Two more examples for you: Hillary did a 3-day Appalachia tour during the primary, meeting with voters on energy, jobs, health care, substance abuse. Biden had a massive effort to help fossil communities attract investment. Idea that either wrote off large swathes of “red” America is so frustrating.

Senate environment Dems have held several such hearings, starting around March of this year IIRC, including on the illegal efforts to freeze competitively awarded, contracted federal funds.

Link to the guidance for those who want to start their weekend with wonkery: aboutblaw.com/bjeL /🧵

In short, we've once again got further headwinds for clean energy developers, with smaller and tax-exempt players hurt the most, at a time when electricity prices are rising nationwide and we should be deploying all the solar, wind, and storage we can get. 7/

The differentiation between 'commence construction' for wind and solar vs other 48E/45Y technologies (plus 45Q, 45V, and 48D) continues to seem on shaky legal ground to me. Not an APA lawyer, but I'd think there are some pretty clear grounds to argue these changes are arbitrary and capricious. 6/

And small private developers don't have the market power to out-compete the big guys to take full advantage of physical work safe harbor. If I'm right, we'll see less deployment, less diversification of clean energy resources, and (as always with this administration) higher costs. 5/

I'm particularly concerned about what these changes will do to rural co-ops, Tribes, and smaller developers. Co-ops and other entities were going to blend tax credits with grants. If they get tangled in permitting chaos, they may not be able to begin physical work. Tribes may struggle even more. 4/

The guidance eliminates the cost safe harbor (previously 5%) altogether for everything except very small ( < 1.5 MW) solar projects. This is going to create chaos for segments of the market that cannot easily meet the physical work test, raise costs even for those who can, and reduce deployment. 3/

It clearly undermines Congressional intent and goes against the text of the GOP bill. The law as actually passed provided a (shorter than optimal) transition period using the longstanding commence construction standard. These changes go against that, and arbitrarily shorten the transition. 2/