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The Inflation Reduction Act is already transforming America. But is it enough?
In the late spring, a scene happened that might have once — even a few years ago — seemed unimaginable.
Senator Joe Manchin and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm visited the town of Weirton, West Virginia, to celebrate the groundbreaking of a new factory for the company Form Energy. The factory will produce a new type of iron battery that could eventually store huge amounts of electricity on the grid, allowing solar and wind energy to be saved up and dispatched when needed.
Manchin was clear about why everyone was gathered in Weirton. “Today’s groundbreaking is a direct result of the Inflation Reduction Act, and this type of investment, in a community that has felt the impact of the downturn in American manufacturing, is an example of the IRA bill working as we intended,” he said.
It’s been nearly a year since the Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s flagship climate law, passed. The law is successful. It is transforming the American energy system. And the Biden administration is implementing it as fast as it can: Since the law passed, the Treasury Department has published nearly three dozen pieces of complicated rules explaining how the IRA’s billions in subsidies can actually be used.
But is the IRA successful enough? The pace and scale of the climate challenge remains daunting. A recent report from the Rhodium Group, an energy-research firm, found that the United States would only meet its Paris Agreement goal of cutting carbon emissions in half by 2030 with more aggressive federal and state policy.
Here are some broad observations about how the IRA — and the broader project of American decarbonization — is going:
Politically, environmentally, no matter how you look at it: The power sector is the thumping heart of the I.R.A. Because engineers know how to generate electricity without producing carbon pollution — using wind turbines, solar panels, nuclear plants, and more — the sector is central to the law’s implicit plan to decarbonize the American economy, which requires, first, building as much zero-carbon electricity infrastructure as possible, while, second, shifting as much of the rest of the economy to using electricity — as opposed to oil, gas, or coal — as possible.
The electricity industry is also the site of perhaps the law’s most powerful climate policy — and its only policy tied to a national emissions-cutting goal. The law will indefinitely subsidize new zero-carbon electricity until greenhouse-gas pollution from the American power sector falls 75% below its 2022 levels. That means these tax credits could remain in effect until the 2060s, according to an analysis from the research firm Wood MacKenzie.
This was a first for American environmental law, and it remains poorly understood by the public. Even some experts claim that the electricity credits will phase out in 2032 with the I.R.A.’s other subsidies — when, in fact, 2032 is the earliest possible year that they could end.
Which is all to say that it’s early days for understanding the I.R.A.’s effect on the power sector. The data is provisional.
Yet the data is … good. Better than I expected when I started writing this article. The overwhelming majority of new electricity generation built nationwide this year — some 83% — will be wind, solar, or battery storage, according to federal data. Although that mostly reflects projects planned before the IRA was passed, it’s still a giant leap over previous years, and it suggests that the law might be giving clean electricity a boost at the margin:
The solar industry, in particular, is surging. The industry just had its best first quarter ever, with rooftop installations booming and some big utility-scale solar farms finally coming online.
But solar can’t power the entire grid, and other renewables are having more trouble. I’m particularly worried about offshore wind. To build a new offshore-wind project, companies bid for tracts of the ocean floor in a government-run auction. Yet many of those bids failed to account for 2021 and 2022’s rapid inflation, and some developers are now on the hook for projects that don’t pencil out. Most outside analysts now believe that the Biden administration will fall short of its goal to build 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030.
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The boom in electric vehicle and battery manufacturing is clearly the I.R.A.’s brightest spot. (The two industries are one and the same: If you have a giant battery, you’re probably going to put it in an EV; and about a third of every EV’s value comes from the battery.)
Since the IRA passed, 52 new mining or manufacturing projects have been announced, representing $56 billion in new investment, according to a tracker run by Jay Turner, a Wellesley College professor. If you zoom out to all of Biden’s term, then more than $100 billion in EV investment has been announced, which will create more than 75,000 jobs, according to the Department of Energy.
It remains to be seen, however, whether this investment will produce the kind of durable, unionized voter base that the Biden administration hopes to form. So far, much of this investment has flowed to the Sunbelt — and in particular, to a burgeoning zone of investment from North Carolina to Alabama nicknamed the “Battery Belt.” These states are right-to-work states with a low cost-of-living, like much of the states that have absorbed manufacturing investment since the 1980s.
This might make Republicans think twice about undermining the IRA, but it might also be a missed opportunity.
In order to cheaply decarbonize its grid, America needs better power lines. Building long-range, interregional electricity transmission will allow the country to funnel clean energy to where it’s needed most. According to a team led by Jesse Jenkins, a Princeton engineering professor, 80% of the IRA’s carbon-reduction benefits could be lost if the United States doesn’t quicken the pace of new transmission construction. (Other models are less worried.)
Yet the effort to build more power lines — and the broader campaign to reform some rules governing permitting and land use, especially the National Environmental Policy Act — is probably over, at least in this Congress. Republican lawmakers figured out that Democrats are desperate for transmission reform, and they were prepared to make the party pay a high price for it — too high a price for much of the caucus. The bipartisan deal to raise the debt-ceiling also contained many of the moderate permitting reforms that Democrats might have accepted as part of a broader bargain over transmission.
Democrats are now stuck hoping that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, will make smaller, more technocratic improvements to the transmission process when they take a majority of the commission’s seats early next year.
The biggest programs in the IRA target mature technologies, like solar, wind, and EVs. But the law is full of unheralded programs meant to encourage the development of early-stage climate technologies, such as sustainable aviation fuel. By encouraging technological progress, these programs could abate hundreds of millions of tons of carbon a year in the decades after 2030. They may prove especially important at reducing emissions outside the United States, according to a new analysis from Rhodium Group.
Which is to say that they could be — from a world-historic perspective — some of the law’s most important policies. But for now, few of these programs have been implemented, and we don’t really know how they’re going to go.
Some of them may also be devilishly hard to set up. My colleague Emily Pontecorvo has reported on the difficulty of setting up the tax credits for green hydrogen, which are some of the law’s most generous. If successful, the credits could give the U.S. a major new industry to tackle the decarbonization challenge; if unsuccessful, they could screw up the American electricity system.
Right now, most of the law’s consumer-facing tax credits are continuations of old policies — such as the longstanding subsidy to install rooftop solar — rather than something new. Perhaps the most expansive subsidy that consumers have seen so far is the new $7,500 tax credit for leasing an electric vehicle.
But many more programs will eventually come, including the IRA’s rebates for heat pumps, induction stoves, and electric water heaters. Those programs, some of which must be administered by state offices, have largely yet to be set up. (Even so — and in keeping with other encouraging trends — heat pump sales outpaced furnace sales in the U.S. for the first time last year.)
The Department of Energy is an agency transformed. The IRA held out the opportunity that the agency could metamorphose from an R&D-focused nuclear-weapons storehouse into the federal government’s dynamo of decarbonization. The Biden administration — and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm — has seized that opportunity.
As I wrote earlier this year, the agency has stepped into the role of being America’s bureau of industrial policy, replete with its own in-house bank. It has published some of the most detailed and sophisticated federal industrial plans that I’ve ever seen.
And it is getting admirably specific about each of the technologies in its portfolio. In a recent report on the nascent hydrogen industry, for instance, the department said that companies might not build out enough infrastructure because they can’t count on future demand for clean hydrogen. (It’s impossible for firms to invest in making hydrogen if they can’t be sure anyone is going to buy it.) Then, earlier this week, the agency announced a new $1 billion program to buy hydrogen itself, thus providing that demand-side certainty that producers need.
Let’s return to renewables. The United States is striving — but will likely fail — to build 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030. It is building a couple dozen gigawatts of new solar capacity every year. That may seem like a lot: One gigawatt of electricity is enough to power about 825,000 homes.
But annual power demand in the United States is closer to 4,000 gigawatts — and it’s on track to grow as we electrify more and more of the economy. While decarbonizing the grid isn’t as simple as switching one energy source for another, still, it would take more than a century to build 4,000 gigawatts of renewables electricity at our current rate.
It’s a similar story in electric cars. The growth is good: EV sales rose 50% year over year in the first half of 2023. But the challenge is daunting: Electric vehicles made up only 7% of all new car sales in the U.S. during the same period, and decarbonizing the car fleet will eventually require making virtually all new car sales EVs, and then — over the next decade — replacing the 275 million private vehicles on the road.
And that’s the story of the IRA — from renewables to EVs, geothermal to nuclear energy. The trends have never been better. The government has never tried to change the energy system so quickly or so thoroughly. That, by itself, is progress: For decades, the great obstacle of climate change was that the government wasn’t trying to solve it at all.
But decarbonization will require replacing hundreds of millions of machines that exist in the world — and doing it fast enough that we avoid dealing catastrophic damage to the climate system. The IRA is about to take on that challenge head-on. Now we find out if it’s up to the task.
The real work, in other words, is just beginning.
Read more from Robinson Meyer:
The East Coast’s Smoke Could Last Until October
The Weird Reasons Behind the Atlantic Ocean’s Crazy Heat
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Economist Philippe Aghion views carbon taxes as a tool to decarbonize, but not a solution in themselves.
Philippe Aghion — one of three Nobel laureates in economics announced Monday — is a theorist of innovation. Specifically, his work concerns “creative destruction,” the process by which technological innovation spreads throughout the economy as new businesses replace old ones, sparking economic growth.
If that reminds you of the energy transition, i.e. the process by which cleaner fuels and new, more efficient ways of generating energy replace fossil fuel combustion, well, you’re not alone.
“I think innovation is the best hope for climate change,” Aghion said in a 2023 interview with VoxTalks Economics. “Of course, we need to innovate in our day to day behavior, but we’ll fight climate change because we will find new sources of energy that are cleaner than coal or gas, and because we will also find ways to produce with energy-saving devices.”
Along with Brown University economist Peter Howitt, Aghion developed mathematical models to describe how creative destruction works, building on foundational work by the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter. Along the way, Aghion also worked with 2024 Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu, who won his prize for describing the institutions that best foster economic growth.
Aghion and Acemoglu have tangled with fellow laureate William Nordhaus, whose models of how the harms of climate change slow down economic growth practically invented the field of climate economics. In Nordhaus’ framing, climate change is the ultimate externality — that is, an economic factor not reflected in the market. The most efficient way to solve climate change, then, is to price in the externality by putting a tax on carbon emissions. Once the price of highly emitting goods reflects the true cost of producing them, the market will naturally favor lower-emitting goods.
Aghion instead sees carbon prices as another way to spur climate-friendly innovation throughout the economy.
In a 2014 paper written with Cameron Hepburn, Alexander Teytelboym, and Dimitri Zenghelis, Aghion argued that “product and process innovation” will ultimately drive decarbonization. Previous approaches to climate economics, Aghion wrote, use inadequate models for the effects of innovation, and so “significantly bias the assessment of the cost of future low-carbon technologies” to be higher than they are in reality.
To be clear, Aghion isn’t against a carbon tax. “A carbon tax or carbon price is a tool to redirect natural charge but it’s not the only tool,” Aghion said during the 2023 interview. “You need other tools, as well,” including “subsidies to green innovation, and more generally green industrial policy.” The point is less to discourage emitters and more to encourage the producers of non-emitting technologies.
Aghion argues that climate policy needs to hit hard and hit quickly, precisely to induce the kind of competitive innovation that he thinks drives economic growth. “If you wait longer, firms will be even better at dirty technologies, and it will take longer before their skills on clean technologies catch up with their skills on dirty technologies, and so you need to act promptly,” he said in 2023.
In a 2012 paper on the auto industry written with Antoine Dechezleprêtre, David Hemous Ralf Martin, and John Van Reenen, Aghion tracks patents in the auto industry and finds that “higher fuel prices induce firms to redirect technical change towards clean innovation and away from dirty innovation.”
He also finds that the nature of the firms matters. Companies that have a background in green technology innovate more in green technology, while companies that specialize in carbon-emitting or “dirty” technologies are more likely to find better ways to emit carbon. You’d expect Porsche or Ferrari to come up with a better internal combustion engine than Tesla, for instance, but for Tesla to invest more in pushing the capabilities of electric drivetrains.
Tesla is in many ways the ideal example of this kind of policy mix working. The company has benefited both from federal and state taxes on gasoline (as well as California’s unique emissions rules), which suppress demand for fossil fuels, and from subsidies and other financial support, which helped it reach economies of scale and performance parity with internal combustion vehicles more quickly.
While theoretically every auto company had the same incentives in both California and the nation as a whole to develop electric vehicles, Tesla made up the bulk of the entire market for years as it never had to split its focus between a legacy internal combustion business and a battery electric business.
Aghion’s work supports this kind of “belt-and-suspenders” approach to climate policy, where fossil fuel emissions are made more expensive and subsidies are provided to advance green innovation.
This may sound pretty familiar. While America’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, eschewed carbon taxes in favor of incentives and subsidies, the overall policy mix pursued by the Biden administration — including a fee on methane emissions, regulations on tailpipe and power plant emissions, and increased fuel economy standards — approximated this mix.
Aghion clearly recognized the IRA as a real life version of his ideas. When asked in 2023 about the kind of industrial policy he envisioned, he said, “The Americans are doing it now with the IRA.”
This kind of policy mix wasn’t just optimal policy economically, but also necessary politically.
Pointing to France’s experience with fuel taxes, which led to country-wide protests beginning in 2018, he cautioned that if policy makes dirty fuels more expensive without making clean technology technology cheaper, “then people riot.”
Of course, the IRA and other U.S. climate policies have not been as politically durable as their supporters hoped for. This is despite the fact that, alongside trying to boost green businesses, recent attempts at industrial policy explicitly tried to support “dirty” business, as well, whether by subsidizing older auto companies’ investments in electric vehicles or by supporting carbon capture and hydrogen investments by big oil companies.
But the power of dirty business remained immense — and opposed to climate policy.
The oil and gas industry were some of the biggest supporters of President Trump’s reelection campaign. Since he took office, one of their own — former fracking executive Chris Wright — has overseen the dismantling of much of the Energy Department’s investments in clean energy.
The basic calculus of Aghion’s approach may very well persist as rich countries struggle with growth and the harms attributed to climate change continue to add up.
“I think now we made progress on the idea that innovation is a big part of the solution and … that carbon price is not enough,” he said. “You need smart industrial policy aimed at green innovation. That’s the idea.”
On Corpus Christi’s drought, China’s Scottish factory, and no more ships to give
Current conditions: Texas declared a wildfire disaster in 179 counties as hot, dry, windy weather puts more than half the state at risk • Floods caused by torrential rain from Tropical Storm Raymond and the remnants of Hurricane Priscilla killed at least 41 people in Mexico over the weekend • A heat wave in Central Asia is spiking temperatures as high as 95 degrees Fahrenheit.
Utah Governor Spencer Cox.Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Republicans are growing frustrated with President Donald Trump’s rollbacks of policies to support solar energy, the cheapest and fastest-growing source of electricity at a moment when power prices are soaring nationwide. In Georgia, voters who backed the president say the repeal of programs that offered free panels to low-income Americans is making them second-guess their ballots. One of those voters, 39-year-old Jennifer McCoy told The New York Times, “I like a lot of Trump’s outlooks on things, but there are some things, like the solar panels, that I don’t like, now that I know.”
Utah Governor Spencer Cox, meanwhile, went on a tear on X over the Bureau of Land Management’s quashing of the nation’s largest solar project, the 6.2-gigawatt Esmeralda 7 in Nevada. In a post that linked to the scoop Heatmap’s Jael Holzman published last week on the cancellation, Cox said, “This is how we lose the AI/energy arms race with China.” While he noted that “intermittent sources have been overvalued in the past (and offshore wind is a disaster and should be discontinued), the incredible leaps in battery technology completely change the value proposition of solar in the right places.” He went on to re-post messages from three think tank researchers criticizing the move and warnings about the energy needs of data centers.
Corpus Christi is the main water provider for South Texas, a region that has drawn the likes of Tesla, Exxon Mobil, fuel refineries, plastic producers, and lithium processors with what The Wall Street Journal called “the promise of land, cheap energy and, perhaps most critically, abundant water.” But a crippling drought is depleting the region’s reservoirs, and the city may fail to meet the area’s water demand in as little as 18 months. “Cue the panic,” the newspaper wrote. Industrial plants are bracing for rate hikes. “The water situation in South Texas is about as dire as I’ve ever seen it,” said Mike Howard, chief executive of Howard Energy Partners, a private energy company that owns several facilities in Corpus Christi. “It has all the energy in the world, and it doesn’t have water.”
China last week ratcheted up restrictions on exports of rare earths, including for electric vehicle batteries and semiconductors, kicking off another round of the trade war with the United States. But in Scotland, one of China’s biggest wind turbine manufacturers is investing more than $2 billion in building a new factory. Guangdong-based Ming Yang announced plans for its new plant to churn out parts for offshore turbines on Friday, though the company said the move was “subject to final approvals from the U.K. government,” the Financial Times reported.
In the U.S., meanwhile, the Trump administration’s crackdown on offshore wind is so severe the oil industry is stepping in to complain, warning that it’s setting a dangerous precedent for other energy sectors, as I reported in this newsletter last week. But private actors are, at least, responding to the Trump administration’s push to re-shore critical industries to the U.S. On Monday morning, JPMorgan Chase announced plans to invest $10 billion into mineral production and infrastructure for artificial intelligence.
Equinor’s 810-megawatt Empire Wind project off the coast of New York’s Long Island has faced real challenges, with the Trump administration halting construction in April before allowing it to resume in May. The latest hurdle? The developers can’t get hold of the specially-made vessel for installing wind turbines it was counting on having by next year. As Canary Media’s Clare Fieseler wrote on Friday, two shipbuilding companies broke into a public skirmish, with one unexpectedly canceling a contract and the other threatening legal action over the construction of the specialized ship. The vessel, which is more than 98% complete, is anchored in Singapore, its fate now uncertain. “We have been informed by Maersk of an issue concerning its contract with Seatrium related to the wind turbine installation vessel originally contracted by Empire Offshore Wind LLC for use in 2026,” an Equinor spokesperson told Fieseler. “We are currently assessing the implications of this issue and evaluating available options.”
The episode shows how the Trump administration’s “total war on wind power,” as Jael once put it, makes companies more vulnerable to other setbacks. The White House tasked a half-dozen federal agencies, as I previously wrote, with trying to block construction of offshore turbines. But the general lack of ships capable of carrying giant turbines was a problem even before Trump returned to office.
California lawmakers last week passed Senate Bill 655, a first-in-the-nation framework to set maximum standards for safe indoor temperatures in residential housing. The bill requires state agencies to achieve the standard as heat deaths surge across the country. While the state has long required homes to maintain a minimum indoor air temperature of 68 degrees Fahrenheit, there was no equivalent standard for heat. “SB 655 responds to the public health emergency of California’s deadly heat waves,” Senator Henry Stern, the bill’s lead author, said in a statement. “This bill proactively requires the state to include safe residential indoor temperatures in its policies and programs so that Californians, especially renters and low-income households who are most at risk, have life-saving cooling.”
It’s part of a bigger wave of state legislation on climate and energy that California just passed, as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo outlined recently. Among them: Families who lose everything in future wildfires will now be able to collect the bulk of their insurance payout without having to catalog every item burned in the blaze under new legislation Governor Gavin Newsom signed Friday. Starting in 2026, as The New York Times reported, insurers must pay at least 60% of a homeowner’s personal-property coverage — up to $350,000 — without requiring a detailed inventory of everything lost. That’s double the 30% of the dwelling’s value that insurers were required to pay out in advance, with a payout capped at $250,000.
As the Trump administration is gutting funding for America's polar research, the British are stepping in. The British Antarctic Survey’s RRS Sir David Attenborough, a state-of-the-art ship named after the famed naturalist, will bolster research on everything from “hunting underwater tsunamis” to tracking glacier melt and whale populations. “The saying goes 'what happens in Antarctica doesn't stay in Antarctica,’” BAS oceanographer Peter Davis told reporters during a tour of the vessel as it prepared to depart Harwich, eastern England, last week.
The administration seems to be pursuing a “some of the above” strategy with little to no internal logic.
The Department of Energy justified terminating hundreds of congressionally-mandated grants issued by the Biden administration for clean energy projects last week (including for a backup battery at a children’s hospital) by arguing that they were bad investments for the American people.
“Following a thorough, individualized financial review, DOE determined that these projects did not adequately advance the nation’s energy needs, were not economically viable, and would not provide a positive return on investment of taxpayer dollars,” the agency’s press release said.
It’s puzzling, then, that the Trump administration is pouring vast government resources into saving aging coal plants and expediting advanced nuclear projects — two sources of energy that are famously financial black holes.
The Energy Department announced it would invest $625 million to “reinvigorate and expand America’s coal industry” in late September. Earlier this year, the agency also made $900 million available to “unlock commercial deployment of American-made small modular reactors.”
It’s hard to imagine what economic yardsticks would warrant funding to keep coal plants open. The cost of operating a coal plant in the U.S. has increased by nearly 30% since 2021 — faster than inflation — according to research by Energy Innovation. Driving that increase is the cost of coal itself, as well as the fact that the nation’s coal plants are simply getting very old and more expensive to maintain. “You can put all the money you want into a clunker, but at the end of the day, it’s really old, and it’s just going to keep getting more expensive over time, even if you have a short term fix,” Michelle Solomon, a program manager at Energy Innovation who authored the research, told me.
Keeping these plants online — even if they only operate some of the time— inevitably raises electricity bills. That’s because in many of the country’s electricity markets, the cost of power on any given day is determined by the most expensive plant running. On a hot summer day when everyone’s air conditioners are working hard and the grid operator has to tell a coal plant to switch on to meet demand, every electron delivered in the region will suddenly cost the same as coal, even if it was generated essentially for free by the sun or wind.
The Trump administration has also based its support for coal plants on the idea that they are needed for reliability. In theory, coal generation should be available around the clock. But in reality, the plants aren’t necessarily up to the task — and not just because they’re old. Sandy Creek in Texas, which began operating in 2013 and is the newest coal plant in the country, experienced a major failure this past April and is now expected to stay offline until 2027, according to the region’s grid operator. In a report last year, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation warned that outage rates for coal plants are increasing. This is in part due to wear and tear from the way these plants cycle on and off to accommodate renewable energy sources, the report said, but it’s also due to reduced maintenance as plant operators plan to retire the facilities.
“You can do the deferred maintenance. It might keep the plant operating for a bit longer, but at the end of the day, it’s still not going to be the most efficient source of energy, or the cheapest source of energy,” Solomon said.
The contradictions snowball from there. On September 30, the DOE opened a $525 million funding opportunity for coal plants titled “Restoring Reliability: Coal Recommissioning and Modernization,” inviting coal-fired power plants that are scheduled for retirement before 2032 or in rural areas to apply for grants that will help keep them open. The grant paperwork states that grid capacity challenges “are especially acute in regions with constrained transmission and sustained load growth.” Two days later, however, as part of the agency’s mass termination of grants, it canceled more than $1.3 billion in awards from the Grid Deployment Office to upgrade and install new transmission lines to ease those constraints.
The new funding opportunity may ultimately just shuffle awards around from one coal plant to another, or put previously-awarded projects through the time-and-money-intensive process of reapplying for the same funding under a new name. Up to $350 million of the total will go to as many as five coal plants, with initial funding to restart closed plants or to modernize old ones, and later phases designated for carbon capture, utilization, and storage retrofits. The agency said it will use “unobligated” money from three programs that were part of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act: the Carbon Capture Demonstration Projects Program, the Carbon Capture Large-Scale Pilot Projects, and the Energy Improvements in Rural or Remote Areas Program.
In a seeming act of cognitive dissonance, however, the agency has canceled awards for two coal-fired power plants that the Biden administration made under those same programs. One, a $6.5 million grant to Navajo Transitional Energy Company, a tribal-owned entity that owns a stake in New Mexico’s Four Corners Generating Station, would have funded a study to determine whether adding carbon capture and storage to the plant was economically viable. The other, a $50 million grant to TDA Research that would have helped the company validate its CCS technology at Dry Fork Station, a coal plant in Wyoming, was terminated in May.
Two more may be out the window. A new internal agency list of grants labeled “terminate” that circulated this week included an $8 million grant for the utility Duke Energy to evaluate the feasibility of capturing carbon from its Edwardsport plant in Indiana, and $350 million for Project Tundra, a carbon capture demonstration project at the Milton R. Young Station in North Dakota.
“It’s not internally consistent,” Jack Andreason Cavanaugh, a global fellow at the Columbia University’s Carbon Management Research Initiative, told me. “You’re canceling coal grants, but then you’re giving $630 million to keep them open. You’re also investing a ton of time and money into nuclear — which is great, to be clear — but these small modular reactors haven’t been deployed in the United States, and part of the reason is that they’re currently not economically viable.”
The closest any company has come thus far to deploying a small modular reactor in the U.S. is NuScale, a company that planned to build its first-of-a-kind reactors in Idaho and had secured agreements to sell the power to a group of public utilities in Utah. But between 2015, when it was first proposed, and late 2023, when it died, the project’s budget tripled from $3 billion to more than $9 billion, while its scale was reduced from 600 megawatts to 462 megawatts. Not all of that was inevitable — costs rose dramatically in the final few years due to inflation. The reason NuScale ultimately pulled out of the project is that the cost of electricity it generated was going to be too high for the market to bear.
It’s unclear how heavily the DOE will weigh project financials in the application process for the $900 million for nuclear reactors. In its funding announcement, it specified that the awards would be made “solely based on technical merit.” The agency’s official solicitation paperwork, however, names “financial viability” as one of the key review criteria. Regardless, the Trump administration appears to recognize the value in funding first-of-a-kind, risky technologies when it comes to nuclear, but is not applying the same standards to direct air capture or hydrogen plants.
I asked the Department of Energy to share the criteria it used in the project review process to determine economic viability. In response, spokesperson Ben Dietderich encouraged me to read Wright’s memorandum describing the review process from May. The memo outlines what types of documentation the agency will evaluate to reach a decision, but not the criteria for making that decision.
Solomon agreed that advanced nuclear might one day meet the grid’s growing power needs, but not anytime soon. “Hopefully in the long term, this technology does become a part of our electricity system. But certainly relying on it in the short term has real risks to electricity costs,” she said. “And also reliability, in the sense that the projects might not materialize.”