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Why the Manchin-Barrasso bill might not be worth it.
Senator Joe Manchin’s new permitting deal is the best shot Congress will get this year to boost transmission and renewables. It may also lock in generations of future fossil fuel production and exports.
To many climate activists, that’s not a trade worth making.
Tomorrow, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will vote on a deal Manchin struck with the panel’s top Republican, John Barrasso, that couples faster transmission and renewable energy approvals and restrictions on litigation with much stronger requirements for regular oil, gas, and coal lease sales on federal lands. It would also restrict the Energy Department from continuing its pause on liquified natural gas export terminal approvals (an action that has already been overturned in court) and also, activists note, potentially bar the federal government from having authority over oil and gas drill sites on private lands. Critics say this would take away a tool regulators in Washington can use to require a well — a potential source of methane, the hyper-potent greenhouse gas — be plugged in the event the owner goes bankrupt and abandons the site.
The environmentalist reaction to the bill has been swift and loud, with a broad swath of organizations coming out fiercely against its passage. Even some groups seen as more business-friendly, such as the Environmental Defense Fund, praised the transmission bits while calling out “permitting proposals drafted without meaningful consultation of frontline communities” and proclaiming the fossil fuel language objectionable.
In a development that has quietly befuddled activists, a growing number of climate-friendly Democrats are coming out in favor of the legislation. Senators John Hickenlooper and Martin Heinrich, whose transmission proposals landed in the deal, are likely to vote in favor of the bill in committee this week.
“This legislation is our opportunity to unlock an American-made clean energy future,” Heinrich told Politico’s E&E News in a statement last week. “It will create good-paying jobs, grow our workforce, and help us deliver affordable and reliable electricity to all Americans — all while helping to meet our ambitious and urgent climate goals.”
Fossil fuels produced on federal lands for energy represent a substantial portion of the greenhouse gas emissions produced by the United States, a fact even Biden regulators have acknowledged while allowing more sales.
Whether this legislation can get to a full vote in the Senate is far from certain, and it’s a longshot for passage in this Congress. The bill goes further in favor of fossil fuels than the 2022 Manchin permitting deal, which was blocked by a confluence of opposition from environmentalists and far-right legislators that wanted an even more aggressive approach to overhauling environmental laws.
The same sort of coalition could stall this bill. But it would not surprise me if many more Democrats added their voices and votes in support. Over my years of reporting in Congress, I found a growing sense of frustration in Democratic circles at the lack of shovel-ready projects funded by the Inflation Reduction Act. They blame the National Environmental Policy Act, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and pencil-pushing government officials. They’re tired of being asked “will they or won’t they” questions by Hill reporters about an ever-elusive permitting deal. So they may take any leap of faith to see those visual victories come to fruition faster — and help shore up political support for keeping the landmark climate law in place.
But that’s not how climate activists want them to see the bill. At all.
“Honestly, the amount of fossil fuels that can be deployed out of this far outweighs to me the gains we would get in transmission,” Johanna Bozuwa, executive director of the Climate and Community Project, told me. “I can understand the ‘for’ side of this. People are frustrated and they are sick of transmission not being deployed. Whereas the people who are against this bill are like, you need to think about the ramifications right now. Because what is being built into this bill is not next year’s emissions. It’s thirty years of emissions.”
Under Manchin-Barrasso, it would be much harder for the federal government to reduce how much land and sea it sells to fossil fuel companies every year.
The federal government regularly offers land for oil and gas companies to purchase for drilling sites. Deciding what land to sell and how much acreage to offer is normally a process decided at the bureaucratic level in tandem with industry input and environmental analyses. Under the Trump administration, lease sales were plentiful, though some had to be canceled because of inadequate climate and species reviews. Biden’s gone the opposite direction, but in order to win Manchin’s crucial vote, the IRA also complicated efforts to wind down fossil fuel auctions. One of Manchin’s non-negotiables for passing the bill was tying renewables leasing to millions of acres in mandatory oil and gas lease sales. In other words, to sell land for renewables, the government must now sell fossil fuels too.
Specifically, the IRA required the government to sell either millions of acres or the acreage that industry expresses interest in. So far, the Interior Department has found wiggle room by saying the acres they sell do not need to align precisely with properties requested by developers. Some in the oil and gas industry have accused the Biden administration of deliberately offering land the industry doesn’t want.
What Manchin-Barrasso would do, activists say, is essentially tie the hands of the government on this requirement. One provision would insert the phrase “for which expressions of interest have been submitted” into the mandatory onshore oil and gas leasing totals in the IRA, in effect putting industry’s desired land for leasing into statute as a requirement.
The bill would also require the government to hold annual offshore oil and gas lease sales at a time when the Biden administration is non-committal about auctioning in certain future years before environmental analyses are conducted.
There’s also the part about drilling on private land. A provision in Manchin-Barrasso appears to ban the federal government from requesting applications for permits to drill on private lands in circumstances when the government owns only the minerals beneath the surface but not above. These applications, known as APDs, are a key opportunity for federal regulators to require project developers post a bond on oil and gas wells as well as provide at least some level of info on environmental mitigation measures. Advocates emphasize this input also comes with an opportunity to intervene when an operator goes bankrupt and leaves a well unplugged, puking methane into the atmosphere. Manchin-Barrasso would instead cede that authority entirely to the states.
The bill would also require the government to process applications for coal leasing when the Biden administration is trying, essentially, to stop such leasing altogether.
Plus there’s the LNG export language which, well, explains itself.
For the energy transition, the bill would: create timetables for permitting renewables on federal rights-of-way; allow minimal environmental reviews of “low-disturbance” renewables construction projects; set a national goal of 50 gigawatts of renewables on federal land by 2030; ease geothermal permitting; provide easier environmental reviews to certain transmission activities within recently approved rights-of-way; grant FERC more authority to greenlight transmission projects that are considered to be in the “national interest;” and give hydropower projects more lenience on license extensions.
To some, that might be a worthwhile compromise — in the world of the possible, the deal may be the biggest opportunity for real gains on transmission and renewables this Congress. Should the November elections swing in the GOP’s direction, Democrats seeking a less fossil-friendly permitting deal would have essentially no chance because they could lose the House, the Senate and the White House, making this the only game in town, potentially for a long time. This bill would also achieve the elusive dream of a bipartisan compromise, where both sides get some but not all of what they want to achieve incremental progress on something viewed in D.C. as a long bemoaned problem.
“It is a really good bipartisan deal,” Xan Fishman of the Bipartisan Policy Center told me last week. “Not everyone is going to be happy.”
That argument isn’t convincing Rep. Jared Huffman, a top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, who has emerged as a vocal critic of the Senate legislation. Huffman told me he wants to see transmission boosted “without massive giveaways to the fossil fuel industry.” When asked if he’s comfortable with accusations he’s holding up a bipartisan compromise, he simply said, “Whatever.”
“This is a bad deal. It just goes way too far in the direction of oil, gas and coal,” he told me. “We’ve got to stop dignifying this notion that to take one step forward on clean energy, we’ve got to take two steps backward on fossil fuel production.”
Brett Hartl, government affairs director for the Center for Biological Diversity, noted to me that when the Inflation Reduction Act was passed into law, Democrats had analyses showing the potential decarbonization benefits of the legislation — oil and gas warts and all. It ultimately showed net wins on climate, no matter how hard the other stuff may have been to swallow.
“Where’s the math that proves this is good?” he asked of the Manchin-Barrasso bill.
The truth is, we don’t know the climate impacts of this legislation yet, though experts are at work poring over the details. Meanwhile, some climate advocates are trying to get their own math out there. At the start of the week, I attended a small roundtable discussion with Jeremy Symons, a longtime environmental advocate who once worked on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, as well as representatives of Public Citizen and Earthjustice and other reporters from Politico and S&P Global. At that roundtable, Symons presented an analysis declaring the legislation’s impact on LNG exports reviews alone would be equivalent to that from 165 coal-fired power plants and that it would take roughly 50 large renewable electricity-powered transmission lines to make up the negative climate impacts of the provision.
“Lawmakers should do some deep dive reevaluation and reach out to other outside experts to make sure that they fully understand [this bill],” Tyson Slocum of Public Citizen said at the roundtable.
Manchin’s office did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
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As bad as previous drafts of the reconciliation bill have been, this one is worse.
Senate Republicans are in the final stages of passing their budget reconciliation megabill — which suddenly includes a new tax on solar and wind projects that has sent many in the industry into full-blown crisis mode.
The proposed tax was tucked inside the latest text of the Senate reconciliation bill, released late Friday night, and would levy a first-of-its-kind penalty on all solar and wind projects tied to the quantity of materials they source from companies with ties to China or other countries designated as adversaries by the U.S. government. Industry representatives are still processing the legislative language, but some fear it would kick in for certain developers as soon as the date of its enactment. Taken together with other factors both in the bill and not, including permitting timelines and Trump’s tariffs, this tax could indefinitely undermine renewables development in America.
On Saturday, as legislators began to digest the new text, Senator Brian Schatz declared on X not once, not twice, but three times that with the new penalty, this bill would on its own “kill” the U.S. solar energy industry, leading to energy shortages and raising costs across the board. "I promise you,” he wrote, “this bill is worse than you think.”
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, a staunch advocate for climate policy, said in a statement to Heatmap that the tax will help China and hurt American families, “all so Republican oil and gas donors can make even bigger profits. This isn’t policy; it’s pay-off.”
Without this new tax, energy companies might’ve quietly swallowed the bitter pill of losing the incentives established in the Inflation Reduction Act. In the weeks since the first version of this legislation was introduced in the House, I’ve interviewed numerous renewables developers, tax attorneys, and cleantech investors, who have emphasized the resilience of the industry given rising energy demand and explained that there would still be many ways for projects currently under development to qualify for the credits before they’d be phased out. The history of renewable energy tax credits in the U.S. is full of of phase-outs and restarts. The industry’s been at least somewhere like this before.
But the withdrawal of incentives is one thing. A targeted federal tax that could increase development costs by up to 20% that is levied over longstanding supply chain relationships that will take not years but rather decades to rebuild is another.
The American Council on Renewable Energy said in a statement that the latest iteration of the bill “effectively takes both wind and solar electric supply off the table, at a time when there is $300 billion of investments underway, and this generation is among the only source of electricity that will help to reduce costs and keep the lights on through the early 2030s.” The North America’s Building Trades Unions issued a statement after the text’s release calling it the “biggest job-killing bill in the history of this county” and adding that that “simply put, it is the equivalent of terminating more than 1,000 Keystone XL pipeline projects.”
“I think it’s impossible to overstate how this new version of the bill makes the House bill look moderate by comparison,” Andrew Reagan, president of Clean Energy 4 America, told me in an exasperated tone over the phone Saturday afternoon. “The hope as I see it is that as the full impact of how devastating this proposal would be for every state in the country comes into play, as this comes to the floor, Senate Republicans who claim to care about this issue come to [Majority Leader John] Thune and ask to amend this.”
The tax would apply to new solar and wind construction and be calculated based on the degree to which a project exceeds statutory limits for materials sourced from “foreign entities of concern,” i.e. Russia, North Korea, Iran, and most especially China. Solar projects would have to pay a 50% tax on the value of the overage, and wind projects would pay 30%.
Here’s a simplified example to illustrate how it would work: Say you are developing a solar project that will begin operating in 2028, and the total cost of all of your material inputs is $100,000. The new law would require that at least 50% of the value of all of your materials come from entities disconnected from Chinese companies and investment (the statutory limit for 2028), but your project is only able to achieve 40%. The extra $10,000 dollars you paid to companies with ties to China would be subject to the 50% solar tax, adding $5,000 to the total cost of your project. And this doesn’t even touch the new expense of capturing and reporting all of this supply chain data for the federal government.
The rules for how developers would actually calculate the value of their various material inputs will be subject to the Treasury’s interpretation and guidance, so it is impossible to determine how harshly this tax would fall on any individual solar or wind energy facility. Even so, Rhodium Group has estimated that it would increase project costs overall by 10% to 20% — a whopping total to eat on top of losing key tax credits.
This penalty for sourcing linked to China dates back to the IRA’s consumer electric vehicle tax credit. As I was first to report years ago for E&E News, Senator Joe Manchin successfully limited the credit’s scope by requiring qualifying cars to be made with an increasing percentage of materials from the U.S. or a country with a free trade agreement and mandating that materials could not come from a foreign entity of concern. This tactic mostly failed to reshore mineral supply chains as quickly Manchin had hoped it would, but it did ensure that relatively few vehicles qualified.
This anti-foreigner approach to energy policy has now been taken up by Republicans in Congress to erode the IRA overall. As my colleagues Emily Pontecorvo and Matthew Zeitlin have explained, the Senate legislation would deny tax credits to companies that have supply chains with any ties to China, which many say would effectively stop them from qualifying for the credits.
This specific policy approach is something I’ve previously dubbed the GOP’s “anti-China trap” for renewable energy. Now, on top of cutting off companies from tax credits, this trap will catch them for failing to reinvent their supply chains overnight with little if any warning. Of course, reshoring these supply chains will also be more difficult because of other provisions in the bill that would erode and eliminate advanced manufacturing tax incentives originally designed to encourage companies to make more of these components at home.
The only silver lining here is that the fight isn’t over. It wouldn’t surprise me to see a senator try to get rid of this tax as the bill moves through the amendment process on the Senate floor.
I expect some sort of intervention here because there appears to be momentum from powerful entities outside of Congress to get rid of this tax. Reviews of this piece of the bill are so bad, it has put the American Clean Power and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on the same side as pro-fossil “philosopher” Alex Epstein, who is also calling on senators to oppose the tax.
“I just learned about the excise tax and it’s definitely not something I would support,” he posted to X yesterday, adding he’d rather they focus on removing the tax credits instead of creating a new cost. “I stand for energy freedom, always, in every situation,” he added in a separate post defending his opposition.
Elsewhere on X yesterday, Elon Musk spent hours (on his birthday, no less) going after the Senate bill, reposting energy wonks’ rants about the bill and its tax on renewables, including from Jesse Jenkins, the host of Heatmap’s very own Shift Key podcast.
So, okay, but will Musk, Epstein or any of these other critics convince at least one senator to force a successful vote on getting rid of the tax? That’s really the only way it can go away, because it’s very likely the Senate will force the House to pass whatever it passes.
I talked to Jenkins hours after Musk reposted him and filled up his replies. Like the iconoclastic billionaire, he told me he thinks this legislation is worse than anything congressional Republicans had released before it. A big reason for that is indeed the excise tax, a completely new idea that hadn’t been in any other previous draft of the bill or debated in committee, which he sees as a “obviously, deliberatively punitive attack on the wind and solar industry for what appears to be purely ideological reasons.”
“It’s going to kill hundreds of billions of dollars in investment and hundreds of gigawatts of new supply that would otherwise help us meet rapidly growing electricity demand. So, yeah, higher energy prices, less jobs, less investment in American energy production, and less confidence in the American business environment,” Jenkins said. “No one is asking for this.”
Debate on the bill is expected to begin later today, and the amendment process will stretch into Monday morning at least.
Additional reporting by Emily Pontecorvo
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include a statement from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.
A little-noticed provision would make the payment option used by tax-exempt groups all but impossible to claim.
A little-noticed provision in the Senate tax bill will sabotage the efforts of tribes, rural electric cooperatives, and public power authorities to develop local affordable energy projects by striking a section of the Inflation Reduction Act that enabled tax-exempt groups to claim the clean energy tax credits as direct cash payments from the Treasury.
The IRA included strict domestic sourcing requirements beginning in 2026 for groups utilizing this “direct pay” option on projects larger than 1 megawatt. But the law also created exceptions for cases where domestic components were not available in sufficient quantity or quality, or would increase costs by more than 25%. The Senate bill would get rid of these exceptions.
“It just makes it unlikely for those projects to go forward — or more likely for those projects to go forward with a private developer, instead of with a public utility or a tribe or a rural co-op,” Grace Henley, a tax attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, told me. “And so they don’t really do anything to increase the amount of domestic material that would be used, they just hurt the projects that are seeking to invest in clean energy infrastructure for these communities to lower costs.”
Public power and tribal energy advocates warn that without the exceptions, energy development will become impossible for their constituents.
Wind and solar projects being developed by these groups are already threatened by the bill’s rapid phase-out of wind and solar tax credits and its complex rules related to using materials from China. Chèri Smith, the executive director of the Alliance for Tribal Energy, told me that Tribes face longer development timelines than the average private developer. “We have multiple stages of approval that are unique to tribal energy development,” she told me, including lengthy internal consultation processes. The changes to direct pay will put these projects further out of reach, she said.
The Alliance provides free energy development consulting services to more than 100 Tribes. Smith sent me a list of projects in Alaska Native villages, Arizona, California, and Oregon that could be killed by the tax credit changes. “Alaska Native villages face some of the highest energy costs in the country,” she said, largely due to their reliance on diesel generators. Just over a third of the Hopi Tribe in Arizona lacks access to electricity, but now multiple microgrid projects meant to close the gap are at risk. Many of the projects on the list are also doubly threatened by grant cancellations and the repeal of the Tribal Energy Loan Guarantee Program.
“The bill is particularly harmful to Tribal Nations, pulling the rug out from under projects that would strengthen their energy sovereignty and power local communities,” Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich, Ron Wyden, and Brian Schatz wrote in a joint statement on Thursday. “Together, the Tribal Energy Loan Guarantee Program and our Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits have cleared pathways and removed significant barriers for Tribes to finance and build their own resilient energy infrastructure.”
The American Public Power Association is also sounding the alarm. John Godfrey, the group’s senior government relations director, told me that in addition to wind and solar, municipal utilities and rural electric co-ops are also considering nuclear and hydropower projects. For example, Energy Northwest, a consortium of 29 public utilities in Washington State, has plans to retrofit the Columbia Generating Station nuclear plant to increase its power output. It’s also in early stages to deploy four small, modular nuclear reactors. As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote a few days ago, the governor of New York has also tasked the New York Power Authority with developing a new nuclear plant in the state.
Nuclear and hydropower “are technologies where often there is not a U.S. source, but there is a good trading partner source — Canada, Germany, Japan,” Godfrey said. By tightening the domestic sourcing requirements for direct pay, the bill would “hinder the very technologies that there’s generally a bipartisan consensus we need to be developing.”
Public utilities and electric co-ops, which serve close to 30% of electric customers in the U.S., are also unfairly singled out by the provision, he said. “If my public power utility wants to develop a project and they need a Canadian turbine, they can’t get any credit. But if a taxable corporation down the street develops exactly the same project, they can.”
“If the purpose is to encourage hydropower, that’s not a good use of resources,” he said.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that the domestic sourcing requirements in the IRA applied to projects larger than 1 megawatt.
Senate Republicans tucked a carveout into their reconciliation bill that would allow at least one lucky renewable energy project to qualify for a major Inflation Reduction Act tax credit even after the law is all but repealed.
The only problem is, it’s near impossible to be sure right now who may actually benefit from this giveaway — and the mystery is driving me up the wall. I feel like Charlie Day in that episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, stringing documents together and ranting like a lunatic.
The Senate bill would phase out the tech-neutral production tax credit starting next year and completely eliminate it by the start of 2028. For the past week and a half, I have been trying to solve the riddle of an exemption tucked into the language that would allow a wind or solar facility that is “part of a single project” to continue to take advantage of the tech-neutral production tax credit as it exists today, which means it would not begin to phase out until 2034.
To qualify for the exemption a project must, according to the Senate text, meet two conditions: It must produce more than 1 gigawatt of electricity, and be sited on federal lands where a “right-of-way grant or lease” had been given by the Bureau of Land Managementbefore June 16, which is the date the text was released.
Only a handful of projects in the U.S. could possibly fit that criteria. But every time I think I’ve identified one that will actually qualify, I learn a new fact that, to me, takes it out of the running.
Here’s why my head hurts so much: A renewables facility that would benefit from this language needs to be sited at least partially on federal lands. But because Trump isn’t issuing new right-of-way approvals or leases to most renewables projects right now, it likely had to get its right-of-way or its lease before he entered office. (The June 16 language feels like a bit of a red herring. Nothing that fits the other definitions has received these documents since the start of Trump 2.0.)
Then there’s another factor: The only projects that would benefit from this language are ones that haven't started construction yet. Even if a project doesn’t have all of its permits for federal land use, its developer can build stuff like roads on any connected private lands and technically meet the deadline to start construction laid out in the new legislation. The construction start date is what counts — it doesn’t matter whether a project is placed in service and provides power to the grid years later, as long as it began construction before that deadline.
Taken together, all this means that a project that would benefit from this language probably has to be sited on federal lands and hold permits already … but for some reason can’t start construction to qualify for the program.
When I first started hunting for an answer, many people — including renewables advocates, anti-wind activists, and even some Senate staff in conversations with me — speculated that the language was a giveaway to two wind projects under construction in Wyoming, Chokecherry and Sierra Madre, which together make up what would likely be the largest wind farm in the U.S. if completed. These two projects are largely sited on federal lands and received all their approvals before Trump entered office.
I understand why people are pointing at Chokecherry and Sierra Madre. They are not expected to be online before 2029, and the House version of the bill would have locked them out of the production tax credit because it added a requirement that projects be “placed in service” — i.e. actively providing power to the grid — by around that same period. Any slippage in construction might have really hurt their finances. They’re also backed by a powerful billionaire, GOP donor and live entertainment power-broker Phil Anschutz, a man who made his initial fortune partially from fossil fuels.
Except … my colleagues and I are still not convinced. That’s because it is not clear that these two projects are at any actual risk of losing the production tax credit. They have been actively under construction for a long time, and the Senate bill killed the House’s “placed in service” requirement.
Another project floated is the Lava Ridge wind farm in Idaho, which was fully permitted under Biden, is largely sited on federal lands, and would produce more power than necessary to qualify for the exception. Hypothetically, this project would be a great candidate for being a beneficiary of the bill because Trump banned work on the project via executive order amid opposition from Idaho politicians, making a carveout to get more time a worthwhile endeavor.
Except … Senate Finance Chair Mike Crapo, the lead author of the pertinent section of the Senate reconciliation bill, was one of those Idaho politicians who pushed Trump to kill Lava Ridge. Why would he give a tax break to a project he wanted dead?
Then there was my personal best guess for the beneficiary: Esmeralda 7, an expansive set of proposed solar farms in the Nevada desert that, as proposed, would produce more than 5 gigawatts of power and is largely sited on federal land. Construction can’t begin until Esmeralda 7 gets its federal approvals, and the Trump administration was expected to complete that work by mid-summer.
Except … I reported last week that the permitting process for Esmeralda 7 is now indefinitely stalled. The project is at best still months away from getting its right-of-way approvals from the Trump administration, which recently pushed back timelines for finishing reviews of other large Nevada solar projects, too.
Ultimately, it will be difficult to glean who the lobbyist giveaway here is for unless the legislators who wrote it disclose their intentions. I reached out to the communications director for Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee to try and find out, but so far I’ve gotten crickets.
It may be that this language is revised and that future changes lay out the true beneficiary. Sometimes lawmakers will put the wrong date or word into a bill and they’ll edit it on the floor before a vote, chalking it up to a drafting error.
If senators decide to add back the “placed in service” requirement to capitulate to the House, this would easily be the Chokecherry-Sierra Madre giveaway. If Republicans were to shift forward the deadline for getting a right-of-way, Esmeralda 7 would qualify. Or maybe they could change some secret third thing and a different project I hadn’t considered will be revealed as the mastermind in the shadows.
Until then, I’ll be in my basement poring over more maps and going slowly insane.
Additional reporting was provided by Emily Pontecorvo.