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Excise tax is out, foreign sourcing rules are in.
After more than three days of stops and starts on the Senate floor, Congress’ upper chamber finally passed its version of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act Tuesday morning, sending the tax package back to the House in hopes of delivering it to Trump by the July 4 holiday, as promised.
An amendment brought by Senators Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska that would have more gradually phased down the tax credits for wind and solar rather than abruptly cutting them off was never brought to the floor. Instead, Murkowski struck a deal with the Senate leadership designed to secure her vote that accomplished some of her other priorities, including funding for rural hospitals, while also killing an excise tax on renewables that had only just been stuffed into the bill over the weekend.
The new tax on wind and solar would have driven up development costs by as much as 20% — a prospect that industry groups said would “kill” investment altogether. But even without the tax, the Senate’s bill would gum up the works for clean energy projects across the spectrum due to new phase-out schedules for tax credits and fast-approaching deadlines to meet complex foreign sourcing rules. While more projects will likely be built under this version than the previous one, the basic outcomes haven’t changed: higher energy costs, project delays, lost jobs, and ceding leadership in artificial intelligence and manufacturing to China.
"This bill will hit Americans hard, terminating credits that have helped families lower their energy and transportation costs, shrinking demand for American-made advanced energy technologies, and squeezing new domestic energy production at a time of rising demand and prices,” Heather O’Neill, the CEO and president of the trade group Advanced Energy United, said in a statement Tuesday. “The advanced energy industry will endure, but the downstream effects of these rollbacks and punitive policies will be felt by American families and businesses for years to come.”
Here’s what’s in the final Senate bill.
The final Senate bill bifurcates the previously technology-neutral tax credits for clean electricity into two categories with entirely different rules and timelines — wind and solar versus everything else.
Tax credits for wind and solar farms would end abruptly with no phase-out period, but the bill includes a significant safe harbor for projects that are already under construction or close to breaking ground. As long as a project starts construction within 12 months of the bill’s passage, it will be able to claim the tax credits as originally laid out in the Inflation Reduction Act. All other projects must be “placed in service,” i.e. begin operating, by the start of 2028 to qualify.
That means if Trump signs the bill into law on July 4, wind and solar developers will have until July 4 of 2026 to “start construction.” Otherwise, they will have less than a year and a half to bring their projects online and still qualify for the credits.
Meanwhile, all other sources of zero-emissions electricity, including batteries, advanced nuclear, geothermal, and hydropower, will be able to continue claiming the tax credits for nearly a decade. The credits would start phasing down for projects that start construction in 2034 and terminate in 2036.
While there are some potential wins in the bill for clean energy development, many of the safe harbored projects will still be subject to complex foreign sourcing rules that may prove too much of a burden to meet.
The bill requires that any zero-emissions electricity or advanced manufacturing project that starts construction after December of this year abide by strict new “foreign entities of concern,” or FEOC rules in order to be eligible for tax credits. The rules penalize companies for having financial or material connections to people or businesses that are “owned by, controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction or direction of” any of four countries — Russia, Iran, North Korea, and most importantly for clean energy technology, China.
As with the text that came out of the Senate Finance committee, the text in the final bill would phase in supply chain restrictions, requiring project developers and manufacturers to use fewer and fewer Chinese-sourced inputs over time. For clean electricity projects starting construction next year, 40% of the value of the materials used in the project must be free of ties to a FEOC. By 2030, the threshold would rise to 60%. Energy storage facilities are subject to a more aggressive timeline and would be required to prove that 55% of the project materials are non-FEOC in 2026, rising to 75% by 2030. Each covered advanced manufacturing technology gets its own specific FEOC benchmarks.
Unlike the text from the Finance Committee, however, the final text includes a clear exception for developers who already have procurement contracts in place prior to the bill’s enactment. If a solar developer has already signed a contract to get its cells from a Chinese company, for example, it could exempt that cost from the calculation. That would make it easier for companies further along in the development process to comply with the eligibility rules.
That said, these materials sourcing rules come on top of strict ownership and licensing rules likely to block more than 100 existing and planned solar and battery factories with partial Chinese ownership or licensing deals with Chinese firms from receiving the tax credits, per a BloombergNEF analysis I reported on previously.
Once again, the details of how any of this will work — and whether it will, in fact, be “workable” — will depend heavily on guidance written by the Treasury department. That not only gives the Trump administration significant discretion over the rules, it also assumes that the Treasury department, which is now severely understaffed after Trump’s efficiency department cleaned house earlier this year, will actually have the bandwidth to write them. Without Treasury guidance, developers may not have the cost certainty they need to continue moving forward on projects.
Up until today, the Senate and House looked poised to destroy the business model for companies like Sunrun that lease rooftop solar installations to homeowners and businesses by cutting them off from the investment tax credit, which can bring down the cost of a solar array by as much as 70%. The final Senate bill, however, got rid of this provision and replaced it with a much more narrow version.
Now, the only “leasing” schemes that are barred from claiming tax credits are those for solar water heaters and small wind installations. Companies that lease solar panels, batteries, fuel cells, and geothermal heating equipment are still eligible. SunRun’s stock jumped nearly 10% on Tuesday.
Other than the new FEOC rules, which will have truly existential consequences for a great many projects, there aren’t many changes to the advanced manufacturing tax credit, or 45X, than in previous versions of the bill. The OBBBA would create a new phase-out schedule for critical mineral producers claiming the tax credit that begins in 2031. Previously, critical minerals were set to be eligible indefinitely. It would also terminate the credit for wind energy components early, in 2028.
One significant change from the Senate Finance text is that the bill would allow vertically integrated companies to stack the tax credit for multiple components.
But perhaps the biggest change, which was introduced last weekend, is a twisted new definition of “critical mineral” that allows metallurgical coal — the type of coal used in steelmaking — to qualify for the tax credit. As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote, most of the metallurgical coal the U.S. produces is exported, meaning this subsidy will mostly help other countries produce cheaper steel.
It looks like the hydrogen industry’s intense lobbying efforts finally paid off: The final Senate bill is the first text we’ve seen since this process began in May that would extend the lifespan of the tax credit for clean hydrogen production. Now, projects that begin construction before January 1, 2028 will still qualify for the credit. This is shorter than the Inflation Reduction Act’s 2033 cut-off, but much longer than the end-of-year cliff earlier versions of the bill would have imposed.
The tax credits for electric vehicles and energy efficiency building improvements would end almost immediately. Consumers will have to purchase or lease a new or used EV before September 30, 2025, in order to benefit. There would be a slightly longer lead time to get an EV charger installed, but that credit (30C) would expire on June 30, 2026.
Meanwhile, energy efficiency upgrades such as installing a heat pump or better-insulated windows and doors would have to be completed by the end of this year in order to qualify. Same goes for self-financed rooftop solar. The tax credit for newly built energy efficiency homes would expire on June 30, 2026.
The bill would make similar changes to the carbon sequestration (45Q) and clean fuels (45Z) tax credits as previous versions, boosting the credit amount for carbon capture projects that do enhanced oil recovery, and extending the clean fuels credit to corn ethanol producers.
The House Rules Committee met on Tuesday afternoon shortly after the Senate vote to deliberate on whether to send it to the House floor, and is still debating as of press time. As of this writing, Rules members Ralph Norman and Chip Roy have said they’ll vote against it.
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A conversation with Matt Weiner on the Fix Our Forests Act and why the Senate needs to take action — now.
After the Los Angeles County wildfires in January, it seemed like the federal government was finally poised to do something about the decades of flawed forestry practices and land management policies that have turned the West into a tinderbox. On January 23, before the L.A. fires were even fully extinguished, the House of Representatives passed the Fix Our Forests Act on a bipartisan 279–141 vote, queuing up a bill that proponents say would speed and simplify forest and wildfire management projects that have gotten bogged down in a regulatory morass.
Then … not much happened. Though Republican Senators John Curtis of Utah and Tim Sheehy of Montana teamed up with Democrats John Hickenlooper of Colorado and Alex Padilla of California to write their own version of the Fix Our Forests Act for the Senate, the bill stalled after a summer spent focused on the reconciliation bill. Meanwhile, more wildfires made headlines.
Matt Weiner, the founder and CEO of the nonprofit advocacy group Megafire Action, wants to bring some urgency back. This week, the organization launched a six-figure ad campaign in Washington, D.C., aimed at spurring senators to get back to working on wildfire resilience and forestry reform. Though the bill’s approach is divisive — the House version drew initial pushback from more than 100 environmental organizations, including the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, and League of Conservation Voters, for opening up large tracts of federal forest to logging, among other concerns — Weiner told me “there’s no huge substantive holdup in the Senate that is keeping it from getting to 60 votes.”
I caught up with Weiner this week to learn more about where things stand with the Fix Our Forests Act and talk through some of the bill’s more controversial regulatory rollbacks. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Catch our readers up: Why the Fix Our Forests Act, and why now?
We’re looking at a generational opportunity to change the way we do land management. This is the most significant change Congress has considered since the Healthy Forest Restoration Act, and maybe even since the original National Forest Act.
The smoke impacts of wildfires are killing more people than the flames. Wildfires are the most significant driver of PM 2.5 emissions growth in the country right now. The clean air community has done a fantastic job of reducing industrial emissions of PM 2.5, which has had real public health impacts, but those gains are in danger of vanishing because of the growth of wildfire smoke exposure.
Then there’s the climate. If you care about carbon emissions, this is a huge opportunity at a time when a lot of other climate issues seem to be on the backburner. The 2020 fire season in California — a particularly bad year — released enough carbon to undo 20 years of the state’s emissions reduction progress. The 2023 Canadian wildfires, if treated as a country, would have been the third-largest emitter in the world that year. And if you start thinking about Alaska and the Boreal burning in the way the West has been burning, it could potentially be game over for the climate. It’s important that people understand that this is an existential climate issue and that we have an opportunity to make progress in a bipartisan way.
You and I have chatted before — we first spoke about the Fix Our Forests Act almost a year ago, now. What’s happened in the past 12 months with the bill?
The bill passed the House right after the Los Angeles fires. The last time we spoke [in October 2024], the bill had passed the House in the previous Congress with a bipartisan margin. But this time, it got a much bigger bipartisan show of support: 64 Democrats and all the Republicans in the House.
The bill saw some changes and improvements to focus on the immediate needs in Los Angeles County [after the January 2025 fires] — things like improving the ability of a city like Los Angeles to gain access to Community Wildfire Defense Grant funding and improvements to the Wildfire Intelligence Center targeted at making sure it plays a role in helping local governments make decisions on where to place assets before a high risk event.
Then the bill went to the Senate, but instead of moving the House bill through, a group of senators came together to write a bipartisan version with some changes. Senator Curtis from Utah was the lead, along with Senators Padilla, Hickenlooper, and Sheehy. Their version included changes to the litigation section from the House bill, which had raised concerns among a lot of environmental organizations, as well as modifications to the permitting section. That earned the bill the support of more environmental organizations than the version from the House — they have the Nature Conservancy, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Audubon Society, and the National Wildlife Federation on board, as well as a lot of local organizations and wildfire groups like the Alliance for Wildfire Resilience.
But then a lot of the oxygen in the Senate was taken up by the reconciliation package. That put a pause on things through the August recess, and now they’re looking to hopefully mark up the bill during the October work period. We’re very optimistic about being able to get floor time. We think there’s a clear path to 60 votes in the Senate for this bill, and if there’s a good, constructive markup, it could be much more than that. There’s no substantive holdup as much as there is the ever-present fear of stasis and losing momentum. That’s why we launched an ad campaign with an eye toward building the urgency back up.
How did the ad campaign come together?
The idea was that this is a bipartisan issue, so where is the support? We didn’t need to launch a big persuasion campaign; we needed to highlight the absurdity of the fact that, eight months after Los Angeles, we still haven’t had any meaningful action from Congress. There is an opportunity before them that would make a big difference in wildfire policy writ large.
I’m interested in your focus on using “state-of-the-art science” and “new and innovative technologies” to address wildfires and forest health. What have you seen in this space that has made you excited?
The bill is about improving the planning and implementation of wildfire policy — especially mitigation work like treatment projects, but also in the built environment. A big cornerstone of that would be the creation of a new Wildfire Intelligence Center, which would use the most advanced technology to understand what our risk profile is on the ground across landscapes and jurisdictions. Right now, there is no one entity in government responsible for taking a comprehensive look at risk across landscapes, what we’re doing on the ground, and how that buys down risk.
At the same time, one of the things we’re negotiating is making sure that the Forest Service and the Department of Interior are positioned to work with some of the companies doing advanced modeling, detection, and tracking work — as opposed to having the government try to build its own clunky system. We’ve modeled it after successful efforts elsewhere in government, such as the Defense Innovation Unit and other Department of Defense and NASA programs that have been great at harnessing private sector innovation for government use. There’s also a new pilot program in the bill, in Section 303, that would create a pathway for the Forest Service to start identifying and piloting new technologies and give them a path to scale across the agency if they find that it helps them do the job better, faster, and cheaper.
The timber industry has collaborated with the Forest Service on fire suppression since the 1920s. In the decades since, “forest management” has at times been used as a euphemism for industry-friendly practices like tree thinning, which many ecologists say would allow invasive species and brush to flourish, and would actually worsen wildfires. How would cutting the red tape around “vegetation management activities” not be a handout to the timber industry?
We all know that the best tool for mitigation is good fire, prescribed fire, beneficial fire, and — where appropriate — managed fire, as well. Unfortunately, because we’ve taken fire out of these landscapes, forested landscapes in particular are so overgrown that you couldn’t introduce good fire even if you wanted to. So mechanical thinning has to be a part of this.
One of the tensions here is that the timber industry wants merchantable timber. They want the big trees, and in a lot of cases, those are the ones we want to keep in the ground with these projects. What we’re focused on is invasive species, overgrown areas, and dead trees from morbidity events like recent droughts so that we can reintroduce good fire at scale. If we all let it burn, like some have proposed, you’d end up with hundreds of thousands of acres of landscape burning at a time, like we saw in the [2021] Caldor fire, where nothing will grow back in a way we recognize for at least decades — and given climate change, maybe not ever.
It’s important to make sure that we don’t go back to the timber wars [of the 1980s and 1990s between environmentalists and loggers in the Pacific Northwest], but at the same time, we need to recognize that the biggest threat to our forests right now is catastrophic fire, not the timber industry. We want to deal with the threat at hand and make sure the pendulum that swung during the timber wars — for very good reason — against the timber industry comes back a little, but doesn’t swing too far in the wrong direction, either. The Senate bill strikes the right balance there.
A number of major environmental groups initially came out in opposition to the Fix Our Forests Act over numerous concerns, including that it erodes Endangered Species Act protections by exempting the Forest Service and BLM from the requirement to adjust land management policies as new information about how projects could affect threatened species arises. What is the other side of this tradeoff? How would limiting the consultation requirement advance the goal of reducing wildfires?
The biggest challenge right now is that, because of all of the regulatory hurdles, it can take upwards of a thousand days to get a project off the ground anywhere in the country. One great example of that is in the Angeles National Forest. They announced a fuel break maintenance strategy in 2020, but they were not able to get the requisite approvals until the start of December 2024. It took four years — and then the last of the permits that were most relevant to Altadena didn’t get approved until March, two months after the fire. There are very real consequences to this kind of delay, both for the environment and for human health and safety, that need to be taken into account.
If you take a step back and look at the bill, the main tool that it uses is not broad NEPA exemptions or writ-large changes in the law. It utilizes categorical exclusions, a method that has been used for energy projects in other areas and is increasingly sought after to advance targeted projects with public benefits.
One great example is the Tahoe categorical exclusion, on which a significant portion of this bill is based. It was a 10,000-acre CE created in 2016, which allowed for work that protected communities and ecosystems and got good fire on the ground. It’s work that directly saved South Lake Tahoe from the Caldor Fire. But one of the challenges right now is that the current level for CE is 3,000 acres, and when we’re talking about landscapes in forests that are hundreds of thousands of miles big and a fireshed that nationwide is 50 million acres, then 3,000 acres is not enough for it to be worth it for the Forest Service and Park Service and DOI officials to go through the CE process — which takes six months and is very rigorous.
But we also wanted to show restraint here for environmental purposes. We wanted to make sure that this was as targeted as it needed to be, and not overly expansive.
On California solar, climate tech’s master plan, and Climeworks’ ‘milestone’ deal
Current conditions: Tropical Storm Gabrielle is intensifying as it travels northwestward through the Atlantic, and may strengthen into a hurricane near Bermuda over the weekend • A trio of tropical storms — Mitag, Ragasa, and Neoguri — is barreling toward East Asia, threatening to build into typhoons as they approach China, the Philippines, South Korea, and Japan • A magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck off Russia’s Pacific coast, triggering a tsunami advisory.
All but one member of New York’s Public Service Commission voted Thursday to endorse a plan from the gas utility National Grid that depends on construction of a controversial natural gas pipeline, the Albany Times-Union reported. The state has yet to approve the pipeline plan. In 2019, then-Governor Andrew Cuomo rejected the Northeast Supply Enhancement project, better known as the Williams Pipeline, on the grounds that it threatened too much environmental damage. Soon after, Cuomo shuttered the nuclear power plant that once supplied a significant portion of New York City’s energy, and the offshore wind projects meant to generate much of its carbon-free electricity stalled out. The only major power project to bring clean electricity into the city, the transmission line designed to connect the five boroughs to the hydroelectric system in Quebec, is underway, but at peak capacity will only supply about half of what the Indian Point nuclear station once produced. As a result, the New York City region on the state’s grid system depends on gas and oil for nearly 90% of its electricity.
The decision drew swift blowback from climate groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council, which called the pipeline a “climate and affordability boondoggle.” The utility’s “own demand forecasts confirm there is no imminent reliability need — capacity is more than sufficient to meet peak demand well into the 2040s, even under unusually cold temperatures,” Chris Casey, the New York utility regulatory director at NRDC, said in a statement. “The Commission’s decision to signal its support for this fracked gas pipeline very likely contradicts state law, is not in the public interest, and will be vigorously challenged.”
Representative Scott Peters, the Democrat who represents part of San Diego, accused the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management of halting permitting on solar projects in California. At a press conference Thursday to promote a bipartisan proposal he drafted along with the Colorado Republican Representative Gabe Evans to ease federal energy permitting, Peters said he had just been told that the agency would not approve any more panels. “It’s hard to get a deal unless we resolve that,” Peters said, according to a post on X from Politico reporter Joshua Siegel.
The proposal is a framework for a bill, essentially a blueprint of what members of the House Problem Solvers Caucus feel constitute reasonable compromises. For Republicans, the agreement offers fewer bureaucratic roadblocks to all kinds of new infrastructure, including gas pipelines. For Democrats, it charts a path for building more of the transmission lines that are key to adding more renewables to the grid. “It’s a big step to have our caucus, which is a pretty significant number of Republicans and Democrats, sign on to a pretty detailed set of policy principles,” Peters said. But as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote last month, “unless Democrats trust the Trump administration to actually allow renewables projects to go forward, his proposal could be dead on arrival.”
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On Thursday, a new coalition that includes Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy, consulting giant McKinsey, and Stanford University’s Doerr School of Sustainability launched the Climate Tech Atlas. The proposal maps out ways to decarbonize different sectors of the economy, and lists priorities for innovation. The idea is not to eliminate potential solutions, Heatmap’s Katie Brigham reported in her scoop about the project, but rather “to enable the next generation of innovators, entrepreneurs, researchers, policymakers, and investors to really focus on where we felt there was the largest opportunity for exploration and for innovation to impact our path to net zero through the lens of technology,” according to Cooper Rinzler, a key collaborator on the initiative and a partner at the venture capital firm Breakthrough Energy Ventures.
Microsoft has announced “the world’s most powerful AI data center” in southeastern Wisconsin. The project, called Fairwater, “is a seamless cluster of hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GB200s, connected by enough fiber to circle the Earth 4.5 times,” CEO Satya Nadella wrote in a post on X. “It will deliver 10x the performance of the world’s fastest supercomputer today, enabling AI training and inference workloads at a level never before seen.” He said Microsoft would match “all of the energy that is consumed with renewable sources.”
That power generation could prove more popular than the data center itself. Just 44% of American voters would support or strongly support a data center being built near them, while 42% would oppose or strongly oppose it, according to a Heatmap Pro poll Matthew covered last week. That mere 2% of net support compares to net support of 34% for a gas plant, 19% for a wind farm, 34% for a solar project, and 11% for batteries.
The carbon removal startup Climeworks just signed its largest-ever deal. By 2039, the Switzerland-based company, one of the biggest direct air capture developers in the world, agreed to suck 31,000 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere on behalf of Schneider Electric, the French industrial giant. Schneider said it remains committed to slashing the direct emissions from its operations by 90% in the next 25 years, and that this deal addresses “future neutralization needs while pursuing aggressive emissions reductions, and supporting the scale-up of an industry crucial for achieving net zero.” In a statement, Schneider’s sustainability chief Esther Finidori said that “both carbon removal and carbon reduction are fundamental to achieving our climate goals, as well as those of the planet.” For Climeworks, the deal is a “milestone,” said CEO Christoph Gebald.
The speed of climate change may be throwing the insect world out of whack. But a new study has put offshore oil rigs in the North Sea to work identifying the vital role a migratory insect plays. University of Exeter researchers studied 121 marmalade hoverflies that landed on an oil rig in the Britannia oil field. The rig off the coast of Scotland was far from any vegetation or land, so the pollen found on 92% of hoverflies “shows they can transport pollen over great distances, potentially linking plant populations that are hundreds of kilometers apart,” according to a press release. “By analysing the pollen samples and wind patterns, we estimate that many of the hoverflies had flown from places including the Netherlands, northern Germany and Denmark — over 500 kilometers away,” Toby Doyle, Exeter’s Centre for Ecology and Conservation in Cornwall, said in a statement.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect the company behind the Fairwater project.
And more on the week’s most important battles around renewable energy.
1. Indianapolis, Indiana – The Sooner state’s top energy official suggested energy developers should sue towns and county regulators over anti-renewable moratoria and restrictive ordinances, according to audio posted online by local politics blog Indy Politics.
2. Laramie County, Wyoming – It’s getting harder to win a permit for a wind project in Wyoming, despite it being home to some of the largest such projects in the country.
3. Ada County, Idaho – Like Wyoming, Idaho is seeing its most populated county locking up land from being available for renewables development.
4. Fairfield County, Ohio – Activists are plotting another appeal to overturn the Ohio Power Siting Board’s decision on a solar farm.
5. Franklin County, Virginia – Constitution Solar is struggling to assuage local residents’ complaints about a proposed project in this county despite doing, well, it appears anything to make them happy.
6. Sumter County, South Carolina – One solar developer is trying for a Hail Mary with South Carolina regulators to circumvent a painful local rejection.