Senate Republicans following CCL's lobbying asks

“It's the fastest [source] that we can get on board. It's faster than natural gas, and it's faster than nuclear most certainly, and we just simply will run out of energy, and it'll be very clear to the folks in Interior rather quickly and to the administration that they will need this in the short term just to meet that power demand,” he added …

Nice to hear MOCs state that clean energy production is pivotal to domestic energy security. Which, if we are truly in an energy emergency, we should really accelerate the adoption and prevalence of commercial wind generation.

Thank you for all your insight and commentary, Dana!

Here's another similar follow-on story.

Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and John Curtis (R-Utah) have placed holds on three of President Donald Trump’s nominees to the Treasury Department, a significant escalation of the battle between key Republican lawmakers and the administration over renewable energy tax breaks in the sprawling megalaw.

The actions follow a so-far unsuccessful effort by a handful of Senate Republicans to meet with Treasury Department officials to express their unhappiness with the agency’s expected clampdown on wind and solar projects’ use of the tax credits.

So we now have Senators Tillis, Rounds, Grassley, Curtis, Murkowski, and Collins pushing back against the executive attack on clean energy, as CCL lobbied them to do!

We've now got some clarity on his question. As Heatmap put it, and as is becoming a pretty common theme, it could have been much worse.

The key question here is how the Treasury Department defines a project having ‘started construction’ in order to qualify for the clean energy tax credits. As defined in the past and explicitly in the IRA, there were effectively two ways for a project to meet that standard:

They could complete “physical work of a significant nature,” such as excavating the project site or installing foundational equipment, or they could simply spend 5% of the total project budget, for instance by purchasing key components and putting them in a warehouse. After that, they had at least four years to start shipping power to the grid before stricter work requirements kicked in.

That second approach of spending 5% of the project budget was called “safe harbor.” You make some key purchases so that it's clear the project is real and is going to proceed, and then the government gives you four years to complete the project and still qualify for the tax credits.

But in order to convince some Freedom Caucus House Republicans to vote for the Senate version of the budget bill, Trump made some sort of assurances that within 45 days, Treasury would redefine the ‘start construction' standard so that fewer clean energy projects could qualify. As discussed above, we lobbied our MOCs to reject those changes, and a half dozen senate Republicans did just that.

The 45 days are up, and Heatmap reports that Treasury just got rid of the 5% safe harbor standard.

Some worried the new guidance would narrow that four year timeframe or affect project eligibility retroactively. Neither happened. The only major change the Treasury department made to the existing guidance was to get rid of the 5% safe harbor provision. While this is not nothing, and will certainly disqualify some projects that might otherwise have been able to claim the credits, it is nowhere near as calamitous for renewables as it could have been … The new guidance also contains a carve-out that allows solar projects that are less than 1.5 megawatts to use the 5% rule, which will help rooftop solar and smaller community-scale installations.

So, it's not great, it still contradicts the budget bill (which said the 5% safe harbor is valid), but I think it's a safe bet that our Republican MOCs who listened to our lobbying asks and pushed back against the Trump Treasury here prevented these changes from being much worse. It's particularly good that rooftop solar got a carve-out, because that will really help rooftop solar leasing remain viable. That industry is expected to take a hit from the budget bill, but gradually recover. And most utility-scale clean energy projects will probably be able to adapt and do enough ‘physical work’ to qualify for the tax credits, if they were planning on using safe harbor instead. All in all, it's fairly good news 🤓