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On one important way we’ll remember the 46th president of the United States.
What is so striking, in immediate retrospect, about many of Joe Biden’s accomplishments as president is how many of them depended on him.
Democrats had tried and failed for 30 years to pass a climate law through the Senate. Biden succeeded.
Now Biden, the 46th president of the United States, is dropping out of the presidential race. He announced the news today on the social network X, endorsing his vice president, Kamala Harris, who will now presumably take over the party’s nomination.
Biden has not done everything climate activists wanted. He has not declared a “climate emergency,” a legally controversial maneuver that could let him order individual companies to change their behavior and spend funds without Congress’s approval. And he has seemed flummoxed by how to sell his decarbonization program to the public without ignoring the economy’s ongoing dependence on fossil fuels. During his presidency, American oil and natural gas production has hit an all-time high, and the country has become the world’s largest fossil fuel exporter. Biden has not really advertised that fact, which would be popular, but he hasn’t run away from it, either — America’s achievement of energy dominance has sat in an odd, under-noticed spot in the discourse.
But Biden will leave office with easily the strongest climate record of any president — and one of the stronger environmental records, generally, in decades. Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest investment in clean energy and decarbonization in American history. It is the first U.S. law that ties clean electricity incentives directly to the country’s carbon emissions, ensuring that tax credits will remain in place until the country hits its goals. But more broadly, he oversaw a revitalization of American industrial strategy, passing the bipartisan infrastructure law and CHIPS and Science Act, which both funded or expanded climate-friendly programs.
His administration also moved quickly to regulate greenhouse gas emissions using executive authority. In the past three years, the Environmental Protection Agency has begun to restrict heat-trapping emissions from power plants, cars, trucks, and oil and gas infrastructure. He also paused the government’s approval of new permits for liquified natural gas export terminals, although that pause has since been overturned by a federal court.
Could another president have accomplished as much? Even though the Inflation Reduction Act is largely the product of a Democratic Senate — of lawmakers drafting text on the issues that they know best — making that into law required Biden’s personal credibility with the labor movement and the party’s cadre of older, working class voters. It is difficult, if not impossible to imagine Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia — one of the chamber’s decisive votes in 2022 — negotiating and voting for the IRA without Biden’s persona. Biden could talk about the law’s aims to revitalize labor, could cast infrastructure and clean energy as jobs programs, without projecting the condescension or cross-class voyeurism that younger Democrats might have summoned.
His sense — which seemed to be held too by his most successful chief of staff, Ron Klain — that politics is above all a game of coalition management meant he was able to keep the fragile Democratic Party in line through the process. Biden often seemed, as his biographer Franklin Foer, put it, a man from a different time — “the last politician.”
But a tension between policy success and political setback has also defined Biden’s presidency.Again and again, he would pull off some difficult domestic policy — and then fail to communicate it to voters. He was foiled, in part, by the high inflation that plagued the U.S. economy throughout the first years of his term. But as his presidency went on, Biden also seemed to struggle with communication specifically. He never successfully sold voters — and specifically young people — on the value of his administration or on his climate accomplishments. As I wrote earlier this month, even voters who say they prioritize climate change told pollsters that they knew little about the IRA. That was and remains a tremendous missed opportunity, especially since — regardless of what voters say or know — a Trump administration and a Republican majority would gleefully gut the IRA if given the chance.
Now the Democratic party and its politicians must pick up where Biden’s team leaves off and defend his domestic climate accomplishments. Many of the IRA’s investments — and the ultimate fate of the EPA’s crackdown on greenhouse gas pollution — will be left to Harris to fight for. Whether she can convince voters that they are worth supporting will determine the long term success of America’s most important decarbonization policy — and whether it, or any climate policy, can survive the country’s deteriorating politics.
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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.