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When Democrats in Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the legislation promised to unleash a wave of funding for electric vehicles, zero-carbon electricity, clean manufacturing, and more across the United States. It signaled the return of industrial policy and the most concerted Democratic attempt in years to revive the moribund manufacturing sector.
More pertinently, the law rested on two hypotheses about how American politics work, and how voters might reward Democrats for passing it.
The first hypothesis was that voters would reward Democrats for investing in their districts — for making promises to renew manufacturing and revive heavy industry, and then for actually delivering on them. They would signal their approval of these policies, above all, by voting for Democrats in the next election. And they would vote for Democrats in greater numbers in exactly the places — the Great Lakes, Appalachia, and the Sunbelt — where the law had done the most to stoke investment.
The second hypothesis was somewhat of a rejoinder to the first. Well, that might not happen, it implicitly replied — investments take a long time to materialize, and people rarely vote to say thank you. Adults in Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, and the emerging southeastern “Battery Belt,” it conceded, might not turn out to support Democrats in the next election any more than they would have without the laws. But earning more votes wasn’t the point.
The second hypothesis said that Americans might not realize the Inflation Reduction Act’s importance to their lives in time for the 2024 election, just like they failed to grasp the Affordable Care Act’s importance in 2016. But come the next Republican trifecta, voters, business leaders, and lawmakers would realize how central the IRA’s tax credits and subsidies had become to their communities. Tens of thousands of jobs, billions of dollars of investment, and years of state and local tax revenue would depend on the continued presence of factories and other clean energy facilities in their region. Then, it said, Americans would rally to defend the law.
Since the IRA passed, more than $491 billion has been invested in manufacturing and deploying clean energy, electric vehicles, building electrification, and carbon management, according to the Clean Energy Monitor, a joint project of MIT and the energy research firm the Rhodium Group. Public and private investment in new factory construction is at a 50-year high.
Yet I think it’s fair to say that the first hypothesis failed. A new analysis from Sarah Eckhardt, Connor O'Brien, and Ben Glasner at the Economic Innovation Group has found essentially no correlation between funding from the three big Bidenomics laws and a change in Democratic vote share from 2020 to 2024. In other words, the amount of money that a county got from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act had no impact on how its citizens voted — some counties shifted to Harris, some to Trump, and some didn’t change much, but you can’t see a clear “Bidenomics signal” in the data.
Now, perhaps we will find a signal in the coming weeks and months. Counties are big places, and as time passes, maybe we’ll discover that when you look at more fine-grained, precinct-level voting data, a clearer Bidenomics effect emerges. Maybe only some kinds of investments pay off with the electorate, or maybe voters living closer (or farther) from certain projects changed how they voted.
But I wouldn’t bet on ever finding anything. One of the IRA’s biggest policy strengths is also its political weakness: It primarily funded privately owned projects via tax credits. This allowed Democrats in Congress to pass it through the budget reconciliation process, meaning it needed only a bare majority in the Senate; and it protected the law from interference from the Supreme Court, which has generally given Congress a wide berth on new spending policies.
Yet that also meant many voters may have seen a new EV or battery plant sprout in their district and not realized Biden’s IRA had anything to do with it. The IRA was easiest to recognize in its effect on hundreds of companies’ balance sheets, for investors and experts to discern in Excel, than for ordinary people to see in their backyards. (I should add that not all IRA programs are so discreet — the direct pay subsidies and the new nonprofit green banks, may be more visible to the public. But they only began to roll out in the past year.)
So much for the first hypothesis, then. Now we come to the second hypothesis: that voters will understand the IRA’s importance to their communities and rally to save it. There are more encouraging signs for climate advocates on this front. We learned this week that the country’s automakers are reportedly trying to save the $7,500 tax credit for buying a new electric vehicle — with the sole exception of Tesla, which has tacitly signaled that it would permit the measure’s repeal. And as has been widely reported, congressional districts represented by Republicans are receiving three times as much money from the law than those represented by Democrats. That’s perhaps why earlier this year, 18 House Republicans begged Speaker of the House Mike Johnson not to repeal the IRA — and as my colleague Jillian Goodman reported last week, the number of House Republicans who signed that letter and are still in Congress exceeds the GOP’s margin in the chamber.
This has all led to a fair amount of optimism over the IRA. I’ve even seen progressives frame it as a kind of transaction — or assert, blithely, that the new Republican majority would never vote so grandly against its constituents’ own economic interests.
But that is wrong. Everyone is capable of voting against their economic interests. It even feels good to do it — like you’re courageously taking one for the team. Next year’s fight to save the IRA is not going to be a transaction or a contract negotiation. It is going to be a political battle — one that will emerge from a political process and be overseen by fundamentally political actors. That means it is going to be ideological. The IRA is much likelier to survive if it can find the right set of messengers — people who can credibly talk about economic growth, liberty, national competition, and more generally speak Republican — who can argue the IRA’s case to congressional Republicans in terms that will resonate with them. Hectoring lawmakers with Excel spreadsheets about spending is going to be less effective, for better or worse, than pointing out that repealing the EV tax credit would essentially grant the global EV industry to China.
Which isn’t to say that the spending on clean energy in districts doesn’t matter. It does, and will be nice to have and not essential to the coming melee. The question of whether the IRA and its innovation-encouraging policies survive will be perhaps the most important climate question of the Trump era. Saving it will require recourse to ideology, to values, to politics — and citing federal spending numbers alone will not allow decarbonization advocates to skip that crucial step.
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A conversation with Mike Hall of Anza.
This week’s conversation is with Mike Hall, CEO of the solar and battery storage data company Anza. I rang him because, in my book, the more insights into the ways renewables companies are responding to the war on the Inflation Reduction Act, the better.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s jump in!
How much do we know about developers’ reactions to the anti-IRA bill that was passed out of the House last week?
So it’s only been a few days. What I can tell you is there’s a lot of surprise about what came out of the House. Industries mobilized in trying to improve the bill from here and I think a lot of the industry is hopeful because, for many reasons, the bill doesn’t seem to make sense for the country. Not just the renewable energy industry. There’s hope that the voices in Congress — House members and senators — who already understand the impact of this on the economy will in the coming weeks understand how bad this is.
I spoke to a tax attorney last week that her clients had been preparing for a worst case scenario like this and preparing contingency plans of some kind. Have you seen anything so far to indicate people have been preparing for a worst case scenario?
Yeah. There’s a subset of the market that has prepared and already executed plans.
In Q4 [of 2024] and Q1 [of this year] with a number of companies to procure material from projects in order to safe harbor those projects. What that means is, typically if you commence construction by a certain date, the date on which you commence construction is the date you lock in tax credit eligibility, and we worked with companies to help them meet that criteria. It hedged them on a number of fronts. I don’t think most of them thought we’d get what came out of the House but there were a lot of concerns about stepdowns for the credit.
After Trump was elected, there were also companies who wanted to hedge against tariffs so they bought equipment ahead of that, too. We were helping companies do deals the night before Liberation Day. There was a lot of activity.
We saw less after April 2nd because the trade landscape has been changing so quickly that it’s been hard for people to act but now we’re seeing people act again to try and hit that commencement milestone.
It’s not lost on me that there’s an irony here – the attempts to erode these credits might lead to a rush of projects moving faster, actually. Is that your sense?
There’s a slug of projects that would get accelerated and in fact just having this bill come out of the House is already going to accelerate a number of projects. But there’s limits to what you can do there. The bill also has a placed-in-service criteria and really problematic language with regard to the “foreign entity of concern” provisions.
Are you seeing any increase in opposition against solar projects? And is that the biggest hurdle you see to meeting that “placed-in-service” requirement?
What I have here is qualitative, not quantitative, but I was in the development business for 20 years, and what I have seen qualitatively is that it is increasingly harder to develop projects. Local opposition is one of the headwinds. Interconnection is another really big one and that’s the biggest concern I have with regards to the “placed-in-service” requirement. Most of these large projects, even if you overcome the NIMBY issues, and you get your permitting, and you do everything else you need to do, you get your permits and construction… In the end if you’re talking about projects at scale, there is a requirement that utilities do work. And there’s no requirement that utilities do that work on time [to meet that deadline]. This is a risk they need to manage.
And more of the week’s top news in renewable energy conflicts.
1. Columbia County, New York – A Hecate Energy solar project in upstate New York blessed by Governor Kathy Hochul is now getting local blowback.
2. Sussex County, Delaware – The battle between a Bethany Beach landowner and a major offshore wind project came to a head earlier this week after Delaware regulators decided to comply with a massive government records request.
3. Fayette County, Pennsylvania – A Bollinger Solar project in rural Pennsylvania that was approved last year now faces fresh local opposition.
4. Cleveland County, North Carolina – Brookcliff Solar has settled with a county that was legally challenging the developer over the validity of its permits, reaching what by all appearances is an amicable resolution.
5. Adams County, Illinois – The solar project in Quincy, Illinois, we told you about last week has been rejected by the city’s planning commission.
6. Pierce County, Wisconsin – AES’ Isabelle Creek solar project is facing new issues as the developer seeks to actually talk more to residents on the ground.
7. Austin County, Texas – We have a couple of fresh battery storage wars to report this week, including a danger alert in this rural Texas county west of Houston.
8. Esmeralda County, Nevada – The Trump administration this week approved the final proposed plan for NV Energy’s Greenlink North, a massive transmission line that will help the state expand its renewable energy capacity.
9. Merced County, California – The Moss Landing battery fire is having aftershocks in Merced County as residents seek to undo progress made on Longroad’s Zeta battery project south of Los Banos.
Anti-solar activists in agricultural areas get a powerful new ally.
The Trump administration is joining the war against solar projects on farmland, offering anti-solar activists on the ground a powerful ally against developers across the country.
In a report released last week, President Trump’s Agriculture Department took aim at solar and stated competition with “solar development on productive farmland” was creating a “considerable barrier” for farmers trying to acquire land. The USDA also stated it would disincentivize “the use of federal funding” for solar “through prioritization points and regulatory action,” which a spokesperson – Emily Cannon – later clarified in an email to me this week will include reconfiguring the agency’s Rural Energy for America loan and grant program. Cannon declined to give a time-table for the new regulation, stating that the agency “will have more information when the updates are ready to be published.”
“Farmland should be for agricultural production, not solar production,” Cannon wrote – a statement also made in the USDA report.
REAP is a program created in 2008 that exists to help fund renewable energy and sustainability projects at the level of individual farms and has been seen as a potential tool for not only building more solar but also more trust in agriculturally-focused communities. It’s without question that retooling REAP to actively disincentivize awardees from building solar on farmland could have a chilling effect, at least amongst those who receive money from the program or wish to in the future. This comes after Trump officials temporarily froze money promised to farmers, too.
As we’ve previously written in The Fight, agricultural interests can at times present as much a threat to the future of solar energy as any oil-funded dark money group, if not more so. Conflicts over solar production on farmland make up a large portion of the total projects I cover in The Fight every week, and it is one of the most frequently cited reasons for opposition against individual renewables projects. (Agricultural workforces are one of the most important signals for renewable energy opposition in Heatmap Pro’s modeling data as well.) I wrote shortly after Trump’s inauguration that I wondered when – not if – he would adopt this position.
It’s unclear what exactly led USDA to dive headlong into the “No Solar on Farmland” campaign, aside from its growing popularity in conservative political circles, but there is reason to believe farming interests may have played a role. USDA has stated the report was the product of discussions with farming groups and an industry roundtable. In addition, per lobbying disclosures, at least one agricultural group – the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau – advocated earlier this year for “congressional action and/or executive orders” to “balance renewable and conventional sources of energy” through “limit[ing] solar on productive farmland.” (The Pennsylvania Farm Bureau denied this in an email to me earlier this week.)
There’s also reason to believe some key stakeholders were caught off-guard or weren’t looped in on the matter.
American Farmland Trust has been trying to cultivate common ground between farmers, solar companies, and various agencies at all levels of government over the future of development. But when asked about this report, the nonprofit told me it couldn’t speak on the matter because it was still trying to suss out what was going on.
“AFT is meeting with the Trump administration to learn more about what they are planning in terms of policy and programs to implement this concept,” AFT media relations associate Michael Shulman told me.