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The GOP keeps searching for the next Solyndra.
If Republicans have their way, Sunnova and Solyndra are about to have more in common than just being solar companies with Pokémon-sounding names.
More than 12 years after conservatives targeted Solyndra — a scandal-plagued, now-defunct solar company that received a $535 million loan from the Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office under President Barack Obama — Republicans are attempting to run the same playbook on the rooftop solar company Sunnova, Bloomberg reported Thursday. They’ve literally said as much: “Solyndra is going to look like chump change compared to the amount of money that’s been wasted by this administration,” Wyoming Republican John Barrasso, who is leading the charge with his Senate colleague Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington, bragged in comments to reporters last month.
The Solyndra fiasco of 2011 effectively shut down the Energy Department’s loan program, which aims to finance the U.S. energy transition by backing emerging technology companies that otherwise might be considered too risky for traditional lenders. At the time, Republicans had zeroed in on Obama’s Energy Department over its approval of a loan to Solyndra, which went insolvent shortly afterward and was later discovered to have misled the department during its application process. The whole ordeal effectively gave the Loan Programs Office “Solyndra PTSD,” Jigar Shah, the current director of the office, told The Wall Street Journal last year. It wasn’t until Biden revived the LPO as one of the three pots of money fueling his climate agenda that it really started loaning in earnest again. Under the Inflation Reduction Act, its loan authority grew to over $400 billion.
And despite the high-profile failed project and goal of helping high-risk businesses, the LPO has been mostly a major success: around the same time it was backing Solyndra, the office also gave a $465 million loan to Tesla, which in turn paid back the loan with interest a full nine years early. The LPO has actually made the government almost $5 billion in interest payments, Bloomberg adds, while LPO-supported projects were responsible for producing enough clean energy to power 900,000 homes and enough fuel-efficient vehicles to displace 2.1 million gallons of gasoline in 2022, the Department of Energy reports.
All this brings us to Sunnova Energy. A rooftop solar company based out of Houston, Sunnova was approved for a $3 billion loan guarantee by the LPO last April. Since then, the company has become a target of conservatives and right-wing media personalities, who seem intent on finding a Solyndra-shaped scandal “that would aid their efforts to repeal President Joe Biden’s landmark Inflation Reduction Act and its historic $369 billion in climate and energy provisions,” Media Matters writes. The Washington Free Beacon, citing customer complaints, has alleged Sunnova scammed elderly dementia patients, while Fox News’ Jesse Watters has repeatedly gone after the company for supposedly handing away “$3 billion — billion — of your money.” (Sunnova only has a loan guarantee; money has not been distributed yet, E&E News reports).
In December, Barrasso and Rodgers wrote a letter citing the scam allegations and demanding related documents from Shah, professing a desire to learn more about “the approval of DOE’s loan guarantee.” The pair have also asked the Energy Department’s inspector general to look into whether Shah has shown favoritism to companies linked to the Cleantech Leaders Roundtable, the renewable energy organization he founded and led until he left for the Department of Energy in 2021. (Shah has denied the accusations and said he has “no role to play whatsoever in choosing who gets a loan” and that the decisions are in the hands of staff).
Beyond all this being an obvious and stated Solyndra rerun, the “increased scrutiny of the [loans] program could deter potential applicants for funding,” Bloomberg further notes, pointing out that shares of Sunnova dipped 16% in December after Barrasso and Rodgers singled the company out in their letter.
However, while analysts generally agreed that the whole situation shows the risk of becoming a political target, Pavel Molchanov of Raymond James & Associates wrote in a research note on the day of the Republicans’ December letter that “we envision minimal risk of any consequences for [Sunnova] in a substantive sense, and view today’s move as an overreaction.”
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Three companies are joining forces to add at least a gigawatt of new generation by 2029. The question is whether they can actually do it.
Two of the biggest electricity markets in the country — the 13-state PJM Interconnection, which spans the Mid-Atlantic and the Midwest, and ERCOT, which covers nearly all of Texas — want more natural gas. Both are projecting immense increases in electricity demand thanks to data centers and electrification. And both have had bouts of market weirdness and dysfunction, with ERCOT experiencing spiky prices and even blackouts during extreme weather and PJM making enormous payouts largely to gas and coal operators to lock in their “capacity,” i.e. their ability to provide power when most needed.
Now a trio of companies, including the independent power producer NRG, the turbine manufacturer GE Vernova, and a subsidiary of the construction firm Kiewit Corporation, are teaming up with a plan to bring gas-powered plants to PJM and ERCOT, the companies announced today.
The three companies said that the new joint venture “will work to advance four projects totaling over 5 gigawatts” of natural gas combined cycle plants to the two power markets, with over a gigawatt coming by 2029. The companies said that they could eventually build 10 to 15 gigawatts “and expand to other areas across the U.S.”
So far, PJM and Texas’ call for new gas has been more widely heard than answered. The power producer Calpine said last year that it would look into developing more gas in PJM, but actual investment announcements have been scarce, although at least one gas plant scheduled to close has said it would stay open.
So far, across the country, planned new additions to the grid are still overwhelmingly solar and battery storage, according to the Energy Information Administration, whose data shows some 63 gigawatts of planned capacity scheduled to be added this year, with more than half being solar and over 80% being storage.
Texas established a fund in 2023 to provide low-cost loans to new gas plants, but has had trouble finding viable projects. Engie pulled an 885 megawatt project from the program earlier this week, citing “equipment procurement constraints” and delays.
But PJM is working actively with a friendly administration in Washington to bring more natural gas to its grid. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission recently blessed a PJM plan to accelerate interconnection approvals for large generators — largely natural gas — so that it can bring them online more quickly.
But many developers and large power consumers are less than optimistic about the ability to bring new natural gas onto the grid at a pace that will keep up with demand growth, and are instead looking at “behind-the-meter” approaches to meet rising energy needs, especially from data centers. The asset manager Fortress said earlier this year that it had acquired 850 megawatts of generation capacity from APR Energy and formed a new company, fittingly named New APR Energy, which said this week that it was “deploying four mobile gas turbines providing 100MW+ of dedicated behind-the-meter power to a major U.S.-based AI hyperscaler.”
And all gas developers, whether they’re building on the grid or behind-the-meter, have to get their hands on turbines, which are in short supply. The NRG consortium called this out specifically, noting that it had secured the rights to two 7HA gas turbines by 2029. These kinds of announcements of agreements for specific turbines have become standard for companies showing their seriousness about gas development. When Chevron announced a joint venture with GE Vernova for co-located gas plants for data centers, it also noted that it had a reservation agreement for seven 7HA turbines. But until these turbines are made and installed, these announcements may all just be spin.
Featuring China, fossil fuels, and data centers.
As Republicans in Congress go hunting for ways to slash spending to carry out President Trump’s agenda, more than 100 energy businesses, trade groups, and advocacy organizations sent a letter to key House and Senate leaders on Tuesday requesting that one particular line item be spared: the hydrogen tax credit.
The tax credit “will serve as a catalyst to propel the United States to global energy dominance,” the letter argues, “while advancing American competitiveness in energy technologies that our adversaries are actively pursuing.” The Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Energy Association organized the letter, which features signatures from the American Petroleum Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Clean Energy Buyers Association, and numerous hydrogen, industrial gas, and chemical companies, among many others. Three out of the seven regional clean hydrogen hubs — the Mid-Atlantic, Heartland, and Pacific Northwest hubs — are also listed.
Out of all of the tax credits for low-carbon energy, the hydrogen subsidy, which was created by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, is among the most generous. It pays up to $3 per kilogram of hydrogen produced, depending on how emissions-intensive the process is. For context, a 15 ton-per-day plant in Georgia owned by hydrogen producer Plug Power has the potential to earn up to $45,000 per day in tax credits.
But the total price of the tax credit depends on how much clean hydrogen production takes off, and the industry is still in its infancy. When the Penn Wharton Budget Model, a research group at the University of Pennsylvania, estimated the fiscal impact of the Inflation Reduction Act, it placed the total cost for the hydrogen credit at $49 billion over 10 years, compared to more than $260 billion for renewable energy and nearly $400 billion for electric vehicles.
Tactically, Tuesday’s letter draws on all of the Trump administration’s favorite talking points. It warns that nixing the tax credit will mean ceding the hydrogen technology war to China, noting that the country now produces more than 60% of the global supply of electrolyzers — equipment that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity. It also says that hydrogen fuel cells are already being used by tech companies to power data centers.
And even though the tax credit was designed specifically to subsidize “clean” hydrogen, the letter mostly ignores this distinction, painting hydrogen production as an extension of the U.S. fossil fuel industry. Oil and gas companies have the infrastructure, workforce, and supply chains to lead the global hydrogen economy, it says. It points out that hydrogen can be produced from “natural gas, biogas, biomethane, as well as any electricity source (i.e. nuclear energy),” but does not mention wind, solar, or geothermal.
Investment in the nascent hydrogen industry was essentially on hold for more than two years while companies eager to take advantage of the tax credit waited for the Biden administration to finalize eligibility rules. But even after Biden’s Treasury Department published those rules in early January, how the Trump administration will view the program remained uncertain. “Our industry is now poised to invest billions of dollars in deployments and manufacturing facilities across the country,” the letter says. “However, that private sector investment is at risk due to the uncertainty around this crucial incentive … We need to ensure that we do not miss this hydrogen moment and respectfully request that you maintain the Section 45V tax credit.”
Intense debate and controversy surrounded the development of the rules for claiming the tax credit, and while the Biden administration tried to strike a compromise, some in the industry still found the rules too strict. I asked the Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Energy Association whether it wanted Congress to make any changes to the tax credit or to simply preserve it but hadn’t heard back as of publication time.
But some of the signatories have already expressed their intent to request changes. In December, the American Petroleum Institute sent a memo to the incoming Treasury Department outlining its key priorities and “asks.” It says the Biden administration’s hydrogen tax credit rules were “overly restrictive and raised concerns about qualifying pathways for natural gas.”
Core inflation is up, meaning that interest rates are unlikely to go down anytime soon.
The Fed on Wednesday issued a report showing substantial increases in the price of eggs, used cars, and auto insurance — data that could spell bad news for the renewables economy.
Though some of those factors had already been widely reported on, the overall rise in prices exceeded analysts’ expectations. With overall inflation still elevated — reaching an annual rate of 3%, while “core” inflation, stripping out food and energy, rose to 3.3%, after an unexpectedly sharp 0.4% jump in January alone — any prospect of substantial interest rate cuts from the Federal Reserve has dwindled even further.
Renewable energy development is especially sensitive to higher interest rates. That’s because renewables projects, like wind turbines and solar panels, have to incur the overwhelming majority of their lifetime costs before they start operating and generating revenue. Developers then often fund much of the project through borrowed money that’s secured against an agreement to buy the resulting power. When the cost of borrowing money goes up, projects become less viable, with lower prospective returns sometimes causing investors not to go forward .
High interest rates have plagued the renewables economy for years. “As interest rates rise, all of a sudden, solar assets that are effectively bonds become less valuable,” Quinn Pasloske, a managing director at Greenbacker, a renewable investor and operating company, told me on Tuesday, describing how the stream of payments from a solar project becomes less valuable as rates rise because investors can get more from risk-free government bonds.
The new inflation data is “consistent with our call of an extended Fed pause, with only one rate cut in 2025, happening in June,” Morgan Stanley economists wrote in a note to clients. Bond traders are also projecting just a single cut for the rest of the year — but not until December.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told the Senate Banking committee Tuesday, “We think our policy rate is in a good place, and we don’t see any reason to be in a hurry to reduce it further.”
The yield for the 10-year Treasury bond, often used as a benchmark for the cost of credit, is up 0.09% today, to 4.63%. While this is below where yields peaked in mid-January, it’s a level still well above where yields have been for almost all of the last year. When Treasury yields rise, the cost of credit throughout the economy goes up.
Clean energy stocks were down this morning — but so is the overall market. Because while high interest rates are especially bad for renewables, they’re not exactly great for anyone else.