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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.
CALISTOGA, Calif. — A quaint northerly outpost of Napa Valley wine country, Calistoga has struggled to keep the lights on when wildfires strike the region. Now it’s got a brand-new microgrid to run the whole town for days on end without any onsite fossil fuels, just batteries and liquid hydrogen.
After disastrous conflagrations in 2017 and 2018, utility Pacific Gas & Electric began preemptively shutting off power lines to avoid sparking fires amid dangerously dry, windy conditions.
“We were the first community in all of PG&E’s network that was getting our power shut off to protect us,” said Calistoga City Council member Lisa Gift. “By 2019 we were one of the first communities to have a microgrid in all of PG&E’s network, and that was being powered by diesel generators.”
PG&E arranged a bank of truck-based diesel generators to sit in the town during fire season. When the utility cut grid power, the generators kicked on, belching smoke in a particularly beloved pocket of the 5,000-person community.
“We’re a small town, so they would come up and they’d be polluting the environment, taking up our dog park — loud, gross, noisy,” Gift recalled.
Now the diesel generators are gone and the park has been turned back over to Calistoga’s canine companions.
On a slim parcel of city land next door, publicly traded energy-storage company Energy Vault installed lithium-ion batteries and a 234-foot, reinforced-steel tank for liquid hydrogen (designed to withstand a roaring fire, should it ever come to that) that runs a bank of hydrogen fuel cells. Altogether, this compound should be able to meet Calistoga’s electricity needs without any power from the broader grid. It’s contracted to produce up to 8.5 megawatts for 48 hours, whenever PG&E shuts off grid power due to fire concerns. Refilling the hydrogen tank could let it run for several days more.
“Even though we’re taking elements — fuel cells, batteries, liquid hydrogen storage and distribution — that have been used before in commercial settings, they’re coming together for the first time as resiliency,” said Craig Horne, Energy Vault’s senior vice president for advanced energy solutions, in an interview before the project’s unveiling in early August.
Fans of hydrogen hail it as a solution to just about any entrenched decarbonization challenge, from heavy transport to steelmaking to on-demand power. But how hydrogen is produced makes a huge difference in its climate impact; seemingly clean sources can actually rack up major carbon emissions for negligible benefit. For now, the clean hydrogen economy remains largely speculative, with hardly any truly clean hydrogen being produced or any real projects using it. Many planned clean hydrogen projects have vanished without a trace, following a short-lived boom fueled by Biden-era support.
In Calistoga, Energy Vault has tapped hydrogen to deal with a very specific set of constraints — delivering energy without local emissions, over multiple days, in a tight footprint — but the cleanliness of that hydrogen is a more complicated issue than public descriptions of the microgrid suggest.
The key players all have a lot riding on the project.
Energy Vault, which previously raised several hundred million dollars in a singular bid to store energy with multi-story robotic cranes that stack blocks, wants to build a new long-duration storage business around this hydrogen microgrid showcase. Plug Power, the financially challenged hydrogen company, points to Calistoga as its largest deployment of hydrogen fuel cells (a beefy 8 megawatts, after 28 years of hard work). And PG&E has orders from regulators to add more clean energy microgrids in communities where it regularly cuts off power — Calistoga was its first delivery on that directive, after a few years of soliciting proposals and a couple more years of permitting and construction.
“Community microgrids are the future of the energy system,” said Craig Lewis, who advocates for such projects as executive director of the Clean Coalition nonprofit. The Calistoga microgrid is “a commercial-scale experiment, and I’m grateful for it.”
The results of that experiment will take time to analyze. It could unleash a new, replicable model for premium-priced community-level backup power. Or the quirkiness of the design and the murkiness of hydrogen’s supply chain and emissions could make it a quixotic outlier of questionable climate value.
The Calistoga microgrid poses an answer to the question of how to provide a few days of backup power to a small town in a small space, without worrying too much about cost. The limitations drove the design, which turned out quite unlike anything built thus far.
Energy Vault had to figure out how to pack 293 megawatt-hours of storage into just two-thirds of an acre. The lot used to hold debris from city works, like old bits of sidewalk and pipes, Horne said.
Lithium-ion batteries have proven themselves capable of storing power, be it as a Powerwall in someone’s garage or as a large-scale grid storage facility. But to store nearly 300 megawatt-hours, grid battery enclosures need more acreage than was available to lease from the city. Even if enough batteries could fit, the auxiliary power consumption for keeping them safely cooled would pose a challenge for a project that’s supposed to mostly sit around waiting for an emergency event.
Hydrogen gas can be liquefied by cooling it to ultra-low temperatures, which unlocks greater energy density. When converted back to gas and run through fuel cells, it produces a stream of electricity and no byproduct besides water vapor. That core technology powers hydrogen vehicles, though their cost and inconvenience make for a widely derided car-ownership experience. At Calistoga, the hydrogen flows directly to six Plug Power GenSure 1540 fuel cells, boxy containers with cooling units stacked on top, making them about two stories tall.
The engineers added a small lithium-ion battery (7.7 MW/11.6 MWh) to perform “black start,” the complicated and crucial task of rebooting an electrical system after a complete blackout, Horne noted. The battery also buffers the output of the system while the hydrogen gets up and running. Then the power flows to Calistoga’s grid, which, when PG&E shuts off the transmission lines, will be fully islanded from the surrounding network.
The hydrogen is stored onsite in an 80,000-gallon tank, manufactured in Minnesota by Chart Industries. The tank holds enough to power the fuel cells for about two days, but Energy Vault will try its best to keep the lights on beyond the contracted timeframe, Horne said. So the company made sure the tank can be refueled while it’s in active use.
“The task is to squeeze toothpaste into a toothpaste tube that was being squeezed,” Horne said. “That’s what we proved in our acceptance testing, running for multiple hours while the fuel cells were running and a tank trailer here in the driveway is pushing liquid hydrogen into the tank itself.”
The microgrid’s promise as a clean energy breakthrough, of course, hinges on the supply of clean hydrogen, but supply chains are barely getting started. Almost all commercial hydrogen is currently made from methane gas, a fossil fuel, through a procedure called steam methane reforming that sends the carbon dioxide byproduct straight into the atmosphere.
For hydrogen to stake any claim as a climate solution, it needs to be made without massive carbon emissions. That usually involves an alternative production method called electrolysis, which separates hydrogen from water using electricity. But this method can produce even more emissions than the dirty methane version if the electrolyzers are drawing power from the grid rather than dedicated renewable sources like solar and wind (see this previous Canary Media coverage for a detailed account of why that’s the case).
Energy Vault describes the hydrogen it’s using in Calistoga as “clean,” which Horne clarified as meeting the federal standard of no more than four kilograms of carbon dioxide emitted per kilogram of hydrogen produced. But he declined to name the source. Notably, California has subsidized hydrogen fueling stations for over a decade but still hasn’t managed to develop a clean hydrogen supply in-state. So for Calistoga’s hydrogen to be clean, it must be coming from somewhere else.
During a tour of the microgrid, Deepesh Goyal, vice president of stationary power at Plug Power, told Canary Media that Plug Power currently supplies hydrogen from its electrolyzer site in Georgia, which runs on grid power. More than half of Georgia’s electricity comes from fossil fuels, so that electrolysis incurs substantial power-plant emissions. Plug Power buys credits for clean energy supply to compensate for this, Goyal said.
To meet the highest federal standard for clean hydrogen, producers need to obtain clean power matched to their consumption on an hourly basis in the areas where they operate. Plug Power did not respond in time for publication to questions clarifying what type of credits it buys. But a spokesperson for Energy Vault told Canary Media that currently there aren’t any facilities that could supply Calistoga with liquid hydrogen from electrolysis powered by time-matched, dedicated clean electricity, and the earliest such facility is targeting completion in 2026.
Goyal also said some of Calistoga’s hydrogen comes from an unnamed partner in Las Vegas that uses renewable natural gas (RNG) as its feedstock. As it happens, legacy gas supplier Air Liquide opened a steam methane reformer in that area a few years ago to serve California’s demand. Air Liquide says it can substitute RNG for the usual methane, which would make the resulting hydrogen carbon-negative according to the convoluted calculations of California’s clean fuels bureaucracy. It’s still hydrogen made by splitting methane and releasing carbon dioxide, but it looks good on paper thanks to controversial rules that privilege certain politically connected providers of RNG.
If someone were to design a climate solution from a blank slate, they probably wouldn’t run electrolyzers on grid power in Georgia in order to load the super-cooled hydrogen onto diesel-powered tankers and haul it more than 2,800 miles to Northern California, where it will sit around almost every day awaiting a utility power outage.
“We still have to truck in that hydrogen,” said Gift. “That’s not ideal, but we were trucking in the diesel, and we were trucking in the diesel sometimes three times a day and burning that diesel.”
One incontrovertible fact is that the microgrid doesn’t combust anything onsite, so the operations within the fenceline emit almost no carbon emissions and don’t impact air quality. But it will be hard to gauge the real climate impacts of such a project until a more verifiably clean and geographically localized hydrogen supply chain develops. Several companies have said they will build truly green hydrogen production in the coming years. That task has only grown more difficult with the Trump administration’s efforts to thwart renewables development and vastly curtail clean hydrogen tax credits.
The other make-or-break variable for hydrogen-backed resilience is how much it costs. Liquid hydrogen is an expensive, specialty fuel only produced by a handful of suppliers in the U.S., and clean liquid hydrogen is even rarer.
For this first project, Energy Vault didn’t need to worry about consumer price sensitivity. The city of Calistoga isn’t paying Energy Vault for backup power: PG&E is paying the company to provide this service, out of funds socialized across the utility customer base. In fact, Calistoga is making some money, since Energy Vault leased the land from the municipality for 10 years.
The project’s total price tag has not been made public. Regulators allocated up to $46.3 million for PG&E to spend on the endeavor. Energy Vault closed $28 million in project financing this spring to support construction. (The company also said on Thursday that it has raised $300 million to launch Asset Vault, a subsidiary that will build, own, and operate storage projects, with Calistoga as one of two anchor properties.) Horne allowed that the hydrogen microgrid costs more than diesel generators up front, but argued it can be competitive in terms of operating costs, given all the hassles associated with diesel.
“We can do more and waste less, and so that’s how we can be more cost effective,” he said.
The regulatory authorization paints a different picture. The California Public Utilities Commission explicitly allowed PG&E to spend more money than the diesel generators cost in order to test a new model for cleaner resilience.
“This project was supported by a CPUC plan that said we could build a solution that costs no more than twice what it would cost to deploy diesel generation over 10 years,” said Jeremy Donnell, a senior manager for microgrid strategy and implementation at PG&E. “It’s a bit of an arbitrary marker, but that’s what was laid out, and this project did come in under that threshold.”
“But still, we have a ways to go to bring the cost down,” Donnell added. “So hopefully, through implementation of this first project, Energy Vault learned a lot, the industry learned a lot on how to integrate these solutions in future projects.”
Energy Vault hopes to improve the project economics by upgrading the site to allow regular power exports to the grid. Currently, the system is configured to only push out power when PG&E has scheduled a shutoff event; that means the microgrid sits idle almost every day of the year (and is unavailable for unforeseen outages, like if a tree falls on a key line). But with the right permissions and technical tweaks in place, Energy Vault expects to use the battery, and potentially even the hydrogen, to send power to California’s grid at particularly lucrative times.
“We can now have a viable second revenue stream outside of providing that resiliency service, without compromising our ability to provide the resiliency service,” Horne said. PG&E amended its contract this summer to clarify that Energy Vault is allowed to pursue this, provided it does not interrupt delivery of the required resilience services.
Going forward, Calistoga will serve as a showcase for Energy Vault’s new “H-Vault” product line, marketed as a high-tech option for long-duration clean energy needs. Hydrogen tanks will join gravity-based block stacking and conventional lithium-ion batteries as the company’s core offerings.
For the people of Calistoga, the project softens the upheavals of living through climate change–induced extreme weather, without all the downsides of onsite fossil fuel combustion.
“Is it absolutely perfect? No,” Gift said. “But as a society, it is about making that next best right step. And for us in our community, this was that next best right step.”
For Energy Vault and the budding hydrogen industry, the next right step will be expanding hydrogen production that’s definitively low-emissions, and closing the 2,800-mile gap between supply and demand.
Wendy Becktold contributed reporting from Calistoga.
Earlier this week, two low-carbon cement startups unveiled new partnerships with data-center developers and operators, which are looking at ways to curb the tech sector’s ballooning climate impact.
The separate announcements from Sublime Systems and Brimstone are a striking example of how businesses are pressing ahead with efforts to decarbonize essential polluting industries like cement making — even as the Trump administration guts federal programs meant to kick-start U.S. manufacturing of cleaner construction materials.
Both companies are developing novel ways of producing cement that don’t cook the planet in the process. Cement — the gluey powder mixed with sand, gravel, and water to form concrete — is responsible for roughly 8% of global carbon dioxide emissions. Nearly all cement is made today by heating carbon-rich limestone in fossil-fuel-burning kilns.
Sublime, an MIT spinout, said on Tuesday that it completed a “pilot pour” of its fossil-fuel-free cement at a data center campus in northern Virginia owned by Stack Infrastructure. Sublime’s approach involves electrically charging a bath of chemicals and calcium silicate rocks. In Virginia, the startup and its partners used the cement to make seven cubic yards of concrete mix, which was then spread over a high-traffic loading dock.
Demonstration projects like these are key to convincing the inherently cautious construction industry to embrace new approaches. “It gives us a proof point to then [do] larger-scale deployments in a few years,” Cory Waltrip, Sublime’s director of business development and strategy, told Canary Media.
Those future deployments could include facilities run by Microsoft. The tech giant recently signed a binding deal to purchase up to 622,500 metric tons of Sublime’s cement products — enough to build roughly 30 professional football stadiums — from the startup’s forthcoming manufacturing facilities. The agreement marks a massive step up for Sublime, which can currently make just 250 metric tons of cement per year at its pilot plant in Somerville, Massachusetts.
Brimstone, for its part, also announced on Tuesday that it signed a commercial agreement with Amazon. The deal allows Amazon, valued at $2 trillion, to reserve future supplies of Brimstone’s low-carbon cement, though the partners declined to provide more specific details.
Oakland, California–based Brimstone sources carbon-free rocks instead of limestone, then pulverizes those rocks and adds chemical agents to leach out valuable minerals. Certain compounds are heated in a rotary kiln to make industry-standard cement. What remains can be used as supplementary cementitious materials — which help bulk up cement mixes — or to make a key component of aluminum.
Cody Finke, Brimstone’s co-founder and CEO, said Amazon began testing Brimstone’s products about a year ago and found they worked just as well as the conventional materials used in Amazon’s buildings. Amazon will get its supply from Brimstone’s $378 million commercial demonstration plant, which is slated to be operating by the end of the decade, Finke said.
The announcements send an important signal that private-sector demand isn’t waning for cleaner construction products — despite the White House abandoning strategies and rescinding funding for using greener cement, steel, glass, and other materials in public buildings, roads, and bridges.
Melissa Hulting, director for industrial decarbonization at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, said she was “really excited” about the latest news from Sublime and Brimstone.
“In the absence of federal demand … it’s great to see that companies are stepping in and supporting procurement” of low-carbon cement, she said. “I’m hoping that we’ll see more companies, especially with the building up of these data centers, come in and fill that void.”
Still, green cement startups continue to face a sizable challenge in scaling up their pioneering manufacturing plants. The task is likely to be even harder now that the Department of Energy has clawed back crucial funding for industrial decarbonization initiatives.
In late May, the DOE said it was canceling over $3.7 billion in awards for two dozen projects aimed at decarbonizing everything from cement kilns and glassmaking furnaces to mac-and-cheese factories and whiskey distilleries. Sublime was slated to get up to $87 million to build its commercial-scale cement facility in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Brimstone had been awarded up to $189 million to finance the construction of its commercial plant, the site for which is still being decided.
Both Sublime and Brimstone said they’re in ongoing conversations with the DOE to try to appeal the decision. In the meantime, however, the startups are moving forward as planned with their manufacturing facilities.
Finke said Brimstone’s award cancellation felt like an “oversight, because critical materials are such an important topic for the Trump administration.” But he said that losing the federal funding doesn’t affect the company’s long-term strategy, which is focused on raising private capital. To date, the six-year-old startup has raised over $80 million from investors.
Sublime, meanwhile, has raised over $200 million since its founding in 2020, a figure that includes the DOE award. Leah Ellis, Sublime’s co-founder and CEO, said the startup remains on track to begin delivering cement to Microsoft and other customers from its Holyoke facility in 2028.
“We do think what we’re doing is aligned with the current administration’s priorities of creating jobs and investing in modernizing and onshoring manufacturing of important materials,” she said.
“Everything inside Sublime is going as well as we could hope,” Ellis added. “Nobody thought that scaling up a new cement technology would be easy, right? But that’s what we’re here for.”
San Francisco already requires most new buildings to eschew gas and run solely on electricity. Now, the metropolis is moving to ensure that substantial renovations in existing buildings are also all-electric.
Last week, the city and county’s Board of Supervisors completed the first of two votes to pass the All-Electric Major Renovations Ordinance, a climate-forward building standard that will apply to commercial and residential structures. The initial 11–0 vote was a resounding sign of approval; the final hearing is likely to occur Sept. 2, according to the San Francisco Environment Department, the agency that developed the rules.
“We can’t build the San Francisco of the future with fuel from the past,” Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman said in a statement. “This legislation picks up where we left off with the All-Electric New Construction ordinance and affords us the opportunity to eliminate the use of fossil fuels in our existing buildings, improve indoor and outdoor air quality, and make San Francisco a safer, healthier, and more resilient place to live and work.”
The proposed ordinance was years in the making, but the city is now fast-tracking its approval before a new statewide pause on updates to building codes kicks in. Under the law, signed in June, San Francisco and other jurisdictions in the Golden State have only until Oct. 1 to adopt stronger building codes unless they claim an exception.
San Francisco can’t meet its climate goals unless it moves buildings away from fossil fuels. The city has vowed to slash carbon pollution by 61% from 1990 levels by 2030 and to achieve net-zero emissions by 2040 — five years faster than California as a whole. Buildings in San Francisco account for 44% of the city’s planet-warming pollution, the largest emitter after transportation, at 45%.
If enacted, the new ordinance will affect projects that are similar in scope to new construction, including additions as well as renovations that rip out mechanical systems. It won’t bear on single equipment replacements, however, like replacing a gas furnace.
The ordinance essentially “closes a loophole” in the new construction requirement, Cyndy Comerford, climate program manager at the SF Environment Department, told Canary Media. For example, on the same downtown parcel of a five-story brick building, a whopping 46-story glass edifice was recently added, she said. “That addition was allowed to have gas in it when it was a totally separate building.” The new ordinance would put a stop to similar cases in the future.
Lawmakers are leaving room for exceptions to the all-electric standard, including restaurants that use gas for cooking, buildings composed of 100% affordable housing units (with gradual compliance after July 2027), and projects that can’t get enough power from the utility in time. Building owners would seek exemptions from the SF Environment Department.
In many cases, the cost of all-electric construction is actually lower than that of mixed-fuel buildings, according to the department. Summarizing several analyses, it estimates that newly built or majorly renovated all-electric single-family homes are cheaper than conventional construction by more than $2 per square foot, on average.
Contrast that to the higher estimated costs to switch to all-electric appliances after construction. The department estimates such retrofits would cost San Francisco homeowners an added $2 to $4 per square foot.
And all-electric retrofits are coming.
In 2023, San Francisco Bay Area air regulators passed landmark rules to phase out the sale of gas-burning water heaters by 2027 and furnaces by 2029 for single-family homes. When old combustion appliances conk out after those dates, homeowners will need to foot the bill to replace them with zero-emissions units. The same will hold for multifamily building owners by 2031.
“Developers aren’t always incentivized to think [about] who’s going to be living in this property 10 or 15 years from now,” said Tyrone Jue, director of the SF Environment Department. “And that’s where government has to step in to say … ‘Yes, we want you to build housing, but we want you to do it smartly so that we don’t end up having to carry the financial burden down the road.’”
Fossil gas also carries heavy social costs. In addition to contributing to an increasing drumbeat of climate disasters, burning fossil fuels in home appliances releases a slew of pollutants, from carbon monoxide to nitrogen oxides, that concentrate indoors and spill outdoors. These by-products can lead to respiratory disorders, cardiovascular disease, and premature death. One in eight childhood asthma cases are linked to gas stoves. All-electric equipment doesn’t emit these compounds.
“As a city, we’re responsible for the well-being of our citizens,” Comerford said.
Gas lines are also a particular liability in the earthquake-prone region. Liquefaction of the earth can sever underground pipelines, which are more prone to damage than the city’s electrical system, Jue said. In a 2020 report, utility Pacific Gas & Electric estimated that after a 7.9 earthquake, it would take up to six months to restore gas services citywide; electricity could be brought back on line in two weeks.
The all-electric renovations ordinance comes as the federal government is rolling back environmental regulations and pushing for more fossil fuel use, not less. “This is a moment for cities like San Francisco to step up,” Jue said. “And this is San Francisco drawing a clear line, not waiting for permission from Washington to protect our people, our health, and the planet.”
President Donald Trump’s new budget law repeals a key federal tax incentive for residential solar — and rooftop solar installations are about to plunge as a result.
Americans are expected to install 33% less rooftop solar next year than they would if federal incentives were still in place, per an updated analysis from Ohm Analytics. That’s a better outcome than the research firm’s earlier, gloomier forecast, which was based on a version of the law that would have also scrapped a separate tax credit that applies to leased systems.
The repeal of the 25D tax credit, which knocks 30% off the price of home solar and storage, will make the technology significantly more expensive. The incentive was originally available until 2035 but now disappears at the end of this year.
Already, residential solar is far more expensive in the U.S. than elsewhere, and high interest rates as well as recent state-level policy developments are eating further into the economics of buying panels. Even before the repeal, rooftop solar installations were declining year over year because of these trends.
In 2025, though homeowners are expected to fast-track solar purchases before the tax credit expires, Ohm expects an 8% decline in installations compared with last year. In 2026, the total gigawatts installed will shrink by 26%, it forecasts.
Rooftop solar is an important piece of the energy transition. In California, photovoltaic panels on roofs produce almost as much power as the sprawling large-scale arrays found in fields and desert areas.
But it’s also a critical way for people to hedge against utility rates, which have climbed high in recent years and are expected to rise even further as data centers demand more energy and the Trump administration stymies cheap wind and solar power. Most households that install rooftop solar see their energy bills drop. Poorer households benefit most.
Still, there are things within the industry’s control, from reining in “soft costs” to developing more virtual power plants, that can help it weather the storm — and make rooftop solar more affordable to Americans even without long-standing tax credits in place.
This analysis and news roundup comes from the Canary Media Weekly newsletter. Sign up to get it every Friday.
California is facing a severe housing shortage. And in some places, namely Los Angeles, the need for new construction is even more dire because of recent wildfire destruction.
So in late June, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) prioritized faster construction over cleaner buildings with a law that pauses updates to state building codes for six years. It’ll also stop local jurisdictions from enacting their own stricter standards, Canary Media’s Alison F. Takemura reports. The move comes after LA suspended its all-electric building requirements to speed its post-wildfire rebuilding efforts.
As it stands, California already has some of the strongest efficiency standards in the country. But this law will make it harder for progress to continue, stopping municipalities from implementing new rules that could, for example, encourage heat-pump adoption in multifamily buildings or mandate all-electric renovations.
And it may not even help the state cut home prices or speed construction. A 2015 study showed no significant correlation between California’s efficient building codes and construction costs, while a 2019 analysis estimated that building an all-electric home cost less than a gas-powered home in most parts of the state. A more efficient home also typically means lower power bills, which translate to even more savings.
On the other coast, a Massachusetts town is further boosting the case for efficient building codes, Canary’s Sarah Shemkus reports. In 2024, the Boston suburb of Lexington banned gas hookups in new construction and adopted an efficiency-boosting building code. The move hasn’t stymied development: Over the last two years, the town of 34,000 has still permitted around 1,100 new units of housing, 160 of which will be affordable. That aligns with a 2022 RMI study that found all-electric homes in Boston are slightly less expensive to build and operate than mixed-fuel homes.
Another state will soon test the balance between affordable and clean construction, Alison reports. New York just approved an all-electric building code that bars gas and other fossil fuels in most new buildings. State officials estimate the new standards will end up raising construction costs, but the lowered energy bills they lead to should offset that increase within a decade.
Solar for none?
The U.S. EPA says it will roll back more federal clean energy funding, this time targeting $7 billion earmarked for states, cities, tribes, and nonprofits under the Solar for All program. The program was created under the Biden administration to help low- and moderate-income households tap into solar power that can help lower their electricity bills.
The clawback comes just as grant awardees were starting to spend their federal dollars. Just this week, Georgia launched a program to let homeowners lease rooftop solar panels for free. Colorado is meanwhile finalizing three programs to boost solar deployment and workforce development. And as Canary Media’s Jeff St. John reports, burgeoning projects all across the country could lose their funding, threatening new power generation that the U.S. needs if it wants to lower electricity prices and meet rising demand.
Advocates say the EPA doesn’t have the authority to claw back the money and promised on Thursday to sue, as Jeff reports in a follow-up piece.
A week of blows to renewables
It’s not just residential solar that’s in the Trump administration’s crosshairs. The administration has also issued a series of orders over the last two weeks targeting solar and wind development on federal lands and in federal waters.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum started by ordering his department to stop “preferential treatment for wind projects” and to evaluate whether to halt wind development on federal lands altogether. The next day, the Interior Department de-designated more than 3.5 million acres of federal waters previously slated for wind development, rendering offshore wind leasing “effectively dead” in the U.S., Canary Media’s Clare Fieseler reports.
Back on land, the DOI also issued an order that would consider a power project’s “density” before it’s approved. It’s a test that wind and solar are destined to fail, as they take up more land than gas power plants to generate the same amount of electricity.
Tax credit kerfuffle: Two Republican senators fight against the Trump administration’s clampdown on wind and solar tax-credit use by placing holds on three of President Trump’s Treasury Department nominees. (Politico)
A literal moonshot: “It is about winning the second space race”: Transportation Secretary and interim NASA Administrator Sean Duffy will announce plans to build a nuclear reactor on the moon by 2030. (Politico)
Electrification is brewing: A Minneapolis coffee company is curbing its emissions with its electric commercial-scale roaster, one of just a few of its kind in the U.S. (Canary Media)
Driving change: As Illinois looks to meet ambitious EV adoption goals, utility ComEd is turning community leaders into EV ambassadors who can help convince skeptical neighbors and businesses to go electric. (Canary Media)
Corruption correction: Ohio has finally repealed consumer-funded subsidies for two 1950s coal plants first created by the power-plant bailout law at the heart of the state’s utility corruption scandal. (Canary Media)
Counting climate wins: A new report shows how local climate action like a Maine heat-pump installation campaign and the Keystone XL pipeline protests will keep millions of metric tons of carbon emissions out of the atmosphere across the U.S. (Grist)
After years of failing to rein in rapidly rising electricity rates, California lawmakers are hoping a radical new approach — and billions of dollars in state financing — can offer a solution.
Bills moving through the California Senate and Assembly would use money raised from state bonds to help pay for the hugely expensive process of expanding the power grid and making it less vulnerable to wildfires. This path would relieve some pressure on utility customers in California, because funding grid upgrades through bonds is cheaper than doing so through energy bills.
Utility costs have reached a boiling point in California, with customers of the state’s three biggest utilities — Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas & Electric — now paying almost twice the U.S. average for their power. Nearly one in five customers of these utilities is behind on paying their electric bills, according to a May report from state regulators.
The bills — Senate Bill 254, sponsored by Sen. Josh Becker, and Assembly Bill 825, sponsored by Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris, both Democrats — aim to lower electricity costs for Californians. Both include provisions that would force the big three utilities to accept public financing for a portion of the tens of billions they plan to spend on their power grids.
The two bills have been passed by their respective legislative chambers. That’s despite opposition from the big investor-owned utilities, which object to using public funding for grid infrastructure projects because they earn guaranteed profits if they invest in infrastructure themselves. The utilities have defeated previous legislative efforts that would have crimped those future profits by having the state assume a portion of the expenses.
But the electricity cost crisis has made rate reform “a top-tier issue in California,” said Matthew Freedman, senior attorney at The Utility Reform Network (TURN), a consumer advocacy group that has joined other consumer and environmental justice groups in supporting SB 254.
“This is different from what we’ve seen in the past — and the solutions being sought by the legislature are more ambitious than what we’ve seen in recent years,” he said. TURN is hoping these dynamics will allow the public-financing portions of the bills to secure support from Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and remain in whatever electricity-affordability legislation emerges before the end of the state legislative session in September.
TURN’s analysis indicates that pulling $15 billion out of the rate base of California’s three big utilities, as SB 254 and AB 825 propose to do, could save about $8 billion over 30 years, with $7.5 billion of that savings coming in the first 10 years. That equates to about 2–3% of an average residential customer’s bill, or about $4–$5 a month, Freedman said.
“Does this solve the affordability crisis? No. There’s no silver bullet. That’s the biggest frustration we have and that many policymakers have,” he said. But it does offer a straightforward path to a quick reduction in rates, and “we’re trying to get some near-term benefits here.”
SB 254 is an omnibus of electricity-affordability policies, ranging from streamlining permitting for grid and energy projects to forcing utilities to propose investment plans that limit their spending to the broader rate of inflation. AB 825 is more limited in scope, but the two bills share a couple of key concepts for state financing of utility infrastructure.
First, both bills would shift $15 billion in grid spending from utility capital expenditures to financing via bonds — a process known as securitization. Regulated utilities have commonly used securitization to help reduce the cost of closing aging power plants and rebuilding their grids after storms, by foregoing the return on equity that utilities typically earn for capital investments and tapping the lower cost of debt available to states or state agencies.
But there’s “little precedent for securitizing future productive utility capital spending,” Julien Dumoulin-Smith, an analyst at investment firm Jefferies, wrote in a June research note. The prospect that lawmakers might force California’s major utilities to securitize some of their highly profitable grid investments has in recent months weighed down investor expectations for the firms, he wrote.
The lawmakers pushing these bills argue that it’s more important to protect Californians from unchecked rate increases than to protect utility profits.
The state’s three big utilities are collectively planning about $90 billion in new capital expenditures from 2025 to 2028, Becker noted in a June press release after SB 254’s passage by the state Senate. Securitizing $15 billion of those investments would “reduce financing costs by eliminating profit margins and lowering interest rates,” Becker said.
In particular, the bills aim to rein in the biggest driver of rate increases — the tens of billions of dollars California’s utilities are investing in hardening their grids against the risk of sparking deadly wildfires.
“We’ve asked the investor-owned utilities to do a lot of that work, and we have to make sure it’s done as efficiently as possible,” Becker said during a virtual town-hall event in June. “I think we can have a discussion today about whether that’s something that should be in rates going forward.”
A March report from the Natural Resources Defense Council, a supporter of SB 254, examined wildfire-mitigation costs at PG&E, the state’s largest utility, which has doubled rates on average over the past decade and increased them 40% above inflation since 2018. According to that analysis, about 60% of PG&E’s rate increase stemmed from wildfire-related expenses, Merrian Borgeson, NRDC’s California policy director for climate and energy, said during the June town hall.
PG&E, which was forced into bankruptcy in 2019 after its power lines sparked the state’s deadliest wildfire, is under state mandate to invest in preventing its grid from causing more conflagrations. But the utility has also notched record-breaking profits in the midst of its record-breaking rate increases — in large part because of the guaranteed return it’s earning on that wildfire-prevention work.
Customers need quick relief from bearing those costs, and “the things that you can do the fastest to reduce electric rates are to take things out of rates,” Borgeson said.
Freedman of TURN highlighted differences between the securitization approaches of SB 254 and AB 825. AB 825 would apply only to the costs of burying power lines to prevent them from sparking wildfires. These “undergrounding” projects make up a big chunk of the broader wildfire-mitigation spending, particularly for PG&E. SB 254, by contrast, would apply to wildfire mitigation more broadly, as well as to spending to expand utility grids to serve fast-growing demand for electricity from big new loads like data centers and electric-vehicle charging hubs.
But in both cases, replacing utility spending with state borrowing would significantly lower costs to utility customers, he said. First, California can borrow money at lower rates of interest than utilities can. Second, the state can spread out the costs over a longer period of time, and reduce the portion of costs borne in earlier years, compared to how utilities pass on the cost of capital investments to their customers, he said.
It’s also been done before in California. In 2019, lawmakers passed a $21 billion wildfire bill to backstop California utilities’ financial stability in the face of PG&E’s bankruptcy. That bill forbade utilities from recovering a return on $5 billion in investments in wildfire-mitigation spending, but offered them the option of securitizing that spending instead, which they accepted. That’s expected to reduce ratepayer costs by as much as $2 billion over the lifetime of those assets.
The $15 billion securitization plan in SB 254 and AB 825 is targeted at reducing utility costs and rates in the shorter term. But both bills also propose a longer-term public-financing option aimed at the state’s high-voltage transmission grid.
“The idea here is to establish a state infrastructure authority that would have the capacity to finance and own these lines,” Freedman said.
That’s not a completely novel concept. The state-run New York Power Authority has owned and managed transmission grids since the 1930s, as have federal power-marketing entities such as the Bonneville Power Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority. More recently, New Mexico and Colorado have created transmission authorities to facilitate grid buildouts.
The California Independent System Operator, which manages the state’s grid, estimates that California must spend between $46 billion and $63 billion over the next 20 years to meet its goal of achieving a carbon-free grid by 2045. An October report from Net-Zero California and Clean Air Task Force found that “traditional investor-owned utility financing and development” of those projects “could substantially increase consumer rates,” but that a public-private partnership model could reduce those costs by up to 57%, saving utility customers as much as $3 billion per year compared to a status-quo approach.
“There are lots of institutional changes, and changes to authorities that operate in California, needed to operationalize the full range of those savings,” said Nicole Pavia, Clean Air Task Force’s director of clean energy infrastructure deployment. SB 254 and AB 825 don’t specify what form any future public-private ownership or public-financing structures for transmission might take, she noted. But both “are picking up pieces of the institutional changes that might be needed to advance some of these savings.”
The two bills take different approaches to this issue, Freedman said. SB 254 would establish a new Clean Infrastructure Authority to take on the work, while AB 825 would revitalize the California Consumer Power and Conservation Financing Authority, a now-defunct entity created after the state’s 2001 energy crisis to finance new power generation, he said.
The move to increase state authority over transmission development would not offer immediate relief to ratepayers, said Vivian Yang, an analyst at the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists.
“These are big projects that are regardless going to take five to 10 years,” she said. “It’s not like we can pass those public-financing bills and then the next year our rates will go down.”
Instead, it would help the state position itself to avoid yet another cost crisis in the years to come. Given the massive amount of transmission California will need over the coming decades, “having all these tools to get us there — one of which is public financing for projects — is really important,” she said. California needs to get to work now to “have these structures up and running already and use them more nimbly, and not discover 10 years out that we’re stuck using what we’ve got.”
The Trump administration has officially announced it is killing the $7 billion Solar for All program. The program had awarded grants to 60 state agencies, municipalities, tribal governments, and nonprofits across the country to help low-income households access solar power. Supporters of Solar for All are vowing to fight the move in court.
On Thursday, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin posted a video on the X social media platform stating that he was terminating the program. Solar for All was created as part of the Inflation Reduction Act’s $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF), which has also been under attack by the Trump administration.
Zeldin stated that the mega-law passed by Republicans in Congress last month “eliminates billions of green slush-fund dollars by repealing the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.”
Referring specifically to Solar for All, Zeldin said, “EPA no longer has the authority to administer the program, or the appropriated funds to keep this boondoggle alive. With clear language and intent from Congress in the One Big Beautiful Bill, EPA is taking action to end this program for good.”
Defenders of Solar for All challenge Zeldin’s interpretation of the One Big Beautiful Bill, or HR 1, and the intent of its provisions.
“It is absolutely ludicrous to suggest that HR 1 rescinded these funds, because they were all under legally obligated grant awards when the bill was signed,” said Jillian Blanchard, vice president of climate change and environmental justice at Lawyers for Good Government, a nonprofit coalition of attorneys, law students, and activists that’s challenging other EPA funding cuts. “HR 1 only rescinded unobligated grant funds,” she told Canary Media on Thursday.
That’s an important distinction, she said. Those unobligated grant funds amounted to only $19 million, as determined by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) when it conducted its analysis of the pending legislation’s overall financial impact. The vast majority of the funds, the office found, were already committed under legally binding contracts to the parties awarded grants during the Biden administration.
But in a court case challenging the EPA’s effort to claw back $20 billion in funds for other GGRF programs, administration officials have claimed that HR 1 terminates the government’s obligation to meet any of its contractual obligations.
Attorneys for nonprofit groups fighting EPA’s attempt to claw back their grants argued that the law clearly states that only “unobligated balances of amounts made available to carry out that section … are rescinded.”
The attorneys also noted that Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, the West Virginia Republican and chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, stated during a congressional debate before the bill passed that funding “that’s already been obligated and out the door, that’s a decision that’s final,” and that arguing the law would claw back obligated funding is “a ridiculous thought.”
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) pointed out this same discrepancy in a July press release attacking EPA’s characterization of the law. “Trump’s DOJ is continuing its mischief by falsely claiming Republicans’ Big Beautiful-for-Billionaires Bill claws back $17 billion from GGRF, even though the CBO score for the unobligated funds was $19 million — what was left to oversee the program after the grant funds had been obligated — and Republicans made clear that their rescissions only touched unobligated funding,” Whitehouse wrote.
The Solar for All program is meant to deliver energy-bill savings of $350 million over the next five years to 900,000 low-income and disadvantaged households and deploy 4 gigawatts of solar generation capacity. In the past few months, a handful of grantees had begun issuing awards to low-income housing projects, municipal facilities, nonprofits, and low-income homeowners.
“Communities promised relief from punishing energy costs are now left in the dark,” Zealan Hoover, a former EPA senior advisor under the Biden administration, told Canary Media. “Nearly a million families will pay hundreds of dollars more each year for their electricity bill because the Trump administration killed a program that would have more than paid for itself.”
Michelle Moore, CEO of Groundswell, a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit that is administering a $156 million Solar for All grant aimed at developing large-scale solar and battery projects in Southeastern states, said that ending the program would run counter to President Donald Trump’s pledge to lower energy prices.
“I would hope [the Office of Management and Budget] could find the funding to cover EPA staff time to help keep President Trump’s campaign promise to cut bills in half and keep energy affordable for American families, which this program does,” she told Canary Media.
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