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Rob and Jesse talk all things solar, steel, and cement with CREA’s Lauri Myllyvirta.
Answering your questions on AI and energy, the economics of solar, the Green New Deal’s legacy, and more.
Jesse hosts a panel discussion at the annual meeting of Princeton’s Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment.
Rob sits down in New York with the outgoing head of America’s energy apparatus.
Revisiting a favorite episode with guest Ilaria Mazzocco.
Rob and Jesse talk with the deputy White House official in charge of implementing the Inflation Reduction Act.
The Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s landmark climate law, is the biggest investment in clean energy in American history. It is also in danger. In January, the Trump administration and a GOP Congress will take over the federal government — and they have made a variety of promises about how they’ll disrupt the law, ranging from full repeal to a more “surgical” reform approach.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with Kristina Costa, who has worked since 2022 to implement the IRA’s climate provisions at the White House. She joins us to discuss what went right about the Biden administration’s rush to implement the law, why state government capacity is holding back Democratic policy goals, and why the federal government needs more tools to support energy innovation if it wants to keep up with China. She also discusses how the administration is trying to Trump-proof the law. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, 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: What do you hear from the companies? And I guess from your vantage point, are they beginning to do the lobbying work you feel like they should be doing to protect the parts of the law that are working?
Kristina Costa: I think they are. You know, we hear a lot of anxiety, as you can imagine, which is —
Meyer: Theme of this period.
Costa: Theme of this period is that there’s a lot of anxiety. And our hope is, and our belief is that they will turn that anxiety into action, in terms of educating members of Congress about how the law actually works and how it is underpinning the investments that they’re making.
And I think, you know, to take a step back and talk about policy for a little bit, one of the things, I think, that is not well understood in the rhetoric about how the different pieces of the Inflation Reduction Act actually work together is that — you know, we have provisions that are incentivizing investments in manufacturing, and people are generally pretty excited about that. We also have provisions that are incentivizing adoption of the technologies that are being manufactured. And in some cases people are pretty excited about that, and in other cases, it has been turned into a bit of a political cudgel. But the fact of the matter is that those two things are pretty interdependent.
So, for instance, we have what is called the 45X advanced manufacturing production tax credit, and that is largely a per-unit tax credit that goes to manufacturers of a specified list of clean energy components, including batteries for electric vehicles, as well as for grid storage. And we have seen just gangbusters investment in the EV battery space since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. It has set the United States up to be an EV battery manufacturing powerhouse. And this is, of course, an area of importance for the clean energy transition. It is also an area of incredible importance for U.S. energy security, given the currently dominant market position that China plays, that China holds in the EV battery supply chain.
And I think people generally think this is pretty good. But one of the reasons besides the 45X credit just providing a strong, straight-up incentive to invest in the United States and make these things in the United States is that the much-maligned 30D new clean vehicle tax credit that provides a subsidy to individuals to buy electric vehicles that are made in the United States has a bunch of pretty stringent requirements about the sourcing of batteries and of critical minerals contained within those vehicles in order to be eligible for the tax credit. And so you have both incentives to manufacture, but you also basically have incentives to provide support for the offtake of what those manufacturers are actually producing.
Those two things go hand in hand, and I don’t think that is well understood in the political rhetoric.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Watershed’s climate data engine helps companies measure and reduce their emissions, turning the data they already have into an audit-ready carbon footprint backed by the latest climate science. Get the sustainability data you need in weeks, not months. Learn more at watershed.com.
As a global leader in PV and ESS solutions, Sungrow invests heavily in research and development, constantly pushing the boundaries of solar and battery inverter technology. Discover why Sungrow is the essential component of the clean energy transition by visiting sungrowpower.com.
Intersolar & Energy Storage North America is the premier U.S.-based conference and trade show focused on solar, energy storage, and EV charging infrastructure. To learn more, visit intersolar.us.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
Rob talks Ford and GM with BloombergNEF’s Corey Cantor. Plus, Rob and Jesse dig into the Trump transition.
It’s been a news-filled few weeks — so it’s time for a roundup. On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk about what Trump’s cabinet selections might mean for his climate policy and whether permitting reform could still happen. Then Rob chats with Corey Cantor, senior EV analyst at BloombergNEF, about promising Q3 sales for U.S. automakers, General Motors’ turnaround, and how much the Trump administration might dent America’s EV uptake.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, 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: How are you thinking about Ford and GM right now? Because they have basically totally reversed their position since the first time we started talking.
Corey Cantor: I hope I’m not too corny today, but I was thinking Missy Elliott — another New Jerseyan — “flip it and reverse it,” in terms of how people feel about Ford and GM. I think GM’s approach … don’t forget this is their second platform at the rodeo here, meaning GM had the Bolt and the Chevy Volt before it, and a good amount of experience with EVs. And really, what they were trying to do with Ultium was to build a battery and EV platform that could work with a variety of different vehicles.
And so the struggle, as we’ve outlined before, and many publications have outlined was they just couldn’t get the battery production working. They had issues with automation. They had issues with ensuring that they were setting up the necessary suppliers. And I’d say, about maybe nine months ago or so, a favorite EV journalist of mine, John Voelcker wrote in, I believe, InsideEVs, around this idea that GM had finally cracked Ultium and were finally kind of … He had got the head of Ultium at the time on record saying that they had resolved a lot of the issues, and really, you’ve seen it in the sales volume, as well as the fact that EVs like the Cadillac Lyric continue to sell pretty consistently.
Then GM ran into a software issue with the Blazer, and fixed that software issue, and that had slowed things down. And then since, really, June of this year has been off to the races. And so we’ll see how the fourth quarter goes, right? I think you don’t want to get too high on any kind of automaker, but GM is clearly in a better spot because they’re approaching making a profit on each of the EVs sold.
Now, I’ll caveat that with, we don’t know if the EV tax credit itself, you know, at the federal level, plays a role in the fact that they’ll be gross margin profitable, but that is a pretty big turning point. Because at that point, you’re no longer losing money on those EVs, and so you are kind of geared to go more high-volume. Where if you look at Ford, Ford has been losing thousands of dollars on every electric vehicle, really had not been building a platform for the current sales of the Mach-E and the F-150 Lightning, hoping to kind of just price them where they’d be losing little enough on each that they can make their bridge to that next platform.
And then earlier this fall, Ford basically announced pushing back those EV models to 2027, along with the new platform. So Ford kind of runs into the issue that we discussed on the previous conversation with Tesla, in that they’re going to have only really two EVs in the U.S. market for the next couple of years. So GM will have the Bolt back next year and some other Cadillacs. There’s a lot of exciting things on the way for GM.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Watershed’s climate data engine helps companies measure and reduce their emissions, turning the data they already have into an audit-ready carbon footprint backed by the latest climate science. Get the sustainability data you need in weeks, not months. Learn more at watershed.com.
As a global leader in PV and ESS solutions, Sungrow invests heavily in research and development, constantly pushing the boundaries of solar and battery inverter technology. Discover why Sungrow is the essential component of the clean energy transition by visiting sungrowpower.com.
Intersolar & Energy Storage North America is the premier U.S.-based conference and trade show focused on solar, energy storage, and EV charging infrastructure. To learn more, visit intersolar.us.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
