When President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, into law two years ago, a starting gun sounded. “The race is on,” said Jacob Corvidae, a senior principal with the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), a clean energy think tank, for states to attract and encourage the private actions that will position their economies at the forefront of the clean economy, and capture the tax incentives in the IRA that spur those investments.
According to a new report from RMI, which Corvidae co-authored, that race is off to a slow start. Corvidae and his team estimate that, for the nation to meet its clean energy goals, the federal government would need to invest around $1 trillion into local economies by 2031 via tax incentives. So far, through June 2024, the feds have distributed $66 billion — or around 6 percent of the full spending that our climate commitments demand.
There is no upper limit on the amount of IRA tax credits that the government can dole out each year, so the federal money going back to states each year in tax incentives is largely ref... Read more
