The investment surge has prompted forecasters to significantly update their views on the long-term potential of the law. Analysts at two research organizations, the Brookings Institution and the Rhodium Group, have estimated that over 10 years, private investment could be at least one and a half to three times as much as initial projections. The largest increase is projected to be in industrial and manufacturing activity for hydrogen, carbon capture, energy storage and critical minerals — areas key to long-term energy security.

This overall investment wave has the potential to drive a more rapid and efficient decarbonization of the economy while increasing the supply of clean energy and maintaining the country’s competitive edge of stable, low-cost energy. Rhodium, for example, along with researchers from the University of Chicago, found that I.R.A. energy production tax credits would lower energy costs for consumers and businesses while reducing power sector carbon dioxide emissions at an average cost of $33 to $50 per metric ton — considerably less than recent estimates of the social cost of carbon, the economic damage that would result from emitting additional carbon.

But these early encouraging signs do not guarantee long-term success. The law did not provide all the necessary tools to achieve national goals for expanding our supply of clean energy. Congress and the Biden administration still have more work to do.

First, lawmakers must make it easier to build clean energy infrastructure in America. Congress should immediately go beyond the permitting provisions included in the recently announced debt limit compromise bill and pass comprehensive legislation to speed energy development, an idea that has bipartisan support. The administration should use its authority to streamline project timelines. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission should more aggressively clear backlogs preventing clean energy projects from connecting to the grid. Policymakers should consider new incentives to expand energy capacity, like conditioning federal assistance to states and localities that reform land-use policies to allow clean energy development.

Second, lawmakers should continue to encourage efficient, low-carbon investments. For example, Congress could develop an industrial competitiveness program for heavy industries like cement, steel and chemicals that includes an emissions-based border adjustment fee on imported industrial goods from countries with less ambitious emissions controls. This would bolster the I.R.A.’s incentives, increase the competitiveness of American industries and address China’s nonmarket practices in these areas, such as flooding the market with products at far below their fair value.

Third, we need to work with allies across developed and emerging markets to build a cooperative international framework around the I.R.A.’s investment incentives. Our allies have little to fear and much to gain from working with the United States to expand incentives domestically to deploy clean energy because it must be deployed everywhere, and the I.R.A. incentives will drive down the global cost of energy technologies. The administration has already forged agreements to harmonize these incentives with the European Union, Japan and Canada but will need to use all levers of its foreign policy to secure cooperative arrangements to build resilient energy supply chains, particularly for critical minerals.

Fourth, policymakers and the public need better tools to close the gap between splashy corporate clean energy announcements and speculative long-term projections to understand where investments are being made and what they are achieving.