President Joe Biden’s legacy in many ways can be measured in numbers, from $369 billion in the Inflation Reduction Act for clean energy to a push for 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by decade’s end.
In the past three years, the president made progress on some promised metrics. His administration approved nine offshore wind farms at the Interior Department, for instance. But on many other goals and projects, Biden fell far short of his pledges, leaving it potentially to Vice President Kamala Harris — or former President Donald Trump — to determine when and how projects across the energy sector get funded.
Trump, if he is elected, also could stall or aim to overturn remaining funds from the Inflation Reduction Act and other laws, which he has called a “green new scam.”
Harris has a long, progressive record on energy and climate change, suing fossil fuel companies as California’s attorney general and signing onto the Green New Deal while in the U.S. Senate. The blueprint aimed to slash greenhouse gas emissions and guarantee jobs, among other progressive priorities.
The record suggests Harris would push hard to complete or ramp up Biden’s clean energy agenda, but she would also inherit record levels of U.S. oil and gas production and a robust fossil fuel sector that many activists say is in conflict with addressing climate change. The Inflation Reduction Act, often regarded as one of the biggest climate bills in U.S. history, shackles new renewables on public lands and waters to new oil and gas leasing.
As Biden enters his last few months in office, here are five numbers that define his energy legacy — and signal challenges and opportunities for the next occupant of the White House:
$97 billion
The Department of Energy controls roughly $97 billion in grant money passed in the IRA and infrastructure law.
That new money has helped shift DOE from an early-stage, seed money disburser to more of a major market driver that’s launching whole new industries in the U.S. For example, the department is aiming to spend $7 billion dollars from the infrastructure law to create a “clean” hydrogen industry from scratch.
Meanwhile, companies are seizing opportunities to pay cut-rate taxes to build new clean energy systems. E2, a clean energy advocacy group, says companies have announced nearly $125 billion in project funding since the IRA passed.
“Thanks to Joe Biden, America seized a once-in-a-generation opportunity to lead on deploying, innovating and manufacturing clean energy,“ Alex McDonough, treasurer for the political action committee Clean Energy for America Action, said in a statement. “Even though his term ends in January, his legacy is cemented in the form of American jobs, factories, and a strong foundation to address the climate crisis.”
But the programs to get those billions of dollars out the door face challenges. Roughly $9 billion in grants for home energy retrofits are still largely at DOE, for example. The department’s loan office has green-lighted a fraction of more than $200 billion in available funds for clean energy projects. DOE announced awardees to clean up U.S. industrial operations, like steel and concrete plants in April — nearly 2.5 years after passage of the infrastructure law that authorized the program.
“It’s been too slow. Little money has truly been allocated to support these projects,” Luke Bolar, chief external affairs officer at ClearPath, a supporter of federal funding, said in an interview.
Bolar said DOE has announced awardees in only “about half” of the programs ClearPath is focusing on, which he said total $63 billion of the $97 billion in total new DOE funding.
As vice president, Harris has echoed Biden on clean energy technologies and would be expected as president to follow similar policies to Biden if she won the presidential election, according to analysts.
If her climate plan in 2019 before joining the presidential ticket is a guide, she could push for more funding for carbon-free technologies, as her blueprint then called for $10 trillion in public and private funding for a carbon-neutral economy.
Bolar said permitting changes, which some lawmakers are trying to legislate, is a major priority for the next administration, as evaluations of the environmental impacts of energy projects takes too long, according to analysts.
13.2 million barrels
U.S. oil production soared to record levels under Biden, with the U.S. Energy Information Administration forecasting that the country could churn out an average of 13.2 million barrels a day of crude in 2024 — more oil than any country has produced ever.
Analysts say the boom is less due to Biden’s policies and more due to innovation in the oil fieldand market forces sparked by OPEC+ production cuts. Even so, the boom prompted pushback on Biden’s left, particularly after he approved ConocoPhillips’ Willow project in the Arctic.
Biden’s now-overturned pause on LNG permits won him some praise from environmentalists and could hinder the industry long term, but others say the current surging oil and gas production complicates his legacy on climate change.
A Harris victory in November could lead to more headwinds for the oil industry.
Harris was a harsher critic of oil and gas both during her time as a U.S. senator and in campaign speeches than Biden. She called for an end to hydraulic fracking in the 2020 presidential primary and brought several lawsuits against oil and gas companies during her time as California’s attorney general.
Those stances could moderate if she ends up clenching the Democratic Party’s nomination, said Andy Lipow, president of Lipow Oil Associates.
With the Supreme Court’s recent ruling overturning the Chevron doctrine, Lipow said oil production under a potential Harris Administration is likely to resemble Biden’s, despite her earlier record. The Chevron ruling, which weakened the power of federal agencies, could make it more difficult for a Harris Administration to do things like enact rules aimed to curbing methane emissions from oil and gas production, or make serious changes to federal oil leases on public lands, he said.
“I don’t think it would be too different than under Biden,” Lipow said. “Any changes in policy [from Biden] are sure to be litigated, and the implementation of many policies still could be years away.”
5 million homes
During more than three years in office, Biden has green-lighted enough offshore wind farms to power 5 million U.S. homes. Harris would be expected to continue delivering gains for the industry if elected president.
The U.S. offshore wind industry was fledgling and demoralized when Biden took office, after extended delays created by the Trump administration for the first proposed large offshore wind farm.
Biden approved that project, Vineyard Wind, as well as another eight offshore wind farms. If constructed, those projects will lead to thousands of turbines built in the ocean.
“He really was the offshore wind president,” said Kris Ohleth, director of the pro-offshore wind group the Special Initiative on Offshore Wind.
Ohleth said Biden modernized offshore wind regulations, passed critical offshore wind tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act and improved the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s communication with Native American tribes and fishermen affected by wind sales and projects.
With Biden’s exit, industry watchers are contemplating the potential of a Harris administration. Offshore wind advocates want Harris to continue to chase the Biden administration’s wind targets, like reaching 110 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2050 after inflation slowed down the industry. They are also bracing for a potential second Trump administration. The former president is threatening on the campaign trail to thwart offshore wind if re-elected.
“We would be fooling ourselves to think that there wouldn’t be some slowdown or interruption [in offshore wind’s progress] if it ends up another Trump administration,” Ohleth said.
Biden officials are racing to keep two key offshore wind commitments from the president that could help the industry in this period of political uncertainty.
Biden committed to approving 16 offshore wind farms by 2025 but has green-lighted only the nine projects so far. Projects in limbo are considered most vulnerable to delays if Trump assumes office next year.
The administration is also weighing four offshore wind lease sales in the second half of this year: in the Gulf of Maine, Gulf of Mexico, Central Atlantic and off the Oregon coast. Lease sales in those areas would give companies lease rights and certainty to plan projects years in advance.
Julia Pendleton, managing director of the Southeastern Wind Coalition, said the group wants to see the planned lease sales take place and proposed projects approved this year.
“You’d really just want to see a level of momentum that can’t be easily rolled back,” Pendleton said, noting that the wind industry should be a politically neutral sector for presidents, as it supports U.S. jobs and manufacturing.
100 percent solar increase
According to the Solar Energy Industries Association, half of America’s solar capacity was installed in the last three and a half years. There’s now enough capacity to power 32.5 million homes.
The industry has grown for a variety of reasons, including competitive costs with natural gas and a need for utilities to replace coal.
But Abigail Ross Hopper, SEIA’s president and CEO, attributed the doubling of U.S. solar generation to Biden’s leadership, calling him the “most influential president in the story of America’s solar industry.”
Hopper cited the IRA’s tax credits, including support for rooftop projects and “adder” credits if solar systems are made in America. Updates to the IRA’s rules allow for an additional 10 percent credit, on top of the 30 percent base credit, for installed solar projects that have parts manufactured in the United States. She also pointed to the IRA’s Solar for All program, which delivered $7 billion in grants to help 900,000 low-income households access solar energy.
Several reports have credited the landmark law’s tax credits with helping solar rebound after the pandemic.
Solar currently is now outpacing other renewables, too. Given the explosion of new projects coming online, the EIA predicts that solar will grow to 286 billion kilowatt hours by 2025 — a 75 increase from all the solar energy generated last year.
This growth has touched both red and blue states.
According to Hopper, Biden also did more to advance U.S. solar manufacturing “than any program or policy in history” because of policies such as leveraging a Cold War-era law, the Defense Production Act, to appropriate $250 million to the production of solar panels and other low-carbon technologies. The IRA’s solar credit known as 45X is poised to spur manufacturing as well.
Earlier this year, solar panel manufacturing marked recording-setting growth: a 71 percent increase compared to the final quarter of 2023, according to SEIA’s latest market report.
More solar manufacturing is slated to take root during the next president’s term, but much depends on whether Biden’s tariffs on Chinese-made solar components are upheld and whether fees are expanded for other Asian countries flooding the U.S market with cheap imports. A study released in March noted that planned U.S. solar factories will struggle to make a profit — and some may be canceled — if South Asian imports aren’t slowed.
This year, U.S. companies announced more than 30 new manufacturing investments for solar components and related storage, a fulfillment of Biden’s promise to on-shore clean energy supply chains instead of relying on Chinese imports.
Mike Carr, president and CEO of the trade group Solar Energy Manufacturers of America, acknowledged that Trump might uphold or increase existing Chinese tariffs if elected, which inevitably help protect U.S. manufacturers. Still, he predicts Democrats are more likely to pursue an agenda that protects the kind of solar growth observed under Biden’s term.
In an interview earlier this summer, Carr said “it is unlikely we see an affirmative statement of support (from Trump) for the solar industry.” Neither SEIA or SEMA have officially endorsed Harris for president.
Zero power plants
While Biden has been in office, no new commercial small modular reactors, large power plants with carbon capture and storage or fusion power plants have come online.
While each industry is different, they all are being pushed by the administration as important carbon-free technologies, including through funding from the IRA and infrastructure law. They also all have critics who say their costs and technical barriers — and pace in getting to widespread deployment — signal that they are unlikely to become widely used and should not receive large amounts of federal funding.
There were several setbacks for these technologies in the past four years, including the cancellation last year of an Idaho project by NuScale, the only U.S. developer with a small modular reactor (SMR) design approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. A Department of Energy program to advance fusion struggled to get started earlier this year because of intellectual property disagreements.
Others say the right measure of the technologies’ success is not how many plants are currently deployed.
“All three of these technologies have done well during the Biden years, mostly with bipartisan support,” said David Hart, an energy technologies expert at George Mason University, in an email. “With SMRs and fusion, the absence of deployment certainly doesn’t say anything about the administration or its policy. The timelines are just long (if ever!).”
SMRs have been advanced through DOE’s advanced reactor program and regulatory changes, he said. Fusion has similarly been helped with new commercially-oriented programs at DOE, even though it is far away from being part of the power mix, he added.
There also have been newly announced carbon capture projects on power plants since the signing of the Inflation Reduction Act, but it may take years for them to actually become operational. One carbon capture project that is not new — the Petra Nova project in Texas — did restart during Biden’s presidency after being mothballed.
“EPA regulations that would essentially mandate CCS at power plants have also been advanced, although they are not certain to come into force,” Hart said, referring to final agency carbon regulations issued in April.
Reporter Christa Marshall contributed.
