Once voters learn a bit about this landmark law, however, a large majority support it.

These findings are from a survey of U.S. registered voters, conducted jointly by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (the publisher of this site) and the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University.

In the nationally representative survey, participants were first asked if they’d heard about the Inflation Reduction Act. Only 39% of participants said they’d heard either “a lot” or “some” information about it. Surprisingly, the number of people who had heard about the law remains unchanged from one year ago, even as the legislation has begun to spur a surge in U.S. manufacturing of batteries, solar panels and automobiles – and has helped consumers make energy-saving purchases.

Next, survey participants read a short description of the Inflation Reduction Act:

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA) aims to curb inflation by reducing the federal deficit, lowering prescription drug prices and the cost of health insurance, modernizing the Internal Revenue Service, and investing in U.S. clean energy production. The law authorizes $391 billion for developing clean energy and addressing global warming, including tax incentives and rebates to help consumers and businesses buy energy-efficient appliances, solar panels, electric vehicles, etc. The IRA also includes support for clean energy jobs and investments in communities that are most harmed by air and water pollution. It is the largest investment the U.S. government has ever made to reduce global warming, and it is projected to help the U.S. reduce its carbon pollution 40% by 2030. The law will be paid for by closing tax loopholes.

After reading a summary of the law, about three-quarters of surveyed voters (74%) said they support it. In other words, voters haven’t heard much about this policy, but when they do, they like it. (It’s possible that some voters have heard about the benefits of the IRA but didn’t attribute them to the law.)

Republicans are divided on the Inflation Reduction Act

In today’s political environment, voters’ opinions on just about everything hinge on their political worldview, and that’s been especially true with climate and energy. But the survey results show an atypical divide.

In this case, it’s Republicans who are split. Like Democrats, moderate and liberal Republicans are largely supportive of the Inflation Reduction Act, with seven out of 10 moderate and liberal Republicans expressing a favourable opinion of it. This number has grown by 13 percentage points over the past year. Conservative Republicans are a notable outlier, with just 30% supporting the law.

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How a small city in Georgia became a solar manufacturing hub

Despite the intraparty split in the GOP, the cluster of data points near the top of this graph shows that much of the public is already on board with measures to cut climate pollution and save energy.

The law is helping to boost American manufacturing and energy innovation and has been especially beneficial to red states. In 2023, more than 3.4 million U.S. households took advantage of tax credits for energy efficiency and residential clean energy, totalling $8.4 billion in savings for consumers. Other results from the survey show that these elements of the Inflation Reduction Act enjoy solid bipartisan support.

The findings could be a boost to policy-makers, communicators, advocates and regular people who want to help spread the word about the benefits of investing in modern energy and preparing for a climate-changed world – and how these measures are helping people and communities.

Solving climate change is hard, but it’s a lot easier when it’s popular.

This article by Yale Climate Connections is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style.

The post U.S. voters are all in on climate policy – even if they don’t know it appeared first on Corporate Knights.

“My parents and grandparents were in manufacturing, and they were the ones saying, ​‘Don’t do it,’” Nash recalled.

Nash disregarded their advice, embarking instead on a long career in manufacturing — first in textiles, followed by stints in aviation, automotive, and steel. Now she’s helping to bring higher-tech, higher-paying factory work back to the corridor between Atlanta and Chattanooga.

Nash is the general manager of the Qcells solar panel factory in Dalton, a town of 34,000 located 50 miles up I-75 from her hometown. It opened in January 2019, after the Trump administration imposed a fresh round of tariffs on Chinese-made panels. The Korean conglomerate Hanwha owns Qcells, and initially planned to hire several hundred people at the site, Nash told me on a recent visit to the factory. By the end of 2019, it employed more than 800.

Then, in 2020, Georgia helped elect President Joe Biden and sent two Democrats to the Senate, clinching a thin majority. Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock got to work crafting detailed policies to promote domestic manufacturing of clean energy technologies, which China had dominated for years; they wanted solar panels and batteries made in America — specifically Georgia — instead of in China, a geopolitical rival.

Those measures made it into the Inflation Reduction Act, which passed in August 2022 — two years ago this week. The legislation created the nation’s first comprehensive policies to support domestic clean energy manufacturing. Qcells broke ground on a second facility in Dalton in February 2023. Completed that August, the expansion added two football fields’ worth of manufacturing space with four new production lines — which produce 1.5 times more solar panels than the original three lines, thanks to technological advances. Now the whole complex employs 2,000 people full time and makes 5.1 gigawatts of solar panels a year, more than any other site in the U.S.

Politicians have been promising for decades to retrain American workers and revive long-lost manufacturing, with little to show for it. Now, though, the U.S. has entered a new era on trade: Leaders of both parties have rejected the long-standing free-trade consensus and its penchant for offshoring jobs. Biden married that reshoring impulse with a desire to boost clean energy production, to both stimulate the economy and fight climate change.

This grand experiment remains in its infancy, and the success of the clean energy manufacturing revolution is by no means guaranteed. Cheap imports could outcompete even newly subsidized American products.

And if Republicans win the presidency and retake Congress, they’ve threatened to stop subsidizing low-carbon energy resources and instead double down on fossil fuel production. House Republicans — including Dalton’s representative, Marjorie Taylor Greene — have voted repeatedly and unsuccessfully to repeal the domestic manufacturing incentives in the IRA. (Greene’s press office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

“Donald Trump and his Republican allies promised to gut the Inflation Reduction Act if he’s reelected, so there’s a lot at stake here,” Representative Nikema Williams, who leads the Georgia Democrats, told me.

Since the IRA passed, Georgia has received $23 billion (all figures in USD) in clean energy factory investment, much of it flowing to northwest Georgia. I wanted to see what impact this is having on communities formerly hit hard by industrial decline, so I followed the money trail to Dalton earlier this summer.

I found a population that seems to like having advanced solar manufacturing in their backyard. Dalton’s solar jobs are boosting wages, invigorating the historic town center, and employing local high school graduates. Those benefits are starting to spread to nearby communities, where new solar factories are springing to life. In November, voters will weigh two very different visions of America’s energy future on the ballot, but Dalton is already reaping the rewards from slotting solar into its storied history of industrial production.

From carpets to solar

Both CSX and Norfolk Southern run Class I rail lines through Dalton, a testament to its industrial legacy, and freight trains bellow day and night.

That legacy harks back to 1900, according to local historians, when Catherine Evans Whitener sold a hand-tufted bedspread from her front porch for $2.50. The cottage industry took off in this land of forested ridges and stream-crossed valleys, and over time, local factories consolidated into global carpeting giants Shaw Industries and Mohawk Industries.

“The carpet industry was born here,” Carl Campbell, executive director of economic development at the Greater Dalton Chamber of Commerce, told me when I visited the Chamber. The New Georgia Encyclopedia states that 80% of America’s tufted carpet production happens within 100 miles of Dalton.

The conference room where we spoke sported large-format aerial photographs of the major factories nearby: the largest Shaw site, 650,000 square feet; and the new Engineered Floors colossus, 2.8 million square feet.

“You feel like there’s enough carpet in that building to cover the whole world,” said Campbell, who grew up in Dalton.

Dalton employment numbers peaked at 80,200 in 2006, per the Chattanooga Times Free Press. But the Great Recession crushed the homebuilding industry, cratering demand for Dalton’s carpeting products.

Dalton ​“was a ghost town in 2011, nothing going on because everybody was hurting,” Campbell added. From June 2011 to June 2012, Dalton notched the dubious distinction of most jobs lost of all 372 metro areas surveyed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By that point, one-quarter of Dalton’s pre-recession jobs had vanished, and unemployment surged to 12.3%.

Since then, the industry has recovered somewhat. Engineered Floors, Mohawk, and Shaw still dominate local employment, with some 14,000 jobs among them, Campbell said. Those companies have had to adapt to evolving consumer tastes, shifting from wall-to-wall carpets to hardwood and other flooring materials. They’ve also automated aspects of production, reducing the number of workers needed.

In the wake of the Great Recession, local leaders sought to diversify Dalton’s industry. The county acquired an undeveloped lot south of town, and Campbell later pushed to clear and level the site, so it was shovel-ready for some future tenant. When Trump’s solar tariffs kicked in, Campbell’s counterparts at Georgia’s Department of Economic Development sent Qcells his way.

Qcells showed up in February 2018, looking to spin up its first American solar-panel factory in less than a year. ​“Suddenly, we had exactly what they needed,” Campbell said.

Thus Dalton managed to bring in new industry to balance out its base of carpets and flooring. Qcells originally promised to invest $130 million and hire 525 people within five years, Campbell said.

“They did it in three months,” he added. ​“In terms of an economic development project, they check all the boxes: Everything they said they would do, they did it faster than they said they would do it.”

Domestic solar manufacturing, by humans and robots

When I asked folks around town what they thought of Qcells, they kept mentioning the dozens of air-conditioning units arrayed on the factory roof, like a field of doghouses, easily visible from I-75. I later learned that Qcells brought in helicopters to install those units, which made for a bit of small-town spectacle. Still, it struck me as a surprising detail to dwell on for a business that somehow turns the sun’s rays into cheap, emissions-free electricity.

Once I crossed Qcells’ sizzling parking lot and stepped indoors, it started to make sense. Georgia gets hot, and carpet factories get hot, but the vast floors of the twin solar factories are quite literally cool places to work.

The climate control is not unique to assembling solar panels, but it is required for the sensitive, precisely calibrated product. The air conditioners are but one sign that high-tech manufacturing has arrived, and that it makes for pretty comfortable work.

I met my two tour guides, Wayne Lock and Alan Rodriguez, in the factory lobby, and they quickly confirmed the physical appeal of Qcells jobs. Lock, now a quality engineer at Qcells, previously worked in carpet manufacturing; he had to wear special heat-resistant gear to handle carpeting materials that would otherwise deliver third-degree burns. Rodriguez, an engineering supervisor at Qcells, used to apply the coating material underneath carpets.

“You’re sandwiched between the steamer and the oven, so it gets quite hot,” Rodriguez told me. Attending to those machines exposed him to temperatures that could exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Even more than Qcells’ air conditioning, though, people I spoke to kept bringing up the pay.

By offering more for zero-skill, entry-level positions than the other factories in town, Qcells started attracting workers and pushed up wages across Dalton, Campbell said: ​“Competition brings everybody, so everybody’s had to kind of equalize to keep employees.”

Now Qcells hourly wages for non-experienced hires start at $17.50 to $22 — that amounts to $36,400 to $45,760 a year for full-time work. Workers with experience in robotics and manufacturing can take home much more than that. Employees can raise their pay through a variety of on-the-job training, most of which involves handling and troubleshooting the in-house fleet of robots.

Lock, Rodriguez, and I walked into the newest factory, past meeting rooms with names like Naboo and Mandalore, Star Wars locales where quirky robots coexist with all manner of creatures. As we strolled across the floor, squat wheeled autonomous vehicles rolled past us down pathways marked by tape on the smooth floor, ferrying bales of materials or hauling out hulking boxes of finished panels.

“We try to stay out of their way, and if we don’t, they yell at us,” said Lock. ​“It’s fun.”

As we stood talking, I noticed that one such robo-buggy was waiting for us to move. Barely discernible over the background drone of machines, a female voice intoned, ​“Robot is moving. Please look out.” When humans hold up more time-sensitive deliveries, Lock explained, the voice switches to male and gets louder.

Other robots remain fixed in place, carrying out repetitive precision tasks. I stared, mesmerized, at one machine that split wafer-thin silicon cells in half, first scoring them with a laser, then slicing them with a concentrated jet of water. A taller machine grabbed nearly 8-foot metal frames and sliced them through the air like a master swordsman in a Kurosawa film, to slot them around glassed-in silicon panels.

Throughout the process, cameras scan cells and use artificial intelligence to shunt defective items off the line for manual correction.

In the 2019-era factory next door, humans carry out many of these tasks. Lock, though, didn’t see the robots as competitors — he said they were taking on more physically demanding jobs so the humans could step into higher-skilled roles tending to robots.

“The ergonomics are better for you,” he said, and the new lines are more productive.

Hiring local, spending local

When Qcells was first staffing up, it relied on Quick Start, a Georgia state program that funds worker training for new factories before they open — a major draw for executives deciding where to locate their factories.

Qcells still recruits to meet ongoing staffing needs, and it has been paying special attention to high schoolers who are graduating and looking for employment. Nash speaks passionately about Qcells’ recruitment efforts; she’s seen the civic fallout from decades when local families encouraged kids to avoid manufacturing.

“Small communities cannot thrive with kids graduating and leaving those communities to live elsewhere, to get high-paying technical jobs,” Nash said. ​“That’s what’s happening across the country. Bringing manufacturing back, and bringing highly automated manufacturing, is offering job opportunities where now these students are staying here.”

Some 56% of Dalton-area students enroll in postsecondary education within 16 months of graduating high school, said Stephani Womack, director of education and workforce development for the Greater Dalton Chamber of Commerce. For the remainder, the chamber wants to make sure family-supporting jobs are available.

For two weeks in June, Womack helped run Project Purpose, a crash course in how to start and navigate careers that pay living wages. Recent high school graduates prepped for interviews, shopped for professional clothes, and toured housing options and downtown hotspots — the kinds of places they could frequent once they join the workforce.

But the centerpiece of the program amounted to professional speed dating, as Dalton’s major employers offered tours and entry-level jobs. Last year, Dalton’s first time running Project Purpose, seven young adults completed the program, and Qcells hired one of them. This time, 18 finished, and Qcells hired 12 of them to start on July 1.

“Next year, we hope to double that, or more,” Nash said.

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Several participants came in knowing about Qcells, betting that the intensive crash course would increase their odds of landing good roles there, Womack told me over a table at Garmony House, a downtown coffee shop that draws lines for its statuesque strawberry cupcakes and coffee-glazed cinnamon rolls.

“Qcells is providing a diverse set of options for our students who need to go to work but want to stay in our community,” Womack said. ​“They see a climate-controlled facility with entry-level opportunities — that’s exciting for them. … Manufacturing isn’t what it used to be.”

For younger people to stay in town and build a life, Dalton needs more housing, and now it’s getting its first large apartment complex in over two decades, Campbell said. In total, 900 apartment units are slated to come online from last August through this November — not enough to catch up on a long-running housing deficit, but a step in the right direction.

That renewed real estate activity is reflected in downtown Dalton’s bustling core.

Locals pack the booths at the Oakwood Cafe, perhaps the only place in America that sells a platter of egg, sausage, toast, and grits for just $3.65. Multiple microbreweries beckon, as does a plush cocktail bar, the Gallant Goat, which stocks fresh mint by the fistful to garnish its drinks. Down the road, diners can sample ceviche of shrimp shipped in from coastal Mexico, succulent chicken wings, and high-end Southern cuisine.

This spring, the plush Carpentry Hotel opened across from the Oakwood Cafe, decked out with vibrant textile art to commemorate the town’s carpeting heritage.

“That’s been big for us, getting that hotel in downtown. That’s indicative of a robust local economy that people are coming to participate in,” local real estate agent Beau Patton told me as the late afternoon sun streamed into the Gallant Goat. Patton works with Qcells employees who want to buy homes in the area. He sees the factory’s decision to locate there as ​“very mutually beneficial” for Qcells and Whitfield County: ​“What you hope is Whitfield County grows with it, and it grows with Whitfield County.”

From Dalton to towns across Georgia

Dalton got in early on the national clean-energy factory revival, and has already seen its solar factory push up wages, enable high school graduates to stay and start careers, and inject money into a reinvigorated downtown. Many more communities in Georgia are following close behind with their own cleantech factories, seeking a similar economic jolt.

“There is a palpable and intense sense of excitement across the state about how these manufacturing and infrastructure policies are supercharging Georgia’s economic development,” said Senator Jon Ossoff, the Georgia Democrat who authored the IRA manufacturing incentives that Qcells is tapping into. ​“And I would add, it’s not just the primary industrial facilities; it’s all of the secondary and tertiary suppliers and vendors and service companies and the financial services firms needed to support them.”

Qcells is building an even bigger factory compound down in Cartersville, which won a conditional $1.45 billion loan guarantee from the Department of Energy on August 8. This facility will take advantage of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits to onshore more steps of the solar supply chain: slicing silicon wafers, carving them into solar cells, and assembling finished modules with even newer robots than the ones I saw in Dalton. Until now, those high-value precursors to solar panels were shipped in from overseas. Workers in Dalton complete just the last step: assembling modules. Cartersville promises to bring the dream of American-made solar a bit closer to reality.

To achieve that dream, the industry has a few other challenges to confront. For one, 97% of the glass that encloses solar panels comes from China. Besides the geopolitical implications of that dependence, glass is so fragile and heavy that its shipping costs make domestic production enticing both economically and environmentally.

“We need domestic glass to have an efficient supply chain,” said Suvi Sharma, founder and CEO of solar recycling startup Solarcycle. His company is breaking ground on a combination solar-panel recycling facility and solar-glass factory in Cedartown, some 70 miles southwest of Dalton. Sharma expects to invest $344 million in the community and hire 600 full-time employees.

Compared with Dalton and Cartersville, ​“Cedartown is more off the beaten path — this would be the first large-scale factory going up there,” said Sharma. After years in which the population declined and young people looked elsewhere for jobs, ​“this enables them to keep people and bring in more people. There’s a cascading impact.”

Solarcycle will use its rail spur to ship in low-iron silica from a mine in Georgia, plus soda ash and limestone. Over time, it will supplement those raw ingredients with increasing amounts of glass the company will pull from decommissioned solar panels, including those made by Qcells. The goal is to produce enough glass for 5 gigawatts of panels per year; Solarcycle will ship the glass to nearby customers. At that point, workers in northwest Georgia will have a hand in all the major steps of solar-module production except the processing of raw polysilicon. Hanwha recently became the largest shareholder in REC Silicon to secure access to domestic polysilicon from the Pacific Northwest.

Georgia also nabbed a hefty chunk of the electric-vehicle factory buildout catalyzed by IRA incentives. Hyundai is dropping nearly $1 billion on its ​“Metaplant” near the deepwater port of Savannah and building an adjacent $4.3 billion battery plant with LG. Kia erected a new EV9 SUV manufacturing line at its plant in West Point, about halfway down Georgia’s border with Alabama. The first EV9 rolled off the line in June — less than two years after the IRA was signed into law.

Dalton, then, is a leading indicator of the industrial invigoration that clean energy factories are bringing to cities and towns across Georgia. People broadly appreciate it — if not for the role in combating climate change or countering China’s industrial might, then for high starting wages, comfortable working conditions, and opportunities for advancement.

But for this nascent factory boom to endure, the policies that triggered it need to stay in effect. The people of Georgia played a decisive role in spurring this manufacturing revival; this November, they’ll have an outsize role in deciding if it continues.

This article by Canary Media is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

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It illustrates how far companies will go to influence elected officials. Politicians have elections to worry about, giving them a general motivation to avoid moves that will be unpopular. In fact, one survey found that congressional representatives rated “staying in touch with constituents” as the most important aspect of their jobs. But behind the scenes, there’s a very meta struggle to sway what politicians perceive as popular opinion.

“What really matters, in some ways, is not objectively what the public thinks, but it’s what decision-makers think the public thinks,” said Matto Mildenberger, a political science professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Across the board, politicians tend to think climate action is much less popular than it really is. The latest example comes from a new study, published in the journal Nature Energy earlier this month, finding that local elected officials in Pennsylvania underestimated support among their constituents for large solar projects. Based on survey responses from nearly 900 residents and more than 200 policymakers, researchers found that Pennsylvanians liked solar projects 7 percentage points more than natural gas ones. Local officials, however, misperceived that preference, thinking natural gas, which is primarily composed of the potent greenhouse gas methane, would be more popular.

Since local officials have a lot of sway over what energy projects get approved, this misperception could translate to less clean energy projects getting built, slowing the transition away from fossil fuels. Pennsylvania has been identified as the state with the fifth-most solar capacity by 2050, according to Princeton’s modeling for how the country could reach net-zero emissions. “In the vast majority of the U.S., the actual ‘Is this project going to be built or not?’ is decided at the local level,” said Holly Caggiano, a co-author of the study and a professor of climate justice and environmental planning at the University of British Columbia in Canada.

Misunderstanding what Americans believe about climate change could be slowing climate action at the national level, too. A study in 2019, co-authored by Mildenberger, showed that congressional staffers underestimated the popularity of putting restrictions on carbon emissions in their local districts. The same bias was true of elected officials at the state level, according to his research. “We should absolutely believe that those perceptions are limiting the ambition of climate and energy policy,” Mildenberger said. “It is one factor among many that makes solving the climate crisis harder.”

It’s not just politicians who hold a distorted view: People systematically underestimate public support for climate policies. A study from 2022 found that Americans imagined only a minority of their fellow citizens supported a carbon tax or a Green New Deal, when it was actually an overwhelming majority — meaning that actual support for climate policies was almost double what they thought.

Part of the problem is that people who support renewable energy or climate policies don’t usually talk about it much, giving everyone else a distorted impression about how popular, or unpopular, those beliefs really are. “Often, opponents to projects are very, very loud,” Caggiano said. In addition, media coverage may give unpopular opinions outsized weight in order to present “both sides” of an issue. While that practice has been fading in climate science coverage, it’s still common in articles about climate policy debates, Mildenberger said.

Some politicians have a more skewed view than others. Those who oppose climate action tend to be even further off in their estimates of what the public wants, because of a psychological bias that assumes most of their constituents share their opinions. But the information lawmakers are exposed to also affects the size of that perception gap — it widened when officials got more campaign contributions from fossil fuel interests, and when they reported having more contact with conservative interest groups, Mildenberger’s 2019 study shows. Those groups might push commissioned polls that make a climate policy look unpopular, for example, Mildenberger said.

“There’s this enormous effort by the industry to shape what politicians think the public wants,” Mildenberger said.

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Pro-fossil fuel interests might also engage in “astroturfing,” a PR strategy that fakes grassroots support for a cause, like Entergy’s natural-gas-fired power station in New Orleans. The tactic has also been used in national debates. In 2009, when Congress was considering the Waxman-Markey bill that would enact a federal cap-and-trade program, a lobbying group for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity forged more than a dozen letters opposing it, supposedly from local community groups concerned about rising energy prices, and sent them to members of Congress. The bill passed the House by a slim margin but was never brought to a vote in the Senate.

There are accurate sources of information showing what Americans think about climate change, like nonpartisan polls from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, which find that nearly three-quarters of Americans want to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Learning that the position they hold is unpopular with the electorate can even lead politicians to change their position on an issue, at least according to one study from Belgium.

More than a decade after the Waxman-Markey debacle, in 2022, Congress finally passed major climate legislation: The Inflation Reduction Act is investing hundreds of billions of dollars into clean energy, heat pumps, and other low-carbon technologies. Since there wasn’t significant public backlash to the law, it’s one data point that can help correct politicians’ misperceptions of public opinion, Mildenberger said. But he warns that fossil fuel interests are still very active in trying to block climate-friendly policies. “We should have every reason to expect that they’re going to keep on bringing more distorted information into the political arena to try and tilt that arena in their favor.”

This article was first published by Grist. Read the original article here. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. 

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He endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, to take his place. “Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year,” he said in another statement. Not long after, Harris announced via the Biden campaign that she intends to run for president. “I am honored to have the president’s endorsement and my intention is to earn and win this nomination,” she said.

During his term, President Biden managed to shepherd a surprising number of major policies into law with a razor-thin Democratic majority in the Senate. His crowning achievement is signing the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA — the biggest climate spending law in U.S. history, with the potential to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions up to 42 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. In announcing his withdrawal, Biden called it “the most significant climate legislation in the history of the world.”

The post Here’s what a Kamala Harris presidency could mean for climate appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The sun and the wind have been the country’s fastest growing sources of energy over the past decade, according to a report the nonprofit Climate Central released Wednesday. Meanwhile, coal power has declined sharply, and the use of methane (marketed as ‘natural gas‘) in electricity generation has all but leveled off. With the Inflation Reduction Act poised to kick that growth curve higher with expanded tax credits for manufacturing and installing photovoltaic panels and wind turbines, the most optimistic projections suggest that the country is getting ever-closer to achieving its 2030 and 2035 clean energy goals.

“I think the rate at which renewables have been able to grow is just something that most people don’t recognize,” said Amanda Levin, director of policy analysis at the nonprofit National Resources Defense Council, who was not involved in preparing the report.

In the decade analyzed by Climate Central, solar went from generating less than half a percent of the nation’s electricity to producing nearly four percent. In that same period, wind grew from four percent to roughly 10. Once hydropower, geothermal, and biomass are accounted for, nearly a quarter of the nation’s grid was powered by renewable electricity in 2023, with the share only expected to rise thanks to the continued surge in solar.

The vast majority of the nation’s solar capacity comes from utility-scale installations with at least one megawatt of capacity (enough to power over a hundred homes, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association). But panels installed on rooftops, parking lots, and other comparatively small sites contributed a combined 48,000 megawatts across the country.

“One thing that surprised a lot of different people who’ve read the report in our office was the strength of small-scale solar,” said Jen Brady, the lead analyst on the Climate Central report.

With residential and other small arrays accounting for 34 percent of the nation’s available capacity, “it lets you know that maybe you could do something in your community, in your home that can help contribute to it,” Brady said.

Still, the buildout of utility-scale solar farms continues to set the pace for how rapidly renewable energy can feed the country’s grid. According to Sam Ricketts, a clean energy consultant and former climate policy advisor to Washington Governor Jay Inslee, solar’s growth was driven by production and investment tax credits that President Barack Obama extended in 2015 and President Joe Biden expanded through the Inflation Reduction Act. Beyond these federal incentives that allow energy developers to claim tax credits equivalent to 30 percent of the installation cost of renewables, state policies that proactively drive clean energy or promote a competitive market in which the dwindling price of renewables allow them to outshine fossil fuels have been critical to ratcheting up growth. Yet, even with the accelerating expansion seen in the last decade, more investments and incentives are needed.

“As rapid as that growth has been, how do we make it all go that much faster?” Ricketts asks. “Because we need to be building renewables and electricity at about three times the speed that we have been over the last few years.”

Achieving that rate of build out is critical for achieving two of President Biden’s climate goals: cutting emissions economy-wide by at least half by 2030 and achieving 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2035.

To realize those goals, the nation must reach 80 percent clean energy by 2030. “I dare say it’s even more important, for the time being, than 100 percent clean by 2035,” Ricketts said. Hitting that benchmark, he said, will require more federal and state policy pushes. Levin agrees.

“The IRA does a lot,” she said, “but it is not likely to do everything.”

The IRA has the ability to push renewable energy from roughly 40 percent of the nation’s energy mix, when nuclear is included, to more than 60 percent – or, in the most optimistic of scenarios, 77 percent.

But for the growth in capacity to be integrated into the system and utilized, the grid needs to be able to transmit electrons from far-off solar fields and wind farms to the places where they’re needed. While the transmission conversation most often revolves around building new lines and transmission towers, Levin notes that recent technology advances have made it possible to address half of these transmission needs simply by stringing new, advanced power lines on existing infrastructure that can handle bigger loads with fewer losses, in a process called “reconductoring.”

The other challenge that comes with building out clean energy is learning how to handle the way  wind speeds and sunshine fluctuate. While this is often levied as an argument against their reliability, Levin points out that a host of solutions exist – from expanding battery storage to adjusting loads when demand spikes – to ensure they’re reliable. The challenge is adopting them.

“Utilities are risk averse,” she said, “and their commissions can also be risk averse. And so it’s getting them to be comfortable with thinking about the way that they provide electricity and the way that they manage their system a little differently.”

This article originally appeared in Grist. Read the original story here.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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Across nearly every segment tracked by Rhodium Group and its collaborators at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, investments have not only increased since President Joe Biden signed the legislation, the rate of growth has quickened, too. In the 12 months from October 2022 through September 2023, $220 billion poured into everything from battery factories to solar farms to emerging technologies like hydrogen, including $34 billion in federal spending, mostly in the form of tax credits.

The report shows, among other things, the scale of investments that the government can spur with a clear commitment to a specific course of action. Both figures reveal a substantive increase in the financial pressure building behind the transition to a clean economy and testify to the role progressive policies play in pushing that economic transformation forward.

“It’s proving the value of the federal government taking the lead, putting in place policy that says, ‘This is the direction that we’re headed: supporting decarbonization, supporting clean energy,’” said Hannah Hess, an associate director of climate and energy at Rhodium Group who co-authored the report.

By taking that lead, many billions more have flowed into the clean economy. In 2023, the sector as a whole logged new records for yet another year. Utility-scale solar and storage grew more than 50% compared to 2022 to a total of $53 billion. Investment in the entire EV supply chain hit $42 billion — up 115% over the previous year. Meanwhile, retail spending by businesses and households on things like EVs, heat pumps, and rooftop solar came in at $118 billion, all told.

Nonetheless, several economists and analysts said that, while impressive, the rate of investment revealed in the Clean Investment Monitor still isn’t enough for the U.S. to achieve its climate goals. We can certainly cut emissions by 40%, as stated in the Inflation Reduction Act, but we’re still far from the 50% reduction needed by 2030 to meet its commitments under the Paris Agreement.

“We have more work to do,” said Catherine Wolfram, a professor of energy economics at MIT. While not involved with the Clean Investment Monitor, much of Wolfram’s work at MIT has studied the expected economic impacts of the Inflation Reduction Act. Though she doesn’t see the level of investment as yet being sufficient to achieve that ambitious goal, she underscored that the Inflation Reducation Act remains a big win, especially as a symbol of America’s commitment to climate action.

By holding a torch to the path the nation’s economy can take toward a future in which excess emissions fade into myths and fables, the government has garnered investments in projects that won’t receive federal support for years to come. In particular, Hess pointed out that more than one-fifth of the $239 billion spent in the 2023 calendar year on clean investments went toward manufacturing, particularly to all things EV. In many cases, companies are spending tens, sometimes hundreds, of millions of dollars to build factories on the promise that they will receive tax credits once batteries, solar panels, and other products start coming off the assembly line.

This reality has some investors keeping a keen eye on Congress.

Bob Keefe, executive director of the nonpartisan advocacy group E2, said that the dozens of attempts by Republican members of Congress to repeal or otherwise roll back provisions and funding sources in the Inflation Recuation Act is making some investors squeamish.

We have more work to do.
– Catherine Wolfram, a professor at MIT

“Nobody’s going to want to invest in something if the policies that [are] driving it are under threat,” Keefe said. “I mean, just the mention of ‘threat’ is enough to spook people.”

Even with those policy scares and a looming election whose outcome may jeopardize the Inflation Reducation Act’s various funding streams, E2 has nonetheless tracked announcements for hundreds of clean energy projects across 41 states since the legislation passed, with $4 billion worth of investments announced in February alone.

As long as the government doesn’t “screw it up,” Keefe said, “We are quite literally on the cusp of the biggest economic revolution we’ve seen in this country in generations.”

The trends for this have crystallized. Yes, the wind industry stumbled on land and at sea, according to the report, but it’s poised to find its footing again. But every other sector saw substantial, even startling, growth — particularly emerging technologies like hydrogen and sustainable aviation fuel. That broad category saw a tenfold increase in spending in 2023, hitting $9.1 billion.

Federal investments are already exceeding the Biden administration’s own estimates, and this spending, as Hess pointed out, will only increase. Barring unexpected obstructions, the government is on track to inject not the oft-cited figure of $369 billion, but perhaps as much as $1 trillion or more into the clean economy through Inflation Reduction Act-related spending alone, according to estimates by Wolfram and her colleagues.

Wherever the final dollar figure falls, the report from Rhodium Group emphasizes the energy and enthusiasm there is behind this economic transition. To those who aren’t forehead deep in economic forecasting, the outpouring has been so expansive as to be wholly unexpected.

“Nobody could have ever predicted that we would see this type of investment, this type of job creation,” Keefe said. “It’s absolutely incredible.”

This article originally appeared in Grist. Read the original story here.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org.

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The made-in-Canada plan seeks to bolster manufacturing at home and secure a place for Canadian firms and products in global supply chains.

Canada’s industrial policy has four tiers of tools: carbon pricing and regulations, investment tax credits, public funds (namely, the Canada Growth Fund and the Canada Infrastructure Bank) and targeted investments in priority sectors. Together with the controversial investment credit for carbon capture, utilization and storage from Budget 2022, the government has now earmarked $83 billion to support Canada’s net-zero industrial policy.

While there has been a lot of focus on tax credits, these measures, as well as accompanying subsidies, do not constitute an industrial strategy on their own. A modern industrial strategy must involve a dynamic process of collaboration with the sector that integrates the tools into a clear strategy.

For example, the tax credits receiving much attention in the IRA are supported by excellent work in the U.S. Department of Energy to set clear targets, organize supply chains and work with industries directly to identify and solve challenges in a dynamic way. The U.S. approach benefits from decades of work to develop the institutional mechanisms for coordinating commercialization strategies between the government and industry.

Canada needs to develop a similar approach: targets and sector tables to hash out clear strategies that organize and focus work in the sectors. Without intentional development of such coordination mechanisms, Budget 2023’s commendable initiatives will risk falling into the Canadian pattern of spreading innovation supports (research funding and R&D and investment tax credits, for example) too thin.

It is difficult to assess whether the proposed tax credits and other measures – such as subsidies for battery plants – address the needs of Canadian businesses, target activities in which Canada can be globally competitive, and trigger private investment at the speed and scale required. A custom industrial policy approach is needed for each sector, reflecting the unique supply-chain challenges and supply/demand barriers to adoption for each solution.

We have proposed three key elements to kick-start industrial policy in Canada and to build capacity for strategic collaboration in government and among other stakeholders.

Goals: A modern, strategic industrial policy should have goals that are concrete economic objectives (or targets) and that refer to the deployment, production and performance of key technologies – for example, the amount of clean hydrogen produced by a specific future date. Goals and milestones should be indexed to a vision of Canada’s place in specific global supply chains.

Public–private partnerships: International best practices in industrial policy underline the key role of robust public–private partnerships in priority sectors, supported by deliberative tables and independent intermediaries. These partnerships would create collaboration clusters at the sector level, which would be used to align strategy, policy and financing.

Government bodies: How can best practices be applied to government institutions in Canada? Institutional innovation is often necessary to build the culture and practice of modern industrial policy with a net-zero focus. Cross-departmental interaction and synergy would be important to set up a new industrial policy process for success. But setting up those processes will take time, and the need to act is urgent, so it is important that government bodies work closely with industry and independent intermediaries to catalyze strategic action now.

While there has been a lot of focus on tax credits, these measures, as well as accompanying subsidies, do not constitute an industrial strategy on their own

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The report lands just as analysts in the United States warn of major verification problems with a CCS tax credit that received a major boost in the Biden administration’s new climate action plan, and as Canadian fossil fuels lobby for more tax relief to match what’s becoming available in the U.S.

One of the case studies in the 79-page IEEFA report concludes that the troubled Boundary Dam CCS project in Saskatchewan has missed its carbon capture by about 50%. The 13 “flagship, large-scale” projects in the analysis account for about 55% of the world’s current carbon capture capacity, the institute says in a release.

Those 13 projects captured a grand total of 39 million tonnes of CO2 per year, the report found, about one-ten thousandth of the 36 billion tonnes that emitters spewed into the atmosphere in 2021.

“CCS technology has been going for 50 years and many projects have failed and continued to fail, with only a handful working,” said report co-author Bruce Robertson, a veteran investment analyst and fund manager now serving as IEEFA’s energy finance analyst for gas and LNG. The report, co-authored by energy analyst Milad Mousavian, concludes that seven of the 13 projects underperformed, two failed outright, and one was mothballed.

“Many international bodies and national governments are relying on carbon capture in the fossil fuel sector to get to net-zero, and it simply won’t work,” Robertson said in the release. Though there is “some indication it might have a role to play in hard-to-abate sectors such as cement, fertilizers, and steel, overall results indicate a financial, technical, and emissions reduction framework that continues to overstate and underperform.”

Robertson said the two most successful projects in the study, both of them in Norway, benefitted from the country’s “unique regulatory environment” for fossil companies.

When CCS or carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) projects did succeed, it was usually in the natural gas processing sector, where CO2 has to be removed to deliver a marketable product, IEEFA explains. But that’s often the CO2 that is handed off for Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR), a process that involves injecting the gas into declining oil wells to boost their production. Canada’s new CCS tax credit excludes EOR projects, but IEEFA says 73% of the CO2 captured across the 13 projects in the study was used for that purpose.

“Producing the primary usable product (i.e. natural (methane) gas) is impossible without separating CO2,” the report states. “This explains why the sector has been using carbon capture technology for decades, not necessarily as a climate-friendly solution, but as an inevitability to produce the fossil fuel natural gas. On top of that, selling the captured CO2 primarily to oil producers for enhanced oil recovery improves the economic viability of gas development projects.”

But last year’s Net Zero by 2050 report by the International Energy Agency “explicitly expressed alarm about the danger of developing any new oil and gas projects globally,” the two authors add. “It emphasized not developing any new oil and gas projects if the world wants to reach net zero by 2050.”

CCS technology has been going for 50 years and many projects have failed and continued to fail, with only a handful working.

-Bruce Robertson, IEEFA’s energy finance analyst for gas and LNG

The other “elephant in the room”, IEEFA says, is that CCS attached to a fossil gas project only applies to the carbon pollution released while a field is in production. It does nothing to reduce the 80% or more of total emissions that occur when the product reaches its final customer and is burned.

“It is obvious that CCUS in the sector is not about reducing Scope 3 emissions from the final combustion/use of gas,” the report says. “Rather, it is about minimizing production-related Scope 1 emissions from gas with excessive CO2 content. This is in contrast to most other CCUS applications in the industrial and power sector, which aim to minimize the emissions coming from the end consumption of fossil fuels.”

That means it makes no sense to declare a carbon capture project attached to a new gas project climate-friendly. “Even if the CCS/CCUS facilities work at their capacity (which has not been the case historically, barring some exceptions), such projects could only manage a minor proportion of [their] value chain emissions.”

The IEEFA analysis coincides with a furor over the 45Q tax credit for CCS operations in the United States that served as a reference point, if not a model, for the C$2.6-billion subsidy introduced in the Trudeau government’s 2022 budget. The U.S. tax measure dates back to 2008, and “by 2021, 12 large projects were using 45Q federal tax credits to capture carbon dioxide from the smokestacks of industry and inject the gas into the ground,” Oil & Gas Watch reports, citing a report by the non-partisan U.S. Congressional Research Service. The Inflation Reduction Act that U.S. President Biden recently signed into law contains billions in new tax incentives for CCS.

But “about half of the carbon sequestration credits claimed by industry over the last decade were later revoked by the [U.S. Internal Revenue Service] because the companies failed to monitor or verify their capture of the greenhouse gas” as required by the Environmental Protection Agency, Oil & Gas Watch says. Of the $894 million that companies claimed between 2010 and 2019 without monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) plans in place, enforcement officials disallowed about $531 million, according to IRS Commissioner Charles P. Rettig.

Of the 10 companies that claimed the largest share of the more than $1 billion in CCS tax credits, seven had no MRV plans.

With the new U.S. legislation now in place, Oil & Gas Watch says its public database shows at least 29 proposed oil, gas, and petrochemical facilities across the U.S.—including 12 nitrogen fertilizer plants, and seven LNG terminals and three petrochemical and plastics plants—that are planning to use CCS techniques.

But neither the shaky nature of the technology nor the growing controversy south of the border is stopping Canadian fossil fuel companies from demanding more generous taxpayer backing for their own CCS ventures. “Canada’s oil and gas industry is asking the federal government to increase its planned tax credits for carbon capture projects, so the country is able to keep pace with new credits introduced in the United States,” the Globe and Mail reported Monday. “Failure to do so, industry figures say, could put Canadian companies that want to invest in emissions-reducing technology at a competitive disadvantage.”

Previously, Cenovus Energy CEO Alex Pourbaix told analysts that the new federal tax credit wasn’t rich enough to convince major oil sands operators to invest their own money in CCS. Environment and Climate Minister Steven Guilbeault countered that Canada’s big oil companies are making record profits this year and should invest some of that extra cash to curb their greenhouse gas emissions.

This article is republished from The Energy Mix. Read the original article.

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So she listened and followed local officials, working to gain their support and spending time to understand the needs of the people they represent and serve. This is one of the lessons Moore tries to impart in her new book, Rural Renaissance, which she hopes can serve as a roadmap for local leaders in the energy transition. Moore, who served in the Obama administration as a sustainability official, provides a how-to guide for town council members, utility directors and business owners looking to bring clean energy to their communities and revitalize rural economies.

Rural America has long been neglected by policy-makers when it comes to green policies, says Moore, as they have been more focused on cities, where most pollution comes from. But Moore sees the potential role that rural America can play in the energy transition and its interdependencies with the transition happening in urban communities.

“As a practical matter, if you’re a big city like New York and you have a zero-emissions goal, where are you going to put all those solar panels?” she says. “You ain’t going to put them on the top of the Empire State Building. You’ve got to put them somewhere.” And that somewhere is in rural America.

Her book lays out seven principles to guide the rural clean energy renaissance. Within these, Moore says it’s imperative that we ensure that the thousands of power utilities scattered throughout rural America prioritize the public interest over profits, and that we right the historic wrongs of energy systems that were shaped by laws and policies that were deliberately racist.

Moore offers five components of the clean energy future for rural communities: energy efficiency, solar power, resilience, electric vehicles and broadband, which is lacking in many parts of rural America but vital for smart energy grids. She notes that energy efficiency is a good place to start, as it was in LaGrange, as retrofits will immediately improve people’s homes and save them money on their energy bills.

The book was released against the backdrop of the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act – a bill that included $369 billion in funding for climate and energy initiatives. It’s been trumpeted as the country’s largest investment in battling climate change, but it’s also the biggest investment in rural power in 100 years, since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, which brought electricity to many rural homes.

Moore sees parallels between the rural electrification movement of the 1930s and today’s renewable energy renaissance. She believes the country is now facing similar challenges to what it did in the early 1930s, when nine out of 10 rural households didn’t have electricity. In a speech in Portland in 1932, Roosevelt declared that “electricity is no longer a luxury. It is a definite necessity.” In the following years, as part of the New Deal, the federal government set up cooperative and public power utilities that spread access to electricity in rural America. Moore sees these power utilities as “energy democracies” that can now be drivers of the clean energy transition, sped up thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act.

Moore says that local leaders need to pay attention to the kinds of energy rebates, subsidies and incentives that are offered through federal programs and will be doled out through the Inflation Reduction Act. The opportunities are great, she says, but it will be up to local innovators and leaders to take advantage of them.

“Go get the money and put it to work in your hometown. Whether you agree with the legislation or not, it’s the law of the land, so go get your piece of it and take care of your community,” she says.

Moore says that every community is on its own journey and that there is no “monolithic energy future,” and that they’ll all be guided by the same clean energy north star. But how do we get such a large group of communities all on the same page, especially in conservative rural America, where economies are fossil-fuel-centric? Moore says it starts with changing one mind at a time.

“I see the hope and potential in all things,” she says. “We may be in a place where it’s hard to get everyone on the same page about clean energy, climate or carbon, but if you sit down and talk with someone long enough, you can probably find somewhere you agree, or a shared value. And that’s a perfect place to begin.”

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