Congressional Republicans are poised to reverse course on U.S.energy policy by wiping out hundreds of billions of dollars in incentives for solar and wind projects as well as for consumers seeking to purchase everything from energy-saving appliances to electric cars.
“They’re proposing an outright massacre with punishing new taxes on these industries,” Sen.Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) wrote in a statement on Saturday.He said Republicans added what amounts to a “death sentence” for green energy with provisions added “in the middle of the night” Friday before voting was expected to start in the Senate.
The bill, which still must be passed by both the Senate and the House, would fulfill a major campaign pledge of President Donald Trump, who favors coal mining and oil drilling and has railed against federal green energy spending.With the reversal, executives and climate experts are expecting a sharp retreat in U.S.
manufacturing and continued Chinese domination of the industry.
“The Senate language effectively takes both wind and solar electric supply off the table,” Ray Long, president and CEO of the American Council of Renewable Energy, wrote in an emailed statement.
The new bill also eliminates consumer subsidies for rooftop solar, electric vehicles, heat pumps, and other energy-efficient technologies.Homeowners will have just a few months (for electric vehicles) or until the end of the year (for heat pumps and rooftop solar) to take advantage of the credits before they expire.
The rapid seesaw in Washington’s industrial policy — with what some estimates say is $1 trillion of government and private investment at stake — will kill some big projects on the drawing board and leave investors facing losses for others where construction has begun.
Construction was supposed to be well underway by now at NorSun’s planned $620 million factory in Tulsa, where hundreds of people could be put to work building solar wafers and ingots and helping revitalize manufacturing in the United States.
But shovels haven’t hit the ground and the project has been put on hold indefinitely.
“We’re in a time where anything that gets done by one administration risks getting undone by the next,” said Todd Templeton, director of Americas for NorSun, which was relying on the targeted subsidies to manufacture the wafers and ingots that enable solar panels to harness the sun’s energy — technology that was invented in the U.S.
but hasn’t been made in an American factory in more than a decade.
“It is shaking the confidence of companies that want to manufacture in the U.S.,” he said.“These are long term investments.You need to be able to count on durable policies.”
Some of the biggest impacts will be in red states like South Carolina and Georgia, where some local Republicans are expressing concern despite all the crowing by Trump and many of his GOP allies.
Trump campaigned against green energy incentives that were passed in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act in 2022.Making good on that promise not only saps momentum for manufacturing projects in the United States but also will allow China to remain comfortably in the lead in the race for renewable energy sources, said Robbie Orvis, senior director of modeling and analysis at the think tank Energy Innovation.
“Getting rid of these credits will do the opposite of what the administration and Congress say they want when it comes to competing with China,” he said.
It is not just the solar industry that is in jeopardy.Battery manufacturers, wind turbine assemblers and makers of electric car parts will be hurt, along with producers of computer chips, minerals, industrial glass and other components that underpin modern energy technologies.Many of those companies are preparing to abandon plans to make things in the U.S., according to E2, a nonprofit that advocates for green business.Its tracking data shows an exodus is already beginning, amid the policy uncertainty and Trump administration efforts to freeze billions of dollars in loan guarantees and grants by executive fiat.
In addition to targeting tax credits for green energy manufacturing, the Republican bill also will gut credits that incentivize consumers to install rooftop solar systems and buy electric vehicles.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright recently told a House committee that technologies like wind and solar are “just a parasite on the [power] grid, because you just make the other sources turn up and down as you come and go.”
The American Petroleum Institute says the tax package “fortifies America’s energy advantage.”
Modeling by the research groups Rhodium and Energy Innovation suggests the clean energy rollbacks will substantially inhibit the economy.It shows the measure would raise electricity prices by making renewable energy more expensive at a time it is supplying most of the new electricity added to the power grid and cost as many as 830,000 jobs in 2030.
Even the most energy hungry consumers in the new economy, the AI data centers the administration contends need 27/7 fossil fuel power, warn cutting clean energy subsidies is bad policy.
These companies say renewable energy is crucial to their efforts.
The Clean Energy Buyers Association, a coalition tech firms helped found and lead, says robust incentives for wind and solar energy are crucial because “these are the most readily available sources of electricity and essential to winning the artificial intelligence (AI) race.”
NextEra Energy CEO John Ketchum, whose firm owns and operates the nation’s largest fleet of gas plants, warns slashing the clean energy tax credits could leave the U.S.
short of the power it needs.At a time no new nuclear plants will be available for years and the turbines required to build new fossil fuel plants are back-ordered into the early 2030s, Kethcum wrote in a Fortune op-ed, “America’s only option is to build wind, solar, and battery storage — which can serve as a bridge.”
At Talon PV, a Houston solar cell manufacturer, the outlook has gone from bright to worrisome for its $680 million investment in a new manufacturing plant.CEO Adam Tesanovich said cutting incentives for purchasers of such American made products puts Talon at risk of being unable to match the prices of heavily subsidized Chinese competitors.
“We can compete against other companies, but we can’t compete against governments,” Tesanovich said.“This change would have us directly competing against products subsidized by the Chinese government.”
It’s too late to pull the plug on the factory, he said, as investments have already been made, leaving his firm at risk of “building into the unknown.”
Such clean energy technology facilities had been one of the fastest growing sector of American manufacturing.The Rhodium Group has identified $522 billion of such investment announced by companies since passage of President Joe Biden’s climate package in 2022 that have yet to come online.
Qcells, a solar industry giant based in South Korea which gambled big on manufacturing in the U.S., employs thousands of people in Georgia making solar panels.The Biden-era incentives were a big factor in its plan to build another factory that would allow production to grow to nearly 45,000 solar panels per day by next year.
Officials say the factory will be built, but the company’s ability to make cells, wafers and ingots at prices competitive with Chinese firms is now jeopardized by the tax bill.
Another giant in clean power, France-based ENGIE, which provides renewable energy and battery storage, says it has cut its planned investment in the U.S.in half since January.
“There’s a lot of questions from our board, from our management — is this the right country to continue to invest in with policy uncertainty?” said David Carroll, chief renewables officer for ENGIE North America.“We operate in 30 countries.
We can direct that capital to other countries.”
“No business can plan for investments in these circumstances,” he said.
The Republicans heeding such warnings face political blowback.The American Energy Alliance, an advocacy group fiercely opposed to the clean energy incentives, has launched an ad campaign targeting two GOP senators balking at the repeal, John Curtis of Utah and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, demanding they “stand up for taxpayers.”
North Carolina Sen.Thom Tillis, a Republican facing a tough reelection fight, also has been pressured by lobbyists.North Carolina has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the clean energy incentives.
The subsidies have driven an estimated $16 billion of investment in 68 facilities in North Carolina, according to Energy Innovation, with another $7 billion of investment in dozens more facilities announced.
Will Etheridge, CEO of Southern Energy Management, a Raleigh firm that employs dozens of people installing solar panels, is among clean energy executives who have pressed Tillis to preserve clean energy tax credits.
“Everybody here is shocked,” said Etheridge, a longtime employee of the company who joined with colleagues to buyout the previous owners last year.They borrowed money from family, and some took second mortgages out on their homes, because the fundamentals of the business were strong thanks to the popular consumer tax credit for rooftop solar that was not set to expire until the 2030s.
Etheridge said he expected there would be some changes to federal clean energy law based on Trump’s railing against incentives on the campaign trail.But he said the rhetoric echoed that of Trump’s first term, when the cuts to solar were far more measured.Etheridge said he figured the odds the president would pursue a complete repeal were minuscule.
Now, the company may have to lay off 50 to 60 workers.
“You cannot have this kind of whiplash,” Etheridge said.“If every four years tax policy changes drastically like this, we are not going to be able to build anything great in this country.”.
