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As some state legislatures try to roll back clean energy measures, a successful policy for community solar in Minnesota has survived a political fight to end it.
Earlier this month, lawmakers ditched language from the state’s energy omnibus bill that would have terminated a successful state community-solar program in three years — and quashed the build-out of 500 megawatts of planned projects, according to advocates.
“I am absolutely thrilled that the community solar program will continue, [particularly] for the communities and individuals that will benefit from it,” said Keiko Miller, director of the community solar program at advocacy group Minneapolis Climate Action. “This really is a way of reducing household energy burden for those who have been left out [of the energy transition] traditionally, as well as increasing the availability of renewable energy resources.”
Minnesota’s Community Solar Garden program is crucial as the state aims to decarbonize its power system by 2040, Miller said. “There is absolutely no way we can get there without community solar being part of the portfolio.”
Community solar projects, which are typically up to 5 megawatts, make it easier for households to tap into the value of solar. Customers who might not be able to install photovoltaic panels on their own roofs, including renters and low-income families, can sign up for a shared solar project sited elsewhere, like on a community center’s roof or in a farmer’s field. Also known as community solar gardens or farms, they can guarantee subscribers a discount on electricity costs.
Minnesota was an early leader in the shared-solar approach, having started the state program in 2013. Last year, the North Star State ranked fourth in the nation for installed capacity with 939 megawatts, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. That’s almost one-third of the state’s total solar capacity of 2.9 gigawatts.
The state revamped its solar garden initiative in 2023 to ensure that more households and lower-income customers would benefit from community solar projects. Lawmakers didn’t assign the initiative an expiration date at the time.
In late March, two Democrats and one Republican introduced Senate File 2855, a bill that would’ve sunset the community solar program in 2028. Senators then rolled the plan into their version of the energy bill.
Minnesota-based utility Xcel Energy supported terminating the program; in a March 26 hearing, a company representative criticized community solar as a costly way to deploy clean energy compared to utility-scale installations. Notably, companies other than utilities can develop community solar projects, and Xcel Energy doesn’t earn a profit on energy infrastructure it doesn’t own.
But the utility and other opponents aren’t accounting for community solar’s wide-ranging benefits, such as avoided transmission costs, the reduction in peak demand on the grid, and resilience, said Patty O’Keefe, Midwest regional director of national nonprofit Vote Solar.
In 2024, the Minnesota Department of Commerce, which oversees the state program, found that it’s expected to deliver $2.9 billion in net benefits over the next four decades. While the initiative is projected to increase bills by 2% to 3% for non-subscribers who aren’t considered low to moderate income, community solar is expected to lower energy bills for participating households by 3% to 8%.
Ultimately, lawmakers stripped the repeal language from the energy bill following pushback from community solar champions in the Legislature, including Democrats Rep. Patty Acomb, Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy, and Rep. Melissa Hortman, O’Keefe said. (On June 14, Hortman and her husband were assassinated at their home in an act of politically motivated violence.)
Droves of supporters also helped save the state solar-garden program; they testified at hearings, marched, and protested, O’Keefe said. By her count, roughly 100 Minnesotans, including community solar subscribers, farmers, and clean energy advocates, called on legislators to reject the repeal.
The win for community solar in Minnesota comes as the broader solar industry — and the already-struggling rooftop solar sector in particular — faces serious federal headwinds. The Trump administration’s rapidly fluctuating tariffs and the looming repeal of solar and wind energy tax credits in the budget bill threaten to make solar more expensive to build. That could throw cold water on the record-breaking pace of solar deployment the U.S. has experienced in recent years.
But in Minnesota, at least, a major source of clean energy endures.
“This is a victory for the community solar movement,” O’Keefe said. “It just shows that even with a … forceful effort to try and repeal the entire program, we had enough power between the public and clean-energy champions to fight it back — and really send a message that Minnesota benefits from community solar.”
Massachusetts last week enacted a revamped version of its solar incentive program that developers and advocates say should keep the state’s solar industry moving forward even as the Trump administration pushes to undermine federal support for clean energy.
“In short, the program makes Massachusetts a very healthy market for solar,” said Nick d’Arbeloff, president of the Solar Energy Business Association of New England. “We’ll still be able to present a compelling case to an investor.”
The newest iteration of the Solar Massachusetts Renewable Target program — generally called SMART — makes fundamental changes to the structure of the incentives to be more responsive to market conditions. Other provisions aim to make the benefits of solar available to more low-income residents, protect valuable open space from development, and encourage placement of panels on rooftops and in parking lots.
The state filed the new rules as emergency regulations, allowing them to go into effect immediately.
The move comes just in time, according to solar developers. The previous version of SMART hasn’t been effective in quite some time, they say. While draft regulations for this newest version of SMART were first released nearly a year ago, and a final revision was expected in fall 2024, months went by without new rules.
“The uncertainty we were facing was confusing inventors, was killing projects, and could have done even more damage,” d’Arbeloff said.
In the meantime, President Donald Trump took office and Republican legislators have been working on a budget bill that seems likely to accelerate the elimination of federal renewable energy tax credits. Massachusetts solar developers became increasingly worried they would find themselves in a “valley of death,” with neither state nor federal support, at least for a time, said Ben Underwood, co-CEO of Resonant Energy, a Boston-based solar company that specializes in projects serving environmental justice communities.
Developers, therefore, heaved a sigh of relief when the new state regulations were filed. The reimagined program will start accepting applications on October 15, which will give developers a chance to get projects in place and investors lined up, even with the threat of disruption at the federal level, Underwood said.
“Now we and other members of the industry can start to plan for the incentives,” he said. “It gives us a much easier transition in case federal incentives are taken away.”
Launched in 2018, SMART pays the owners of solar systems a set rate per kilowatt of energy generated by their panels. The base rate depends on project type, location, and size. Projects advancing goals the state supports — serving low-income communities, for example, or building on a closed landfill — receive a boost, known as an “adder,” to their base rate.
The program was initially designed to lower its rates as more solar installations were built. The thinking was that, as the solar industry became more established, the cost of developing projects would go down and developers would need less financial support to be viable.
For years, SMART helped drive solar growth in the state: From 2019 to 2021, annual solar installations more than doubled. Then the Covid-19 pandemic intervened, upending supply chains and sparking inflation. At the same time, SMART compensation rates had fallen, as intended. Suddenly, the incentive payments weren’t enough to cover growing costs, and the industry took a hit. In 2024, less than half as much solar capacity was installed than in 2021.
“You were finding that the incentive level for many projects was, in fact, zero,” d’Arbeloff said.
The new rules jettison the old system of declining rates, replacing it with one that resets the compensation and program size each year, allowing the program to adjust to future unexpected market changes. Annually, the state will conduct an economic analysis that considers progress toward emissions reduction goals, regional and national solar costs, current and historic program participation rates, and land-use and protection goals, and will use the results to set compensation for the coming year. Adders will still be part of the system, and will also be adjusted annually, as needed.
“We can understand the costs, we can understand the size of the program, and we can make adjustments with ratepayers in mind,” said Elizabeth Mahony, commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources. “That’s really important for ratepayers and the development community — we’re going to be so nimble.”
For 2025, the program will be open to up to 450 megawatts of capacity. The base compensation rates will be set after the state completes a new economic analysis in the next few months, Mahony said.
The revised regulations also aim to increase the amount of money flowing to solar projects serving low-income residents. For a development to receive an adder as a community shared solar project, it must allocate at least 40% of the bill credits it generates to low-income households and guarantee these customers a savings of at least 20%, compared with the basic retail price.
“It represents a substantial move toward having greater value for low-income community shared solar participants,” Underwood said. “It’s really good to see that.”
The new regulations also target ongoing tensions about how best to site solar projects while still protecting wildlife habitats and agricultural land.
“We hope the way this works is it pushes folks to do more on rooftops, to do more on canopies, and to do more on previously developed land,” said Michelle Manion, vice president of policy and advocacy for the Massachusetts Audubon Society. “When it comes down to the actual numbers, then we’ll see how well it actually works.”
Certain categories of land with particular environmental value have been declared ineligible for solar development going forward. Projects built on other open spaces will have to pay a mitigation fee that will be determined by a list of factors, including the land’s carbon storage and agricultural potential, the parcel’s ecological integrity, the cumulative impact of the proposed development and others in the area, and location of the planned project relative to grid infrastructure.
“It’s a good way to be a little more strategic about siting solar,” said Erin Smith, clean grid director for the Environmental League of Massachusetts.
These measures are combined with provisions that encourage more development on the built environment. The regulations expand the definition of a solar canopy that qualifies for an adder — which was limited to projects over parking lots, canals, and pedestrian walkways — to include any array raised high enough off the ground to allow the use of the area beneath for another function. The rules also create a new category of adder for panels mounted above other equipment atop buildings, allowing more efficient use of rooftop space.
Though the emergency regulations process put the new rules into effect immediately, the state must still hold three hearings within 90 days to gather public feedback and get final approval from utility regulators. Some tweaks to the program could be coming, but state officials are confident they’ve got the basics right.
“There are quite a few projects that have been waiting for this to come out,” Mahony said. “We believe this is one of the best ways we have to build energy generation in the next few years.”
See more from Canary Media’s “Chart of the week” column.
Wind and solar are on the rise worldwide — here are the 10 countries that rely on the clean-energy sources most for their electricity.
All of these countries used wind and solar to produce at least one-third of their electricity in 2024, according to a new report from the Energy Institute. For leading countries such as Denmark, Djibouti, and Lithuania, that figure was in the range of two-thirds or more.
Those numbers are much higher than the global average: Overall last year, wind and solar accounted for 15% of global power generation, up from 13% in 2023.
To be clear, China is still by far the largest producer of solar and wind energy in the world in terms of volume. The country generated 1,836 terawatt-hours of wind and solar last year. All of Europe, for comparison, generated 990 TWh over the same period. But despite that huge amount of renewable energy generation, China received a much lower share of its power from solar and wind in 2024 than the 10 countries on this list — just about 18%.
The list is mostly populated by smaller countries, but it does include some large economies like Germany and Spain. In Germany, wind and solar accounted for a combined 43% of power. In Spain, 42%. (Spain recently suffered a countrywide blackout for which its high share of renewables was blamed. The true culprit, according to a government report released last week, was poor grid planning.)
By the end of the decade, the International Energy Agency expects wind and solar together to account for nearly 30% of global electricity generation. So, while only a handful of countries boast high levels of renewable energy penetration today, many more will join their ranks in the coming years, as wind, and especially solar and batteries, get cheaper and harder to refuse.
A big-budget offshore wind project that would clean up a contaminated California port and turn it into America’s first hub for floating wind turbines is the latest target of an increasingly emboldened national anti-offshore wind movement.
Representatives of a D.C.-based conservative think tank, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), and a local California community group asked the U.S. Department of Transportation early this month to cancel a $426 million grant issued last year to repurpose the Redwood Marine Terminal in Northern California’s Humboldt County for wind. If successful, they could stymie the state’s plan to generate up to 5 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030 and 25 gigawatts by 2045.
Anti-wind activists told Canary Media they are looking to capitalize on the “timing” of a recent implosion of offshore wind plans in Maine, which — like California — sought to pioneer floating turbine technology in this country. Currently, all turbines operating or under construction in U.S. waters are fixed to the seafloor.
The move represents a westward spread of anti-wind activism from the East Coast, where longtime organized opposition has found sympathetic ears as it petitions the Trump administration to tank permitted projects.
For example, in February, groups lobbied for a halt to offshore projects already being built, an approach the Trump administration tested out in April by freezing New York’s Empire Wind installation, though construction was already underway. President Donald Trump reversed that decision after a month, but the move signaled that opposition groups have gained traction.
“They are clearly feeling emboldened by Donald Trump,” said J. Timmons Roberts, a professor of environmental studies and sociology at Brown University, who studies networks of anti-wind activists. “They are taking these local victories on the East Coast and continuing to move along.”
Both CFACT and the California community group, Responsible Energy Adaptation for California’s Transition (REACT) Alliance, are part of the National Offshore Wind Opposition Alliance, a coalition formed last year to broaden the fight against offshore wind, which had previously played out mostly at the local level.
The Humboldt project was awarded the DOT grant in January 2024 and a developer has not yet been announced, but it’s been five years in the making. Humboldt Bay Harbor, Recreation, and Conservation District has already used nearly $20 million in state and federal funds to design and permit much of the planned wharf. The federal grant includes additional funds for port expansion as well as environmental restoration, a solar array, trails, public kayaking access, and a fishing pier.
Earlier this month, CFACT and REACT Alliance sent a letter to DOT Secretary Sean Duffy challenging the project’s “public interest” grant requirement, citing the “lack of viability of the floating offshore wind ‘industry.’” The letter also points to Trump’s anti-wind directive, which halted federal permitting and leasing for wind projects but did not mention grants for supporting wind infrastructure, like ports.
“We decided that the timing and the political will was there for us to go ahead and write this letter and to ask for the grant to be terminated,” said Mandy Davis, REACT Alliance’s president.
Davis told Canary Media that two recent setbacks in Maine’s pursuit of floating offshore wind motivated the group to act. First, Maine’s application for the same DOT grant awarded to the Humboldt Bay Harbor project was rejected in October. Those funds would have helped finance a port for floating offshore wind on Sears Island, Maine. Secondly, this spring, the Department of Energy clawed back a grant to the University of Maine to build and test the state’s first floating turbines.
Davis leads both REACT Alliance and the National Offshore Wind Opposition Alliance. She insists that neither of those groups receive any monetary support from CFACT, though the D.C. think tank co-signed the letter. According to the research group DeSmog, CFACT has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from fossil-fuel groups over the years.
“CFACT has, for decades, been undermining the science of climate change and attacking efforts to address the issue. This is just their latest effort to destroy a climate solution,” said Roberts.
This week, Senate Republicans joined their House colleagues in proposing to curtail a slew of clean energy incentives. Losing those could upend many a clean energy business, but the cuts would drive a dagger through the heart of the burgeoning green hydrogen sector in particular.
The Senate and House still need to agree on the final text of the bill, but both chambers would take a decade of incentives meant to incubate green hydrogen production and end them after this year. The truth is, though, even before Republican lawmakers sharpened their knives for the tax credit, the much-anticipated green hydrogen boom had quietly collapsed.
Just a few years ago, green hydrogen developers were planning to invest billions of dollars to build gigawatts of wind and solar capacity in prime locations from the Gulf to the desert Southwest, then funnel that electricity into huge banks of electrolyzers. These devices zap water and deliver pure hydrogen gas without the carbon dioxide released by conventional hydrogen production. Ambitious dreamers even proposed billion-dollar pipelines to carry the gas across Texas to ports on the Gulf, where it could be shipped to buyers in Europe and Asia.
I caught a bit of hydrogen fever myself during a reporting trip along the Gulf Coast in December 2023.
In Mississippi, leaders from a company called Hy Stor Energy showed me a vast sandy tract, framed by mastlike pines, where they intended to build a clean industrial park powered by gigawatts of off-grid wind and solar. These power plants would electrolyze hydrogen, which Hy Stor would stash in enormous subterranean storage tanks carved from the region’s salt dome formations. Then steelmakers and chemicals companies would flock there for an uninterrupted supply of undeniably clean hydrogen.
Sure, it sounded bold, but not impossible: Hy Stor’s then-CEO Laura Luce had previously developed salt dome storage for natural gas, and elsewhere in the region, salt dome tanks already store hydrogen molecules for the Gulf petrochemical corridor.
By October 2024, though, Hy Stor had canceled a contract to buy over 1 gigawatt of alkaline electrolyzers from Norwegian cleantech company Nel, and the company’s leadership had moved on, per their LinkedIn pages. (When I texted a former Hy Stor leader to request comment for this story, the phone number’s new owner told me they had nothing to do with the company. A few days later, they texted me again asking if I could give them $20.)
Other firms have canceled projects partway through construction, are holding off on final investments, or have found new customers for their renewables. A few green hydrogen projects are still moving forward, but they’re either in jeopardy, heading overseas, or far more modest than the gigawatt-scale ventures recently under development.
“I think it is overstating it to say [green hydrogen] is dead,” said Sheldon Kimber, whose firm Intersect Power spent years developing ideal wind and solar sites for hydrogen production, before pivoting to supply clean energy to data centers. But, he added, projects that get built in the next few years are likely to rank in the tens of megawatts, not the thousands, and focus on “small-volume, high-margin markets.”
Plug Power stands out as the rare company still building substantial non-fossil-fueled hydrogen production in the U.S. It recently finished a site in St. Gabriel, Louisiana, that can liquefy 15 metric tons of hydrogen daily, bringing its total production capacity to 40 metric tons per day. The company claims it runs the largest liquid-hydrogen production fleet in the nation.
Plug, however, serves as an inauspicious standard bearer for the U.S. green hydrogen industry. The 28-year-old company reported an accumulated deficit of $6.8 billion as of late March, meaning its cumulative losses outweigh any profits by that hefty amount. In February 2021, CEO Andy Marsh raised a warchest of $5 billion to build 500 metric tons per day of green hydrogen production by 2025; the stock traded above $60 a share at that time. Plug burned through that cash and completed just a sliver of the production goal. Currently, its stock trades at just over $1. (A company spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.)
Plug Power and other hydrogen developers attracted billions of dollars from investors on the promise that success was just around the corner. Now, though, the hydrogen build-out has collapsed under the weight of several interlocking burdens. Self-defeatingly slow federal rulemaking on tax credits, soaring production costs, a dearth of major industrial buyers, and AI’s insatiable demand for power hobbled green hydrogen construction well before the Trump administration decided to go for the jugular.
The late 2010s were a euphoric time for clean energy developers. Renewables construction shot forward despite President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign vows to bring back coal. Low interest rates paired nicely with the low but predictable returns that renewables projects could generate. Entrepreneurs imagined ways to capitalize on the imminent abundance of clean electricity by converting it into hydrogen.
The Covid-19 pandemic slowed the pace of activity, but then the Biden administration passed the 2021 infrastructure law, which designated $7 billion for a series of “hydrogen hubs” around the country. The administration chased that with the Inflation Reduction Act, which included a lucrative credit for the production of clean hydrogen, up to $3 per kilogram. A new multibillion-dollar industry was in the offing, and visionaries prepared to make their moves, as soon as the Internal Revenue Service published its guidance on how to claim that credit.
Then they waited. And waited.
“At $3 per kilogram, if your plant did not qualify for that and your neighbor’s plant did, then you’re out of business,” said Brenor Brophy, who ran development for Plug Power’s hydrogen production business in the early 2020s (he is no longer with the company). But there was no airtight way of ensuring one’s project would qualify until the final rule came out.
“The Treasury Department sat on that for two and a half years,” which was worse for the industry than if the credit were never created, Brophy added.
Paralysis seized the whole supply chain. Savvy suppliers chose a wait-and-see approach. This saved them money, at the expense of the communities they had promised to invest in.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D), for instance, famously flew to Oslo to close a deal with Norwegian electrolyzer company Nel. That firm planned to invest $400 million to build a factory near Detroit, and gain $16 million in state funds for creating some 500 jobs. Nel has declined to make a final investment decision on the site. Despite that display of financial discipline, its stock was trading for pennies at the time of writing.
Plug Power, not afraid to be early to the party, went ahead and built a factory in Rochester, New York, in 2021 capable of fabricating 1.5 gigawatts of electrolyzers per year. That’s a big swing compared to today’s demand: Plug noted its Georgia plant, which it called “the largest liquid green hydrogen plant in the U.S. market” in January 2024, contains 40 megawatts of electrolyzers.
Biden’s Treasury Department didn’t release final guidance until days before Donald Trump moved into the White House. The new administration promptly held back funds appropriated by Congress for clean energy efforts and then set about dismantling the clean energy tax credit regime.
“Most of the pipeline will get abandoned if they cannot get a $3/kg subsidy,” said BloombergNEF analyst Xiaoting Wang. Some developers have put on a brave face and said they’ll plow ahead even without the tax credit, but she suspects such assertions are “more advertisement than a real business decision.”
Many of the planned hydrogen projects would have enriched solidly Republican districts, like Texas and Louisiana, the locus of legacy hydrogen production for petrochemical refining. But the prospect of self-inflicted economic pain has proven less of a deterrent for Republican lawmakers than industry insiders had hoped.
Project cancellations have continued amid the uncertainty. Major legacy hydrogen producer Air Products was supposed to build a $500 million green hydrogen production plant in Massena, in upstate New York. The company had cleared the 85-acre site and laid foundations to support 35 metric tons per day of green hydrogen electrolysis, per reporting by local outlet North Country Now.
But new CEO Eduardo Menezes took office in February, after an activist investor attacked the company’s green hydrogen strategy. Menezes promptly canceled Massena and a few other projects, incurring a cost of $3.1 billion for breaking contracts and writing down asset value. Burning that cash seemed preferable to actually finishing and operating those projects.
“Treasury was so effective at destroying the industry that it kind of seems malicious,” Brophy said.
Scaling breakthrough technologies requires faith that costs will fall and customers will want to buy. Elon Musk bet on that happening for electric cars, long before they were widely available to consumers. Solar evangelists dismissed predictions that their technology would never go anywhere; now solar is the fastest-growing new source of electricity production in the U.S. and the world.
Similarly, in that bright period before Biden-era inflation set in, hydrogen boosters saw a clear path to achieving cost declines akin to what solar and batteries had achieved. Legacy dirty hydrogen could be made for about $1 per kilogram; the green stuff cost several dollars more. But a technological learning curve could close that gap, the thinking went, and sway large industrial buyers. In 2021, the Biden Department of Energy set a goal to get green hydrogen costs down to $1 per kilogram within a decade.
Unfortunately, the cost declines that experts expected in the early 2020s never materialized. A late-2024 DOE report on clean hydrogen commercialization noted that costs had gone up, not down, by $2 to $3 per kilogram since its March 2023 analysis. The report cites higher real-world installation costs, rising interest rates, and escalating prices for clean power to meet the IRS requirements for the tax credit.
BloombergNEF analysts looked back at real-world installation costs for electrolysis plants built in 2023, and found they were 55% higher in the U.S. and Europe than the firm had predicted in 2022. Earlier estimates had assumed the core electrolysis equipment would drive most of the cost, but in practice, the seemingly incidental factors — like utility and contractor management, and contingency planning — inflated project costs considerably, Wang noted.
Researcher Joe Romm oversaw hydrogen efforts at the DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy in the 1990s, and subsequently published a book-length critique, “The Hype About Hydrogen.” He reissued it this spring, just in time for the latest cycle of boom and bust.
“Electrolyzers aren’t like photovoltaic cells or battery cells,” he told me recently. “There’s no ‘then a miracle occurs’ thing. … If there was going to be a learning curve, we never got there.”
Solar panels and battery cells are identical units that get mass-produced economically. Electrolyzer systems require more hands-on and bespoke installation work, with pipes and pumps and compressors and water tanks.
The other problem with analogizing green hydrogen to wind, solar, and batteries is a key difference in their uses. The latter group delivers electricity, which is distributed and used across modern society. But clean hydrogen requires highly specialized infrastructure to transport and utilize the famously flighty molecule.
“Someone’s going to have to take a big gamble, and if they lose, they’re stuck with a stranded asset,” Romm noted. An electrolysis plant with no green hydrogen customers can’t do anything else. And would-be producers struggled to find any committed customers.
Michael Cembalest, chairman of market and investment strategy for J.P. Morgan Asset and Wealth Management, tallied the missing demand to damning effect in his annual global energy-market report from March (see slide 46). He calculated that only 1% of green hydrogen projects slated for completion by 2030 have a binding offtake agreement.
That’s not to say developers were crazy for trying. A few years ago, major companies in Asia and Europe seemed eager to purchase large volumes of green hydrogen for their decarbonization plans, said Kimber, from Intersect Power. Such high-volume deals were vital for justifying construction of gigawatt-scale electrolysis projects in the sunny, windy sites of the American West.
“We had plenty of negotiations for gigawatt and multi-gigawatt-scale hydrogen, but most of them were with European and Asian customers, and most of those folks have backed away from the table,” Kimber said. “Without that policy certainty, no large oil company, steel company, power company is going to move ahead purchasing green molecules globally.”
Lacking that kind of anchor customer, a developer can’t justify building big or financing a whole pipeline to market — the billion-dollar gigaprojects depend on high utilization to make any financial sense, Kimber noted. They’re not something you can build and then wait a few years for demand to materialize.
Electrolysis devours electricity, which is fine in a world of cheap and abundant power. But, suddenly, any fledgling hydrogen project has to compete with much better-funded rivals in electric gluttony: AI computing hubs.
The business calculus of clean hydrogen necessitated driving down energy costs as much as possible to compete with cheap dirty hydrogen. For green hydrogen ventures to succeed, they would need to render their product a cheap commodity.
AI customers, on the other hand, are flush with cash and willing to pay top dollar to anyone who could deliver them gobs of power as soon as possible.
“When you enable a more valuable product, the total pie of value for the supply chain to carve up is greater,” Kimber said. “That makes the whole process of dealing with your customer and your vendors and everybody just less of a fight to the death. Everybody can truly be focused on, how do we scale this industry?”
For clean energy developers like Intersect, then, the choice to swap customers was uncomplicated. They had scouted the most energy-rich acreage they could find, but the big buyers for green hydrogen never showed up, and suddenly the wealthiest tech companies in the world wanted to sign deals ASAP.
“We were never a hydrogen company,” Kimber said. “We have been, are, and will be a company that is focused on finding ways to use the massive surpluses of all forms of energy that exist in places like West Texas, the panhandle of Texas, to power new industrial loads.”
“Now, it’s very easy for us to pivot into data centers,” he continued. “We’re negotiating AI data centers on all of our large [hydrogen] projects right now.”
Plug Power CEO Marsh opened a quarterly earnings call in May by going on defense about the tax credit revisions proposed by congressional Republicans.
“My first reaction was, we’re going to have to work to start construction this year to make sure that that plant would qualify,” Marsh told investors, referencing a development in Texas.
Then, tellingly, he handed the mic to Chief Revenue Officer Jose Luis Crespo, who talked up the bounty awaiting across the Atlantic, saying “Europe today is the most dynamic electrolyzer market in the world.” The European Union’s binding hydrogen procurement rules will soon kick in, and electrolysis projects at the 100-megawatt scale are starting to move toward reality, he explained.
Instead of building gigawatts of electrolyzers in the U.S. to export hydrogen to Europe, investment might just flow there instead.
Other U.S. entrepreneurs hope to survive through a more targeted approach: building small but closer to customers. The U.S. already produces 10 million metric tons of hydrogen per year for industrial users; many of them are open to cleaner and cheaper options, said Matt McMonagle, founder and CEO of startup NovoHydrogen.
“There’s no pricing transparency in this market; it’s very opaque,” he said. “There’s no Henry Hub equivalent like there is for natural gas.”
Green electrolysis still can’t compete with the $1 per kilogram that it costs to make dirty hydrogen at huge petrochemical complexes with cheap natural gas. But companies that get smaller deliveries of super-cooled liquid hydrogen can pay anywhere from $5 to $50 per kilogram, depending on region and shipping distance, McMonagle explained.
“We try to focus on the ones where we can save the customer money,” he said, recalling prior experience selling solar and batteries to businesses that wanted to cut their utility bills. And, unlike so many giga-scale hydrogen projects, NovoHydrogen actually has signed offtake agreements. “There’s no project without a customer,” McMonagle noted.
Novo is developing 10-megawatt electrolyzer systems at customer sites, which can produce about 2 metric tons per day depending on uptime, McMonagle explained. These projects will hook up to the grid, drawing power via clean energy supply agreements from the local utility. By building on-site, Novo needn’t worry about constructing pipelines across hundreds of miles or driving a fleet of super-cold tanker trucks.
Novo’s bigger projects function more like community solar: They’re located off-site but still near customers. Novo intends to install 235 megawatts of solar production across 1,000 acres in Antelope Valley, at the outer reaches of Los Angeles County, and funnel that power into electrolysis. If it comes online as planned in 2028, this facility should make about 27 metric tons per day. That’s nothing close to the colossal projects other companies contemplated at the height of the boom times, but it’s still bigger than any single green hydrogen source in the U.S. today.
As McMonagle sees it, the lure of the $3-per-kilogram credit attracted maybe too much attention to hydrogen, beyond situations where it really makes sense.
“A lot of people may have been chasing a shiny object and didn’t understand the details,” McMonagle said. “Let’s burst the bubble. I don’t think that means green hydrogen as an industry is gone — it will play a fundamental role in certain use cases. Trying to do everything just invites criticism that’s frankly valid.”
Hydrogen’s critics have long insisted that it never made much sense, either as a decarbonization strategy or a moneymaking venture. They see the industry’s implosion as a chance to avoid plowing billions of dollars into a technological dead end. Many climate advocates have dismissed hydrogen as a guise for fossil-fuel interests to prolong the use of their planet-warming product; they won’t be shedding any tears now.
But for the contingent of hydrogen entrepreneurs who emerged from successful renewables firms, the sudden loss of momentum delivers a yearslong setback in efforts to clean up heavy-duty transport, steelmaking, and other industries that are hard to decarbonize, and a missed opportunity to head off the worst impacts of climate change.
“I worry we’ve lost a decade, and that was a decade we didn’t have,” said Brophy.
The sudden vaporization of the imagined green hydrogen economy may be the kind of healthy correction this market needed. Whichever hydrogen projects ultimately get built could prove more durable for having made it through the ringer after the days of easy money. But that’s paltry consolation for the townships and states that were promised billion-dollar projects and high-tech jobs within a couple years. Beyond the economic hit, the green hydrogen collapse removes a leading contender for cleaning up the most carbon-intensive industries — at least until the next hydrogen boom comes around.
Former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman is being remembered by advocates and lawmakers as one of the most important climate and clean energy leaders in the state’s history.
From the state’s trailblazing community solar program to the flurry of energy and environmental laws adopted during Democrats’ 2023 trifecta, Hortman had a hand in passing some of the country’s most ambitious, consequential state-level clean energy policy during her two-decade legislative career.
Hortman, who was a Democrat, and her husband Mark were shot and killed in their suburban Minneapolis home Saturday in what authorities say was a politically motivated assassination. The alleged gunman, Vance Boelter, is also charged with attempted murder for shooting Democratic Minnesota state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife Yvette.
Hortman, who was 55 years old, twice tried for a state House seat before finally winning in 2004. Moving through the ranks of House leadership, the attorney served as speaker pro tempore, deputy minority leader, and minority leader before becoming speaker in 2019 and serving in that role for three legislative sessions.
“Clean energy was her first love,” said Michael Noble, who worked with Hortman for more than 20 years during his time as executive director of the Minnesota-based clean-energy policy advocacy organization Fresh Energy. “She really mastered the details and dug deep into climate and clean energy.”
Hortman chaired the House Energy Policy Committee in 2013, a standout year for solar policy in which she helped pass legislation establishing one of the country’s first community solar programs, and also a law requiring utilities to obtain 1.5% of their electricity from solar by 2020, with a goal of 10% by 2030.
“That was the year we put solar on the map,” Noble said.
Community solar advocate John Farrell recalled answering Hortman’s questions in detail concerning the benefits and drawbacks of community solar during meetings. She was preparing to defend the bill and convince others, even Republicans, that it could be something they could support.
“She wasn’t going to tell them something untrue,” said Farrell, who directs the Energy Democracy Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, an advocacy group. “She was going to seek reasons why this policy might be something that they would care about or that it might align with their values.”
Nicole Rom, former executive director of the Minnesota-based youth climate advocacy group Climate Generation, said Hortman was committed to educating herself on climate issues. Hortman attended the United Nations’ Conference of the Parties (COP) climate conferences and was part of the University of Minnesota’s delegation at the 2015 Paris climate talks, where her vision for more ambitious state climate goals and policy may have begun to percolate, Rom said.
The result was the strong climate legislation Minnesota accomplished in 2023, Rom said.
“If she never served a day before or a day after the 2023 session, she would still go down in history as an incredible leader,” said Peter Wagenius, legislative and political director of the Sierra Club’s Minnesota chapter.
After Democrats won control of the state House, Senate, and governor’s office in the 2022 election, Hortman understood the trifecta was a rare opportunity that may not arise for another decade, he said.
The following year, Hortman combined her skills and experience as a legislator, committee chair, and political leader to push forward an agenda that would fundamentally transform clean energy and transportation in Minnesota while solidifying her reputation as one of the legislative body’s greatest leaders.
The session’s accomplishments included a state requirement of 100% carbon-free electricity by 2040, along with more than 70 other energy and environmental policy provisions that created a state green bank, funded renewable energy programs, supported sustainable building, and increased funding for transit. Other laws passed that year required the state to consider the climate impacts of transportation projects, provided electric vehicle rebates, revised the community solar program to focus on lower-income customers, and improved grid-interconnection bottlenecks.
When the trifecta arrived, she ensured her colleagues were “ready to move on a whole list of items in an unapologetic way,” Wagenius said. Hortman also practiced “intergenerational respect” by elevating and helping pass laws proposed by first- and second-term legislators, he said.
Democratic Rep. Patty Acomb said Hortman empowered others within the party, made legislators feel they were “like a team,” and had a habit of never taking credit for legislative success. “She shied away from that,” Acomb said.
Acomb, who began serving in 2019, became chair of the House Climate and Energy Finance and Policy Committee four years later. She credits Hortman with that opportunity and with making Minnesota a national leader in clean energy.
“In so many ways, she was a trailblazer,” she said.
Gregg Mast, executive director of the industry group Clean Energy Economy Minnesota, said Hortman followed up on the historic 2023 session with a 2024 legislative agenda that built upon the previous year’s success. The Legislature made the permitting process for energy projects less onerous while passing a handful of other measures promoting clean buildings and transportation.
“She knew that ultimately, to reach 100% clean energy by 2040, we actually needed to be putting steel in the ground and building these projects,” Mast said.
Ben Olson, legislative director for the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, first met Hortman 20 years ago while lobbying for an environmental bill. He found her to be kind, witty, and pleasantly sarcastic, the kind of legislator who asked questions, closely listened to responses, and offered sage advice. “Everyone liked her, and she was close to everybody who had spent time with her,” he said.
Ellen Anderson, a former Democratic state senator and clean energy champion, remembered when Hortman asked if she could co-teach a course with her on climate change at the University of Minnesota in 2015. Hortman came prepared for classes with notebooks of data and information. “She was super organized,” Anderson said.
Rom thinks Hortman’s love for nature drove her climate and clean energy advocacy. The legislator loved hiking, biking, gardening, and other outdoor activities.
In a blog post for Climate Generation before attending the UN’s 2017 climate conference, Hortman wrote about the impact of climate change on trees and how she had planted nearly two dozen in her backyard to offset her family’s carbon emissions. It was a message not lost on her two children, Colin and Sophie, who suggested in a statement that people commemorate their parents by planting a tree, visiting a park or trail, petting a dog, and trying a new hobby.
“Hold your loved ones a little closer,” they wrote. “Love your neighbors. Treat each other with kindness and respect. The best way to honor our parents’ memory is to do something, whether big or small, to make our community just a little better for someone else.”
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The Senate Finance Committee released its portion of the “Big, Beautiful Bill” on Monday, including highly anticipated plans for clean energy tax credits that the House’s version sought to repeal. Here’s what’s better off in the Senate text — which still could change — and what’s not looking so hot.
Solar and wind — sort of
The House version would require clean power projects to start construction within 60 days of the bill’s passage to access production and investment tax credits introduced under the Inflation Reduction Act. The Senate proposes a more gradual phaseout of credits for solar and wind projects before they terminate entirely at the end of 2027. Certain wind and solar projects would be able to access the tax credits beyond that point, as long as they are at least 1 gigawatt, are on federal land, and have already earned right-of-way approval from the Bureau of Land Management. But as Heatmap notes, those exceptions are unlikely to help any projects already in development.
Utility-scale battery storage
Incentives for energy storage projects would’ve ended just like those for wind and solar under the House bill, but that’s changed in this version. The Senate specifically says battery storage projects can access those production and investment tax credits until 2036, though the value of the incentives will taper over the years.
Geothermal, hydropower, and nuclear
Nuclear power was notably spared in the House’s gutting of clean energy incentives, but it got a few new friends in the Senate iteration. Like battery storage and advanced nuclear, geothermal and hydropower projects will be able to tap 45Y production tax credits until 2036.
EVs
The $7,500 tax credit for new EV purchases would end about six months after the legislation is signed, while the $4,000 incentive for used EV purchases would end in three. The House extended that rebate for new EVs through 2026 for some emerging automakers, but the Senate didn’t carry over that same exemption.
Home energy improvements
Homeowners would only be able to get tax credits for rooftop solar installations for 180 days after the bill’s passage. Rebates for home energy upgrades, including to help homeowners buy electric heat pumps and other efficient appliances, will also be phased out in 180 days.
Hydrogen
The IRA’s green hydrogen production credit will only be available to projects that start construction this year, and after that, would end immediately. That cut would be brutal for the already-struggling industry, Canary Media’s Julian Spector reports.
While the Senate’s proposal steps back some from the House version, tax credits that directly benefit consumers remain the most at risk. And as many experts have warned, those slashed tax credits will put jobs, energy bill savings, and major clean power projects at risk.
Still, these changes aren’t set in stone. Once the whole bill is drafted, the Senate will have to actually pass it, and then reconcile its differences with the House, with an ultimate goal of getting the package on President Donald Trump’s desk by July 4. His signature would start the clock ticking on all those tax credit phaseouts.
A wave of community solar wins
The skies are cloudy for clean energy, but community solar is still providing some bright spots.
In Delaware, power will soon begin flowing from a 4.7-megawatt array that will help power as many as 750 homes and small businesses. It’s the first of six projects planned across the state to help locals — especially renters and low-income residents — tap into cleaner power, WHYY reports.
More community solar is on the way in the Northeast. A developer broke ground this week on a 3-MW array in Glastonbury, Connecticut, that’s part of a raft of projects across the region. And in New Jersey, lawmakers advanced a bill that would expand the state’s community solar capacity by 50% in an attempt to help curb power bills.
Meanwhile in Minnesota, the preservation of a community solar program will stand as a piece of state Rep. Melissa Hortman’s lasting legacy on clean energy. Hortman, a Democrat who was assassinated in her home last weekend, played a pivotal role in passing the state’s clean electricity standard and updating a community solar program in 2023. More recently, she pushed to keep the repeal of that program out of the state’s energy omnibus bill passed earlier this month.
Renewables still win: Renewable electricity is cheaper than power produced by fossil fuels, even without government subsidies, though low gas costs and rising prices for renewables threaten the clean energy buildout, an investment bank’s annual report finds. (E&E News)
Energy research deep freeze: Federal employees say Trump administration funding cuts and freezes are making it impossible for EPA scientists to publish research, for Energy Department employees to visit the agency’s labs, and for other energy and environmental staffers to conduct critical work. (Politico)
Fossil fuels financed: The world’s largest banks increased financing for fossil fuel projects between 2023 and 2024 despite their climate commitments, reversing several years of shrinking financial support for coal, gas, and oil projects. (The Guardian)
Another blow to wind: Anti-wind activists say they’re looking to build on the implosion of a Maine floating offshore wind project as they push the Trump administration to revoke a grant for a similar project in Northern California. (Canary Media)
Pricing out gas: Maryland residents who want new gas service will now have to pay for the connection, as public utilities regulators decide the old system of free or reduced-price hookups is at odds with the state’s climate goals. (Baltimore Sun)
Nuclear goes nationwide: State lawmakers across the U.S. have filed more than 200 bills related to nuclear energy this year, with dozens going into law as states look to meet rising power demand. (E&E News)
When the team at Second Harvest Food Bank of Northwest North Carolina first started planning construction of a new headquarters in Winston-Salem in 2019, they seriously considered solar panels.
“Food banking at its core has always been about sustainability,” said Beth Bealle, Second Harvest’s director of philanthropy, stewardship, and engagement. The organization rescues food that would have ended up in landfills to feed those in need, and Bealle and her colleagues wanted to push the sustainability concept “in other aspects of our work — like our facility.”
But at the time, they were advised that a rooftop array would be too expensive. Second Harvest shelved the idea and moved into its gleaming new 140,000-square-foot building in a former R.J. Reynolds Tobacco industrial park.
“Fast forward to the Piedmont Environmental Alliance Earth Day Fair of April 2023,” Bealle said. That’s where she met the alliance’s new green jobs program manager, Will Eley, who asked, “Did y’all know about the Inflation Reduction Act?”
Eley and Bealle “hit it off fabulously,” she said. Together, they took the food bank’s solar plan off the shelf and worked through the details of complying with the federal law’s clean energy incentives. Two years later, on Earth Day 2025, Second Harvest and the alliance flipped the switch on a 1-megawatt array, one of the largest rooftop solar projects in the state.
Assuming promised refunds from the federal government materialize, the project is expected to save Second Harvest $143,000 each year, funds the group says will be reinvested directly into programs that provide food, nutrition education, and workforce development across 18 counties of Northwest North Carolina.
But with the tax rebates now on the chopping block in Congress, other organizations considering new facilities may not have the chance to follow Second Harvest’s footsteps.
“We’ve already talked to several food banks who are in that process about our project, because they’re interested in putting solar on the rooftops of their new buildings,” Bealle said. “And that’s not going to be within reach for some people if these tax credits aren’t available.”
The federal government has long offered tax credits to incentivize renewable energy projects, from solar farms to rooftop arrays. But before the Inflation Reduction Act, those enticements were of little use to food banks and other entities that don’t pay an income tax.
The 2022 landmark climate law allowed organizations like Second Harvest to access the 30% tax credit on their solar investment by essentially transforming it to a rebate.
“The process by which they were able to fully monetize the tax credits was quite the game changer,” Eley said.
In North Carolina, the provision known as “direct pay” serves as a vital sequel to an expired rebate program from utility Duke Energy, which helped dozens of houses of worship and other nonprofits go solar during its five years of existence.
“Duke Energy had the nonprofit solar rebate, and that was a tremendous tool that was very helpful,” said Laura Combs, a one-time solar salesperson who worked with tax-exempt groups around the state to access the cash back from the utility. “When the direct payment came into play,” she said, “that took up that slack.”
The federal climate law also offers other inducements. It provides a 10% bonus to tax credits for projects deployed in government-defined “energy communities,” including those on former industrial sites or brownfields. At least another 10% is available for clean-electricity projects that are located in or benefit low-income communities.
As an organization that serves food-insecure households and that is headquartered in a poor census tract on a brownfield, Second Harvest qualified for both of these extra incentives.
“We really maximized the clean-energy layer cake,” Eley said.
Altogether, the tax credits cut the $1.5 million price tag for the solar rooftop installation in half, Eley said. While the food bank had to pay the full amount up front and won’t recoup those savings until it files its tax return for the year, the extra incentives mean the 1,702 solar panels will pay for themselves more quickly in the form of lower energy bills.
Second Harvest and Piedmont Environmental Alliance hoped the project would serve as a beacon to other nonprofits looking to go solar. And in and around Winston-Salem, that’s starting to come true, Eley says.
“It’s opened up several doors there,” he said, mentioning that a local credit union and groups like Goodwill have expressed interest in installing panels. “We’re presently working with six faith communities that are navigating [direct pay] and going through their feasibility and contracting processes for solar specifically.”
That tracks with a nationwide trend of houses of worship going solar thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act.
There’s also been an uptick in nonprofit installations statewide, according to data compiled by the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association.
The association doesn’t monitor whether institutions access the direct-pay feature, and some recent arrays may be holdovers from the Duke rebate program, which ended in 2022. But the numbers are striking nonetheless: Since 2011, almost 150 houses of worship, local governments, and other entities that don’t pay taxes have erected solar arrays, nearly all on rooftops. Sixty-three, or 42%, did so in 2023 and 2024.
Now, Eley said, the groups he’s working with are especially motivated to act quickly.
“The idea of going solar has been something they have tossed around for a number of years,” he said. “We’re certainly reiterating to them if you’re going to make that investment, do so now.”
That’s because the massive budget bill passed last month by the House — dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in an homage to President Donald Trump — would make tax credits for solar and other renewable energy projects nearly unusable. The Senate is now considering whether to pass the measure as is or to make changes.
As the legislation stands now, projects would have to begin construction within 60 days of the bill’s passage to access the 30% tax credit. That’s an easier feat for a rooftop installation than a larger, ground-mounted affair, but still incredibly difficult for nonprofits, religious institutions, or local governments that tend to have lengthy decision-making processes and aren’t already planning to go solar.
Even more unworkable is a provision that requires documentation that no component of a project, no matter how small, is linked to a“foreign entity of concern” such as China.
While House lawmakers voted to make the underlying 30% tax credit virtually useless, they didn’t explicitly target the three related adjustments that helped enable the Second Harvest project: direct pay, the low-income community benefit, and the brownfield benefit.
“These cross-cutting provisions are part of the tax credit structure, but they are their own mechanisms,” said Rachel McCleery, the former senior adviser at the U.S. Department of the Treasury who led stakeholder engagement for the climate law’s implementation.
The survival of direct pay in the House measure stands in contrast to the elimination of its twin in the private sector, transferability, which allows smaller energy companies better access to incentives.
But direct pay means little if the baseline 30% tax credit is still hamstrung by the 60-day start-work requirement and the foreign-entity provision.
“This is backdoor repeal of the IRA,” said McCleery, who now advises clients on defending clean energy tax credits, “and it’s backdoor repeal of direct pay — because you can’t use direct pay if you don’t have an underlying tax credit.”
The same applies to the bonus incentives for low-income and brownfield communities. “These cross-cutting mechanisms can still be used,” McCleery said, “but if the underlying credit is moot, that essentially repeals the mechanisms.”
On the flipside, if the Senate restores the viability of the underlying 30% tax credit in its version of the bill, the mechanisms that aid nonprofits like food banks and houses of worship will also be accessible.
But advocates say that remains a big “if.” And there are other challenges: Slashes to the Internal Revenue Service workforce could delay payments to Second Harvest and others. And the group is bracing for the impact of the other budget cuts in the House bill as written, such as to food assistance and Medicaid.
“It’s just going to put pressure on people who are already under-resourced,” Bealle said. “And that has a ripple effect to every organization that supports under-resourced people, including us.”
Combs, the former solar sales professional who also volunteers with climate advocacy group North Carolina Interfaith Power and Light, called it a “tragic snowball.” She then brought up U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, the North Carolina Republican who has consistently voiced disapproval of a full-scale repeal of the tax credits.
“Thank goodness Sen. Tillis has spoken out and been a leader on the importance of the Inflation Reduction Act incentives,” Combs said. “I am anxious to see how this plays out in the Senate.”
A plan to build a wood-burning power plant in a Massachusetts city once dubbed the asthma capital of the country could be springing back to life years after state and local officials struck it down — and opponents are ready to renew their fight against what many call a “zombie project.”
Palmer Renewable Energy, the developer of the project in the city of Springfield, recently won a pair of legal victories reversing previous decisions to revoke key permits. At the same time, a little-known provision buried in the state’s 2021 climate law could pave the way for the project to improve its financials by selling renewable energy credits.
Local residents, community leaders, and environmental advocates are gearing up for another round of resistance by appealing the recent court rulings and pushing legislation to block the developer’s financial path forward.
“It’s really urgent,” said Laura Haight, U.S. policy director for the Partnership for Policy Integrity, a nonprofit that advocates against burning wood for power generation. “This is about making sure Palmer doesn’t rise again. There is no benefit — there’s only downside for the community.”
Palmer first proposed the plant in 2008, pitching it as a sustainable way to generate electricity by burning the woody waste left behind when utilities trim vegetation along power lines. The Springfield City Council issued initial approvals with little fanfare or public attention. Not long after, however, local residents and advocates realized what had happened and began to mobilize against the plan, kicking off years of debate and litigation.
Springfield, the third-largest city in Massachusetts, has long grappled with poor air quality and high asthma rates. The city sits at the intersection of two interstate highways, has a long industrial history, and was for many years home to a coal-burning power plant and neighbor to an oil and gas-fired plant. In 2018 and 2019, the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America dubbed the city the country’s asthma capital because of the prevalence of the disease and the high numbers of emergency room visits.
A wood-fired power plant may have an environmentally friendly ring to it. Proponents argue that the process is carbon-neutral because new trees can be grown to capture carbon, offsetting the emissions. However, researchers have found that promise is not the reality: The emissions created by burning wood have years to do climate damage before regrowth is adequate to absorb the added carbon dioxide. Burning woody biomass releases 50% more carbon dioxide than coal and three to four times as much as natural gas. Wood-burning facilities also emit other air pollutants and particulate matter that can cause or aggravate respiratory conditions.
Still, power plants that burn wood have often been propped up as valuable, sustainable resources. In the United Kingdom, the country’s largest single emitter is a wood-fired power station that, as of 2022, released more than 12 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. In European Union countries, the production of wood pellets to fuel power plants is big business, despite the objections of scientists and climate advocates.
In Springfield, a new power plant that would burn more than 1.2 million pounds of wood a day was not — and is not — an acceptable option, said many angry public health advocates, environmental activists, community leaders, and average citizens.
“It was a bad idea then, and it is still a bad idea,” said Sarita Hudson, senior director of strategy and development at the Public Health Institute of Western Massachusetts. “The community is against it.”
In 2015, however, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled in favor of Palmer in one of the cases challenging its permits, a decision that seemed to clear the way for construction. Palmer, however, never started building. So, in the spring of 2021, the Springfield Zoning Board of Appeals, at the request of the city council, ruled the project’s permits invalid, and the state rescinded its environmental approval, citing this lack of progress.
Opponents celebrated the demise of the project.
Palmer, however, was not ready to give up and appealed both of those decisions, arguing that statewide permit extensions implemented during the Great Recession and the Covid-19 pandemic meant it had more time to begin work. In January, the Massachusetts Superior Court agreed and ruled the project’s state air permit is still in effect. A few months later, the state Appeals Court also found Palmer’s building permits still valid, creating what many are calling a “Franken-permit.”
Both the state and Springfield City Council have appealed these rulings.
“There’s nothing stopping Palmer at this point from going back and applying for new building permits,” said Alexandra St. Pierre, director of communities and toxics for the Conservation Law Foundation, which is representing the city of Springfield in court. But the company would be unlikely to get approval this time around, she said, “and that’s why they’re pushing and pushing and pushing this issue.”
Permits are not the only potential hurdle: The plant still needs to make money, and observers doubt just selling power onto the grid would bring in enough revenue to turn a profit on an investment of that scale.
Earlier in the process, the administration of then-Gov. Charlie Baker (R) considered adding biomass facilities like Palmer to the list of renewable energy resources that qualify for the state’s renewable portfolio standard. Investor-owned utilities meet the standard by buying credits from operators of eligible renewable energy generation. Putting biomass on the list of renewable options would have allowed Palmer to make money selling such credits.
As public opposition mounted in 2021, however, Baker scrapped that proposal. But Palmer was already working on another plan.
While investor-owned utilities are required to meet the renewable portfolio standard, the state’s 41 municipally owned power companies are not. A 2021 climate law, however, created a new, separate standard for municipal utilities. The legislation does not include biomass on the initial list of eligible renewable resources, but does include a line adding biomass to the options as of 2026.
Palmer did not respond to requests for comment, so Canary Media cannot confirm when company leaders knew this addition was likely. But by late 2019, the developer had connected with Energy New England, a cooperative of municipal power companies, to promote the plant. In early 2020, eight municipal power companies signed contracts to buy 75% of the energy the Palmer plant was to produce.
“Which meant they were very, very close to having whatever financing they needed to get this project built,” Haight said.
As the project continued to stall and public sentiment against the plant grew, the municipal utilities all dropped their contracts in 2023. Observers, however, worry that some would sign back up if it helped them meet state requirements, either because they don’t know about the negative impacts of wood burning or because they are willing to overlook them.
Lawmakers in both the state House and Senate have introduced legislation to prevent biomass from joining the list of eligible resources next year. Gov. Maura Healey (D) also included the measure in the major energy bill she introduced last month, though supporters worry that legislation won’t advance quickly enough.
“There’s nothing subtle about this,” Haight said. “We have to close this loophole.”
A correction was made on June 17, 2025: This story originally misstated the amount of CO2 produced by the wood-burning power station that is the U.K.’s largest single emitter. As of 2022, the facility released over 12 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, not per day.
U.S. companies that install and finance residential solar have been struggling for years with rising interest rates and unfavorable policy shifts in California, the country’s biggest rooftop solar market. Now, they face an even more serious threat — Republicans in Congress, who have proposed to take away the tax credits that undergird the industry.
These mounting pressures have driven two of the most prominent firms in the U.S. residential solar sector into bankruptcy in recent days.
Residential solar provider Sunnova filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Sunday, three months after the publicly traded company warned investors that it could run out of cash due to falling sales, rising operational costs, and a growing debt burden. The Houston-based company, which reported 3 gigawatts of solar and battery systems under management as of the end of 2024, stated on Monday that it “intends to continue operating its business in the ordinary course throughout the sale process.”
Privately held solar lender Solar Mosaic filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Friday, stating it has taken action to “reorganize the business to meet its current liquidity needs.” The Oakland, California-based company, which claims it has funded $15 billion in loans to more than 500,000 households, cited “[m]acroeconomic challenges facing the entire residential solar industry, including high interest rates and legislation that threatens to eliminate tax credits for residential solar.”
Those two companies have unique problems that have contributed to their financial collapse, said Joe Osha, an analyst at Guggenheim Securities. “The causes of the difficulties that Mosaic and Sunnova face predate Trump,” he said.
But they also suffered from a market environment that is increasingly difficult and uncertain for every firm in the sector, he said.
The reconciliation bill passed by the House of Representatives last month and now being considered in the Senate would abruptly end a tax-credit regime that’s supported households and solar installers for the past 20 years.
The bill would terminate the 30% tax credit available to households installing solar panels, batteries, inverters, and associated solar equipment at the end of 2025, essentially making those installations about one-third more expensive than they are today.
And the legislation would eliminate the tax credit of 30% or more available to companies that lease solar panels to households and businesses. That would be a blow to firms like Sunnova and Sunrun, the country’s top residential solar company, which have made such third-party ownership structures central to their business models.
All in all, the changes in the House bill could mean U.S. households install 40% less solar over the next five years compared to current policy, according to research firm Wood Mackenzie.
That’s not just a threat to large companies like Sunrun and Tesla, but also to the regional and local businesses that are responsible for a majority of the roughly 5 million rooftop solar systems installed in the U.S. to date — and to a source of zero-carbon energy that stood at more than 50 gigawatts of generation capacity as of 2024.
That bill hasn’t been passed yet, however. Osha warned that it’s too early to extrapolate broader implications for the industry at large from these latest bankruptcies.
That’s because both Mosaic and Sunnova have fallen prey not only to challenging business conditions, but to mistakes in how they’ve reacted to the sector’s ongoing woes, he said.
“The way this business works, at the most basic level, is that you spend money now to create a long stream of contracted cash flows in the future,” Osha said. In the case of solar companies like Sunnova and Mosaic, those cash flows come from households making payments on the loans, leases, or power purchase agreements they’ve signed. The companies bundle those into asset-backed securities for sale to investment banks and other financial firms.
But those securities become far less attractive to buyers when the market for residential solar sours — and in the past year it has soured dramatically. Wood Mackenzie reported a 31% drop in U.S. residential solar installations in 2024 from the prior year.
The Solar Energy Industries Association reported in March that last year’s sales hit a low not seen since 2021. The trade group’s latest data, released this week, shows that “we have now had six consecutive quarters of year-over-year decline in residential solar installations,” Pavel Molchanov, investment strategy analyst at financial services firm Raymond James, pointed out. That includes a 13% year-over-year decline in the first quarter of 2025.
“In any industry, six consecutive down quarters is going to lead to pressure on companies across the board,” he said. “There’s just no escaping that.”
This downturn left Sunnova and Mosaic exposed to a cash crunch, Osha said.
Over the past 18 months or so, Sunnova had chosen to take on large amounts of corporate debt rather than selling off more of its portfolio to raise cash, he explained. As the market turned, finding buyers for those solar-backed assets became harder, making it difficult to raise cash to meet debt payments. The firm listed estimated assets and liabilities of $10 billion to $50 billion and debt of $10.67 billion as of Dec. 31.
Mosaic most likely experienced a similar liquidity crunch as it was unable to sell its portfolios of solar loans at the volume and price required to raise enough capital for new loans, Osha said. In a Monday analyst note, he highlighted that Mosaic had also “failed to make the transition from solar loans to third-party ownership” as interest rates climbed, making loans more expensive options compared to leases or power purchase agreements.
Molchanov emphasized that “financing is at the center of how this industry has historically functioned.” The companies in question built their businesses during the 2010s, when the country had historically low interest rates. But those interest rates have spiked in the past three years in response to the Covid pandemic’s economic disruptions and resulting inflation, driving up the cost of capital for all businesses — including companies borrowing money to install rooftop solar systems.
“There’s a very narrow pathway to navigate when the broader interest rate environment is so difficult,” Molchanov said. “Whatever strategic or tactical mistakes companies made, if we had this conversation five years ago, when interest rates were close to zero, those mistakes would not have been lethal. But now they can be lethal.”
Sunnova is the latest in a string of residential-solar bankruptcies in the past two years, which has included firms from regional installers and financing providers to icons of the industry like SunPower, which collapsed in August 2024. Solar lender Sunlight Financial, which offered lending options similar to those from Mosaic, declared bankruptcy in 2023 and emerged from reorganization later that year.
Filing for bankruptcy protection doesn’t necessarily mean that the companies will cease to exist. Some of SunPower’s business was purchased by Complete Solaria, which has since rebranded under the SunPower name, for example.
Nor does bankruptcy mean that customers will be bereft of customer service support for the solar systems these companies have financed, although that’s certainly a risk, as customers across the country have attested.
It’s also important to distinguish these newly bankrupt companies from others in the space, Osha said. For example, Sunrun, the biggest U.S. residential solar installer with roughly 10% of the market as of 2023, has better managed its way through the market downturn of the past 18 months or so, he said.
“What Sunrun has done in contrast to Sunnova is say, ‘We’re going to sell off those future cash flows to the greatest extent possible, so that we have money today,’” he said.
The House bill’s provision that would cut off tax credits for solar leasing does, however, pose a significant threat to Sunrun’s predominant business model of offering leases and power purchase agreements to residences, Osha said.
The House bill would not cancel tax credits for power purchase agreements, the other primary mechanism for companies that offer third-party-owned solar, Osha said. But in his Monday research note, he opined that this exclusion was “a loophole, not a deliberate plan on the part of legislators,” and that incentives for power purchase agreements would likely suffer the same fate as those for leases and homeowners in a final bill to emerge from Congress.
Whether tax credits expire abruptly at the end of 2025 or there’s an extension beyond that will have a significant impact on the financial viability of large-scale residential solar companies like Sunrun.
“Today, Sunrun’s business model is entirely centered on third-party ownership and tax credits,” he said. “But you can also say that they are a very well-run company that has surely thought about this, and [it] is likely, if the hammer does come down, they have a plan.”
At the same time, thousands of smaller companies that make up the majority of residential solar installations would almost certainly suffer from the tax-credit changes, even if their challenges go less noticed than those of industry stalwarts, said Kristina Costa, former clean energy adviser for the Biden administration.
That would have negative consequences for those working in the industry. Residential solar installation accounted for just over 100,000 jobs in the U.S. at the end of 2023, according to the most recent survey from the Interstate Renewable Energy Council. The current market downturn has already had a negative impact. The California Solar and Storage Association estimated that roughly 17,000 people, or 22% of the state’s distributed solar and storage workforce, lost their jobs between April 2023, when the state reduced incentives for rooftop solar owners, and the end of that year.
“You have a lot of mom-and-pop small business outfits in the solar residential space that are going to be profoundly affected by this bill that’s being debated in Congress right now,” Costa said. “It will be harder and more expensive to install solar and storage in homes — and it may or may not still make sense for somebody to do so, depending on what their state’s energy prices are looking like.”
Given that the House bill is expected to drive up electricity prices already being pushed higher by President Donald Trump’s tariff and energy policies, undermining the economics of rooftop solar “is a pretty direct attack by the House on energy prices in the wrong direction,” Costa said.
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