DAILY TRIFECTA: Playing Dirty With Clean Energy
Inflation Reduction Retroaction
THE SET-UP: Hell hath no fury like a Tech Bro scorned?
That’s the melodrama we’ll be binge-watching for a while as the long-anticipated break-up of Elon and Don spills out onto their social media platforms.
Yeah … how perfectly “21st Century” is it that they both have their own social media platforms?
Elon got the jump on Don today … live-tweeting out real-time responses to Don’s “disappointed” take on Elon’s criticism of the “Big Beautiful Bill” (BBB) during Don’s Oval Office presser with German Chancellor Merz. It wasn’t long before Elon was linking Don to the unreleased Epstein Files.
Don claimed, among other things, that Elon’s upset about the BBB’s termination of EV tax credits. That was Speaker Mike Johnson’s first take when confronted with Elon’s first attack on the BBB’s “abomination.” And it makes sense to spin Elon’s criticism as an outgrowth of financial self-interest rather than as a critique of the bill’s flaws.
Of course, that contradicts months of Johnson and Trump defending Elon’s role In DOGE by claiming he’s so rich that he’s beyond mere financial self-interest. Back then, the conventional wisdom determined that Tesla would actually benefit from the end of credits and subsidies. But that was before Tesla’s epic crash in both sales and stock price … which, ironically, was the price Elon paid for leading the Trump-endorsed effort to cut government.
Now that Elon’s been shown the door and his cutting has been swamped by the BBB’s fiscal imprudence, those Federal tax credits may, as CNN Business explained today, be desperately needed to stoke consumer demand for Teslas. Elon, though, denied it repeatedly on X:
Keep the EV/solar incentives cuts in the bill, also cut all the crazy spending increases in the Big Ugly Bill so that America doesn’t go bankrupt!
Just based on his fanboy admiration for Milton Friedman, I kinda doubt Elon’s using fiscal conservatism as a ruse to keep Tesla’s tax credits … but it could be true.
What I know is true is that Senate Majority Leader John Thune is grappling with the countervailing demands of fiscal conservatives and the beneficiaries of what Trump calls the “Green New Scam.” It’s more commonly known as the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and, in what might be called the “Revenge of the Autopen,” its clean energy benefits were strategically spread around Red States. Those benefits generated jobs. That, in turn, created constituents. Constituents are voters. And politicians like voters. That means many of them like the clean energy initiatives their voters like … despite the “R” next to their name. But unlike Elon, they can’t afford to be fiscal conservatives on the issue of clean energy. - jp
TITLE: Texas Legislature Beats Back Assault on Clean Energy
https://prospect.org/environment/2025-06-05-texas-legislature-beats-back-assault-on-clean-energy/
EXCERPTS: It may surprise some people that Texas is the American poster child for clean energy. But a fortunate mix of climatic and topographic elements has made it the leading state in the nation for wind energy generation, while second for solar and battery storage. Billions and billions of dollars of investments unlocked those resources, and its business-friendly opportunities (no corporate or personal income tax!) for all comers, from entrepreneurs to fossil fuel giants to small landowners, have sparked one of the strangest regional energy revolutions in the world. Sprinkle in generous federal clean-energy tax credits, and the country’s largest industrial and consumer energy market has been booming.
It’s never been easy being green in a Republican stronghold, but more than a few Texas Republican lawmakers were on the verge of tossing it all away. They failed, but Congress is next up to take its shot. Can renewables proponents protect clean-energy dominance in Texas, or anywhere else for that matter, in an era of ferocious political backsliding?
Several state Senate bills backed by deep-pocketed anti-renewables interests would have curbed wind and solar installation on private lands. The bills, respectively, would have implemented onerous permitting requirements; mandated that the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the state’s independent electric grid operator, be sourced from dispatchable generation (read: natural gas) and other fossil fuels rather than wind, solar, or battery storage; and required that new and existing renewables projects buy backup generation from fossil fuel plants.
Those individual bills were bad enough. But as a package, they would have been devastating for the state’s power sector. Renewables provide 30 percent of power generation in Texas, and cutting back on that capacity meant consumers would have paid even more for unreliable electricity susceptible to blackouts.
A constellation of clean-energy and environmental advocates, as well as the Texas Oil and Gas Association, the Chemical Council, the state Association of Manufacturers, and the state Energy Buyers Alliance and others all lined up to oppose the Senate bills. Desperation forces strange alliances. Oil companies, for example, have power purchasing agreements to buy from low-cost wind and solar energy producers to power their operations, which in turn reduces the cost of producing a barrel of oil.
The renewables bills were never taken up by the Texas House of Representatives, and therefore died when the legislature adjourned for the year on Monday. The failure comes at a time when load growth—in other words, consumer demand for power—has been rising at about a 5 percent annual rate in the state. “Why would you not want to continue to build out solar power, which is nearly perfectly correlated with air-conditioning load. It just defies logic,” says Doug Lewin, a state energy consultant who publishes The Texas Energy and Power Newsletter. “A majority understood that it would be, to put it mildly, counterproductive, and maybe to put it more on point, ruinous to the state’s economy.”
But Congress may pick up where Texas Republicans left off.
TITLE: House Republicans’ ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ Might Kill Jobs in Many of Their Districts
https://time.com/7291191/big-beautiful-bill-republicans-biden/
EXCERPTS: While much of the talk in Washington right now is about pitfalls aplenty in Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill, the rollback of Biden-era clean-energy efforts is getting scant attention. Yet many voters are likely to notice the fallout from those changes, particularly in swing districts that will decide control of the House next year.
Take the districts those 14 House Republicans represent. Thirteen of them voted for the House bill (Rep. Andrew Garbarino of New York missed the vote) despite provisions that could mean the loss of $40 billion in investment and 43,000 jobs in their districts collectively, according to a report from the nonpartisan Rhodium Group, which publishes quarterly updates on green jobs. Nationally, the rollbacks threaten 830,000 jobs connected to clean-energy projects.
Despite the economic downsides, GOP leaders are moving ahead with a tax-and-spending bill that would wind down tax credits for cleaner cars like electric vehicles by the end of this year, scrap incentives for battery makers by 2028, and levy a new annual fee on drivers who opt into lower-emission vehicles (purportedly to replace lost gasoline taxes). At the same time, clean-energy manufacturers would see their tax credits go dark by 2031, and lower-emissions energy projects like wind, nuclear, and solar would lose their incentives in 2032. Across the country, job-creating projects currently in development would no longer make economic sense.
For instance, in Rep. Jen Kiggans’ Virginia district, which is based in the Hampton Roads region, about $11.3 billion in funding is at risk. That means about 2,005 jobs, an estimate based on announced projects that were not yet online as of March 31, the end of the first quarter of the year.
Kiggans has been out front urging changes to the work her fellow Republicans have been doing, organizing the letter to colleagues asking they tweak their repeal language to give more flexibility on projects. “We appreciate the Ways and Means Committee putting America first by investing in American energy dominance, but the last thing any of us want is to provoke an energy crisis or cause higher energy bills for working families,” they wrote on May 14.
These lawmakers have already seen the upside from the three-year-old incentives. In Rep. Mark Amodei’s Nevada district, constituents were expecting a total of $15.2 billion in clean-energy investments, but $7.6 billion of that is pending and now at risk. In Rep. Dan Newhouse’s Washington district, the expected $5.4 billion in clean investments could be $4.5 billion less under the new proposal. And the list goes on for district after district, from coast to coast.
TITLE: How Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ hits wind, solar and batteries
https://www.eenews.net/articles/how-trumps-big-beautiful-bill-hits-wind-solar-and-batteries/
EXCERPTS: A critical group of moderate Republicans say the Senate should reconsider the House’s rapid phase down of tax credits for wind, solar and battery manufacturing, among other clean energy sources.
There are multiple provisions in the House megabill that would hinder solar and wind, but two in particular are cited frequently by analysts.
One involves tight timelines to start and complete projects. Currently, the language calls for projects to commence construction within 60 days of the bill becoming law to qualify to receive technology-neutral investment and production tax credits. The timeline would block most initiatives, according to analysts.
Developers also would have to ensure a project is placed in service by 2028 to receive credits, rather than an earlier plan to phase out incentives after 2031.
Secondly, “foreign entities of concern” requirements that would kick in by 2026 could stymie projects. The language mandates that projects not receive “material assistance” with minerals and key components from countries such as China, Russia and North Korea to obtain tax credits.
Robbie Orvis, senior director of modeling and analysis at Energy Innovation: Policy and Technology, said either provision alone — the timelines or “foreign entity” language — would be enough to block most wind and solar installations from receiving tax credits. To comply with the language, industries would have to set up a complex tracing system for their supply chains within a few months.
“There’s no way the industry will ever be able to set that up on that time frame,” said Orvis.
Another obstacle for wind and solar is text blocking tax credit eligibility for projects financed through leasing arrangements in the residential sector. Currently, many rooftop solar projects operate through leasing, allowing customers to utilize panels even though they don’t own the system.
If the language remains, it could force the residential solar industry to “reevaluate its entire business model,” said a research note from the law firm Paul Hastings.
Rhodium Group found the bill language as it is today would reduce the amount of clean capacity added to the grid by 2035 by 57 to 72 percent. An analysis from Princeton University researchers concluded the House text could increase U.S. greenhouse gas emissions annually by 1 billion metric tons in a decade.
The Solar Energy Industries Association released a report Tuesday breaking down potential job losses in every state if the House package became law. The group has said there could be 300,000 lost jobs overall. “Lost jobs in every single state are a recipe for disaster for American families, businesses, and the U.S. economy,” said SEIA president and CEO Abby Ross Hopper in a statement.
But [Sylvia Leyva Martinez, a solar analyst at Wood Mackenzie], said the solar industry would not be fully decimated if tax credits were to be repealed. She noted that solar’s levelized cost of electricity is competitive with other fuels and there are existing challenges with bringing natural gas online, such as backlogs of turbines.
If full rollbacks of credits occur, it would most affect smaller solar developers who don’t have much flexibility to renegotiate power purchase agreements, she said.
BloombergNEF has projected that under a full tax repeal, more than 80 percent of wind and solar projects would still get built.
“Still, a 17% cut in renewables construction at a time when electricity demand is growing and gas turbine infrastructure is increasingly scarce is a recipe for spiking power prices,” the firm said in a research note.
On the deployment side, many of the same provisions that would affect wind and solar, such as rollbacks of technology-neutral tax credits, could affect storage. The battery supply chain is heavily reliant on Chinese minerals and components, which would kick in the foreign entity requirements.
The foreign entity provisions alone could reduce battery storage deployments approximately 89 percent by 2035 in comparison to where the industry would be otherwise, according to C2ES modeling. Any decline could have implications not just for renewables but grid reliability, as storage can help meet electricity demand peaks. The House language also could affect battery manufacturers.
“The vast majority of U.S. solar and battery factories — which together account for the bulk of the clean-tech manufacturing pipeline — are downstream solar module and battery cell factories. Their relatively higher reliance on upstream components renders all the more fraught efforts to comply with the anti-China provisions,” BloombergNEF analysts said.
Some Senate Republicans have been supportive of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits. In April, GOP Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, John Curtis of Utah and Jerry Moran of Kansas sent a letter to Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) saying a full-scale repeal of tax credits, including for renewable power, could lead to “significant disruptions for the American people.”
“Moderation may be likely simply because senators represent entire states, and diverse sectors’ multiplier effects can stretch across district boundaries,” ClearView Energy Partners said in a research note after passage of the House bill. The analysts noted that Thune hails from a state with a stake in wind energy and biofuels.
On Capitol Hill on Tuesday, senators offered a few clues on which way they may go. Tillis, for example, called for changes to the foreign entity provisions and said he would not back the House bill language.
SEE ALSO:
Grassley says he’ll seek compromise on phase-out of wind energy tax incentives
https://www.radioiowa.com/2025/06/03/grassley-says-hell-seek-compromise-on-phase-out-of-wind-energy-tax-incentives/
Director of bipartisan energy group says Big Beautiful Bill could kill clean energy jobs in West Virginia
https://www.wvnstv.com/news/director-of-bipartisan-energy-group-says-big-beautiful-bill-could-kill-clean-energy-jobs-in-west-virginia/
Trump’s Budget Wish Could Threaten Billions in Clean Energy Investment in Virginia
https://www.virginiascope.com/trumps-budget-wish-could-threaten-billions-in-clean-energy-investment-in-virginia/
Repealing clean energy tax credits would raise SC utility bills, reduce jobs
https://scdailygazette.com/2025/06/03/repealing-clean-energy-tax-credits-would-raise-sc-utility-bills-reduce-jobs/
Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill' sets sights on clean energy in Colorado
https://kiowacountypress.net/content/trumps-big-beautiful-bill-sets-sights-clean-energy-colorado
California added record clean energy — can it keep it up?
https://www.theverge.com/climate-change/679615/renewable-energy-record-capacity-growth-california