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A personal account of the final act in the fight to pass the United States’ first comprehensive climate law
One year ago, the Inflation Reduction Act became law, throwing the full financial might of the federal government behind the clean energy transition and forever changing the fight against climate change.
Recent polling finds that too few recognize the historical significance of the hundreds of billions of dollars the law invests to make clean energy cheaper for American households, businesses, and industries.
Even fewer people appreciate just how close we came to losing it all.
This is a personal account of the final days of the fight to pass the nation’s first comprehensive climate law, and of how the Inflation Reduction Act remarkably arose from the ashes of near-defeat.
On July 14, 2022, just over a month before eventually becoming law, the budget bill that would eventually become known as the Inflation Reduction Act died. Again.
That evening, Senator Joe Manchin, the coal-state Democrat from West Virginia, called Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to tell him he was done with the long-simmering inter-party negotiations striving to craft a budget bill that could unite all 50 Democratic senators and pass the evenly divided Senate. The stubborn hold-out had already dashed progressive dreams multiple times in the year and a half since the 117th Congress gaveled into session, including dealing the killing blow to the House-passed Build Back Better Act in December 2021.
The news was a shock. Less than two weeks earlier, over the Fourth of July weekend, I was told by Senate staffers party to the budget negotiations that a deal was imminent. They told me to prepare the REPEAT Project, a Princeton University team that I lead and that assesses the impacts of federal energy and climate policies as they are debated, to stand by to run the numbers on a new bill.
But in July 2022, inflation was running at nearly 9% and gasoline prices were over $5 per gallon in many parts of the U.S. Then we got one bad report on the rate of inflation after another, prompting Manchin to say he could no longer support any additional government spending that might further fuel inflation.
Manchin called Schumer on July 14 to say he could no longer continue negotiations, and that he would not support legislation that included any clean energy or climate spending — leaving only a slimmed-down bill focused on health care left in play.
"DEVASTATING... utterly SENSELESS!" I tweeted at the time, using REPEAT Project modeling to illustrate the massive climate gap we would have faced, had that been the end of the story.
Courtesy of the REPEAT Project at Princeton University's Zero Lab
And it really did seem like the end.
The tone I heard from Senate staffers that day was very different from the several prior ‘false demises’ of the budget negotiations we had all endured. They were despondent. “I feel like I just wasted the last six years of my life,” one staffer texted me on July 14. So did I.
The next day, Manchin issued an ultimatum: Either Democrats could quickly pass a “skinny” budget bill focused only on health care or they could wait a few weeks to see if inflation improved and try negotiating a larger package in August.
The problem: Basically no one thought inflation would meaningfully cool that quickly, and there was only a few weeks left to pass a law before the August recess, after which Congress would go into full campaign season and nothing would pass.
The game clock was winding down.
Then President Biden threw in the towel. He issued an official statement vowing to keep the climate fight up via executive action but urged the Senate to quickly pass a bill focused only on health care.
Schumer appeared poised to do just that, and a caucus meeting for Senate Democrats was set for the following Tuesday to discuss how to move forward. Since Congress only gets one shot at a budget reconciliation law per fiscal year, if they ended up passing a bill without any climate package, it was game over.
I had been working to advance federal climate policy since 2008. I lived through the demise of the last serious effort to pass a federal climate law in 2009 and 2010. I knew how rare these windows of opportunity to pass meaningful legislation are. And we’d just blown a once-in-a-decade chance. Would we have to wait until the 2030s for our next shot? Could we even survive another decade with the United States standing on the sidelines of the global climate fight?
By July 16, I had apparently had enough time to go through the various stages of grief, arriving at bargaining (or perhaps denial). “It’s just not okay to end like this, with Manchin walking away from the deal and the rest of the caucus just quietly accepting that!” I wrote in a text to a key Senate staffer. “There’s got to be at least a dozen [Senate] members who are furious and could be unwilling to accept that in the end, right?”
“Working on it 😄,” the staffer replied.
And just like that, while many gave up and others fumed, staff from just a handful of Senate offices and a rag-tag group of allied individuals and advocacy groups got back to what we’d been doing since the start: doggedly working the problem to find some way to passage.
Even then, I had very little faith our efforts would succeed. I just knew that the game clock had a few seconds left on it, time enough to run a couple more Hail Mary plays, and I wanted to be able to look my kids in the eye some day and say, “We failed, but we truly tried everything we could.”
So we got back to work.
So how did we get Manchin back to the negotiating table?
From my limited perspective, three things worked.
First, the concern that climate spending would stoke inflation was bogus. The budget deal under negotiation was doubly paid for, raising twice as much new revenue as it spent. What’s more, the spending plan was estimated to be in the ballpark to $30 to $50 billion per year spread over a decade, or less than 1% of our roughly six trillion dollar federal budget.
The climate spending was peanuts, and any honest macroeconomist would say that the budget deal would have a mild, fiscally contractionary effect at best or no effect on inflation at worst. Plus, the proposals specifically took aim at two key drivers of inflation: health care costs and energy costs.
Either Manchin was honest in his inflation fears but misappreciating the issues, or he was trying to give himself cover to scuttle the bill.
Our so-called “Never Give Up Caucus” took him at face value. To address his inflation concerns, allies succeeded in getting inflation-hawk-in-chief Larry Summers, the conservative leaning Penn-Wharton Budget Model team, and the deficit hawkish head of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget to tell Manchin (and the press) that the deal would cut the deficit and not raise prices.
Second, the many vested interests that stood to gain from the clean energy package were mobilized and pushed Manchin hard not to leave them high and dry.
This was always a key part of the political strategy of the clean energy package: rather than focus on pricing carbon emissions and making fossil energy more expensive (as Congress had attempted in 2009), the budget bill would instead provide a wide-ranging set of direct subsidies — tax credits, grants, loan programs — to make climate-friendly technologies cheaper and help build up manufacturing of clean energy components in the U.S. Concentrated beneficiaries create organized power to back the bill. That was the theory, and it was time to put it to the test.
The pressure campaign to get Manchin back to the table was “across the board,” according to National Wildlife Federation CEO Collin O’Mara, who was one of the most dogged and effective organizers during those pivotal final days.
Executives from renewable energy companies reminded Manchin that billions of dollars of investment were at stake.
The United Mine Workers of America pushed Manchin not to walk away from his promise to create a permanent trust fund for miners suffering from black lung disease, which the budget bill would do.
In my personal estimation, the most effective voices were probably from those sectors Manchin had styled himself as personally championing as chairman of the Senate Energy Committee: carbon capture, nuclear power, hydrogen, and advanced manufacturing.
A senior executive with a utility operating in Appalachia reportedly told Manchin: “We know coal plants are ultimately going to close. What is going to replace them? What are the jobs? What are we transitioning to? In this case, we are going to explore hydrogen, new nuclear and get manufacturing in the state.”
Manchin received incoming pressure to pass a bill from the Carbon Capture Coalition, oil companies like BP with big plans to invest in hydrogen, and Nucor, the nation’s largest steel maker, which planned new investments in West Virginia in part to supply growing demand for steel for burgeoning renewable energy industries.
Utilities like Constellation and Duke reminded Manchin that this law was our best shot at preserving the nation’s existing nuclear fleet, which provides about a fifth of our electricity without contributing to air pollution or climate change.
Bill Gates, who has invested in nuclear and energy storage startups, called Manchin personally. And executives at a Gates-backed battery company with plans for a West Virginia manufacturing hub explained to Manchin’s staff how the bill’s incentives would accelerate their growth trajectory.
Third, a few key senators that Manchin personally trusted or respected, including John Hickenlooper of Colorado, Chris Coons of Delaware, Tina Smith of Minnesota, Mark Warner of Virginia, and Ron Wyden of Oregon, reportedly pressed him with direct personal appeals.
I imagine their pitches either made the political case — did Manchin really want to send his party into the midterms having utterly failed on their domestic policy agenda? — or a personal one, emphasizing the opportunity to secure his legacy and the admiration of his grandchildren.
I don’t think we should discount the importance of these personal appeals. At the end of the day, senators are humans too. They crave the respect of their colleagues (at least those they admire). And everyone wants to be the hero of their own story, not the villain.
Which of these (or other parallel efforts I don't know about) pushed Manchin back to the table? Who knows what went through his mind in the end. But somehow, against virtually all expectations, it worked.
We didn’t know it until later, but by as early as Tuesday, July 19, Manchin and Schumer, with just a couple key aids each, began meeting in secret somewhere in the Senate offices and got back to work.
No one else had any idea this was happening.
Like others working to save the bill, I spent the next week continuing to talk to press, allies, congressional staff, etc., marshaling talking points and data, mobilizing various interests to pressure Manchin, and doing everything we could to convince the stubborn senator to make a deal that would get a climate package into law. Little did we know, he was already back at it.
In fact, a little over a week later, on Wednesday, July 27, Manchin issued a statement that shocked everyone: He and Leader Schumer had reached a deal after all and were unveiling a full-fledged bill to be called “The Inflation Reduction Act.”
“The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 addresses our nation’s energy and climate crisis by adopting commonsense solutions through strategic and historic investments that allow us to decarbonize while ensuring American energy is affordable, reliable, clean and secure,” Manchin wrote.
The full text of the bill dropped later that evening, and we were blown away to see how much of the original climate package from the ill-fated Build Back Better Act was retained by this new legislation.
The deal contained roughly $370 billion in estimated climate and clean energy spending, an historic package. All the key tax incentives were still in the proposal, including credits for clean electricity, electric vehicles, and heat pumps. Major grant programs were funded at similar levels. Even a new fee on methane pollution from the oil and gas sector had survived. In fact, a tax credit for U.S. clean energy manufacturing had even been expanded, apparently at Manchin’s request, to support production of batteries and their components and the mining and processing of critical minerals.
Rather than lose it all, we were poised to win nearly everything we’d hoped for.
“Holy shit. Stunned, but in a good way,” wrote Senator Tina Smith, a tireless advocate for the climate package, on Twitter. “$370B for climate and energy … BFD.”
It took us a couple weeks to run the numbers, but once we did, REPEAT Project estimated on August 4 that the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA (pronounce it like your friendly Uncle Ira!), would cut emissions by about one billion metric tons per year in 2030 and retained about 80% of the cumulative emissions reductions of the larger Build Back Better package.
Courtesy of the REPEAT Project at Princeton University's Zero Lab
IRA could get the United States to about 42% below our peak historical emissions by 2030, we estimated at the time. (REPEAT Project’s latest updated analysis published last month revises 2030 emissions under IRA to 37-41% below peak.) That was still short of the target of 50% below peak levels that President Biden had committed the country to on the world stage, but the proposed legislation was a true game changer that gave us a fighting chance to hit that goal.
After the Manchin-Schumer deal dropped, we were off to the races.
Manchin shifted from the package’s chief obstacle to its chief spokesperson, stumping for the bill on Fox and haranguing senators on the floor alongside Schumer to get IRA passed during an exhausting, overnight “vote-a-rama.” After a 16-hour process where Republicans proposed amendment after amendment to be shot down one by one by a united Democratic caucus — plus a little last minute drama wherein Kyrsten Sinema nearly killed the bill to save private equity firms billions in taxes — the Inflation Reduction Act passed the Senate at 3:17 PM on August 7, 51-50, with Vice President Harris casting the deciding vote.
The House passed IRA in turn on August 14, and President Biden signed it into law two days later. The rest, as they say, is history.
We’re still writing that history, but it’ll be forever changed by passage of the landmark law. And we almost lost it all.
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Rob and Jesse talk with Texas energy expert Doug Lewin.
Texas is one of the country’s biggest producers of zero-emissions energy. Last year, the Lone Star State surpassed California to become the country’s No. 1 market for utility-scale solar. More solar and batteries were added to the Texas grid in 2024 than any other energy source, and the state has long dominated in onshore wind.
But that buildout is now threatened. A new tranche of bills in the Texas House and Senate could impose punitive engineering requirements on wind, solar, and storage plants — even those already in operation — and they could send the state’s power bills soaring.
Doug Lewin is the founder and CEO of Stoic Energy Partners in Austin, Texas. He writes the Texas Energy and Power Newsletter, and he is the host of the Energy Capital podcast. On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse and Rob talk with Doug about how Texas became a clean energy powerhouse, how it has dealt with eye-watering demand power growth, and why a handful of bills in the Texas statehouse could break its electricity market. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: What is the menagerie of legislation here that folks need to understand? What should they be following?
Doug Lewin: There’s a couple of different flavors of this. There’s a bunch of them that are just right up, they’re on a level like 1A, 1B, 1C, 1D — they’re all major, major problems that if any of them passed, the cost for all consumers in Texas would go up. And this is something that I think is starting to set in at the legislature right now — that members are starting to think about, what does this vote look like? If I actually take this vote and power prices go up 20%, 50%, 80%, what have I just done? That’s starting to set in.
But I would say one of them that is the most pernicious — and I think you’re going to see this around the country as a lot of the national groups start talking about it more and more — is firming requirements on renewables and assigning them to individual projects, or even individual developers across their portfolios. Because as you guys know, and I think most of your listeners know, but legislators don’t necessarily know yet — they’re getting an education in real time right now — you don’t firm for individual resources. You firm for a system, right? That is far more economically efficient. '
And we should talk about the right level of how many backups we need. Those conversations have been going on for years, and they continue to go on in Ercot stakeholder forums and at the Public Utility Commission. But to require every resource to have its own backup, you create, as I heard one witness at one of the hearings say, you’ve got a thousand mini Ercots, right? Everybody’s gotta have their own backup. That is an insane way to run an energy system.
Meyer: Can you just describe what exactly you mean by — like, what would it mean to firm up solar? What do these bills actually require?
Lewin: One of them actually requires solar to have full, 24-hour, round the clock backup. So like, forget the fact that solar has meant so much for Texas in the summertime. We had no conservation alerts last year, 2024, the sixth hottest summer in the history of the state. Not only did we not have any blackouts or energy emergencies, not even a conservation alert, all summer long. Because that 30 gigawatts, when it’s hottest, when it’s 105 degrees [Fahrenheit] and all those air conditioners are cranking all around Texas — we love our air conditioning — solar is just perfectly suited for that. But no, you would have to back it up around the clock.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
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.
Chaos, uncertainty, “we don’t know yet.” These are words I’ve heard more during Donald Trump’s first 100 days back in the White House than I’ve heard at any other time as a reporter.
That’s not to say there haven’t already been real-world impacts. Trump has gutted the staff of key agencies dealing with climate policy and science, and shut multiple offices focused on environmental justice. His administration has taken offline thousands of web resources related to climate change and shut down a $5 billion offshore wind project that had just started construction. And then there’s the fact that now everyone, no matter what side of the energy transition they fall on, is talking about “energy dominance.”
With on-again-off-again tariffs, court-challenged funding freezes, “because I said so” regulatory rollbacks, and hazy threats to clean energy tax credits, it’s still hard to know what of Trump’s early actions back in office will stick. The long-term effects of Trump’s initial actions on the climate economy are still just estimates; projections. But I wanted to see what we could say definitively about Trump’s second first 100 days. What does the data tell us?
By the end of Trump’s first first 100 days, he had signed 24 executive orders, total. As of today, Trump has signed 20 executive orders related to environmental policy alone, out of more than 100 total.
This is partially a volume play. Trump stated in the run-up to the inauguration that he would sign 100 executive orders on his first day. He didn’t, but clearly quantity is part of the point.
Some executive orders are more potent than others. Legal experts say his order directing the attorney general to “stop the enforcement” of state climate programs is unlikely to go anywhere. It’s also not clear that his “reinvigoration of the clean coal industry” is more than wishful thinking. But he’s also terminated environmental justice programs and positions throughout the government, and ordered agencies to expand timber production and fishing, as well as to expedite fossil fuel development and deep-sea mining.
Trump’s tariff strategy is still shifting by the day, making it hard to pin down exactly how it will affect the clean energy transition. If global tariffs on steel and aluminum remain in place, everything — fossil fuels and renewables, internal combustion cars and EVs — will feel the pain. Tariffs on China and other East Asian countries will be tough for battery and solar companies, but they could also hurt liquified natural gas companies hoping to sell into those markets.
What we do know is that markets have been hanging on Trump’s every word, and that every utterance of “tariff” has sparked a crash. Even after Trump pulled back his sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs, the economy still appears to be bracing for a recession.
Fears of a global recession have also tanked oil prices. West Texas Intermediate crude oil, a common benchmark for oil prices, has traded below $65 since April 4, shortly after Trump’s global tariff announcement. Oil companies have said that $65 a barrel is the minimum price they need to profitably drill new wells.
But the trade war isn’t the only headache for U.S. producers. The same day Trump announced sweeping global tariffs, the international oil cartel OPEC+ declared that it would boost production, and will flood the market with more than 400,000 barrels per day in May. Ironically, despite his “drill, baby, drill” agenda, Trump may view both cases as a victory. He has been pushing OPEC and domestic producers alike to bring down the price of oil.
The weekly rig count, a common metric for the health of the oil industry, declined after the tariff announcement, dropping from 489 to 480 from April 4 to 11. While that doesn’t sound like much, it’s the largest drop recorded since June 2023, according to Baker Hughes. (And a reminder that the U.S. produced more oil under President Biden than ever before.) Producers don’t appear to be making rash changes on the oil patch just yet, but if prices remain low, experts expect production to plateau, or even decline.
Perhaps the most difficult question to suss out in the data is the extent to which Trump’s initial actions have caused clean energy projects to collapse.
A recent report from Clean Investment Monitor, a project of the Rhodium Group and MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, found that the first quarter of this year saw the biggest loss of investment in clean manufacturing from project cancellations and closures of the past several years. The data is stark and implies that Trump is to blame, but a closer look at the projects complicates that narrative.
For example, American battery manufacturer KORE Power announced in February that it was cancelling plans to build a $1.25 billion factory in Buckeye, Arizona, but the company had quietly put its production site on the market in mid-January and is now trying to revive the plan as a factory retrofit rather than a new build. Freyr Battery cancelled a $2.6 billion plan to manufacture battery cells in Newnan, Georgia, but the company cited “rising interest rates, falling battery prices, a change in company leadership and a shift in its goals,” according to the Associated Press — Freyr has decided to produce solar panels instead. The closure of two of Solar4America’s manufacturing sites in California and South Carolina, first reported by PV Magazine, were likely due to waning sales in 2024.
Every example I found seemed to present a similarly muddled picture. It’s possible, and even likely, that Trump has spooked clean manufacturing companies and affected demand projections for things like batteries. But companies don’t seem to be citing federal policy explicitly in their decisions — at least not yet.
Investment in new projects also appears to be continuing alongside these cancellations. The Clean Investment Monitor report found that $9.4 billion worth of projects were announced in the first quarter of this year. That's more than the end of last year, but 23% below the first quarter of 2024.
Clean energy generation is another story, presenting cases where there’s no question Trump has played a role in killing projects. On his first day in office, Trump issued a Presidential Memorandum pulling approvals for the Lava Ridge wind farm in Idaho, a project that would have created more than 700 jobs during construction, 20 permanent jobs, and brought millions in tax revenue into the state, but that faced intense local opposition. The developer behind Lava Ridge, LS Power, quietly took the project off its portfolio map.
But here, too, there’s shades of gray. Many solar farms were set to receive loans from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, for example, but are in limbo as the fate of the program gets battled out in the courts. Some may not survive the time it takes for that process to play out, but if the program is ultimately salvaged, other projects could take their place.
The real moment of truth for clean manufacturing and energy generation projects is coming up in Congress, which is working on a “big, beautiful” budget bill to enact Trump’s tax cut agenda. If Republicans decide to kill the tax credits that are crucial to these factories and power plants, there’ll be no question about what happens next — or what’s to blame.