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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.

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Sparks

Major Renewables Nonprofit Cuts a Third of Staff After Trump Slashes Funding

The lost federal grants represent about half the organization’s budget.

The DOE wrecking ball.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

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.)

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Sparks

Esmeralda 7 Solar Project Has Been Canceled, BLM Says

It would have delivered a gargantuan 6.2 gigawatts of power.

Donald Trump, Doug Burgum, and solar panels.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images, Library of Congress

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.

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Trump Just Suffered His First Loss on Offshore Wind

A judge has lifted the administration’s stop-work order against Revolution Wind.

Donald Trump and wind turbines.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

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.”

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