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Which institutional purchaser of qualifying carbon credits will come out on top?
The Department of Energy wants YOU to purchase carbon removal. Well, maybe not you, personally, but your city, state, or employer. And as an incentive, it’s turning the buying process into the equivalent of an arcade game, inviting companies to try to make it to the top of a new carbon removal buyers leaderboard.
The agency soft-launched the concept on Thursday under the banner of the “Voluntary Carbon Dioxide Removal Purchase Challenge.” There’s no prize money associated with the challenge — it’s not even clear whether there will be any winners. The goal is to encourage companies to make “bigger and bolder” public commitments to purchase carbon removal. At least one company, Google, has already said it would commit $35 million this year.
As the world has delayed climate action, developing the capacity to remove carbon from the atmosphere has become an imperative. Scientists now suggest it is “unavoidable” if we want to limit warming to internationally agreed-upon levels. Carbon removal offers both a way to cancel out emissions from activities like flying and growing food that could take decades to figure out how to eliminate, and an antidote for some of the legacy carbon that’s already been emitted.
But today, existing carbon removal methods and technologies are too small-scale and expensive to make a meaningful difference. Many also lack adequate techniques to measure and verify how effective they are. That’s why last year the Department of Energy announced that it would spend $35 million to purchase carbon removal from promising companies. The initial winners are expected to be announced later this year.
With that program, the DOE was following in the footsteps of companies like Stripe and Microsoft, both of which have put significant resources toward vetting carbon removal startups and making early purchases of credits to help get the industry off the ground. With this new challenge, the agency said it aims to address non-financial barriers that are preventing companies from buying carbon removal as part of their climate strategies, such as a lack of transparency and a “lack of recognition that carbon removal credit purchases are essential and valuable today.”
To join the challenge, a company or organization will be required to purchase carbon removal credits “annually” and disclose the details to the DOE. The agency will build a public inventory of carbon removal credit buyers, suppliers, projects, standards and methodologies used, and volume of carbon removal delivered.
Companies have no apparent incentive to participate other than to see their names on the list, and possibly try and get to the top. In the words of DOE, it offers a “a unique opportunity to enter the carbon removal market with a splash!” (Exclamation point added by me.)
There is already a voluntary leaderboard tracking carbon removal purchases and deliveries called CDR.FYI. But not just anyone will be able to get on the DOE’s list. To qualify, the purchases must also be “aligned with the requirements and assessment criteria of DOE’s purchases.” The agency also said it would evaluate additional carbon removal projects beyond those it has assessed for its purchase pilot, and publish a list of available credits that have garnered a government stamp of approval.
Sasha Stashwick, the policy director at Carbon180, a carbon removal advocacy nonprofit, told me this is a promising step to building a carbon removal market that doesn’t suffer from the integrity issues that have plagued the voluntary carbon offsets markets.
“I think one of the key non market barriers is, how do you even define what is a reputable ton of carbon removal? Alleviating that burden is potentially huge,” she said. “The federal government is basically saying, we’ll de-risk these projects for you. We’ll determine what is a good project, and you can buy alongside us.”
The rules are preliminary, and the agency is accepting comments on the program until May 15. It expects to launch the challenge later this year.
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Three companies are joining forces to add at least a gigawatt of new generation by 2029. The question is whether they can actually do it.
Two of the biggest electricity markets in the country — the 13-state PJM Interconnection, which spans the Mid-Atlantic and the Midwest, and ERCOT, which covers nearly all of Texas — want more natural gas. Both are projecting immense increases in electricity demand thanks to data centers and electrification. And both have had bouts of market weirdness and dysfunction, with ERCOT experiencing spiky prices and even blackouts during extreme weather and PJM making enormous payouts largely to gas and coal operators to lock in their “capacity,” i.e. their ability to provide power when most needed.
Now a trio of companies, including the independent power producer NRG, the turbine manufacturer GE Vernova, and a subsidiary of the construction firm Kiewit Corporation, are teaming up with a plan to bring gas-powered plants to PJM and ERCOT, the companies announced today.
The three companies said that the new joint venture “will work to advance four projects totaling over 5 gigawatts” of natural gas combined cycle plants to the two power markets, with over a gigawatt coming by 2029. The companies said that they could eventually build 10 to 15 gigawatts “and expand to other areas across the U.S.”
So far, PJM and Texas’ call for new gas has been more widely heard than answered. The power producer Calpine said last year that it would look into developing more gas in PJM, but actual investment announcements have been scarce, although at least one gas plant scheduled to close has said it would stay open.
So far, across the country, planned new additions to the grid are still overwhelmingly solar and battery storage, according to the Energy Information Administration, whose data shows some 63 gigawatts of planned capacity scheduled to be added this year, with more than half being solar and over 80% being storage.
Texas established a fund in 2023 to provide low-cost loans to new gas plants, but has had trouble finding viable projects. Engie pulled an 885 megawatt project from the program earlier this week, citing “equipment procurement constraints” and delays.
But PJM is working actively with a friendly administration in Washington to bring more natural gas to its grid. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission recently blessed a PJM plan to accelerate interconnection approvals for large generators — largely natural gas — so that it can bring them online more quickly.
But many developers and large power consumers are less than optimistic about the ability to bring new natural gas onto the grid at a pace that will keep up with demand growth, and are instead looking at “behind-the-meter” approaches to meet rising energy needs, especially from data centers. The asset manager Fortress said earlier this year that it had acquired 850 megawatts of generation capacity from APR Energy and formed a new company, fittingly named New APR Energy, which said this week that it was “deploying four mobile gas turbines providing 100MW+ of dedicated behind-the-meter power to a major U.S.-based AI hyperscaler.”
And all gas developers, whether they’re building on the grid or behind-the-meter, have to get their hands on turbines, which are in short supply. The NRG consortium called this out specifically, noting that it had secured the rights to two 7HA gas turbines by 2029. These kinds of announcements of agreements for specific turbines have become standard for companies showing their seriousness about gas development. When Chevron announced a joint venture with GE Vernova for co-located gas plants for data centers, it also noted that it had a reservation agreement for seven 7HA turbines. But until these turbines are made and installed, these announcements may all just be spin.
Featuring China, fossil fuels, and data centers.
As Republicans in Congress go hunting for ways to slash spending to carry out President Trump’s agenda, more than 100 energy businesses, trade groups, and advocacy organizations sent a letter to key House and Senate leaders on Tuesday requesting that one particular line item be spared: the hydrogen tax credit.
The tax credit “will serve as a catalyst to propel the United States to global energy dominance,” the letter argues, “while advancing American competitiveness in energy technologies that our adversaries are actively pursuing.” The Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Energy Association organized the letter, which features signatures from the American Petroleum Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Clean Energy Buyers Association, and numerous hydrogen, industrial gas, and chemical companies, among many others. Three out of the seven regional clean hydrogen hubs — the Mid-Atlantic, Heartland, and Pacific Northwest hubs — are also listed.
Out of all of the tax credits for low-carbon energy, the hydrogen subsidy, which was created by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, is among the most generous. It pays up to $3 per kilogram of hydrogen produced, depending on how emissions-intensive the process is. For context, a 15 ton-per-day plant in Georgia owned by hydrogen producer Plug Power has the potential to earn up to $45,000 per day in tax credits.
But the total price of the tax credit depends on how much clean hydrogen production takes off, and the industry is still in its infancy. When the Penn Wharton Budget Model, a research group at the University of Pennsylvania, estimated the fiscal impact of the Inflation Reduction Act, it placed the total cost for the hydrogen credit at $49 billion over 10 years, compared to more than $260 billion for renewable energy and nearly $400 billion for electric vehicles.
Tactically, Tuesday’s letter draws on all of the Trump administration’s favorite talking points. It warns that nixing the tax credit will mean ceding the hydrogen technology war to China, noting that the country now produces more than 60% of the global supply of electrolyzers — equipment that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity. It also says that hydrogen fuel cells are already being used by tech companies to power data centers.
And even though the tax credit was designed specifically to subsidize “clean” hydrogen, the letter mostly ignores this distinction, painting hydrogen production as an extension of the U.S. fossil fuel industry. Oil and gas companies have the infrastructure, workforce, and supply chains to lead the global hydrogen economy, it says. It points out that hydrogen can be produced from “natural gas, biogas, biomethane, as well as any electricity source (i.e. nuclear energy),” but does not mention wind, solar, or geothermal.
Investment in the nascent hydrogen industry was essentially on hold for more than two years while companies eager to take advantage of the tax credit waited for the Biden administration to finalize eligibility rules. But even after Biden’s Treasury Department published those rules in early January, how the Trump administration will view the program remained uncertain. “Our industry is now poised to invest billions of dollars in deployments and manufacturing facilities across the country,” the letter says. “However, that private sector investment is at risk due to the uncertainty around this crucial incentive … We need to ensure that we do not miss this hydrogen moment and respectfully request that you maintain the Section 45V tax credit.”
Intense debate and controversy surrounded the development of the rules for claiming the tax credit, and while the Biden administration tried to strike a compromise, some in the industry still found the rules too strict. I asked the Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Energy Association whether it wanted Congress to make any changes to the tax credit or to simply preserve it but hadn’t heard back as of publication time.
But some of the signatories have already expressed their intent to request changes. In December, the American Petroleum Institute sent a memo to the incoming Treasury Department outlining its key priorities and “asks.” It says the Biden administration’s hydrogen tax credit rules were “overly restrictive and raised concerns about qualifying pathways for natural gas.”
Core inflation is up, meaning that interest rates are unlikely to go down anytime soon.
The Fed on Wednesday issued a report showing substantial increases in the price of eggs, used cars, and auto insurance — data that could spell bad news for the renewables economy.
Though some of those factors had already been widely reported on, the overall rise in prices exceeded analysts’ expectations. With overall inflation still elevated — reaching an annual rate of 3%, while “core” inflation, stripping out food and energy, rose to 3.3%, after an unexpectedly sharp 0.4% jump in January alone — any prospect of substantial interest rate cuts from the Federal Reserve has dwindled even further.
Renewable energy development is especially sensitive to higher interest rates. That’s because renewables projects, like wind turbines and solar panels, have to incur the overwhelming majority of their lifetime costs before they start operating and generating revenue. Developers then often fund much of the project through borrowed money that’s secured against an agreement to buy the resulting power. When the cost of borrowing money goes up, projects become less viable, with lower prospective returns sometimes causing investors not to go forward .
High interest rates have plagued the renewables economy for years. “As interest rates rise, all of a sudden, solar assets that are effectively bonds become less valuable,” Quinn Pasloske, a managing director at Greenbacker, a renewable investor and operating company, told me on Tuesday, describing how the stream of payments from a solar project becomes less valuable as rates rise because investors can get more from risk-free government bonds.
The new inflation data is “consistent with our call of an extended Fed pause, with only one rate cut in 2025, happening in June,” Morgan Stanley economists wrote in a note to clients. Bond traders are also projecting just a single cut for the rest of the year — but not until December.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told the Senate Banking committee Tuesday, “We think our policy rate is in a good place, and we don’t see any reason to be in a hurry to reduce it further.”
The yield for the 10-year Treasury bond, often used as a benchmark for the cost of credit, is up 0.09% today, to 4.63%. While this is below where yields peaked in mid-January, it’s a level still well above where yields have been for almost all of the last year. When Treasury yields rise, the cost of credit throughout the economy goes up.
Clean energy stocks were down this morning — but so is the overall market. Because while high interest rates are especially bad for renewables, they’re not exactly great for anyone else.