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One of the most vulnerable states in the U.S. wants nothing to do with “climate change.”
The Biden administration loves a hub. There are the hydrogen hubs, the direct air capture hubs, and now there are the tech hubs. Established as a part of the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, the $10 billion program has so far seeded 12 such hubs across the country. Four of these are focused on clean energy and sustainability, and one is located in the great state of Florida, which recently passed legislation essentially deleting the words “climate change” from state law.
The South Florida ClimateReady Tech Hub did not, in the end, eliminate climate from its name. But while Governor Ron DeSantis might not approve, the federal government didn’t seem to mind, as the Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration awarded the hub $19.5 million to “advance its global leadership in sustainable and resilient infrastructure.”
“Regardless of how you feel about the word climate or the words climate change, what I have found in this process is what deeply resonates with folks is that their relationship with water is changing,” Francesca de Quesada Covey, chief of economic innovation and development for Miami-Dade County, told me.
Sea levels around Florida have risen about 8 inches since 1950, and the rate of rise is only accelerating, putting the state’s extensive, low-lying coastlines at high risk for flooding and, eventually, total submersion. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that by 2100, average sea levels will have risen between 1.4 and 2.8 feet, with more drastic scenarios possible if little is done to curb emissions.
Covey, who grew up in Miami, said everyone agrees there are simply more puddles and flooded roads to navigate than when she was a kid. “So there is an understanding that regardless of how you think it happened, or why you think it happened, that our everyday life is harder because the environment around us is changing.”
This narrative, she believes, can help form a basis of bipartisan support for Florida’s hub, which she told me has three technical focus areas: limiting coastal hazards due to sea level rise and extreme weather events, implementing energy efficient technologies, and building resilient structures using low-carbon concrete and cement. South Florida, Covey said, is the perfect place to undertake these projects, as the state has been investing in climate adaptation and mitigation since 1992, when Hurricane Andrew touched down in Miami-Dade County, causing $25 billion in damages. Since then, she says the state’s universities have been churning out climate tech intellectual property.
“We’re seeing the IP grow 10% year-over-year over the last few years,” Covey said. Nine colleges and universities are tech hub partners, with the bulk of the funding going to Florida International University, which will receive $10.3 million to help scale up low-carbon concrete tech, establish an infrastructure innovation center, and improve upon industry building codes and standards. Miami Tech Works, which aims to build a pipeline of tech talent in South Florida, is set to receive $6 million for workforce development programs while the Miami-Dade County government will get $3.2 million for governance and oversight. Two private companies working on advanced concrete products, Titan America and Carbon Limit, are also getting a portion of the FIU funding — $740,000 for Carbon Limit and an undisclosed amount for Titan.
Tim Sperry, CEO of Carbon Limit, is used to getting questions about why he based his early-stage startup out of Florida, his home state. “Great that you guys are a climate tech company, but why would you be in South Florida?” Sperry said people wonder. “Florida at all was a bad look for climate tech companies until this hub actually came together,” he told me. Since the hub was initially announced last October, Sperry says he’s seen more money for climate tech flowing into the state.
Carbon Limit has a patented powder additive for concrete mixes, which enhances concrete’s natural ability to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere and sequester it permanently, thereby reducing the carbon intensity of built infrastructure such as buildings and roads. So far the company has worked with the Minnesota Department of Transportation to pave a section of interstate highway, and with Google to pave a portion of its campus. Carbon Limit raised a $1 million pre-seed round two years ago, and its business model revolves around licensing the formula for its additive to concrete producers.
Sperry sees Florida as “ground zero” for climate-related natural disasters, and thus a natural home for this type of technology. When he worked in Miami, he saw people kayaking down the streets during king tides, and found crabs in his office after floods. “They actually raised the road four feet and put pumps and did all this stuff down there. So I think, why shouldn’t it be South Florida?” he asked, “Short of the government stuff …”
Ah yes, the government stuff. While DeSantis hasn’t weighed in publicly on the ClimateReady Tech Hub, Covey said the state’s DeSantis-appointed Chief Resilience Officer, Wesley Brooks, is supportive. Brooks helped craft the “state support” section of the hub’s application, which calls the Office of Resilience “an advocate for the Hub and an ally in providing technical guidance to local governments.”
Climate tech startups can’t eat guidance, however. If the hub is going to accomplish its lofty technical and workforce development goals, it’s going to need a lot more than $19.5 million, and a lack of state-level support could make securing additional funds that much more difficult.
“We requested $70 million,” Covey told me, the maximum amount of federal funding that tech hubs could apply for. Most of the other hubs received between $40 million and $50 million, putting the South Florida hub at the small end of the bunch. Covey said the county didn’t receive feedback as to why. “The way that we’re looking at $19.5 [million] is that this is our first investment tranche. We will be going back to the federal government. We will be going back to private funders. We will be going back to philanthropic funders in order to achieve our metrics,” she told me.
Ultimately, Miami-Dade County wants to leverage the ClimateReady Tech Hub to create 23,000 green jobs with an average base salary of $87,000 over a 10-year period. Thus far, Miami-Dade has raised an additional $500,000 — not nothing, but far from its ultimate goal of raising another $50 million. The increasing probability of a Trump win in November could put future federal funding for the hub at the whims of a notoriously mercurial and climate-adverse cabinet.
But if the tech hub does achieve its goals, Covey estimates the payoff will be huge, adding $41 billion to the region’s GDP. Given all the growth South Florida has seen over the last four years, with entrepreneurs and venture capitalists flooding into the region during the pandemic, Covey thinks the hub’s got a real shot of securing the money it needs. She even told me she views South Florida as “the most competitive place when it comes to climate technology.”
When I noted that the San Francisco Bay Area might beg to differ, Covey emphasized how much it matters that Miami-Dade County is experiencing the impacts of climate change in real time. “The Bay Area doesn’t have those sort of real life testing conditions that we have here. We have $3.5 trillion exposed to climate change right now,” she told me, citing a figure from a National Wildlife Federation report showing that out of all the cities in the world, Miami stands to lose the most from coastal flooding. In other words, in South Florida climate tech isn’t a matter of theoretical tinkering and ideating. As Covey says, “Our economy depends on it.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the name of the chief of economic innovation and development for Miami-Dade County and the target average salary for new jobs created by the hub.
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“We had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them.”
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.
It’s not entirely clear what the president could do to unilaterally “deal with” tax credits already codified into law. Norman declined to answer direct questions from reporters about whether GOP holdouts like himself were seeking an executive order on the matter. But another Republican holdout on the bill, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, told reporters Wednesday that his vote was also conditional on blocking IRA “subsidies.”
“If the subsidies will flow, we’re not gonna be able to get there. If the subsidies are not gonna flow, then there might be a path," he said, according to Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News.
As of publication, Roy has still not voted on the rule that would allow the bill to proceed to the floor — one of only eight Republicans yet to formally weigh in. House Speaker Mike Johnson says he’ll, “keep the vote open for as long as it takes,” as President Trump aims to sign the giant tax package by the July 4th holiday. Norman voted to let the bill proceed to debate, and will reportedly now vote yes on it too.
Earlier Wednesday, Norman said he was “getting a handle on” whether his various misgivings could be handled by Trump via executive orders or through promises of future legislation. According to CNN, the congressman later said, “We got clarification on what’s going to be enforced. We got clarification on how the IRAs were going to be dealt with. We got clarification on the tax cuts — and still we’ll be meeting tomorrow on the specifics of it.”
Neither Norman nor Roy’s press offices responded to a request for comment.
The foreign entities of concern rules in the One Big Beautiful Bill would place gigantic new burdens on developers.
Trump campaigned on cutting red tape for energy development. At the start of his second term, he signed an executive order titled, “Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation,” promising to kill 10 regulations for each new one he enacted.
The order deems federal regulations an “ever-expanding morass” that “imposes massive costs on the lives of millions of Americans, creates a substantial restraint on our economic growth and ability to build and innovate, and hampers our global competitiveness.” It goes on to say that these regulations “are often difficult for the average person or business to understand,” that they are so complicated that they ultimately increase the cost of compliance, as well as the risks of non-compliance.
Reading this now, the passage echoes the comments I’ve heard from industry groups and tax law experts describing the incredibly complex foreign entities of concern rules that Congress — with the full-throated backing of the Trump administration — is about to impose on clean energy projects and manufacturers. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, wind and solar, as well as utility-scale energy storage, geothermal, nuclear, and all kinds of manufacturing projects will have to abide by restrictions on their Chinese material inputs and contractual or financial ties with Chinese entities in order to qualify for tax credits.
“Foreign entity of concern” is a U.S. government term referring to entities that are “owned by, controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction or direction of” any of four countries — Russia, Iran, North Korea, and most importantly for clean energy technology, China.
Trump’s tax bill requires companies to meet increasingly strict limits on the amount of material from China they use in their projects and products. A battery factory starting production next year, for example, would have to ensure that 60% of the value of the materials that make up its products have no connection to China. By 2030, the threshold would rise to 85%. The bill lays out similar benchmarks and timelines for clean electricity projects, as well as other kinds of manufacturing.
But how companies should calculate these percentages is not self-evident. The bill also forbids companies from collecting the tax credits if they have business relationships with “specified foreign entities” or “foreign-influenced entities,” terms with complicated definitions that will likely require guidance from the Treasury for companies to be sure they pass the test.
Regulatory uncertainty could stifle development until further guidance is released, but how long that takes will depend on if and when the Trump administration prioritizes getting it done. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act contains a lot of other new tax-related provisions that were central to the Trump campaign, including a tax exemption for tips, which are likely much higher on the department’s to-do list.
Tax credit implementation was a top priority for the Biden administration, and even with much higher staffing levels than the department currently has, it took the Treasury 18 months to publish initial guidance on foreign entities of concern rules for the Inflation Reduction Act’s electric vehicle tax credit. “These things are so unbelievably complicated,” Rachel McCleery, a former senior advisor at the Treasury under Biden, told me.
McCleery questioned whether larger, publicly-owned companies would be able to proceed with major investments in things like battery manufacturing plants until that guidance is out. She gave the example of a company planning to pump out 100,000 batteries per year and claim the per-kilowatt-hour advanced manufacturing tax credit. “That’s going to look like a pretty big number in claims, so you have to be able to confidently and assuredly tell your shareholder, Yep, we’re good, we qualify, and that requires a certification” by a tax counsel, she said. To McCleery, there’s an open question as to whether any tax counsel “would even provide a tax opinion for publicly-traded companies to claim credits of this size without guidance.”
John Cornwell, the director of policy at the Good Energy Collective, which conducts research and advocacy for nuclear power, echoed McCleery’s concerns. “Without very clear guidelines from the Treasury and IRS, until those guidelines are in place, that is going to restrict financing and investment,” Cornwell told me.
Understanding what the law requires will be the first challenge. But following it will involve tracking down supply chain data that may not exist, finding alternative suppliers that may not be able to fill the demand, and establishing extensive documentation of the origins of components sourced through webs of suppliers, sub-suppliers, and materials processors.
The Good Energy Collective put out an issue brief this week describing the myriad hurdles nuclear developers will face in trying to adhere to the tax credit rules. Nuclear plants contain thousands of components, and documenting the origin of everything from “steam generators to smaller items like specialized fasteners, gaskets, and electronic components will introduce substantial and costly administrative burdens,” it says. Additionally the critical minerals used in nuclear projects “often pass through multiple processing stages across different countries before final assembly,” and there are no established industry standards for supply chain documentation.
Beyond the documentation headache, even just finding the materials could be an issue. China dominates the market for specialized nuclear-grade materials manufacturing and precision component fabrication, the report says, and alternative suppliers are likely to charge premiums. Establishing new supply chains will take years, but Trump’s bill will begin enforcing the sourcing rules in 2026. The rules will prove even more difficult for companies trying to build first-of-a-kind advanced nuclear projects, as those rely on more highly specialized supply chains dominated by China.
These challenges may be surmountable, but that will depend, again, on what the Treasury decides, and when. The Department’s guidance could limit the types of components companies have to account for and simplify the documentation process, or it could not. But while companies wait for certainty, they may also be racking up interest. “The longer there are delays, that can have a substantial risk of project success,” Cornwell said.
And companies don’t have forever. Each of the credits comes with a phase-out schedule. Wind manufacturers can only claim the credits until 2028. Other manufacturers have until 2030. Credits for clean power projects will start to phase down in 2034. “Given the fact that a lot of these credits start lapsing in the next few years, there’s a very good chance that, because guidance has not yet come out, you’re actually looking at a much smaller time frame than than what is listed in the bill,” Skip Estes, the government affairs director for Securing America’s Energy Future, or SAFE, told me.
Another issue SAFE has raised is that the way these rules are set up, the foreign sourcing requirements will get more expensive and difficult to comply with as the value of the tax credits goes down. “Our concern is that that’s going to encourage companies to forego the credit altogether and just continue buying from the lowest common denominator, which is typically a Chinese state-owned or -influenced monopoly,” Estes said.
McCleery had another prediction — the regulations will be so burdensome that companies will simply set up shop elsewhere. “I think every industry will certainly be rethinking their future U.S. investments, right? They’ll go overseas, they’ll go to Canada, which dumped a ton of carrots and sticks into industry after we passed the IRA,” she said.
“The irony is that Republicans have historically been the party of deregulation, creating business friendly environments. This is completely opposite, right?”
On the budget debate, MethaneSAT’s untimely demise, and Nvidia
Current conditions: The northwestern U.S. faces “above average significant wildfire potential” for July • A month’s worth of rain fell over just 12 hours in China’s Hubei province, forcing evacuations • The top floor of the Eiffel Tower is closed today due to extreme heat.
The Senate finally passed its version of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act Tuesday morning, sending the tax package back to the House in hopes of delivering it to Trump by the July 4 holiday. The excise tax on renewables that had been stuffed into the bill over the weekend was removed after Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska struck a deal with the Senate leadership designed to secure her vote. In her piece examining exactly what’s in the bill, Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo explains that even without the excise tax, the bill would “gum up the works for clean energy projects across the spectrum due to new phase-out schedules for tax credits and fast-approaching deadlines to meet complex foreign sourcing rules.” Debate on the legislation begins on the House floor today. House Speaker Mike Johnson has said he doesn’t like the legislation, and a handful of other Republicans have already signaled they won’t vote for it.
The Environmental Protection Agency this week sent the White House a proposal that is expected to severely weaken the federal government’s ability to rein in planet-warming pollution. Details of the proposal, titled “Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding and Motor Vehicle Reconsideration,” aren’t clear yet, but EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has reportedly been urging the Trump administration to repeal the 2009 “endangerment finding,” which explicitly identified greenhouse gases as a public health threat and gave the EPA the authority to regulate them. Striking down that finding would “free EPA from the legal obligation to regulate climate pollution from most sources, including power plants, cars and trucks, and virtually any other source,” wrote Alex Guillén at Politico. The title of the proposal suggests it aims to roll back EPA tailpipe emissions standards, as well.
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So long, MethaneSAT, we hardly knew ye. The Environmental Defense Fund said Tuesday that it had lost contact with its $88 million methane-detecting satellite, and that the spacecraft was “likely not recoverable.” The team is still trying to figure out exactly what happened. MethaneSAT launched into orbit last March and was collecting data about methane pollution from global fossil fuel infrastructure. “Thanks to MethaneSAT, we have gained critical insight about the distribution and volume of methane being released from oil and gas production areas,” EDF said. “We have also developed an unprecedented capability to interpret the measurements from space and translate them into volumes of methane released. This capacity will be valuable to other missions.“ The good news is that MethaneSAT was far from the only methane-tracking satellite in orbit.
Nvidia is backing a D.C.-based startup called Emerald AI that “enables AI data centers to flexibly adjust their power consumption from the electricity grid on demand.” Its goal is to make the grid more reliable while still meeting the growing energy demands of AI computing. The startup emerged from stealth this week with a $24.5 million seed round led by Radical Ventures and including funding from Nvidia. Emerald AI’s platform “acts as a smart mediator between the grid and a data center,” Nvidia explains. A field test of the software during a grid stress event in Phoenix, Arizona, demonstrated a 25% reduction in the energy consumption of AI workloads over three hours. “Renewable energy, which is intermittent and variable, is easier to add to a grid if that grid has lots of shock absorbers that can shift with changes in power supply,” said Ayse Coskun, Emerald AI’s chief scientist and a professor at Boston University. “Data centers can become some of those shock absorbers.”
In case you missed it: California Governor Gavin Newsom on Monday rolled back the state’s landmark Environmental Quality Act. The law, which had been in place since 1970, required environmental reviews for construction projects and had become a target for those looking to alleviate the state’s housing crisis. The change “means most urban developers will no longer have to study, predict, and mitigate the ways that new housing might affect local traffic, air pollution, flora and fauna, noise levels, groundwater quality, and objects of historic or archeological significance,” explained Cal Matters. On the other hand, it could also mean that much-needed housing projects get approved more quickly.
Tesla is expected to report its Q2 deliveries today, and analysts are projecting a year-over-year drop somewhere from 11% to 13%.