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As a result, Trump’s threats of revenge and retribution have become the background noise of the election year—it’s just more blah-blah-blah from a master of it

CREW, a good-government group in Washington, D.C., which reviewed more than thirteen thousand of Trump’s Truth Social posts for a report released this week.

They found that Trump had threatened to unleash the powers of the federal government on Biden twenty-five times in the past two years. Other targets against whom Trump called for vengeance included senators, judges, and members of Biden’s family. “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”—a blunt Trump social-media post from last year cited in the report

yet Congress, even when it was under full Democratic control in the first two years of Biden’s Presidency, has failed to pass measures that might insulate the Justice Department and other parts of the executive branch from efforts to politicize it during a second Trump term, such as reforming the Insurrection Act to make it harder to deploy the military on U.S. soil or passing legislation to make it more difficult for the White House to interfere in federal law-enforcement investigations.

Everywhere, new investment in green energy generation is being propelled by general concern for the climate, shifting corporate and household demand, the plunging prices for solar and batteries triggered by Chinese policy, and a combination of national and regional interventions

How different would we expect this data to look without the IRA?

The most useful overview of these modeling efforts that I have been able to find is by Bistline et al “Power sector impacts of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022” in Environmental Research Letters November 2023. If anyone has a better source, please let me know.

The top panel shows the historical trajectory of US generating capacity from 1980 to 2021. The second half of the graphic shows how 11 different models predict that the US electricity system might be expected to develop up to 2035, with and without IRA.

all the models expect the trends of the 2010s to continue through to the 2030s which means that solar, wind and battery storage dominate America’s energy future. Even without the IRA, the low carbon share of electricity generation will likely rise to 50-55% by 2035. Bidenomics bumps that to 70-80 percent.

The question is: “How does the renewable surge of 2022-2024, compare to the model-based expectations, with and without the IRA?”

The answer is either, “so so”, or, more charitably, it is “too early to tell”. In broad terms the current rate of expansion is slightly above the rate the models predict without the provision of additional Bidenomics incentives. But what is also clear is that the current rate of expansion, is far short of the long-run pace that should be expected from the IRA

At this point, defenders of the IRA interject that the IRA has only just come into effect. Cash from the IRA is only beginning to flow. And in an environment of higher costs for renewable energy equipment and higher interest rates, cash matters.

As Yakov Feygin put it: “Maybe the pithiest way to put it is that there are pre-IRA trends and outside IRA trends, but IRA has served to rapidly compress the timeframes for installation in a lot of technologies. So five years has turned into two, for example.”

So, to judge the impact of the IRA to date, the real question is not what has been built in 2022 and 2023, but what is in the pipeline.

Advised by JP Morgan, sophisticated global players like Ørsted are optimizing their use of both the production and investment tax credits offered by the IRA to launch large new renewable schemes. Of course, correlation is not the same as causation

Where the IRA is perhaps doing its most important work may be in incentivizing the middle bracket of projects where green momentum is less certain.

According to Utility Drive: “The 10 largest U.S. developers plan to build 110,364 MW of new wind and solar projects over the next five years, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, but the majority of these projects remain in early stages of development. Just 15% of planned wind and solar projects are under construction, and 13% are considered to be in advanced stages of development, … ”

The states that I have highlighted in red stand out either for their unusually low existing level of renewable power capacity or their lack of current momentum.

Along with Texas, the pipelines for the PJM, MISO and Southeast regions (which includes Florida) look particularly healthy.

The relatively modest California numbers should not be a surprise. As Yakov Feygin and others pointed out, what is needed in California is not more raw generating capacity, but more battery storage. And that is what we are seeing in the data.

The numbers would be even larger if it were not for the truly surreal logjam in California’s system for authorizing interconnections. According to Hamilton/Brookings data the volume of hybrid solar and batter capacity in the queue for approval is 6.5 times the capacity currently operating in the state. In other words there is an entire energy transition waiting to happen when the overloaded managerial processes of the system catch up

Texas’s less bureaucratic system seems to be one of its key advantages in the extremely rapid roll-out of solar.

though it may be true that globally speaking the United States as a whole is a laggard in renewable energy development,

If California (with an economy roughly comparable to that of Germany at current exchange rates) and Texas (with an economy roughly the size of Italy’s) were countries, they would be #3 and #5 in the world in solar capacity per capita.

the obvious question is, which are the laggards in the US energy system.

So there is a lot to get excited about, at, what we are learning to call, the “meso”-level of the economy (more on this in a future post).

What the state-level data reveal is that there are a significant number of large states in the USA where solar and wind energy have barely made any impact. Pennsylvania, for instance

The relative levels of sunshine between US states is irrelevant. As the global solar atlas shows, the entire United States has far better solar potential than North West Europe. If you can grow corn and tobbaco, you can do utility-scale solar. The fact that Arizona is not a solar giant is mind boggling.

Texas is both big and truly remarkable. California already is a world leader in renewable energy. Meanwhile, the majority of the US electricity system presents a very different picture. There is a huge distance to be traveled and the pace of solar build-out is unremarkable.

This is where national level incentives like the IRA must prove themselves

And these local battles in America matter. Given the extremely high per capita energy consumption in the USA, greening state-level energy systems is significant at the global level. It does not compare to the super-sized levels of emissions in China, but it matters.

Indonesia’s total installed electricity generating capacity is rated at 81 GW. As far as immediate impact on the global carbon balance is concerned, cleaning up the power systems of Pennsylvania and Illinois would make an even bigger impact.

A key test of Biden-era climate and industrial policy will be whether it can untie the local political economy of fossil fuels, which, across many regions of the United States still stands in the way of a green energy transition that now has all the force of economics and technological advantage on its side.

As Douglass argued, “To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.”

Acts of intimidation are as grave a threat to free speech as restrictive government policies. Again, Douglass said it well: “There can be no right of speech where any man, however lifted up, or however humble, however young, or however old, is overawed by force, and compelled to suppress his honest sentiments.”