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Temperatures aren’t supposed to get nearly as low as winter 2021. The doesn’t mean folks aren’t worried.
Winter has begun to arrive in Texas. In the panhandle, temperatures are expected to get as low as 22 degrees Fahrenheit on Monday, while the National Weather Service forecast office in Amarillo told residents to brace themselves for Tuesday, when “temperatures will plummet to some 20 to 30 degrees below normal.” The more populous parts of the state can expect more cold weather later this week and next; in Austin, lows could dip below freezing by Sunday and into next week, while in Dallas, the thermometer could reach down to 25 this weekend. Austin could have ice, possibly leading to snarled traffic and the occasional downed power line thanks to a gliding car.
None of this is any match for Winter Storm Uri, which paralyzed the state in February 2021, causing a multi-day blackout that killed more than 200 people. But any winter cold stretch in Texas will bring up questions about how the state’s unique electricity system will handle it. “It’s deep in the Texas psyche now, and anytime it gets really hot or really cold the grid is front of mind,” said Joshua Rhodes, a research scientist at the University of Texas.
The vast majority of Texas is on its own electric grid, and the state’s electricity market for businesses and households is far less regulated than anywhere else in the country — Texas households have more options about where they can purchase electricity from, for instance, and the offerings tend to be less standardized.While Texas does typically have low electricity prices, the system can also lead to massive spikes in what households pay. After Uri, when some customers who did still have power faced charges in the five figures, utilities regulators capped prices at $5,000 per megawatt hour.
As in much of the South, Texan households are more like to use electricity to heat their homes, which makes a blackout during a prolonged cold snap extra deadly. The failures during Uri triggered a slew of reports and investigations into what happened and who profited from it. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission found a lack of weatherization across the board, but especially in the natural gas system, which was behind 87% of all generation outages, some due to distribution failures and others due to power production issues. There were wind outages, as well, thanks to iced turbine blades.
“ERCOT” — the Texas electricity authority — “says they’re ready, but they say they’re ready all the time,” said Ed Hirs, an energy economist and lecturer at the University of Houston. “There’s a credibility issue.”
There has been substantial winterization across the entire system since Uri, Rhodes said. Considering the expected lows will be around 12 degrees higher this week than they were during Uri, Rhodes added, “if any power trips offline for temperature issues, then that would worry me because that means we haven’t done our jobs.”
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But ... how?
President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday rocked the energy world when he promised “fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals” for “Any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America,” in a post on Truth Social Tuesday.
“GET READY TO ROCK!!!” he added.
Trump has frequently derided regulatory barriers to development, including in his announcements of various economic and policy roles in his upcoming administration. His designee for Secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum, for instance, will also head a
National Energy Council that will “oversee the path to U.S. ENERGY DOMINANCE by cutting red tape … by focusing on INNOVATION over longstanding, but totally unnecessary, regulation.”
When Trump
announced his nomination of Lee Zeldin to head the Environmental Protection Agency, he said Zeldin would “ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American business.”
Current interpretations of existing laws dictate that any project constituting a major federal action (e.g. one that uses public lands) must be reviewed under the National Environmental Policy Act, the country’s signature permitting law. Federal courts are often asked in litigation to sign off on whether that review process — although not the outcome — was sufficient.
Regardless of any changes Trump may make to the federal regulatory system as president, that infrastructure is already in flux. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals recently issued a ruling that throws into doubt decades of NEPA enforcement. Also on Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard a separate case on the limits of NEPA as it relates to aproposed rail line expansion to transport oil from Utah’s Uinta Basin to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. Although the court is unlikely to issue a decision until next year, its current membership has shown itself plenty willing to scrap longstanding precedent in the name of cutting the regulatory state down to size.
Trump did not support his announcement with any additional materials laying out the legal authorities he plans to exercise to exempt these projects from regulation or proposed legislation, but it already attracted criticism from environmentalists, with the Sierra Club describing it as a “plan to sell out communities and environment to the highest bidder.It’s also unclear whether Trump was referring to foreign direct investment in the United States, of which there was $177 billion in 2022,according to the Department of Commerce.
Trump’s appointed co-deregulator-in-chief, for one, approved of his message today. “This is awesome 🚀🇺🇸,” Elon Musk wrote on X in response.
Companies are racing to finish the paperwork on their Department of Energy loans.
Of the over $13 billion in loans and loan guarantees that the Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office has made under Biden, nearly a third of that funding has been doled out in the month since the presidential election. And of the $41 billion in conditional commitments — agreements to provide a loan once the borrower satisfies certain preconditions — that proportion rises to nearly half. That includes some of the largest funding announcements in the office’s history: more than $7.5 billion to StarPlus Energy for battery manufacturing, $4.9 billion to Grain Belt Express for a transmission project, and nearly $6.6 billion to the electric vehicle company Rivian to support its new manufacturing facility in Georgia.
The acceleration represents a clear push by the outgoing Biden administration to get money out the door before President-elect Donald Trump, who has threatened to hollow out much of the Department of Energy, takes office. Still, there’s a good chance these recent conditional commitments won’t become final before the new administration takes office, as that process involves checking a series of nontrivial boxes that include performing due diligence, addressing or mitigating various project risks, and negotiating financing terms. And if the deals aren’t finalized before Trump takes office, they’re at risk of being paused or cancelled altogether, something the DOE considers unwise, to put it lightly.
“It would be irresponsible for any government to turn its back on private sector partners, states, and communities that are benefiting from lower energy costs and new economic opportunities spurred by LPO’s investments,” a spokesperson wrote to me in an email.
The once nearly dormant LPO has had a renaissance under the Biden administration and the office’s current director, Jigar Shah. The Inflation Reduction Act supercharged its lending authority to $400 billion, from just $40 billion when Biden took office. Then a week after the election, the office announced that it had recalibrated its risk estimates for the loan guarantees that it makes under the Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment program, which works to modernize and repurpose existing energy infrastructure to make it cleaner and more energy efficient. As the office explained, these projects “may reflect a relatively moderate risk profile in comparison to typical projects LPO finances with higher project risk.” When there’s less risk involved, LPO doesn’t have to set aside as much money to cover a possible default, which in this case has allowed the office to more than quadruple its funding for qualifying projects.
It’s not just that LPO staffers are working fast, though that’s part of it — it’s also that loan beneficiaries have picked up their pace in responding to the LPO. As Shah emphasized today at the LPO’s second annual Demonstrate Deploy Decarbonize conference, finalizing conditional commitments largely depends on companies getting their ducks in a row as quickly as possible. “I do think that right now borrowers are sufficiently motivated to move more quickly than they have probably a year ago,” Shah said. “It's up to the borrowers. Our process hasn’t changed. Their ability to move through it faster is in their control.”
Shah noted that though timelines may be accelerating, the office’s due diligence procedures have remained the same. Thus far, the project that has moved the fastest from a conditional commitment to a finalized loan was for a clean hydrogen and energy storage facility in Utah. That took 43 days, and there are 46 left in Biden’s presidency. Let’s see what the LPO can do.
The expanded investment tax credit rules are out.
In the waning days of the Biden administration, the Treasury Department is dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on the tax rules that form the heart of the Inflation Reduction Act and its climate strategy. Today, Treasury has released final rules for the Section 48 Investment Tax Credit, which gives project owners (and/or their tax equity partners) 30% back on their investments in clean energy production.
The IRA-amended investment tax credit, plus its sibling production tax credit, are updates and expansion on tax policies that have been in place for decades supporting largely the solar and wind industries. To be clear, today’s announcement does not contain the final rules for the so-called “technology-neutral” clean electricity tax credits established under the IRA, which will supercede the existing investment and production tax credits beginning next year and for which all non-carbon emitting sources of energy can qualify.
But projects that begin construction this year can still qualify for and claim the legacy credits, which were expanded by the Inflation Reduction Act to include things like standalone energy storage. Projects that go into service this year would only be eligible for the legacy credits, while a project that begins construction this year and goes into service next year or later could choose between the legacy credits or the tech neutral credits, but not both.
The proposed rules, released in November of last year, set off a flurry of campaigning and lobbying by the industry, seeking adjustments to their favor. The final regulations largely hew to the earlier release, although they do include clarifications on what precise aspects of an energy system qualify for the credits. Under the final rules, for instance the “upgrading equipment” necessary for “cleaning and conditioning” biogas — i.e. removing other gases to make it a pure gas stream — can qualify for the credit.
Going into the end of the year, the major items left on the Treasury Department’s agenda were the tech neutral tax credits, rules for the advanced manufacturing tax credit, and rules for credits related to the production of clean hydrogen; advanced manufacturing tax credit rules came out in late October. While the Biden Treasury is doing its best to get rules out the door before Donald Trump’s inauguration, the fate of all clean energy tax credits is up in the air as Republicans prepare take power in Washington and start carving up the IRA, whether by “sledgehammer” or by “scalpel.”