We live in a different world now, just a few years later. It is no longer clean energy that requires political interventions for survival. And increasingly it is fossil fuels flailing about for political lifelines to impede market forces. Partly because of the climate-forward interventions of the infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act, and partly because of market and cultural momentum much larger than American energy legislation, the status quo has been effectively inverted.
A few months ago, after the passage of the I.R.A., I wrote that the wave of new investment could accelerate American depolarization over green energy, since so much of the money was flowing to red states and districts.
The path was never going to be smooth, and there were some brief digressions in that narrative; the Texas standoff is just one of the recent bumps in the road. There’s also been the transitory Republican threat in debt-ceiling negotiations to scuttle the I.R.A. tax incentives, and scattershot fights by state legislatures and attorneys general against socially conscious investments. But in the big picture it looks like these are just bumps along the same road.
The trend predates the impacts of the I.R.A. Solar power is already as much as 33 percent cheaper than gas power in the United States, according to an analysis from last year; onshore wind may be nearly 45 percent cheaper. And when American investors are drawn to opportunities, they find themselves overwhelmingly in red states like Texas. When Bloomberg analyzed green energy investment in the summer of 2022, before the passage of the bill, it found that of the 14 congressional districts with the most wind, solar and battery tech capacity, 13 were represented by Republicans and only one by a Democrat. This was, in its way, as logical as it might have seemed counterintuitive — more than two-thirds of American renewable potential today resides in mostly rural areas, which lean heavily Republican.
The I.R.A. turbocharged these dynamics. A bill originally estimated at $370 billion may ultimately yield a trillion dollars or more in federal subsidies, and the result is already an unprecedented manufacturing boom — with some measures of new construction almost doubling year over year and projections suggesting the trend will only grow. Nearly a hundred new clean energy manufacturing facilities or factory expansions have been announced since the bill, marking more than $70 billion in new investment, according to Canary Media. This is the rundown offered by the former director of President Biden’s National Economic Council, Brian Deese, last month:
Companies have announced at least 31 new battery manufacturing projects in the United States. That is more than in the prior four years combined. The pipeline of battery plants amounts to 1,000 gigawatt-hours per year by 2030 — 18 times the energy storage capacity in 2021, enough to support the manufacture of 10 million to 13 million electric vehicles per year. In energy production, companies have announced 96 gigawatts of new clean power over the past eight months, which is more than the total investment in clean power plants from 2017 to 2021.
This is a satisfying turn of events for those of us pushing for evermore decarbonization and horrified by the environmental costs of inaction. But it is not a triumph.
