This article is exclusively
for Heatmap Plus subscribers.
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:
A conversation with Jason Clark, former chief strategy officer for American Clean Power
With the election approaching, I wanted to talk to the smartest person I could find to explain how the election could affect the Inflation Reduction Act and ultimately renewable energy development. So I hit up Jason Clark, who was until recently chief strategy officer for American Clean Power during passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and the first years of IRS guidance.
Clark, who has started energy policy consulting firm Power Brief, put together a risk profile for every major IRA program in the event of unified Republican control in Washington. I talked to him about the risk analysis, what programs are most at risk, and whether we should care about oil companies supporting some parts of the law.
Why did you do this?
I spent the last six months traveling the world and during that time, I was blissfully tuned out on politics. Now that I’m back in D.C., and given how consequential this election is going to be – suffice it to say, I’m tuned back in.
I was close to the IRA drafting process – I’m familiar with the underlying bill and also how the government thinks about the programs. I recently started a company, Power Brief, that marries my love for clean energy policy and my old consulting habits: pretty visuals and PowerPoints. And looking at what might happen to the IRA felt like THE big thing happening in the space right now, so I wanted to dive deeper.
A lot of the content has been “will they/won’t they” analysis. How much do Republicans feel strongly about this bill overall? How much passion would Trump have for pushing for a full repeal? It’s been out there. But this is so complicated and has so many moving parts. I wanted to try and capture both the political reality for some of these programs and also the very practical reality of how the government thinks about the cost of these programs. The fact it can all be contained in one visual is to help people who care about climate policy and want to really understand what may happen depending on how the election turns out.
We know Congress is going to take a stab at a new tax bill next year. I’ve written about how the IRA would be targeted in that situation. Can you help our readers understand why these programs would be vulnerable in tax talks?
Classic partisan politics in D.C. By the nature of using reconciliation, the IRA was ultimately purely Democratic-led and that automatically paints it with a certain color. I think that [former] President Trump has been very unshy about criticizing the IRA, and when he doesn’t use the IRA moniker, he uses different monikers thereof. And people are going to be looking for the easiest path [to money to extend the Trump-era tax cuts].
What I don’t think is that it’ll be thrown out entirely. We’ve seen members of the House and Senate express support for parts of it–
Republicans?
Correct. There was a letter from 18 House Republicans to the [House] Speaker [Mike Johnson] saying we shouldn’t just throw this out, we should really look at it. And I think that there’s a lot of people who look at where the investment from the IRA is flowing – a lot of the dollars are going to Republican-controlled states and districts. Yes, that may insulate the whole bill from repeal outright but a lot of that is announced investment but hasn’t turned into steel on the ground and jobs yet.
So your chart singles out EV tax credits as most vulnerable to repeal. Why?
The universe of electric vehicle tax credits is fully at risk. We’ve seen it from Republican voters – constituents! – who feel that EVs are just some type of government mandated, this is some car you have to buy. But it also happens to be very, very expensive. When the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT} crunches the numbers about what this is going to cost between now and 10 years from now, it’s one of the most expensive portions of the legislation. So when you look at it and ask how much is it going to cost to ax this and give us the most savings in the tax code? You get this.
The IRA didn’t create these credits though. It simply expanded them. You think the entire credit could go away in a Republican trifecta?
I think the entire EV tax credit.
Okay. So next up on the chopping block per your chart is the renewable energy investment tax credit, or ITC. Why?
“Both the ITC and the PTC [production tax credit] when they shift into this new tech neutral paradigm have the same risk profile. For these, I don’t think it’s necessarily going to be a full repeal. I think the data about how much money is going into Republican districts is legitimate, and I think it will materialize. But there’s many spectrums of levers that someone can pull.
The tech neutral credit doesn’t end on a certain calendar year date. It ends when the U.S. sector hits a certain emissions target. The credit continues until that moment in time. One way to make the credit look less expensive on paper is to say, no, we are going to end it at a certain point. Take 2030 or 2032. You could codify a timeline on it, so the JCT won’t score the out-years on how expensive the credit is going to be. That is one version of it.
Another version of it is that there’s a base credit and then there’s added layers, like wage requirements or low-income area benefits. And that’s another thing you could pull to say, look, we’re not going to do that anymore.
What would be the impact on developers?
I don’t think a lot of folks appreciate just how long range some of this planning is, how long it takes to permit something, how long it takes to figure out the interconnection queue.
Companies aren’t thinking what are we going to build this year – they’re thinking what will be put online in 2035. So if the government changes the stability of that, companies start to pull back and say hey, let’s not go too crazy in the outyears. Baseline? It means fewer clean energy projects come online. The industry has been banking on a certain level of certainty to plan against. Any shockwave against that and some companies are going to look and ask if they have the assurance to move forward with this or not.
Okay well, candidly, to that I say: woof. So okay, your chart labels the PTC and energy efficiency credits as vulnerable. Why are they at risk if they cost less than other programs?
There are going to be certain things where the dollars and cents lose out to the political policy realities. On energy efficiency, it would be easy to make that whole category a continuation over the fight on gas stoves or heat pumps and frame them as tax credits for wealthy people to do expensive stuff on their homes, costing the rest of the country. I don’t think it’s as much of a kitchen table conversation per se but it’s up there. Even if it doesn’t save them that much money, it does face the risk of being that low-hanging fruit.
Well, alrighty then. What about 45X? That’s pretty crucial to many manufacturers out there today.
I think both Democrats and Republicans can stand behind more domestic manufacturing coming to the United States. That’s something that is a bipartisan consensus and reducing that, harming that, will pose a liability for politicians. Now similarly, you could shorten the window and amounts, but at the end of the day, it’s a lot more politically resilient despite being seen as the most expensive part of what was included in the IRA.
You ranked about half of the IRA’s programs – hydrogen, carbon capture, sustainable aviation fuels, and more – as being both low cost and at low risk for repeal. Why?
What they benefit from is a greater resonance with Republican policymakers. Carbon capture and sequestration, sustainable aviation fuels and biofuels, hydrogen – all of these things get more of a shrug with Republicans when you talk to them. And that is why you see major oil and gas groups come out and say, hey, let’s not repeal the whole IRA.
But repealing the programs at risk while keeping these other programs… how would that outcome impact the pace of decarbonization?
Drastically. It would effectively remove the economic premise for all future renewable energy generation. It gets rid of a key driver of the shift toward electric vehicles. I think if you repealed everything in the red, then I think what you’ve done is you’ve gotten rid of all the reasons capital is pouring money into renewable energy projects and storage right now. In that scenario you’d see a drastic slowdown in climate ambitions in the electric power sector and also the EV transition that’s been happening.
So… the oil companies telling Trump to keep some of the IRA is a cold comfort, then?
Knowing it doesn’t go away fully is a cold comfort looking at this risk analysis.
What did this exercise teach you about the IRA?
I think that a lot of the net benefit of the decarbonization that translates to jobs and economic development is really, really close, and a lot of what is in the IRA would be lower risk if more of that had been pushed through faster. I think implementation and the natural barriers of the lack of transmission, siting and permitting challenges… There's a confluence of things that make it hard to quickly double the size of the sector but a lot of stuff is coming. But there’s capital behind it, plans behind it, and I think they’re going to build a lot more. As they do that, the sentiment is going to change behind it, but we have to get to that promised land first.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Inside a wild race sparked by a solar farm in Knox County, Ohio.
The most important climate election you’ve never heard of? Your local county commissioner.
County commissioners are usually the most powerful governing individuals in a county government. As officials closer to community-level planning than, say a sitting senator, commissioners wind up on the frontlines of grassroots opposition to renewables. And increasingly, property owners that may be personally impacted by solar or wind farms in their backyards are gunning for county commissioner positions on explicitly anti-development platforms.
Take the case of newly-elected Ohio county commissioner – and Christian social media lifestyle influencer – Drenda Keesee.
In March, Keesee beat fellow Republican Thom Collier in a primary to become a GOP nominee for a commissioner seat in Knox County, Ohio. Knox, a ruby red area with very few Democratic voters, is one of the hottest battlegrounds in the war over solar energy on prime farmland and one of the riskiest counties in the country for developers, according to Heatmap Pro’s database. But Collier had expressed openness to allowing new solar to be built on a case-by-case basis, while Keesee ran on a platform focused almost exclusively on blocking solar development. Collier ultimately placed third in the primary, behind Keesee and another anti-solar candidate placing second.
Fighting solar is a personal issue for Keesee (pronounced keh-see, like “messy”). She has aggressively fought Frasier Solar – a 120 megawatt solar project in the country proposed by Open Road Renewables – getting involved in organizing against the project and regularly attending state regulator hearings. Filings she submitted to the Ohio Power Siting Board state she owns a property at least somewhat adjacent to the proposed solar farm. Based on the sheer volume of those filings this is clearly her passion project – alongside preaching and comparing gay people to Hitler.
Yesterday I spoke to Collier who told me the Frasier Solar project motivated Keesee’s candidacy. He remembered first encountering her at a community meeting – “she verbally accosted me” – and that she “decided she’d run against me because [the solar farm] was going to be next to her house.” In his view, he lost the race because excitement and money combined to produce high anti-solar turnout in a kind of local government primary that ordinarily has low campaign spending and is quite quiet. Some of that funding and activity has been well documented.
“She did it right: tons of ground troops, people from her church, people she’s close with went door-to-door, and they put out lots of propaganda. She got them stirred up that we were going to take all the farmland and turn it into solar,” he said.
Collier’s takeaway from the race was that local commissioner races are particularly vulnerable to the sorts of disinformation, campaign spending and political attacks we’re used to seeing more often in races for higher offices at the state and federal level.
“Unfortunately it has become this,” he bemoaned, “fueled by people who have little to no knowledge of what we do or how we do it. If you stir up enough stuff and you cry out loud enough and put up enough misinformation, people will start to believe it.”
Races like these are happening elsewhere in Ohio and in other states like Georgia, where opposition to a battery plant mobilized Republican primaries. As the climate world digests the federal election results and tries to work backwards from there, perhaps at least some attention will refocus on local campaigns like these.
And more of the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Madison County, Missouri – A giant battery material recycling plant owned by Critical Mineral Recovery exploded and became engulfed in flames last week, creating a potential Vineyard Wind-level PR headache for energy storage.
2. Benton County, Washington State – Governor Jay Inslee finally got state approvals finished for Scout Clean Energy’s massive Horse Heaven wind farm after a prolonged battle over project siting, cultural heritage management, and bird habitat.
3. Fulton County, Georgia – A large NextEra battery storage facility outside of Atlanta is facing a lawsuit that commingles usual conflicts over building these properties with environmental justice concerns, I’ve learned.
Here’s what else I’m watching…
In Colorado, Weld County commissioners approved part of one of the largest solar projects in the nation proposed by Balanced Rock Power.
In New Mexico, a large solar farm in Sandoval County proposed by a subsidiary of U.S. PCR Investments on land typically used for cattle is facing consternation.
In Pennsylvania, Schuylkill County commissioners are thinking about new solar zoning restrictions.
In Kentucky, Lost City Renewables is still wrestling with local concerns surrounding a 1,300-acre solar farm in rural Muhlenberg County.
In Minnesota, Ranger Power’s Gopher State solar project is starting to go through the public hearing process.
In Texas, Trina Solar – a company media reports have linked to China – announced it sold a large battery plant the day after the election. It was acquired by Norwegian company FREYR.What happened this week in climate and energy policy, beyond the federal election results.
1. It’s the election, stupid – We don’t need to retread who won the presidential election this week (or what it means for the Inflation Reduction Act). But there were also big local control votes worth watching closely.
2. Michigan lawsuit watch – Michigan has a serious lawsuit brewing over its law taking some control of renewable energy siting decisions away from municipalities.