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Sparks

The Biden Administration Is Unleashing $20 Billion for Green Banks

Yet another Inflation Reduction Act program launches today.

Money and cute critters.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Vice President Kamala Harris and EPA administrator Michael Regan are in Charlotte, North Carolina this morning to announce the award of … wait for it … $20 billion dollars for climate mitigation and adaptation projects. This is the official launch of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $27 billion program that was part of the Inflation Reduction Act — in fact, it is the single largest and most flexible program in the IRA. (The remaining $7 billion is earmarked for “Solar for All,” a separate initiative that will launch later this year.)

The money will go to eight organizations and help “create a national clean financing network for clean energy and climate solutions.” The awardees include:

  • The Coalition for Green Capital, a nonprofit that got $5 billion to help leverage a network of green lenders. More than 50% of its work under the grant will be aimed at low-income communities.
  • Rewiring America, which will share a $2 billion award with four other housing and community-building groups, including Enterprise Community Partners, LISC (Local Initiatives Support Corporation), Habitat for Humanity, and United Way to create a national financing program to decarbonize housing. The initiative will focus 75% of its investments in low-income and disadvantaged communities.
  • Community Preservation Corporation, a U.S. Treasury Department-certified community development financial institution and part of an umbrella coalition known as the Climate United Fund. Together with other nonprofit financial institutions, it will receive nearly $7 billion to lend to traditionally underserved populations, including rural and Tribal communities.

The general idea is to funnel the money into green lending programs, colloquially known as “green banks,” that will offer low-cost loans and other financing options for consumers, community organizations, businesses, and local governments. Projects financed through the fund could do everything from residential electrification, to green public transit, to solar on schools, to storm water management.

EPA anticipates the awardees will mobilize $7 of private capital for every $1 of federal funds — a total investment of nearly $150 billion. Each of the winners will get access to their share of the funding in the next six months, and will have until 2031 to use it.

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Sparks

Meta’s Major AI Energy Buildout

CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed the company’s expanding ambitions in a Threads post on Monday.

Electrical outlets and a computer chip
Justin Renteria/Getty Images

Meta is going big to power its ever-expanding artificial intelligence ambitions. It’s not just spending hundreds of millions of dollars luring engineers and executives from other top AI labs (including reportedly hundreds of millions of dollars for one engineer alone), but also investing hundreds of billions of dollars for data centers at the multi-gigawatt scale.

“Meta is on track to be the first lab to bring a 1GW+ supercluster online,” Meta founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote on the company’s Threads platform Monday, confirming a recent report by the semiconductor and artificial intelligence research service Semianalysis that

That first gigawatt-level project, Semianalysis wrote, will be a data center in New Albany, Ohio, called Prometheus, due to be online in 2026, Ashley Settle, a Meta spokesperson, confirmed to me. Ohio — and New Albany specifically — is the home of several large data center projects, including an existing Meta facility.

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Trump Says He’s Going to Slap a Huge Tariff on Copper

“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%.”

Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

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“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%,” he told reporters.

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Trump Will ‘Deal’ with Wind and Solar Tax Credits in Megabill, GOP Congressman Says

“We had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them.”

Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

A member of the House Freedom Caucus said Wednesday that he voted to advance President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after receiving assurances that Trump would “deal” with the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits – raising the specter that Trump could try to go further than the megabill to stop usage of the credits.

Representative Ralph Norman, a Republican of North Carolina, said that while IRA tax credits were once a sticking point for him, after meeting with Trump “we had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them in his own way,” he told Eric Garcia, the Washington bureau chief of The Independent. Norman specifically cited tax credits for wind and solar energy projects, which the Senate version would phase out more slowly than House Republicans had wanted.

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