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Earlier this week, I was thinking to myself, how are we going to know how many people are actually taking advantage of the tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act?
When I put the question out on Twitter — I mean, X — I heard from Sam Hughes, a researcher inside the Treasury who pointed me to a section of the department’s website that contains data on tax credits by year. The problem is, it hasn’t been updated since 2020. But then today, as if to answer my prayers, I received a taste of the data I was looking for in my inbox.
A Treasury official shared that the IRS has received notices from car sellers indicating they sold more than 25,000 tax credit-eligible vehicles between January 1 and February 6. That’s an average of more than 675 EVs sold at a government-sponsored discount per day.
To put that in perspective, about 1.08 million cars were sold in total in the month of January, according to Cox Automotive, or about 34,840 per day. So the tax credit-supported EVs were only about 2% of the total cars sold.
But 25,000 discounted EVs is nothing to scoff at — especially since starting January 1, two big changes were made to the tax credit that made it both harder and easier for Americans to get them.
First, new rules that limit what countries the components in eligible EVs are allowed to come from had the effect of disqualifying a lot of EVs from the tax credit. As of today, only 22 models from Chevy, Ford, Rivian, Tesla, and Volkswagen qualify, according to the Department of Energy. Last year, there were 35 models.
But at the same time, car buyers were given the option to transfer the tax credit to their dealer at the point of sale. That meant the dealer could take the $7,500 discount for new EVs, or $4,000 for used EVs, directly off the price of the car. Buyers no longer have to worry about whether or not they will owe $7,500 in taxes at the end of the year, or wait around for their tax return, to get that money back.
The Treasury said it has paid approximately $135 million in advance payments to dealers for about 19,000 of the EVs sold this year.
So even with fewer options available, buyers are still taking advantage of the new instant rebate and finding vehicles that work for them. The vast majority of the EVs sold — more than 22,000 — were new cars, while just over 3,000 were used EVs.
One disheartening stat included in the data is that some 11,000 dealerships have registered with the IRS to sell tax credit-eligible vehicles. As of last year, there were just over 16,800 dealerships in the country, according to the National Automobile Dealerships Association, so that means only about 65% of dealerships can offer customers the EV tax credit. Many dealers are not yet on board with the electric revolution. They take longer to sell and require less maintenance, cutting into profits.
The Treasury official said the department was trying to increase registrations via trade association partners, webinars, and conferences.
This smidgeon of data is not enough to assess how well the tax credits are working, and I hope that after tax day, the agency releases similar information about how many people claimed other IRA-related tax credits last year.
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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.
A new letter sent Friday asks for reams of documentation on developers’ compliance with the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act.
The Fish and Wildlife Service is sending letters to wind developers across the U.S. asking for volumes of records about eagle deaths, indicating an imminent crackdown on wind farms in the name of bird protection laws.
The Service on Friday sent developers a request for records related to their permits under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, which compels companies to obtain permission for “incidental take,” i.e. the documented disturbance of eagle species protected under the statute, whether said disturbance happens by accident or by happenstance due to the migration of the species. Developers who received the letter — a copy of which was reviewed by Heatmap — must provide a laundry list of documents to the Service within 30 days, including “information collected on each dead or injured eagle discovered.” The Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
These letters represent the rapid execution of an announcement made just a week ago by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who released a memo directing department staff to increase enforcement of the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act “to ensure that our national bird is not sacrificed for unreliable wind facilities.” The memo stated that all permitted wind facilities would receive records requests related to the eagle law by August 11 — so, based on what we’ve now seen and confirmed, they’re definitely doing that.
There’s cause for wind developers, renewables advocates, and climate activists to be alarmed here given the expanding horizon of enforcement of wildlife statutes, which have become a weapon for the administration against zero-carbon energy generation.
The August 4 memo directed the Service to refer “violations” of the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act to the agency solicitor’s office, with potential further referral to the Justice Department for criminal or civil charges. Violating this particular law can result in a fine of at least $100,000 per infraction, a year in prison, or both, and penalties increase if a company, organization, or individual breaks the law more than once. It’s worth noting at this point that according to FWS’s data, oil pits historically kill far more birds per year than wind turbines.
In a statement to Heatmap News, the American Clean Power Association defended the existing federal framework around protecting eagles from wind turbines, noted the nation’s bald eagle population has risen significantly overall in the past two decades, and claimed golden eagle populations are “stable, at the same time wind energy has been growing.”
“This is clear evidence that strong protections and reasonable permitting rules work. Wind and eagles are successfully co-existing,” ACP spokesperson Jason Ryan said.