The coolest parts of Biden's expansive infrastructure plan

Hey, everybody! President Joe Biden has unveiled his first
infrastructure proposal and … hot damn.


The eight-year "American Jobs Plan" would spend $2.25 trillion on
a huge range of initiatives, from highways to the energy grid,
water systems, airports, transit systems, broadband, energy
R&D, and — paging a Sen. Joe Manchin — abandoned coal mine
clean-up.


This is an amazing document. Yes, there’s stuff in it that I
would take out (some highway spending) and stuff I would add
(more transit spending). Yes, a serious transition to
sustainability would probably take closer to $10 trillion. Yes,
there’s a very good chance the plan gets cut or compromised on
the way to passage, if it passes at all, which is far from
certain.


Still. As presented by the Biden team, it represents not only an
enormous total investment, but some really smart investments, in
areas where the positive knock-on effects for the clean energy
transition could be enormous. There were some true-blue energy
wonks involved in writing this thing.


I’ll just quickly go over the parts that are most exciting to me
and then mention a couple of benefits that are getting
underplayed.


Transportation


The plan would put $174 billion toward a plan to “win the EV
market,” which is on the verge of enormous growth. Biden wants to
create a domestic supply chain for batteries and EVs (something
that is virtually nonexistent today) and domestic manufacturing
capacity to make the EVs, all of which will create domestic jobs.


It would offer point-of-sale rebates to purchasers of
domestic-made EVs, “while ensuring that these vehicles are
affordable for all families and manufactured by workers with good
jobs.”


It would offer grants and incentives to state and local
governments and private businesses to install EV charging
stations, with the goal of 500,000 up and running by 2030.


And I love this, though I wish it were much bigger: “Replace
50,000 diesel transit vehicles and electrify at least 20 percent
of our yellow school bus fleet through a new Clean Buses for Kids
Program at the Environmental Protection Agency, with support from
the Department of Energy.” This will put us on “a path to 100
percent clean buses.”


I have sung the praises of electric city buses; see Vox’s Kelsey
Piper on electric school buses. Not only do they save money over
time, but they generate immediate air quality benefits for some
of the most vulnerable populations — kids and low-income and POC
communities, who bear the brunt of diesel pollution. The benefits
wildly outweigh the costs. (On the campaign trail, Bernie Sanders
proposed $407 billion just for electric buses, which is more like
it.)


Finally, oh, by the way: the plan “will utilize the vast tools of
federal procurement to electrify the federal fleet, including the
United States Postal Service.” Whaaat?


As Sarah Kaplan reported in The Washington Post in January:


There are some 645,000 vehicles in the federal fleet. They
include roughly 200,000 passenger vehicles, 78,517 heavy-duty
trucks, 47,369 vans, 847 ambulances and three limousines.


That’s a lot of vehicles.


As for electrifying the 225,000 Postal Service vehicles, I have
written at great length about what a fantastic idea that is. This
part of the plan is honestly like a present to me. Thank you, Joe
Biden.


It’s not all about cars and trucks, though. The plan also has $85
billion for public transit (“to modernize existing transit and
help agencies expand their systems to meet rider demand”), which
would double existing federal investment in transit, and at least
$80 billion for rail (“to address Amtrak’s repair backlog;
modernize the high traffic Northeast Corridor; improve existing
corridors and connect new city pairs; and enhance grant and loan
programs that support passenger and freight rail safety,
efficiency, and electrification.”)


As for transportation infrastructure, there’s $20 billion for “a
new program that will reconnect neighborhoods cut off by historic
investments and ensure new projects increase opportunity, advance
racial equity and environmental justice, and promote affordable
access” and $25 billion “for a dedicated fund to support
ambitious projects that have tangible benefits to the regional or
national economy but are too large or complex for existing
funding programs.”


In my dream world I would spend much more on transit and rail,
but this is a huge improvement over previous infrastructure
bills, even from Democrats.


Transmission


Readers of Transmission Month know that long-distance
transmission is very much needed for national decarbonization and
currently very difficult to build.


The big news in the plan is that Sen. Martin Heinrich’s federal
transmission investment tax credit (ITC) made it in. The fact
sheet doesn’t specify the size of the ITC, but Heinrich’s
proposal is 30 percent. The idea is to spur “the buildout of at
least 20 gigawatts of high-voltage capacity power lines and
mobilize tens of billions in private capital off the sidelines.”


And remember my post on using existing rail and road
rights-of-way to site long-distance transmission? Get this:
“President Biden’s plan will establish a new Grid Deployment
Authority at the Department of Energy that allows for better
leverage of existing rights-of-way – along roads and railways –
and supports creative financing tools to spur additional high
priority, high-voltage transmission lines.”


Hell yes.


Innovation


I have also written a great deal about the importance of
concerted, well-funded clean-energy innovation policy. The US
currently spends about $150 billion a year on R&D, of which
about half goes to the Department of Defense and a paltry $8
billion goes to energy research. Biden’s plan calls for $180
billion of research money for the “technologies of the future.”


It would spend $50 billion on the National Science Foundation
(NSF) to create a technology directorate that would coordinate
advanced-tech research across agencies, $30 billion on R&D to
spur job creation in rural areas, and $40 billion on upgrading
research labs across the country. Half of that lab money would go
to “Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and
other Minority Serving Institutions, including the creation of a
new national lab focused on climate that will be affiliated with
an HBCU.”


A climate lab in an HBCU is a nice touch. Good stuff.


Speaking of climate change, the plan would put $35 billion
specifically toward tech research and innovation focused on the
climate crisis, in part by creating an ARPA-C (modeled on ARPA-E
and, before it, DARPA) “to develop new methods for reducing
emissions and building climate resilience.”


And the plan contains something for which every innovation
scholar and expert has been advocating for years: funding for
demonstration projects.


In addition to a $5 billion increase in funding for other
climate-focused research, his plan will invest $15 billion in
demonstration projects for climate R&D priorities, including
utility-scale energy storage, carbon capture and storage,
hydrogen, advanced nuclear, rare earth element separations,
floating offshore wind, biofuel/bioproducts, quantum computing,
and electric vehicles, as well as strengthening U.S.
technological leadership in these areas in global markets.


And there are some other bits scattered throughout, like “ten
pioneer facilities that demonstrate carbon capture retrofits for
large steel, cement, and chemical production facilities, all
while ensuring that overburdened communities are protected from
increases in cumulative pollution.”


This investment in clean-energy innovation is long, long overdue,
and something that every Democrat, including Manchin, at least
claims to support.


Clean energy standard


Midway through one of the bullet points, almost as an aside, we
get this:


President Biden will establish an Energy Efficiency and Clean
Electricity Standard (EECES) aimed at cutting electricity bills
and electricity pollution, increasing competition in the market,
incentivizing more efficient use of existing infrastructure, and
continuing to leverage the carbon pollution-free energy provided
by existing sources like nuclear and hydropower.


This is rather cryptic given that a CES is a central part of
Biden’s climate plan. I’ve heard of clean electricity standards
and efficiency standards, but I’ve never heard of an EECES and
there’s not much here on how it would work or its targets. (The
mention of nuclear and hydropower seems like a signal to
lawmakers in, say, the Upper Midwest that they don’t need to be
nervous.)


It’s good that this made it into the plan, but the lack of detail
does cause one to wonder how much faith the administration has
that it will survive the coming Manchin Bath.


(Listen to my podcast with Dr. Leah Stokes and Sam Ricketts on
how to get a CES through reconciliation.)


Buildings and distributed energy


I have also written on the importance of decarbonizing buildings.
(I am old and have written about everything.) Biden’s plan would
drop a whopping $213 billion on upgrading buildings.


The plan would “produce, preserve, and retrofit more than a
million affordable, resilient, accessible, energy efficient, and
electrified housing units” and “build and rehabilitate more than
500,000 homes for low- and middle-income homebuyers.”


It would also — my heart sings — create a competitive grant
program to reward local jurisdictions that take steps to
eliminate exclusionary zoning. (Read Sightline’s Dan Bertolet for
more on the evils of exclusionary zoning.)


The plan has $27 billion for a Clean Energy and Sustainability
Accelerator “to mobilize private investment into distributed
energy resources; retrofits of residential, commercial and
municipal buildings; and clean transportation.”


There’s $40 billion to improve public-housing infrastructure.
There’s money to upgrade, modernize, and reduce the greenhouse
gas emissions of schools ($100 billion), community colleges ($12
billion), child-care facilities ($25 billion), VA hospitals ($18
billion), and federal buildings ($10 billion).


All of that work on buildings creates lots and lots of high-skill
domestic jobs that can’t be outsourced, while reducing energy
bills for consumers.


So much more


I’ve only highlighted a handful of the dozens and dozens of
provisions in the proposal. It extends the federal clean-energy
tax credits by 10 years, aims for 100 percent broadband access,
invests in resilience for vulnerable communities and ecosystems,
creates hundreds of thousands of union jobs plugging orphan oil
and gas wells, and on and on.


Much like the Covid recovery bill passed last month, the plan
contains dozens of provisions and programs that, were they passed
on their own, would count as major milestones. If even a
substantial number of them make it through, this will be a
historic achievement.


Biden’s job plan would have seismic direct effects on the US
economy and people, but a couple of its less-discussed
second-order effects are worth highlighting.


Reducing air pollution produces enormous progressive benefits


First, if Biden can kick-start a domestic EV industry the way
Obama’s stimulus bill kick-started solar — if he can electrify
the federal fleet, get hundreds of thousands of charging stations
built, and put the electricity sector on a path to net-zero — he
will have indirectly set in motion the greatest and most rapid
reduction of US air pollution in generations.


As I wrote last year on Vox, all the recent science points in the
same direction: air pollution, particularly smog, does much worse
damage to health, at much lower exposure, than previously
appreciated. The upshot of this new research is that a transition
away from fossil fuels to clean energy will pay for itself in
proximate health benefits alone, even setting aside reductions in
future warming.


Similarly, though it will take some professional modeling to
determine the exact level of pollution reductions Biden’s plan
would produce, there’s a very good chance that it too would more
than pay for itself in health benefits.


And, again, the impacts of air pollution are not equitably
distributed. Low-income and minority communities are more likely
to be located along highways or near polluting facilities.
Children, the elderly, and those with disabilities are hardest
hit. Reducing air pollution, especially from vehicles, is
progressive, in both the economic and political senses of the
term.


Cheap batteries will have spillover effects


Second, by pushing the shift to EVs and scaling up a domestic
supply chain and manufacturing base, Biden’s plan will further
accelerate the already vertiginous plunge in battery prices.


A recent comprehensive study found that lithium-ion batteries
have fallen in price by 97 percent since their commercial
introduction in 1991. As co-author Jessika Trancik of MIT put it:
“lithium-ion battery technologies have improved in terms of their
costs at rates that are comparable to solar energy technology,
and specifically photovoltaic modules, which are often held up as
the gold standard in clean energy innovation.”


Batteries’ movement down the cost curve can be accelerated by
public policy, just as happened so many times for solar PV.
Biden’s plan would put Americans to work making batteries
cheaper.


The cheaper batteries get, the more uses they find for
themselves: as home energy storage, reliable backup power for
data centers, or large-scale grid storage. The more storage is
distributed throughout the grid, the more stable the grid is.


Cheap storage is good for everyone. It’s difficult to predict all
the knock-on effects, but I think it’s going to generate some
cool surprises.


Biden’s plan faces a long, uncertain road


What Biden and the Democrats pulled off with the Covid recovery
bill was something of a miracle. They held together and got a
huge bill through Congress with remarkably little fuss, which
never happens any more.


That moment, with its particular sense of urgency and necessity,
has passed. Congress will inevitably spend a lot more time on
this infrastructure bill.


Generally speaking, time is Democrats’ enemy. Every day that
passes is a chance for right-wing media to fully polarize the
issue and make the negotiations look ugly and contentious to the
public.


Dems have to go through the motions of negotiating with
Republicans, not because there’s any prospect of Republican
cooperation (there isn’t), but because Joe Manchin’s political
brand-building requires it, and nothing can pass without Manchin.


At some point (one hopes) it will become clear to everyone that
Republicans are a lost cause and Dems must pass the bill through
reconciliation, for which they only need 50 votes.


Then the only problem will be getting every single Democratic
senator on board. Who knows what that will look like.


Pelosi says she wants to pass the bill by July 4, but who knows
how firm that deadline will prove. There are many twists and
turns and setbacks ahead.


The very best-case scenario is that Manchin (perhaps with some
group of “moderates”) picks a fight over a particular item — the
exact structure of the taxes that will pay for the bill, or one
of the spending areas — and theatrically wins it, getting some
changes made.


Meanwhile … the rest of the enormous bill passes largely
unremarked. That’s basically what happened with the Covid
recovery bill.


If the bill passes at all, it won’t be exactly what Biden has
proposed. Nonetheless, no matter what happens, it’s worth
celebrating what Biden has done here. Within this expansive
infrastructure package is a mini-Green New Deal, with large-scale
spending targeted at just the areas energy wonks say could
accelerate the transition to clean energy — all with a focus on
equity and justice for vulnerable communities on the front lines
of that transition.


If it passes in anything like its current form, it will be the
most significant climate and energy legislation of my lifetime,
by a wide margin. I’m going to allow myself a moment of
excitement and hope. Don’t worry, I’m sure it will pass.


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