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On another offshore wind kill, inverter bans, and NYC’s new power line
Current conditions: The wildfires in Spokane, Washington, have burned nearly 11,000 acres and destroyed close to 900 structures in the past week • Tropical Depression Maymay is veering away from the Philippines after battering northern Luzon with 45-mile-per-hour winds • Temperatures in Seoul are surpassing 103 degrees Fahrenheit today as South Korea’s heat wave caps off before dropping about 10 degrees over the weekend.
A solar cell at the Elin Energy factory in Texas. Brett Coomer/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images
The Trump administration taketh away, and the Trump administration giveth. A month after President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act effectively eliminated a key incentive for solar developers to buy domestically-made panels, the White House has announced new tariffs on polysilicon and virtually every component in each step of the photovoltaic supply chain. The trade case originally came before the Department of Commerce when polysilicon makers complained that they couldn’t compete with Chinese manufacturers on semiconductor-grade material without also having a market for the solar-grade stuff. As my colleague Emily Pontecorvo and I reported last night, the administration will impose a 15% tariff on all imports and set baseline prices at which the levies would kick in for each part of the solar supply chain, ranging from $0.22 per watt for solar cells, the actual devices that convert sunlight into electricity, to $0.38 per watt for completed panels. Raw polysilicon, meanwhile, will start at $20 per kilogram. Tariffs have been tried before in the U.S. and Europe to keep out the onslaught of cheap Chinese products and protect domestic manufacturers in the name of national security, but those had only mixed success due to a lack of supply chain visibility. The Trump administration has vowed to try something novel, providing strict oversight over which companies qualify for offsets from the program to prevent Chinese manufacturers from gaming the market.
Still, just a small fraction of the nearly 300,000 Americans who work in the solar industry are in manufacturing. The Solar Energy Industries Association, the solar sector’s largest trade group and a longstanding advocate of importing cheap panels, said the tariffs would only worsen electricity inflation. “America has made terrific progress rebuilding its solar manufacturing base,” Tim Pawlenty, SEIA’s chief executive, said in a statement, “but imposing tariffs and prices floors on solar materials will create new challenges for American manufacturers and raise energy costs for families and businesses.”
Speaking of renewables the Trump administration taketh away: Yet another offshore wind developer has reached a deal with the White House to take a payment in exchange for abandoning a project. On Thursday, the German giant RWE entered into a settlement with the Department of the Interior for $1.2 billion to surrender federal leases for offshore wind projects in New York Bight and off the coasts of California and Louisiana. “After careful consideration, it was determined there is no path forward to permit these projects in the U.S. for the foreseeable future,” RWE said in a press release. “The company determined that this resolution best serves the interests of its stakeholders and allows it to direct resources toward energy projects that can be advanced with certainty.” Noting that this deal is the largest payout yet of any of the agreements the Trump administration has made to kill offshore wind projects, my colleague Robinson Meyer wrote that the price tag is “fittingly” high “because it is among the most damaging” yet. While RWE has pledged to invest in gas projects elsewhere, such as a liquified natural gas export terminal in Louisiana, RWE “well knows” that “these projects won’t help solve a coming energy shortage in New York or New England,” Rob wrote.
Dominion Energy has long dominated Virginia’s politics as the state’s utility giant and one-time political kingmaker. Now Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger, a moderate Democrat who soared to victory last year promising to rein in runaway electricity prices, is getting involved in the utility megamerger that could see Dominion join forces with Florida-based NextEra Energy in what my colleague Matthew Zeitlin called a “juggernaut.” In an op-ed in The Washington Post, Spanberger said she had “serious questions about what this deal would mean” and vowed to intervene by formally submitting to become a party in the case to decide whether the deal, which would create a $420 billion behemoth, violates consumer-protection rules. “I know this action is unprecedented by a Virginia governor — but so, too, is the size of this proposed merger and its potential impact on the commonwealth,” Spanberger wrote. “Virginians deserve to know that their leaders are laser-focused on ensuring that their needs are part of” the review by the State Corporation Commission, the regulator that determines whether a utility deal harms ratepayers. The move comes as state regulators order Dominion to create a process for making data centers pay more of the direct costs for their electricity use, such as sponsoring construction of substations to meet new demand, E&E News reported.
On Capitol Hill, meanwhile, Democrats are eyeing new ways to crack down on data centers beyond backing the national moratorium progressive lawmakers proposed. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate’s tax-writing committee, pitched a new excise tax and the elimination of tax breaks for data center construction, NOTUS reported.
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By the end of next year, American factories will have enough capacity to produce all the solar inverters the country needs. The U.S. once imported 90% of its large-scale inverters, including more than 30% from Chinese-headquartered vendors. But domestic manufacturers are on track to open more than 100 gigawatts of inverter-making plants by December 2027, according to a new analysis from Wood Mackenzie. The consultancy cautioned that the devices, which patch panels onto the grid, will come at a high premium than today. As I reported last week, the Federal Communications Commission banned new types of foreign inverters on the grounds that they pose a threat to the U.S. grid and the artificial intelligence buildout. “The FCC’s intent here is clear. The US government determined that the U.S.’s reliance on foreign inverters poses a national security risk, citing both cybersecurity and economic concerns,” Joe Shangraw, research analyst at Wood Mackenzie, said in a statement. “Leading manufacturers are notifying clients that they believe their products will not fall under the scope of this ban, while project owners are concerned that their existing inverters could be blocked from receiving critical firmware updates.”
The Pentagon, meanwhile, is canceling plans to award a contract worth up to $300 million for lithium carbonate after twice delaying the deadline for bids, Inside Defense reported. The Defense Logistics Agency gave no explanation for rescinding the solicitation for a five-year, indefinite-delivery deal.
Last month, New York City’s newly minted clean energy megaproject, a 339-mile transmission line plugging the five boroughs into Quebec’s famously cheap and clean hydroelectric system, went down unexpectedly for maintenance. Just in time for the city’s temperature to go back up, Hydro Quebec’s Champlain Hudson Power Express line completed repairs two weeks ago and started delivering electricity at full capacity again on Thursday, the province’s state-owned utility told me. “We are seeing full capacity flows now on CHPE as we’ve entered a heatwave,” Pete Rose, Hydro Quebec’s senior director of stakeholder relations in New York, told me via text yesterday. “This large volume of clean energy helps suppress wholesale electricity prices while displacing large quantities of CO2.”
Like Germany itself, BMW’s Munich factory has, uh, seen a lot of changes since its opening in the early 1920s. At each step of the way, however, the vehicles coming off the assembly line ran on petroleum products. Not for long. The company’s oldest manufacturing facility will begin exclusively building electric vehicles starting next year. “This marks a huge turning point for the brand, as it phases out internal combustion models for its Neue Klasse EVs. It isn’t only a production milestone for the brand but a symbolic one,” reporter Nico DeMattia wrote for InsideEVs. “Munich is the site of BMW's HQ and its Bavarian home, and it's about to be fully electric.”
Alexander C. Kaufman
Alexander C. Kaufman is an award-winning journalist who has covered energy and climate change for more than a decade. His reporting has spanned four continents, taking readers from Indigenous villages in the Brazilian Amazon to Mongolian nomads' homes on the frigid steppe, Greenland's ice sheet to Finland's world-first nuclear waste repository. He writes the Substack newsletter FIELD NOTES from Alexander C. Kaufman and can be reached via his website, http://www.alexanderckaufman.com. A fourth-generation New Yorker, he lives in Southern Brooklyn with his wife.
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New tariffs and price floors for imported polysilicon aim to protect U.S. producers from Chinese competition.
Almost exactly a month after President Donald Trump’s landmark tax law effectively eliminated a key incentive for solar developers to buy panels made in America, his administration is throwing a lifeline to manufacturers behind the nation’s fastest-growing and quickest-to-deploy source of electricity.
On Thursday afternoon, after the markets closed, the White House announced new tariffs and minimum import prices for imported polysilicon as part of an effort to prop up the domestic supply chain for the primary ingredient in semiconductors and solar panels.
The levies come in response to complaints from polysilicon makers that the dearth of U.S. factories demanding solar-grade polysilicon made it difficult to compete with Chinese giants who benefit from selling both the solar- and microchip-grade versions of the ultra-pure industrial material derived from quartz and sand. The companies made the petition under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which gives the White House the power to restrict imports and charge tariffs on imports that demonstrably impair national security.
The Trump administration will impose a 15% tariff on all imports and set baseline prices at which the levies would apply for each component in the solar supply chain. Polysilicon will have a minimum import price of $20 per kilogram. Wafers, the ultra-thin slice of crystalline silicon that acts as the foundation of a photovoltaic cell, and ingots, the silicon material before it’s sliced, will start at $100 per kilogram. Cells, the tiny silicon-based devices that absorb photons from sunlight and break away electrons that generate electrical currents, will have a minimum price of $0.22 per watt. Modules, the completed panels, are $0.38 a watt.
The majority of U.S. solar factories simply assemble wafers and cells into modules, leaving them reliant on imports. But the policy won’t hit all at once. The Commerce Department is giving companies 120 days before the restrictions kick in.
The agency will also set up an incentive program that allows manufacturers that make large capital investments in the U.S. to avoid the worst of the levies. Jeffrey Kessler, the Under Secretary of Commerce in charge of executing on 232 cases, pushed for the provision as a bid to avoid what happened when Europe attempted to protect its own solar manufacturers by setting a minimum import price meant to keep Chinese companies from flooding the market. That policy ended up subsidizing the very Chinese parent companies putting market domination ahead of profits back home.
Avoiding that outcome is tricky under any circumstances. China and the U.S. don’t have a tax treaty, which makes it difficult for American authorities to confirm a company’s ownership structure. The surest way to seal off the U.S. market is with 100% tariffs such as those imposed on Chinese electric vehicles.
In this case, the Commerce Department decided to allow companies with active plans to onshore the solar supply chain to apply for an exemption from the new trade rules. Ahead of the announcement, sources familiar with the talks listed South Korean giant Qcells, which just opened the nation’s largest integrated solar factory in Georgia, as one obvious example of a company that would pass muster.
Solar manufacturers applauded the move. “Today’s decision from the White House balances the reality of where America’'s solar energy manufacturing is today while advancing our collective ambition to onshore the entire supply chain from polysilicon to finished panels in the U.S.,” Andy Park, the global CEO of Qcells, said in an emailed statement. “American solar manufacturers are ready to rise to the occasion.”
The trade action “creates a market where wafer and cell manufacturing can happen in the United States, and companies can go fully vertically integrated,” Nick Iacovella, the executive vice president of the Coalition for a Prosperous America, a bipartisan trade association that represents manufacturing companies at every stage of the polysilicon supply chain, told Heatmap.
“What this does is cement a key input in the supply chain that’s critical not just for chips, but for the most efficient, best-performing solar modules,” he said. “We shore up our chip supply chain at a time when there is a greater urgency to derisk from China invading Taiwan — and also during a time when the AI data center boom is driving massive demand for new energy generation, with solar driving a lot of the new capacity coming onto the grid.”
The levies come a week after the Federal Communications Commission banned the use of new types of foreign-made inverters, the equipment needed to patch solar panels onto the grid. Analysts said the ban would have a limited effect on the solar industry, since it allows for the current models on the market to be sold. The purpose of that policy is to prop up domestic factories at a moment when Europe, despite its struggle to reindustrialize, is experiencing an inverter manufacturing boom.
Despite those intentions, multiple industry sources who spoke on condition of anonymity told Heatmap that trade restrictions alone would likely prove insufficient to prop up a domestic solar supply chain at the scale needed to minimize imports.
The latest data from the Rhodium Group found that new U.S. investments in solar factories peaked from the second half of 2022 through the first quarter of 2025. During that time, as Emily reported in May, the announced projects averaged more than $2 billion per quarter. At least 30 new utility-scale solar factories opened across the U.S. just last year.
Since then, development has plummeted. Investment in new solar factories announced fell to about $350 million in the first quarter of 2026, a drop of more than 80%.
By raising the price of panels overall, the Commerce Department is providing a particular boon to America’s leading solar manufacturer, First Solar. While the Phoenix-based panel-maker’s thin-film cell technology doesn’t use polysilicon, the price hike from the tariffs will give the company an edge by allowing the company to either raise its prices to match new industry-wide benefits or undercut its competitors. Investors in the company told Heatmap its recent bookings average sales of about $0.36 per watt.
Another clear winner is T1 Energy, which Roth analysts say “would eventually be a beneficiary once it ramps up its U.S. cell manufacturing, which is now expected to come online” next year. The company’s share price spiked more than 10% in after-hours trading, while First Solar was up more than 8%.
“There are a lot of people in the administration who support solar,” Iacovella said. “They just don’t want a bunch of Chinese solar panels.”
Still, he added, “this is all about the chip supply chain.” While the benefits to solar are welcome, “this is a two-for-one.”
The Trump administration has signed a deal with RWE, a German developer, to cancel more than 3 gigawatts of offshore wind near New York and New Jersey.
This is an edition of Heatmap Daily, an evening review of the day’s news written by our executive editor. Sign up for it here.
There goes another one. The German energy developer RWE has signed a $1.2 billion deal with the Trump administration to give up its claims to develop offshore wind farms in New York, California, and Louisiana. The Trump administration has now bought out 12 offshore wind leases, paying energy developers $3.93 billion for the privilege of not developing renewable energy along the American coastline.
Today’s is the largest payout yet — and fittingly so, I suppose, because it is among the most damaging. As part of the deal, RWE abandoned its plans to build a more than 3-gigawatt offshore wind farm in the New York Bight. When RWE first leased that site in 2022, it paid $1.1 billion for it — the biggest offshore wind lease auction ever held in the United States.
RWE promised that the resulting facility, dubbed Community Offshore Wind, would generate 700 jobs and $3 billion in local economic activity. It would have been close enough to New Jersey and New York that its power could have flowed to either state, although no final power contract was ever signed. Now all of that is kaput.
In the eyes of some critics, RWE had overpaid for that lease — and in that context, the Trump administration has I suppose done the German developer a favor, bailing them out from a bad investment in a legally dubious manner. (New York’s attorney general is suing to block a similar payout to Total Energies.)
But even beyond that context, there remains one big problem with these deals — an issue even more glaring now than when Trump started targeting wind projects last year. It is that the United States — and especially the Northeast, and especially New York — needs as much electricity as it can get right now. The Trump administration is striving to bring new power demand online in the form of data centers, but cutting off new sources of generation if they fail to meet its aesthetic standards.
Anticipating this sensitivity, RWE’s press statement announcing the deal goes on to list major energy projects that it’s committed to in the United States. These projects all involve, coincidentally (or not), fossil fuels: They include a $900 million stake in a Louisiana liquified natural gas export terminal and a $300 million reservation for new natural gas turbines. (RWE implies, but doesn’t say outright, that it will build 15 natural gas peaker plants with these turbines.) When we asked for more details about these projects, and whether we should anticipate anything new, RWE immediately got back to us: “We are unable to discuss further details on the investments.”
Yet as RWE well knows, these projects won’t help solve a coming energy shortage in New York or New England. For one, the Louisiana LNG export terminal is, well, an export terminal: It will help move energy out of the country, not generate more of it at home. Those exports might boost Americans’ fortunes in a vague, long-term, balance-of-payments way, but they won’t keep a lid on anyone’s power bills (which, by the way, just hit an all-time high). More importantly, the 15 peaker plants that RWE cites are largely going to be built … in other regions of the country. If the lights go out on Houston Street, a new gas plant in Houston can’t help.
Americans paid $217 on average for electricity last month, according to Heatmap and MIT’s Electricity Price Hub.
July is typically the season of high electricity bills, and this year is no exception.
Nationally, the average electricity bill spiked to $217, an all-time high, according to new data from Heatmap and MIT’s Electricity Price Hub. That’s up from $177 in June, and $215 last July. Meanwhile, electricity rates were 19 cents per kilowatt-hour, virtually unchanged from June and slightly higher than July of last year.
Throughout the country, many ratepayers are seeing higher costs and charges in the portion of their bill covering the cost of power generation.
Once again, some of the most notable electricity price and bill trends were seen in the mid-Atlantic region, the heart of the data center boom and the anchor area of the PJM Interconnection. The region also includes Virginia, where Florida utility and energy developer NextEra is attempting to acquire the commonwealth’s dominant utility, Dominion.
In July, Dominion customers saw typical generation charges rise to $155 a month, up from $124 a year ago. Overall bills for Dominion customers were about $259 this past month.
The higher bills are in part due to the “fuel charge rider” that went into effect this past month to help recover about $1 billion in additional generation costs claimed by the utility. Those charges stem in part from higher fuel costs this past winter, when natural gas prices spiked to their highest level since the winter of 2022-23, Dominion officials said in a filing to the state’s utilities regulator. The MIT researchers estimate that the fuel charge added around $53 to July bills, up $12 from July of last year.
In neighboring Delaware, bills were $216 a month in July, a record high, while prices were around 19 cents per kilowatt-hour. Customers of the state’s main utility, Delmarva Power, saw a near 20% hike in the supply charge in their standard service offerings, as prices rose from around 16 cents per kilowatt-hour from last year.
The Delaware Public Service Commission voted at the beginning of last month to allow an interim rate increase of about $3 per month for the typical customer, which went into effect July 9. Soon after, Delaware Governor Matt Meyer signed a law giving the state’s regulators more discretion to reject putting certain utility costs into the rate base and thus limit subsequent price hikes requested by utilities. The governor’s office described the law as a mechanism “to prioritize prudent spending over unchecked cost recovery.”
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A solar cell at the Elin Energy factory in Texas. Brett Coomer/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images
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