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Federal court tosses out Trump’s strict limits on solar and wind tax credits

  Last August, the Internal Revenue Service issued strict new rules for solar and wind developers hoping to tap the federal tax credits known as 45Y, for the production of carbon-free electricity, and 48E, for investment in green generating assets. For years, the U.S. government had required companies to invest 5% of the total cost of the project by a certain deadline to qualify for the rebates. But last summer, the Trump administration eliminated the 5% threshold and instead mandated that projects over 1.5 megawatts in capacity show evidence that physical construction has begun to be eligible for the writeoffs. In all, the new rules “could have been so much worse,” Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote at the time. But requiring construction to start narrowed the scope of how many turbines and panels could be built before the two tax credits are phased out this July 4. With less than a month to go before the credits go away, a federal court has intervened to restore the original 5% ru...
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The Iron Law Of Power Density, Revisited

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  Note: You can’t understand energy and power systems if you don’t understand power density. As I explained in the article below, published on August 20, 2023, here on Substack , power density is the most important and least understood metric in physics. I’m reposting it because it is just as relevant today as it was in 2023. It’s also heartening to see that the Trump Administration has adopted power density as a key metric for determining its approach to energy policy. Last summer, Interior Secretary Doug Burghum issued an order that underscored the importance of density and noted that an offshore wind project requires 5,500 times more area to produce the same amount of electricity as a modern nuclear plant . Before going further, I must give credit where credit is due. Jesse Ausubel’s landmark 2007 essay, “ Renewable and Nuclear Heresies ,” changed the course of my career. In the very first sentence of the abstract, Ausubel boldly declares, “Renewables are not green.” His essay...
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Global Warming or Just Getting Old?

  A hot day in Rome.     The World Health Organization is at it again. A top commission—stacked with a former European Union climate commissioner, a former prime minister of Iceland, other former ministers and environmental campaigners—has recommended that the health body declare climate change a global health emergency. The commission’s headline evidence is a Lancet study showing heat deaths in Europe are rapidly rising, reaching 63,000 a year. This study shows that European heat-death risk has risen 82% since 1990. But the study and the commission report both ignore a crucial factor : Heat mortality risk rises sharply with age, and Europe has aged dramatically. Since 1990, the share of Europeans over 70 has increased by 78%. Aging alone explains virtually all the observed increase in heat deaths. Any honest analysis of mortality in a rapidly aging society uses age-standardized death rates, which are comparable over time because they control for demographic change. Th...
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The Insane Climate Bureaucracy That Never Was

  The SEC’s Atkins deserves praise for strangling the climate disclosure rule in its cradle.   On Friday, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Paul Atkins made one of the most important announcements in the history of modern financial regulation. His news was not a new regulation or a billion-dollar fine for some white-collar miscreant. In a refreshing move that will hopefully inspire future policymaking , Atkins announced the elimination of a huge bureaucratic burden: the agency’s climate disclosure rule . Critics of the rule cheered . The rule would have imposed an annual reporting mandate on every public company in the U.S. related to their energy use and climate-change-related policies . This would have been a departure from the SEC’s traditional “ principles-based ” approach to disclosure, which allows companies to prioritize the information they think will be most useful to investors. This emphasis on one specific topic — especially coming during the Bid...
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Clean Economy Works: Q1 2026 Analysis

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY   Clean energy developers announced more than 50 new utility-scale generation and storage projects in the first quarter of this year—nearly double the number of active projects announced in all of 2025— continuing a rush to start construction on solar and wind projects ahead of a looming July 4 deadline for tax incentive eligibility imposed by last year’s federal One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBA).   According to new data analyzed by E2, businesses plan to invest more than $18 billion in the 54 projects announced in the January-March period. Combined, the projects would be able to generate over 12 gigawatts (GW) of badly needed new electricity that could power about two million homes - reaffirming solar, wind and storage as the nation’s biggest suppliers of new electricity and the cheapest, fastest-to-deploy new power sources available.   Still , actions by the Trump administration and Congress to ban clean energy permits, eliminate tax incentives and d...
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Climate And Energy Provisions In New York's FY 2027 Budget: Making The Coming Crash Worse

  May 29, 2026     Francis Menton   New York State’s fiscal year runs from April 1 to March 31, and thus there is a mandate that the budget for each year must be approved before April Fool’s Day. This year they blew right by that deadline. But today, 8+ weeks late, it appears that a new budget has been enacted for what they call “fiscal year” 2027, that is, April 1, 2026 to March 31, 2027. Among several contentious issues that held up enactment of this year’s budget, probably the most contentious involved the provisions relating to energy and “climate.” Our climate law, the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act of 2019 (CLCPA) had imposed absurd deadlines for eliminating fossil fuels from the energy system. Seven years in, Kathy Hochul, our lightweight Governor, had finally mustered just enough brain cells to recognize that disaster was approaching. But she faces big legislative majorities of her own Democratic Party committed to “climate action.” And of t...
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Wind Repowering—A Second Wind for the Industry

  It’s a known fact that wind power sites across the U.S. eventually will reach the end of their lifecycles. So now what? The industry is coming upon an age where owners and operators must repower these sites by leveraging existing infrastructure to help meet the growing national demand for power. With more than 75,000 turbines across 45 states, many approaching 15-20 years of operation, wind repowering— upgrading existing wind farms with newer, more efficient technologies to increase energy production and extend operational life—is no longer a niche consideration. It is a central pillar of the wind industry’s future. Our country’s renewable energy repowering strategy is essential to the nation’s future clean energy ambitions and its evolving power demands. In recent years, there has been a downturn in greenfield wind project development due to supply chain challenges, changes in tax laws, and limited, new interconnection opportunities. Repowering, as a supportive and sustaining me...
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