On the Climate Bill’s Second Birthday, Surging Successes — But a Split Reality
The Inflation Reduction Act promised an unprecedented wave of clean energy growth. Two years on, its impacts are exceeding even optimistic initial estimates, but climate damage is mounting. Here, we round up RMI’s diverse contributions to the bill’s far-flung priorities.
On Aug. 16, 2022, the Biden administration signed into law the single biggest investment in climate solutions ever — not just in the United States but in the world.
On the bill’s second birthday, the nation faces a split climate reality. On one hand, climate change impacts are worsening rapidly, piling up financial losses and taking lives prematurely. On the other, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) has supercharged clean energy growth, fuelling real progress toward decarbonizing the world’s energy and industrial systems. Below, we check in on the landmark act’s impact so far and round up RMI’s work linked to the act.
Take, for example, the next-to-last Sunday in July. It was the planet’s hottest day ever recorded. But Monday was hotter still, and July closed as the hottest month yet. The heat can be deadly: In the United States, the toll of preventable deaths from heat stress more than doubled to over 21,500 during 1999–2023. From destructive storms to wilder wildfires, billion-dollar-plus disasters are multiplying in the United States. Globally, 2023’s losses hit $380 billion, the fourth year in a row that insured losses from natural disasters exceeded $100 billion.
Against this anxious backdrop, the energy transition is unfolding faster than ever, thanks in large part to the IRA. As the price of renewables continues to plummet, the United States is advancing clean energy deployments, seeding new industrial investment, and growing related jobs faster than ever.
Initial estimates put the act’s impact at $370 billion in federal incentives. Together with elements of the earlier Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (see America’s Triple Climate Play, bottom), the United States is targeting a goal to cut climate pollution by 40 percent from 2005 levels by 2030.
Two years on, the IRA is on track to mobilize far more investment. Because each public dollar committed by the bill mobilizes additional dollars of private investment, the bill’s aggregate investment is on track to more than triple initial estimates.
Given the multi-year timelines typically needed to finance, plan, and build everything from factories to grid infrastructure, investment will likely endure for years. By 2030, RMI predicts total potential IRA-related public funding will top $1 trillion.
Estimates of both public and private funds already spent are in line with this forecast. MIT and the Rhodium group recently tallied up private and public spending to date in energy production, clean manufacturing, and projects that cut industrial emissions, along with consumer and business purchases of durable goods like EVs and heat pumps. Since late 2022, through the first half of this year, business and consumer investment in related technologies and infrastructure surged by 73 percent, to a total of $493 billion, compared with the two years before the bill.
Thanks partly to rules requiring minimum levels of domestic manufacturing, the IRA jump-started a race for clean energy investment not just at home but between the world’s top three economies. As quickly as China has charged ahead, the United States has joined the race with huge increases in investment.
A growing number of economies are on track to fully decarbonize their electricity sectors, a goal considered hard to achieve just a few years ago. Today, three US states generate more than half their power from renewables. California, the second largest US state in power consumption, routinely runs 100 percent renewable operations for hours-long stretches. Globally, at least 14 countries source almost all their power from renewables.
New jobs are proliferating in parallel. Since the IRA’s passage, announced clean energy projects will create more than 334,000 jobs in nearly every US state, according to Climate Power. These span industries from battery manufacturing and EV assembly to solar installation and building retrofits. “Landing a clean energy job can equal an 8–19 percent income increase,” Climate Power reports.
With the bulk of IRA funds yet to be deployed, additional new jobs are in the pipeline. In solar, for example — the United States’ fastest-growing energy of any type — the country will need nearly half a million workers, including those to build storage, by 2033, more than double today’s headcount. Yet today, with unemployment at a sustained low, solar companies report that it is “very difficult” to find qualified workers.
That’s why developing new workers is so crucial. Philadelphia’s Energy Coordinating Agency (ECA), which saw increased funding from the IRA, offers a model showing how to mobilize new workers from historically marginalized communities. ECA provides training in building weatherization, solar installation, and related programs that “are pretty much free” and target low-income communities, says Jackie Robinson, lead instructor at ECA. “You get a good skillset that can change your life and give your family generational wealth.”
RMI's role
RMI’s role
Over the past decade, RMI experts consulted on and helped shape the language in key sections of the landmark climate bill. Two years after its passage, a growing number of RMI teams are working to expand and speed up the deployment of funds:
Targeting investment
In the global race, the IRA has given US policymakers, regions, and industry a powerful way to deploy investment. Clean energy investment is already flowing to the places where these industries are most likely to thrive, and RMI’s Clean Growth Tool can help it find the right home, faster.
Developed in partnership with the Brookings Institution, the Clean Growth Tool assesses every US metro area’s feasibility for clean energy industries to thrive based on their current endowment of labor, industry, education, and related factors. For laggards, it also reveals workforce gaps that community leaders can focus on to improve their long-term industrial competitiveness.
“The IRA is still in early stages,” says RMI’s Aaron Brickman, a senior principal and economic development expert. “We’re taking a place-based approach to economic strategy to revitalize as many communities as possible — many left behind by prior economic and technological transformations.”
As IRA-backed investments multiply across the country (see map, below), the tool will help “us to improve America’s long-term competitiveness in the global clean energy race and turn nascent clean energy industries into lasting sources of growth and shared prosperity,” Brickman adds.
Improving access to clean energy
With the IRA’s new “direct pay” provision, which allows previously ineligible tax-exempt entities — such as schools, governments, and nonprofits — to claim renewable energy tax credits, more cities are building clean energy projects to take advantage of IRA incentives.
For example, in Texas, RMI partnered with the City of San Antonio to shape one of the country’s largest municipal multi-site solar projects. The city will save up to $11 million over the project’s lifetime. In addition to temporary construction jobs, the 13 megawatts of new panels — spread across 42 municipal buildings and parking lots — will create at least 15 permanent jobs. The panels’ carbon-free energy will help void some 13 percent of the buildings-related emissions from San Antonio, the seventh largest US city.
By financing and installing a substantial volume of solar all at once, “San Antonio rewired its approach to both more efficiently reduce emissions and energy consumption and achieve a greater economy of scale,” says RMI Manager Matthew Popkin, who works with local governments to procure clean energy.
“This bulk purchase strategy is not only a responsible use of taxpayer dollars but far more efficient than pursuing sites one at a time. It’s also a market-based approach that’s accessible to most cities and counties,” he adds.
Extending solar to low-income communities
Thanks to direct pay, the IRA has also unlocked a new approach to finance and install solar at scale, which can especially benefit low-income communities. Tax-exempt financial institutions such as community development financial institutions and green banks can act as third-party owners of solar and storage systems and leverage federal tax credits to finance them.
Thanks to this aspect of the bill, low-income households and nonprofits can go solar with no money down and pay less for power over the long term. RMI’s RISE cohort brings together ambitious communities to pilot this new project finance model, setting programs in motion to accelerate the deployment of rooftop solar.
“The IRA not only provides funding for individual projects, but it also acts as a catalyst to spur private investment and create self-sustaining programs even in communities that couldn’t afford it in the past,” says RMI’s Yuning Liu, a manager who works with local governments to advance their climate goals.
Accessing consumer incentives
The IRA includes a variety of consumer tax credits and rebates, structured to lower energy costs, reduce pollution, and improve resilience. The Home Energy Rebate programs are starting to roll out — New York and Wisconsin are the first states to launch programs, 22 states and territories have submitted applications to DOE for review, and 26 other states and territories are working toward an application. DOE tracks where each state is in the process here.
While most rebates will be available in 2025, the US Treasury just released the first year of data on residential tax credits, and the results are encouraging. At almost $2,500 average per household, households have already claimed $8.4 billion from two related tax credits, nearly four times more than originally estimated. The Residential Clean Energy Credit is mainly used for installing solar panels, while the Energy Efficient Home Improvement Credit is used to install energy efficient projects like insulation and heat pumps.
RMI has been working with states to help design their Home Energy Rebate programs. Specifically, we did research on how this new federal funding can stack with new and existing state, local, and utility incentives to support more affordable and comprehensive clean energy retrofits. Our “Incentive Stacking Resources for Clean Buildings” can be found here.
In short, there are huge opportunities to improve individual homes and businesses, and states can play a key role in helping residents, businesses, and organizations take advantage of clean energy incentives, which can bring in the billions and help states reach their full investment potential.
Developing climate action plans
Earlier this year, 45 states, along with dozens of metropolitan areas, Tribes, and territories, submitted priority climate action plans, many representing their first meaningful climate planning effort. Eight states used the Energy Policy Simulator (developed by RMI and Energy Innovation) to develop and quantify the impact of their climate plan measures.
The plans represent a gold mine of information about state climate action that RMI partnered with Evergreen and Climate XChange to review, organize, and quantify. Notably, every single state-level climate plan included at least one buildings-focused measure. For more, see RMI’s “Why State Climate Plans Prioritize Upgrades to Homes and Buildings.”
Building on these plans, in July, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced $4.3 billion in Climate Pollution Reduction Grant (CPRG) Implementation Grants advancing clean investment in transportation, buildings, agriculture, industry, power, and waste. RMI actively supported four of the biggest awards, representing $1.5 billion in funding or over one-third of the entire CPRG award. These four awards will advance heat pump adoption, industrial decarbonization, and freight electrification, among other initiatives, across eight states.
Attention now turns to implementation of the awarded projects, as well as identifying alternate funding sources for the over 600 priority measures that were not covered by the implementation grant awards.
Scaling hydrogen for heavy industry
The IRA is also catalyzing industrial decarbonization, helping some of the highest-emitting sectors — including chemicals, cement, and steel — transition to low-emissions processes. While many of these early-stage efforts may seem small in the face of heavy industry’s big carbon impact — industry accounts for about a quarter of global warming emissions — they are a clear sign that progress is on the way.
The past year saw the launch of multiple major pilots or projects, each a milestone in its industry, including:
- Electra’s pilot project to produce green steel in Colorado;
- Sublime, which is producing low-carbon cement for a net-zero office park in Massachusetts; and
- Limelight, which is developing a method to make steel with carbon-free lasers in California.
The IRA funds the Industrial Demonstrations Program, announcing approximately $6.2 billion in Energy Department awards to 33 projects around the country to spur decarbonization across industrial sectors. Nearly half of the 33 awarded project developers attended RMI webinars on best practices for developing well-rounded applications and community benefit plans, and multiple applicants worked closely with RMI experts on concept notes and full-applications.
IRA funding has unlocked new industrial investment in regions previously left behind. “The IRA represents the largest investment in industrial decarbonization in American history,” says RMI Manager Hadia Sheerazi, a community engagement and equitable industrial decarbonization expert.
She adds: “Nationwide, over 27,200 low-income and BIPOC communities — that have been historically overburdened by legacy pollution, environmental hazards, and underinvestment — have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to co-create a new blueprint for achieving a just, clean, energy transition.”
Transitioning to a greener grid
RMI’s IRA Opportunity Map is a dynamically updated resource designed to support electric utilities, regulators, and advocates as they explore implementation strategies for IRA provisions, which can create billions of dollars of savings for customers by building new clean energy resources.
Clean repowering is an immediate, no-regrets opportunity to address the challenges of interconnection queues by using existing fossil asset interconnection rights to interconnect nearby renewable energy and storage resources.
Using existing interconnection rights could eliminate years of delays, which, along with IRA incentives that improve the economics of clean energy, can make clean repowering financially attractive for both utilities and their customers.
A critical innovation of the IRA is direct pay — a mechanism that allows governments, nonprofits, and rural electric cooperatives (co-ops) to get cash payments from the US Treasury for the full value of federal clean energy tax credits, even without tax liability. Direct pay entities can now make clean energy investments — locating and owning resources like wind turbines, utility-scale solar, and utility-scale batteries in their communities — and most of these credits will be available well into the 2030s.
For co-ops, direct pay tax credits can also be combined with grants and low-interest loans provided through the Empowering Rural America (New ERA) program of the USDA, which offers up to $9.7 billion in IRA funding. The New ERA application window closed last fall, garnering an impressive 151 letters of interest; and while the USDA has since made its decisions, details about which co-ops received awards — and for how much — will gradually emerge. The impact on rural communities should be significant. RMI analysis estimates that every $10 billion invested in wind and solar projects by co-ops will yield more than $50 billion in induced economic development revenues.
The IRA’s message for rural America is clear: Far from being left out of the clean energy conversation, rural communities are now poised to become the nation’s powerhouse.
Innovating finance
The IRA authorized the EPA to create the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) to help fight climate change by making affordable financing for clean energy technologies more accessible. GGRF is America’s largest-ever clean energy investment in low-income and disadvantaged communities. Leveraged effectively, this investment will not just deliver clean energy, but will also transform financial markets and spur local job growth, while cutting emissions.
On April 4, 2024, the EPA announced awardees in the $14-billion National Clean Investment Fund and the $6-billion Clean Communities Investment Accelerator. Following the EPA’s announcement, RMI held a training with community lenders on how this new green financing can integrate effectively with IRA incentives to help them develop and deliver affordable green lending products in communities. RMI also convened awardees, community lenders, and commercial banks to discuss strategies for effectively leveraging the GGRF program to mobilize private capital.
The $7 billion Solar for All awards were announced shortly after with new low-income solar programs serving every US state. RMI worked with many of the Solar for All recipients to help strengthen their program design and released a guide on how to develop an impactful Solar for All proposal.
For more on RMI’s work related to GGRF, see “For Low-Income Communities, America’s Largest-Ever Clean Energy Investment Takes Shape.”
Electrifying transportation
The IRA’s transportation-related provisions will significantly accelerate the electrification of transportation, via a broad mix of incentives. These include as much as $7,500 in tax credits consumers can use to buy personal electric vehicles (EVs), as well as tax credits and incentives for medium- and heavy-duty electric trucks.
As stakeholders determine how they are going to use this unprecedented wave of funding, RMI has focused primarily on cracking the battery minerals problem. The IRA is structured to strengthen EV battery supply chains, which are vulnerable to disruption and rely heavily on mineral imports. The act stipulates that a minimum percentage of the minerals that go into EV batteries be sourced domestically, or from allies with which the United States has a free trade agreement. Battery material reuse offers a potent solution to this challenge.
RMI launched its Battery Circular Economy Initiative to help stakeholders understand what they can do to create a circular battery economy. Its dashboard allows users to enter their own inputs and create scenarios that show how much EV battery demand will grow; predicted supply gaps; the amount of recoverable materials from end of life batteries; and other parameters.
Indeed, if battery mineral reuse continues to rise just as battery performance (capacity, weight, and durability) continues to improve, RMI predicts that the industry could end its dependence on newly mined minerals well before midcentury, even as the world’s vehicle fleet electrifies more fully.
Rising resilience
Uninterrupted supplies of power are a vital lifesaver. During heat waves, heat-related fatalities surge when air conditioning goes offline, as Houston experienced during multi-day outages in July caused by hurricane Beryl.
RMI is working to scale local renewable energy minigrids, which offer a potent, cost-effective fix to avoid grid outages and extend energy access. Solar-plus-storage, especially when combined into microgrids, not only localizes the production of energy to nearby rooftops and solar fields, it also reduces vulnerability when transmission lines fail. Batteries offer reliable backup supplies of energy, closer to the points of need.
Across the United States, the increased interest in utilizing Direct Pay tax credits to cover up to 60 percent of the cost of solar-plus-storage microgrids shows communities are eager and ready to use IRA programs to adopt clean energy technologies.
And in times of grid rebuilding, the IRA is changing how communities recover from disasters. In impacted areas, instead of rebuilding to the previous state, FEMA will now cover 75 percent of the costs of clean energy investments for public buildings, ensuring that these sites are well prepared for the next outage.
Combined with plummeting prices for solar, batteries, and related equipment, “IRA programs mean there has never been a better time to deploy solar-plus-storage microgrids,” says electricity expert and RMI Manager Michael Liebman. These systems deliver a variety of benefits to communities, he explains, “including resilience during ever more frequent outages, savings on electricity bills in many areas, plus the opportunity to create additional savings and help the broader grid as part of a virtual power plant.”
IRA's road ahead
IRA’s road ahead
Estimated IRA Funding by Sector, 2023–2030
Potential climate-aligned funding from the IRA, $ billion
Data: RMI Analysis, Clean Investment Monitor.
With a substantial $66 billion already distributed across the nation, spurring additional private investment, this is still just the beginning. This is 6 percent of the estimated potential for the IRA funding that communities can capture. It’s to be expected that the first two years would see adoption ramping up and that future years could see even larger investments if communities seize the opportunity.
For now, the biggest physical obstacle may be the transmission and interconnection queue reform needed to get clean energy projects built at the pace and scale required. But another obstacle remains in a deficit of understanding among US registered voters about the IRA, most of whom support the act after learning about it, even if they’ve not heard much about it previously. But with the IRA driving investment, jobs, lower electricity bills, and resilience in communities across the country, Americans are seeing more and more how the clean energy transition can improve their lives, spurring both hope and progress toward a safer, cleaner future.
America’s Triple Climate Play
The IRA is the largest-ever US climate bill, but it’s not the only major federal effort to spark the energy transition. Two related investment bills preceded it. From early-stage invention through industrial production to consumer incentives, the bills work together to stimulate clean energy investment, innovation, and scale adoption.
> The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, passed Nov. 15, 2021, mobilized more than $1.2 trillion dollars to build and upgrade broad swaths of US infrastructure, from highways to the electric grid, as well as billions to upgrade the efficiency of public buildings and housing and facilitate the growth of renewable energy. Critics point out that, by spurring a construction boom, the bill doesn’t do enough to offset the impact of high-emissions building materials such as cement and steel or to spur the development of low-carbon alternatives.
> The CHIPs and Science Act was signed into law on Aug. 9, 2022, and authorizes roughly $280 billion in new funding to boost domestic research and manufacturing of semiconductors in the United States. While not energy focused directly, the act is priming domestic production of materials that are essential to scaling the US energy transition. For more, see RMI’s “How Semiconductor Leadership Could Boost US Solar Manufacturing.”
> Passed on Aug. 16, 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act includes scores of programs, harnessing a variety of direct subsidies, tax credits, and other financial incentives to advance clean energy across the United States.
For a guide to IRA and other federal clean energy programs, see RMI’s Guide to Federal Clean Energy Incentives. Learn more about RMI’s take on the compounding benefits of these three bills at Congress’s Climate Triple Whammy.
RMI’s role
Over the past decade, RMI experts consulted on and helped shape the language in key sections of the landmark climate bill. Two years after its passage, a growing number of RMI teams are working to expand and speed up the deployment of funds:
In the global race, the IRA has given US policymakers, regions, and industry a powerful way to deploy investment. Clean energy investment is already flowing to the places where these industries are most likely to thrive, and RMI’s Clean Growth Tool can help it find the right home, faster.
Developed in partnership with the Brookings Institution, the Clean Growth Tool assesses every US metro area’s feasibility for clean energy industries to thrive based on their current endowment of labor, industry, education, and related factors. For laggards, it also reveals workforce gaps that community leaders can focus on to improve their long-term industrial competitiveness.
“The IRA is still in early stages,” says RMI’s Aaron Brickman, a senior principal and economic development expert. “We’re taking a place-based approach to economic strategy to revitalize as many communities as possible — many left behind by prior economic and technological transformations.”
As IRA-backed investments multiply across the country (see map, below), the tool will help “us to improve America’s long-term competitiveness in the global clean energy race and turn nascent clean energy industries into lasting sources of growth and shared prosperity,” Brickman adds.
Improving access to clean energy
With the IRA’s new “direct pay” provision, which allows previously ineligible tax-exempt entities — such as schools, governments, and nonprofits — to claim renewable energy tax credits, more cities are building clean energy projects to take advantage of IRA incentives.
For example, in Texas, RMI partnered with the City of San Antonio to shape one of the country’s largest municipal multi-site solar projects. The city will save up to $11 million over the project’s lifetime. In addition to temporary construction jobs, the 13 megawatts of new panels — spread across 42 municipal buildings and parking lots — will create at least 15 permanent jobs. The panels’ carbon-free energy will help void some 13 percent of the buildings-related emissions from San Antonio, the seventh largest US city.
By financing and installing a substantial volume of solar all at once, “San Antonio rewired its approach to both more efficiently reduce emissions and energy consumption and achieve a greater economy of scale,” says RMI Manager Matthew Popkin, who works with local governments to procure clean energy.
“This bulk purchase strategy is not only a responsible use of taxpayer dollars but far more efficient than pursuing sites one at a time. It’s also a market-based approach that’s accessible to most cities and counties,” he adds.
Extending solar to low-income communities
Thanks to direct pay, the IRA has also unlocked a new approach to finance and install solar at scale, which can especially benefit low-income communities. Tax-exempt financial institutions such as community development financial institutions and green banks can act as third-party owners of solar and storage systems and leverage federal tax credits to finance them.
Thanks to this aspect of the bill, low-income households and nonprofits can go solar with no money down and pay less for power over the long term. RMI’s RISE cohort brings together ambitious communities to pilot this new project finance model, setting programs in motion to accelerate the deployment of rooftop solar.
“The IRA not only provides funding for individual projects, but it also acts as a catalyst to spur private investment and create self-sustaining programs even in communities that couldn’t afford it in the past,” says RMI’s Yuning Liu, a manager who works with local governments to advance their climate goals.
Accessing consumer incentives
The IRA includes a variety of consumer tax credits and rebates, structured to lower energy costs, reduce pollution, and improve resilience. The Home Energy Rebate programs are starting to roll out — New York and Wisconsin are the first states to launch programs, 22 states and territories have submitted applications to DOE for review, and 26 other states and territories are working toward an application. DOE tracks where each state is in the process here.
While most rebates will be available in 2025, the US Treasury just released the first year of data on residential tax credits, and the results are encouraging. At almost $2,500 average per household, households have already claimed $8.4 billion from two related tax credits, nearly four times more than originally estimated. The Residential Clean Energy Credit is mainly used for installing solar panels, while the Energy Efficient Home Improvement Credit is used to install energy efficient projects like insulation and heat pumps.
RMI has been working with states to help design their Home Energy Rebate programs. Specifically, we did research on how this new federal funding can stack with new and existing state, local, and utility incentives to support more affordable and comprehensive clean energy retrofits. Our “Incentive Stacking Resources for Clean Buildings” can be found here.
In short, there are huge opportunities to improve individual homes and businesses, and states can play a key role in helping residents, businesses, and organizations take advantage of clean energy incentives, which can bring in the billions and help states reach their full investment potential.
Developing climate action plans
Earlier this year, 45 states, along with dozens of metropolitan areas, Tribes, and territories, submitted priority climate action plans, many representing their first meaningful climate planning effort. Eight states used the Energy Policy Simulator (developed by RMI and Energy Innovation) to develop and quantify the impact of their climate plan measures.
The plans represent a gold mine of information about state climate action that RMI partnered with Evergreen and Climate XChange to review, organize, and quantify. Notably, every single state-level climate plan included at least one buildings-focused measure. For more, see RMI’s “Why State Climate Plans Prioritize Upgrades to Homes and Buildings.”
Building on these plans, in July, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced $4.3 billion in Climate Pollution Reduction Grant (CPRG) Implementation Grants advancing clean investment in transportation, buildings, agriculture, industry, power, and waste. RMI actively supported four of the biggest awards, representing $1.5 billion in funding or over one-third of the entire CPRG award. These four awards will advance heat pump adoption, industrial decarbonization, and freight electrification, among other initiatives, across eight states.
Attention now turns to implementation of the awarded projects, as well as identifying alternate funding sources for the over 600 priority measures that were not covered by the implementation grant awards.
Scaling hydrogen for heavy industry
The IRA is also catalyzing industrial decarbonization, helping some of the highest-emitting sectors — including chemicals, cement, and steel — transition to low-emissions processes. While many of these early-stage efforts may seem small in the face of heavy industry’s big carbon impact — industry accounts for about a quarter of global warming emissions — they are a clear sign that progress is on the way.
The past year saw the launch of multiple major pilots or projects, each a milestone in its industry, including:
- Electra’s pilot project to produce green steel in Colorado;
- Sublime, which is producing low-carbon cement for a net-zero office park in Massachusetts; and
- Limelight, which is developing a method to make steel with carbon-free lasers in California.
The IRA funds the Industrial Demonstrations Program, announcing approximately $6.2 billion in Energy Department awards to 33 projects around the country to spur decarbonization across industrial sectors. Nearly half of the 33 awarded project developers attended RMI webinars on best practices for developing well-rounded applications and community benefit plans, and multiple applicants worked closely with RMI experts on concept notes and full-applications.
IRA funding has unlocked new industrial investment in regions previously left behind. “The IRA represents the largest investment in industrial decarbonization in American history,” says RMI Manager Hadia Sheerazi, a community engagement and equitable industrial decarbonization expert.
She adds: “Nationwide, over 27,200 low-income and BIPOC communities — that have been historically overburdened by legacy pollution, environmental hazards, and underinvestment — have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to co-create a new blueprint for achieving a just, clean, energy transition.”
Transitioning to a greener grid
RMI’s IRA Opportunity Map is a dynamically updated resource designed to support electric utilities, regulators, and advocates as they explore implementation strategies for IRA provisions, which can create billions of dollars of savings for customers by building new clean energy resources.
Clean repowering is an immediate, no-regrets opportunity to address the challenges of interconnection queues by using existing fossil asset interconnection rights to interconnect nearby renewable energy and storage resources.
Using existing interconnection rights could eliminate years of delays, which, along with IRA incentives that improve the economics of clean energy, can make clean repowering financially attractive for both utilities and their customers.
A critical innovation of the IRA is direct pay — a mechanism that allows governments, nonprofits, and rural electric cooperatives (co-ops) to get cash payments from the US Treasury for the full value of federal clean energy tax credits, even without tax liability. Direct pay entities can now make clean energy investments — locating and owning resources like wind turbines, utility-scale solar, and utility-scale batteries in their communities — and most of these credits will be available well into the 2030s.
For co-ops, direct pay tax credits can also be combined with grants and low-interest loans provided through the Empowering Rural America (New ERA) program of the USDA, which offers up to $9.7 billion in IRA funding. The New ERA application window closed last fall, garnering an impressive 151 letters of interest; and while the USDA has since made its decisions, details about which co-ops received awards — and for how much — will gradually emerge. The impact on rural communities should be significant. RMI analysis estimates that every $10 billion invested in wind and solar projects by co-ops will yield more than $50 billion in induced economic development revenues.
The IRA’s message for rural America is clear: Far from being left out of the clean energy conversation, rural communities are now poised to become the nation’s powerhouse.
Innovating finance
The IRA authorized the EPA to create the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) to help fight climate change by making affordable financing for clean energy technologies more accessible. GGRF is America’s largest-ever clean energy investment in low-income and disadvantaged communities. Leveraged effectively, this investment will not just deliver clean energy, but will also transform financial markets and spur local job growth, while cutting emissions.
On April 4, 2024, the EPA announced awardees in the $14-billion National Clean Investment Fund and the $6-billion Clean Communities Investment Accelerator. Following the EPA’s announcement, RMI held a training with community lenders on how this new green financing can integrate effectively with IRA incentives to help them develop and deliver affordable green lending products in communities. RMI also convened awardees, community lenders, and commercial banks to discuss strategies for effectively leveraging the GGRF program to mobilize private capital.
The $7 billion Solar for All awards were announced shortly after with new low-income solar programs serving every US state. RMI worked with many of the Solar for All recipients to help strengthen their program design and released a guide on how to develop an impactful Solar for All proposal.
For more on RMI’s work related to GGRF, see “For Low-Income Communities, America’s Largest-Ever Clean Energy Investment Takes Shape.”
Electrifying transportation
The IRA’s transportation-related provisions will significantly accelerate the electrification of transportation, via a broad mix of incentives. These include as much as $7,500 in tax credits consumers can use to buy personal electric vehicles (EVs), as well as tax credits and incentives for medium- and heavy-duty electric trucks.
As stakeholders determine how they are going to use this unprecedented wave of funding, RMI has focused primarily on cracking the battery minerals problem. The IRA is structured to strengthen EV battery supply chains, which are vulnerable to disruption and rely heavily on mineral imports. The act stipulates that a minimum percentage of the minerals that go into EV batteries be sourced domestically, or from allies with which the United States has a free trade agreement. Battery material reuse offers a potent solution to this challenge.
RMI launched its Battery Circular Economy Initiative to help stakeholders understand what they can do to create a circular battery economy. Its dashboard allows users to enter their own inputs and create scenarios that show how much EV battery demand will grow; predicted supply gaps; the amount of recoverable materials from end of life batteries; and other parameters.
Indeed, if battery mineral reuse continues to rise just as battery performance (capacity, weight, and durability) continues to improve, RMI predicts that the industry could end its dependence on newly mined minerals well before midcentury, even as the world’s vehicle fleet electrifies more fully.
Rising resilience
Uninterrupted supplies of power are a vital lifesaver. During heat waves, heat-related fatalities surge when air conditioning goes offline, as Houston experienced during multi-day outages in July caused by hurricane Beryl.
RMI is working to scale local renewable energy minigrids, which offer a potent, cost-effective fix to avoid grid outages and extend energy access. Solar-plus-storage, especially when combined into microgrids, not only localizes the production of energy to nearby rooftops and solar fields, it also reduces vulnerability when transmission lines fail. Batteries offer reliable backup supplies of energy, closer to the points of need.
Across the United States, the increased interest in utilizing Direct Pay tax credits to cover up to 60 percent of the cost of solar-plus-storage microgrids shows communities are eager and ready to use IRA programs to adopt clean energy technologies.
And in times of grid rebuilding, the IRA is changing how communities recover from disasters. In impacted areas, instead of rebuilding to the previous state, FEMA will now cover 75 percent of the costs of clean energy investments for public buildings, ensuring that these sites are well prepared for the next outage.
Combined with plummeting prices for solar, batteries, and related equipment, “IRA programs mean there has never been a better time to deploy solar-plus-storage microgrids,” says electricity expert and RMI Manager Michael Liebman. These systems deliver a variety of benefits to communities, he explains, “including resilience during ever more frequent outages, savings on electricity bills in many areas, plus the opportunity to create additional savings and help the broader grid as part of a virtual power plant.”
IRA's road ahead
IRA’s road ahead
Estimated IRA Funding by Sector, 2023–2030
Potential climate-aligned funding from the IRA, $ billion
Data: RMI Analysis, Clean Investment Monitor.
With a substantial $66 billion already distributed across the nation, spurring additional private investment, this is still just the beginning. This is 6 percent of the estimated potential for the IRA funding that communities can capture. It’s to be expected that the first two years would see adoption ramping up and that future years could see even larger investments if communities seize the opportunity.
For now, the biggest physical obstacle may be the transmission and interconnection queue reform needed to get clean energy projects built at the pace and scale required. But another obstacle remains in a deficit of understanding among US registered voters about the IRA, most of whom support the act after learning about it, even if they’ve not heard much about it previously. But with the IRA driving investment, jobs, lower electricity bills, and resilience in communities across the country, Americans are seeing more and more how the clean energy transition can improve their lives, spurring both hope and progress toward a safer, cleaner future.
America’s Triple Climate Play
The IRA is the largest-ever US climate bill, but it’s not the only major federal effort to spark the energy transition. Two related investment bills preceded it. From early-stage invention through industrial production to consumer incentives, the bills work together to stimulate clean energy investment, innovation, and scale adoption.
> The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, passed Nov. 15, 2021, mobilized more than $1.2 trillion dollars to build and upgrade broad swaths of US infrastructure, from highways to the electric grid, as well as billions to upgrade the efficiency of public buildings and housing and facilitate the growth of renewable energy. Critics point out that, by spurring a construction boom, the bill doesn’t do enough to offset the impact of high-emissions building materials such as cement and steel or to spur the development of low-carbon alternatives.
> The CHIPs and Science Act was signed into law on Aug. 9, 2022, and authorizes roughly $280 billion in new funding to boost domestic research and manufacturing of semiconductors in the United States. While not energy focused directly, the act is priming domestic production of materials that are essential to scaling the US energy transition. For more, see RMI’s “How Semiconductor Leadership Could Boost US Solar Manufacturing.”
> Passed on Aug. 16, 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act includes scores of programs, harnessing a variety of direct subsidies, tax credits, and other financial incentives to advance clean energy across the United States.
For a guide to IRA and other federal clean energy programs, see RMI’s Guide to Federal Clean Energy Incentives. Learn more about RMI’s take on the compounding benefits of these three bills at Congress’s Climate Triple Whammy.
With the IRA’s new “direct pay” provision, which allows previously ineligible tax-exempt entities — such as schools, governments, and nonprofits — to claim renewable energy tax credits, more cities are building clean energy projects to take advantage of IRA incentives.
For example, in Texas, RMI partnered with the City of San Antonio to shape one of the country’s largest municipal multi-site solar projects. The city will save up to $11 million over the project’s lifetime. In addition to temporary construction jobs, the 13 megawatts of new panels — spread across 42 municipal buildings and parking lots — will create at least 15 permanent jobs. The panels’ carbon-free energy will help void some 13 percent of the buildings-related emissions from San Antonio, the seventh largest US city.
By financing and installing a substantial volume of solar all at once, “San Antonio rewired its approach to both more efficiently reduce emissions and energy consumption and achieve a greater economy of scale,” says RMI Manager Matthew Popkin, who works with local governments to procure clean energy.
“This bulk purchase strategy is not only a responsible use of taxpayer dollars but far more efficient than pursuing sites one at a time. It’s also a market-based approach that’s accessible to most cities and counties,” he adds.
Thanks to direct pay, the IRA has also unlocked a new approach to finance and install solar at scale, which can especially benefit low-income communities. Tax-exempt financial institutions such as community development financial institutions and green banks can act as third-party owners of solar and storage systems and leverage federal tax credits to finance them.
Thanks to this aspect of the bill, low-income households and nonprofits can go solar with no money down and pay less for power over the long term. RMI’s RISE cohort brings together ambitious communities to pilot this new project finance model, setting programs in motion to accelerate the deployment of rooftop solar.
“The IRA not only provides funding for individual projects, but it also acts as a catalyst to spur private investment and create self-sustaining programs even in communities that couldn’t afford it in the past,” says RMI’s Yuning Liu, a manager who works with local governments to advance their climate goals.
Accessing consumer incentives
The IRA includes a variety of consumer tax credits and rebates, structured to lower energy costs, reduce pollution, and improve resilience. The Home Energy Rebate programs are starting to roll out — New York and Wisconsin are the first states to launch programs, 22 states and territories have submitted applications to DOE for review, and 26 other states and territories are working toward an application. DOE tracks where each state is in the process here.
While most rebates will be available in 2025, the US Treasury just released the first year of data on residential tax credits, and the results are encouraging. At almost $2,500 average per household, households have already claimed $8.4 billion from two related tax credits, nearly four times more than originally estimated. The Residential Clean Energy Credit is mainly used for installing solar panels, while the Energy Efficient Home Improvement Credit is used to install energy efficient projects like insulation and heat pumps.
RMI has been working with states to help design their Home Energy Rebate programs. Specifically, we did research on how this new federal funding can stack with new and existing state, local, and utility incentives to support more affordable and comprehensive clean energy retrofits. Our “Incentive Stacking Resources for Clean Buildings” can be found here.
In short, there are huge opportunities to improve individual homes and businesses, and states can play a key role in helping residents, businesses, and organizations take advantage of clean energy incentives, which can bring in the billions and help states reach their full investment potential.
Developing climate action plans
Earlier this year, 45 states, along with dozens of metropolitan areas, Tribes, and territories, submitted priority climate action plans, many representing their first meaningful climate planning effort. Eight states used the Energy Policy Simulator (developed by RMI and Energy Innovation) to develop and quantify the impact of their climate plan measures.
The plans represent a gold mine of information about state climate action that RMI partnered with Evergreen and Climate XChange to review, organize, and quantify. Notably, every single state-level climate plan included at least one buildings-focused measure. For more, see RMI’s “Why State Climate Plans Prioritize Upgrades to Homes and Buildings.”
Building on these plans, in July, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced $4.3 billion in Climate Pollution Reduction Grant (CPRG) Implementation Grants advancing clean investment in transportation, buildings, agriculture, industry, power, and waste. RMI actively supported four of the biggest awards, representing $1.5 billion in funding or over one-third of the entire CPRG award. These four awards will advance heat pump adoption, industrial decarbonization, and freight electrification, among other initiatives, across eight states.
Attention now turns to implementation of the awarded projects, as well as identifying alternate funding sources for the over 600 priority measures that were not covered by the implementation grant awards.
Scaling hydrogen for heavy industry
The IRA is also catalyzing industrial decarbonization, helping some of the highest-emitting sectors — including chemicals, cement, and steel — transition to low-emissions processes. While many of these early-stage efforts may seem small in the face of heavy industry’s big carbon impact — industry accounts for about a quarter of global warming emissions — they are a clear sign that progress is on the way.
The past year saw the launch of multiple major pilots or projects, each a milestone in its industry, including:
- Electra’s pilot project to produce green steel in Colorado;
- Sublime, which is producing low-carbon cement for a net-zero office park in Massachusetts; and
- Limelight, which is developing a method to make steel with carbon-free lasers in California.
The IRA funds the Industrial Demonstrations Program, announcing approximately $6.2 billion in Energy Department awards to 33 projects around the country to spur decarbonization across industrial sectors. Nearly half of the 33 awarded project developers attended RMI webinars on best practices for developing well-rounded applications and community benefit plans, and multiple applicants worked closely with RMI experts on concept notes and full-applications.
IRA funding has unlocked new industrial investment in regions previously left behind. “The IRA represents the largest investment in industrial decarbonization in American history,” says RMI Manager Hadia Sheerazi, a community engagement and equitable industrial decarbonization expert.
She adds: “Nationwide, over 27,200 low-income and BIPOC communities — that have been historically overburdened by legacy pollution, environmental hazards, and underinvestment — have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to co-create a new blueprint for achieving a just, clean, energy transition.”
Transitioning to a greener grid
RMI’s IRA Opportunity Map is a dynamically updated resource designed to support electric utilities, regulators, and advocates as they explore implementation strategies for IRA provisions, which can create billions of dollars of savings for customers by building new clean energy resources.
Clean repowering is an immediate, no-regrets opportunity to address the challenges of interconnection queues by using existing fossil asset interconnection rights to interconnect nearby renewable energy and storage resources.
Using existing interconnection rights could eliminate years of delays, which, along with IRA incentives that improve the economics of clean energy, can make clean repowering financially attractive for both utilities and their customers.
A critical innovation of the IRA is direct pay — a mechanism that allows governments, nonprofits, and rural electric cooperatives (co-ops) to get cash payments from the US Treasury for the full value of federal clean energy tax credits, even without tax liability. Direct pay entities can now make clean energy investments — locating and owning resources like wind turbines, utility-scale solar, and utility-scale batteries in their communities — and most of these credits will be available well into the 2030s.
For co-ops, direct pay tax credits can also be combined with grants and low-interest loans provided through the Empowering Rural America (New ERA) program of the USDA, which offers up to $9.7 billion in IRA funding. The New ERA application window closed last fall, garnering an impressive 151 letters of interest; and while the USDA has since made its decisions, details about which co-ops received awards — and for how much — will gradually emerge. The impact on rural communities should be significant. RMI analysis estimates that every $10 billion invested in wind and solar projects by co-ops will yield more than $50 billion in induced economic development revenues.
The IRA’s message for rural America is clear: Far from being left out of the clean energy conversation, rural communities are now poised to become the nation’s powerhouse.
Innovating finance
The IRA authorized the EPA to create the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) to help fight climate change by making affordable financing for clean energy technologies more accessible. GGRF is America’s largest-ever clean energy investment in low-income and disadvantaged communities. Leveraged effectively, this investment will not just deliver clean energy, but will also transform financial markets and spur local job growth, while cutting emissions.
On April 4, 2024, the EPA announced awardees in the $14-billion National Clean Investment Fund and the $6-billion Clean Communities Investment Accelerator. Following the EPA’s announcement, RMI held a training with community lenders on how this new green financing can integrate effectively with IRA incentives to help them develop and deliver affordable green lending products in communities. RMI also convened awardees, community lenders, and commercial banks to discuss strategies for effectively leveraging the GGRF program to mobilize private capital.
The $7 billion Solar for All awards were announced shortly after with new low-income solar programs serving every US state. RMI worked with many of the Solar for All recipients to help strengthen their program design and released a guide on how to develop an impactful Solar for All proposal.
For more on RMI’s work related to GGRF, see “For Low-Income Communities, America’s Largest-Ever Clean Energy Investment Takes Shape.”
Electrifying transportation
The IRA’s transportation-related provisions will significantly accelerate the electrification of transportation, via a broad mix of incentives. These include as much as $7,500 in tax credits consumers can use to buy personal electric vehicles (EVs), as well as tax credits and incentives for medium- and heavy-duty electric trucks.
As stakeholders determine how they are going to use this unprecedented wave of funding, RMI has focused primarily on cracking the battery minerals problem. The IRA is structured to strengthen EV battery supply chains, which are vulnerable to disruption and rely heavily on mineral imports. The act stipulates that a minimum percentage of the minerals that go into EV batteries be sourced domestically, or from allies with which the United States has a free trade agreement. Battery material reuse offers a potent solution to this challenge.
RMI launched its Battery Circular Economy Initiative to help stakeholders understand what they can do to create a circular battery economy. Its dashboard allows users to enter their own inputs and create scenarios that show how much EV battery demand will grow; predicted supply gaps; the amount of recoverable materials from end of life batteries; and other parameters.
Indeed, if battery mineral reuse continues to rise just as battery performance (capacity, weight, and durability) continues to improve, RMI predicts that the industry could end its dependence on newly mined minerals well before midcentury, even as the world’s vehicle fleet electrifies more fully.
Rising resilience
Uninterrupted supplies of power are a vital lifesaver. During heat waves, heat-related fatalities surge when air conditioning goes offline, as Houston experienced during multi-day outages in July caused by hurricane Beryl.
RMI is working to scale local renewable energy minigrids, which offer a potent, cost-effective fix to avoid grid outages and extend energy access. Solar-plus-storage, especially when combined into microgrids, not only localizes the production of energy to nearby rooftops and solar fields, it also reduces vulnerability when transmission lines fail. Batteries offer reliable backup supplies of energy, closer to the points of need.
Across the United States, the increased interest in utilizing Direct Pay tax credits to cover up to 60 percent of the cost of solar-plus-storage microgrids shows communities are eager and ready to use IRA programs to adopt clean energy technologies.
And in times of grid rebuilding, the IRA is changing how communities recover from disasters. In impacted areas, instead of rebuilding to the previous state, FEMA will now cover 75 percent of the costs of clean energy investments for public buildings, ensuring that these sites are well prepared for the next outage.
Combined with plummeting prices for solar, batteries, and related equipment, “IRA programs mean there has never been a better time to deploy solar-plus-storage microgrids,” says electricity expert and RMI Manager Michael Liebman. These systems deliver a variety of benefits to communities, he explains, “including resilience during ever more frequent outages, savings on electricity bills in many areas, plus the opportunity to create additional savings and help the broader grid as part of a virtual power plant.”
IRA's road ahead
IRA’s road ahead
Estimated IRA Funding by Sector, 2023–2030
Potential climate-aligned funding from the IRA, $ billion
Data: RMI Analysis, Clean Investment Monitor.
With a substantial $66 billion already distributed across the nation, spurring additional private investment, this is still just the beginning. This is 6 percent of the estimated potential for the IRA funding that communities can capture. It’s to be expected that the first two years would see adoption ramping up and that future years could see even larger investments if communities seize the opportunity.
For now, the biggest physical obstacle may be the transmission and interconnection queue reform needed to get clean energy projects built at the pace and scale required. But another obstacle remains in a deficit of understanding among US registered voters about the IRA, most of whom support the act after learning about it, even if they’ve not heard much about it previously. But with the IRA driving investment, jobs, lower electricity bills, and resilience in communities across the country, Americans are seeing more and more how the clean energy transition can improve their lives, spurring both hope and progress toward a safer, cleaner future.
America’s Triple Climate Play
The IRA is the largest-ever US climate bill, but it’s not the only major federal effort to spark the energy transition. Two related investment bills preceded it. From early-stage invention through industrial production to consumer incentives, the bills work together to stimulate clean energy investment, innovation, and scale adoption.
> The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, passed Nov. 15, 2021, mobilized more than $1.2 trillion dollars to build and upgrade broad swaths of US infrastructure, from highways to the electric grid, as well as billions to upgrade the efficiency of public buildings and housing and facilitate the growth of renewable energy. Critics point out that, by spurring a construction boom, the bill doesn’t do enough to offset the impact of high-emissions building materials such as cement and steel or to spur the development of low-carbon alternatives.
> The CHIPs and Science Act was signed into law on Aug. 9, 2022, and authorizes roughly $280 billion in new funding to boost domestic research and manufacturing of semiconductors in the United States. While not energy focused directly, the act is priming domestic production of materials that are essential to scaling the US energy transition. For more, see RMI’s “How Semiconductor Leadership Could Boost US Solar Manufacturing.”
> Passed on Aug. 16, 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act includes scores of programs, harnessing a variety of direct subsidies, tax credits, and other financial incentives to advance clean energy across the United States.
For a guide to IRA and other federal clean energy programs, see RMI’s Guide to Federal Clean Energy Incentives. Learn more about RMI’s take on the compounding benefits of these three bills at Congress’s Climate Triple Whammy.
The IRA includes a variety of consumer tax credits and rebates, structured to lower energy costs, reduce pollution, and improve resilience. The Home Energy Rebate programs are starting to roll out — New York and Wisconsin are the first states to launch programs, 22 states and territories have submitted applications to DOE for review, and 26 other states and territories are working toward an application. DOE tracks where each state is in the process here.
While most rebates will be available in 2025, the US Treasury just released the first year of data on residential tax credits, and the results are encouraging. At almost $2,500 average per household, households have already claimed $8.4 billion from two related tax credits, nearly four times more than originally estimated. The Residential Clean Energy Credit is mainly used for installing solar panels, while the Energy Efficient Home Improvement Credit is used to install energy efficient projects like insulation and heat pumps.
RMI has been working with states to help design their Home Energy Rebate programs. Specifically, we did research on how this new federal funding can stack with new and existing state, local, and utility incentives to support more affordable and comprehensive clean energy retrofits. Our “Incentive Stacking Resources for Clean Buildings” can be found here.
In short, there are huge opportunities to improve individual homes and businesses, and states can play a key role in helping residents, businesses, and organizations take advantage of clean energy incentives, which can bring in the billions and help states reach their full investment potential.
Earlier this year, 45 states, along with dozens of metropolitan areas, Tribes, and territories, submitted priority climate action plans, many representing their first meaningful climate planning effort. Eight states used the Energy Policy Simulator (developed by RMI and Energy Innovation) to develop and quantify the impact of their climate plan measures.
The plans represent a gold mine of information about state climate action that RMI partnered with Evergreen and Climate XChange to review, organize, and quantify. Notably, every single state-level climate plan included at least one buildings-focused measure. For more, see RMI’s “Why State Climate Plans Prioritize Upgrades to Homes and Buildings.”
Building on these plans, in July, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced $4.3 billion in Climate Pollution Reduction Grant (CPRG) Implementation Grants advancing clean investment in transportation, buildings, agriculture, industry, power, and waste. RMI actively supported four of the biggest awards, representing $1.5 billion in funding or over one-third of the entire CPRG award. These four awards will advance heat pump adoption, industrial decarbonization, and freight electrification, among other initiatives, across eight states.
Attention now turns to implementation of the awarded projects, as well as identifying alternate funding sources for the over 600 priority measures that were not covered by the implementation grant awards.
Scaling hydrogen for heavy industry
The IRA is also catalyzing industrial decarbonization, helping some of the highest-emitting sectors — including chemicals, cement, and steel — transition to low-emissions processes. While many of these early-stage efforts may seem small in the face of heavy industry’s big carbon impact — industry accounts for about a quarter of global warming emissions — they are a clear sign that progress is on the way.
The past year saw the launch of multiple major pilots or projects, each a milestone in its industry, including:
- Electra’s pilot project to produce green steel in Colorado;
- Sublime, which is producing low-carbon cement for a net-zero office park in Massachusetts; and
- Limelight, which is developing a method to make steel with carbon-free lasers in California.
The IRA funds the Industrial Demonstrations Program, announcing approximately $6.2 billion in Energy Department awards to 33 projects around the country to spur decarbonization across industrial sectors. Nearly half of the 33 awarded project developers attended RMI webinars on best practices for developing well-rounded applications and community benefit plans, and multiple applicants worked closely with RMI experts on concept notes and full-applications.
IRA funding has unlocked new industrial investment in regions previously left behind. “The IRA represents the largest investment in industrial decarbonization in American history,” says RMI Manager Hadia Sheerazi, a community engagement and equitable industrial decarbonization expert.
She adds: “Nationwide, over 27,200 low-income and BIPOC communities — that have been historically overburdened by legacy pollution, environmental hazards, and underinvestment — have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to co-create a new blueprint for achieving a just, clean, energy transition.”
Transitioning to a greener grid
RMI’s IRA Opportunity Map is a dynamically updated resource designed to support electric utilities, regulators, and advocates as they explore implementation strategies for IRA provisions, which can create billions of dollars of savings for customers by building new clean energy resources.
Clean repowering is an immediate, no-regrets opportunity to address the challenges of interconnection queues by using existing fossil asset interconnection rights to interconnect nearby renewable energy and storage resources.
Using existing interconnection rights could eliminate years of delays, which, along with IRA incentives that improve the economics of clean energy, can make clean repowering financially attractive for both utilities and their customers.
A critical innovation of the IRA is direct pay — a mechanism that allows governments, nonprofits, and rural electric cooperatives (co-ops) to get cash payments from the US Treasury for the full value of federal clean energy tax credits, even without tax liability. Direct pay entities can now make clean energy investments — locating and owning resources like wind turbines, utility-scale solar, and utility-scale batteries in their communities — and most of these credits will be available well into the 2030s.
For co-ops, direct pay tax credits can also be combined with grants and low-interest loans provided through the Empowering Rural America (New ERA) program of the USDA, which offers up to $9.7 billion in IRA funding. The New ERA application window closed last fall, garnering an impressive 151 letters of interest; and while the USDA has since made its decisions, details about which co-ops received awards — and for how much — will gradually emerge. The impact on rural communities should be significant. RMI analysis estimates that every $10 billion invested in wind and solar projects by co-ops will yield more than $50 billion in induced economic development revenues.
The IRA’s message for rural America is clear: Far from being left out of the clean energy conversation, rural communities are now poised to become the nation’s powerhouse.
Innovating finance
The IRA authorized the EPA to create the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) to help fight climate change by making affordable financing for clean energy technologies more accessible. GGRF is America’s largest-ever clean energy investment in low-income and disadvantaged communities. Leveraged effectively, this investment will not just deliver clean energy, but will also transform financial markets and spur local job growth, while cutting emissions.
On April 4, 2024, the EPA announced awardees in the $14-billion National Clean Investment Fund and the $6-billion Clean Communities Investment Accelerator. Following the EPA’s announcement, RMI held a training with community lenders on how this new green financing can integrate effectively with IRA incentives to help them develop and deliver affordable green lending products in communities. RMI also convened awardees, community lenders, and commercial banks to discuss strategies for effectively leveraging the GGRF program to mobilize private capital.
The $7 billion Solar for All awards were announced shortly after with new low-income solar programs serving every US state. RMI worked with many of the Solar for All recipients to help strengthen their program design and released a guide on how to develop an impactful Solar for All proposal.
For more on RMI’s work related to GGRF, see “For Low-Income Communities, America’s Largest-Ever Clean Energy Investment Takes Shape.”
Electrifying transportation
The IRA’s transportation-related provisions will significantly accelerate the electrification of transportation, via a broad mix of incentives. These include as much as $7,500 in tax credits consumers can use to buy personal electric vehicles (EVs), as well as tax credits and incentives for medium- and heavy-duty electric trucks.
As stakeholders determine how they are going to use this unprecedented wave of funding, RMI has focused primarily on cracking the battery minerals problem. The IRA is structured to strengthen EV battery supply chains, which are vulnerable to disruption and rely heavily on mineral imports. The act stipulates that a minimum percentage of the minerals that go into EV batteries be sourced domestically, or from allies with which the United States has a free trade agreement. Battery material reuse offers a potent solution to this challenge.
RMI launched its Battery Circular Economy Initiative to help stakeholders understand what they can do to create a circular battery economy. Its dashboard allows users to enter their own inputs and create scenarios that show how much EV battery demand will grow; predicted supply gaps; the amount of recoverable materials from end of life batteries; and other parameters.
Indeed, if battery mineral reuse continues to rise just as battery performance (capacity, weight, and durability) continues to improve, RMI predicts that the industry could end its dependence on newly mined minerals well before midcentury, even as the world’s vehicle fleet electrifies more fully.
Rising resilience
Uninterrupted supplies of power are a vital lifesaver. During heat waves, heat-related fatalities surge when air conditioning goes offline, as Houston experienced during multi-day outages in July caused by hurricane Beryl.
RMI is working to scale local renewable energy minigrids, which offer a potent, cost-effective fix to avoid grid outages and extend energy access. Solar-plus-storage, especially when combined into microgrids, not only localizes the production of energy to nearby rooftops and solar fields, it also reduces vulnerability when transmission lines fail. Batteries offer reliable backup supplies of energy, closer to the points of need.
Across the United States, the increased interest in utilizing Direct Pay tax credits to cover up to 60 percent of the cost of solar-plus-storage microgrids shows communities are eager and ready to use IRA programs to adopt clean energy technologies.
And in times of grid rebuilding, the IRA is changing how communities recover from disasters. In impacted areas, instead of rebuilding to the previous state, FEMA will now cover 75 percent of the costs of clean energy investments for public buildings, ensuring that these sites are well prepared for the next outage.
Combined with plummeting prices for solar, batteries, and related equipment, “IRA programs mean there has never been a better time to deploy solar-plus-storage microgrids,” says electricity expert and RMI Manager Michael Liebman. These systems deliver a variety of benefits to communities, he explains, “including resilience during ever more frequent outages, savings on electricity bills in many areas, plus the opportunity to create additional savings and help the broader grid as part of a virtual power plant.”
IRA's road ahead
IRA’s road ahead
Estimated IRA Funding by Sector, 2023–2030
Potential climate-aligned funding from the IRA, $ billion
Data: RMI Analysis, Clean Investment Monitor.
With a substantial $66 billion already distributed across the nation, spurring additional private investment, this is still just the beginning. This is 6 percent of the estimated potential for the IRA funding that communities can capture. It’s to be expected that the first two years would see adoption ramping up and that future years could see even larger investments if communities seize the opportunity.
For now, the biggest physical obstacle may be the transmission and interconnection queue reform needed to get clean energy projects built at the pace and scale required. But another obstacle remains in a deficit of understanding among US registered voters about the IRA, most of whom support the act after learning about it, even if they’ve not heard much about it previously. But with the IRA driving investment, jobs, lower electricity bills, and resilience in communities across the country, Americans are seeing more and more how the clean energy transition can improve their lives, spurring both hope and progress toward a safer, cleaner future.
America’s Triple Climate Play
The IRA is the largest-ever US climate bill, but it’s not the only major federal effort to spark the energy transition. Two related investment bills preceded it. From early-stage invention through industrial production to consumer incentives, the bills work together to stimulate clean energy investment, innovation, and scale adoption.
> The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, passed Nov. 15, 2021, mobilized more than $1.2 trillion dollars to build and upgrade broad swaths of US infrastructure, from highways to the electric grid, as well as billions to upgrade the efficiency of public buildings and housing and facilitate the growth of renewable energy. Critics point out that, by spurring a construction boom, the bill doesn’t do enough to offset the impact of high-emissions building materials such as cement and steel or to spur the development of low-carbon alternatives.
> The CHIPs and Science Act was signed into law on Aug. 9, 2022, and authorizes roughly $280 billion in new funding to boost domestic research and manufacturing of semiconductors in the United States. While not energy focused directly, the act is priming domestic production of materials that are essential to scaling the US energy transition. For more, see RMI’s “How Semiconductor Leadership Could Boost US Solar Manufacturing.”
> Passed on Aug. 16, 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act includes scores of programs, harnessing a variety of direct subsidies, tax credits, and other financial incentives to advance clean energy across the United States.
For a guide to IRA and other federal clean energy programs, see RMI’s Guide to Federal Clean Energy Incentives. Learn more about RMI’s take on the compounding benefits of these three bills at Congress’s Climate Triple Whammy.
The IRA is also catalyzing industrial decarbonization, helping some of the highest-emitting sectors — including chemicals, cement, and steel — transition to low-emissions processes. While many of these early-stage efforts may seem small in the face of heavy industry’s big carbon impact — industry accounts for about a quarter of global warming emissions — they are a clear sign that progress is on the way.
The past year saw the launch of multiple major pilots or projects, each a milestone in its industry, including:
- Electra’s pilot project to produce green steel in Colorado;
- Sublime, which is producing low-carbon cement for a net-zero office park in Massachusetts; and
- Limelight, which is developing a method to make steel with carbon-free lasers in California.
The IRA funds the Industrial Demonstrations Program, announcing approximately $6.2 billion in Energy Department awards to 33 projects around the country to spur decarbonization across industrial sectors. Nearly half of the 33 awarded project developers attended RMI webinars on best practices for developing well-rounded applications and community benefit plans, and multiple applicants worked closely with RMI experts on concept notes and full-applications.
IRA funding has unlocked new industrial investment in regions previously left behind. “The IRA represents the largest investment in industrial decarbonization in American history,” says RMI Manager Hadia Sheerazi, a community engagement and equitable industrial decarbonization expert.
She adds: “Nationwide, over 27,200 low-income and BIPOC communities — that have been historically overburdened by legacy pollution, environmental hazards, and underinvestment — have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to co-create a new blueprint for achieving a just, clean, energy transition.”
RMI’s IRA Opportunity Map is a dynamically updated resource designed to support electric utilities, regulators, and advocates as they explore implementation strategies for IRA provisions, which can create billions of dollars of savings for customers by building new clean energy resources.
Clean repowering is an immediate, no-regrets opportunity to address the challenges of interconnection queues by using existing fossil asset interconnection rights to interconnect nearby renewable energy and storage resources.
Using existing interconnection rights could eliminate years of delays, which, along with IRA incentives that improve the economics of clean energy, can make clean repowering financially attractive for both utilities and their customers.
A critical innovation of the IRA is direct pay — a mechanism that allows governments, nonprofits, and rural electric cooperatives (co-ops) to get cash payments from the US Treasury for the full value of federal clean energy tax credits, even without tax liability. Direct pay entities can now make clean energy investments — locating and owning resources like wind turbines, utility-scale solar, and utility-scale batteries in their communities — and most of these credits will be available well into the 2030s.
For co-ops, direct pay tax credits can also be combined with grants and low-interest loans provided through the Empowering Rural America (New ERA) program of the USDA, which offers up to $9.7 billion in IRA funding. The New ERA application window closed last fall, garnering an impressive 151 letters of interest; and while the USDA has since made its decisions, details about which co-ops received awards — and for how much — will gradually emerge. The impact on rural communities should be significant. RMI analysis estimates that every $10 billion invested in wind and solar projects by co-ops will yield more than $50 billion in induced economic development revenues.
The IRA’s message for rural America is clear: Far from being left out of the clean energy conversation, rural communities are now poised to become the nation’s powerhouse.
Innovating finance
The IRA authorized the EPA to create the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) to help fight climate change by making affordable financing for clean energy technologies more accessible. GGRF is America’s largest-ever clean energy investment in low-income and disadvantaged communities. Leveraged effectively, this investment will not just deliver clean energy, but will also transform financial markets and spur local job growth, while cutting emissions.
On April 4, 2024, the EPA announced awardees in the $14-billion National Clean Investment Fund and the $6-billion Clean Communities Investment Accelerator. Following the EPA’s announcement, RMI held a training with community lenders on how this new green financing can integrate effectively with IRA incentives to help them develop and deliver affordable green lending products in communities. RMI also convened awardees, community lenders, and commercial banks to discuss strategies for effectively leveraging the GGRF program to mobilize private capital.
The $7 billion Solar for All awards were announced shortly after with new low-income solar programs serving every US state. RMI worked with many of the Solar for All recipients to help strengthen their program design and released a guide on how to develop an impactful Solar for All proposal.
For more on RMI’s work related to GGRF, see “For Low-Income Communities, America’s Largest-Ever Clean Energy Investment Takes Shape.”
Electrifying transportation
The IRA’s transportation-related provisions will significantly accelerate the electrification of transportation, via a broad mix of incentives. These include as much as $7,500 in tax credits consumers can use to buy personal electric vehicles (EVs), as well as tax credits and incentives for medium- and heavy-duty electric trucks.
As stakeholders determine how they are going to use this unprecedented wave of funding, RMI has focused primarily on cracking the battery minerals problem. The IRA is structured to strengthen EV battery supply chains, which are vulnerable to disruption and rely heavily on mineral imports. The act stipulates that a minimum percentage of the minerals that go into EV batteries be sourced domestically, or from allies with which the United States has a free trade agreement. Battery material reuse offers a potent solution to this challenge.
RMI launched its Battery Circular Economy Initiative to help stakeholders understand what they can do to create a circular battery economy. Its dashboard allows users to enter their own inputs and create scenarios that show how much EV battery demand will grow; predicted supply gaps; the amount of recoverable materials from end of life batteries; and other parameters.
Indeed, if battery mineral reuse continues to rise just as battery performance (capacity, weight, and durability) continues to improve, RMI predicts that the industry could end its dependence on newly mined minerals well before midcentury, even as the world’s vehicle fleet electrifies more fully.
Rising resilience
Uninterrupted supplies of power are a vital lifesaver. During heat waves, heat-related fatalities surge when air conditioning goes offline, as Houston experienced during multi-day outages in July caused by hurricane Beryl.
RMI is working to scale local renewable energy minigrids, which offer a potent, cost-effective fix to avoid grid outages and extend energy access. Solar-plus-storage, especially when combined into microgrids, not only localizes the production of energy to nearby rooftops and solar fields, it also reduces vulnerability when transmission lines fail. Batteries offer reliable backup supplies of energy, closer to the points of need.
Across the United States, the increased interest in utilizing Direct Pay tax credits to cover up to 60 percent of the cost of solar-plus-storage microgrids shows communities are eager and ready to use IRA programs to adopt clean energy technologies.
And in times of grid rebuilding, the IRA is changing how communities recover from disasters. In impacted areas, instead of rebuilding to the previous state, FEMA will now cover 75 percent of the costs of clean energy investments for public buildings, ensuring that these sites are well prepared for the next outage.
Combined with plummeting prices for solar, batteries, and related equipment, “IRA programs mean there has never been a better time to deploy solar-plus-storage microgrids,” says electricity expert and RMI Manager Michael Liebman. These systems deliver a variety of benefits to communities, he explains, “including resilience during ever more frequent outages, savings on electricity bills in many areas, plus the opportunity to create additional savings and help the broader grid as part of a virtual power plant.”
IRA's road ahead
IRA’s road ahead
Estimated IRA Funding by Sector, 2023–2030
Potential climate-aligned funding from the IRA, $ billion
Data: RMI Analysis, Clean Investment Monitor.
With a substantial $66 billion already distributed across the nation, spurring additional private investment, this is still just the beginning. This is 6 percent of the estimated potential for the IRA funding that communities can capture. It’s to be expected that the first two years would see adoption ramping up and that future years could see even larger investments if communities seize the opportunity.
For now, the biggest physical obstacle may be the transmission and interconnection queue reform needed to get clean energy projects built at the pace and scale required. But another obstacle remains in a deficit of understanding among US registered voters about the IRA, most of whom support the act after learning about it, even if they’ve not heard much about it previously. But with the IRA driving investment, jobs, lower electricity bills, and resilience in communities across the country, Americans are seeing more and more how the clean energy transition can improve their lives, spurring both hope and progress toward a safer, cleaner future.
America’s Triple Climate Play
The IRA is the largest-ever US climate bill, but it’s not the only major federal effort to spark the energy transition. Two related investment bills preceded it. From early-stage invention through industrial production to consumer incentives, the bills work together to stimulate clean energy investment, innovation, and scale adoption.
> The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, passed Nov. 15, 2021, mobilized more than $1.2 trillion dollars to build and upgrade broad swaths of US infrastructure, from highways to the electric grid, as well as billions to upgrade the efficiency of public buildings and housing and facilitate the growth of renewable energy. Critics point out that, by spurring a construction boom, the bill doesn’t do enough to offset the impact of high-emissions building materials such as cement and steel or to spur the development of low-carbon alternatives.
> The CHIPs and Science Act was signed into law on Aug. 9, 2022, and authorizes roughly $280 billion in new funding to boost domestic research and manufacturing of semiconductors in the United States. While not energy focused directly, the act is priming domestic production of materials that are essential to scaling the US energy transition. For more, see RMI’s “How Semiconductor Leadership Could Boost US Solar Manufacturing.”
> Passed on Aug. 16, 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act includes scores of programs, harnessing a variety of direct subsidies, tax credits, and other financial incentives to advance clean energy across the United States.
For a guide to IRA and other federal clean energy programs, see RMI’s Guide to Federal Clean Energy Incentives. Learn more about RMI’s take on the compounding benefits of these three bills at Congress’s Climate Triple Whammy.
The IRA authorized the EPA to create the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) to help fight climate change by making affordable financing for clean energy technologies more accessible. GGRF is America’s largest-ever clean energy investment in low-income and disadvantaged communities. Leveraged effectively, this investment will not just deliver clean energy, but will also transform financial markets and spur local job growth, while cutting emissions.
On April 4, 2024, the EPA announced awardees in the $14-billion National Clean Investment Fund and the $6-billion Clean Communities Investment Accelerator. Following the EPA’s announcement, RMI held a training with community lenders on how this new green financing can integrate effectively with IRA incentives to help them develop and deliver affordable green lending products in communities. RMI also convened awardees, community lenders, and commercial banks to discuss strategies for effectively leveraging the GGRF program to mobilize private capital.
The $7 billion Solar for All awards were announced shortly after with new low-income solar programs serving every US state. RMI worked with many of the Solar for All recipients to help strengthen their program design and released a guide on how to develop an impactful Solar for All proposal.
For more on RMI’s work related to GGRF, see “For Low-Income Communities, America’s Largest-Ever Clean Energy Investment Takes Shape.”
The IRA’s transportation-related provisions will significantly accelerate the electrification of transportation, via a broad mix of incentives. These include as much as $7,500 in tax credits consumers can use to buy personal electric vehicles (EVs), as well as tax credits and incentives for medium- and heavy-duty electric trucks.
As stakeholders determine how they are going to use this unprecedented wave of funding, RMI has focused primarily on cracking the battery minerals problem. The IRA is structured to strengthen EV battery supply chains, which are vulnerable to disruption and rely heavily on mineral imports. The act stipulates that a minimum percentage of the minerals that go into EV batteries be sourced domestically, or from allies with which the United States has a free trade agreement. Battery material reuse offers a potent solution to this challenge.
RMI launched its Battery Circular Economy Initiative to help stakeholders understand what they can do to create a circular battery economy. Its dashboard allows users to enter their own inputs and create scenarios that show how much EV battery demand will grow; predicted supply gaps; the amount of recoverable materials from end of life batteries; and other parameters.
Indeed, if battery mineral reuse continues to rise just as battery performance (capacity, weight, and durability) continues to improve, RMI predicts that the industry could end its dependence on newly mined minerals well before midcentury, even as the world’s vehicle fleet electrifies more fully.
Rising resilience
Uninterrupted supplies of power are a vital lifesaver. During heat waves, heat-related fatalities surge when air conditioning goes offline, as Houston experienced during multi-day outages in July caused by hurricane Beryl.
RMI is working to scale local renewable energy minigrids, which offer a potent, cost-effective fix to avoid grid outages and extend energy access. Solar-plus-storage, especially when combined into microgrids, not only localizes the production of energy to nearby rooftops and solar fields, it also reduces vulnerability when transmission lines fail. Batteries offer reliable backup supplies of energy, closer to the points of need.
Across the United States, the increased interest in utilizing Direct Pay tax credits to cover up to 60 percent of the cost of solar-plus-storage microgrids shows communities are eager and ready to use IRA programs to adopt clean energy technologies.
And in times of grid rebuilding, the IRA is changing how communities recover from disasters. In impacted areas, instead of rebuilding to the previous state, FEMA will now cover 75 percent of the costs of clean energy investments for public buildings, ensuring that these sites are well prepared for the next outage.
Combined with plummeting prices for solar, batteries, and related equipment, “IRA programs mean there has never been a better time to deploy solar-plus-storage microgrids,” says electricity expert and RMI Manager Michael Liebman. These systems deliver a variety of benefits to communities, he explains, “including resilience during ever more frequent outages, savings on electricity bills in many areas, plus the opportunity to create additional savings and help the broader grid as part of a virtual power plant.”
IRA's road ahead
IRA’s road ahead
Estimated IRA Funding by Sector, 2023–2030
Potential climate-aligned funding from the IRA, $ billion
Data: RMI Analysis, Clean Investment Monitor.
With a substantial $66 billion already distributed across the nation, spurring additional private investment, this is still just the beginning. This is 6 percent of the estimated potential for the IRA funding that communities can capture. It’s to be expected that the first two years would see adoption ramping up and that future years could see even larger investments if communities seize the opportunity.
For now, the biggest physical obstacle may be the transmission and interconnection queue reform needed to get clean energy projects built at the pace and scale required. But another obstacle remains in a deficit of understanding among US registered voters about the IRA, most of whom support the act after learning about it, even if they’ve not heard much about it previously. But with the IRA driving investment, jobs, lower electricity bills, and resilience in communities across the country, Americans are seeing more and more how the clean energy transition can improve their lives, spurring both hope and progress toward a safer, cleaner future.
America’s Triple Climate Play
The IRA is the largest-ever US climate bill, but it’s not the only major federal effort to spark the energy transition. Two related investment bills preceded it. From early-stage invention through industrial production to consumer incentives, the bills work together to stimulate clean energy investment, innovation, and scale adoption.
> The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, passed Nov. 15, 2021, mobilized more than $1.2 trillion dollars to build and upgrade broad swaths of US infrastructure, from highways to the electric grid, as well as billions to upgrade the efficiency of public buildings and housing and facilitate the growth of renewable energy. Critics point out that, by spurring a construction boom, the bill doesn’t do enough to offset the impact of high-emissions building materials such as cement and steel or to spur the development of low-carbon alternatives.
> The CHIPs and Science Act was signed into law on Aug. 9, 2022, and authorizes roughly $280 billion in new funding to boost domestic research and manufacturing of semiconductors in the United States. While not energy focused directly, the act is priming domestic production of materials that are essential to scaling the US energy transition. For more, see RMI’s “How Semiconductor Leadership Could Boost US Solar Manufacturing.”
> Passed on Aug. 16, 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act includes scores of programs, harnessing a variety of direct subsidies, tax credits, and other financial incentives to advance clean energy across the United States.
For a guide to IRA and other federal clean energy programs, see RMI’s Guide to Federal Clean Energy Incentives. Learn more about RMI’s take on the compounding benefits of these three bills at Congress’s Climate Triple Whammy.
Uninterrupted supplies of power are a vital lifesaver. During heat waves, heat-related fatalities surge when air conditioning goes offline, as Houston experienced during multi-day outages in July caused by hurricane Beryl.
RMI is working to scale local renewable energy minigrids, which offer a potent, cost-effective fix to avoid grid outages and extend energy access. Solar-plus-storage, especially when combined into microgrids, not only localizes the production of energy to nearby rooftops and solar fields, it also reduces vulnerability when transmission lines fail. Batteries offer reliable backup supplies of energy, closer to the points of need.
Across the United States, the increased interest in utilizing Direct Pay tax credits to cover up to 60 percent of the cost of solar-plus-storage microgrids shows communities are eager and ready to use IRA programs to adopt clean energy technologies.
And in times of grid rebuilding, the IRA is changing how communities recover from disasters. In impacted areas, instead of rebuilding to the previous state, FEMA will now cover 75 percent of the costs of clean energy investments for public buildings, ensuring that these sites are well prepared for the next outage.
Combined with plummeting prices for solar, batteries, and related equipment, “IRA programs mean there has never been a better time to deploy solar-plus-storage microgrids,” says electricity expert and RMI Manager Michael Liebman. These systems deliver a variety of benefits to communities, he explains, “including resilience during ever more frequent outages, savings on electricity bills in many areas, plus the opportunity to create additional savings and help the broader grid as part of a virtual power plant.”
IRA’s road ahead
Estimated IRA Funding by Sector, 2023–2030
Potential climate-aligned funding from the IRA, $ billion
Data: RMI Analysis, Clean Investment Monitor.
With a substantial $66 billion already distributed across the nation, spurring additional private investment, this is still just the beginning. This is 6 percent of the estimated potential for the IRA funding that communities can capture. It’s to be expected that the first two years would see adoption ramping up and that future years could see even larger investments if communities seize the opportunity.
For now, the biggest physical obstacle may be the transmission and interconnection queue reform needed to get clean energy projects built at the pace and scale required. But another obstacle remains in a deficit of understanding among US registered voters about the IRA, most of whom support the act after learning about it, even if they’ve not heard much about it previously. But with the IRA driving investment, jobs, lower electricity bills, and resilience in communities across the country, Americans are seeing more and more how the clean energy transition can improve their lives, spurring both hope and progress toward a safer, cleaner future.
America’s Triple Climate Play
The IRA is the largest-ever US climate bill, but it’s not the only major federal effort to spark the energy transition. Two related investment bills preceded it. From early-stage invention through industrial production to consumer incentives, the bills work together to stimulate clean energy investment, innovation, and scale adoption.
> The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, passed Nov. 15, 2021, mobilized more than $1.2 trillion dollars to build and upgrade broad swaths of US infrastructure, from highways to the electric grid, as well as billions to upgrade the efficiency of public buildings and housing and facilitate the growth of renewable energy. Critics point out that, by spurring a construction boom, the bill doesn’t do enough to offset the impact of high-emissions building materials such as cement and steel or to spur the development of low-carbon alternatives.
> The CHIPs and Science Act was signed into law on Aug. 9, 2022, and authorizes roughly $280 billion in new funding to boost domestic research and manufacturing of semiconductors in the United States. While not energy focused directly, the act is priming domestic production of materials that are essential to scaling the US energy transition. For more, see RMI’s “How Semiconductor Leadership Could Boost US Solar Manufacturing.”
> Passed on Aug. 16, 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act includes scores of programs, harnessing a variety of direct subsidies, tax credits, and other financial incentives to advance clean energy across the United States.
For a guide to IRA and other federal clean energy programs, see RMI’s Guide to Federal Clean Energy Incentives. Learn more about RMI’s take on the compounding benefits of these three bills at Congress’s Climate Triple Whammy.
The IRA is the largest-ever US climate bill, but it’s not the only major federal effort to spark the energy transition. Two related investment bills preceded it. From early-stage invention through industrial production to consumer incentives, the bills work together to stimulate clean energy investment, innovation, and scale adoption.
> The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, passed Nov. 15, 2021, mobilized more than $1.2 trillion dollars to build and upgrade broad swaths of US infrastructure, from highways to the electric grid, as well as billions to upgrade the efficiency of public buildings and housing and facilitate the growth of renewable energy. Critics point out that, by spurring a construction boom, the bill doesn’t do enough to offset the impact of high-emissions building materials such as cement and steel or to spur the development of low-carbon alternatives.
> The CHIPs and Science Act was signed into law on Aug. 9, 2022, and authorizes roughly $280 billion in new funding to boost domestic research and manufacturing of semiconductors in the United States. While not energy focused directly, the act is priming domestic production of materials that are essential to scaling the US energy transition. For more, see RMI’s “How Semiconductor Leadership Could Boost US Solar Manufacturing.”
> Passed on Aug. 16, 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act includes scores of programs, harnessing a variety of direct subsidies, tax credits, and other financial incentives to advance clean energy across the United States.
For a guide to IRA and other federal clean energy programs, see RMI’s Guide to Federal Clean Energy Incentives. Learn more about RMI’s take on the compounding benefits of these three bills at Congress’s Climate Triple Whammy.