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The senator from West Virginia is retiring. Who will we think about now?
What can you say about Joe Manchin, perhaps the most important — and most complicated — American climate policy maker of the past decade?
Let’s start here: Soon, he won’t be a senator any more. On Thursday, Manchin announced that he will not pursue re-election in West Virginia in 2024.
“I’ve made one of the toughest decisions of my life and decided that I will not be running for re-election to the United States Senate,” he said in a video message. Instead, he said, he will be “traveling the country and speaking out to see if there is an interest in creating a movement to mobilize the middle and bring Americans together.”
We don’t have many details about what “mobilizing the middle” might look like; Manchin was recently said to be considering a third-party presidential run. If he did make a go for the White House, that would seemingly have disastrous consequences for Joe Biden’s re-election effort — and, in all likelihood, for climate action generally — because it could probably hand the 2024 race to Donald Trump.
But pending that possibility, Manchin’s decision immediately reframes several aspects of next year’s elections.
It means, first, that West Virginia Governor and serial coal-mine-safety violator Jim Justice will likely win Manchin’s seat, marking the end of a tectonic political realignment that saw the state go from solidly Democratic to solidly Republican.
Without West Virginia, Democrats’ path to a Senate majority now looks more like a tightrope: It requires Democrats to hold difficult seats in Ohio, Montana, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. Then the party needs to win in one additional state. But the pickings are slim. Are Texas or Florida really going to elect a Democrat to the Senate? Is Mississippi, Missouri, or Nebraska?
Manchin’s decision will, in other words, have big implications for what Democrats can and cannot do in government. Without a working Senate majority, Democrats will struggle to pass laws or appoint justices to the Supreme Court even if they control the House of Representatives and the White House.
But, of course, Manchin’s decision is even more profound because who he is — his anxieties, whims, and cognitive biases — has long had an outsized influence on legislation. Setting aside presidents and a few jurists, there may not be a recent Democratic policymaker whose personal views more closely shaped the law.
Manchin wielded power, above all, because he represented West Virginia, the most conservative state to send a Democrat to the Senate. That meant he was his caucus’s obvious marginal member and swing vote.
And you could tell. What other Democrat could get away with owning a coal plant while ostensibly overseeing the coal industry? (Manchin is the chairman of the Senate energy and natural resources committee.) What other Democrat could demand last-minute changes to an economic recovery package?
Manchin’s crowning legacy will be the Inflation Reduction Act, which is often described as “President Biden’s signature climate bill,” but which is smudged with Manchin’s fingerprints, too. As chairman of the Senate energy committee, Manchin had a good deal of de jure authority over the law; as the Senate’s swing vote, he had even more de facto power. The final bill text was hammered out in negotiations between Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s team — who were essentially negotiating on behalf of the rest of the caucus — and Manchin’s team.
You can see it in the law’s final policies.
Some of the Inflation Reduction Act’s most generous subsidies will go to the nascent clean hydrogen industry, which Manchin has long nurtured. If hydrogen becomes an anti-environmental boondoggle on par with ethanol, then Manchin will bear a good deal of the blame; if it decarbonizes the American industrial sector, he should get some credit.
Likewise, Manchin is why the bill’s tax credits for electric vehicles do not incentivize union membership.
He is behind the law’s peculiar rules about exactly which industries and organizations can claim their subsidies as direct cash payments. He also shaped the design of its carbon-capture tax credits.
If there is something distinctive in the IRA, the odds are good that Manchin either insisted on it, approved it, or didn’t notice it.
But Manchin drove other climate and energy policy too. He cowrote the bipartisan Energy Act of 2020 with Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. That law focused the federal government’s industrial policy on carbon management, clean hydrogen, and critical minerals — some of the same topics that would dominate the IRA. It also expanded the powers of the Loan Programs Office, the Department of Energy’s in-house bank.
He criticized the Environmental Protection Agency and sometimes voted to overturn its rules. He consistently opposed carbon taxes or pricing carbon in any way, all but ensuring the idea’s political death in the short-term. Even his Senate career more or less began with him taking aim — literally — at Obama’s climate bill. During his first race for Senate in 2010, Manchin ran a TV ad in which he shot a rifle at a stack of papers labeled “cap and trade bill” and promised to take on then-President Barack Obama’s proposal.
In short, if you thought about climate policy over the past decade, you wound up thinking quite a lot about the likes, dislikes, and peculiarities of Joe Manchin. What he might support or oppose mapped the frontier of political possibility in the United States. He was, in short, potentially the most influential force in shaping American climate policy during the 2010s. (Only Mary Nichols, who has been California’s chief air-pollution regulator since 2007, might match his importance.)
My first thought is that Manchin may soon join that list of capricious ex-senators — Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson come to mind — whose names, once synonymous with power itself, become the answer to bad trivia questions. But I have been thinking about Joe Manchin, 76, for a long time, and I expect to find it a hard habit to break. He is an ambitious, eccentric, and preternaturally lucky man. I suspect his next few decisions will prove even more important than those that have come before.
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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.