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The Trump administration has set up yet another roadblock for wind and solar power in the U.S. — one that will make it harder for clean-energy developers to qualify for federal tax credits before they expire next summer.
Treasury Department guidance released Friday puts new restrictions on the “safe-harboring” rules that have for decades guided whether solar and wind developers are considered to have “commenced construction,” a key milestone required to secure tax-credit eligibility.
The rules, which will go into effect on September 2, are likely to further slow the rollout of wind and solar power — two of the fastest-growing sources of energy in the country, both of which have been under siege by President Donald Trump since January.
Clean-energy industry advocates attacked the guidance as an improper use of executive authority that will make it harder for the U.S. to meet growing electricity demand and will further drive up electricity bills. But industry analysts noted that the new rules, though restrictive, could have turned out even worse.
Under the big new tax and spending law passed by Republicans last month, solar and wind projects must commence construction by early July 2026 to access tax credits.
For projects larger than 1.5 megawatts in size, Treasury’s new guidance eliminates one way for developers to prove they’ve started work: spending at least 5% of the total cost of the project by the deadline. That new restriction won’t apply to residential and commercial solar installations, so companies in that space such as Sunrun, Freedom Forever, SolarEdge, and Enphase, saw their share prices rise on Friday.
But it will apply to most other clean-energy developments, from community solar farms to massive utility-scale solar and wind projects. Starting in just a few weeks, projects larger than 1.5 megawatts will have only one option for proving they’re under construction: They must demonstrate that they are undertaking “physical work of a significant nature” on a continuous basis.
The test is not new, and project developers have relied on it in the past. But it is less straightforward than the 5% safe-harbor rules, creating uncertainty that could make it harder or more expensive for developers to lock down financing for a project.
“Unless you’re pretty far along, you’re not going to go build some roads and install racking overnight,”said Andy Moon, CEO and cofounder of Reunion Infrastructure, a company that manages clean-energy tax-credit transfers. “It’s not so easy to change your plans and accelerate something that fast.”
Clean-energy industry groups declined to speculate about how the changes would impact the hundreds of gigawatts of solar and wind projects now under development across the country. But these industries are already reeling under the much-shortened timeline for securing tax credits under last month’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act; previously, under the Inflation Reduction Act, developers had until at least 2032 to commence construction and thereby secure tax credits. Analysts have said the drastically shortened tax-credit window will cut clean-energy growth by more than half over the coming decade.
That’s a problem for a country facing rising demand for power for data centers, factories, and broader economic growth. Solar, batteries, and wind made up 96% of new capacity added to U.S. grids last year and will remain the primary option for new power in the next few years, given that there are five- to seven-year wait times for new gas turbines and even longer construction timelines for nuclear and geothermal power plants.
“This is yet another act of energy subtraction from the Trump administration that will further delay the buildout of affordable, reliable power,” Abigail Ross Hopper, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, said in a Friday statement.
Since Trump signed the megalaw in July, his administration has taken a host of anti-wind and anti-solar actions, including subjecting projects to byzantine Interior Department reviews, setting “capacity density” restrictions for projects on federal lands, and potentially halting already permitted wind farms both onshore and offshore.
Shortly after the law passed in July, Trump ordered the Treasury Department to review the safe-harbor rules. The directive came after pressure from the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus members in the House of Representatives, who were upset that the law preserved tax credits for wind and solar projects at all. In that same executive order, Trump also told Treasury to develop rules governing “foreign entity of concern” restrictions; those rules, which are still in development, could be even more disruptive to the industry.
“The Treasury Department’s decision to accelerate the phaseout of clean energy tax credits undermines the integrity of our energy grid and our legislative process,” Jason Grumet, CEO of the American Clean Power Association trade group, said in a Friday statement. “Congress explicitly chose to provide energy companies with one year to phase out tax credits to keep energy prices low while meeting growing power demand.”
Friday’s guidance came despite entreaties from Senate Republicans Chuck Grassley of Iowa and John Curtis of Utah, who negotiated the tax-credit amendment to the final bill. Though both senators voted for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which cleared the Senate by just one vote, earlier this month they placed holds on three of Trump’s Treasury Department nominees in an attempt to force the administration to negotiate a less harmful change to the safe-harbor rules.
Grassley’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday afternoon.
“Frankly, I think the intervention worked,” said Pavel Molchanov, a Raymond James analyst covering cleantech companies. “Treasury could have gone really far in the direction of making life difficult.”
Molchanov cited rules left unchanged in Friday’s guidance, such as the four-year window for projects that commence construction by July 2026 to complete their work to secure their tax-credit eligibility. “Imagine if they had said, ‘Oh, did we say four years? It’s actually two.’”
Similarly, the “physical work” requirements listed in Friday’s guidance are not outside the bounds of what a large-scale solar or wind project developer can reasonably take on over the next year, he said. Exemptions for extreme weather, permitting delays, and other obstacles to continuing work should shield developers from risks of being declared out of compliance with those requirements, he said.
“The good news is that it’s still almost 11 months until July 2026, so developers have plenty of room to make adjustments before starting construction,” Molchanov said. “From my perspective, it’s actually better than expected. But maybe my expectations were just so low to begin with.”
Jeff Cramer, CEO of the Coalition for Community Solar Access, a trade group that represents companies building smaller-scale solar and battery projects, decried the new guidance as a violation of the deal Republicans made in crafting the megalaw. But he also said that simply knowing the rules of the game is a help.
“I think the only good news is that there may now be less uncertainty,” he said. “The onus is now on the states to ensure that any projects that can meet that July 2026 deadline can do that.”
While China leads the world in both the production and adoption of clean energy tech like solar and EVs, the country has been slower to tackle decarbonizing heavy industry. That is starting to change.
In July, the Chinese state-owned steelmaker HBIS Group agreed to sell more than 10,000 metric tons of green steel to a buyer in Italy. The agreement set a deadline for delivery by the end of August. That same week, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visited China and pledged to work together to build out the green steel industry.
Meanwhile, in the U.S., steel producers are backing away from earlier commitments to produce green steel. Just before President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, the Swedish steelmaker SSAB pulled out of negotiations for $500 million in federal funding to back a project to make iron with green hydrogen. In June, Cleveland-Cliffs abandoned its own green steel effort in Middletown, Ohio, after the Trump administration pressed the steelmaker to use a $500 million Biden-era grant to ramp up coal-fired iron production. Nippon Steel pledged to modernize U.S. Steel after securing Trump’s support for a $15 billion acquisition of its American rival in June, but the Japanese giant’s reputation as a “coal company that also makes steel” suggests the merger could extend the life of blast furnaces in Indiana and Pennsylvania.
“A lot of the rhetoric around competitiveness with China makes it seem like we think we must not fall behind. Stories like this make clear we already are behind,” said Marcela Mulholland, a former official at the Department of Energy’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations who now leads advocacy at the nonpartisan climate group Clean Tomorrow. “It is happening. The green steel example is just one of many.”
China produces a staggering amount of steel each year — more than 1 billion metric tons. About 90% is made with a two-stop process that relies on coal. First, iron is smelted from ore in a coal-fired blast furnace. Then the iron is transformed into steel in a basic oxygen furnace. About 10% of the country’s steel is made with an electric arc furnace, a process that – if powered by green electricity – is much cleaner, but depends on a steady supply of scrap metal as a feedstock. (The U.S. has a decided advantage with this particular technology since most of the steel that the nation produces uses scrap metal in EAFs.)
China has yet to widely implement the technology known as direct reduction of iron, or DRI, which typically relies on natural gas to produce iron but which can also use hydrogen. The country’s supplies of the former fuel are limited, spurring it to experiment with ways to conduct DRI using the latter.
China has many small-scale pilot projects manufacturing steel with hydrogen, but most involve minimal volumes of the material. For example, the country’s No. 2 steelmaker, Angang Steel Co., is producing just 10,000 metric tons of iron from green-hydrogen-fueled DRI per year. HBIS is shipping that volume of steel to Italy this month alone. Only HBIS and another major producer, China Baowu Steel Group, are producing green steel with hydrogen in significant quantities, according to research published last month by the Helsinki-based nonprofit Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.
How clean the hydrogen is that China uses to make steel is a complicated question.
Hydrogen – the smallest molecule – is already widely used in industrial processes and offers a cleaner alternative to fossil fuels since it produces no carbon dioxide when burned. Yet the vast majority of the global supply of hydrogen is made through methods that use fossil fuels and generate planet-heating emissions. When made with electrolyzers powered by renewable energy, hydrogen produces almost no emissions at all, but production of this form – green hydrogen – is nascent and comes at a high premium. (DRI using green hydrogen paired with EAFs is the highest – but nearly nonexistent – standard for producing green steel.)
Headquartered in Hebei province, HBIS started experimenting with lower-carbon steel in part by using hydrogen captured from its coking plants, where coal is roasted at more than 1,110 degrees Fahrenheit to cook off contaminants and produce an industrial-grade fuel. Roughly 60% of the gas emitted during the process is hydrogen.
It’s unclear how much of the steel HBIS is shipping to Italy is made with iron that employs hydrogen produced from industrial waste processes rather than the green stuff made from electricity generated by nearby renewables. HBIS did not respond to a request for comment.
But David Fishman, a principal at the Shanghai-based energy consultancy The Lantau Group, said “there are quite a few” sources of hydrogen made with renewable power near HBIS’s facility in northern China. He noted that HBIS has a strategic partnership with the China National Petroleum Corp., which launched its first large-scale demonstration project to make green hydrogen in 2023.
The export deal may be a sign of China raising its ambitions for cleaner steel. The national government had set a target for 15% of steel coming from EAFs by the end of this year. But that steelmaking capacity has remained at 10% for more than a decade.
Part of the problem is that provincial steel targets are at odds with the policies set in Beijing. Though the national government opened China to imported scrap steel that could be used in EAFs, imports halved in 2024 compared to the previous year, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air analysis. Ten provinces, meanwhile, ramped up production of coal-made steel in the first half of this year, bringing down prices and disincentivizing more costly green investments, said Xinyi Shen, the China team lead for the Finnish nonprofit, who authored the report.
But if China can deepen its stockpiles of scrap steel, the country could more quickly build out a lower-carbon steel industry using EAFs while it waits to improve technology on green hydrogen that can bring down costs of fully decarbonized steel, Shen said.
“This is a more promising way to produce low-carbon steel,” she said. “For hydrogen steelmaking, it depends on the progress of green power.”
The bottleneck, she said, is “always the feedstock for DRI.”
But two recent policy changes on renewable power could incentivize Chinese companies to use more of the nation’s vast solar and wind resources to generate green hydrogen.
The first, called the 430 policy, took effect on May 1 and requires that new distributed solar arrays — like those on buildings’ rooftops — first power the facility they are sited on before selling any surplus electricity onto the grid. The second, dubbed the 531 policy, eliminates the guaranteed “feed-in tariffs” that renewables projects long benefited from in China, and requires new solar and wind farms to sell electricity on the spot market.
Whether policies that direct renewable power away from the grid benefit hydrogen producers by making that power more available to them depends on the provincial-level strategies for the fuel, which vary, Shen said. But the emergence of overseas buyers willing to pay more for steel made with green hydrogen could drive the market, she said.
Starting next year, the European Union, of which Italy is a founding member, is set to fully implement its Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. The carbon tariff essentially levies an extra cost on imports made with more planet-heating pollution. That means China’s coal-fired steel is about to become less competitive. While China could ramp up scrap-based EAF steel, Shen said the quality of that product tends to be very low, making it unappealing for export. The Italy deal, according to the Boston Consulting Group, shows the levies are creating a market for truly green material.
“This development holds significant implications,” Nicole Voigt, the Boston Consulting Group’s global lead of metals, told Canary Media. “China’s commitment clearly highlights its intent to seize commercial opportunities in the green steel market, especially in Europe.”
It’ll take time for the cost to come down. But China “overall has a long-term direction for carbon neutrality,” Shen said. “This gives companies and investors confidence and certainty to invest into newer technologies.”
Under the previous administration, the U.S. pumped billions of dollars into green hydrogen and clean industrial projects, and made tax credits for renewables available into the 2030s. Even then, America hardly employed all the policy mechanisms at play in China. The federal clean-industry program where Mulholland worked supported a few dozen projects, almost all of which saw their funding yanked away by the Trump administration this spring. Last year alone, China had nearly twice the number of low-carbon industrial demonstration projects. This year, Beijing funded a second set of more than 100 new projects.
“The investment into these new technologies will need a long, stable policy environment,” Shen said. “Long-term, the political goal is there here in China.”
A correction was made on Aug. 18, 2025: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that basic oxygen furnaces directly burn coal.
President Donald Trump’s crusade against wind energy is intensifying — and it could come with some serious costs.
As much as $317 billion in lost investment, to be exact, per new analysis from research firm Cleanview. That figure is based on the 790 projects totaling 213 gigawatts that developers plan to build in the years to come — all of which are at risk of delay or even cancellation under the administration’s policies.
To be clear, those figures represent the high end of what’s at stake — they’re based on what’s currently in the interconnection queue, and projects drop out of that process all the time for various reasons.
But if even a fraction of that investment is canceled or delayed, it will be painful for the regions that miss out on the tax revenue and jobs, with Texas, Illinois, and New Jersey standing to lose the most.
It would also be bad timing: Electricity demand is on the rise nationwide, largely due to the boom in AI data center construction. Delaying or blocking the buildout of gigawatts worth of wind projects when the U.S. is in the midst of an energy-supply crunch would drive up already-climbing power bills. Wind produced just over 10% of U.S. electricity last year.
And, of course, any slowdown in the construction of clean energy is a setback for efforts to transition the U.S. away from fossil fuels, a task that grows more urgent with the passage of every hot summer day.
Trump entered office in January with promises that not a single new “windmill” would be constructed during his second term. Though he’s not managed to carry out that vision in its most literal sense, he has certainly operated with its spirit in mind.
On his first day, he issued an executive order calling for an end to offshore wind leasing and a review of leases and permits for all wind projects. In the spring, Trump tried — and ultimately failed — to quash the Empire Wind offshore installation that had just begun construction near New York’s coast. After GOP lawmakers rammed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act through Congress, Trump signed the megalaw on July 4, mandating the swift phaseout of tax credits for wind (and solar) projects.
In recent weeks, his administration has stepped up its attacks even further and undertaken an all-out blitz on wind power, issuing a barrage of far-reaching orders that, at least in theory, could jeopardize every wind project underway in the country.
Cheese. Beer. Clothes. Paper. Manufacturers across the country rely on combustion boilers to produce the heat required for making a range of products. But by burning coal, oil, gas, and other fuels to do so, that equipment spews health-harming and planet-warming pollution into the skies.
A different technology would allow communities to breathe easier. Electric heat pumps, which can provide industrial heat without emissions, are spreading but remain underutilized. They only supply about 5% of global industrial heat.
Now, a new study quantifies what Americans stand to gain from manufacturers switching to heat pumps. A gradual transition would not only decarbonize heating but deliver a staggering $1.1 trillion in public health benefits and avoid 77,200 pollution-inflicted deaths from 2030 to 2050, according to a report released Thursday by the nonprofit American Lung Association.
It’s a move “that’s going to save lives, reduce health emergencies, cut asthma attacks, [and] keep kids healthy enough to be in school rather than missing school days,” said Will Barrett, an assistant vice president at the American Lung Association who works on national clean air policy.
Nearly half of the U.S. population lives in places with very unhealthy levels of ozone or particle pollution, two of the most common and dangerous air pollutants. Antiquated boilers are an oft-overlooked part of the problem.
Like other fossil-fuel-burning machines, such as home appliances and cars, industrial combustion boilers release nitrogen oxides, fine particulate matter, and sulfur dioxide into the air. These toxic byproducts can harm children and adults in severe ways, such as asthma attacks, preterm births, heart attacks, strokes, and an impaired ability to think.
To quantify the benefits of switching to industrial heat pumps, the authors created an inventory of the industrial boilers across the U.S. based on publicly available data. They found that about 33,500 boilers scattered around the nation operate at the low and medium temperatures — i.e., less than 200 degrees Celsius — that make them the best candidates for heat pumps to replace. (For now, heat pumps are most feasible for lower temperatures, though Barrett noted research-and-development efforts will bring down the costs for higher-temperature changeouts over time.)
The team then estimated how much pollution would be avoided by gradually swapping these boilers out for electric heat pumps over the next 15 years, with lower temperatures addressed soonest. By leveraging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s health impacts tool, the team found that switching to heat pumps would not only save thousands of lives but also prevent 33 million asthma attacks, 204,000 asthma cases, 13 million lost school days, and 3.4 million lost work days.
States in which more people live close to industrial pollution sources would experience the greatest boost to public health and productivity, according to the team’s analysis. The three with the biggest estimated health benefits are Florida, which would save $107 billion over the study period, Pennsylvania ($82 billion), and North Carolina ($68 billion). Twenty-three others would save at least $25 billion each.
The transition would also reduce carbon emissions by 1.6 billion metric tons through 2050. That translates to $351 billion in avoided societal costs due to a destabilized climate — which is already being felt in record-breaking heat waves and deadlier floods. Sources of industrial heat, including boilers, account for 9% of all U.S. greenhouse gas pollution, according to the Department of Energy.
The findings come as the Trump administration aggressively rolls back public health protections, emissions regulations, and support for industrial decarbonization projects, having cancelled $3.7 billion in funding in May.
To push industries to switch to heat pumps, the report recommends state and local policymakers offer manufacturers incentives to electrify their heating, launch education campaigns aimed at communities and companies, and require the adoption of nonpolluting equipment. California has taken the lead; its South Coast Air Quality Management District passed a first-in-the-nation measure last year to gradually phase out combustion boilers and process heaters starting in 2026.
“It’s a new paradigm when you’re operating and fulfilling all the needs of these manufacturing heat processes without causing health-harming pollution,” Barrett said.
Massachusetts has taken another significant step toward its goal of a fossil-fuel-free future.
Last week, state regulators issued an order changing who pays when a new customer wants to connect to the gas system, shifting the burden from gas utility consumers as a whole to the household or organization that requests the hookup. Utilities have 30 days from the date of the order to file plans that reflect the new payment guidelines for consideration by regulators.
It may seem like a small change, but it’s actually a pretty big deal, advocates said.
“It means the expansion of the gas system will be much slower than it otherwise would’ve been,” said Mark Dyen, a climate activist working with advocacy groups Gas Transition Allies and 350 Mass. “It says, ‘If you want to add to that for your own benefit, you can pay for it.’”
Massachusetts has for years been at the forefront of efforts to transition away from natural gas. In December 2023, state utility regulators issued a sweeping order — the first of its kind in the country — that made clear the state’s goal is to move away from fossil-fuel use as it aims to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The 2023 order laid out a framework for how gas utilities will be expected to participate in this evolution.
Last week’s decision on who should pay for gas-line extensions is the latest effort to turn those principles into practice.
Under the old rules, a new customer that wants to hook up their building to gas generally does not have to pay out of pocket: The cost is spread out among all the utility’s customers over the course of several years on the assumption that the newcomer’s future fuel use will create enough revenue to cover the initial price, a practice known as “line-extension allowances.” In 2023, the average cost of such an installation was $9,000, for an annual total of more than $160 million statewide, according to an analysis filed in the case by research firm Groundwork Data.
“Existing customers are subsidizing these new customers,” said Kristin George Bagdanov, senior policy research manager for the nonprofit Building Decarbonization Coalition. “It’s a misalignment of who’s shouldering the costs.”
In their ruling last week, Massachusetts’ regulators agreed with this stance and also declared that the existing approach runs counter to the state’s climate goals by encouraging greater adoption of natural gas. Plus, they said, the current system increases the chance that customers will be left paying for unneeded infrastructure, as more homes and businesses leave the gas system for electricity.
Typically, utilities calculate a 10-year payback period for commercial connections and 20 years for residential. However, as more customers adopt energy-efficiency measures, switch to electric appliances, and even electrify completely, their gas usage — and therefore the revenue they generate for utilities — will drop, extending the payback period, argued Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell in an October filing to state utility regulators.
Currently, more than half of Massachusetts homes are heated with natural gas. However, between 2021 and 2024, about 90,000 households installed heat pumps using incentives from energy-efficiency program Mass Save; the true total, including installations that didn’t go through the incentive program, is likely higher. The state is aiming to get 500,000 households to adopt heat pumps between 2020 and 2030.
“It really doesn’t make sense for existing ratepayers to pay for people to join when we are actively transitioning people off the system,” said Sarah Krame, a senior attorney for the Sierra Club’s Environmental Law Program. “The economics of that don’t make sense anymore. We’re no longer in that world.”
Massachusetts joins a handful of other states addressing the issue of line-extension allowances. Over the past three years, these subsidies have been reduced or eliminated in six states, and another six and Washington, D.C., are now considering reforms, according to the Building Decarbonization Coalition. In 2022, California became the first to do away with the practice. In June of this year, Maryland utility regulators ended the allowances, and New York state legislators passed a bill that will do the same if it becomes law.
“This is definitely a trend we’re tracking,” George Bagdanov said. “It’s part of the larger movement to reevaluate business-as-usual gas system operations.”
A clarification was made on Aug. 14, 2025: This article has been updated to reflect that there will still be a round of comments taken on the new plans utilities must file.
As the Trump administration aims to bolster fossil fuels at the expense of clean energy expansion, new research shows the oil and gas sector has so far failed to become a major jobs creator for heavily fracked areas of northern Appalachia.
“To the degree that we allocate resources to help develop that industry, we’re diverting those resources from other industries that actually could deliver” more jobs and higher per-capita incomes, said Sean O’Leary, author of the recent report from the Ohio River Valley Institute.
The report uses the term “Frackalachia” to describe 30 top oil- and gas-producing counties in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. As a group, the counties have smaller populations and a net loss in the number of jobs compared to 2008, just before Appalachia’s shale-gas boom began.
The counties’ growth in per-capita income also has lagged behind the national average, even as their nominal gross domestic product nearly doubled, increasing their share of the country’s GDP by 6%. Basically, comparatively high economic output from the counties did not produce higher-than-average incomes for their residents.
“Despite immense economic growth as measured by GDP, Frackalachia is in a position of actually having lost jobs since the beginning of the natural-gas boom,” O’Leary said. In his view, the numbers contradict pro-industry pitches for more oil and gas development.
“Whatever else it is, the natural-gas boom is not an engine for economic prosperity,” O’Leary said. He thinks the gas industry is “structurally incapable” of delivering lasting growth in jobs and income for the people living in heavily fracked areas. The Frackalachia counties have also seen relatively few jobs from “downstream” industries, such as the production of plastics, he added.
Oil and gas development is “highly capital-intensive, but not very labor-intensive,” O’Leary explained. Most earnings go to shareholders, investors, and suppliers based far from where fossil fuels are extracted, so only a small share of project income stays in the community to stimulate more economic activity.
Completed wells don’t need many permanent employees, O’Leary said. And many people who work in drilling and fracking come from outside the local area.
Canary Media’s review of data from the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services is consistent with that observation. From 2012 through 2022, the agency issued annual reports about the economic impact of the state’s oil and gas industry, including data for both “core” jobs and “ancillary” industries, which support oil and gas development.
More than half of the new hires for the core industry jobs in 2021 came from outside Ohio, according to the state data. Even in ancillary industries, nearly four-tenths of new hires were from other states.
Meanwhile, the state holds clean energy companies to higher standards when it comes to sourcing local labor. Solar developers who want to qualify for certain property tax relief must provide at least 70% of a project’s jobs to Ohio residents.
Canary Media drilled further into the figures from the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services to see how employment numbers compare to those touted by fossil-fuel industry organizations.
As of 2024, the core shale-industry sectors employed almost 9,100 people. The net gain compared to 2012 was about 860 jobs. Employment in those sectors peaked in 2017 at about 16,400.
Roughly 199,000 people worked in the industry’s ancillary sectors in 2024, for a net gain of about 30,000 jobs compared to 2012. However, the Department of Job and Family Services’ reports note that those ancillary sectors support other industries as well, such as engineering services, iron and steel mills, and construction of highways, streets, and bridges.
The Ohio agency numbers fall short of the 204,000 new jobs that an industry-funded report forecast oil and gas businesses might create or support. That analysis was published in 2011, in the lead-up to the 2012 law that set up the state’s current regulatory scheme for drilling and fracking of horizontal wells.
The agency numbers are also far lower than the 79,000 direct and 375,000 total jobs the American Petroleum Institute cited in a 2021 report based on data from 2019.
A communications representative for the American Petroleum Institute declined to answer Canary Media’s questions about that report or the new research from the Ohio River Valley Institute.
A spokesperson for the Ohio Oil and Gas Association did not respond to a phone call and emails seeking comment for this story.
The cyclical boom-and-bust dynamics that often characterize oil and gas development also impact jobs, said Gilbert Michaud, an assistant professor of environmental policy at Loyola University Chicago. In contrast, utility-scale solar could be built out over time, to offer “opportunities for a more stable and consistent workforce,” he said.
An analysis prepared by Michaud and others in 2020 estimated that utility-scale solar development could provide tens of thousands of jobs over the course of a few decades if the state encouraged it. That study came out before Ohio lawmakers added extra hurdles for most utility-scale solar and wind projects in 2021.
Now federal policy has also shifted away from renewables and in favor of fossil fuels.
“While this might spur some jobs in oil and gas, it will also take jobs away from renewables, which can be built nearly anywhere, not just in places like eastern Ohio that have shale resources,” Michaud said. “It will threaten a big renewable energy pipeline that has developed over the past decade or two.”
State leaders and clean energy groups across the country are pushing to build more wind and solar projects before the window to claim federal tax credits slams shut.
The new GOP megalaw rapidly phases out incentives for clean energy, years before the Biden-era tax credits were set to lapse. The shortened timeline is expected to slow the construction of wind and solar projects at a moment when states are grappling with soaring power demand that is raising both utility bills and greenhouse gas emissions.
Many local lawmakers and utility regulators were already working to modernize their grids and streamline energy permitting before President Donald Trump signed the budget bill last month. Recently, decision-makers in a handful of places have taken steps to expedite those efforts so that more large-scale renewables projects can qualify for the tax credits before they expire.
Under the megalaw, wind and solar farms must either start construction by July 4, 2026, or be placed in service by Dec. 31, 2027, to qualify for the full production or investment tax credits. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act previously allowed developers to access credits if they began construction either by 2033, or by the time the U.S. power sector cut emissions by 75% compared with 2022 — whichever came later.
For states, “The question then becomes, what can they do to try to maximize the benefits they’ll get from those [clean] technologies between now and then — the jobs, clean air, and power?” said Nathanael Greene, director of renewable energy policy for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
In Maine, state utility regulators have responded by fast-tracking plans to procure nearly 1,600 gigawatt-hours of renewable energy, so that projects can get started before tax credits phase out. Residential and community solar developers in California’s Orange County and Minnesota say they’re focused on installing as many solar arrays as they can, including by tapping into state and municipal incentives that still remain.
Meanwhile, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) has directed state energy regulators to conduct “a high-level review” of the budget law and its “specific impacts to New Yorkers.” However, clean energy developers in the state are calling for more specific actions to expedite wind and solar development, such as speeding up the yearslong process for issuing construction permits and improving coordination among state agencies.
For now, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) is the only state leader to issue an executive action to prioritize deployment of clean electricity projects in response to Trump’s budget law.
Earlier this month, Polis penned a letter that directs state agencies to “move quickly and secure success” for large-scale wind, solar, and battery storage resources, as well as community solar projects. The letter calls for eliminating “administrative barriers and bottlenecks” and “prioritizing expeditious review of projects as they come into the queue for state consultation and permitting.” It also raises the idea of invoking the Public Utilities Commission’s authority to override local permit denials.
“When we look at the new generation that is being built in Colorado, the vast majority of it is wind and solar,” Will Toor, executive director of the Colorado Energy Office, told Canary Media. “Getting as many projects as possible able to move forward on a timeline that allows them to receive those [tax] credits is very much in the interest of the state — not only for clean energy goals, but very much for reducing costs to ratepayers.”
Alana Miller, who leads NRDC’s climate and clean energy policy team in Colorado, said the governor’s letter “is a key first step and provides a lot of urgency at this specific moment.” Still, “There’s a lot to be seen how it plays out and how agencies actually implement it,” she said, noting that state legislative action could follow next year.
In Colorado and beyond, officials are largely waiting to outline more concrete plans until the Treasury Department issues its new tax-credit guidance, which is expected to tighten the rules on which projects can claim incentives. Policy experts say they’re watching closely to see how the leaders of other major energy-producing states, including Pennsylvania and California, step in to support renewables in their backyards.
In June, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) warned legislators that the House’s version of the budget bill — which proposed even deeper cuts to clean energy incentives than the final version — would undermine more than $3 billion in direct investment in Pennsylvania energy projects. The impact would be most severe on the “nearest-term energy sources,” namely wind, solar, and batteries, that are coming online to meet surging demand in the state, his letter said.
Shapiro has made building “next-generation power” a key priority as power-hungry data centers strain the state’s grid and drive up electricity costs. His sweeping six-part energy strategy released in January includes policy proposals to increase the amount of electricity that comes from renewable sources in the state, and to establish a “cap-and-invest” program that reduces carbon emissions while also lowering electricity bills.
In California, a leader on clean energy deployment, the industry is urging Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) to help blunt the megalaw’s impact on utility-scale wind, solar, and energy storage developments.
Five trade groups sent a letter last month asking Newsom’s office and state legislative leaders to create a “coordinated action plan” to address the shortened tax-credit timelines, as well as the Treasury Department’s forthcoming guidance. The groups proposed steps such as streamlining environmental reviews and making it easier to build projects on agricultural land.
Another measure that California officials could immediately take is to enable wind, solar, and batteries to access “surplus interconnection” at existing gas-fired power plant sites — a concept that state legislators are currently considering.
Gas power plants in California are running less often as the state works to slash its planet-warming emissions, Mike O’Boyle, director of electricity policy at Energy Innovation, explained in a recent opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times. That leaves gas plants’ transmission wires mostly unused. Wind and solar projects could use this existing surplus to immediately connect to the grid, rather than wait years for system upgrades.
A working paper by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, estimates that this pathway could allow California to cost-effectively integrate 24 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity by 2030. For context, the state currently has nearly 90 GW of total generation capacity.
Clean energy developers in every state will need all the bureaucratic fixes and outside-the-box solutions they can get in order to maintain momentum for the energy transition. Early estimates found that Trump’s megalaw could shrink new clean capacity additions to the grid by up to 62% over the next decade compared to the baseline scenario. By 2035, national average household energy bills could be $78 to $192 higher than if Biden-era policies remained in place, according to Rhodium Group.
“We still anticipate that clean energy will be built and will likely still be able to compete [with fossil fuels] despite the headwinds,” said Miller of NRDC. But the cost of electricity will be higher without the tax incentives.
The Trump administration appears to be backing away from its fiercely contested efforts to freeze a $5 billion federal funding program for electric vehicle chargers.
On Monday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy unveiled revised guidance for states to access their remaining share of $5 billion in formula grants from the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program. NEVI was created by the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law to establish reliable charging along major highways, particularly in underserved parts of the country.
“Our revised NEVI guidance slashes red tape and makes it easier for states to efficiently build out this infrastructure,” Duffy said in a statement. “While I don’t agree with subsidizing green energy, we will respect Congress’ will and make sure this program uses federal resources efficiently.”
Groups representing industries involved in EV charger deployments welcomed the decision, which could allow states to restart projects that have in some cases been paused for months due to orders from the federal government. But environmental advocates warned that the move is just another delay tactic from an administration that’s exceeding its lawful authority by blocking money appropriated by Congress, for EV charging and beyond.
Monday’s announcement comes after months of legal challenges to the Department of Transportation’s February decision rescinding guidance for states to access their NEVI funding. That withdrawal, part of the Trump administration’s broader attack on Biden-era climate and clean energy initiatives, forced states to halt work underway on contracts and projects representing roughly half of the $5 billion in program funding.
Litigation hasn’t panned out in the administration’s favor so far. In June, a federal judge ordered the Transportation Department to release about $875 million for the states that had contested the freeze, including Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin.
Some of those states have been able to access NEVI funding since then, said Daniel Wilkins, a policy analyst at research firm Atlas Public Policy.
However, a chunk of the funding remains unavailable, and the District of Columbia and 20 states are continuing their fight in court in the hopes of getting the Trump administration to unfreeze the rest. The federal government’s actions have disrupted ongoing contracts with EV charging developers and caused “costly delays in project implementation,” according to an August court filing.
The 20 states suing the Transportation Department are led by Democratic governors, but the NEVI program sets aside money for red and blue states alike. Texas is set to receive nearly $408 million, more than any other state, and Ohio opened the first NEVI-funded charging station.
Under Monday’s order, states can now reapply for funding within the next 30 days.
Getting the NEVI program back up and running will “help to ensure that EV drivers can find charging when and where they need it,” Albert Gore, executive director of the Zero Emission Transportation Association, a trade group that includes automakers, battery manufacturers, mining companies, charging manufacturers, and electric utilities, said in a Monday statement. In that light, the new guidance “provides important regulatory certainty for the companies and state departments of transportation that are implementing this program on the ground.”
But the Sierra Club, one of seven nonprofit groups that have joined the legal challenges against the NEVI funding freeze, noted that the department’s guidance does not reinstate those plans, but instead requires states to resubmit them, “further delaying the nationwide EV charging buildout.”
“While the Trump administration has moved away from anti-EV rhetoric in this guidance in response to federal litigation filed by over a dozen states, Sierra Club, and other nonprofit organizations, it is still illegally withholding billions Congress dedicated to EV charging,” Katherine García, director of Sierra Club’s Clean Transportation for All campaign, said in a Monday statement. “We will continue to work towards the recovery of nationwide NEVI funding.”
A spokesperson for the Washington state attorney general’s office, one of the lead plaintiffs in the lawsuit by the 20 states and D.C., said the office is reviewing the revised guidance.
Monday’s announcement also weakens the program’s support for lower-income and disadvantaged communities. It removes requirements that the funding “ensure that the deployment, installation, operation, and use of EV charging infrastructure achieves equitable and fair distribution of benefits and services,” and eliminates Biden-era Justice40 requirements that at least 40% of the benefits of the projects be targeted toward disadvantaged communities.
Duffy justified these changes in Monday’s statement. “If Congress is requiring the federal government to support charging stations, let’s cut the waste and do it right,” he said.
The NEVI program has made slow progress. The Biden administration hoped to spur the buildout of 500,000 public charging stations by 2030, up from about 206,000 today. But just 378 NEVI fast chargers have come online as of this month, according to Wilkins at Atlas Public Policy. And of the $5 billion in funds, only about $615 million was under contract for constructing almost 1,000 charging sites as of February, according to EV-charging data firm Paren.
Monday’s announcement highlighted that slow start as a “clear signal of the program’s failure.” Both Republicans and Democrats have criticized the pace of deployment under the Biden administration.
The NATSO and SIGMA trade groups, which represent truck stops and fuel retailers, respectively, praised the Transportation Department’s new guidance, saying in a Monday statement that it “marks a constructive step toward addressing the ongoing challenges associated with deploying EV charging infrastructure while also ensuring that taxpayer dollars are spent wisely and effectively.”
But Sierra Club’s García said the Trump administration’s freeze has only further delayed the work that Monday’s order purports to streamline. “It’s ironic that this guidance was sold as cutting red tape, yet all it has accomplished is more than half a year of needless delay,“ she said.
The country doubled its number of public charging ports between 2020 and last year, and over 7,100 public fast-charging ports came online in the first half of this year, according to Atlas Public Policy. Still, only 23 NEVI chargers have opened since February.
That delay is particularly harmful to parts of the country that lack the EV adoption to make charger investments worthwhile for private-sector developers — a hurdle NEVI was meant to help overcome. Rural communities in particular are lagging in fast-charger deployments.
Loren McDonald, Paren’s chief analyst, noted that Monday’s revised guidance does give individual states more flexibility and control over how they spend NEVI dollars, which could speed project selection and construction.
However, it could also make the program less effective at serving “charging deserts,” he said — a term for places where EV charging companies like Tesla, EVgo, and Electrify America were “not deploying stations because utilization would be low.”
“One of the main factors holding many people back from getting an EV is they dream of that one road trip in rural Wyoming and won’t get an EV because they’ve heard there are no charging stations,” he said. “NEVI was designed to fix that perception in reality. But I worry that if states have complete control over locations, they may not focus on solving the charging-desert issue.”
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When a heat wave hits New York City, many customers can soon expect a message from Con Edison, asking customers to conserve energy.
The reason is to protect the heat-strained electric grid, which, when taxed to the point of failure, can lead to blackouts and brownouts.
Addy Spiller, an Upper West Sider and founder of a product management business, said those messages from Con Ed drive her bananas.
“Listen, I don’t know how to use less electricity,” she said. “I already have the AC at a reasonable temperature. I don’t think I can do enough to help Con Ed on my own.”
But this summer, Spiller and her dog, Ranger, are among 65 households across the city actually doing more to help — and they don’t have to stop blasting their ACs on sweltering days. That’s because they’re participating in an experiment that connects their air conditioning units to small batteries in their homes. The batteries, about the size of a small microwave oven, plug into wall sockets.
The pilot program, called Responsible Grid, is run by the company Standard Potential in partnership with Con Ed. When demand for energy is high but the utility company needs customers to lay off, the company powers the participants’ AC units with the battery instead of the electric grid.
“There’s a class of large portable phone chargers almost, and instead of powering a whole building, they power a single device and take it off the grid,” said Andrew Wang, Standard Potential’s CEO. “Because we have the battery, it allows folks to participate in the program without having to adjust their comfort levels.”
If more New Yorkers were to connect electric appliances to batteries in their homes, this approach could make the city more resilient, add to the stability of the electric grid, and keep people cool. Responsible Grid is one of about a dozen programs residential Con Ed customers can enroll in to reduce energy during key windows and get financial rewards.
Participants who have the freely provided batteries in their homes through September will also receive about $100 per air conditioning unit plugged into them from Responsible Grid, as Con Ed pays the company to reduce demand.
In southeast Queens, participant Farudh Emiel noticed several times over the hottest days of the summer that his three air conditioning units plugged into the batteries he got through the pilot program kept pumping even as he saw lights dimming. It was likely Con Ed reduced the voltage in his neighborhood to protect the electric system, but his AC units, relying on the batteries, were unaffected.
“I run my ACs 24/7, three of them at the same time,” Emiel said. “One thing I will spend money on is electricity because I don’t want to sweat.”
Outside the individual homes of the participants, batteries have the potential to reshape the electric-supply system and protect ratepayers’ wallets.
When demand for power is high, especially in the summer, fossil-fuel-fired peaker plants kick in to meet that need. Those plants, often located in and around low-income neighborhoods, can be highly polluting and costly to rely on.
“By switching your AC to a battery rather than the outlet, you’re providing a measure of relief to the grid, avoiding more expensive, dirtier power plants turning on,” said Jamie Dickerson, senior director of climate and clean energy programs at Acadia Center, a research and advocacy nonprofit.
The small batteries in participants’ homes have served as a source of backup power in other instances.
In the midst of a heat wave in July, Emiel had just finished cooking a meal when the power went out in his neighborhood. He scurried around his home — a detached, multistory house — to connect his refrigerator, WiFi router, and TV to the batteries.
“We were the only house with electricity because of the stand-alone batteries,” said Emiel, who works as a policy manager for a clean-energy advocacy organization. “We had internet still, we were charging our phones, we had a lamp connected. The air conditioning was still working.”
The blackout lasted for about four hours, he said.
Spiller, too, relied on her batteries in early June, when her prewar apartment building had a planned electrical outage to do some upgrades. The day was hot, and she began feeling stressed as she wondered where she should bring her dog and how she’d get her work done. But then she remembered the battery.
“With the battery, I was able to continue working. My AC worked, my WiFi worked,” Spiller said. “It was such a relief to realize I had a little bit of a buffer and didn’t have to leave my house — I was able to continue just living.”
New York state is looking to deploy large batteries to help make the grid more reliable, especially as officials look to add more forms of renewable energy to replace fossil-fuel sources, and as electric heating, stoves, and vehicles become more common. Wind and solar projects produce power intermittently, but batteries can store extra energy and discharge it back into the grid when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine.
But connecting big batteries to the grid requires navigating lots of red tape and finding major real estate, two tough tasks in New York City that can slow down adoption.
Jesse Jenkins, a professor in energy and engineering at Princeton University, called the pilot a “compelling model and a good way to avoid the very high costs and bureaucratic headaches of trying to install a grid-connected home battery or solar system.”
But he added that eventually, getting more customers to put the batteries “comes down to the cost of these devices, and whether the value delivered exceeds that cost.”
Looking ahead, Wang said he’s looking forward to scaling up the program to include more participants next summer, and to potentially try pairing the batteries with electric heat pumps in the winter.
The Trump administration recently terminated a $4.9 billion loan for the Grain Belt Express, the country’s biggest transmission grid project. Sen. Martin Heinrich, Democrat from New Mexico, says the decision is illegal.
In an exclusive new interview with Canary Media, Heinrich discusses why he’s demanding that the Department of Energy account for the decision — and what response he’s received.
Last month, Heinrich, the top Democrat on the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, sent a letter to the DOE challenging its vague excuse for cutting off the legally binding contract between the federal government and Invenergy, the Chicago-based energy project developer planning to build the power-line project from Kansas to Illinois.
“Not only am I concerned that this move is illegal,” Heinrich wrote — a belief shared by Jigar Shah, the former head of the DOE Loan Programs Office, which issued the conditional loan guarantee in the waning days of the Biden administration. “I am concerned that the federal government is eroding what little trust the private sector has in our ability to be reliable partners.”
That trust is eroding rapidly, Heinrich said. The project has been in the works for more than a decade and is one of only a handful of major transmission developments underway in the United States.
The Grain Belt Express would support gigawatts’ worth of new wind and solar projects — energy sources that are under attack by the Trump administration.
The new GOP megalaw is expected to cut new solar, wind, and battery deployments by more than half just as power demand is rising. Last year, clean energy made up 96% of the new energy capacity being added to the U.S. grid.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has unleashed a flurry of anti-wind and anti-solar actions in the past month that threaten to subject wind and solar projects to burdensome and potentially insurmountable Interior Department reviews, block development on federal lands under “capacity density” restrictions, and potentially put a halt to already permitted wind farms on land and at sea.
The move to block the Grain Belt Express is part of this broader attempt to slow renewable energy — just when the country can least afford it, Heinrich said.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Why did you decide to write the letter to Energy Secretary Chris Wright?
Secretary Wright, before he was secretary, said numerous times to our committee [the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources] that he was going to follow the law, and a conditional loan guarantee is a legally binding commitment.
It’s as if you go to your bank and you get preapproved for a mortgage, then when you show up for the closing, you expect the bank to make good on that. And that’s what we had here.
The reality is, we need this administration to follow the law and make good on commitments that have been made so that there is predictability in the market. We also need every cheap electron we can get right now, and so if you put these big infrastructure projects in jeopardy, what you’re really doing is passing along more costs to consumers.
Have you received any response from DOE?
Not yet.
Do you expect you’ll eventually get a response?
I certainly expect to. And if the secretary wants to be taken seriously by the Senate, then he needs to provide that information.
One of the things that really bothers me about a lot of the actions that the Department of Energy and the Department of Interior are taking right now is the sum total is creating a lot of uncertainty in the finance markets, and that flows through to create additional costs for consumers.
When you have a big transmission project like this one, there are $52 billion in energy savings over the course of the next decade, and that should be accruing to consumers. And if you put all of this in jeopardy, the real impact is that costs are going up, and then when you put all of these permits that are usually very predictable and are now uncertain, all of this is going to raise costs for consumers — for retail consumers and for commercial consumers. We’re already seeing electric rates start to rise, and I am deeply concerned that that is going to get a lot worse in the coming years because of their actions and their inactions.
You asked the department if it had analyzed the impact of canceling the loan guarantee. What do you see as the administration’s responsibility in analyzing its actions on energy policy in terms of affordability? And are they fulfilling those responsibilities?
They are not. And it doesn’t take a detailed analysis to understand that, in an environment of surging demand, if you artificially constrain supply, you’re going to be raising costs for people. And I want the American people to know that this is not an accident. They are choosing to take actions which are raising people’s electric bills.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, a Republican representing Iowa, has said he won’t be moving Treasury Department nominations forward until there’s some response from the administration regarding its actions on wind and solar tax credits. Can you tell us more about where members of Congress have power to challenge how the administration is managing energy policy?
Well, I think the confirmation process is one obvious place. This is an administration that has been very public about saying that they need more people in place to be able to execute their agenda. But unless they’re responsive to the Congress, that process is not going to speed up.
You asked the DOE for a list of all the closed loans and conditional commitments that the department is reviewing. Have you received any response?
I’ll be honest, they have not been particularly transparent or responsive on many of these issues, and that is a trend that I think does not bode well for the next several years.
Having been through a 17-year process to get one transmission line built [the SunZia line in New Mexico and Arizona], I’m also acutely aware of the jobs that hang in the balance. We’re talking about thousands and thousands of good, high-quality American jobs that are simply not going to come to fruition because this administration has a political agenda. I’ve never seen an administration so insensitive to the job implications of their actions.
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