by 2030, and over $9 billion by 2035. Strip the IRA, and we lose supply chains. We lose factories. For what? To make China stronger? To make our grid weaker? To raise bills on the very communities who finally have something to look forward to?
Here’s the truth: You can’t be energy “dominant” if you gut the energy sources that are projected to add 80% to 90% of new gigawatts to the U.S. grid between now and 2030. Clean power is projected to add a whopping 463 gigawatts of power to the grid by 2030, according to the Energy Information Administration. That’s the equivalent of 230 Hoover Dams — but only if the IRA stays. And you can’t claim dominance when you gut the means to manufacture those products at home. Saying that the U.S. is striving for energy dominance except in the clean energy sector is like opening a steakhouse and forgetting the meat. What happened to “all of the above”?
If we’re serious about reclaiming energy dominance, the path isn’t theoretical, it’s legislative. It’s the IRA. It’s our biggest shot at securing the grid, reshoring supply chains, lowering bills, and out-innovating everyone else.
Energy dominance requires a no-holds-barred battle plan; let’s not surrender our most powerful weapon as we make America irresistible for investment again.
The views expressed here are the author’s own and not necessarily those of the DGA Group.
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New York City may very well be the epicenter of this particular fight.
It’s official: the Moss Landing battery fire has galvanized a gigantic pipeline of opposition to energy storage systems across the country.
As I’ve chronicled extensively throughout this year, Moss Landing was a technological outlier that used outdated battery technology. But the January incident played into existing fears and anxieties across the U.S. about the dangers of large battery fires generally, latent from years of e-scooters and cellphones ablaze from faulty lithium-ion tech. Concerned residents fighting projects in their backyards have successfully seized upon the fact that there’s no known way to quickly extinguish big fires at energy storage sites, and are winning particularly in wildfire-prone areas.
How successful was Moss Landing at enlivening opponents of energy storage? Since the California disaster six months ago, more than 6 gigawatts of BESS has received opposition from activists explicitly tying their campaigns to the incident, Heatmap Pro® researcher Charlie Clynes told me in an interview earlier this month.
Matt Eisenson of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Law agreed that there’s been a spike in opposition, telling me that we are currently seeing “more instances of opposition to battery storage than we have in past years.” And while Eisenson said he couldn’t speak to the impacts of the fire specifically on that rise, he acknowledged that the disaster set “a harmful precedent” at the same time “battery storage is becoming much more present.”
“The type of fire that occurred there is unlikely to occur with modern technology, but the Moss Landing example [now] tends to come up across the country,” Eisenson said.
Some of the fresh opposition is in rural agricultural communities such as Grundy County, Illinois, which just banned energy storage systems indefinitely “until the science is settled.” But the most crucial place to watch seems to be New York City, for two reasons: One, it’s where a lot of energy storage is being developed all at once; and two, it has a hyper-saturated media market where criticism can receive more national media attention than it would in other parts of the country.
Someone who’s felt this pressure firsthand is Nick Lombardi, senior vice president of project development for battery storage company NineDot Energy. NineDot and other battery storage developers had spent years laying the groundwork in New York City to build out the energy storage necessary for the city to meet its net-zero climate goals. More recently they’ve faced crowds of protestors against a battery storage facility in Queens, and in Staten Island endured hecklers at public meetings.
“We’ve been developing projects in New York City for a few years now, and for a long time we didn’t run into opposition to our projects or really any sort of meaningful negative coverage in the press. All of that really changed about six months ago,” Lombardi said.
The battery storage developer insists that opposition to the technology is not popular and represents a fringe group. Lombardi told me that the company has more than 50 battery storage sites in development across New York City, and only faced “durable opposition” at “three or four sites.” The company also told me it has yet to receive the kind of email complaint flood that would demonstrate widespread opposition.
This is visible in the politicians who’ve picked up the anti-BESS mantle: GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa’s become a champion for the cause, but mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” campaign itself would provide for the construction of these facilities. (While Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has not focused on BESS, it’s quite unlikely the climate hawkish democratic socialist would try to derail these projects.)
Lombardi told me he now views Moss Landing as a “catalyst” for opposition in the NYC metro area. “Suddenly there’s national headlines about what’s happening,” he told me. “There were incidents in the past that were in the news, but Moss Landing was headline news for a while, and that combined with the fact people knew it was happening in their city combined to create a new level of awareness.”
He added that six months after the blaze, it feels like developers in the city have a better handle on the situation. “We’ve spent a lot of time in reaction to that to make sure we’re organized and making sure we’re in contact with elected officials, community officials, [and] coordinated with utilities,” Lombardi said.
And more on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects in Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.
1. St. Croix County, Wisconsin - Solar opponents in this county see themselves as the front line in the fight over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” law and its repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.
2. Barren County, Kentucky - How much wood could a Wood Duck solar farm chuck if it didn’t get approved in the first place? We may be about to find out.
3. Iberia Parish, Louisiana - Another potential proxy battle over IRA tax credits is going down in Louisiana, where residents are calling to extend a solar moratorium that is about to expire so projects can’t start construction.
4. Baltimore County, Maryland – The fight over a transmission line in Maryland could have lasting impacts for renewable energy across the country.
5. Worcester County, Maryland – Elsewhere in Maryland, the MarWin offshore wind project appears to have landed in the crosshairs of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.
6. Clark County, Ohio - Consider me wishing Invenergy good luck getting a new solar farm permitted in Ohio.
7. Searcy County, Arkansas - An anti-wind state legislator has gone and posted a slide deck that RWE provided to county officials, ginning up fresh uproar against potential wind development.
Talking local development moratoria with Heatmap’s own Charlie Clynes.
This week’s conversation is special: I chatted with Charlie Clynes, Heatmap Pro®’s very own in-house researcher. Charlie just released a herculean project tracking all of the nation’s county-level moratoria and restrictive ordinances attacking renewable energy. The conclusion? Essentially a fifth of the country is now either closed off to solar and wind entirely or much harder to build. I decided to chat with him about the work so you could hear about why it’s an important report you should most definitely read.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
Tell me about the project you embarked on here.
Heatmap’s research team set out last June to call every county in the United States that had zoning authority, and we asked them if they’ve passed ordinances to restrict renewable energy, or if they have renewable energy projects in their communities that have been opposed. There’s specific criteria we’ve used to determine if an ordinance is restrictive, but by and large, it’s pretty easy to tell once a county sends you an ordinance if it is going to restrict development or not.
The vast majority of counties responded, and this has been a process that’s allowed us to gather an extraordinary amount of data about whether counties have been restricting wind, solar and other renewables. The topline conclusion is that restrictions are much worse than previously accounted for. I mean, 605 counties now have some type of restriction on renewable energy — setbacks that make it really hard to build wind or solar, moratoriums that outright ban wind and solar. Then there’s 182 municipality laws where counties don’t have zoning jurisdiction.
We’re seeing this pretty much everywhere throughout the country. No place is safe except for states who put in laws preventing jurisdictions from passing restrictions — and even then, renewable energy companies are facing uphill battles in getting to a point in the process where the state will step in and overrule a county restriction. It’s bad.
Getting into the nitty-gritty, what has changed in the past few years? We’ve known these numbers were increasing, but what do you think accounts for the status we’re in now?
One is we’re seeing a high number of renewables coming into communities. But I think attitudes started changing too, especially in places that have been fairly saturated with renewable energy like Virginia, where solar’s been a presence for more than a decade now. There have been enough projects where people have bad experiences that color their opinion of the industry as a whole.
There’s also a few narratives that have taken shape. One is this idea solar is eating up prime farmland, or that it’ll erode the rural character of that area. Another big one is the environment, especially with wind on bird deaths, even though the number of birds killed by wind sounds big until you compare it to other sources.
There are so many developers and so many projects in so many places of the world that there are examples where either something goes wrong with a project or a developer doesn’t follow best practices. I think those have a lot more staying power in the public perception of renewable energy than the many successful projects that go without a hiccup and don’t bother people.
Are people saying no outright to renewable energy? Or is this saying yes with some form of reasonable restrictions?
It depends on where you look and how much solar there is in a community.
One thing I’ve seen in Virginia, for example, is counties setting caps on the total acreage solar can occupy, and those will be only 20 acres above the solar already built, so it’s effectively blocking solar. In places that are more sparsely populated, you tend to see restrictive setbacks that have the effect of outright banning wind — mile-long setbacks are often insurmountable for developers. Or there’ll be regulations to constrict the scale of a project quite a bit but don’t ban the technologies outright.
What in your research gives you hope?
States that have administrations determined to build out renewables have started to override these local restrictions: Michigan, Illinois, Washington, California, a few others. This is almost certainly going to have an impact.
I think the other thing is there are places in red states that have had very good experiences with renewable energy by and large. Texas, despite having the most wind generation in the nation, has not seen nearly as much opposition to wind, solar, and battery storage. It’s owing to the fact people in Texas generally are inclined to support energy projects in general and have seen wind and solar bring money into these small communities that otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of attention.