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It’s not just what they say over the next few weeks — it’s when they say it.
When the Senate returns from recess next week, it will have Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill” to contend with. There’s no doubt the chamber will try to make changes to the omnibus plan to extend and expand Trump’s tax cuts that passed the House last week. The president even told reporters over the weekend that senators should “make the changes they want to make,” and that some of the changes “maybe are something I’d agree with, to be honest.”
Whether those changes include salvaging the nation’s clean energy tax credits will likely depend on a small group of Republican senators who have criticized the House’s near-total gutting of the subsidies and how much they are willing to fight to undo it.
The bill that passed the House would outright eliminate consumer tax credits for electric vehicles, rooftop solar, and both energy efficiency renovations and new energy-efficient homes. It would also kill the clean hydrogen tax credit at the end of this year and give most zero-carbon power plants, including wind, solar, and geothermal, an end-of-year deadline to start construction, among many other damaging provisions.
To date, at least eight Senate Republicans have spoken out against at least some of these changes, but none of them have tied their vote to the issue. The pressure to stick with your party is “enormous” when your vote is the difference between a bill’s success or failure, Josh Freed, the senior vice president for climate and energy at Third Way, told me. “As we saw in the House, the biggest question is whether any Republican Senator, when push comes to shove, has any willingness to try to stop this bill in order to defend energy tax credits.”
Pay attention to what they say over the next few weeks — and when they say it. It’s one thing to speak out when everything’s still up in the air. It’s quite another to keep talking when votes are on the line.
When the budget fight was first heating up in April, four senators led by Lisa Murkowski of Alaska sent a letter to Majority Leader John Thune warning that repealing the tax credits “would create uncertainty, jeopardizing capital allocation, long-term project planning, and job creation in the energy sector and across our broader economy.” The three co-authors were Thom Tillis of North Carolina, John Curtis of Utah, and Jerry Moran of Kansas.
Last week, after the House modified its proposal to phase out the tax credits more aggressively, Murkowski told Politico the Senate was “obviously going to be looking at” the provisions “as well as the final product, and kind of seeing where we start our conversation.” The moderate Republican has a history of supporting environmental policy, and has already broken with her party on at least one vote this year. In February, she was the only Republican who voted in favor of a Democrat-led effort to reinstate 5,500 federal public lands employees that had been fired by the Department of Government Efficiency. (The legislation failed.) Murkowski has also gone her own way to support more efficient energy codes, loans for electric vehicle manufacturers, and the impeachment of President Trump over the January 6 insurrection. But she did not vote for the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, and if you look at her overall voting record, these occasions of deviating from the party line have been rare.
Tillis, who is a member of the Finance Committee and will therefore be directly involved in writing the tax credit portion of the bill, has made more specific comments. He said he would push to wind down the tax credits more slowly to give businesses more time to prepare. “We have a lot of work that we need to do on the timeline and scope of the production and investment tax credits,” he told Politico in the same article.
While Tillis does not have the same kind of track record as Murkowski, he’s up for re-election next year, and his state has a lot to lose. Some 34 clean energy projects worth $20 billion in investment and tied to more than 17,000 jobs came to North Carolina because of the tax credits, according to the advocacy group Climate Power. Toyota invested in an EV battery manufacturing plant and just started production last month. Several EV charger manufacturers are setting up shop in the state. Siemens Energy is building a factory to make large power transformers, equipment that is essential to expanding the grid and is currently in very tight supply.
Curtis has also continued to rally around the tax credits. He attended a press conference for Fluence, an energy storage company, back in Utah where he told the Deseret News on Tuesday that the House’s changes to the subsidies were “a problem for the future” of energy. “And I think if I have anything to say about it, I’ll make sure that we’re taking into account our energy future,” he said.
When it became clear that the House was considering changes that would effectively repeal the clean energy tax credits in the IRA, Senators Kevin Cramer and John Hoeven of North Dakota, and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia chimed in to voice their concerns. Cramer criticized new deadlines the House proposed for ending the tax credits, telling Politico that “it’s too short for truly new technologies. We’ll have to change that. I don’t think it’s fair to treat an emerging technology the same as a 30-year-old technology.”
After the bill passed the House, Jon Husted of Ohio decided it was time to speak up. “You have companies that have already made investments, made commitments,” he told the outlet NOTUS. “Supply chains have been built around them, and we need to phase that out more slowly. I think that they deserve to have at least five years of that credit.” Like Tillis, Husted has an election coming up — and 35 clean energy projects in his state to protect.
The D.C. insiders I spoke to mentioned a few other powerful senators who could play a role in the debate who’ve been mum on the IRA so far. Thune, of South Dakota, has a history of being friendly toward tax credits for wind energy, and was honored by the American Council on Renewable Energy for his support for renewable energy in 2019. Lindsey Graham, chair of the Budget Committee, has also long been a sometimes-ally for climate action in the Senate. His home state of South Carolina has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the tax credits, with some 43 projects and 22,000 jobs at risk.
Susan Collins also came up repeatedly as one to watch, despite her not saying much of anything publicly about the tax credit changes yet. Collins is up for re-election next year, and while the IRA hasn’t spurred much manufacturing in Maine, it has driven a clean energy boom. The Maine Climate Labor Council, a coalition of unions, estimates there are 145 utility-scale clean energy projects that are either operating or in development that could be eligible for the tax credits. The state has also made a big energy efficiency push in recent years, with the tax credits supporting the expansion of efficiency jobs.
Then there are the potential spoilers. Republicans can only afford to lose three votes on the bill in order to send it back to the House and ultimately to the President’s desk, and the party has already split into a number of factions looking for various tweaks. Some, like Josh Hawley of Missouri, oppose the legislation’s deep cuts to Medicaid. Meanwhile, fiscal conservatives like Ron Johnson of Wisconsin have said they will push to reduce spending even more.
In the House, defenders of the tax credits ultimately cared more about raising the limit on the state and local tax deduction than fighting for clean energy subsidies. We could see a similar dynamic play out in the Senate, where Murkowski and Collins have also expressed concern about cuts to Medicaid. The Senate also can’t afford to change the bill so much that it will lose support in the House, so any changes will have to be surgical. The calculation will be, “What is the smallest thing that the authors of the bill can give these folks to fall back into line so that it is relatively easy to both pass the Senate and then get back through the House?” Freed explained.
Cramer, for his part, is not coming to the rescue for wind and solar, but he may be able to revive support for other forms of clean energy. The North Dakota Senator wrote a letter to Republican leaders in early May railing against the “indefinite entitlement” given to energy sources that depend on the wind and sun, and arguing that the tax credits should prioritize electricity generators on the basis of “reliability,” so as to encourage “geothermal, hydropower, coal and natural gas with carbon capture, and nuclear without excluding wind and solar.”
Capito has barely made a fuss about the energy credits, but she and Cramer will be the ones to watch to see how the Senate deals with the bill’s provision to repeal the Environmental Protection Agency’s greenhouse gas limits for vehicles, as both sit on the Environment and Public Works Committee, of which Capito is the chair. The repeal may not be allowed under the Senate’s rules for budget reconciliation, as it doesn’t have a direct effect on the federal budget. The Senate Parliamentarian hasn’t yet weighed in, but a negative ruling did not stop the two Republicans from leading the fight to revoke waivers granted to California that allowed it to set pollution limits on cars and trucks.
In the end, if any of these Senators wants to take a stand for big changes to the tax credits, they are going to need at least three colleagues to stick it out with them. A more likely outcome, Freed told me, is for them to attempt some smaller adjustments.
“Hopefully they can make it better, but they’re also under enormous pressure to not deviate too significantly from what the House wrote,” he said. “We just need to go in clear-eyed that it's going to be difficult.”
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article misidentified one of the signatories of the letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune. It’s been corrected. We regret the error.
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On Trump’s coal push, PJM’s progress, and PG&E’s spending plan
Current conditions: Tropical Storm Imelda is gaining wind intensity this week, bringing flooding rain and storm surge to the southeastern U.S. • Hurricane Humberto, now a Category 4 storm, is passing west of Bermuda, bringing marine hazards to the U.S. East Coast • Typhoon Bualoi is pummeling the Philippines and Vietnam, where it’s already killed a dozen people.
If you were planning to cash in on the $7,500 federal tax credit for buying an electric vehicle, you’d better make moves. Today’s the last day to claim the so-called 30D tax credit. Congress moved the expiration date for the writeoff to September 30 as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
That doesn’t mean all government incentives for EVs are going away. New York still offers a $2,000 “Drive Clean Rebate” for some vehicles, and California offers up to $7,000 in rebates. Prices for new electric cars are still higher than those for comparable internal combustion vehicles, a frustratingly persistent condition the federal tax credit was meant to help address. Owning an EV has its own rewards, however, including lower fuel and maintenance costs over time. For more on how to go about choosing an EV, here’s Andrew Moseman’s guide from our Decarbonize Your Life series.
Stacks at the Hugh L. Spurlock Generating Station in Maysville, Kentucky. Jeff Swensen/Getty Images
The Trump administration is opening more than 13 million acres of federal land to leasing for new coal mines. And it’s providing funding to keep demand for coal roaring. The Department of Energy announced Monday it will offer $625 million to upgrade, reopen, and “modernize” coal-fired power plants across the country.
It’s a sign of the trend Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin clocked in July: “Global coal demand is rising,” he wrote, “and America wants in.” Indeed, in a press release, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright boasted that the new funding would “keep our nation’s coal plants operating” and would ultimately help lower rising electricity prices. “Beautiful, clean coal will be essential to powering America’s reindustrialization and winning the AI race,” Wright said. “Coal built the greatest industrial engine the world has ever known, and with President Trump’s leadership, it will help do so again.”
The Trump administration is shutting down or shrinking roughly one third of the federal offices that track bird populations after hurricanes, map megafire risks in the Midwest, figure out new ways to fight invasive plants, and prepare communities’ stormwater drains against intense flooding. The U.S. Geological Survey’s Climate Adaptation Science Centers “are expected to drastically wind down and possibly close after Tuesday because of a lack of funds,” The Washington Post reported Monday. The centers in the South Central, Northeast, and Pacific Islands regions, which “collectively cover about one-third of the U.S. population and are funded under the Interior Department,” are potentially facing permanent closure.
The shuttering isn’t linked to a potential government shutdown, and appears planned as part of the Trump administration’s broader cuts to federal research. “We’re not willing to just drop everything and walk away,” Bethany Bradley, the co-director of the Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Center and a University of Massachusetts professor, told the newspaper. “But the reality is we can’t do this for free.”
Amazon, Google, Microsoft, utility giant Constellation, and power company Talen came together to propose a way to meet electricity needs in the nation’s largest power grid. Under their plan, the PJM Interconnection would allow large power users to volunteer for time-limited periods of reducing electricity demand when the grid is stressed. The proposal also outlines plans for time-limited use of backup generation. If making the load more flexible doesn’t work, PJM would increase the supply of firm power through procurement.
The pitch comes in response to an earlier mandatory curtailment proposal from PJM, which drew fierce blowback from many of the companies that wrote up this alternative. (“Everyone hates it,” Matthew wrote.) As analyst Aniruddh Mohan noted, PJM ultimately withdrew its initial load flexibility proposal.
Pacific Gas & Electric announced plans to spend $73 billion on upgrades to the electrical grid in California to meet the surge in demand from data centers. PG&E, as it’s known, has been deemed responsible for multiple large-scale wildfires in recent years, incurring billions in damages. As the utility told investors on a call Monday, the new investment plan “comes on the heels” of new liability reforms in the state. Under Senate Bill 254, the state expanded its wildfire fund by $18 billion and “acknowledged that the utilities and their customers cannot continue to carry the full burden of climate-driven catastrophic wildfires, especially when the utility has acted prudently,” PG&E CEO Patricia Poppe said, according to Power magazine. The utility had filed a proposal in March to build 700 miles of underground power lines between 2026 and 2028 and complete 500 miles of additional wildfire safety system upgrades by next year.
Fervo Energy, the company using fracking technology to harness the planet’s molten energy, is undeniably leading the race to commercialize next-generation geothermal. But a clear second-place contender emerged Tuesday when XGS Energy released the results from its first commercial test, the company told Heatmap exclusively. The startup’s system outperformed the executives’ expectations, setting the stage for full-scale development. While Fervo’s technology represents what’s known as “enhanced” geothermal system, XGS’ approach is what’s known as “advanced” geothermal systems that rely on closed-loop infrastructure, as Matthew previously explained.
The company is vying to challenge Fervo for leadership in the next-generation geothermal market.
The geothermal startup XGS Energy has now completed four months of tests to see whether its technology can maintain steady production of heat at temperatures above what’s needed to generate energy. Over 3,000 hours, the company monitored the drilling process and checked how heat flowed from its wells, the status of their temperature, and how precisely XGS’ mathematical predictions matched the outcome of the testing.
The results, which the company shared exclusively with Heatmap, were “almost too good,” XGS CEO Josh Prueher told me.
“Had we been within 10% of predictive performance, we would have been pretty happy with the outcome,” Prueher said. “Turns out we were within 2% under a variety of different parameters.”
“It worked like a charm,” he said.
To understand what makes XGS Energy stand out among the geothermal startups racing to commercialize next-generation technology, it helps to compare the company to its fellow Houston-based rival that’s currently leading the sector, Fervo Energy. Unlike Fervo, XGS doesn’t use fracking technology to drill horizontal wells in pursuit of hot, dry rocks from which to harvest energy.
Instead, XGS drills vertical wells and inserts a closed steel pipe with water and fills the gap between the metal and the rock with a patented slurry that conducts heat. Technology like Fervo’s requires pumping cold water over the fractured hot rocks to harvest heat. But with its method, XGS claims, it avoids losing any water.
The testing took place off the US-395 highway in a volcanic field in California’s Mojave desert, sandwiched between the eastern edge of the Sequoia National Park and western border of Death Valley National Park. The geothermal field XGS tapped is already actively producing energy for the Coso Operating Company, which runs a 270-megawatt geothermal power plant on the land. The results, the company said, showed the “unprecedented predictability and active control of field performance” of XGS’ technology “versus other geothermal systems, which are subject to complex and continuously changing subsurface reservoir conditions.”
At least one outside observer agreed. “This is impressive, and something to be proud of,” Advait Arun, an energy analyst and senior associate at the think tank Center for Energy Enterprise who co-authored a recent report on next-generation geothermal, told me.
While the 3,000 hours of testing still falls short of the year’s worth of data Fervo has produced at one of its sites, it’s the longest any other competitor in the space has successfully demonstrated its approach so far, Arun said.
“These guys would be second to Fervo in terms of their ability to prove a commercial-scale performance test,” he added.
XGS is now poised to build a 150-megawatt power plant for Meta’s New Mexico data centers. Even after that’s complete, however, Prueher said the surrounding area has nearly 3 gigawatts of untapped heat. In California, where the company is headquartered and carried out its demonstration project, there’s a growing need for clean power sources that don’t further tax the depleted water table.
“A lot of the historical sensitivities around developing in California — a state where, like many others, water usage for industrial development is kind of a no-no — because we don’t need water, we have some real advantages,” Prueher said.
At a moment when surging demand from data centers is supercharging dealmaking in the electricity sector, Prueher said XGS is looking beyond the boom from the artificial intelligence buildout.
“It’s not about data centers,” he said. “It really is just the fundamental power needs of California. With the restrictions around water usage, we line up really, really well for California.”
For now, the company remains focused on the U.S. But Prueher said XGS is well suited to export its technology to East Asia, as well, where countries along the Pacific Rim have vast geothermal potential and growing electricity demand but limited development. XGS already has ties to the Philippines and “may actually be subsurface” — i.e. digging wells — there by the end of 2026, Prueher told me.
The “big enchilada,” he said, would be establishing a foothold in Japan, where the onsen hotspring industry has long protested geothermal development they say could diminish the resource that makes the ancient bathhouse tradition possible. Prueher told me his technology mitigates concerns over fracking-induced earthquakes, as well.
For now, he said, his main market is in the fast-growing Southwest. The executive compared this moment to 2021, when he worked at a battery company. That February, Winter Storm Uri collapsed the Texas grid as natural gas pipes froze and demand for electricity to heat homes designed to stay cool in a typically arid climate skyrocketed. Back then, he said, batteries were “still a pretty new asset class.”
“People were still uncertain about how it would perform,” Prueher said. But his company was “able to keep our batteries up and operating 100% of the time, no one minute of downtime during that entire episode.”
“From a market perspective, the storm showed that, if you can bring this new type of technology into the market, it can really deliver remarkable value,” he added. “We made 10 years of revenue in six days.”
In a lot of ways, he went on, “this is the same thing.”
“We’ve proven a technology is reliable,” Prueher said. “It works at commercial scale over a period of time. We would regard this as a real pivot point in the industry.”
Voters are mad at Trump over rising bills, but assigning blame is complicated.
Electricity prices are rising and voters are mad about it — two facts that might seem to add up to a political victory for Democrats.
Environmental groups and elected officials alike are gearing up to use electricity prices against Trump, citing the president’s multi-pronged assault on renewables as the problem and promising to immediately bring them down as the solution. “Cheap is clean and clean is cheap,” Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz said at Heatmap House during New York Climate Week, echoing what has become essentially a universal talking point among climate activists.
The problem with that message, however, is that lowering electricity prices is really hard. In reality, the responsibility for high prices can’t be laid that the feet of any one person, party, or governmental body. What’s worse for Democrats: the voters seem to agree.
That’s not to say Trump isn’t giving Democrats a fighting chance.
“What’s interesting politically is that Trump started this term with cost of living being his single strongest issue, and now it’s his weakest,” Democratic political strategist David Shor said at an event hosted by the moderate Democratic group Third Way during New York Climate Week last week.
“A lot of the Democratic attacks trying to blame these energy price increases on Republicans have done well in our testing,” Shor said, and that there was “potential” for such attacks to be effective.
But the public’s views on energy go back further than January 20.
Trump won the 2024 election in part because of public outrage at rising prices across the board. Polling done during the campaign showed that Trump both had an advantage on cost of living issues in general and energy in particular. A Third Way poll conducted early last year showed that Trump had strong advantages on energy production, supporting manufacturing, reducing the cost of energy and gasoline, and the economy in general.
“While Biden was president, energy was one of his biggest vulnerabilities,” Shor said on the panel. “The flip side though, though, is that Democrats aren’t in charge anymore.”
According to polling by Heatmap Pro, voters largely don’t pin the fault for high electricity prices on Washington, D.C. They are more likely to blame “more demand,” their “ electricity utility,” or their “state government,” with roughly equal numbers blaming “the Biden administration and Democrats” and “the Trump administration and Republicans,” with predictable partisan splits.
And while the Trump administration is undoing tax credits for clean energy projects and unleashing regulatory hellfire on existing projects, the electricity price hikes we’re already experiencing are largely due to the cost of the poles and wires that transit and distribute electricity. In some cases, sharply rising demand has played a role, especially in the Mid-Atlantic and parts of the Midwest covered by PJM Interconnection.
Because the bulk of high energy costs are due to investments that have already been made — and can likely only be slowed down by new investments in longer-distance transmission — politicians are unlikely to find a way to lower costs, so much as perhaps slow down their increase. “Unfortunately, electricity rates are not going to go down. Our goal here is to minimize how much they go up,” Gretchen Kershaw, vice president of strategy at Grid Strategies, said on the same Climate Week panel as Shor’s.
Any politician running as a challenger can simply say that rising electricity prices are bad and force incumbents to take responsibility for it, even if they don’t have a plan to lower prices in the short term.
However, Democrats are in charge in some places that have seen large price increases, and that has tripped up their ability to make electricity price increases a marquee issue.
New Jersey, for instance, not only has some of the highest retail electricity prices in the nation, it has seen substantial price increases over the last five years as the state’s electricity market, PJM, has faced billions of dollars in new costs for capacity. Just in the past year, retail electricity prices in New Jersey have risen by over 25%, to around 25 cents per kilowatt-hour.
Along with Virginia, New Jersey’s gubernatorial election — held the year after the presidential election, is often considered a kind of mid-mid-term temperature-check for the country as a whole.
New Jersey is a solidly Democratic state, although one that swung considerably towards Trump in 2024. The Democratic nominee in this year’s governor’s race, Mikie Sherrill, is the favorite and should be able to ride the backlash against Trump to Drumthwacket, a.k.a. the New Jersey governor’s mansion. But with electricity prices at the center of the race, she has failed to dominate the polls.
Her Republican opponent, Jack Ciattarelli, has tried to pin the price increases on progressive policy, namely support for renewables, especially the troubled offshore wind industry, as well as efforts to prevent new fossil fuel power plants from opening.
One anti-Sherrill ad quotes the congresswoman saying, “We need to move into clean power. It’s going to cost you an arm and a leg, but if you’re a good person you’ll do it,” and describes her price freeze plan as just a way to “lock in” already high prices.
Sherrill’s campaign has hit back at the Republican Governors Association, which ran the ad, pointing out that the quote was actually Sherrill explaining how not to talk about climate and energy policy. In other words, Sherrill is getting tagged with the argument that she explicitly says Democrats should reject.
Sherrill has tried to go after utilities specifically in her campaign, and in August proposed a freeze on electricity rate increases.
There’s some indication that voters in New Jersey at least give an edge to Republicans on energy and electricity questions. In a Quinnipiac poll showing Sherrill leading Ciattarelli 49% to 41%, she had just a two-point lead on electricity prices, specifically, with 17% of the respondents not having an opinion.
In short, Sherrill was right to be concerned about how voters perceive Democrats when it comes to electricity prices.
“Democrats have to be very careful,” Shor said. “If you just ask people ‘what party do you trust more to keep energy prices down’? Historically, that’s something that Republicans have massive advantages on.”