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If Vice President Kamala Harris is elected president in November — as is looking increasingly likely — her term will last until the beginning of 2029. At that point, we’ll have a much better idea whether the planet is on track to hit the 1.5 degrees Celsius climate threshold that some expect it to cross that year; we’ll also know whether the United States is likely to meet the first goal of the Inflation Reduction Act: to reduce national greenhouse gas emissions to half of 2005 levels by 2030.
There is a lot riding on the outcome of the 2024 election, then. But even more to the point, there is a lot riding on how, and how aggressively, Harris extends President Biden’s climate policies. Last week, I spoke to nine different climate policy experts about what’s on their wishlists for a potential Harris-Walz administration and encountered resounding excitement about the opportunities ahead. I also encountered nine different opinions on how, exactly, Harris should capitalize on those opportunities, should she wind up in the White House come January.
That said, the ideas I heard largely coalesced into three main avenues of approach: The first would see Harris use her position to shore up the country’s existing climate policies, doubling down on spending and addressing loopholes in the IRA. A second path would involve aggressively expanding on Biden’s legacy, mainly through major new investments. The final and most ambitious path would involve Harris approaching climate change and the energy transition with an original and bold vision for the years ahead (though your priorities may vary).
The policy proposals that fall under these loosely organized paths aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, and, as you’ll see, some of the advocate’s proposals fall into multiple categories. But it’s also true that by making everything a priority, nothing is. With that in mind, here are three approaches climate insiders say Harris could take if she wins the White House in November.
Before jumping headlong into expanding the country’s climate policies, the Harris administration could start by shoring up existing legislation — mainly, the loopholes and oversights in the Inflation Reduction Act. “The IRA was the biggest climate investment in history and fundamentally changed the emissions trajectory of the U.S — but the work is not done,” Adrian Deveny, founder of the decarbonization strategy group Climate Vision who previously worked on the IRA as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s director of energy and environmental policy, told me.
As things stand, the policies in the IRA alone won’t be enough to meet President Biden’s goal of halving the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2030; to do that, the U.S. would “need to pass another IRA-sized bill,” Deveny said. Until that happens, filling the IRA’s emissions gaps will take a lot of work “in every sector of the economy,” he added.
Lena Moffitt, the executive director of Evergreen Action — which has already released a comprehensive 2025 climate roadmap for a Harris administration — told me that the task of “doubling down on Biden’s climate legacy as a job creator” will run through rebuilding and expanding the grid and revitalizing industry and rural economies, two projects that started in the IRA but remain incomplete. “We’d love to see a day one executive order from the White House outlining a plan to create American jobs and seize the mantle of leadership by building clean energy and clean tech in the United States,” she told me.
Permitting reform is part of that — and could be another piece of yet-unfinished business Harris will need to wrap up. “If that doesn’t get done this year, that is what we have to look to as soon as possible during a future Harris administration,” Harry Godfrey, who leads Advanced Energy United's Federal Investment and Manufacturing Working Group, told me.
That’s not the only regulatory matter still up in the air. Austin Whitman, the CEO of The Climate Change Project, a non-profit that offers climate certification labeling and helps businesses reduce their emissions, told me that the Federal Trade Commission, for example, still hasn’t updated its green guides — “a loose collection of recommendations to companies on how to behave to not violate the FTC Act” — since 2012. “We just need a clear timeline and a sense of direction of where that whole process is going,” Whitman told me. Additionally, he said that the government has a substantial and outstanding role to play in standardizing and streamlining emissions reporting practices for businesses — which, while perhaps not “very sexy,” are necessary to “relieve the administrative burden so companies can focus on decarbonization.”
The last piece: Make sure everything that’s already in place is actually working. “We’re seeing that states and local governments need additional capacity to manage [the IRA] money well,” Jillian Blanchard, the director of Lawyers For Good Government’s climate change program, told me. Harris could help by enacting “more tangible policies like granting federal funding to hire community engagement specialists or liaisons or paying for the time of community leaders to provide local governments with key information on where the communities are that need to be benefited, and what they need.” She also floated the idea of a Community Change Grant extension to help get federal funding to localities more directly.
“One of the criticisms of the Inflation Reduction Act is that it didn’t do ‘X’ — whatever ‘X’ is,” Costa Samaras, the director of the Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation at Carnegie Mellon and a former senior White House energy official, told me. “And in reality, it probably did. It just didn’t do it big enough.”
As opposed to those who thought Harris should take a quieter, dare I say conservative approach to advancing the U.S. climate agenda, Samaras told me he wanted to see Harris pump up the volume. The current climate moment requires “attacking the places where we need to immediately make big emissions cuts and big resilience investments. This is the industrial sector, the cultural sector, heavy transportation, as well as making sure that our cities and communities are built for people.”
There are plenty of existing programs that could take some supersizing. Godfrey of Advanced Energy United brought up the home energy rebate programs, arguing that as things stand, those resources are only serving “a fraction of the eligible population.” Blanchard of Lawyers For Good Government also pointed out that the Environmental Protection Agency had almost 300 Climate Pollution Reduction Grant applications totaling more than $30 billion in requests — but only $4.3 billion to hand out. “There are local governments, state governments, tribal nations, and territories hungry for this money to implement clean energy projects,” she said. “There are plans that are ready to go if there are additional federal award dollars in the future.”
Another place Harris could expand on Biden’s legacy would be by reinstating the U.S. as a climate leader on the world stage. “We need to say, ‘climate is back on the table,’” Whitman of The Climate Change Project told me. “It’s a main course, and we’re going to talk about it” — something that would give us “a more credible seat at the negotiating table at the COPs.”
Perhaps most importantly, though, Harris needs to use her term to start looking toward the future. As Deveny of Climate Vision told me, “We designed the IRA to think about meeting our 2030 target. And now we have to think about 2035.” Looking ahead isn’t “just about extending policies,” in other words, but about anticipating new technologies and opportunities that could arise in the next decade — and Harris, if elected, should step up to the challenge.
Some believe Harris shouldn’t limit herself to the framework of the IRA as it exists now — that she needs to dream bigger and better than anything seen under the Biden administration. “The question is: Are we going to just ride the coattails of the IRA as if this problem is mostly solved? Or are we going to put forward a whole new, bold vision of how we can take things on?” Saul Levin, the political director of the Green New Deal Network, wondered to me.
According to Deveny of Climate Vision, that means continuing to build on “our industrial renaissance.”
“We have really awakened a sleeping giant of clean industrial manufacturing in this country to make solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries,” he explained. “We can also lead the world in clean industrial manufacturing for steel, cement, and other heavy industry projects.” Samaras of Carnegie Mellon, too, shared this vision. “By the end of a potential Harris Administration first term, the path to zero emissions should be visible everywhere,” he told me. Also on his wishlist were “abundant energy-efficient and affordable housing, accessible clean mobility infrastructure everywhere, schools and post offices as community clean energy and resilience hubs, and climate-smart agriculture and nature-based solutions across the country,” plus greater investment in adaptation.
“The fact is that both the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act are the largest investments in resilience we’ve ever done,” he said. But “we have to think about it the same way we have to think about mitigation,” he went on. “It’s the largest thing we’ve ever done — comma, so far.”
One of the biggest openings for Harris to distinguish herself from Biden, though, would be by taking a tougher tone with big polluters. Biden had shown less of an appetite for going after businesses, several times kicking the can down the road on a decision to what would have been his second term. Harris, by contrast, is well positioned with her background as a prosecutor and already went as far as to call for a “climate pollution fee” and the creation of an independent Office of Climate and Environmental Justice and Accountability during her 2019-2020 campaign.
“We love seeing her already reference from the stump that there is a lot that she can do with Congress or through the executive branch to hold polluters accountable for the toll that they have taken on families and our climate,” Moffitt of Evergreen Action told me. “That could look like a host of things, from repealing subsidies to using the Department of Justice to hold polluters accountable.” Maria Langholz, the senior director of Arc Initiatives, a strategy group that works with climate-related organizations, told me in an email that her team would also like to see the Harris administration revoke the presidential permit for Enbridge’s Line 5 pipeline as high, in addition to developing a public interest determination “that fully addresses the social, environmental, and economic impacts of LNG.”
But Levin, more than anyone else, wanted to see Harris pursue a “moonshot campaign from day one,” he said. “Hoping that tweaking the IRA is an appropriate solution to climate change is totally out of step with mainstream scientific consensus. It’s absolutely ridiculous. At the end of the day, we need to fundamentally transform our economy so that all people can survive climate change.” To have a prayer of meeting the IRA’s climate goals — let alone putting a meaningful dent in America’s contribution to global emissions — the U.S. must “invest trillions of dollars in transforming our transportation system, our building sector, our food and agriculture sector, and every part of the economy so that we can create a livable, sustainable world forever that works for everyone.”
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Renewable energy just became a much more enticing investment.
That’s thanks to the Federal Reserve, which announced today that it would reduce the benchmark federal funds rate by half a percentage point, from just over 5% to just below. It’s the beginning of an unwinding of years of high interest rates that have weighed on the global economy and especially renewable energy.
The Federal Reserve’s economic projections also indicated that the federal funds rate could fall another half point by the end of the year and a full point in 2025. The Federal Reserve began hiking interest rates from their near-zero levels in March 2022 in response to high inflation.
High interest rates, which drive up the cost of borrowing money, have an outsize effect on renewable energy projects. That’s because the cost of building and operating a renewable energy generator like a wind farm is highly concentrated in its construction, as opposed to operations, thanks to the fact that it doesn’t have to pay for fuel in the same way that a natural gas or coal-fired power plant does. This leaves developers highly exposed to the cost of borrowing money, which is directly tied to interest rates. “Our fuel is free, we say, but our fuel is really the cost of capital because we put so much capital out upfront,” Orsted Americas chief executive David Hardy said in June.
So what does that mean in practice? Let’s look at some numbers.
Wood Mackenzie estimates that a 2% increase in interest rates pushes up the cost of energy produced by a renewables project by around 20%, compared to just over 10% for conventional power plants.
Meanwhile the investment bank Lazard estimates that reducing the cost of capital (the combined cost of borrowing money and selling equity in a project, both of which can be affected by interest rates) from 7.7% — the bank’s rough assumption over the summer — to 5.4% would lower the levelized cost of energy for an offshore wind system from $118 to $97 — around 17% — and for a utility solar project from $76 to $54 — roughly 28%. While there's not a one-to-one relationship between interest rates and the cost of capital, they move in the same direction.
Reductions in cost of capital also make more renewables project viable to finance. According to a model developed by the Center for Public Enterprise, a typical renewable energy project with a weighted average cost of capital of 7.75% will have a debt service coverage ratio (a project’s cash flow compared to its loan payments)of 1.16. Investors consider projects to be roughly viable at 1.25.
So at the cost of capital assumed by Lazard, many projects will not get funded because investors don't see them as viable. If the weighted average cost of capital were to fall one percentage point to 6.75%, a project’s debt service coverage ratio would rise to 1.28, just above the viability threshold. If it fell by another percentage point, the debt ratio would hit a likely compelling 1.43.
“As rates fall, projects become increasingly financially viable,” Advait Arun, senior associate of energy finance at the Center for Public Enterprise and Heatmap contributor, told me matter-of-factly.
Why farmers are becoming the new nemeses of the solar and wind industries
Farms are fast becoming one of the most powerful opponents to renewable energy in the United States, second perhaps only to the fossil fuel industry. And it’s frighteningly unclear how developers will resolve this problem – or if they even can.
As solar and wind has grown rapidly across the country, so too have protests against solar and wind power on “prime farmland,” a loose term used by industry and government officials to describe property best suited for growing lots of crops. Towns and counties are banning the construction of solar and wind farms on prime farmland. State regulators – including those run by Democrats – are restricting renewable development on prime farmland, and members of Congress are looking at cutting off or restricting federal funds to projects on prime farmland.
In theory, meeting our country’s climate goals and industry needs should require very little farmland. But those same wide expanses flush with sunlight and gusts of wind sought after by developers happen to often be used by farmers: A USDA study released this year found more than 90% of wind turbines and 70% of solar farms in rural areas were sited on agricultural land.
It would be easy for an activist or energy nerd to presume this farmland free-for-all is being driven by outside actors or adverse incentives (and there’s a little bit of that going on, as we’ll get to).
However, weeks of reporting – and internal Heatmap News datasets – have revealed to me that farmland opposition actually has a devilishly simple explanation: many large farm owners are just plain hostile to land use changes that could potentially, or even just hypothetically, impact their capacity to grow more crops.
This means there is no easy solution and as I’ll explain, it is unclear whether the renewables sector’s efforts to appear more accommodating to agricultural businesses – most notably agri-voltaics – will stem the tide of local complaints from rural farmers.
“This is a new land use that is very quickly accelerating across the country and one of the major reactions is just to that fact,” Ethan Winter of American Farmland Trust, a nonprofit promoting solar education in farm communities, told me. “These are people who’ve been farming this land for generations in some instances. The idea of doing anything to take it out of agricultural production is just hard for them, for their community, and it’s about the culture of their community, and if solar is something that can be considered compatible with agriculture.”
Over 40% of all restrictive ordinances and moratoriums in Heatmap Pro's database are occurring in counties with large agricultural workforces.
In fact, our internal data via Heatmap Pro has found that agricultural employment can be a useful predictor of whether a community will oppose the deployment of renewables. It's particularly salient where there's large-scale, capital-intensive farming, likely because the kind of agriculture requiring expensive machinery, costly chemicals, and physical and financial infrastructure — think insurance and loans — indicates that farming is the economic cornerstone of that entire community.
Resentment against renewables is pronounced in the Corn Belt, but it’s also happening even in the bluest of states like Connecticut, where state environmental regulators have recommended against developing on prime farmland and require additional permits to build on preferred fertile soils. Or New York, where under pressure from farming groups including the state Farm Bureau, the state legislature last year included language in a new permitting authority law limiting the New York Power Authority from approving solar and wind on “land used in agricultural production” unless the project was agrivoltaics, which means it allows simultaneous farming of the property. The state legislature is now looking at additional curbs on siting projects in farmland as it considers new permitting legislation.
Deanna Fox, head of the New York Farm Bureau, explained to me that her organization’s bottom-up structure essentially means its positions are a consensus of its grassroots farm worker membership. And those members really don’t trust renewables to be safe for farmland.
“What happens when those solar arrays no longer work, or they become antiquated? Or farmland loses its agricultural designation and becomes zoned commercial? How does that impact ag districting in general? Does that land just become commercial? Can it go back to being agricultural land?” Fox asked. “If you were to talk to a group of farmers about solar, I would guarantee none of them would say anything about the emotional aspect of it. I don’t think that's what it really is for them. [And] if it’s emotional, it’s wrapped around the economics of it.”
Surveys of farmers have hinted that fears could be assuaged if developers took steps to make their projects more harmonious with agricultural work. As we reported last week, a survey by the independent research arm of the Solar Energy Industries Association found up to 70% of farmers they spoke with said they were “open to large-scale solar” but many sought stipulations for dual usage of the land for farming – a practice known as agrivoltaics.
Clearly, agrivoltaics and other simultaneous use strategies are what the industry wants to promote. As we hit send on last week’s newsletter, I was strolling around RE+, renewable energy’s largest U.S. industry conference. Everywhere I turned, I found publicity around solar and farming.
The Department of Energy even got in on the action. At the same time as the conference, the department chose to announce a new wave of financial prizes for companies piloting simultaneous solar energy and farming techniques.
“In areas where there has been a lot of loss of farmland to development, solar is one more factor that I think has worried folks in some communities,” Becca Jones-Albertus, director of DOE’s solar energy technologies office, told me during an interview at the conference. However agri-voltaics offer “a really exciting strategy because it doesn’t make this an either or. It’s a yes and.”
It remains to be seen whether these attempts at harmony will resolve any of the discord.
One industry practice being marketed to farm communities that folks hope will soften opposition is sheep grazing at solar farms. At RE+, The American Solar Grazing Association, an advocacy group, debuted a documentary about the practice at the conference and had an outdoor site outside the showroom with sheep chilling underneath solar panel frames. The sheep display had a sign thanking sponsors including AES, Arevon, BP, EDF Renewables, and Pivot Energy.
Some developers like Avangrid have found grazing to be a useful way to mitigate physical project risks at solar farms in the Pacific Northwest. Out in rural Oregon and Washington, unkempt grasslands can present a serious fire risk. So after trying other methods, Avangrid partnered with an Oregon rancher, Cameron Krebs, who told me he understands why some farmers are skeptical about developers coming into their neck of the woods.
“Culturally speaking, this is agricultural land. These are communities that grow wheat and raise cattle. So my peers, when they put in the solar farms and they see it going out of production, that really bothers the community in general,” he said.
But Krebs doesn’t see solar farms with grazing the same way.
“It’s a retooling. It may not be corn production anymore. But we’re still going to need a lot of resources. We’re still going to need tire shops. I think there is a big fear that the solar companies will take the land out of production and then the meat shops and the food production would suffer because we don’t have that available on the landscape, but I think we can have utility scale solar that is healthy for our communities. And that really in my mind means honoring that soil with good vegetation.”
It’s important to note, however, that grazing can’t really solve renewables’ farmland problem. Often grazing is most helpful in dry Western desert. Not to mention sheep aren’t representative of all livestock – they’re a small percentage. And Heatmap Pro’s database has found an important distinction between farms focused on crops versus livestock — the latter isn’t as predisposed to oppose renewable energy.
Ground zero for the future of renewables on farmland is Savion's proposed Oak Run project in Ohio, which at up to 800 megawatts of generation capacity would be the state’s largest solar farm. The developer also plans to let farmers plant and harvest crops in between the solar arrays, making it the nation’s largest agri-voltaics site if completed.
But Oak Run is still being opposed by nearby landowners and local officials citing impacts to farmland. At Oak Run’s proposed site, neighboring township governments have passed resolutions opposing construction, as has the county board of commissioners, and town and county officials sued to undo Oak Run’s approval at the Ohio Power Siting Board. Although that lawsuit was unsuccessful, its backers want to take the matter to the state Supreme Court.
Some of this might be tied to the pure fact Ohio is super hostile to renewables right now. Over a third of counties in the state have restricted or outright banned solar and wind projects, according to Heatmap Pro’s database.
But there’s more at play here. The attorney representing town and county officials is Jack Van Kley, a lawyer and former state government official who remains based in Ohio and who has represented many farms in court for myriad reasons. I talked to Van Kley last week for an hour about why he opposes renewables projects (“they’re anything but clean in my opinion”), his views on global warming (“I don’t get involved in the dispute over climate change”) and a crucial fact that might sting: He says at least roughly two thirds of his clientele are farmers or communities reliant on agricultural businesses.
“It’s neighbor against neighbor in these communities,” he told me. “You’ve got a relatively low number of farmers who want to lease their land so that the solar companies can put solar panels on them for thirty or forty years, and it’s just a few landowners that are profiting from these projects.”
Van Kley spoke to a concern voiced by his clients I haven’t really heard addressed by solar developers much: overall impacts to irrigation. Specifically, he said an outsized concern among farmers is simply how putting a solar or wind farm adjacent or close to their property will impact how groundwater and surface water moves in the area, which can impact somebody’s existing agricultural drainage infrastructure.
“If you do that next to another property that is being farmed, you’ll kill the crop because you’ll flood the crop,” he claimed. “This is turning out to be a big issue for farmers who are opposing these facilities.”
Some have tried to paint Van Kley as funded or assisted by the fossil fuel lobby or shadowy actors. Van Kley has denied any involvement in those kinds of backroom dealings. While there’s glimpses of evidence gas and coal money plays at least a minor role with other characters fomenting opposition in the state, I really have no evidence of him being one of these people right now. It’s much easier and simpler to reason that he’s being paid by another influential sect – large landowners, many of whom work in agriculture.
That’s the same conclusion John Boeckl reached. Boeckl, an Army engineer, is one of the property owners leasing land for construction of the Oak Run project. He supports Oak Run being built and has submitted testimony in the legal challenge over its approvals. Though Boeckl certainly wants to know more about who is funding the opposition and has his gripes with neighbors who keep putting signs on his property that say “no solar on prime farmland,” he hasn’t witnessed any corporate skullduggery from shadowy outside entities.
“I think it’s just farmers being farmers,” he said. “They don’t want to be told what to do with their land.”
A look at the conflicts around renewable energy projects over the past week
1. Newport County, Rhode Island – I’ve learned that climate activists in Rhode Island are now using local protests to oppose NIMBYs who are challenging renewables projects.
2. Coos County, Oregon – The Confederated Tribes of the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians have sued the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management requesting it delay an offshore wind lease sale scheduled on Oct. 15.
3. Polk County, Iowa – Landowners have sued the Iowa Utilities Commission over permitting the Summit Carbon Solutions CO2 pipeline and providing eminent domain authority, the latest in a string of setbacks that has galvanized local opposition from the midwest to the Dakotas.
4. Houston County, Georgia – One of Georgia’s largest proposed solar projects has been rejected by a potential host county over its potential impacts to bear habitat and property values.
Here’s what else I’m watching…