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It sure looks that way, at least. Democrats should start coming up with a plan.
For the first six months of President Trump’s term, the big question was about what would happen to the Inflation Reduction Act. We now have something like an answer.
President Trump’s memorably named One Big Beautiful Bill Act repealed many of the IRA’s most important clean energy tax credits, including incentives for wind, solar, and electric vehicles. And while it’s still unclear whether the Trump administration will let developers actually use the tax credits that remain on the books — especially the now-denuded credits for wind and solar — fewer “unknown unknowns” remain about what might come next.
So I’ve been trying to figure out where climate and energy policy might go from here. And one story that I keep coming back to is the flashing red lights around what could become a serious electricity affordability crisis.
It’s now widely understood that electricity demand is rising in the United States for the first time in a generation. The Energy Information Administration projects that electricity use will grow 1.7% in the next few years, after increasing by just 0.1% per year from 2005 to 2020. That growth is projected to come from new data centers, new factories, the (now) slow(er) but (still) steady adoption of electric vehicles, and population growth.
What is less well understood is how poorly the United States is prepared to match this rise in electricity demand with an equivalent increase in supply. To some degree, American electricity prices are already rising: So far this year, utilities have received or requested permission to increase customers’ bills by $29 billion, according to a July report from PowerLines, a think tank and advocacy group. That’s a large number in its own right, and it’s more than twice as much as had been approved at this time last year.
But when you look across the power system, virtually every trend is setting us up for electricity price spikes:
On top of all this, of course, the Trump administration has made it much more uncertain which new solar, wind, and battery projects will be able to secure tax credits — and with them, secure bank financing.
None of these trends alone would guarantee price increases or electricity supply constraints. But taken together, they reveal an electricity system that is coming under a variety of strains.
In the 2010s, cheap natural gas and technological advances in energy efficiency pacified much of the power system. We won’t have the same luxury this decade.
This is all going to be bad for the economy, bad for the climate, and bad for climate policy.
It’s a setback for the U.S. economy because, as President Trump somewhat alluded to in his second inaugural address, energy is a key input to virtually every other economic process, including manufacturing. But it’s especially bad for climate policy. The dominant plan to decarbonize much of the U.S. economy is to “electrify everything” — cars, appliances, home heating, and even many industrial processes. Americans will be far less eager to electrify everything if electricity is expensive.
If energy price hikes do arrive, Democrats are going to have a relatively straightforward time communicating about them in a narrow political sense. The story is just too simple: Democrats passed a law to encourage clean energy called the Inflation Reduction Act. Republicans repealed it. Energy prices inflated. QED.
That story alone might be too contrived, but the evidence we have suggests that OBBBA will raise energy bills. The REPEAT Project at Princeton University — led by Jesse Jenkins, my Shift Key podcast cohost — has a new report out projecting that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will increase Americans’ electricity bills by $165 a year by the end of the decade. (If the law is allowed to stick around, and in the absence of intervening policies, it could raise bills by hundreds of dollars a year by the middle of next decade.)
OBBBA’s explosion of the federal deficit will make the situation worse: By expanding the deficit for such little public gain — that is, merely to memorialize earlier tax cuts, not even to make new ones — the Federal Reserve will have a more difficult time cutting interest rates in the future. That will in turn make it even more difficult for utilities and developers to finance new energy projects.
The political story will be so compelling here, I think, that Democrats will come under a lot of pressure to reinstate the wind and solar tax credits. And maybe they should do that — it could make sense as part of a larger energy or permitting deal. But stacking more solar and wind on the grid will not on its own lower people’s electricity bills.
Going into 2028, Democrats will need an actual plan to stabilize or cut electricity costs. They will need ideas about how (and whether) to speed up permitting, restructure wholesale power markets, and build new power plants in order to stabilize the power grid.
One thing that’s already clear is that in this inflationary environment, states like New York with publicly owned power authorities are able to intervene more forcefully in their own power markets than states that lack such capability. That’s because the state itself can act to build its own large-scale power plants. New York Governor Kathy Hochul recently directed the state’s power authority to build a new nuclear power plant upstate in order to grow the supply of zero-emissions electricity. Using their state own power authorities, governors in other states — or even the federal government, with an entity like the TVA— could take a similar step.
With all that said, I’ve been trying to come up with a scenario under which these price hikes will not materialize. In the late 2010s, for instance, America’s liquified natural gas exports surged essentially from zero, but domestic consumers didn’t see significant price hikes because drillers increased gas production to match the exports. Maybe that could happen again. And maybe utilities will — and this would, to be clear, be horrible for the climate — run their aging coal plants much more than they once anticipated doing.
Or maybe load growth won’t be as bad as we think. When Jesse and I spoke to Peter Freed, Meta’s former director of energy strategy, for Shift Key, he told us that the current data center boom is different from any previous buildout because of the presence of speculators. For the first time, he said, speculative data center developers are buying up prospective sites and requesting utility-scale hookups with the expectation that they will find a tenant for the data center in the future. In other words, the demand side of the electricity system is filled with an unusual amount of froth at the moment.
We also know that, more generally, the demand side of the power system is a mess. In the past few years, climate analysts have gotten used to talking about the power grid’s interconnection queue — that is, its supply side. But the demand-side queue — the process that lets new data centers, factories, and other new electricity users connect — is even more broken. In some jurisdictions, it’s little more than an Excel file that projects move up and down within as local politics requires.
We also know that one source of new demand — one planned factory or, more often, one data center — will sometimes apply to hook up to multiple states or utilities at the same time. It will get utilities to bid against each other, suss out the best construction sites and power rates, and only relatively late in the process make a final decision about where to build.
So if I were putting together a bear case for electricity demand, I would start here. Maybe aggressive data center speculators are bidding in multiple utilities, driving up projections across many states. That’s causing utilities to freak out about their supply, leading them to project the need for a lot of new investment — and, with it, a lot of electricity rate increases. But as data center speculators actually begin to build (or abandon) projects — and as some of the air inevitably comes out of the AI boom — some of this projected demand will start to evaporate. Perhaps the data centers that do get built will find ways to reduce their power usage, too.
Even this story won’t fully eliminate load growth on its own, though. Data centers make up the largest share of new electricity demand, but even then, they’re not the majority of it. The rest comes from, roughly, new factories, the slow electrification of the vehicle fleet, and new residential construction. But let’s say the One Big Beautiful Bill Act succeeds in hobbling the electric vehicle sector in the United States, many EV and battery factories get canceled, and fewer Americans buy EVs overall. Calculate in a mild recession, too, since all the AI and EV investment will be drying up.
In that world, most new sources of power demand really will be in abeyance. That’s how some of these power projections might not come true. But in most other scenarios, it’s time to hold on — and for blue-state leaders to think about how they can find cheap, zero-emissions electrons, as soon as possible.
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It all happened today at Heatmap House, part of New York Climate Week.
If you’ll allow us to toot our own horn for a moment, Heatmap House — our first-ever daylong series of panels with the most influential voices in climate, clean energy, and sustainability, part of New York Climate Week — had everything. Senator Chuck Schumer kicked things off with an emphatic call to action for climate advocates at the top of the day. Then a series of industry leaders in clean energy manufacturing gave us a forecast for the future of American decarbonization, followed by investors and technologists including Tom Steyer and Dawn Lippert telling us how exactly we might find the funding for that future.
Here’s a quick recap, in case you weren’t able to make it out to New York City for the event. Our first session of the day, “The Big (Green) Apple,” centered on New York’s efforts to future-proof the state. Schumer began the day with what my colleague Katie Brigham described as a “rousing condemnation of the Trump administration’s climate policies and a call to action for climate advocates everywhere.”
“New York remains the climate leader, but Donald Trump is doing everything in his power to kill solar, wind, batteries, EVs and all climate friendly technologies while propping up fossil fuels, Big Oil, and polluting technologies that hurt our communities and our growth,” Schumer said.
Among the various sessions that followed, Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo spoke with Uchenna Bright, a commissioner on the New York State Public Service Commission, about New York’s evolving energy system and how to keep it affordable for New Yorkers. Later, Emily spoke with Elijah Hutchinson of the NYC Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice about the city’s specific climate goals, and how those are inextricably tied with advancing equality for all the city’s residents.
Other speakers from the morning session included Andrew Bowman, CEO of Jupiter Power, and Jon Powers, co-founder of CleanCapital, who spoke with Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin about the nuts and bolts of power generation. Meanwhile Ben Furnas, executive director at Transportation Alternatives, emphasized the importance of clean, efficient ways of getting around the city in conversation with executive editor Robinson Meyer.
Our midday session, “Built to Scale,” was a lesson in pragmatism. Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, along with other clean energy voices including Ricardo Falu, chief operating officer at AES, argued that the global fight to decarbonize is going on with or without the United States. “It is best for people to operate under the assumption that the United States, at least for the next three years, will be a destructive force on collective climate action,” Schatz said to Rob.
Falu, whose company has succeeded in getting clean energy projects off the ground abroad, concurred. “In Chile, we pay 12 cents for a solar panel. Here in the U.S., it’s 36 to 37 [cents]. Why is that?” he said in conversation with Emily. “In many other countries, you don’t need incentives for renewables. They are competitive.”
But many of the panelists remained cautiously optimistic about the future of decarbonization in the U.S. These included Jake Oster of Amazon, who told Katie that energy efficiency is at the forefront of Amazon’s data center growth efforts. Carla Peterman, chief sustainability officer of PG&E, told my colleague Matthew Zeitlin that she was confident data center demand will eventually bring down electricity rates for consumers. Other speakers highlighted the need for clarity from lawmakers in order for clean energy projects to advance, including Julien Dumoulin-Smith of Jefferies, who talked to Matthew about the clean energy financing equation.
Our final session of the night, “Up Next in Climate Tech,” focused on the future of climate tech investment. Climate investor and philanthropist Tom Steyer sat down with Rob to discuss what needs to happen for climate innovation to finally achieve deployment. Steyer is confident that a “huge, powerful wave” is still driving renewable energy.
“For the people who never look at the numbers, for the people who don’t pay attention to actual investment decisions, costs, profit margins, you can say whatever you want. But I’ll tell you this: The rig count is down 10% to 20% in 2025 in America,” Steyer said.
Dawn Lippert, CEO of Elemental Impact, then talked with Rob about the biggest potential challenge facing renewables deployment, even in the face of such unstoppability — that is, “bankability,” otherwise known as the “missing middle” in climate tech investment.
“It takes quite a lot of capital, and there’s no one to hand it out on the financial infrastructure side. They’re not ready for infrastructure investors. They’re definitely not ready for banks,” Lippert said.
Rounding out our last session were Christian Anderson, co-founder of the carbon accounting platform Watershed, and Rick Needham, chief commercial officer of Commonwealth Fusion, who discussed what makes a climate tech unicorn with Katie. Sublime Systems CEO Leah Ellis, whose company makes low-carbon cement, and Microsoft’s Katie Ross, talked with Emily about how their companies are partnering up to produce low-carbon cement.
The bottom line? Circumstances for clean energy deployment may be particularly tough at the moment, but there are thousands of creative people finding innovative ways to reach our decarbonized future.
The current policy environment “doesn’t mean that collective climate action can’t continue,” said Schatz. “It doesn’t mean that American companies, American governors, American nonprofits, American journalists, can’t be part of this whole movement to solve this generational challenge.”
At Heatmap House’s third session of the day, “Up Next in Climate Tech,” investors Tom Steyer and Dawn Lippert chart a path forward for the clean energy economy.
Tom Steyer is still riding the wave.
The climate investor and philanthropist told the audience at Heatmap House’s third session of the day, “Up Next in Climate Tech,” that he started his investment firm Galvanize in 2021 because “there’s a huge, powerful wave behind us.” And now, after the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the Trump administration’s regulatory assault on renewables? “Does any of that change? No, it’s better,” Steyer said.
Steyer was skeptical that the oil and gas industry could ultimately compete with clear energy, even with the current administration’s support.
“For the people who never look at the numbers, for the people who don’t pay attention to actual investment decisions, costs, profit margins, you can say whatever you want. But I’ll tell you this: The rig count is down 10% to 20% in 2025 in America. That’s a statement about future profitability” of the oil industry Steyer said, pointing to declining domestic drilling.
For Steyer, the math is simple. A huge portion of demand for oil comes from the transportation sector, and the movement towards electric vehicles is “unstoppable.”
“We’re talking about a commodity with a worldwide price where we’re the biggest producers of oil in the world,” Steyer said. He noted that the U.S. is also the “high-cost producer” compared to countries like Saudi Arabia, which can produce oil more cheaply than in the U.S. shale patch.
So if there’s such a huge market opportunity for clean energy businesses, can they get funded? That’s the challenge fellow investor Dawn Lippert is trying to solve. Lippert is the founder and chief executive of Elemental, a non-profit climate investment firm. The trick she’s trying to perfect is to attract investors beyond the specialized, earlier stage investor group that typically seeds decarbonization, who can fund actual, steel-in-the-ground projects.
“We are trying to finance the energy transition with venture capital,” referring to the broader financing community. “It’s a total mistake.”
Venture capital has catalyzed “a huge wave of technology, invention, and technologies that are really working,” Lippert added. What’s happening now is that those companies are “trying to deploy, they’re trying to build their first plants, trying to build their second plants. It takes quite a lot of capital, and there’s no one to hand it out on the financial infrastructure side. They’re not ready for infrastructure investors. They’re definitely not ready for banks.”
This problem of “bankability,” or the “missing middle,” has bedeviled the climate tech sector for years, as technologically innovative energy projects struggle to get funding from infrastructure investors who want projects that can produce predictable cash flows, not risky venture-stage experiments.
Elemental developed an investment vehicle called a D-SAFE — a.k.a. a Development Simple Agreement for Future Equity — to help solve this problem. The D-SAFE is an investment agreement that can unlock future investment by pointing investment directly at development costs. “A development SAFE says, I’m going to give you dollars, and I’m going to get those dollars back when you hit specific milestones,” Lippert said.
So far, Elemental has done nine D-SAFEs. “We’re trying to create much simpler financial infrastructure so that financial innovation can catch up to where technology innovation is, and we can stop slowing things down,” Lippert said.
The challenge for American climate technology and infrastructure companies will be to compete with state-supported Chinese businesses, Lippert said. “China actually does have a very methodical way of putting a ton of state capital into these companies to get them all the way through. We don’t have that in this country, so we have to be much more creative and make sure that companies where technology is working are not falling into a scale gap just because we can’t get our act together.”
At Heatmap House’s second session, speakers including Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii looked overseas to spot the clean energy future.
None of the speakers at Heatmap House’s second session at New York Climate Week, “Built to Scale,” minced words when it came to describing the current U.S. policy environment. The global fight to decarbonize is still happening, our guests emphasized — but it might happen without the U.S.
Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii emphasized in his discussion with Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer that in previous years, he would assure his international colleagues that the U.S. was still fully invested in the climate fight. What about now? “I would say we will be back — but do not wait for us,” Schatz said.
Ricardo Falu, executive vice president and chief operating officer at AES corporation, touched on a similar point while speaking with my colleague Emily Pontecorvo. His company, which invests in clean energy projects in addition to natural gas at home and abroad, has found particular success in Chile, where the regulatory environment has proved especially fruitful for renewables. “In many other countries, you don't need incentives for renewables. They are competitive,” Falu pointed out. “You don’t need the government financing or the government to be involved.”
This isn’t to say that there’s no hope whatsoever for climate progress in the U.S., our speakers made sure to highlight. We might just have to refrain from calling it “climate progress.” Schatz pointed out that the language of affordability will come to define clean energy projects moving forward, echoing what Senator Chuck Schumer said earlier in the day. “Cheap is clean, and clean is cheap,” said Schatz. “We don't have to make a complicated argument.”
This framing from Schatz and Schumer makes perfect sense in the context of the new package of energy proposals from House Democrats announced this morning, fittingly called the Cheap Energy Act. As my colleague Robinson wrote today, “Democrats have reoriented to talking about energy chiefly as an affordability problem.” Schatz summed up the strategy thusly: “We have to just say, ‘See that spike in electricity prices? It’s their fault. Solar is cheap.’”
Data centers and the rapid growth of AI were also top of mind for panelists. The tension between AI growth objectives and renewables didn’t seem to be an issue, however. Rather, our speakers pointed out, data center growth could be an opportunity to invest in a stronger renewables rollout. Jake Oster, director of sustainability at Amazon, told Heatmap’s Katie Brigham that “the first thing we're focused on is energy efficiency in our facilities.”
Carla Peterman, executive vice president at PG&E, was even more unequivocal in her support. “We know that our communities, our society will benefit from having that load and having those data centers,” she remarked. “We don’t want to block bringing them on.”