Renewable Loophole in the One Big Beautiful Bill
Excerpt:
Key Takeaways
1
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act repealed lucrative tax credits for wind and solar, but a loophole allowed the tax credit for battery storage to continue until 2036.
2
New solar capacity is being built with battery storage to capitalize on its tax credit.
3
A recent study of the costs of a renewables system backed by storage batteries for the PJM grid shows buildout costs of more than $4 trillion through 2045, with capacity increases of 800%.
4
Other scenarios limited to new natural gas and nuclear capacity, with and without battery storage, through 2045 saw costs drop significantly and capacity builds of 48 to 62%.
5
A number of states have net-zero carbon policies and battery storage procurement mandates.
6
If policies continue to incentivize intermittent renewable energy backed by expensive battery systems, electricity costs for consumers will likely skyrocket.
7
Europe is already reeling from similar programs that threaten to deindustrialize the continent.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) of 2025 phased out hefty solar and wind tax credits created under former President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) passed in 2022. But instead of phasing out battery storage tax credits along with the wind and solar tax credits, the OBBBA phases them out much later — in 2036—which solar developers are now capitalizing on by adding battery storage components to new builds, allowing them to keep earning lucrative clean energy tax credits despite the phaseout. Warren Buffett pointed out more than a decade ago: “For example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.”
Under the OBBBA, solar and wind projects that have not started construction no longer qualify for the IRA tax credits. Because of lucrative tax credits, wind and solar projects have made up a majority of the energy sector’s growth since 2019. According to the Energy Information Administration, new solar and wind capacity through June 30, just before the end of their phase-out, exceeded the total added to date in 2025 and will likely outpace prior years. This result is similar to what happened when the OBBBA ended the tax credit for electric vehicles last year, with sales of electric vehicles rising sharply just before the tax credit expired on September 30.
Because of tax credits for battery storage and battery procurement mandates in 13 states, battery storage facilities are being built despite their high costs and land requirements. Batteries do not generate electricity; they store excess electricity that may be available on the grid for later release when generators are no longer producing, such as when the wind is not blowing or the sun is not shining. Thus, they are an extra expense that ratepayers and taxpayers must pay because federal and state governments are incentivizing them.
How Mexican Drug Cartels Have Shifted Methamphetamine Production to Africa
https://youtu.be/omGu_QzO-8g?si=GEmTcOCw7DDkKvIB
Excerpt:
.....Methamphetamine laboratories linked to Mexican cartels have been operating in Africa for years. According to AFRICOM, the first documented case occurred in Nigeria in 2016. Since then, laboratories have been located in countries such as Mozambique, Kenya, and South Africa.
James Griego, head of counter-narcotics operations at AFRICOM, reported that 14 Mexican-run laboratories have been dismantled in Africa since 2023—four of them in Nigeria. Specifically, links were found between some of these laboratories and the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels.
However, the most significant operation took place in May 2026. Nigerian authorities dismantled the largest clandestine methamphetamine laboratory discovered in Africa to date. More than 2.4 tons of methamphetamine and chemical precursors were seized, with an estimated value of $360 million.
.....You might wonder, though: why did the cartels decide to expand into this continent? Africa offers numerous advantages. The first is its geography; vast stretches of forest provide ideal locations for setting up isolated, hard-to-detect laboratories. The second factor is logistical: West Africa offers direct access to Atlantic shipping routes, facilitating the transport of goods to Europe and other regions of the world.
Added to this is the fact that some African countries have fewer regulations regarding the import of chemicals used to manufacture synthetic drugs. There is also less surveillance at their borders. This facilitates criminal operations and allows them to cut costs when supplying highly lucrative markets.
In Europe, the latest report indicates a 47% increase in methamphetamine consumption between 2014 and 2024. Meanwhile, in East and Southeast Asia, seizures of the drug hit an all-time high in 2024. Demographics play a role as well. According to Femi Babafemi, spokesperson for Nigeria’s National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA), Africa’s large youth population acts as an incentive for criminal organizations, providing not only cheap labor but also a market for local consumption.
.....One is the increased pressure on traditional drug trafficking routes. Since Donald Trump’s return to the U.S. presidency, Washington has stepped up actions against cartels, potentially accelerating the search for new routes and production hubs
Battery storage - storage in itself is not a terrible idea since daytime and on-peak demand can be much higher than off-peak demand. There have been times when I was at TVA where our peak was roughly double what our off peak system load (demand) was. We made great use of the Raccoon mountain pumped storage facility and people that operate the generation system would love to have 2 or 3 more Raccoon Mountain facilities.
Why? Because you could pump roughly the equivalent of a total of 1600 megawatts (1,600,000 kilowatts) of energy for several hours during off peak and have it available at times of peak demand so that you could more easily meet customer load. Keep your generators on line to run the pumps at night rather than cycling which does take a toll, especially on more sophisticated coal and combined cycle gas units.
Plus, if you have nuclear units, all the nuclear plants I’ve seen will NOT move the output of the generator up and down to follow load - only for emergencies. So you’re sometimes stuck with the power that you don’t need. Pumped storage helps here because it lets you store those watts for when you need them.
So, batteries serve this purpose, but at great expense. Both types of energy storage cost quite a bit to build, but in the case of batteries, they have a finite life and will lose their capacity over time. Like a 4 year old iPhone, they don’t store as much energy so the output becomes more and more limited, and in a few years, battery replacement is necessary. At a great expense. But they make the climate fanatics happy so there’s that.
Servers Over Shelter: How AI Data Centers Are Outbidding Home Builders for America’s Land
https://www.nahb.org/advocacy/industry-issues/land-use-101/data-centers-outbidding-home-developers
Excerpt:
In November 2025, two of Northern Virginia’s biggest land deals closed within days of each other, and neither one was for housing. Amazon paid $700 million for about 189 acres in Prince William County. A few days later, SDC Capital Partners paid $615 million for 97 acres in Loudoun County.
The deals were made by a data center company and digital infrastructure investor intent on building facilities to support artificial intelligence.
.....As AI use has grown, so has demand for the facilities that make it possible. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta were expected to spend more than $300 billion in capital expenditures in 2025, with much of that spending tied to AI infrastructure, cloud capacity, and data center buildouts.
That demand is being met with land, and much of it is land that would otherwise have become housing.
Home builders cannot bid in that market, because a builder’s land budget is capped by what home buyers can afford. Every dollar spent on land gets passed through to the price of the finished home, and buyers have no room to absorb it. NAHB’s 2026 priced-out analysis estimated that 65% of U.S. households could not afford a median-priced new home of $413,595 at a 6 % mortgage rate, and that every $1,000 increase in the price of a new home would price out another 156,405 households.
A data center operator faces no such constraint. So, when a landowner gets an offer of several million dollars per acre from a data center company, and a fraction of that from a home builder, there is no real decision to make. The result is not more expensive homes on that parcel. It is no homes at all. The data center wins, the land is gone, and the houses that might have been built there are never built.
This problem is not limited to Virginia. In Illinois, Stream Data Centers bought and razed 55 homes in Elk Grove Village to make way for a three-building data center campus of about 2 million sq. ft. In Texas, data center demand is pushing up land prices in growth corridors near Dallas. HousingWire reported that land along U.S. Route 67 that had sold for $20,000 to $40,000 per acre a few years ago was selling for more than $350,000 per acre in some locations by 2026. One local residential land developer put it plainly: “There’s no possible way you can make those numbers work.” In North Las Vegas, VanTrust Real Estate sold nearly 205 acres in Apex Industrial Park to Novva Data Centers for $181 million in 2025, or more than $880,000 per acre.
.....NAHB estimates that the country needs about 1.5 million more homes. Mortgage rates remain elevated, construction costs remain high, and entry-level and workforce housing are getting harder to build. Land is the foundation of every home. Land that goes into a data center pipeline at $4 million or $6 million per acre does not come back to the housing market. When a parcel sells for $6.3 million per acre, it is going to hold servers, not families. In markets already short on housing, every acre lost to data center development means fewer homes built, higher prices for the homes that are built, and more households shut out of ownership entirely.
The numbers explain why home builders and developers are losing. In Northern Virginia alone, some of the deals that have closed since 2024 include:
In Loudoun County, the SDC deal came out to about $6.3 million per acre.
In Prince William County, Microsoft paid $465.5 million for about 124 acres in 2024, or about $3.75 million per acre.
In Fairfax County, Starwood Capital Group agreed in 2026 to buy about 42 acres of county-owned land in Chantilly for $166.8 million, or about $4 million per acre, for potential data center development.
In Ashburn, Amazon agreed to buy George Washington University’s roughly 120-acre Virginia Science and Technology Campus for $427 million, with the deed reportedly allowing a data or information technology center on the site ($3.5 million per acre).
In March 2026, a data center developer reportedly began offering homeowners in Ashburn’s Regency neighborhood about $4.4 million per acre to assemble a roughly 130-acre site.
Median land prices in Northern Virginia are nowhere close to those figures. A 2025 land price analysis reported median land prices of about $125,000 per acre in Loudoun County and $93,750 per acre in Prince William County. Those medians are broad countywide estimates, not perfect comparisons to fully entitled development sites. But once land can be used for data centers, especially where power, water, and zoning are available, it becomes a different kind of land market where data center bidders are willing to pay 30-50 times what developers are used to paying.