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You know the climate economy has made it when ...
As investment in renewable energy rises globally, so too does the potential for massive corruption. This proved true on Tuesday, when Portuguese Prime Minister António Costa resigned amid an explosive investigation into his administration’s handling of lithium mining and hydrogen projects.
“The dignity of the functions of prime minister is not compatible with any suspicion about his integrity, his good conduct, and even less with the suspicion of the practice of any criminal act,” Costa said in a tearful televised announcement on Tuesday.
While Costa assured viewers that he would be cooperating with authorities in their investigation, he maintained his innocence, adding that he is “not conscious of having done any illegal act or even any reprehensible act.”
Per NPR, the investigation involves “alleged malfeasance, corruption of elected officials, and influence peddling” in awarding concessions for lithium mines in northern Portugal, as well as a green hydrogen plant and proposed data center in the town of Sines. Portugal’s large lithium reserves are viewed as essential to the European Union’s green energy transition because the mineral is used in the batteries powering electric vehicles.
Costa’s announcement came hours after police raided several public buildings and detained Costa’s chief of staff, Vítor Escária. Arrest warrants have also been issued for four other people in Costa’s inner circle, including the mayor of the town of Sines. Prosecutors additionally named infrastructure minister João Galamba as a formal suspect in the corruption probe. These suspects, according to a statement from the prosecutor general’s office, used Costa’s name and influence to “unblock procedures” related to the exploration concessions.
After taking office in 2015, Costa was re-elected with an absolute majority last year, though his administration has been plagued by scandal and allegations of misconduct ever since. In December 2022, his infrastructure and housing minister was forced to resign amid a controversy over an irregular severance payment made to a former board member of the state-owned airline TAP Air Portugal.
“It is a stage of my life that is finished,” Costa said in his announcement, adding that he will not be running for office again.
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We’ll give you one guess as to what’s behind the huge spike.
Georgia is going to need a lot more electricity than it once thought. Again.
In a filing last week with the state’s utility regulator, Georgia Power disclosed that its projected load growth for the next decade from “economic development projects” has gone up by over 12,000 megawatts, to 36,500 megawatts. Just for 2028 to 2029, the pipeline has more than tripled, from 6,000 megawatts to 19,990 megawatts, destined for so-called “large load” projects like new data centers and factories.
To give you an idea of just how much power Georgia businesses will demand over the next decade, the two new recently booted up nuclear reactors at Vogtle each have a capacity of around 1,000 megawatts. Of the listed projects that may come online, five will require 1,000 megawatts or more.
The culprit is largely data centers. About 3,330 megawatts’ worth of data centers have broken ground in Georgia, and just over 4,100 megawatts are pending construction, vastly outstripping commitments made by industrial customers.
“New load growth, led predominately by data centers, could triple [Georgia Power’s] size, in ten years. This is the second industrial revolution, led by artificial intelligence,” Simon Mahan, the executive director of the Southern Renewable Energy Association, wrote on X.
Georgia Power is used to upgrading load forecasts. The company had to update its three-year planning process (known as an integrated resource plan, or IRP) in October of 2023, just a year after releasing its previous three-year plan, as its five-year load growth projections had grown from 400 megawatts to 6,660 megawatts, a 17-fold increase. Regulators approved the new plan in April of this year, which included adding turbines to an existing gas-fired plant, pushing out the retirement of a coal-fired plant, and more battery storage.
The latest update, Georgia Power said in the filing, “should provide further certainty that Georgia Power’s load forecast is materializing and that the constructive outcome of the 2023 IRP Update is supportive of economic growth in Georgia.”
The signs marking projects funded by the current president’s infrastructure programs are all over the country.
Maybe you’ve seen them, the white or deep cerulean signs, often backdropped by an empty lot, roadblock, or excavation. The text on them reads PROJECT FUNDED BY President Joe Biden’s Infrastructure Law, or maybe President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act, or President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan. They identify Superfund cleanup sites in Montana, road repairs in Acadia National Park in Maine, bridge replacements in Wisconsin, and almost anything else that received a cut of the $1.5 trillion from the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.
Officially, the signs exist to “advance the goals of accountability and transparency of Federal spending,” although unofficially, they were likely part of a push by the administration to promote Bidenomics, an effort that began in 2023. The signs follow strict design rules (that deep cerulean is specifically hex code #164484) and prescribed wording (Cincinnati officials got dinged for breaking the rules to add Kamala Harris’ name to signs ahead of the election), although whether to post them is technically at the discretion of local partners. But all federal agencies — including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Transit Authority, which of each received millions in funding — were ordered by the Office of Management and Budget to post the signs “in an easily visible location that can be directly linked to the work taking place and must be maintained in good condition throughout the construction period.”
This has caused some irritation on the right, as you might imagine. Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas lodged a grievance with the Office of Special Counsel alleging Biden had violated the Hatch Act by using taxpayer dollars to pay for “nothing more than campaign yard signs.” Republican Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa gave her monthly “squeal award” to Biden in June for lack of transparency over how much the signs have cost and demanded disclosure from the OMB. (Signs erected to credit President Obama’s construction projects cost an estimated $300 million adjusted for inflation, though the Biden administration, likely aiming to skirt a similar scandal, specifies that the “signs should not be produced or displayed if doing so results in unreasonable cost, expense, or recipient burden.” Ernst’s office did not reply to a request from Heatmap about whether or not she ever got the numbers she was seeking from the OMB, and the White House never returned a request from Heatmap to supply the same.)
Democrats aren’t the only politicians who sign their names to their big accomplishments, however. Donald Trump took credit for COVID-19 stimulus checks, and George W. Bush’s Internal Revenue Service sent mailers to let the American people know who they could thank for their income tax refunds. But suppose America were to elect a president who happened to be especially petty and vindictive? In that case — this is, of course, hypothetical — would it be possible for the incoming president to order the removal of signs touting his predecessor’s achievements?
I ran the question by a Department of Transportation spokesperson, who told me such things are simply not done. “There has never been a request to remove project signs from the U.S. Department of Transportation, and we hope to see signage remain in communities for the lifecycle of BIL-funded projects,” the DOT spokesperson said.
Their answer implies that while such a thing would be unprecedented, it is also theoretically possible.
It’s unclear how many such signs there are, although the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law has funded more than 66,000 projects, all of which are at least eligible for a sign. Whatever the exact number is, it’d be a big and expensive hassle to remove them all. Given that much of the IRA and BIL funding has already been allocated, as well, it seems like such a demand ought to be very low on an incoming president of the United States’ list of priorities.
At least, one would think.
The Trump administration is hoping to kill the $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicle buyers, according to a Reuters report citing two anonymous sources within the Trump transition team.
That aspiration isn’t totally unexpected — President-elect Donald Trump flirted with ending the EV tax credit throughout the campaign. But it’s nonetheless our first post-election sense of how the Trump administration plans to pursue the Republican tax package that is expected to be the centerpiece of its legislating agenda.
If the EV tax credit is repealed, it would deal a significant setback to the American auto industry’s attempts to make the transition to electric vehicles. General Motors, Ford, and other legacy automakers have invested billions of dollars to build EV factories and battery plants in order to prepare for an electric future. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, the automaking industry’s trade group, has privately lobbied lawmakers to keep all of the Biden administration’s subsidies for EV production.
GM and Ford aren’t doing this just for the climate. They’re trying to compete with European and East Asian automakers that are transitioning to EVs — and will continue to transition, regardless of policy changes within the United States. BYD, the Chinese company that exclusively makes EVs, is on track this year to sell more cars globally than Ford. That’s the entire Ford line-up, not just EVs. China has reached its commanding position in the EV industry partly by offering EV consumers and companies more than $200 billion in subsidies, according to an analysis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The rollback would also be a setback for Tesla and Rivian, the two highest-profile American EV-only companies. Yet according to the same Reuters report, Tesla supports the plan to repeal the tax credit. Elon Musk has asserted in interviews that because Tesla has more experience building EVs than any other company, it would suffer least from the subsidy’s disappearance. (As the country’s No. 1 EV seller, Tesla has also likely benefited from EV tax credits — in their current and pre-Biden forms — more than any other company.) Repeal is part of Musk’s hypothesized plan to turn Tesla into a de facto monopoly, controlling the entire American EV industry.
Rivian shares have fallen 11% today, while Tesla’s are down just 5%. Ford and GM are trading flat.
The new GOP majorities in Congress hope to extend their 2017 package of tax cuts, which mostly benefit wealthy Americans. One way to pay for those tax cuts could be to repeal the tax incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s landmark climate law. The news today, then, is mostly a sign that the battle lines are being drawn in the auto industry: Much of the auto industry wants to keep the full slate of EV subsidies. Tesla wants to take them down.