How the Renewable Energy Industry Is Processing Trump 2.0

This week we’re talking to Carl Fleming, a renewables attorney with McDermott Will & Emery who was an advisor to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo under the Biden administration. We chatted the morning after the Trump administration attempted to freeze large swathes of federal spending. My goal? To understand whether this chaos and uncertainty was trickling down into the transition as we spoke. But Fleming had a sober perspective and an important piece of wisdom: stay calm and remain on course.

The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

How are you seeing the private sector respond to all of this news?

My view is, you can read a lot into what people publish in the EOs and what’s written and what’s issued and you can sometimes read a good deal into what hasn’t been issued and what hasn’t been said. In the executive orders that got first issued in a flurry we saw a few that got pointed directly at onshore wind, some on offshore wind, but solar and standalone storage – as predicted – remained pretty much intact.

We were under the impression and we stood by it that we had the guidance in hand, bankable guidance, from the IRS prior to the change in administration and prior to any look-back window that people had been transacting on over the past year at kind of a record pace. Standalone storage has just had a breakout year. Solar continues to go, to continue to be put on the grid. And we also have manufacturing of solar panels, the domestic supply chain. This year we stood up is nowhere near what we need to fulfill our requirements to get everything we need to do domestically to fill our generation requirements [but] its a pretty great step in the right direction. And those credits have been pretty good to the economy and Republican states.

The way I’ve seen people react is, I’ve probably been busier than ever the past two weeks, not only fielding questions like that but also for tax credit transfers, all of the corporates we work with. We work in both the buy and the sell side of all these credit transfers. We’re working with a lot of solar module manufacturers to sell the credits under the IRA. We’re working with a lot of buyers to purchase those credits. And we’re working with the buyers and sellers under the generation of these projects.

All of the buyers have come out and continued with their 2025 strategy to buy more of these credits, if not more so. And all of the developers we represent continue to produce more of these credits. So I haven’t seen a hiccup or slowdown in actual transactions. If anything, I’ve seen stuff pick up in the solar space and in the manufacturing space. I continue to be very optimistic about those two fundamental parts of the energy transition, because if you need to go be an energy superpower, you wouldn’t want to turn off solar, turn off storage –

Is that argument that if you were trying to deal with “energy security,” you wouldn’t turn off solar and storage – is that enough to assuage uncertainty in the investor space?

I think it’s helpful. If you’re a private equity investor or you’re any sort of lender or a developer, you’re probably not going to base your whole model on the hopes that our energy security strategy syncs up with what most people think it should look like. But when you layer it on top of some of the fundamentals… I want to say that solar did not go away eight years ago. When Trump first came in, we saw more renewables deployed in his administration. At times, we saw more beneficial guidance, issuance of tax guidance under that administration, than we would hope for from some more favorable administrations.

The fact that the IRA has disproportionately benefited red states is just a fact that can’t be overlooked. I met with a group of about two dozen lawmakers a few weeks ago to talk about the IRA and there’s quite a few of those folks in the room that say, “Whatever we do, we can’t dismantle the IRA.”

But how has the chaos in the last week and a half impacted investment in renewable energy, though?

I think the renewable energy industry is used to a lack of predictability. It’s kind of a lawyer’s job, our team’s job, to help folks mitigate risk [and] to see what potential pitfalls there may be and to structure and draft around those.

You might see as things get more unpredictable, as folks go out to investors to raise capital, you might see a little bit of tightening around different portfolios or different types of companies based on their pipelines or how they’re put together. But I think one investor’s look on a project or pipeline may vary widely from another investor who’s got a different project or pipeline. There’s a lot of capital out there to be deployed. I think people are looking to invest.

I think you just need to partner the right developers with the right investors.

Are you seeing any slowdown in solar investment though?

I don’t see folks taking a hardline approach or stopping any time soon.

This is not an existential crisis while the ITC [investment tax credit] and PTC [production tax credit] exist. It’s not even, could you go back in time to unwind these credits. It’s moreso, going forward, what will the IRA look like? Will there be additional technologies added to the IRA? That’s possible to help stand up other technologies. Will the runway for the credit, instead of it being unlimited for at least 10 years, will [it] be pared back a bit? There’s potential, but it’s unlikely.

Okay last question and it’s a fun one: what was the last song you listened to?

I’m not going to lie, I’m an Eagles fan. And I’m from Philly and a huge Meek Mill fan. So “Uptown Vibes” by Meek Mill is in the car.