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Federal regulators are joining forces on a fresh effort to go after solar energy scams and help the public parse potentially deceptive business practices in the industry.
Treasury Department officials said Wednesday they will soon release a consumer advisory warning against deceptive sales practices, officials said at a public event featuring leaders at Treasury as well as the Federal Trade Commission and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. These agencies are also releasing a slew of documents to help American consumers gauge whether solar marketers are legitimate and encourage people to report any potential fraudulent behavior in the sector to come forward to the government for potential inquiry.
Solar energy fraud at the residential consumer level is a rare but profoundly painful phenomenon that can acutely harm low- and middle-income households. At the public event announcing the move, officials said they took this step after seeing a rising amount of consumer losses due to frauds and predatory behavior in the household solar space. More than a quarter of a billion dollars in solar-related fraud has been reported between January 2022 and June of this year, FTC Chair Lina Khan said. The Internal Revenue Service issued a warning in July against new efforts by fraudsters to cite the Inflation Reduction Act in predatory pitches.
As Treasury Deputy Secretary Wally Adeyemo said at the event, any time a major law passes and unleashes federal dollars to support consumers, you will “have people trying to take advantage” – but “like in most industries, these bad actors represent a small number of solar companies.”
CFPB Director Rohit Chopra, meanwhile, sounded a note of concern. “I’m really worried about this,” he said, pointing to the 2007-2008 subprime mortgage crisis and saying these behaviors pose the risk of “undermin[ing] the growth and development of residential solar programs in our country.”
Chopra pointed to a specific business practice regulators that can be concerning: sales quotas and commissions. “Sometimes when those are set in unreasonable ways, it can create the conditions where people who are on the frontlines selling these products go too far.”
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Voltpost announced two new models today designed to mount on walls and ceilings.
Voltpost, the company putting electric vehicle chargers on lampposts, is now expanding to parking garages.
On Wednesday, the company unveiled two new configurations that can attach to the walls and ceilings of parking garages, lots, and other locations without easy access to streetlights or utility poles. Like Voltpost’s signature pole-mounted design, the ceiling- and wall-mounted options avoid the expensive construction work required by freestanding charging infrastructure. In theory at least, that should allow the company to deploy more chargers faster.
“Our mission has always been to decarbonize mobility by democratizing charging access,” Jeff Prosserman, Voltpost’s co-founder and CEO, told me. “And the real value proposition is that, when you can leverage the existing infrastructure, you can significantly reduce the cost, the timeline, and the physical footprint of chargers.”
The second Trump administration hasn’t made things easy. Almost immediately after taking office, Trump officials began slashing Biden-era programs designed to support the EV charging buildout, including the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure and Charging and Fueling Infrastructure programs. Along with a handful of environmental groups, 17 states sued in May of last year to force the federal government to release NEVI funding and quickly received a preliminary injunction unfreezing the program. A similar group sued in December over the CFI funding, and though that case is still pending, Prosserman told me he expects to see a positive resolution before the end of the year.
Though the death of the EV tax credit has shrunk its addressable market, Voltpost has emerged relatively unscathed. “Honestly, that doesn’t really impact us at all,” Prosserman told Heatmap’s Katie Brigham last year. “At the end of the day, EV adoption will either increase X or Y percent in a given year, but it’s going to continue to increase year over year. We’re past the tipping point, going from early adopters into the mainstream.”
That said, he also told Katie that the company was taking a “more conservative approach” to growth as climate tech investment dried up. Voltpost itself also received several federal grants that are still in limbo. Instead, the company focused on its strategic partnerships with the likes of AT&T and Zipcar, and in July signed an agreement with InCharge Energy to handle installation and maintenance. To date, Voltpost’s funders include RWE Energy Transition Investments, a private equity vehicle within German energy giant RWE, alongside Twynam Funds Management, Exelon Foundation, Good News Ventures, and Climate Capital.
Like its lamppost chargers, Voltpost’s wall- and ceiling-mount kits work with Tesla and non-Tesla vehicles alike, and come with demand management software that responds to electricity time-of-use price signals to enable cheaper charging where and when possible. As for the cost of the kits and how many the company plans to install initially, Prosserman wouldn’t say.
Since deploying its first lamppost chargers in New York in 2024, Voltpost has expanded into California, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C., among other states. It has more than 100 deployments in the pipeline through the end of this year, and is aiming for 10,000 by 2030. The point, Prosserman told me, is not to stand out in these communities, but rather to fit in.
“It’s not going to be just about greenfield project development if we’re going to decarbonize a planet across all aspects,” Prosserman said. “We’re really looking at building something that’s integrated, that fits in the fabric of the built environment and communities.”
A proposed change in how the agency implements an obscure Cold War-era law would impose onerous reporting requirements on renewables and pipelines.
Democrats in Congress claim that a new Trump administration proposal will have a chilling effect on the energy sector by subjecting renewables and fossil fuel pipelines alike to an obscure, rarely cited Cold War-era law requiring detailed information on foreign farmland ownership be submitted to the Agriculture Department.
In late June, the Agriculture Department released a proposal to change implementation of the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act of 1978, which requires companies to provide information to the federal government on foreign investors in farmland holdings, acquisitions, and sales. If finalized, the new rule would expand the definition of “agricultural land” in regulation to include all renewable energy facilities and pipeline corridors by explicitly tying the term to those industries’ formal codes under the North American Industry Classification System.
Top Senate Democrats on Monday argued that taken together with expanded investor reporting thresholds and land boundary mapping requirements, this rule change “may exceed what is necessary” to deal with national security issues around farmland ownership.
One of the letter’s signatories, Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman, has previously joined the GOP in railing against foreign companies purchasing U.S. farmland as a potential national security concern. And indeed, there certainly exists a broader bipartisan anxiety around Chinese influence on essential industries, e.g. mining and critical minerals. That Fetterman is now joining climate hawks Martin Heinrich and Sheldon Whitehouse in opposing the administration’s move is a striking moment of unity, especially as Fetterman bats away beltway rumors that he’ll flip parties.
The letter demands a briefing from the Agriculture Department that includes the proposal’s “anticipated impacts on the energy, infrastructure, and agricultural sectors,” as well as the legal basis for changing its definition of “agricultural land.”
“[W]e are concerned that USDA’s proposed rule may exceed what is necessary to address those objectives, have unintended national security consequences, and may create substantial compliance burdens on agricultural producers, landowners, infrastructure operators, energy developers, and investors that could undermine efforts to address rising energy and food prices without a corresponding national security benefit,” the letter reads.
As I have previously written, the USDA is an increasingly vital organ in the Trump administration’s war on renewable energy projects, and focusing its laser beam at project development on what it calls “prime” farmland. Trump also recently tapped country music star John Rich to be his “special envoy for American landowners,” which directly led to the USDA working with people fighting solar on farmland in upstate New York.
The Trump change goes after pipelines as well as renewable energy, although logic suggests that solar development could be more vulnerable due to the sheer acreage often required for utility-scale project construction and property setbacks.
The Agriculture Department responded to my request for comment with a statement: “As Secretary [Brooke] Rollins has noted before, the regulations governing the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act of 1978 are extremely outdated and need to be updated to better reflect today’s conditions. USDA looks forward to considering all public comments before finalizing the rule.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include the statement from USDA.
Americans paid $217 on average for electricity last month, according to Heatmap and MIT’s Electricity Price Hub.
July is typically the season of high electricity bills, and this year is no exception.
Nationally, the average electricity bill spiked to $217, an all-time high, according to new data from Heatmap and MIT’s Electricity Price Hub. That’s up from $177 in June, and $215 last July. Meanwhile, electricity rates were 19 cents per kilowatt-hour, virtually unchanged from June and slightly higher than July of last year.
Throughout the country, many ratepayers are seeing higher costs and charges in the portion of their bill covering the cost of power generation.
Once again, some of the most notable electricity price and bill trends were seen in the mid-Atlantic region, the heart of the data center boom and the anchor area of the PJM Interconnection. The region also includes Virginia, where Florida utility and energy developer NextEra is attempting to acquire the commonwealth’s dominant utility, Dominion.
In July, Dominion customers saw typical generation charges rise to $155 a month, up from $124 a year ago. Overall bills for Dominion customers were about $259 this past month.
The higher bills are in part due to the “fuel charge rider” that went into effect this past month to help recover about $1 billion in additional generation costs claimed by the utility. Those charges stem in part from higher fuel costs this past winter, when natural gas prices spiked to their highest level since the winter of 2022-23, Dominion officials said in a filing to the state’s utilities regulator. The MIT researchers estimate that the fuel charge added around $53 to July bills, up $12 from July of last year.
In neighboring Delaware, bills were $216 a month in July, a record high, while prices were around 19 cents per kilowatt-hour. Customers of the state’s main utility, Delmarva Power, saw a near 20% hike in the supply charge in their standard service offerings, as prices rose from around 16 cents per kilowatt-hour from last year.
The Delaware Public Service Commission voted at the beginning of last month to allow an interim rate increase of about $3 per month for the typical customer, which went into effect July 9. Soon after, Delaware Governor Matt Meyer signed a law giving the state’s regulators more discretion to reject putting certain utility costs into the rate base and thus limit subsequent price hikes requested by utilities. The governor’s office described the law as a mechanism “to prioritize prudent spending over unchecked cost recovery.”