“That solar power installations are going up as the technology improves and prices come down isn’t too surprising, but the sustained surge is still stunning.
“When you look at the absolute numbers that we’re on track for this year and that we installed last year, it is completely sort of mind-blowing,” said Euan Graham, lead author of the report and an electricity data analyst at Ember.
Several factors have aligned to push solar power installations so high in recent years, like better hardware, economies of scale, and new, ripe, energy-hungry markets. Right now, solar still just provides around 5.5 percent of the world’s electricity, so there’s enormous room to expand. But solar energy still poses some technical challenges to the power grid, and the world’s ravenous appetite for electrons means that countries are looking for energy wherever they can get it.
So if you’re concerned about climate change, it’s not enough that solar wins; greenhouse gasses must lose.”
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“Energy storage technologies like batteries are also getting way better and cheaper. The price of batteries has tanked 97 percent since 1991. Because of better technology, falling costs, and more markets for saving power, the US is on track to double its grid energy storage capacity compared to last year. More than 10 gigawatts of solar and storage came online in 2023 across the country and that’s likely to double this year. “Energy storage is at an earlier stage [than solar] but we are likely to see rapid expansion in that segment, especially in regions where solar and wind penetration are high already such as California and Texas,” said Steve Piper, director of energy research at S&P Global Commodity Insights”
“These projections have a fatal blind spot: They fail to consider how humans respond to changing conditions like new vehicle lanes. When people see cars traveling freely over a recently expanded highway, they will recalibrate their travel decisions. Some will choose to drive at rush hour when they would have otherwise driven at a non-peak time, taken public transit, or perhaps not traveled at all. When a roadway is widened, Marshall said, “You might have less congestion at first, but it quickly goes away.”
Such behavioral adjustments will continue until traffic is as thick as it was before, when the roadway was narrower. The only difference is now there will be more cars stuck in traffic, emitting even more pollution.
This phenomenon is known as induced demand. In his book Fighting Traffic, historian Peter Norton notes that as early as the 1920s, a New York City engineer warned that new roadways “would be filled immediately by traffic which is now repressed because of congestion.” In the 1960s, the economist Anthony Downs wrote a seminal economics paper that codified the concept, which has been called the Iron Law of Congestion. As one researcher put it, “If you build it, they will drive.””
“Carr blames the delay on “the addition of a substantive wish list of progressive ideas” to the approval process. In an April 2023 letter to Davidson, 11 Republican U.S. senators warned that “NTIA’s bureaucratic red tape and far-left mandates undermine Congress’ intent and would discourage participation from broadband providers while increasing the overall cost of building out broadband networks.”
Among several examples, the senators noted that NTIA’s BEAD proposal “requires subgrantees to prioritize certain segments of the workforce, such as ‘individuals with past criminal records’ and ‘justice-impacted […] participants.'” The infrastructure law that authorized the program merely required contractors to be “in compliance with Federal labor and employment laws.”
The previous year, in a letter to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, Republican senators warned that the NTIA’s proposed BEAD rollout “creates a complex, nine-step, ‘iterative’ structure and review process that is likely to mire State broadband offices in excessive bureaucracy and delay connecting unserved and underserved Americans as quickly as possible.”
In practice, this is exactly what’s happening: Multiple representatives from the telecommunications industry told MinnPost this week that they had no interest in applying for a piece of Minnesota’s $652 million in BEAD grants. Brent Christensen, president and CEO of Minnesota Telecom Alliance, which represents 70 Minnesota telecom companies, said, “None of them would bid for the federal grants because of the regulations that would come with it—especially the requirement to provide low-cost services to low-income households in exchange for grants that would allow internet providers to build out their networks.”
MinnPost noted that new state laws also “requir[e] companies who receive state grants to pay workers a ‘prevailing wage,’ a basic hourly rate paid on public works projects to a majority of workers in a particular occupation.” Since the federal government’s prevailing wage list does not include telecom workers, “companies in Minnesota would have to pay more because they would have to use a similar, but higher-paying, classification.”
“For decades, New York City has been trying to enact an ambitious experiment to reduce traffic and pollution on some of the most congested roads in the world by charging cars a fee to drive in parts of Manhattan and using the revenue to better fund public transportation.
It’s known as congestion pricing, and after many hard-fought political and legal battles, lawmakers and transit officials had finally agreed on a plan that was set to launch later this month. Mere weeks before the new fees would go into effect, however, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul postponed the implementation of the plan indefinitely, citing economic concerns.
Supporters of the long-planned, much-discussed effort are fuming. The plan’s ultimate goals were to get cars off the road, reduce carbon emissions, and improve public transit, including the New York subway and regional rail. Congestion pricing would have, in other words, made the city safer, cleaner, and easier to get around for the people who live there.
“In 2021, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act included $7.5 billion to build 500,000 public charging stations for electric vehicles (E.V.s) across the country in an effort to boost a switch to the use of clean energy.
As Reason reported in December, not one charger funded by the program had yet come online. Now, six months later, the number of functional charging stations has ticked up to eight.”
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“Why so little progress? Alexander Laska of the center-left Third Way think tank told Autoweek’s Jim Motavalli that the federal cash “comes with dozens of rules and requirements around everything from reliability to interoperability, to where stations can be located, to what certifications the workers installing the chargers need to have.” Laska says the regulations “are largely a good thing—we want drivers to have a seamless, convenient, reliable charging experience—but navigating all of that does add to the timeline.”
A spokesperson with the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program, which administers $5 billion of the $7.5 billion total, further told Motavalli that the delay is because “we want to get it right.””
“Less than 17 percent of the $1.1 trillion those laws provided for direct investments on climate, energy and infrastructure has been spent as of April, nearly two years after Biden signed the last of the statutes.”
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“Trump has said he should have the power to refuse to spend congressionally appropriated money he considers wasteful, despite a 1974 law that says otherwise. This raises the prospect that he could attempt to pare Biden-era funding even if it’s at an advanced stage of distribution.”
“That’s why federal Covid relief money was so transformational for agencies like WMATA. It freed them from worrying about revenue — at least in the short term — and gave them the ability to focus on providing a good and affordable service. Had there been no federal aid, DC’s transit agency wouldn’t have been able to invest in hiring staff, improving train and bus frequency, or reducing costs for riders. And ridership would likely be nowhere near where it is today.
Despite this obvious lesson, transportation agencies across the country will still have to overcome a deep-rooted culture in government that deprioritizes transit, dating back to Ronald Reagan and his crusade against welfare and public services. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter proposed a $50 billion spending plan to “reclaim and revitalize America’s transit systems.” But “that initiative fell apart during the Reagan years due to austerity politics,” Freemark said.
The Reagan administration swiftly abandoned Carter’s idea and cut transit funding by over 30 percent. During those years, the idea of meaningfully subsidizing public transit was under attack. David Stockman, Reagan’s first director of the Office of Management and Budget, for example, considered subsidies for transit agencies’ operating costs a “special abomination.”
Since then, the federal government has largely steered clear of subsidizing operating costs of public transit, particularly in large urban areas, and has focused its money mostly on capital improvement projects. So instead of cobbling together funds for necessities like hiring more bus drivers to provide more frequent service, cities end up spending hundreds of millions of dollars on splashy projects like an isolated streetcar line that comparatively serves very few people.
Covid funds changed all of that. Through the various relief packages, the federal government injected $14 billion into transit agencies to make up for lost revenue and pay for day-to-day operations. Agencies like WMATA showed Americans just how much federal subsidies can achieve when they are directed toward operational costs: In 2023, Metro announced that it would run more train service than at any point in its history.”