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Good morning and happy Friday,
The fight to preserve the IRA’s clean energy tax credits continues. Last Friday, 13 House Republicans – all of whom supported the OBBB – sent a letter to Senate leaders urging them to make some “refinements.” A handful of Republican senators are reportedly on board, including John Curtis of Utah, and their Democratic colleagues are working hard to win more converts. We last read of a Senate GOP huddle this Wednesday to iron out some of the trickiest
parts of their “big, beautiful bill, and are waiting to hear more as of the Dispatch’s Thursday night scheduling.
SEIA released its Q2’25 Market Insight Report, which finds that U.S. solar module manufacturing added 8.6 GW of capacity in Q1, prompting pv magazine to observe that “manufacturing booms while uncertainty looms.” Meanwhile, the IEA projects that global energy investment will rise to $3.3 trillion in 2025, with $2.2 trillion of that going to clean technologies.
And, kWh Analytics’ annual Solar Risk Assessment report finds that 91% of U.S. solar farms are at risk of getting hit by 2” hail within a 10-year period; financial losses from wildfire smoke are the second-biggest risk, and thermal management in BESS needs to improve.
Read on for more.
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Gambling with the Grid
There were lots of conversations about clean energy this week, including at Politico’s annual Energy Summit, a hearing held by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and as a result of a letter sent to Senate Majority Leader John Thune by the Data Center Coalition calling for “‘thoughtful and targeted changes’ to help power data centers and emerging tech across the country.” Here are
a few noteworthy highlights:
At Politico’s confab, the executive director of President Trump’s National Energy Dominance Council slammed renewables, saying the administration doesn’t have faith in solar and wind energy and “The last thing we want is in the short term to have any problems with the grid.”
NextEra CEO John Ketchum injected much-needed knowledge and experience into the discussion, deftly co-opting an oft-used analogy to argue that "We need a bridge [= renewables] to get ourselves to 2032 when [natural] gas shows up…and when [it does], it's going to be three times more expensive than it's ever been.”
- Central to the case made by Ketchum and many others are expectations for electricity demand from data centers, which the EIA says will hit record highs in 2025 and 2026, a fact that is ratcheting up pressure on Republicans. Indeed, the tech industry is fighting to save the IRA’s clean energy tax credits, and the Data Center Coalition has discussed the matter with about 30 Republican senators.
⚡️ The Takeaway
Undermining American energy. During the hearing mentioned above, Energy Secretary Chris Wright faced intense criticism from Democrats. He clarified that he supports preserving tax credits – but for emerging technologies like nuclear, geothermal, and fusion. He was “resolute in his opposition to subsidies for wind and solar,” calling them “technologies that were no longer emerging and, therefore, not in need of federal support.” Well, be that as it may, one thing that’s definitely emerging is soaring demand for electricity, and the GOP megabill could undermine the affordability and reliability of America’s electricity sector, the very things the party says it wants to advance.
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Culture Wars
Sometimes polls serve to confirm what we already know in our gut, and the latest offering from the Pew Research Center is of that ilk: it shows that while support for clean energy has remained strong among Democrats, it’s sunk by double digits among Republicans since 2020. Here are some key points:
Back in 2020, the most popular forms of energy development among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents were wind and solar, with 84% in support of more solar power and 75% in favor of more wind power. Today, those numbers have declined significantly, with just 61% favoring more solar and only 48% supporting more wind power.
Meanwhile, whereas 65% wanted to prioritize renewables in 2020, things have flipped, and now 67% say the country should give priority to developing fossil fuel sources like oil, coal, and natural gas. One bright spot is that 69% of all respondents favor offshore wind, despite President Trump’s feelings about the technology.
At least one observer believes this shift is due to “a successful effort to link climate change and renewable energy to broader culture war issues,” and says that whereas “in the past, prominent Republicans supported renewables and sought solutions to climate change…those stances could now be seen as ’disloyal’ to
Trump.”
⚡️ The Takeaway
Resonating with the right-of-center. Republican political consultant Mike Murphy says that touting the environmental benefits of clean technologies polarizes Republicans. “The key is you want to talk about jobs and national security and other events that naturally resonate a lot more with right-of-center people.” Successful outreach strategies will focus on amplifying the positive impacts for local communities while steering clear of ideological issues. Folks may not see eye-to-eye on those topics, but pretty much everyone prefers prosperity to the alternative. That said, messages about economic benefits won’t land if they’re blocked by layers of misinformation, so fighting fear with facts remains an essential part of the development
process.
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Data Centers in Space
As data centers proliferate, some communities are pushing back, a situation most renewable energy developers probably view with empathy tinged with a touch of schadenfreude. One tech magnate has an audacious workaround to the issue: put the data centers in space.
The tech magnate in question is former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who nearly two months ago acquired Relativity Space, which bills itself as “a customer-centric rocket company.” (Well, it’s about time! Get it?)
Anyway, Schmidt confirmed to a reporter that he acquired the space startup to launch data centers in space. He’s thinking big because he sees a massive shortfall looming: in an April hearing held by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce on the future of AI, “Schmidt explained that ‘people are planning 10 gigawatt data centers,’ and noted that a typical nuclear power plant in the US generates 1 gigawatt of power.”
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Schmidt added that “One of the estimates that I think is most likely is that data centers will require an additional 29 gigawatts of power by 2027, and 67 more gigawatts by 2030. These things are industrial at a scale that I have never seen in my life.”
It’s early days, and a lot remains to be seen. For one thing, the company hasn’t launched a single rocket yet. And, “a lot is riding on the reveal of the company’s official plans.” But we’ll be watching closely to see where this goes.
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Building American power requires a powerful team.
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