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A year and a half ago, President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, the biggest climate law in American history — and arguably in world history. The law will spend an estimated $500 billion in grants and tax credits to incentivize people and businesses to switch from burning fossil fuels to using cleaner, zero-carbon technologies.
That’s the goal, at least. But is the IRA actually working? Now, 18 months after its passage, we’re starting to be able to answer that question. A new report from a coalition of major energy analysts — including MIT, the Rhodium Group, and our cohost Jesse Jenkins’ lab at Princeton — looks at data from the power and transportation sectors and concludes that yes, the law is starting to decarbonize the American economy.
But it isn’t working in the way many people might expect, because while electric vehicles are on track to meet the IRA’s climate goals, the power sector is not.
That’s the opposite of what you might think from reading the popular press, which has bemoaned an alleged slowdown in new EV sales. But the new report finds that the transportation sector actually came in at the upper end of what modelers expected to see this year. About 9.2% of new cars sold last year in the United States were zero-emissions vehicles; after the IRA passed, modelers had expected EVs to come in anywhere from 8.1 to 9.4% of sales.
But the power sector is lagging behind what modelers had expected to see. While the three groups had projected that 46 to 79 gigawatts of new zero-carbon power would come online last year, only 32.3 gigawatts of new capacity actually did. That is primarily due to a drop in new onshore wind projects, which fell below the installation levels achieved in 2020 and 2021. While solar and batteries continued to go gangbusters, exceeding previous records, they could not make up for the drop in wind. That means that the power sector is not on track to cut emissions 40% by 2030, as compared to 2005 levels, as the bill’s supporters have hoped.
Jesse Jenkins, an energy systems expert and professor at Princeton University, and I dive into the details on the latest episode of Shift Key.
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: First, let's do the moment of truth. Let’s just first get into the data. So in the power sector, what do we see?
Jesse Jenkins: What we see in the electricity sector is a new record set for zero carbon electricity generation and storage capacity additions. So that's new power plant and battery storage construction.
In aggregate, we saw over 32,000 megawatts or 32 gigawatts of new zero carbon generation and storage added to the U.S. grid in 2023. That's about a 32% increase from the rate in 2022. And it edges out a previous record that we saw in 2021 of about 31.6 gigawatts. So good news is we're setting new record growth rates in total in terms of wind and solar and battery additions.
Unfortunately, that does fall on the lower end of what we were projecting in most of the modeling results. We were looking for, on average, about 46 to 79 gigawatts, so call it 40 to 80 gigawatts on average of additions in 2023 and 2024. We fell short of the low end of that range at 32.3 gigawatts. So unless the pace accelerates substantially in 2024, we're probably going to fall a bit behind schedule in terms of capacity additions.
Meyer: And do we have a sense of what's driving that? Because I think that's a very surprising finding, that we're behind schedule in the power sector, where I think people feel pretty good generally about the pace of decarbonization. Or I think where the common wisdom, at least, is that the pace of decarbonization is like proceeding apace. What's driving this underperformance of the model?
Jenkins: So it's really the difference between solar and wind additions.
The solar sector added about 18.4 gigawatts of capacity in 2023. That's up massively from just about 11 gigawatts in 2022. It's about double what we had seen in 2020, which was kind of our reference when we were doing our modeling as we started the REPEAT project in 2021. And so that's looking encouraging and in fact is running ahead of schedule with the average pace of additions that we saw in REPEAT project results.
Batteries are growing way faster than we expected.
And that helps really make the most of those solar capacity additions because solar and batteries are kind of like peanut butter and jelly, they go together quite well. And that's because solar has this nice, regular daily fluctuation, right? From the sun rising and setting. And that pairs really well with batteries, which today in a way lithium ion batteries are best suited for, you know, only a few hours of storage. So they'll charge for three or four hours in the middle of the day when we've got an abundance of sun. And then they'll discharge in the evening to help meet the evening peak of demand when everybody's coming home from work.
The batteries basically helped shift the solar output from the middle of the day to hit that evening peak. And that's, that's really helpful. Where things are running behind schedule is really in the wind sector, where we only built about half of the peak rate, actually less than half that we've seen historically in 2023. Additions of wind power in 2023 were only about 6.3 gigawatts, and that's down from nearly 15 gigawatts in each of 2020 and 2021.
So that's a step backwards at a time when we should be smashing new record growth rates across all of these sectors. And that's giving me the biggest concern as we look at in the next couple of years.
Meyer: And that's, I mean, last show we talked about offshore wind and the troubles in offshore wind and how it seems like some big offshore wind projects that we thought might be coming online in the middle of this decade might not be coming online till the end of the decade. But when we talk about wind underperforming in terms of the whole country over the past year, we're really still talking about onshore wind. This is like big turbines in the middle of the Great Plains, not big turbines off the coast of New York, New Jersey, right?
Jenkins: That's right. Yeah, I think I don't think we had any significant offshore wind capacity additions coming in 2024. You know, most of that we were expecting would come in between 2026 and 2030 or 2035. So this is really a story about onshore wind, where if we look at the economics of onshore wind across the country, there's a tremendous number of sites that look very economic given the incentives provided by the Inflation Reduction Act.
And unfortunately, we're just not building out at the pace that would be economically justified. And that is really an indicator that there are a substantial number of other non-economic frictions or barriers to deployment of wind in particular at the pace that we want to see.
The full transcript is here.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by Advanced Energy United, KORE Power, and Yale …
Advanced Energy United educates, engages, and advocates for policies that allow our member companies to compete to power our economy with 100% clean energy, working with decision makers and energy market regulators to achieve this goal. Together, we are united in our mission to accelerate the transition to 100% clean energy in America. Learn more at advancedenergyunited.org/heatmap
KORE Power provides the commercial, industrial, and utility markets with functional solutions that advance the clean energy transition worldwide. KORE Power's technology and manufacturing capabilities provide direct access to next generation battery cells, energy storage systems that scale to grid+, EV power & infrastructure, and intuitive asset management to unlock energy strategies across a myriad of applications. Explore more at korepower.com — the future of clean energy is here.
Build your skills in policy, finance, and clean technology at Yale. Yale’s Financing and Deploying Clean Energy certificate program is a 10-month online certificate program that trains and connects clean energy professionals to catalyze an equitable transition to a clean economy. Connect with Yale’s expertise, grow your professional network, and deepen your impact. Learn more at cbey.yale.edu/certificate.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
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Rob and Jesse talk with John Henry Harris, the cofounder and CEO of Harbinger Motors.
You might not think that often about medium-duty trucks, but they’re all around you: ambulances, UPS and FedEx delivery trucks, school buses. And although they make up a relatively small share of vehicles on the road, they generate an outsized amount of carbon pollution. They’re also a surprisingly ripe target for electrification, because so many medium-duty trucks drive fewer than 150 miles a day.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with John Henry Harris, the cofounder and CEO of Harbinger Motors. Harbinger is a Los Angeles-based startup that sells electric and hybrid chassis for medium-duty vehicles, such as delivery vans, moving trucks, and ambulances.
Rob, John, and Jesse chat about why medium-duty trucking is unlike any other vehicle segment, how to design an electric truck to last 20 years, and how President Trump’s tariffs are already stalling out manufacturing firms. Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, 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 is it like building a final assembly plant — a U.S. factory — in this moment?
John Harris: I would say lots of people talk about how excited they are about U.S. manufacturing, but that's very different than putting their money where their mouth is. Building a final assembly line, like we have — our team here is really good, that they made it feel not that hard. The challenge is the whole supply chain.
If we look at what we build here in-house at Harbinger, we have a final assembly line where we bolt parts together to make chassis. We also have two sub-component assembly lines where we take copper and make motors, and where we take cells and make batteries. All three of those lines work pretty well. We're pumping out chassis, and they roll out the door, and we sell them to people, which is great. But it’s all the stuff that goes into those, that's the most challenging. There's a lot of trade policy at certain hours of the day, on certain days of the week — depending on when we check — that is theoretically supposed to encourage us manufacturing.
But it's really not because of the volatility. It costs us an enormous amount to build the supply chain, to feed these lines. And when we have volatile trade policy, our reaction, and everyone else's reaction, is to just pause. It’s not to spend more money on U.S. manufacturing, because we were already doing that. We were spending a lot on U.S. manufacturing as part of our core approach to manufacturing.
The latest trade policy has caused us to spend less money on U.S. manufacturing — not more, because we're unclear on what is the demand environment going to be, what is the policy going to be next week? We were getting ready to make major investments to take certain manufacturing tasks in our supply chain out of China and move them to Mexico, for example. Now we’re not. We were getting ready to invest in certain kinds of automation to do things in house, and now we're waiting. So the volatility is dramatically shrinking investment in US manufacturing, including ours.
Meyer: And can you just explain, why did you make that decision to pause investment and how does trade policy affect that decision?
Harris: When we had 25% tariffs on China, if we take content out of China and move it to Mexico, we break even — if that. We might still end up underwater. That's because there's better automation in China. There's much higher labor productivity. And — this one is always shocking to people — there’s lower logistics costs. When we move stuff from Shenzhen to our factory, in many cases it costs us less than moving shipments from Monterey.
Mentioned:
CalStart’s data on medium-duty electric trucks deployed in the U.S.
Here’s the chart that John showed Rob and Jesse:
Courtesy of Harbinger
It draws on data from Bloomberg in China, the ICCT, and the Calstart ZET Dashboard in the United States.
Jesse’s case for EVs with gas tanks — which are called extended range electric vehicles
On xAI, residential solar, and domestic lithium
Current conditions: Indonesia has issued its highest alert level due to the ongoing eruption of Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki • 10 million people from Missouri to Michigan are at risk of large hail and damaging winds today • Tropical Storm Erick, the earliest “E” storm on record in the eastern Pacific Ocean, could potentially strengthen into a major hurricane before making landfall near Acapulco, Mexico, on Thursday.
The NAACP and the Southern Environmental Law Center said Tuesday that they intend to sue Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI over alleged Clean Air Act violations at its Memphis facility. Per the lawsuit, xAI failed to obtain the required permits for the use of the 26 gas turbines that power its supercomputer, and in doing so, the company also avoided equipping the turbines with technology that would have reduced emissions. “xAI’s turbines are collectively one of the largest, or potentially the largest, industrial source of nitrogen oxides in Shelby County,” the lawsuit claims.
The SELC has additionally said that residents who live near the xAI facility already face cancer risks four times above the national average, and opponents have argued that xAI’s lack of urgency in responding to community concerns about the pollution is a case of “environmental racism.” In a statement Tuesday, xAI responded to the threat of a lawsuit by claiming the “temporary power generation units are operating in compliance with all applicable laws,” and said it intends to equip the turbines with the necessary technology to reduce emissions going forward.
Shares of several residential solar companies plummeted Tuesday after the Senate Finance Committee declined to preserve related Inflation Reduction Act investment tax credits. As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin reported, Sunrun shares fell 40%, “bringing the company’s market cap down by almost $900 million to $1.3 billion,” after a brief jump at the end of last week “due to optimism that the Senate Finance bill might include friendlier language for its business model.”
That never materialized. Instead, the Finance Committee’s draft proposed terminating the residential clean energy tax credit for any systems, including residential solar, six months after the bill is signed, as well as the investment and production tax credits for residential solar. SolarEdge and Enphase also suffered from the news, with shares down 33% and 24%, respectively. You can read Matthew’s full analysis here.
Chevron announced Tuesday that it has acquired 125,000 net acres of the Smackover Formation in southwest Arkansas and northeast Texas to get into domestic lithium extraction. Chevron’s acquisition follows an earlier move by Exxon Mobil to do the same, with lithium representing a key resource for the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources “that would allow the company to pivot if oil and gas demands wane in the coming decades,” Bloomberg writes.
“Establishing domestic and resilient lithium supply chains is essential not only to maintaining U.S. energy leadership but also to meeting the growing demand from customers,” Jeff Gustavson, the president of Chevron New Energies, said in a Tuesday press release. The Liberty Owl project, which was part of Chevron’s acquisition from TerraVolta Resources, is “expected to have an initial production capacity of at least 25,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate per year, which is enough lithium to power about 500,000 electric vehicles annually,” Houston Business Journal reports.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency prepared a memo titled “Abolishing FEMA” at the direction of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, describing how its functions can be “drastically reformed, transferred to another agency, or abolished in their entirety” as soon as the end of 2025. While only Congress can technically eliminate the agency, the March memo, obtained and reviewed by Bloomberg, describes potential changes like “eliminating long-term housing assistance for disaster survivors, halting enrollments in the National Flood Insurance Program, and providing smaller amounts of aid for fewer incidents — moves that by design would dramatically limit the federal government’s role in disaster response.”
In May, FEMA’s acting administrator, Cameron Hamilton, was fired one day after defending the existence of the department he’d been appointed to oversee when testifying before the House Appropriations subcommittee. An internal FEMA memo from the same month described the agency’s “critical functions” as being at “high risk” of failure due to “significant personnel losses in advance of the 2025 Hurricane Season.” President Trump has, on several occasions, expressed a desire to eliminate FEMA, as recommended by the Project 2025 playbook from the Heritage Foundation. The March “Abolishing FEMA” memo “just means you should not expect to see FEMA on the ground unless it’s 9/11, Katrina, Superstorm Sandy,” Carrie Speranza, the president of the U.S. council of the International Association of Emergency Managers, told Bloomberg.
The Spanish government on Tuesday released its report on the causes of the April 28 blackout that left much of the nation, as well as parts of Portugal, without power for more than 12 hours. Ecological Transition Minister Sara Aagesen, who heads Spain’s energy policy, told reporters that a voltage surge in the south of Spain had triggered a “chain reaction of disconnections” that led to the widespread power loss, and blamed the nation’s state-owned grid operator Red Eléctrica for “poor planning” and failing to have enough thermal power stations online to control the dynamic voltage, the Associated Press reports. Additionally, Aagesen said that utilities had preventively shut off some power plants when the disruptions started, which could have helped the system stay online. “We have a solid narrative of events and a verified explanation that allows us to reflect and to act as we surely will,” Aagesen went on, responding to criticisms that Spain’s renewable-heavy energy mix was to blame for the blackout. “We believe in the energy transition and we know it’s not an ideological question but one of this country’s principal vectors of growth when it comes to re-industrialisation opportunities.”
Metrograph
“It seems that with the current political climate, with the removal of any reference to climate change on U.S. government websites, with the gutting of environmental laws, and the recent devastating fires in Los Angeles, this trilogy of films is still urgently relevant.” —Filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal on the upcoming screenings of the Anthropocene trilogy, co-created with Nicholas de Pencier and photographer Edward Burtynsky between 2006 and 2018, at the Metrograph in New York City.
Shares in Sunrun, SolarEdge, and Enphase are collapsing on the Senate’s new mega-bill draft.
The residential solar rescue never happened. Shares in several residential solar companies plummeted Tuesday as the market reacted to the Senate Finance Committee’s reconciliation language, which maintains the House bill’s restriction on investment tax credits for residential solar installers and its scrapping of the tax credit for homeowners who buy their own systems.
The Solar Energy Industries Association, a solar trade group, criticized the Senate text, saying that it had only “modest improvements on several provisions” and would “pull the plug on homegrown solar energy and decimate the American manufacturing renaissance.”
Sunrun shares fell 40% Tuesday, bringing the company’s market cap down by almost $900 million to $1.3 billion, a comparable loss in value to what it sustained the day after the passage of the House reconciliation bill. The stock price had jumped up late last week due to optimism that the Senate Finance bill might include friendlier language for its business model.
Instead the Finance Committee proposal would terminate the residential clean energy tax credit for any systems, including residential solar, six months after the bill is signed. The text also zeroes out investment and production tax credits for residential solar when “the taxpayer rents or leases such property to a third party,” a common arrangement in the industry pioneered by Sunrun.
Sunrun’s third party ownership model well predates the Inflation Reduction Act and is about as old as the company itself, which was founded in 2007. The company had been claiming investment tax credits for solar before the IRA made them tech neutral. The company began securitizing solar deals in 2015 and in a 2016 securities filling, the company said that it had six deals where investors would be able to garner the lease payments and investment tax credits.
“Ain’t no sunshine for resi,” Jefferies analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith wrote in a note to clients on Tuesday. “Overall, we view Senate's version as a negative” for Sunrun, as well as SolarEdge and Enphase, the residential solar equipment companies, whose shares are down by about 33% and 24% respectively.
“If this language is not adjusted before the bill passes the Senate floor,” Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Perocco wrote in a note to clients, “we believe Sunrun, SolarEdge, and Enphase will trade towards our bear cases.”
Morgan Stanley had earlier estimated that cutting off home solar from tax credits would lead to a “85% contraction in residential solar volumes” due, in many cases, to solar products no longer resulting in savings on electricity bills.
That’s because the ability to lease solar equipment (or have homeowners sign power purchase agreements) and then claim tax credits sits at the core of the contemporary residential solar model.
“Our core solar service offerings are provided through our lease and power purchase agreements,” the company said in its 2024 annual report. “While customers have the option to purchase a solar energy system outright from us, most of our customers choose to buy solar as a service from us through our Customer Agreements without the significant upfront investment of purchasing a solar energy system.”
This means that to claim tax credits for the projects, they have to be investment tax credits, not home energy credits. These credits play a role in Sunrun’s extensive business raising money from investors to finance solar projects, which can then be partially monetized via tax credits.
Fund investors “can receive attractive after-tax returns from our investment funds due to their ability to utilize Commercial ITCs,” the company said in its report. The financing then “enables us to offer attractive pricing to our customers for the energy generated by the solar energy system on their homes.”
Without the ability to claim investment tax credits, Sunrun could be left having to charge higher prices to homeowners and face a higher cost of capital to raise money from investors.
“Last night’s draft text confirms the Senate intends to abruptly repeal tax credits available to homeowners who want to go solar – effectively increasing costs and limiting choice for countless Americans,” Chris Hopper, chief executive of Aurora Solar, said in an emailed statement.