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Local governments once fought the adoption of wireless communications technology. Then Congress did something.
The landmark Inflation Reduction Act invested some $370 billion toward transitioning the United States to a clean energy economy. Yet turning that spending into actual new energy facilities – getting turbines in the air, and solar arrays on the ground – is another matter.
How many facilities materialize, and how quickly, will hinge on countless permitting processes carried out in cities and towns around the country. And at the hyper-local level, renewable energy developers often meet resistance and drawn-out processes.
If left unchecked, NIMBYism could effectively veto much of the IRA, one project at a time. But fortunately, Congress has a ready-made model to defend their investment: a Clinton-era law that helped bring cellphones to more Americans by partially insulating wireless infrastructure from local resistance. We can do the same thing to ensure that the renewable energy transition is not stonewalled on the ground.
Back in the 1990s, NIMBY opposition was hampering the adoption of then-novel wireless communications technology. Local zoning boards frequently enacted moratoria on new wireless towers, and opponents spread unsubstantiated myths about health risks and complained that the towers were eyesores. This often prevented (or at least delayed) the construction of new towers, which slowed the deployment of cellphone technology. For example, in Georgia, a county commissioner said, “By and large, the towers are ugly, and people don’t want them in their backyards. If folks would stay off their cell phones there would be no need for the towers.” Medina, Washington was one of many cities that enacted multiple moratoria on new cell tower citing; a leading opponent of the cell towers there said, “People are willing to not use their cell phones for three blocks on their way to the grocery store, if that means not having the towers here.”
Rather than let NIMBYism hold back progress, Congress took action. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 passed with overwhelming bipartisan support to “encourage the rapid deployment of new telecommunications technology.” The TCA struck a balance on local permitting and siting: it preserved “the traditional authority of state and local governments to regulate the location, construction, and modification” of wireless towers, but crafted limits on that authority. Under the TCA, local governments can no longer impose regulations tantamount to bans on cell towers. They must issue decisions on proposed towers within a reasonable time, and must support those decisions with “substantial evidence” – in writing. And they cannot turn away projects on the basis of debunked health fears. If a town violates these rules, telecom companies can get an expedited hearing in court.
Congress aimed to let local communities continue to have some say over cell tower siting, but added guardrails to ensure that they couldn’t undermine national imperatives. As Republican Congressman Thomas Bliley, chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, put it at the time: “Nothing is in this bill that prevents a locality … from determining where a cellular pole should be located, but we do want to make sure that this technology is available across the country, that we do not allow a community to say we are not going to have any cellular pole in our locality.”
The TCA paved the way for greater adoption of modern telecommunications technology. Before the law, there were roughly 20,000 wireless towers in the United States and 30 million cellphone users. Six years later, there were nearly 130,000 towers and 130 million users. The TCA continues to reap dividends, such as by neutralizing some of the resistance to the 5G rollout. In 2018, the Federal Communications Commission adopted rules under the TCA to limit the power of localities to obstruct new 5G facilities, constraining the power of cities and towns to block the new sites.
Just as the TCA’s siting rules have helped support the expansion of cellphone networks in the United States, a similar policy could support the expansion of renewable energy. Local permitting has increasingly become a bottleneck for our clean-energy transition. As the Idaho Capital Sun recently observed: “Across the country — from suburban Virginia, rural Michigan, southern Tennessee and the sugar cane fields of Louisiana to the coasts of Maine and New Jersey and the deserts of Nevada — new renewable energy development has drawn heated opposition that has birthed, in many cases, bans, moratoriums and other restrictions[,]” with new wind and solar developments “igniting fierce battles over property rights, loss of farmland, climate change, aesthetics, the merits of renewable power and a host of other concerns.”
A report last year from Columbia University's Sabin Center on Climate Change Law identified 121 local policies restricting renewables development across 31 states, and more than 200 renewables projects challenged across the country – and those numbers are undercounts, according to the Center’s Matthew Eisenson. Common local tactics, the report found, “include moratoria on wind or solar energy development; outright bans on wind or solar energy development; regulations that are so restrictive that they can act as de facto bans on wind or solar energy development; and zoning amendments that are designed to block a specific proposed project.” These local restrictions have been fueled in part by misinformation spread on social media promoting unsupported health and safety concerns around wind and solar farms. Sometimes these groups are literally bankrolled by the oil industry trying to curb the transition from fossil fuels.
Congress could step in to limit localities’ power to obstruct clean energy. Patricia Salkin and Ashira Pelman Ostrow, legal scholars at Albany Law School and Hofstra University, proposed a new legal framework modeled off of the TCA that would outlaw bans and indefinite moratoria on new wind farms, require reasonably fast decisions that are issued in writing and backed by substantial evidence, and create a judicial right of action for wind developers to challenge permitting denials. This would speed up the siting process, and force localities to keep their doors open to renewable energy. And it would incentivize more localities to grant wind citing requests by imposing litigation risk on decisions denying projects.
This framework could provide the foundation for a new Renewable Energy Siting Act – one that, unlike some other permitting reform proposals, would streamline the process for approving renewables only, without sacrificing community protections against fossil fuels. It could also be strengthened. For one, it should apply to other forms of clean energy beyond wind, including solar. The timeline for issuing a decision on a project could be specified at a fixed deadline, like 90 days.
The “substantial evidence” standard could also be bolstered to exclude common NIMBY complaints. In a 2015 Supreme Court case involving the TCA, at least one Supreme Court justice – Justice Alito – said that a permitting decision rejecting a cell tower based solely on aesthetics or community compatibility would count as “substantial evidence.” In adapting the TCA model for renewable energy, Congress should require permitting decisions to be supported by evidence that is both substantial and credible. As it did for fears over radiofrequency emissions from cell towers, Congress could explicitly rule out certain disproven or baseless objections around health, safety, and aesthetics.
Congress could also crack down on extreme and prohibitive “setbacks” – the distance that a structure must be from any neighboring properties – that some states and municipalities impose on renewable facilities. In Ohio, wind turbines must be built at least 1,125 feet from the nearest property line. (Meanwhile, the state allows new oil and gas wells just 100 feet from homes.) That has made new wind development in the state a practical impossibility. Congress could let states and localities take reasonable precautions to protect nearby properties (in the unlikely event that a turbine falls over), while setting a maximum setback rule at perhaps 1.5 times the turbine’s height – a setback of around 450 feet for a typical utility-scale tower.
By design, this approach protects national goals while preserving a role for state and local governments. Though given the climate stakes and the federal dollars at risk, some might understandably want to hand more permitting authority to national agencies. But that risks provoking a backlash, and may also lead federal authorities to miss legitimate local concerns. Putting the federal government in charge of permitting and siting decisions could also trigger federal environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act and other laws, further slowing deployment.
Though without a new law from Congress reining in local permitting, the Biden administration may have little choice but to resort to targeting specific projects to speed them up. Existing authority under the Defense Production Act allows the federal government to override other laws – including permitting laws – to expedite renewable energy development. The administration has also reportedly started leveraging certain grants to reward states and localities that agree to streamline permitting for projects receiving federal funding. Similar conditions could be attached to some Inflation Reduction Act funding too.
With the House under Republican control, the odds of congressional action seem admittedly slim. But red states and conservative districts stand to benefit mightily from IRA spending given the geographic skew of wind and solar energy toward rural areas in the middle of the country. And providing more national uniformity in permitting processes is fundamentally a pro-business, deregulatory act that will provide more certainty to energy developers. Perhaps those dynamics can produce a bipartisan coalition for congressional action like the one that enacted the TCA.
As we build our way out of the climate crisis, local communities deserve a say in how and where we build, but not a veto. With the climate clock ticking, we can ill afford to run out that clock with undue delays and frivolous objections. Congress can strike the right balance here, and help clean energy proliferate just as quickly as cellphones did.
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Investing in red states doesn’t make defying Trump any safer.
In the end, it was what the letters didn’t say.
For months — since well before the 2024 election — when asked about the future health and safety of the clean energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act, advocates and industry folks would point to the 20 or so House Republicans (sometimes more, sometimes fewer) who would sign on to public statements urging their colleagues to preserve at least some of the law. Better not to pull out the rug from business investment, they argued. Especially not investment in their districts.
These letters were “reassuring to a lot of folks in clean energy and climate communities,” Chris Moyer, the founder of Echo Communications and a former staffer for longtime Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, told me.
“I never felt reassured,” Moyer added.
Plenty of people did, though. The home solar company Sunrun, for instance, told investors in a presentation earlier this monththat a “growing number of Republicans in Congress — including 39 overall House members and four Senators — publicly support maintaining energy tax credits through various letters over the past few months.” The company added that “we expect a range of draft proposals to be issued, possibly including draconian scenarios, but we expect any extreme proposals will be moderated as they progress.”
Instead, the draft language got progressively worse for the residential solar industry, with the version that passed the House Thursday morning knocking billions of dollars off the sector, as tax credits were further squeezed to help make room for other priorities that truly posed an existential threat to the bill’s passage.
What Sunrun and others appear to have failed to notice — or at least publicly acknowledge — is that while these representatives wanted to see tax credits preserved, they never specified what they would do if their wishes were disregarded. Unlike the handful of Republicans who threatened to tank the bill over expanding the deduction for state and local taxes (each of whom signed one of the tax credit letters, at some point), or the Freedom Caucus, who tend to vote no on any major fiscal bill that doesn’t contain sizable spending cuts (so, until now, every budget bill), the tax credit Republicans never threatened to kill the bill entirely.
Ultimately, the only Republicans to outright oppose the bill did so because it didn’t cut the deficit enough. All of the House Republicans who signed letters or statements in support of clean energy tax credits voted yes on the legislation, with a single exception: New York’s Andrew Garbarino, who reportedly slept through the roll call. (He later said he would have voted for it had he been awake.)
“The coalition of interests effectively persuaded Republican members that tax credits were driving investment in their districts and states,” Pavan Venkatakrishnan, an infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress, told me in a text message. “Where advocates fell short was in convincing them that preserving energy tax credits — especially for mature technologies Republicans often view skeptically — should take precedence over preventing Medicaid cuts or addressing parochial concerns like SALT.”
The Inflation Reduction Act itself was, after all, advanced on a party-line basis, as was Biden’s 2021 American Rescue Plan. Combined, those two bills received a single Democratic no vote and no Republican yes votes.
In the end, Moyer said, Republican House members in the current Congress were under immense political pressure to support what is likely to be the sole major piece of legislation advanced this year by President Trump — one that contained a number of provisions, especially on SALT, that they agreed with.
“There are major consequences for individual house members who vote against the president’s agenda,” Moyer said. “They made a calculation. They knew they were going to take heat either way. They would rather take heat from clean energy folks and people affected by the projects.”
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
White House officials and outside analysts frequently touted job creation linked to IRA investments in Republican House districts and states as a tangible benefit of the law that would make it politically impossible to overturn, even as Congress and the White House turned over.
“President’s Biden’s policies are leading to more than 330,000 new clean energy jobs already created, more than half of which are in Republican-held districts,” White House communications director Ben LaBolt told reporters last year, previewing a speech President Biden would give on climate change.
Even after Biden had been defeated, White House climate advisor Ali Zaidi told Bloomberg that “we have grown the political consensus around the Inflation Reduction Act through its execution,” citing one of the House Republican letters in support of the clean energy tax credits.
One former Biden White House climate official told me that having projects in Republican districts was thought by the IRA’s crafters to make the bill more politically sustainable — but only so much.
“A [freaking] battery factory is not going to save democracy,” the official told me, referencing more ambitious claims that the tax credits could lead to more Democratic electoral victories. (The official asked to remain anonymous in order not to jeopardize their current professional prospects.) Instead, “it was supposed to make it slightly harder for Republicans to overturn the subsidies.”
Congresspeople worried about jobs weren’t supposed to be the only things that would preserve the bill, either, the official added. Clean energy and energy-dependent sectors, they thought, should be able to effectively advocate for themselves.
To the extent that business interests were able to win a hearing with House Republicans, they were older, more traditionally conservative industries such as nuclear, manufacturing, agriculture, and oil and gas.The biofuels industry (i.e. liquid Big Agriculture) won an extension of its tax credit, 45Z. The oil and gas industry’s favored measure, the 45Q tax credit for carbon sequestration, was minimally fettered. Nuclear power was the one sector whose treatment notably improved between the initial draft from the House’s tax-writing committee and the version voted on Thursday. Advanced nuclear facilities can still claim tax credits if they start construction by 2029, while other clean energy projects have to start construction within 60 days of the bill’s passage and be in service by the end of 2028.
“I think these outcomes are unsurprising. In places where folks consistently engaged, things were protected,” a Republican lobbyist told me, referring to manufacturing, biofuels, and nuclear power, requesting anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. “But assuming a project in a district would guarantee a no vote on a large package was always a mistake.”
“The relative success of nuclear is a testament to the importance of having strong champions — predictable but notable show of political might,” a second Republican lobbyist told me, who was also not allowed to speak publicly about the bill.
But all hope isn’t lost yet. The Senate still has to pass something that the House will agree with. Some senators had made noises about how nuclear, hydropower, and geothermal were treated in the initial language.
“Budget reconciliation is, first and foremost, a fiscal exercise,” Venkatakrishnan told me. “Energy tax credits offer a path of least resistance for hitting lawmakers’ fiscal targets. As the Senate takes up this bill, the case must be made that the marginal $100 billion to $200 billion in cuts seriously jeopardizes grid reliability and energy innovation.” Whether that will be enough to generate meaningful opposition in the Senate, however, is the $600 billion question.
A loophole created by the House Ways and Means text disappeared in the final bill.
Early this morning, the House of Representatives launched a full-frontal assault on the residential solar business model. The new language in the budget reconciliation bill to extend the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed Thursday included even tighter restrictions on the tech-neutral investment tax credits claimed by businesses like Sunrun when they lease solar systems to residential buyers.
While the earlier language from the Ways and Means committee eliminated the 25D tax credit for those who purchased home solar systems after the end of this year (it was originally supposed to run through 2034), the new language says that no credit “shall be allowed under this section for any investment during the taxable year” (emphasis mine) if the entity claiming the tax credit “rents or leases such property to a third party during such taxable year” and “the lessee would qualify for a credit under section 25D with respect to such property if the lessee owned such property.”
This is how you kill a business model in legislative text.
“Expect shares of solar companies to take a significant step back,” Jefferies analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith wrote in a note to clients Thursday morning, calling the exclusion “scathing.” Investors are “losing the now false sense of security that we had 'seen the worst' of it with the initial House draft.”
Joseph Osha, an analyst for Guggenheim, agrees. “Considering the fact that ~70% of the residential solar industry is now supported by third-party (e.g. lease or PPA) financing arrangements, the new language is disastrous for the residential solar industry,” he wrote in a note to clients. “We believe the near-term implications are very negative for Sunrun, Enphase, and SolarEdge.”
Shares of Sunrun are down 37.5% in mid-day trading, wiping off almost $1 billion worth of value for its shareholders. The company did not respond to a request for comment. Shares of fellow residential solar inverter and systems Enphase are down 20%, while residential solar technology company SolarEdge’s shares are down 24.5%.
“Families will lose the freedom to control their energy costs,” Abigail Ross Hopper, chief executive of the Solar Energy Industries Association, said in a statement, in reference to the last-minute alteration to the investment tax credit.
When the House Ways and Means Committee released the initial language getting rid of 25D by the end of this year but keeping a limited version of the investment tax credit, analysts noted that Sunrun was an unexpected winner from the bill. It typically markets its solar products as leases or power purchase agreements, not outright sales of the system.
The reversal, Dumoulin-Smith wrote, “comes as a surprise especially considering how favorable the initial markup was” to the Sunrun business model.
“Our core solar service offerings are provided through our lease and power purchase agreements,” the company said in its 2024 annual report. “While customers have the option to purchase a solar energy system outright from us, most of our customers choose to buy solar as a service from us through our Customer Agreements without the significant upfront investment of purchasing a solar energy system.”
The new bill, Dumoulin-Smith writes is “‘leveling the playing field’ by targeting all future residential solar originations, whether leased or owned.” The bill is “negative to Sunrun with intentional targeting of the sector.
Last year, Sunrun generated over $700 million from transferring investment tax credits from its solar and storage projects. The company said that it had $117 million of “incentives revenue” in 2024, which includes the tax credits, out of around $1.4 billion in total revenue.
But the tax credits play a far larger role in the business than just how they’re recognized on the company’s earnings statements. The company raises investment funds to help finance the projects, where investors get payments from customers as well as monetized tax credits. Fund investors “can receive attractive after-tax returns from our investment funds due to their ability to utilize Commercial ITCs,” the company said in its report. Conversely, the financing “enables us to offer attractive pricing to our customers for the energy generated by the solar energy system on their homes.”
Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Perocco wrote to clients that “this is a noteworthy change for the residential solar industry, and Sunrun in particular, which dominates the residential solar [third-party owned] market and has recognized ITC credits under 48E.”
Current conditions: A late-season nor’easter could bring minor flooding to the Boston area• It’s clear and sunny today in Erbil, Iraq, where the country’s first entirely off-grid, solar-powered village is now operating • Thursday will finally bring a break from severe storms in the U.S., which has seen 280 tornadoes more than the historical average this year.
1. House GOP passes reconciliation bill after late-night tweaks to clean energy tax credits
The House passed the sweeping “big, beautiful” tax bill early Thursday morning in a 215-214 vote, mostly along party lines. Republican Representatives Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Warren Davidson of Ohio voted no, while House Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris of Maryland voted “present;” two additional Republicans didn’t vote.
The bill will effectively kill the Inflation Reduction Act, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has written — although the Wednesday night manager’s amendment included some tweaks to how, exactly, as well as a few concessions to moderates. Updates include:
The bill now heads to the Senate — where more negotiations will almost certainly follow — with Republicans aiming to have it on President Trump’s desk by July 4.
2. FEMA cancels 4-year strategic plan, axing focus on ‘climate resilience’
The combative new acting administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, David Richardson, rescinded the organization’s four-year strategic plan on Wednesday, per Wired. Though the document, which was set to expire at the end of 2026, does not address specific procedures for given disasters, it does lay out goals and objectives for the agency, including “lead whole of community in climate resilience” and “install equality as a foundation of emergency management.” In axing the strategic plan, Richardson told staff that the document “contains goals and objectives that bear no connection to FEMA accomplishing its mission.”
A FEMA employee who spoke with Wired stressed that while rescinding the plan does not have immediate operational impacts, it can still have “big downstream effects.” Another characterized the move by the administration as symbolic: “There are very real changes that have been made that touch on [equity and climate change] that are more important than the document itself.”
3. Energy Department redirects Puerto Rican rooftop solar investment to upkeep of fossil fuel plants
The U.S. federal government is redirecting a $365 million investment in rooftop solar power in Puerto Rico to instead maintain the island’s fossil fuel-powered grid, the Department of Energy announced Wednesday. The award, which dates to the Biden administration, was intended to provide stable power to Puerto Ricans, who have become accustomed to blackouts due to damaged and outdated infrastructure. The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority declared bankruptcy in 2017, and a barrage of major hurricanes — most notably 2017’s Hurricane Maria — have destabilized the island’s grid, Reuters reports.
In Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s statement, he said the funds will go toward “dispatching baseload generation units, supporting vegetation control to protect transmission lines, and upgrading aging infrastructure.” But Javier Rúa Jovet, a public policy director for Puerto Rico’s Solar and Energy Storage Association, added to The Associated Press that “There is nothing faster and better than solar batteries.”
4. EDF, Shell, and others to collaborate on hydrogen emission tracker
The Environmental Defense Fund announced Wednesday that it is launching an international research initiative to track hydrogen emissions from North American and European facilities, in partnership with Shell, TotalEnergies, Air Products, and Air Liquide, as well as other academic and technology partners. Hydrogen is an indirect greenhouse gas that, through chemical reactions, can affect the lifetime and abundances of planet-warming gases like methane and ozone. Despite being a “leak-prone gas,” hydrogen emissions have been poorly studied.
“As hydrogen becomes an increasingly important part of the energy system, developing a robust, data-driven understanding of its emissions is essential to supporting informed decisions and guiding future investments in the sector,” Steven Hamburg, the chief scientist and senior vice president of EDF, said in a statement. Notably, EDF took a similar approach to tracking methane over a decade ago and ultimately exposed that emissions were “a far greater threat” than official government estimates suggested.
5. The best-selling SUV in America will now be available only as a hybrid
Toyota
The bestselling SUV in America, the Toyota RAV4, will be available only as a hybrid beginning with the 2026 model, Car and Driver reports. The car will be available both as a conventional hybrid and as a plug-in that works with CCS-compatible DC fast chargers, meaning “owners can quickly fill up its battery during long road trips” to minimize their fossil fuel mileage, The Verge adds. The RAV4 will also beat the Prius for electric range, hitting up to 50 miles before its gas engine kicks in.
Toyota’s move might not come as a complete surprise given that the automaker already introduced a hybrid-only lineup for its Camry. But given the popularity of the RAV4, Car and Driver notes that “if you ever wondered whether or not hybrids have entered the mainstream yet, perhaps this could be a tipping point.”
Nathan Hurner/USFWS
The Fish Lake Valley tui chub, a small minnow threatened by farming and mining activity, could become the first species to be listed as endangered under the second Trump administration.