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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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The Federal Reserve raised the federal funds rate by a quarter point, the central bank announced Wednesday afternoon, its first rate change since Chairman Kevin Warsh took his seat in May and its first rate hike in over three years.
The federal funds rate will now sit between 3.75% and 4%. According to projections by regional Federal Reserve presidents and members of the Board of Governors, the central bank expects to hike rates one more time this year.
In its now characteristically brief statements, the Federal Open Market Committee said that the hike “will support a timelier return to the Committee's 2 percent goal” for inflation. Inflation is currently running at 3.4% and has been above the Fed’s 2% target since 2021.
The FOMC’s (brief) statement explaining the hike pointed to “resilient” domestic spending and “robust” capital investment. It characterized the economy as “expanding at a solid pace,” albeit with “elevated” uncertainty due to “geopolitical developments.”
This combination of factors — high oil prices due to the partial shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz and high investment in data centers — have helped push up yields on Treasury bonds, which helped maneuver the Federal Reserve into its rate hike. These rising Treasury yields have made raising capital more difficult for sectors besides artificial intelligence, very much including the capital-intensive renewable and clean energy industries.
Warsh attributed higher Treasury yields to “economic strength, competition for capital, and geopolitics,” in his press conference following the rate announcement. The yield on the 10-year treasury bond, often used as a benchmark for the cost of money throughout the economy, rose to over 5% on the news, the highest level since 2007.
The August Electricity Price Hub data is in.
It’s another hot and expensive summer.
Across the country, average household electricity bills are up 2.7% in the first eight months of the year, according to the latest update to Heatmap and MIT’s Electricity Price Hub, tacking on $4 per month to the typical bill. This level of rise is consistent with the pace set in 2024 and 2025, but faster than 2021 and 2023.
As we’ve discussed before, some of the fastest growth in prices comes either in the Atlantic Seaboard — with Washington, D.C., Virginia, and New Jersey all having year over year growth rates of at least 7.5% — thanks largely to increased demand and capacity payments in the PJM Interconnection marketplace. Another standout so far this year is Hawaii, which is uniquely dependent on imported oil to power its grid and has seen its 12-month trailing average prices rise by over 8% so far this year.
California, which is well known for seeing especially sharp price increases in recent years largely due to wildfire-related costs, has seen somewhat restrained bill growth so far this year across the state, with the 12-month-rolling average bill rising just 3% in the past 12 months and prices going up 4%. (That price level is still quite high, however, at almost 32 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared to a national average of around 19.)
Rates charged by Southern California Edison, one of the state’s big three investor-owned utilities, are up almost 15% in the past year, averaged across its baseline regions. The MIT researchers attribute this increase to two major factors: one, a decrease in the California Climate Credit, which is paid out to electricity customers from the state’s emissions cap-and-invest program. This year, the credit for Southern California Edison ratepayers is $72, applied to bills in July and August in tranches of $36. Last year, by contrast, Southern California Edison handed out $112 in two tranches, April and October.
The second factor in Southern California Edison’s inflated bills is an increase in the fixed charge portion of the bills ratepayers receive. Following changes in California state law designed to distribute the cost of the grid more equitably, SCE revamped its rate structure at the end of last year to include a “Base Services Charge” of $24 per month for customers not enrolled in any special rate program. At the same time, SCE instituted a roughly 10% decrease in its per-kilowatt-hour electricity rate in order to protect lower-income ratepayers (who would pay a fixed charge substantially lower than the baseline $24). PG&E moved to a similar system earlier this year.
When it introduced the new rates in November of last year, SCE said that “medium energy users” would likely see little change in their bills. Price Hub data suggests, however, that the typical household has seen a bill increase from the new service charge of 13%, even before accounting for the smaller climate credit.
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.”