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The tax agency reopened its online portal to allow dealerships to register sales retroactively.
As recently as last month, some electric vehicle buyers were running into roadblocks when they tried to claim the EV tax credit on their 2024 returns. Their claims were rejected, it turned out, because the dealership where they bought their EV never registered the sale with the Internal Revenue Service.
On Wednesday, the IRS instituted a fix: It reopened the online portal for dealerships to report these sales retroactively.
The confusion all started with a major change the IRS made to the EV tax credit program last year. Previously, all dealers had to do was give the buyer a “time of sale” report that they could submit to the IRS come tax season. But as of 2024, dealerships were expected to register every EV sale that was eligible for the tax credit through this new online portal. Not only that, they had to do so within three days of the sale. The portal would not allow entries dated more than three days post-sale.
The IRS and the National Automobile Dealers Association did outreach to educate dealerships about the changes, but many were apparently still unaware of the requirements — some never even made an online account. Customers were similarly ignorant of the intricacies of the process. Many received time of sale reports and thought they were all set. But in January, when they began trying to claim the credit on their taxes for the previous year, they were surprised to receive an error message saying that their EV was not registered with the IRS. Some tried to get their dealerships to register the sale retroactively, but the IRS portal didn’t allow for it.
President Trump has vowed to kill the EV tax credit, and Congress is just now beginning to hammer out the legislation that could execute his wishes. In light of that, and given the relative chaos at the IRS caused by Elon Musk’s “efficiency” department demanding access to private taxpayer information and laying off thousands of IRS employees, it was unclear whether the Treasury Department would do anything to help these unlucky EV buyers seeking their refunds. The Treasury did not respond to multiple inquiries from Heatmap in February.
The Dealers Association also never responded to multiple inquiries from Heatmap about the issue. But in a notice to dealerships this week, first reported by NPR, the trade group said the IRS planned to roll out an update to the portal on Wednesday to allow for sales made in 2024 to be submitted.
If any of this has made you nervous about getting an EV this year, remember that you have another, safer option for claiming the tax credit. Instead of claiming it on your taxes in 2026, you can transfer it to your dealer, who can take it off the sale price of the car on the spot. Just make sure they know about the online portal!
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The lost federal grants represent about half the organization’s budget.
The Interstate Renewable Energy Council, a decades-old nonprofit that provides technical expertise to cities across the country building out renewable clean energy projects, issued a dramatic plea for private donations in order to stay afloat after it says federal funding was suddenly slashed by the Trump administration.
IREC’s executive director Chris Nichols said in an email to all of the organization’s supporters that it has “already been forced to lay off many of our high-performing staff members” after millions of federal dollars to three of its programs were eliminated in the Trump administration’s shutdown-related funding cuts last week. Nichols said the administration nixed the funding simply because the nonprofit’s corporation was registered in New York, and without regard for IREC’s work with countless cities and towns in Republican-led states. (Look no further than this map of local governments who receive the program’s zero-cost solar siting policy assistance to see just how politically diverse the recipients are.)
“Urgent: IREC Needs You Now,” begins Nichols’ email, which was also posted to the organization’s website in full. “I need to be blunt: IREC, our mission, and the clean energy progress we lead is under assault.”
In an interview this afternoon, Nichols told me the DOE funding added up to at least $8 million and was set to be doled out over multiple years. She said the organization laid off eight employees — roughly a third of the organization’s small staff of fewer than two-dozen people — because the money lost for this year represented about half of IREC’s budget. She said this came after the organization also lost more than $4 million in competitive grant funding for apprenticeship training from the Labor Department because the work “didn’t align with the administration’s priorities.”
Nichols said the renewable energy sector was losing the crucial “glue” that holds a lot of the energy transition together in the funding cuts. “I’m worried about the next generation,” she told me. “Electricity is going to be the new housing [shortage].”
IREC has been a leading resource for the entire solar and transmission industry since 1982, providing training assistance and independent analysis of the sector’s performance, and develops stuff like model interconnection standards and best practices for permitting energy storage deployment best practices. The organization boasts having worked on developing renewable energy and training local workforces in more than 35 states. In 2021, it absorbed another nonprofit, The Solar Foundation, which has put together the widely used annual Solar Jobs Census since 2010.
In other words, this isn’t something new facing a potentially fatal funding crisis — this is the sort of bedrock institutional know-how that will take a long time to rebuild should it disappear.
To be sure, IREC’s work has received some private financing — as demonstrated by its solar-centric sponsorships page — but it has also relied on funding from Energy Department grants, some of which were identified by congressional Democrats as included in DOE’s slash spree last week. In addition, IREC has previously received funding from the Labor Department and National Labs, the status of which is now unclear.
It would have delivered a gargantuan 6.2 gigawatts of power.
The Bureau of Land Management says the largest solar project in Nevada has been canceled amidst the Trump administration’s federal permitting freeze.
Esmeralda 7 was supposed to produce a gargantuan 6.2 gigawatts of power – equal to nearly all the power supplied to southern Nevada by the state’s primary public utility. It would do so with a sprawling web of solar panels and batteries across the western Nevada desert. Backed by NextEra Energy, Invenergy, ConnectGen and other renewables developers, the project was moving forward at a relatively smooth pace under the Biden administration, albeit with significant concerns raised by environmentalists about its impacts on wildlife and fauna. And Esmeralda 7 even received a rare procedural win in the early days of the Trump administration when the Bureau of Land Management released the draft environmental impact statement for the project.
When Esmeralda 7’s environmental review was released, BLM said the record of decision would arrive in July. But that never happened. Instead, Donald Trump issued an executive order directing the Departments of the Treasury and the Interior to review their treatment of wind and solar, part of a deal with conservative hardliners in Congress to pass his tax megabill — the same bill that also effectively repealed the Inflation Reduction Act’s renewable electricity tax credits. This led to a series of subsequent orders by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum that effectively froze all federal permitting decisions for solar energy.
Flash forward to today, when BLM quietly updated its website for Esmeralda 7 permitting to explicitly say the project’s status is “cancelled.” Normally when the agency says this, it means developers pulled the plug.
I’ve reached out to some of the companies behind Esmeralda 7. A NextEra spokesperson provided me a statement from the company after this story’s publication saying it is “in the early stage of development” with its portion of the Esmeralda 7 mega-project, and the company is “committed to pursuing our project’s comprehensive environmental analysis by working closely with the Bureau of Land Management.”
This article was updated after publication to include a statement from NextEra.
A judge has lifted the administration’s stop-work order against Revolution Wind.
A federal court has lifted the Trump administration’s order to halt construction on the Revolution Wind farm off the coast of New England. The decision marks the renewables industry’s first major legal victory against a federal war on offshore wind.
The Interior Department ordered Orsted — the Danish company developing Revolution Wind — to halt construction of Revolution Wind on August 22, asserting in a one-page letter that it was “seeking to address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States and prevention of interference with reasonable uses of the exclusive economic zone, the high seas, and the territorial seas.”
In a two-page ruling issued Monday, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth found that Orsted would presumably win its legal challenge against the stop work order, and that the company is “likely to suffer irreparable harm in the absence of an injunction,” which led him to lift the dictate from the Trump administration.
Orsted previously claimed in legal filings that delays from the stop work order could put the entire project in jeopardy by pushing its timeline beyond the terms of existing power purchase agreements, and that the company installing cable for the project only had a few months left to work on Revolution Wind before it had to move onto other client obligations through mid-2028. The company has also argued that the Trump administration is deliberately mischaracterizing discussions between the federal government and the company that took place before the project was fully approved.
It’s still unclear at this moment whether the Trump administration will appeal the decision. We’re still waiting on the outcome of a separate legal challenge brought by Democrat-controlled states against Trump’s anti-wind Day One executive order.