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The Transportation and Infrastructure Committee released a budget proposal that attempts to claw back nearly $9 billion in grants.
The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee released the first draft of its portion of Trump’s big budget bill on Tuesday, and it includes the first official swipe at the Inflation Reduction Act of the months-long process ahead.
Remember, the name of the game for Republicans is to find ways to pay for Trump’s long list of tax cuts. The budget framework Congress passed two weeks ago assigned eleven House committees to craft proposals that would each raise or reduce revenue by a specific amount to accomplish Trump’s agenda.
The Transportation Committee proposal contains one new revenue-generating program, placing a $200 annual fee on electric vehicles and $100 fee on hybrid vehicles, alongside a $20 fee on conventional cars. The money would go into the Highway Trust Fund, which is currently financed mostly by the gas tax — and which, of course, EV owners don’t pay.
But the draft also includes a list of “rescissions” of unobligated funds from seven IRA grant programs. While the Biden administration awarded the vast majority of the money allocated to the programs listed, in many cases the recipients never reached a final project agreement with the government. That means a lot of the funding can, in fact, be clawed back.
Take the first item on the list, the Alternative Fuel and Low Emissions Aviation Technology Program. The IRA allocated $291 million for grants to support producing sustainable aviation fuel and developing low-emission aviation technologies, and the Biden administration awarded the full amount to 36 recipients in August of last year. It’s not clear how many reached final project agreements with the Federal Aviation Administration, however. A quick scan of the government’s database of awards is missing a $25.7 million grant to oil giant BP to produce sustainable aviation fuel at its refinery in Washington State, but it does include the full obligation of $240,000 to the City of Atlanta to conduct a study on deploying SAF at Hartsfield-Jackson Airport.
Grants aren’t always logged in USASpending.gov in a timely manner, so it’s possible BP does have an agreement in place. Among the other awardees that I could not find listed in the database were World Energy, which was awarded nearly $22 million to install infrastructure enabling Los Angeles International Airport to get deliveries of SAF, and Buckeye Terminals, which got $24 million to upgrade four SAF storage facilities in the midwest. Republicans tend to support biofuels, so it’s somewhat surprising they went after this program — especially since $291 million is chump change on the scale of a multi-trillion-dollar budget.
We know a bit more about the second item on the list, the Neighborhood Access and Equity Grant Program. This one allocated just over $3.2 billion to the Federal Highway Administration to award state and local governments with grants to improve walkability and transportation access, to mitigate transportation-related pollution in disadvantaged communities, and to improve transportation equity. The advocacy group Transportation for America found that of the nearly 100 awards the Biden administration announced from this program in 2023, totaling more than $3.1 billion, only 25 projects may have reached a final project agreement, per USASpending.gov. The group says this means it’s possible that nearly the entire $3 billion is up for grabs.
Other funding targeted includes more than $3.3 billion across three allocations to the General Services Administration to improve the efficiency of government buildings, prioritize lower-carbon building materials, and invest in other “emerging and sustainable” building solutions. The Government Accountability Office published a well-timed report about these three programs today, noting that while 99% of the money has been awarded, only half has been obligated, leaving more than $1.7 billion for Congress to take back.
Lastly, the proposal lists $2 billion in grants for states and local governments to use low-carbon materials in road projects. The Department of Transportation awarded $1.8 billion of the money to 39 states last year, although again, it's unclear how many of these awards have been obligated.
Having said all that, let’s assume for a moment that the full amount allocated to each of the programs was available to Congress to claw back. That would come to just under $9 billion of the $10 billion of deficit reductions the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee is required to find under the special rules governing the budget bill.
But the draft bill also contains huge amounts of new spending, including allocating more than $20 billion to the United States Coast Guard for border security and $15 billion for upgrades to Air Traffic Control systems. The nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that the new fees on EVs and other vehicles could raise between $7 and $33 billion over the lifetime of the bill, which is not enough to pay for all of that. (They also note that it would barely make up for the more than $200 billion deficit in the Highway Trust Fund.) So if Republicans want to keep those provisions, they may have to find more cuts. They’ll likely have to find more anyway, depending on how much of the IRA money has been obligated.
I’ll leave you with a reminder that I’ll be repeating ad nauseam over the next few weeks or months as Congress hammers out its budget bill: This is just a first pass, and this is all subject to change. The Transportation and Infrastructure Committee will be holding a markup of the proposal on Wednesday, where it will debate each line and make changes before voting on whether to advance it.
Most of the Inflation Reduction Act programs come under the aegis of the Energy and Commerce and Ways and Means committees, neither of which have published any bill text yet. But we’ll be here for you when they do.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to remove a reference to Gevo, a sustainable aviation fuel producer, which told Heatmap that it declined its awarded grant due to changed business priorities. It has also been update to include the Union of Concerned Scientists’ revenue estimate.
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On the worsening transformer shortage, China’s patent boom, and New York’s nuclear embrace
Current conditions: Tropical Storm Erin is still intensifying as it approaches the Caribbean • Rare August rainstorms are deluging the Pacific Northwest with a month’s worth of precipitation in 24 hours, threatening floods • Hong Kong has issued its highest-level “black” rainstorm warning multiple times this month as Tropical Storm Podul lashes southern China.
President Donald Trump’s order to keep large fossil-fueled power stations scheduled to retire between now and 2028 operating indefinitely will cost ratepayers across the United States $3.1 billion per year, according to new research from the consultancy Grid Strategies on behalf of four large environmental groups. If the Department of Energy expands the order to cover all 54 fossil fuel plants slated for closure in the next three years, the price tag for Americans whose rates fund the subsidies to keep the stations running would rise to $6 billion per year.
The problem may only grow. The agency’s existing mandates “perversely incentivize plant owners to claim they plan to retire so they can receive a ratepayer subsidy to remain open,” the report points out.
With electricity consumption hitting new records in the U.S., demand for transformers is surging. The years-long supply shortage for power and distribution transformers is now set to hit a deficit below demand of 30% and 10%, respectively, in 2025, according to a new report from the energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie. Complicating matters further for manufacturers scrambling to ramp up supply, Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act is throwing clean-energy projects into jeopardy and sending mixed signals to factories on what kinds of transformers to produce. At the same time, tariffs are raising the price of materials needed to make more transformers.
“The U.S. transformer market stands at a critical juncture, with supply constraints threatening to undermine the nation's energy transition and grid reliability goals,” Ben Boucher, a senior supply chain analyst at Wood Mackenzie, said in a statement. “The convergence of accelerating electricity demand, aging infrastructure and supply chain vulnerabilities has created constraints that will persist well into the 2030s.”
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A worker in a Chinese electric vehicle factory. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
For years, China was known for ripping off the West’s technology and patenting cheaper but more easily manufactured copies. Not anymore. China applied for twice as many high-quality clean energy patents as the U.S. in 2022, according to a New York Times analysis of the most recently available public data. The European Patent Office, which supplied data to the Times, defines a “high quality” patent as one that has been filed in two or more countries, indicating that the company or individual involved has a strong competitive interest in protecting its idea.
The growth in China’s intellectual property ambitions is a sign that Beijing’s strategic push to ramp up academic research and industrial innovation is maturing. “It is the opposite of an accident,” said Jenny Wong Leung, an analyst and data scientist at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which created a database of global research on technologies that are critical to nations’ economic and military security, including clean energy.
In June, New York Governor Kathy Hochul directed the New York Power Authority, the nation’s second-largest government-owned utility after the federal Tennessee Valley Authority, to support the construction of the state’s first new nuclear plant since the 1980s. Albany has plenty to sort out between now and the 15-year deadline for completing the project, including selecting a site, picking from one of the many new reactor designs, and finding a private partner. But one thing isn’t a problem, at least for now: Public support.
New Siena polling I covered in my Substack newsletter yesterday shows that 49% of registered voters in New York support the effort, with just 26% opposed. Both sides of the political spectrum are largely in lockstep, with Republican support outpacing that of Democrats by a margin of 55% to 49%. That’s lucky for Hochul, who will need support from the more politically conservative upper reaches of the state where the facility is likely to be built. For more on the technical and political considerations in play, here’s Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin on the plan.
It seems like everyone is abandoning their net zero goals. But not insurer Aviva. The company’s chief executive, Amanda Blanc, said the British giant remained committed to its carbon-cutting goals in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, The Guardian reported. With rising profits propelling shares in the company to their highest level since the 2008 financial crisis, Blanc said, “extreme weather conditions, climate change, and the impact that that has on our insurance business that actually insures properties” meant Aviva needed to “remain committed to our ambition.”
The British government’s decision in May to hand back sovereignty over the Chagos Island to Mauritius more than two centuries after seizing the Indian Ocean archipelago and forcing out its residents to make way for a military base created a political uproar in the United Kingdom earlier this year. But British rule over the island chain yielded at least one major benefit beyond military defense. A new study found that the supersized Marine Protected Area the U.K. established in 2010 protected large ocean animals throughout much of their lifecycle. Scientists tracked sea turtles, manta rays and seabirds in the nearly 250,000-square-mile sanctuary. In total, 95% of tracking locations showed the area “is large enough to protect these wandering animals” which travel far to forage, breed and migrate. By contrast, the study from Exeter and Heriot-Watt universities found that seabirds in marine areas with smaller than 40,000 square miles “would be less well protected.”
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy projects.
1. Lawrence County, Alabama – We now have a rare case of a large solar farm getting federal approval.
2. Virginia Beach, Virginia – It’s time to follow up on the Coastal Virginia offshore wind project.
3. Fairfield County, Ohio – The red shirts are beating the greens out in Ohio, and it isn’t looking pretty.
4. Allen County, Indiana – Sometimes a setback can really set someone back.
5. Adams County, Illinois – Hope you like boomerangs because this county has approved a solar project it previously denied.
6. Solano County, California – Yet another battery storage fight is breaking out in California. This time, it’s north of San Francisco.
A conversation with Elizabeth McCarthy of the Breakthrough Institute.
This week’s conversation is with Elizabeth McCarthy of the Breakthrough Institute. Elizabeth was one of several researchers involved in a comprehensive review of a decade of energy project litigation – between 2013 and 2022 – under the National Environment Policy Act. Notably, the review – which Breakthrough released a few weeks ago – found that a lot of energy projects get tied up in NEPA litigation. While she and her colleagues ultimately found fossil fuels are more vulnerable to this problem than renewables, the entire sector has a common enemy: difficulty of developing on federal lands because of NEPA. So I called her up this week to chat about what this research found.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
So why are you so fixated on NEPA?
Personally and institutionally, [Breakthrough is] curious about all regulatory policy – land use, environmental regulatory policy – and we see NEPA as the thing that connects them all. If we understand how that’s functioning at a high level, we can start to pull at the strings of other players. So, we wanted to understand the barrier that touches the most projects.
What aspects of zero-carbon energy generation are most affected by NEPA?
Anything with a federal nexus that doesn’t include tax credits. Solar and wind that is on federal land is subject to a NEPA review, and anything that is linear infrastructure – transmission often has to go through multiple NEPA reviews. We don’t see a ton of transmission being litigated over on our end, but we think that is a sign NEPA is such a known obstacle that no one even wants to touch a transmission line that’ll go through 14 years of review, so there’s this unknown graveyard of transmission that wasn’t even planned.
In your report, you noted there was a relatively small number of zero-carbon energy projects in your database of NEPA cases. Is solar and wind just being developed more frequently on private land, so there’s less of these sorts of conflicts?
Precisely. The states that are the most powered by wind or create the most wind energy are Texas and Iowa, and those are bypassing the national federal environmental review process [with private land], in addition to not having their own state requirements, so it’s easier to build projects.
What would you tell a solar or wind developer about your research?
This is confirming a lot of things they may have already instinctually known or believed to be true, which is that NEPA and filling out an environmental impact statement takes a really long time and is likely to be litigated over. If you’re a developer who can’t avoid putting your energy project on federal land, you may just want to avoid moving forward with it – the cost may outweigh whatever revenue you could get from that project because you can’t know how much money you’ll have to pour into it.
Huh. Sounds like everything is working well. I do think your work identifies a clear risk in developing on federal lands, which is baked into the marketplace now given the pause on permits for renewables on federal lands.
Yeah. And if you think about where the best places would be to put these technologies? It is on federal lands. The West is way more federal land than anywhere else in the county. Nevada is a great place to put solar — there’s a lot of sun. But we’re not going to put anything there if we can’t put anything there.
What’s the remedy?
We propose a set of policy suggestions. We think the judicial review process could be sped along or not be as burdensome. Our research most obviously points to shortening the statute of limitations under the Administrative Procedures Act from six years to six months, because a great deal of the projects we reviewed made it in that time, so you’d see more cases in good faith as opposed to someone waiting six years waiting to challenge it.
We also think engaging stakeholders much earlier in the process would help.