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National Observer
9 hours ago
- Business
- National Observer
Clean energy project cancellations top $14 billion so far in 2025
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration Businesses have cancelled or delayed more than $14 billion of investments in US clean energy projects so far this year, reflecting their uncertainty and pessimism over federal support amid President Donald Trump's climate policy retreat, industry analysts reported Thursday. The sector still is showing resilience—at least $4.2 billion in new renewable energy, grid, electric vehicle and battery projects were announced over the same time period, from January through April, according to the tracking report by the nonprofit group Environmental Entrepreneurs, or E2, and its research partner, Atlas Public Policy. Some 10,000 jobs are expected to be created by these newly announced projects—including an electric truck assembly plant that the Jeff Bezos-backed startup Slate Auto said it would site in Warsaw, Indiana. That's equal to the estimated number of job losses from all the clean energy projects that have been abandoned so far this year. Nevertheless, it's a sharp reversal of trends E2 tracked in the sector over the previous three years, when $127.7 billion in new clean energy project announcements outpaced cancellations at a rate of nearly 50-to-1. Officials at E2, a nonpartisan group of clean energy business leaders and investors, said it was an ominous sign as the Senate prepares to take up Trump's 'One Big, Beautiful Bill,' the House-passed tax and spending cut package that would eliminate most of the clean energy tax credits Congress passed in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. 'If the tax plan passed by the House last week becomes law, expect to see construction and investments stopping in states across the country as more projects and jobs are cancelled,' said Michael Timberlake, communications director for E2. 'Businesses are now counting on Congress to come to its senses and stop this costly attack on an industry that is essential to meeting America's growing energy demand and that's driving unprecedented economic growth in every part of the country.' The White House did not immediately respond to questions about the report. The biggest of the cancellations that E2 tracked came in April. The United Auto Workers announced that Stellantis would not go forward with a $3.2 billion battery plant it planned to add to a giant shuttered assembly facility it is reopening in Belvidere, Illinois. And global energy giant RWE announced it was shuttering its US offshore wind operations 'for the time being' due to 'the political environment' in the United States. RWE had invested $1.1 billion to develop wind projects offshore of New York, Louisiana and California. While E2 tracks public announcements of new projects and cancellations, other efforts at tracking what's happening in the clean energy sector provide a more detailed picture—and in some senses, a more optimistic one. The Clean Investment Monitor, a project of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the consulting firm Rhodium Group, tracks actual capital spending in the quarter of all projects that have broken ground, and also includes investment in decarbonization projects at energy and industrial plants as well as consumer spending—for example, on EVs, rooftop solar and efficiency upgrades. For the first quarter of 2025, Clean Investment Monitor reported $67.3 billion in spending, a 6.9 percent increase from the same period in 2024. However, it was a 3.8 percent falloff from the previous quarter, and the second consecutive quarterly decline after an unbroken record of quarterly expansion that began in 2021. Retail purchases of clean energy technology by households and businesses clearly were the driving force in investment in early 2025, the Clean Investment Monitor reported. Its analysis, like that of E2, noted the cancellation of a number of big clean energy projects over the quarter. And it warned of the headwinds for the clean energy supply chain, not only due to uncertain federal policy but the escalation of tariffs and broader macroeconomic pressures. The American Clean Power Association (ACPA), which tracks utility-scale electricity projects, also put out its first quarter report Thursday, showing that developers installed 7.4 gigawatts of solar, wind and storage capacity, marking the second-strongest start to a year on record. (The strongest start on record was 2024, when 8 gigawatts came on line.) That brings total utility-scale clean power capacity to more than 320 gigawatts, which the association estimates is enough to power nearly 80 million US homes. Of course, that electricity is not only powering homes but also businesses, where power demand is rising sharply due to data centers. It was a record-setting quarter for battery storage capacity, which surpassed 30 gigawatts, a 65 percent increase from last year. Indiana quadrupled its energy storage capacity in just one quarter, with the help of a big system owned by the energy company AES that opened in April at the site of a former coal power plant. Texas continued to lead the nation in both utility-scale solar and land-based wind capacity, with its total clean energy portfolio reaching more than 80 gigawatts, a 20 percent increase from a year ago, ACPA said. In all, eight of the top 10 states for clean power additions in the quarter voted Republican in the 2024 presidential election. The association also saw continuing growth in the project development pipeline, with a 12 percent year-over-year increase in projects under construction or in the advanced stages of development. If all are built, it would add up to $328 billion in investment, said the group's CEO, Jason Grumet. 'Clean power is shovel-ready at scale,' he said, while echoing E2's concerns about the retreat from federal support for the sector in Washington. 'With unprecedented demand growth for electricity, we must send consistent investment signals across the energy sector,' Grumet said. 'The greatest threat to a reliable energy system is an unreliable political system.'
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Chart: Republicans take aim at clean energy boom benefiting GOP most
See more from Canary Media's "Chart of the week' column. House Republicans introduced legislation on Monday that would gut the Inflation Reduction Act. If the proposed rules become law, it will lead to more greenhouse gas emissions — and threaten hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of economic development in regions represented in Congress by Republicans. A vast majority of the clean energy projects announced after the Inflation Reduction Act was enacted benefit Republican-led congressional districts, per the latest update from the Clean Investment Monitor, a joint project from research firm Rhodium Group and experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The budget proposal introduced Monday by the House Ways and Means Committee would not outright repeal the Inflation Reduction Act. Instead, it'd saddle the law's various clean energy incentives with confusing and difficult-to-meet requirements, and phase many of the tax credits out sooner than current statute does. A former Biden administration Treasury official described it to Canary Media as 'a backdoor repeal.' If passed in its current form, the proposal would have a crushing effect on the booming U.S. clean energy industry, according to a separate preliminary analysis released Tuesday by Rhodium. Since the Inflation Reduction Act was signed into law in August 2022, companies have invested a total of about $320 billion into clean energy projects in the U.S. and plan to spend more than $500 billion on top of that to build cleantech factories, low-carbon industrial facilities, and installations of solar, batteries, and other renewables. Nearly 80% of the dollars already spent went to Republican districts, and three-quarters of planned investment will go to those areas. As law, the Ways and Means proposal could derail a lot of that outstanding spending — and even some of the projects already under construction or operational. Rhodium's preliminary analysis found that somewhere between 57% and 72% less clean energy would be added to the grid over the next decade under a repeal scenario, while somewhere between 16% and 38% fewer EVs would be on the road by 2035 than if the law was preserved as is. Those declines in clean-energy and EV adoption would mean less demand for manufacturers who plan to build factories to produce electric vehicle batteries, solar panels, wind transmission cables, and other cleantech in the States. They would have to reevaluate whether their factories still make sense under an entirely different set of economic conditions — and it's likely that the answer would be 'no' for many. Already, thanks to the Trump administration's trade and policy uncertainty, manufacturers of clean energy technology are abandoning projects at a rate not seen in the post-Inflation Reduction Act era. Nearly $7 billion worth of clean-energy manufacturing projects were canceled in the first quarter of the year alone. Monday's House Ways and Means proposal may never make it into law as is; some Republican senators and representatives are quickly coming out in opposition to the tax-credit changes. But the aggressive nature of the proposal will do little to restore the confidence of companies already wavering on domestic clean energy projects amid the chaos of the Trump administration.
