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The plant will cut CO2 emissions compared to traditional coal furnaces. But Hyundai’s use of gas and resulting pollution show the messiness of cleaning up steel.
Hyundai is set to break ground in southern Louisiana this week on a nearly $6 billion steel mill, which may become the lowest-carbon facility of its kind in the U.S.
On Friday, the Korean industrial giant will hold a ceremony at the project site, where the fields of a former sugarcane plantation have been cleared for the major work ahead. Hyundai’s plant will initially run on natural gas when it opens in 2029 — making it significantly less carbon-intensive than the aging coal-fueled mills that produce most of America’s automotive steel.
Yet the facility is hardly a perfect blueprint for decarbonizing steel production, given that it will still produce planet-warming emissions and other harmful air pollution.
Most of the Louisiana plant’s emissions will come from the gas-burning furnace that turns iron ore into direct-reduced iron — which then gets melted into steel in an electric arc furnace. The project is one of several huge new developments in Ascension Parish, where rural communities along the Mississippi River are increasingly being hemmed in by industrialization.
“Even though Hyundai has tried to sell this as a clean and green project, we know from their own numbers that this facility would be a major source of just about every type of pollution that the state regulates,” said Kimberly Terrell, a New Orleans–based research scientist with the Environmental Integrity Project’s Center for Applied Environmental Science.
That pollution includes emissions of nitrogen oxide, particulate matter, and sulfur dioxide, each of which is known to cause respiratory problems and other serious health issues, she told reporters ahead of Friday’s groundbreaking.
Terrell said she believes the plant’s draft environmental permit downplays the steel mill’s potential impacts on nearby air quality. Local residents have also voiced concerns that the project is moving forward before the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality has the chance to rigorously review and issue a final air permit.
“Development should improve our communities, not leave families wondering what the long-term cost will be to their children,” said Courtney Harris, a program manager for Rural Roots Louisiana and a resident of Donaldsonville, the nearest city to Hyundai’s steel mill site.
Hyundai-Posco Louisiana Steel, the U.S.-based subsidiary of Hyundai Steel, said the company has “made every effort to ensure that our project meets environmental standards and complies with all applicable regulatory requirements. We respect the permitting process and will continue to follow all required procedures as it moves forward,” according to Ascension Business Report. (Hyundai didn’t return Canary Media’s request for comment.)
The steelmaker could drastically reduce both air and carbon pollution in Louisiana by replacing the gas with green hydrogen — which is made from renewable electricity and water, and whose only byproduct is water vapor. When Hyundai first unveiled the project in early 2025, it indicated the plant would use the carbon-free fuel and become a “catalyst for the hydrogen ecosystem” in the Bayou State.
However, Hyundai’s plans for switching to hydrogen remain nebulous, and the broader market for green hydrogen continues to face major cost and logistical hurdles. The manufacturer has offered little clarity about its hydrogen ambitions in its state permit applications and in previous responses to Canary Media.
But Hyundai’s gas-fueled mill will nevertheless be much cleaner than traditional coal-based steelmaking. The company says its steel products will have a carbon footprint that’s 70% lower than those produced using conventional methods.
That may be the best the U.S. can get right now, experts say.
Earlier efforts to pursue hydrogen-based steelmaking have stalled in the face of economic headwinds and the Trump administration’s hostility toward clean energy. Cleveland-Cliffs, which got a $500 million Biden-era grant to install hydrogen-ready technology, says it will instead use the funding to upgrade a coal-fueled blast furnace in southern Ohio.
As manufacturers look to boost domestic steel production — driven by tariffs and increasing demand — they’re primarily planning to build gas-fueled ironmaking furnaces like Hyundai’s.
U.S. Steel, for example, says it will invest nearly $2 billion to build a direct-reduced-iron plant at its Big River Steel site in Arkansas, where four electric arc furnaces already melt down scrap steel. In Minnesota, the mining company Mesabi Metallics is considering installing such a furnace at its giant operation in the Iron Range.
“The industry is naturally moving towards [direct-reduced-iron] based production for cost and efficiency reasons, leveraging low-cost natural gas that we have in the United States,” said Nick Yavorsky, a senior associate on the iron and steel team at RMI, a clean energy think tank.
“We’re still not at the point where hydrogen-based steelmaking is cost-competitive with incumbent fossil methods,” he said.
Even so, new facilities can be designed in ways that avoid locking companies into using natural gas for decades and help ease the transition to hydrogen, Yavorsky wrote in a July analysis with Kaitlyn Ramirez, who leads the RMI team. That could include leaving land available for hydrogen-producing electrolyzers and working with utilities early on to secure renewable energy supplies — as well as taking cues from Hyundai’s project, which will deploy hydrogen-ready furnace technology and electrify certain steps of steel processing.
“Planning for flexibility [around hydrogen] will ultimately have the potential to position the U.S. as a real leader in this space,” Ramirez said.
North Plains Connector has earned backing from the Energy Department and utilities, and could deliver huge cost and reliability benefits — if states give it the OK.
Michael Skelly knows it’s hard to build a huge transmission line that connects different regions of the grid. He has spent a decade trying to get one up and running.
But Skelly, now CEO of Grid United, thinks his current attempt to build a first-of-its-kind transmission line is on the right track. And he’s gotten a consortium of utilities from Minnesota to Oregon, and officials in the U.S. Department of Energy through both the Biden and Trump administrations, to back it up.
Grid United’s North Plains Connector will be a 420-mile, 3-gigawatt high-voltage direct current (HVDC) link between Montana and North Dakota. It will require an estimated $6 billion in investment across both states, and won’t be completed until 2032 at the earliest.
When it’s done, North Plains Connector will be able to share power between three grid regions spanning three time zones across the U.S. West, Great Plains, and Upper Midwest. Today, such region-spanning connections are extremely rare. But study after study has shown they can yield major benefits that extend far beyond the states the line transects.
“If you connect two grids whose peak moments are at two different times, you create an ability for the grids to lean on one another,” Skelly said.
The reliability and cost benefits that could flow from linking entire regions are almost certainly substantial. But it’s hard to quantify all the good that can come from such links when they have never existed before — and utilities and regulators want to be able to clearly define long-term benefits before they approve major investments.
Grid United’s solution is to front the costs for getting the project off the ground while trying to convince utilities to join in paying for a portion. Financing from the DOE is helping immensely with navigating these early costs and risks — and in getting utilities on board.
Back in 2024, the DOE awarded a $700 million grant to the consortium, including Grid United and the Montana Department of Commerce, which is the lead agency for administering the award. And last week, the DOE published a final environmental impact statement for the project, helped along by a federal interagency process launched under the Biden administration.
The Trump administration has continued to work with Grid United, even as it has clawed back or delayed billions of dollars in other Biden-era grants and terminated a $4.9 billion DOE loan for the Grain Belt Express, another massive HVDC line meant to carry wind and solar energy from the Great Plains to states farther east.
For North Plains Connector, having that federal money available “is quite helpful to the utilities that are participating in the project as they go through regulatory approvals,” Skelly said. Regulators “want their states to get their fair share, if you will — and they also want customers whose utilities are paying for the project to not have to pay for the whole thing.”
This combination of the DOE and Grid United taking on the early costs and risks has given a growing list of utilities enough confidence to make at least conditional commitments to pay for a piece of the project once it’s finished.
Some of them are directly involved in the states where it’s being built, such as Minnkota Power Cooperative and NorthWestern Energy. While others — such as Allete Energy and Great River Energy in Minnesota, Portland General Electric in Oregon, and Puget Sound Energy in Washington state — are joining up to earn a share of the reliability and cost benefits that will flow indirectly from the project and across the grid regions it will link.
Those far-off utilities don’t need to draw power directly from the end points of the HVDC line to gain the benefits, said Gretchen Kershaw, chief operating officer at consultancy Grid Strategies, which is not involved in the project. That’s because HVDC lines enable two-way flows of power that can energize and backfill shortfalls across entire regional grid networks.
Being able to tap into generation well beyond their borders makes it easier for utilities to deal with disruption or demand spikes caused by intense weather events like winter storms or heat waves. That’s one of the benefits cited for North Plains Connector in last month’s draft National Transmission Needs Study, the most recent in a series of DOE reports highlighting the value of these kinds of interregional connections.
“The most reliable and resilient system will have diversity in generation supply, both in terms of types of generation and location,” said Kershaw, who previously worked as a senior adviser to the DOE’s Grid Deployment Office, which was the source of the North Plains Connector grant but disbanded by the Trump administration last year. “You’re essentially able to make the system bigger, with generators and customers on both sides, and weather systems that are different at both ends.”
Those are some of the benefits that drew Allete to partner on the North Plains Connector project in 2023.
“We knew this energy transformation happening in our nation is going to require people to go well beyond the boundaries of their previous business and service territories,” said Julie Pierce, vice president of strategy and planning for the utility and energy company.
Allete owns Minnesota Power, a utility serving about 150,000 customers, as well as renewable energy subsidiaries including wind farms in North Dakota, which happen to be connected with a decades-old HVDC line to its Minnesota territory.
Allete is also part of a group of utilities that developed a large-scale, multi-utility grid-expansion plan in the early 2000s, which helped lay the groundwork for billions of dollars in additional regional transmission buildouts in the Midwest, Pierce said.
A key step in convincing other utilities to sign on is figuring out how to measure the new interregional line’s resource adequacy value. That’s the term of art for how utilities ensure they can keep their grids running during times of high demand, power plant outages, severe weather, or other emergencies.
“It’s so massive, it’s hard to put boundaries around what it’s going to enable,” Pierce said. “How do you value the ability to keep lights on in the Upper Midwest when there’s a storm coming through, but you’re able to import that solar from California?”
That work has some clear starting points, she said. Utilities can start to incorporate the reliability value of their share of the line into the integrated resource plans they file with state regulators, which lay out how much new generation and grid investment they need to make over the next decade or more.
North Plains Connector has its work cut out for it beyond measuring resource adequacy. Before it can break ground, it must make agreements with landowners along the path of the line, secure state and local permits, and win final regulatory approvals from both states it passes through.
“These projects take many years to put together,” Skelly said.
Indeed, high-profile transmission lines like the SunZia project from New Mexico to California and the Champlain Hudson Power Express from Canada to New York City have taken more than a decade from inception to completion. Many transmission projects fail to overcome hurdles. Skelly’s previous company, Clean Line Energy Partners, shut down in 2019 after failing to complete five power lines to carry 16.5 GW of wind power across the Midwest.
But if North Plains Connector can get connected, “the project will be online for 30 years,” he said. “What does generation in America look like in 2050? I don’t know. But it’s very likely we have very different demand profiles in each system, and whatever generation we have in that time, we’ll be better able to optimize if we have a great grid to lean on.”
Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee is the first Democrat targeted by the Invest in Tomorrow Coalition, which has notched wins against clean energy foes in GOP primaries.
The troubled reelection campaign of Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee is facing a new obstacle: a super PAC determined to take down foes of clean energy.
The Invest in Tomorrow Coalition has declared McKee its first Democratic target, following campaigns against three Republican primary candidates, all of whom lost their races. The political action committee announced this week that it is spending $500,000 to air ads opposing McKee in advance of the Sept. 9 Democratic primary. The campaign will be run by the state-level political action committee Invest in America’s Future.
McKee has repeatedly linked rising utility bills to clean energy. His budget proposal this spring included measures that would have delayed the state’s transition to 100% renewable energy by nearly two decades and slashed energy-efficiency spending by more than 20%. State lawmakers in June blocked these efforts, but a few weeks later McKee vetoed legislation that would have required owners of large buildings to track and report their energy use.
“We are on a mission to ensure that there are consequences for politicians in both parties who scapegoat renewable energy for their own failures,” said Invest in America’s Future spokesperson Chris Coffey. “McKee might believe that blaming clean energy is a convenient way to deflect responsibility for Rhode Island’s affordability crisis, but by the time primary day comes around, we will ensure that every single Rhode Islander knows exactly where the buck stops.”
McKee’s chances at keeping his seat were already shaky, with a recent poll putting him 38 percentage points behind his primary challenger, former CVS executive Helena Foulkes. His lack of support has largely been attributed to the hasty closure in 2023 of the Washington Bridge, a major span in the tiny state, and the long delay before rebuilding began.
Invest in Tomorrow, however, wants its involvement to send a message: Oppose clean energy and we will do everything we can to oppose you.
Invest in Tomorrow was founded after the Trump administration — with the help of congressional Republicans — unraveled clean-energy incentives created by the Inflation Reduction Act. Its goal is to threaten clean energy opponents with the kind of electoral consequences long wielded by the gun lobby and oil interests.
The group’s first three targets were all congressional Republicans: Rep. Chip Roy, who was running for state attorney general in Texas; Rep. Andy Ogles, who was seeking reelection in Tennessee; and Rep. Ralph Norman, whom ITC targeted in his bid for South Carolina’s Republican gubernatorial nomination in June and then again in the recent race for the late Sen. Lindsey Graham’s seat. All three lost their races.
The ads ITC pays for generally do not reflect the group’s focus on climate and clean energy issues. Instead, it deploys messages it thinks will be most effective against an individual candidate. Ads opposing Roy painted him as insufficiently loyal to President Donald Trump, for example. The spots running against McKee accuse him of mismanaging the Washington Bridge closure and of doing financial favors for his donors.
McKee is not the only Democratic governor to consider tempering climate commitments in the face of high prices and anxious constituents. Most prominently, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has rolled back the state’s once-ambitious emissions-reduction goals.
McKee, however, has been perhaps the most pugnacious on the topic. He declared in July that anyone who argues against his proposals wants residents to have higher bills and is “advocating for their own personal self-interests.”
“If you wanted to take an action to show the Democratic governors that they need to get in line on the issue of climate, McKee is a good choice,” said Christian Roselund, a leader with nonprofit advocacy group Climate Action Rhode Island. “I’ve been trying to find a Democratic governor with a worse record on the climate than Dan McKee, and I’m not sure there is one.”
The geothermal startup will supply 400 MW from its Cape Station project to a Google data center in Utah. An initial phase of the project will come online this fall.
Fervo Energy inked a landmark deal to supply Google with nearly 400 megawatts of clean electricity from the startup’s geothermal project in southwest Utah.
The agreement is the largest of its kind for a next-generation geothermal system — an emerging technology that involves drilling deep into hot, dry rock to use underground heat for producing power. Fervo is investing over $2 billion to build what could become the biggest such system in the world when it is completed in 2028.
Securing customer contracts is an essential step for a novel project like Fervo’s Cape Station. Without a clear buyer, it can be difficult to attract financing for first-of-a-kind facilities, even if they promise transformative benefits for the power sector. Fervo, which went public in May, saw its shares jump 15% on Tuesday morning following news of the Google power deal.
Houston-based Fervo is now developing the first, 100-MW phase of Cape Station and expects to start generating test power from a 33-MW unit in the fourth quarter of this year. The deal with Google supports the buildout of the second, 400-MW phase, which is slated to be up and running in about two years.
Google said it intends to buy the geothermal power for a potential data center in Utah.
“As demand for reliable electricity grows, customers like Google need energy resources that can be deployed at scale, operate around the clock, and deliver where power is needed,” Tim Latimer, Fervo’s CEO and co-founder, said in a Tuesday news release.
The companies did not disclose PPA terms. Phase 1 of Fervo’s Cape Station is set to deliver power at $7,000 per kilowatt, while Phase 2 should come in at $5,500 per kW, Sarah Jewett, Fervo’s chief operating officer, previously told Canary Media.
Geothermal energy generates just 0.4% of total U.S. electricity today. Conventional geothermal relies on natural features like hot springs, limiting where such facilities can go. Fervo is part of a rapidly growing effort to deploy innovative tools and techniques — often derived from oil and gas drilling — to access the earth’s heat in more diverse places.
The startup has been working with Google in this pursuit for years.
In 2021, the two companies signed an agreement to develop a next-generation geothermal project. Two years later, Fervo turned on its 3.5-MW commercial pilot plant in Nevada. The first-of-a-kind facility is still the largest operating “enhanced geothermal system” in the country — though another firm, Sage Geosystems, recently began producing power from its 3-MW, next-gen pilot project in Texas.
Before Tuesday, Fervo and Google had previously signed a 115-MW power purchase agreement with the Las Vegas–based utility NV Energy to develop more geothermal for the tech giant’s data centers in Nevada.
Google said it hasn’t determined where it will build the Utah data center that will run on Cape Station’s power.
“Even though right now we don’t have clarity yet on how this will service a data center … we know that it will be a foundational building block of power generation for a data center presence in Utah,” Lucia Tian, Google’s director of advanced energy technologies, told The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.
Under the new deal, Google has the option to expand its Cape Station agreement by around 600 MW by June 2030. The tech company and Fervo also have a deal in place allowing Google the right of first refusal to purchase up to 3 GW of electricity from certain new geothermal power plants the startup develops.
The outlook for storage construction keeps getting brighter as everyone from the Trump White House to clean energy advocates to AI giants clamors for more.
There’s never been a better time to build energy storage in the U.S. than right now.
Grid batteries — which sop up power when it’s abundant and discharge that energy when it’s needed — have been ascendant for a decade, as the price of the underlying lithium-ion cells fell precipitously. Bolstered by plummeting costs and increasing familiarity with the tech, developers started building bigger and in more parts of the country.
Now, the U.S. power sector has added more battery capacity in the second quarter of this year than any quarter ever, according to a report out today from the Solar Energy Industries Association and Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. Even as the wind and solar industries face uncertain futures, the outlook for continued battery growth is so strong that Benchmark Minerals upped the prediction for cumulative installs through 2030 by 11.5% from its previous report, issued just three months ago.
The 20.2 gigawatt-hours of battery capacity built from April through June represents one-tenth of the nation’s entire grid storage capacity. Seven of the new projects mustered at least 1 GWh or more of storage capacity, reflecting developers’ rising appetite for megabatteries.
To contextualize the numbers, the second-quarter installations can inject 6.7 gigawatts of instantaneous power onto the grid — equivalent to nearly seven big old-school nuclear reactors, but without the decade-plus wait time for construction. That comparison has its limits, though, because nuclear plants can generate around the clock, whereas batteries must refill and discharge.
Batteries can make a huge difference in places where the grid is stretched thin, and can be built quickly and closer to centers of energy consumption than new fossil-fuel-burning plants with their smokestacks and emissions.
Those qualities make the tech attractive in places where capacity is scarce, which happens to include California, Texas, the Southeast, the mid-Atlantic, the Northeast, and just about anywhere else. AI data center developers are turning to batteries to ensure they can keep the algorithms running during peak demand hours. And solar developers leverage batteries to turn their clean electrons into a more valuable on-demand resource; 44% of the new storage capacity was built alongside solar plants.
This widespread zeal for batteries extends to the Trump White House, which revoked wind and solar subsidies last year but kept Biden-era tax incentives for batteries. As the executive branch found novel and often legally dubious means to thwart wind and solar construction, it has left battery developers to go about their business.
Recently, the administration has more proactively encouraged the battery industry, loaning $490 million dollars to a battery project in Puerto Rico as well as funding efforts to reshore the supply chain for critical minerals used to make the tech. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who regularly blasts solar power on his official platforms, recently stopped by the Maine site of a novel iron-air battery that Form Energy plans to build, with help from Department of Energy grant funding.
An observer unencumbered by historical nuance might conclude that Trump is the battery president, and that no president has done more for batteries than he. SEIA even gestures in that direction, noting in its press release that large-scale storage nearly doubled during the first year and a half of the second Trump term, and that 74% of the second-quarter storage additions happened in states that voted for him — like Texas, Utah, and newly minted battery storage powerhouse Arizona.
The reality is these outcomes took years to build up to. Technologists tinkered with batteries in big boxes; California mandated its utilities buy storage and subsidized it for smaller customers; Texas wildcatters took big risks on early battery investments and made windfall profits; and companies like LG and Tesla built huge factories to solidify domestic battery supplies. Now, all that hard work is paying off with installations on a scale we’ve never seen before.
The Demand Side Grid Support program was given no money for next year, though supporters blocked an effort that could have disbanded the VPP altogether.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration has blocked an effort to keep the state’s most successful virtual power plant program funded through next year.
State budget language finalized last week does not authorize additional money for the Demand Side Grid Support program, one of the biggest VPPs in the country. Friday was the last day for bills to be published before being voted on by the Aug. 31 deadline for this year’s legislative session.
But that budget language also excluded a plan from Newsom, a Democrat, to shift control of the program from the California Energy Commission to the California Public Utilities Commission, which DSGS supporters feared could lead to it being dismantled entirely.
That means that while “there is no guaranteed funding for the program for next year, at the very least it wasn’t outright gutted,” said Brandon García, California policy director for Advance Energy United, a clean energy trade group that reported the outcome of the DSGS negotiations on Friday.
Newsom’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A spokesperson for Democratic state Sen. Josh Becker, a DSGS supporter and author of several virtual power plant bills that passed both houses of the legislature last week, confirmed that the $70 million “we were hoping to use for DSGS over the next couple of years was not agreed on” in the final budget bills. At the same time, leaving the program under control of the California Energy Commission “does allow us an opportunity to take this issue up early next year, potentially with a new administration,” the spokesperson said.
Still, that’s cold comfort for the companies participating in the program, which pays households and businesses willing to turn down power use or share solar power stored up in batteries at times when California’s grid is under stress.
Since it was launched in 2022, DSGS has grown to include around 130,000 homes equipped with batteries and nearly 75,000 homes with smart thermostats and flexible load devices. The performance of its rooftop solar–charged batteries has been particularly noteworthy; a July 2025 test yielded roughly 476 megawatts of grid capacity over two hours, in what utility Pacific Gas & Electric called “the largest test of its kind ever done in California — and maybe the world.”
All told, DSGS has brought online more than a gigawatt of collective capacity to relieve costly stresses on the state’s power grid, García said.
Absent an intervention from lawmakers and California’s next governor sometime next year, “we don’t anticipate there being any more money for this program,” García said.
And without secure funding, it’s unclear how companies like Sunrun, Tesla, Leap, Renew Home, and others participating in DSGS will be able to pay their customers to help the grid.
That’s unfortunate, because DSGS stands out in a state that’s largely failed to tap into its nation-leading supply of rooftop solar–charged batteries and electric vehicles as an alternative to utility investments in power plants and transmission lines, said Sachu Constantine, executive director of nonprofit advocacy group Vote Solar.
“We should pursue every avenue available to use these resources that customers and companies have already invested in, that are already providing invaluable resources for the grid,” he said.
Similar programs regulated by the CPUC and administered by utilities have largely failed to thrive. That includes the CPUC’s Emergency Load Reduction Program, another approach to enlisting customers to relieve grid stresses that was created alongside DSGS in response to California’s grid emergencies from 2020 to 2022.
Paying customers with solar-charged batteries, smart thermostats, and remote-controllable EV chargers can also help lower utility bills for residents who don’t have those devices.
That’s because a large portion of the costs being passed on to customers of California’s three major utilities, which now charge among the highest rates in the continental U.S., are driven by the need to pay for fossil-fueled power plants and invest in grid infrastructure to meet peaks in grid demand.
By cutting funding for DSGS, California may be undermining a more economical way to defer those costs “at a moment when utilities are earning record profits and bills are going up, reliability is in question, and we’re continuing to prop up old, outmoded resources that don’t make sense for the future,” Constantine said.
Despite the potential cost savings, DSGS had its budget cut in 2024 and 2025, and was allocated no money in Newsom’s January budget proposal, leaving it at risk of being unable to pay participants this year. Early this summer, lawmakers were able to negotiate a transfer of $27 million from another program to keep DSGS running through 2026, García told Canary Media.
But lawmakers couldn’t overcome opposition from the Newsom administration to secure funding to pay DSGS participants in 2027. The final budget bills drafted by the legislature on Friday failed to include a proposal from Senate Democrats that would have shifted $70 million from another California Energy Commission program to cover those costs.
“We’re incredibly disappointed the administration rejected the legislature’s proposal to fund DSGS. It’s baffling,” García said.
García warned that DSGS participants don’t have much time to wait. “Even if the next incoming administration wants to fund DSGS, if they wait until June, I don’t know how many participants will be around to enroll in that program,” he said.
After Republicans voted to undo much of the Inflation Reduction Act, a few cleantech professionals set out to exact electoral revenge. So far, it seems to be working.
Last summer, when the Republican-controlled Congress took a wrecking ball to the Inflation Reduction Act, Tom Matzzie was pissed. Though some Republican members of Congress had written letters trying to save wind and solar tax credits, when it came time to vote, they nearly all fell in line behind President Donald Trump. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed with widespread Republican support, canceling a decade-long tax incentive meant to accelerate America’s transition to cheaper, cleaner energy.
Politicians have long lived in fear of certain powerful lobbies — the National Rifle Association, Big Oil, Big Pharma — knowing that if they voted against those interest groups it could cost them their seats. But as the votes came down for the OBBBA, nobody in Congress, Matzzie couldn’t help noticing, seemed scared of antagonizing the clean energy industry.
Matzzie, who founded electricity retailer CleanChoice Energy and previously led campaigns for progressive groups and the Democratic National Committee, resolved to try to strengthen clean energy’s political clout by taking down the industry’s most prominent foes seeking elected office.
This strategy attracted the interest of Chris Larsen, a major clean energy investor who made a fortune in cryptocurrency, and Michael Brune, former head of the Sierra Club. Together, Matzzie, Larsen, and Brune formed the Invest in Tomorrow Coalition — a forgettable name that sounds like those of the other shadowy groups blanketing the airwaves during election season, but that happens to share an acronym with the now-defunct investment tax credit for solar installations. As primary season got underway, the super PAC cobbled together commitments for $20 million from Larsen, Matzzie, and other donors to spend on races this election cycle. Their targets: the far-right House Freedom Caucus members who pushed hardest to undo the IRA.
“Are we strong or weak? Are we someone that people can hurt without consequences?” Matzzie said of the clean energy industry.
Freedom Caucus Vice Chair Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina got a fresh taste of those consequences last week, when he lost the Republican primary race to replace the late Sen. Lindsey Graham. ITC had hit Norman with $1 million in attack ads accusing him of insufficient loyalty to Trump. The president happened to corroborate the message by enthusiastically endorsing Norman’s opponent, Graham’s sister, Darline, who went on to beat Norman by 5 points.
https://vimeo.com/1218123668?fl=pl&fe=vl
An Invest in Tomorrow Coalition ad against Ralph Norman
In his concession speech, Norman lamented that he couldn’t keep up with the outside spending against him.
“All of our money came from South Carolina and from my personal account,” Norman said. “My opponents, the money came from outside PACs. It’s a fact; I’m not being critical. The PACs that were against, to me, freedom — as Democrats, they got what they wanted.”
ITC got what it wanted in all five Republican races it intervened in this primary season. The results suggest that even a small amount of strategic spending and targeted messaging can have an outsize impact on the foes of clean energy. If Matzzie and his team keep dealing vengeance to their enemies, they could deliver some of the political firepower needed to create more durable pro-renewable policies.
ITC kicked off election season by funding attack ads against Rep. Chip Roy in his May primary runoff for Texas attorney general. The ads did not mention Roy’s antipathy to clean energy subsidies. Instead, they blasted Roy for not being loyal enough to Trump. ITC rigorously tests different messages to find what’s most effective, Matzzie explained: “We’re going to use whatever works.” Roy lost by 10.4%.
Matzzie, jumping into Republican primary races for the first time, found that each dollar spent on them goes a surprisingly long way. Conservative audiences get their news from a relatively small number of ideologically aligned media spaces, which means ITC can buy ads on Fox News, Truth Social, Rumble, and a few others and have a good shot at reaching a lot of motivated Republican voters, at which point it can cater to those voters’ deeply held beliefs rather than challenging them.
After tackling Roy, ITC put out ads supporting the reelection bid of Iowa Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, a pro-renewable Republican running in a primary against an anti-renewable challenger. “Stand with Trump, support MAGA, vote Miller-Meeks,” one of the TV spots declared, alongside photos of the candidate posing with Trump. She won her primary on June 2.
Then, ITC launched its first offensive against Ralph Norman. At that point, he was running in the June 9 primary for South Carolina governor and needed to place in the top two to advance to a runoff. The PAC funded a wave of attack ads against him, and he finished in a distant third.
ITC’s clearest flex thus far has been to take on Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles, who faced a primary challenge from former state Agriculture Commissioner Charlie Hatcher. Each campaign had spent nearly $600,000; ITC dropped $2 million on a two-pronged strategy to attack Ogles and elevate Hatcher.
The PAC sought to label Ogles as “Lyin’ Andy” by calling attention to instances in which he missed votes in Congress and triggered an FBI investigation over campaign finance irregularities.
At the same time, since incumbent Ogles had much better name recognition, ITC paid for ads to raise Hatcher’s profile and ran tracking polls to test their efficacy. Over three weeks, the portion of Republican primary voters who had never heard of Hatcher fell from around half to one-quarter, Matzzie said.
Despite an endorsement from Trump and an infusion of more than $700,000 from the Freedom Caucus Fund, Ogles lost the August 6 primary by more than 6 points.
The upset proved sufficiently embarrassing that Trump disavowed Ogles in a subsequent Truth Social post, calling him “a person who I remained loyal to even though he had virtually no chance of winning.”
Of course, there’s no way to prove that ITC’s money played a decisive role in these races. The group operates in a noisy political landscape with many variables at play. Ogles, for instance, was reportedly in hot water with voters over Islamophobic and homophobic remarks, per Politico, and needed to reach new voters due to redistricting. Graham had Trump stumping for her in the state, and his PAC funded a barrage of get-out-the-vote texts for her.
Still, each race turned out the way ITC wanted.
As Matzzie sees it, scientifically proving a causal link is beside the point; what matters is that politicians fear the possibility of this happening to them. That narrative gains strength with each candidate who’s knocked out.
It would be hard to find better testimony to the effectiveness of that strategy than the words of the defeated candidates themselves. Norman railed against ITC during his final minutes in the public spotlight as a candidate. Ogles, before he lost, called out the group during a radio interview: “They literally are trying to make an example out of me to try to strike fear in other Republicans. Which is why, if they prevail, this will have a chilling effect to the conservatives in Congress.”
Even if politicians think they can survive an assault from a scrappy team of clean energy enthusiasts, the PAC’s interventions increase the cost of running a campaign, pushing candidates to raise more money to counter the spending. “If you make enemies, your next election will be more expensive for you,” Matzzie said.
ITC hopes to keep raising money to spend up to $30 million in this cycle, he said. The PAC is now targeting its first Democratic primary, attacking Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee for scapegoating clean energy as the cause of the state’s affordability problems. McKee was trailing his challenger in an Emerson College poll released last week.
The general election season will draw a much broader electorate than the races ITC has participated in so far. Matzzie declined to comment in detail on what the PAC’s general election strategy will be.
ITC’s efforts may have delivered a visceral satisfaction to clean energy pros chafing from last year’s defeats, but these actions aren’t likely to yield a more renewable-friendly Congress. Two of the candidates it attacked — Norman and Roy — were running for offices outside of Congress. Hatcher was never a champion of wind and solar. Some Republicans may think twice before loudly attacking the clean energy industry in the future, but that doesn’t mean they’re more likely to sign legislation that’s good for the industry.
Meanwhile, the major clean energy trade groups are not exactly embracing the PAC’s approach.
“We’re in the business of making more friends, not more enemies,” Tim Pawlenty, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, said in an email. (Matzzie, for his part, allowed that the trade group has “to stay friends with everybody so they can walk into every office.”)
Another clean energy leader, cleantech executive and investor Steve McBee, sees ITC’s work on “enforcing accountability” as a valuable effort in a broader campaign to expand clean energy’s political power, even as he himself focuses on coalition building.
In May, McBee launched Amped, an effort to mobilize clean energy professionals and executives to engage more in public discourse, in order to build sustainable bipartisan support for their industry.
Though solar, wind, and batteries have taken over the power sector, representing an estimated 93% of all new power plant capacity getting built this year, the industry doesn’t yet wield the political power to match that success.
“We don’t show up with any swagger,” McBee said. “We continue to call ourselves ‘alternative.’ … We find ourselves a bit outside the cultural zeitgeist, and that’s not a good place to be.”
McBee believes that the IRA was a “beautifully designed piece of legislation,” but that not enough work was done to tell voters and their representatives about the jobs and economic opportunities flowing to their districts. He wants to spur energy professionals to flood the political arena with the degree of money and effort that the fossil fuel industry has invested over the decades — but without the “lying and distortion.”
“The good news is, as an industry, we have all the facts on our side,” McBee said. “We just have to prosecute the case.”
Since starting Amped, McBee said he has received hundreds of inbound messages from people who want to help the industry put up more of a fight, noting the “organic unstructured energy that can be harnessed.”
That’s a bigger project than the upcoming midterms: to turn the IRA defeat into a political awakening for the clean energy sector.
As an anchor tenant for several off-site arrays in development, the center will help spur investment and educate residents on the benefits of shared solar.
The Obama Presidential Center, which opened on Chicago’s South Side in June, features a museum full of mementos to democracy and the famous family, native prairie landscaping, an indoor basketball court, and other amenities. It will also be powered entirely by clean energy. Solar panels sit on the roof and on a garden pavilion, and a geothermal system heats and cools the complex. But the bulk of its power will be produced by community solar — the center will pay a set “subscription” fee to arrays located off-site.
The Obama Presidential Center will be the anchor tenant for several community solar projects that the Chicago-based company Reactivate is in the process of developing, slated to go online in 2027. Reliable anchor tenants are crucial to the success of community solar: They pay for large amounts — often 40% to 50% — of a project’s output, and can be key to persuading banks or other lenders to help finance a community solar array. The center’s subscription will cover about 6 gigawatt-hours of solar power annually, enough, along with its rooftop panels, for the entire campus.
The Obama Foundation, which runs the center, says community solar is a way to make clean energy accessible to renters, residents in multifamily housing, and those who aren’t able to afford or install solar panels on their own properties. That includes many people who live on Chicago’s South Side, where Obama cut his teeth as a community organizer decades ago.
Community solar delivers significant bill savings to households, especially in Illinois, where a state program guarantees robust benefits to low-income participants.
But in order to reap these savings, residents need to sign up. And too few of the people in marginalized neighborhoods who could benefit most do so, many solar advocates say.
Obama Foundation CEO Valerie Jarrett and Reactivate CEO Utopia Hill hope the Obama Presidential Center’s foray into community solar will raise awareness of, and trust in, the model so that it can help more residents struggling with their energy bills on the South Side and beyond.
They also expect the Obama Presidential Center will set an example for other mission-driven nonprofit organizations and companies to become anchor tenants.
“The foundation sought to use its buying power to catalyze the development of new renewable-energy generation sources,” Jarrett said.
“It is the foundation’s hope that this partnership with Reactivate will encourage other equity-focused organizations to consider community solar as a cost-effective way of procuring renewable energy.”
While Reactivate and other community solar developers in Illinois have signed up thousands of subscribers for their projects, they agree that people are often skeptical of the concept — especially in low-income and Black communities that have sometimes been targeted by predatory lenders and other unscrupulous businesses. Illinois lawmakers and consumer watchdogs, for example, have long struggled to rein in retail electric suppliers that offer residents energy plans under terms that end up being exploitative.
Hill, who grew up in a working-class Chicago suburb, said that people often respond to an offer of guaranteed savings with “What’s the catch?”
“There is no catch. It’s just an opportunity,” Hill said. “Having a well-established name [with the Obama Presidential Center] will hopefully help people understand that community solar is a real program that will provide savings.”
A series of Illinois state clean energy laws created robust incentives for community solar development, with particularly generous support for low-income residents and those in environmental justice communities, who are guaranteed savings equal to at least half of the value of the energy generated from their solar subscription.
The program has spurred the installation of community solar arrays located in and serving communities like Waukegan in northern Illinois, a heavily industrial area where community solar built on a landfill provides clean energy and savings to about 1,000 households and the local school district.
A community solar project developed by Reactivate — which focuses on marginalized and underserved communities — in a Chicago suburb provided a total of $186,000 in savings last year to its 650 subscribers, 44% of whom earn less than $20,000 a year.
Mercy Housing, a national nonprofit affordable housing developer, is the anchor tenant for two Reactivate community solar projects that went online in 2024.
The benefits go to two Chicago-area Mercy buildings, with 96 and 65 living units. Mercy Housing senior environmental analyst Max Stewart said they’ve seen significant savings on energy bills, money that can be reinvested into energy efficiency or resident services, and help keep affordable housing projects sustainable. He noted that it can be hard to find organizations willing to make such a big commitment to community solar.
The opportunities available to anchor tenants should get “more awareness,” Stewart said. “It always helps to have someone leading the way.”
Interior is using tax dollars to pay firms to ditch offshore wind leases and invest in fossil fuels instead. California just became the eighth state to sue to stop it.
The Trump administration has agreed to fork over nearly $4 billion since the spring to get major energy firms to abandon a dozen leases for U.S. offshore wind projects.
The controversial maneuver to return lease payments to developers — often in exchange for their investing in fossil fuels — is part of President Donald Trump’s broader strategy to stymie the clean energy resource, which coastal states have been depending on to meet their growing need for reliable and affordable electricity. The buyouts began as Trump’s earlier efforts to halt in-progress offshore wind farms largely failed under scrutiny from federal judges.
Now the unprecedented lease-refund approach is increasingly facing legal blowback of its own. Late last week, California became the eighth state to challenge the practice, arguing that it jeopardizes the state’s investments and resulting jobs in offshore wind.
The U.S. offshore wind industry had already been struggling before Trump began issuing stop-work orders, freezing permitting, and rolling back tax credits. High inflation, rising interest rates, and supply-chain constraints in recent years threatened to derail a handful of projects along America’s coastlines.
That’s why it’s all the more bizarre that the federal government is proactively paying developers to walk away from beleaguered, undeveloped projects, James Sallee, a business professor at the University of California, Berkeley, recently argued in the Energy Institute Blog. He likened the buyouts to spending billions in taxpayer dollars “to shoot a corpse.”
But for states that were banking on gigawatts of offshore wind power to shore up their grids and hoping the industry could rebound after Trump leaves office in 2029, the agreements are like salt in their wounds — particularly given the deals’ legally questionable nature. Here’s the latest on states’ legal challenges and congressional pushback.
California’s new lawsuit focuses on the agreement between the U.S. Department of the Interior and the company Golden State Wind, which paid $120 million in 2022 to lease waters along California’s Central Coast through a competitive bidding process.
Golden State Wind had planned to develop a 2-gigawatt offshore wind farm using floating turbine technologies in a large swath near Morro Bay. The company is owned by Ocean Winds North America — a joint venture of the European firms Engie and EDP Renewables — and the U.K. offshore wind developer Reventus Power.
In late April, Interior said it would return the $120 million to Golden State Wind. In exchange, the developer agreed to invest the same amount of money in U.S. liquified natural gas facilities and other fossil-fuel projects. Ocean Winds also struck a similar deal that month to get back the $765 million it paid to lease water for Bluepoint Wind, a fixed-bottom project near New York and New Jersey.
California’s challenge — filed by state Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) and the California Energy Commission — asks a federal court to strike down the agreement with Golden State Wind, saying the deal is “blatantly unlawful.”
Offshore wind experts and former Interior officials have previously questioned whether Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management has the legal authority to return the funds it collects from leasing federally controlled waters. They noted that when oil major Royal Dutch Shell relinquished its offshore leases near Alaska in 2022, the company simply ate the $2.1 billion loss.
California raises the same concerns in its lawsuit and claims Interior improperly tapped the federal Judgment Fund, which Congress intended to be used to settle lawsuits, not to pay for voluntary agreements like this one.
“Offshore wind presents an opportunity for our state to scale up an innovative new clean energy industry that reduces pollution while providing new jobs and investment for the people of our state,” David Hochschild, chair of the California Energy Commission, said in an Aug. 28 news release. “We will not let the Trump administration’s reckless actions turn back the clock.”
Interior has separately moved to cancel and refund two other offshore wind leases in California, with the developers Invenergy and RWE, though neither were named in the lawsuit.
In announcing the legal challenge last week, California Attorney General Bonta accused the Trump administration of using the buyouts to “line the pockets of their Big Oil donors.”
A day earlier, The Washington Post broke the news that another offshore-wind deal with German energy firm RWE will generate a giant payday for one of Trump’s neighbors near Mar-a-Lago.
In early August, Interior agreed to hand over $1.22 billion to RWE to give up its leases off the coasts of California, Louisiana, and New York. As part of the deal, RWE said it would spend $900 million on a stake in a huge Louisiana liquefied natural gas terminal — a stake it’s buying from a private equity fund run by Michael Dorrell, one of Trump’s million-dollar donors, who owns a mansion near the president’s Florida estate.
The administration told the newspaper that it had no involvement in the decision to pick the Louisiana gas project, and RWE said it made its investment plans independently. But for critics of the lease agreements, the revelation only solidified their suspicions. California Rep. Jared Huffman, the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, said he would expand an ongoing probe of the deals to include the ties to Dorrell’s firm.
“In writing and to their faces when I meet with these energy company CEOs, I am telling them, ‘You better tell your shareholders we are coming for that money,’” he told The Washington Post. “I would not even cash the check.”
As the legal fight heats up in California, an ongoing challenge on the East Coast continues to play out in court.
Earlier this summer, New York and six other Democratic-led states sued Interior over its $795 million agreement with the French energy giant TotalEnergies. In March, the company became the first developer to reach such an arrangement with the government — creating a “blueprint” for other offshore wind leaseholders to follow, according to the lawsuit.
Under the deal, TotalEnergies agreed to forfeit its lease for a large area near New York and New Jersey, where it had aimed to develop over 3 GW of offshore wind power to provide clean electricity for more than a million homes across the two states. Five New England states were also slated to benefit from the wind farm, since they regularly import energy from New York.
In exchange for ditching the project, Interior said it would “reimburse” the developer for the $795 million it paid in a 2022 auction, funds that TotalEnergies promised to invest in fossil fuel projects. At the same time, the company signed a similar, separate deal to cancel the $133 million lease for its planned 1-GW Carolina Long Bay project near North Carolina.
Similar to California, the seven East Coast states argued the New York–New Jersey lease cancellation was “arbitrary and capricious,” since the administration didn’t follow proper procedures or provide a clear reason for striking the agreement, along with violating the Judgment Fund Act. The challenge is still moving through the early procedural stages in a D.C. federal court.
While the eastern states are hoping for a much larger expansion of offshore wind, the few projects they do have are already benefiting the region’s grid — including during recent heat waves and brutal cold snaps. Even with the Trump administration’s attacks, at least a few more gigawatts are slated to come online in the coming years.
Some city residents went two weeks without power following storms. The federal program, ended by Trump, would have enabled many to access solar and batteries.
Stephen Mays was left without power for 12 days after violent storms and tornadoes struck northwest Indiana this month. Lori Latham for 13. Thousands of other residents of Gary, Indiana, where both Mays and Latham live and work, went without power for as long as two full weeks following the storms, in what has become one of the longest power outages in modern U.S. history.
Mays, an insurance agent and president of the NAACP chapter in Gary, scrambled to serve clients who had trees fall on their roofs or smashed-out windows. Latham, a member of the Gary City Council, also struggled to care for her constituents and her family — including her kids and 91-year-old father.
“We were without refrigeration, without lights, leading a community that was suffering collectively,” Latham recalled. “Many of the homes were underinsured or uninsured, many people in the community had underlying health issues. Trying to get through that was extremely difficult.”
Mays and Latham agree that things could have been easier with a simple solution: solar panels and batteries spread throughout Gary, which could have allowed people to charge their phones and computers, chill their food and medicine, operate their medical devices, and simply turn on the lights while they dealt with all the other damage and turmoil.
Just last year, Mays and Latham were among a group of city officials and other community leaders working to bring that exact vision to life. They aimed to use federal funding to outfit Gary with hundreds of rooftop solar arrays, battery storage, community solar, and microgrids. Plans also called for at least one resiliency hub at a downtown community center, where people could come for power and support.
The effort was put on hold when President Donald Trump canceled the federal Solar for All program last August. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin called the larger program it was a part of a “boondoggle.”
Indiana had been awarded a total of $117 million for solar, battery, and microgrid installations for marginalized communities under the program, which was created by the Inflation Reduction Act. Tens of millions of those dollars had been earmarked to pay for the Gary projects, which would have also brought 100 jobs to the once-thriving industrial city now notorious for disinvestment.
The cancellation filled Latham with a deep sense of grief, one that had been building as she watched environmental justice and equity initiatives get eliminated one after another following the start of Trump’s second term.
The Solar for All funds granted to Indiana were administered by the nonprofit Indiana Community Action Association and doled out to seven subrecipients, including the cities of Gary, Fort Wayne, and Indianapolis and multiple nonprofits.
Denise Abdul-Rahman, founder and CEO of the nonprofit Black Sun Light Sustainability, said the organization was awarded almost $30 million to deploy 200 residential solar plus storage systems, 50 resiliency hubs with energy storage, and five community solar arrays statewide.
One of the community solar projects and about a dozen residential systems were planned for Gary, where poverty, crumbling infrastructure, unstable housing stock, and high rates of health problems exacerbate the damage and danger caused by power outages.
“If they had received those resources, being a year later now, how much resiliency could have been deployed?” Abdul-Rahman asked. “Lives are at stake, people’s health is at stake. There could have been a lot of economic benefits and work created.”
The main focus of Indiana’s Solar for All funding was not just promoting resilience but bringing down energy costs — a particularly acute problem in Gary.
“When the power went out, that made things difficult. But also keeping the power on for many people in my community is equally if not more difficult with NIPSCO’s rate increases,” Latham said, referring to the utility that serves northwest Indiana.
Gary residents bear a steep energy burden, and electric rates for a typical household rose by around $83 a month between 2023 and 2025, according to NIPSCO.
Solar for All would have given lower-income households in Gary the opportunity to reduce their bills with clean energy, at no out-of-pocket cost.
Though the plan for Gary involved installing batteries and the construction of resilience hubs, many of the planned projects would have been solar alone — no storage. But the prolonged power outage, which affected not only Gary but more than 300,000 other customers across the region, has now driven home the value of storage systems.
“Before all this, there was a lot of skepticism that battery systems were needed, since we’re not in a hurricane area,” said Alison Becker, program director for the Indiana Community Action Association. “This showed we need to be resilient for whenever these events occur.”
The Aug. 11 storms were not an isolated event; Indiana has now seen 84 tornadoes in 2026, breaking the annual record of 72 set in 2014, not to mention the derechos, floods, and other storms that have battered the state in recent months.
“Obviously, the climate is not going to get any better,” Mays said. “Northwest Indiana is now a new Kansas” — a state infamous for tornadoes.
But without Solar for All or similar incentives, the upfront cost of solar-plus-storage can be cost-prohibitive for low- and moderate-income families — especially in a city like Gary, where the median household income is $38,700.
Black Sun Light Sustainability is among eight plaintiffs that sued the U.S. EPA last fall over the cancellation of Solar for All. No ruling has been made yet, but Abdul-Rahman is hopeful that the court or, longer term, a change in federal administration could restore funding for the program. She and other leaders also say they wish the state would step in to fund solar for underserved communities, as Illinois has done with its own state Solar for All program.
“Indiana has a rainy day fund. I hear it’s really huge,” she said — in fact, the fund holds $1.14 billion. “They could easily fund Solar for All.”
The restoration of the funding, whether at the federal or the state level, would let work resume on projects that would be “transformational” for Gary, according to Latham.
“After the storm, our neighbors learned to lean on each other in a way that came quite naturally,” she said. “How much more could we have done if there had been investments [from Solar for All] and those commitments had been kept?”
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