A Push To Revive Clean Energy Incentives |
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With spiking gasoline prices now intensifying the pain of higher utility bills, there’s an effort afoot in Congress to rework some Trump administration rollbacks of clean energy policies. The Energy Bills Relief Act, sponsored by Democratic Representatives Mike Levin of California and Sean Casten of Illinois, was introduced last week to spur action to help consumers and, by default, the climate.
If enacted–a long shot at the moment, unless House Speaker Mike Johnson is willing to let the bill come up for a vote–it would restore tax credits for residential and system-wide energy improvements eliminated last year by President Trump and congressional Republicans with the passage of the One Big Beautiful Budget Bill. Among other things it pushes for grid upgrades, speeds up the connection of new power sources and incentivizes utilities to help consumers save money by rewarding them for making energy-efficient home upgrades.
It also provides financial assistance to help struggling families avoid having their power cut off. Importantly, it ensures that energy-thirsty data centers pay for their power in ways that don’t raise costs for the surrounding community, a policy Trump has also advocated.
Levin isn’t confident the bill, which doesn’t yet have any Republican cosponsors, can pass in its current form, “but there are pieces where we're going to try to see if we can push on a bipartisan basis,” he told Forbes. “The data center piece–particularly the desire to prevent rate payers from having to foot the bill for all these data centers as they're built out–that should be pretty bipartisan.”
“The president had the big trillion-dollar tech companies come to the White House and sign a pledge that they wouldn't make ratepayers bear the expense, but that pledge is nonbinding. It’s not even an executive order,” he said. “We need some statutory concept, so we'll continue to advocate for that. That might be an area where we could work together this year.”
He’s had positive feedback to the proposed bill from Republican members but doesn’t expect that to turn into firm support.
“Just like the clean energy tax credits went away with the OBBB–even when 20 or 22 of them wrote a letter to the president saying, ‘Please don't take away these credits’–when push comes to shove, are they willing to stand up for what they know to be common sense good policy? Or are they going to allow their decisions or their personal opinions to be subject to the president's anti-wind, anti-solar predisposition?”
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Tesla Semi’s Biggest Rival Might Be Its Chinese Twin
Nine years after Elon Musk vowed to electrify trucking with Tesla’s electric Semi, the vehicle is finally edging into something like regular production. The twist: while Tesla has treated the Semi’s real-world pricing like a state secret, a Chinese-European upstart is doing the opposite—rolling into the U.S. market with a Tesla-shaped electric big rig and a number on the window.
That company is Windrose Tech, led by CEO and founder Wen Han, 35, who will cheerfully tell you most anything you want to know about his electric big rig: price, range, weight, hauling capacity —and, yes, why the truck looks like it came out of the same design team meeting as Tesla’s.
“Our truck looks a lot like the Tesla because that's what the aerodynamics dictate,” Han said by video chat, standing outside a restaurant on a chilly night in Antwerp, Belgium (where Windrose is now headquartered). “Somewhat surprisingly, we managed to patent in the United States our cab design, and also the chassis.”
“Fuel cost is much bigger for fleets than driver costs, and is much bigger than truck costs”
Windrose has begun selling initial units of its electric truck to customers in California and Texas. The company’s 1,400-horsepower R700 model is priced at $300,000 and targets about 400 miles per charge. It weighs in at just over 22,000 pounds and can haul up to 60,000 pounds of cargo in the U.S. Han’s pitch includes three months of free charging via Greenlane Infrastructure, which is building high-powered charging stations in Southern California, Nevada and Arizona. (It has similar arrangements in Europe, where it just announced a charging partnership with France’s ENGIE Vianeo, and the truck sells for 250,000 Euros.)
Tesla’s price hasn’t been publicly disclosed yet. Early customers tell Forbes it runs between $225,000 and about $300,000, based on range-per-charge of either 300 miles or 500 miles. That’s a wee bit more than the $180,000 Musk publicly pegged it at back in 2017 (though cheaper than electric models from Kenworth, Daimler and Volvo that can cost $400,000).
Tania Strauss, head of Sustainable Growth and People for the World Economic Forum, on global and U.S. water challenges
We marked World Water Day on March 22. What are the top challenges in terms of ensuring global water availability and safety?
It's critical to recognize that the World Bank has given us figures suggesting we're going to have a 40% shortfall in four years. That's 2030. But this issue is so much more complex than just volume.
It’s not just safeguarding and understanding water from a scarcity perspective, but really looking at clean water, looking at extreme weather. So a kind of framing around too much, too little or too polluted really resonates, I think, with a much wider group of people, whether it's companies or communities or countries. There isn't really one siloed approach to thinking about it, and there's definitely not a siloed approach to solving for it. I think there's more momentum and I think it's coming from a few different angles.
We're certainly seeing the intensification of supply chain disruptions driving the financial community, which has to underwrite a lot of that inaction on their bills, recognizing the risk landscape. And I think companies, and we talk about this regularly at the World Economic Forum, the water companies get this. But at this point, who isn’t a water company? Everyone is dependent on it as both an ingredient in their supply chain, a resource or productivity in the communities where they’re operating. Water is getting more expensive for those who are trying to get it from other places.
I think there's definitely a top of mind sort of risk-led narrative. There's also a growth narrative. How do you build resilience by being smarter? What are the partnerships that can help drive that stable supply? In the agriculture sector, for example, if a third of our synthetic fertilizer is currently in a conflict area, we have to rethink the way we're growing our food. And that doesn't mean just pesticides. It means water use. It means making sure that supply is stable.
U.S. water problems aren’t as severe as in some parts of the world, but Los Angeles is frequently having to ensure sufficient supply and recently we see that Corpus Christi, Texas, is now at risk of running short. What are the challenges you see in the U.S.?
That’s the thing with water: It's not this esoteric challenge. And frankly, at least for now, it’s quite bipartisan as an agenda to engage in. We’re seeing the multifaceted ways in which an out of balance water cycle, and that's what the science is telling us, that we have an out of balance water cycle globally, has so many of these regional manifestations. Whether it's extreme weather or droughts or scarcity or pollution, frankly, it's really all connected and there's this sort of binary and multifaceted relationship. I was reading about Corpus Christi as well and it's interesting because they are not the first ones to be at this kind of stage. We've had European cities, we've had Latin American cities at the brink of this kind of threshold.
So number one, it's really about stepping back and also understanding what tools are available through this network approach, because there are ways for addressing some of these challenges. They're not alone and there are blueprints to look at. And partnerships like the C40 Cities plan, which are the mayors of some of these cities really at the forefront of building water resilience that are having that kind of peer exchange. I know there's more of a triage kind of vibe there right now, but it is about understanding what holistically cities can do in the face of this kind of complexity.
Is there any good news, whether here in the U.S. or globally, when it comes to water?
There is good news. I can't emphasize enough how important it is that there is a bigger group of stakeholders that want to do something about this. I know that sounds sort of like early days in terms of action, but for so long, for decades, some of these people have been working on water.
I think just the realization of how important it is to plan for water management and recognize the volatility of inaction and just having more people, it gives me a lot of hope because that means we've got more expertise around the table, more financing, more capabilities, and we need to rethink it. We won't have a choice soon.
The other piece is this kind of combination of next-generation/innovator bullishness. You're just seeing people solving problems in their communities. A lot of the aquapreneurs are not necessarily strictly profit driven, although they're all economic actors. Some of them got into this because they're solving a community problem they can see. They see an industry opportunity, but they're also looking at the societal piece of this.
What Else We’re Reading
Thousands evacuated as Hawaii faces its worst flooding in 20 years (BBC)
New York’s governor pushes to delay a key portion of the state’s climate law (Inside Climate News)
Carney climate plan at risk as Canadian oil companies stress need to boost production (Reuters)
Why Brazil’s ‘bitter’ coffee is thriving as the climate crisis hits global crops (The Guardian)
Trump officials weigh new $1 billion deal to stop offshore wind farms (New York Times)