Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Sparks

The New Climate Laws’ Tax Credits for Homeowners Are Crazy Powerful

A new study in Energy Policy does the math.

A heat pump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act — better known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law — are together filled with dozens of financial incentives to help regular Americans switch to clean technologies. The IRA, in particular, is the largest investment in confronting climate change the country has ever made. That work is happening, in no small part, on the (literal) home front.

A new study published in the journal Energy Policy authored by researchers from Vanderbilt University, shows that while only about 12% of climate and energy funds in the IRA and 5.7% in the BIL target voluntary household actions, they could leverage 40% of the cumulative emissions reductions under those laws.

That’s a big return on investment, and a rare sign that regular citizens might, after all, have some level of agency in helping solve a problem that can often feel beyond our grasp. The authors note that getting to that level of emissions reduction is perhaps easier said than done — navigating the process of figuring out eligibility for tax credits, determining cost savings, and actually contracting with local professionals to install all that clean tech is a pretty significant undertaking, and all those roadblocks could get in the way of that best case scenario. The authors’ estimate also accounts for all households in the country, whereas it’s much easier (and more appealing) for an owner of a single-family home to make those kinds of changes to their building than, say, a landlord who won’t see any direct benefits from improving a building they’ve rented out.

A lot of pain points, then. But still, in the face of a huge and abstract problem, knowing that individual actions do make a difference is no small thing.

Want to take advantage of some of these incentives? We’ve got you covered on at least a few of those fronts: my colleague Emily has written a guide to decarbonising your home with the IRA, and Robinson has a car buyer’s guide to the 2024 EV tax credit. That 40% emissions reduction goal will take a lot of individual investment; those guides (and more to come!) are good places to start.

Blue

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Sparks

Meta’s Major AI Energy Buildout

CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed the company’s expanding ambitions in a Threads post on Monday.

Electrical outlets and a computer chip
Justin Renteria/Getty Images

Meta is going big to power its ever-expanding artificial intelligence ambitions. It’s not just spending hundreds of millions of dollars luring engineers and executives from other top AI labs (including reportedly hundreds of millions of dollars for one engineer alone), but also investing hundreds of billions of dollars for data centers at the multi-gigawatt scale.

“Meta is on track to be the first lab to bring a 1GW+ supercluster online,” Meta founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote on the company’s Threads platform Monday, confirming a recent report by the semiconductor and artificial intelligence research service Semianalysis.

That first gigawatt-level project, Semianalysis wrote, will be a data center in New Albany, Ohio, called Prometheus, due to be online in 2026, Ashley Settle, a Meta spokesperson, confirmed to me. Ohio — and New Albany specifically — is the home of several large data center projects, including an existing Meta facility.

Keep reading...Show less
Sparks

Trump Says He’s Going to Slap a Huge Tariff on Copper

“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%.”

Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

President Trump announced Tuesday during a cabinet meeting that he plans to impose a hefty tax on U.S. copper imports.

“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%,” he told reporters.

Keep reading...Show less
Green
Sparks

Trump Will ‘Deal’ with Wind and Solar Tax Credits in Megabill, GOP Congressman Says

“We had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them.”

Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

A member of the House Freedom Caucus said Wednesday that he voted to advance President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after receiving assurances that Trump would “deal” with the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits – raising the specter that Trump could try to go further than the megabill to stop usage of the credits.

Representative Ralph Norman, a Republican of North Carolina, said that while IRA tax credits were once a sticking point for him, after meeting with Trump “we had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them in his own way,” he told Eric Garcia, the Washington bureau chief of The Independent. Norman specifically cited tax credits for wind and solar energy projects, which the Senate version would phase out more slowly than House Republicans had wanted.

Keep reading...Show less