China installed 400 GW of new power last year, over 350 gigawatts of solar and wind. The U.S.? Just 63. We talk a big game about leading on AI, chips, and reshoring manufacturing. But where’s the electricity going to come from? Some say natural gas can replace renewables. But the largest turbine manufacturer, GE Vernova, is already sold out until after Trump’s term. Meanwhile:
China = 400 GW
U.S. = 60 GW
GE Vernova’s global gas turbine output = 20 GW… for the entire globe!
If we gut clean energy incentives now, we don’t just fall behind, we’re cooked. You can’t grow your economy and run AI data centers on backorders and broken promises. We’re demanding more energy than ever. And we’re about to constrain the resources that are actually delivering it.
I continue talking to farmers about their experience with clean energy. Don Clark, a dairy farmer in Rosebush, Michigan, is one of a select few who have experience with both wind, and solar energy.
A few years ago, after Don had spent a LOT of money upgrading his dairy operation, the price of milk collapsed. There was some concern that large chunks of the farm would have to be sold to keep up with bills. Wind turbines came to the area in 2020, and Don got several on his property. Now, a co-located solar farm will also occupy some of Don’s acreage. Result? The farm can stay in the family, and when it’s time, Don can back out of the dairy business and do something he’s been wanting to do – raise bees.
The financial advisory firm Lazard reaffirmed last week that renewables remain the cheapest form of energy: “On an unsubsidized $/MWh basis, renewable energy remains the most cost-competitive form of generation.”
In other words, if Congress removes clean energy tax credits — even maintaining myriad other energy subsidies for just about every other form of energy — renewables will still be built, but electricity will cost a lot more.
What does that mean? Your energy bills would go up.
Anti-clean energy activists blithely suggest that the nation can just build a lot of new gas and nuclear power; market realities tell a different story. Even the staunchest nuclear proponents don’t think it can scale up before 2032.
Republicans like to make a big deal about how they support nuclear power, but the Trump administration has been gutting the technical and financial infrastructure needed to support that industry’s growth. Keystone Cops approach to energy dominance not likely to succeed.
A White House executive order issued last month targeting the independence of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the federal agency that oversees the safety and security of U.S. commercial nuclear facilities and materials, as well as the possibly illegal firing earlier this month of Commissioner Christopher Hanson by President Donald Trump, are raising serious concerns about the agency’s effectiveness as a regulator going forward. While I’ve often been a critic of the NRC for taking actions favoring the nuclear industry at the expense of public health and safety, preserving the NRC in its current form is the best hope for heading off a U.S. nuclear plant disaster like the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi reactor meltdowns in Japan.
My long-standing beef with the NRC has primarily been with its political leadership, not with the rank-and-file staff of highly knowledgeable inspectors, analysts and researchers committed to helping ensure that nuclear power remains safe and secure. These professionals are well aware how quickly things can go south at a nuclear power plant without rigorous oversight. They know from experience what obscure corners to look in and what questions to ask. And they can tell — and are not afraid to push back — when they are getting sold snake oil by fly-by-night startups looking to make easy money by capitalizing on the current nuclear power craze. Technical rigor and expert judgment form the bedrock of this work.
The video above is set to begin at the point in Senator Whitehouse’s speech yesterday where he describes the potential impacts on the clean power industry, and power production in general, should this bill be approved.
Climate and clean energy advocates thought they had already seen the worst case scenario in previous versions of the Senate’s sweeping reconciliation bill. They were wrong.
The latest bill, released late Friday night, includes a new tax on solar and wind farms that analysts at Rhodium Group estimate will increase the cost of renewable energy projects by 10 to 20%. That’s on top of cost increases that will come from an aggressive phase out of tax credits that have led to a clean energy boom over the last decade.
“It’s a kill shot. This new excise tax on wind and solar is designed to fully kill the industry,” Adrian Deveny, founder and president of the policy advisory firm Climate Vision, told Politico.
The bill could become law as soon as this evening if the Senate succeeds at bringing it to the floor while most Americans are asleep.
North American Building Trades Unions – on the current No Good, Horrible Very Bad Bill before the Senate:
“If enacted, this stands to be the biggest job-killing bill in the history of this country. Simply put, it is the equivalent of terminating more than 1,000 Keystone XL pipeline projects. In some cases, it worsens the already harmful trajectory of the House-passed language, threatening an estimated 1.75 million construction jobs and over 3 billion work hours, which translates to $148 billion in lost annual wages and benefits. These are staggering and unfathomable job loss numbers, and the bill throws yet another lifeline and competitive advantage to China in the race for global energy dominance.”
The bill wouldn’t just dramatically slow clean energy’s growth. It would also provide subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. One provision in the bill would exempt oil and gas drillers from paying any corporate taxes. Another provision offers coal producers a production tax credit. These giveaways would add to the hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies the industry has received from taxpayers over the last century.
The new fossil fuel subsidies in the bill come after a month of intense pressure from fossil fuel industry lobbyists and advocates. In a lunch with Republican Senators, fossil fuel advocate Alex Epstein successfully argued that Senate leaders should go further than the House did in slowing clean energy’s growth.
Last week, Epstein said wind and solar were “a cancer we have to get rid of” before referring to jobs created by the industry as “fentanyl jobs.” He told the New York Times his advocacy is funded by the fossil fuel industry.
Has any great nation committed suicide in quite the way the United States seems poised to?
Podcast above discusses current state of the emerging tax bill as of Sunday, June 29. Big implications for clean energy in the Bill’s present form. Big implications for the economy of the United States. If this bill passes it will go down in history as the symbolic end of the American Century. Clean energy discussion begins at 5:11.
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.
The Senate’s tax bill, which cleared a key procedural hurdle Saturday, contains strict green energy cutbacks that disappointed lobbyists for solar, wind and battery companies, who hoped senators would temper some of the House’s most draconian cuts. It also imposes a new tax on existing wind and solar farms if they include materials from a foreign entity like China — a huge blow for the renewables industry, which incorporates many materials from China across its supply chain.
“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 started in the Senate.
The Republicans' One Big Horrible Bill simultaneously manages to raise US energy bills, kill 100s of planned manufacturing plants, hundreds thousands of good manufacturing jobs & millions of construction jobs, give up on AI, EVs, solar, batteries and other industries of the…
Donald Trump and Senate Republican leaders worked Saturday to persuade reluctant holdouts to back the president’s multi-trillion dollar tax and spending bill ahead of a pivotal vote.
The weekend arm-twisting, which included Trump golfing with frequent foe Rand Paul and other senators, came as the party worked to rush the bill to the president’s desk ahead of a self-imposed July 4 deadline.
–
Senate Republicans moved up a cut-off for tax credits used for wind and solar projects even earlier then they initially proposed, amid pushback on the credits from Trump. The new measure requires those projects to be “placed in service” by the end of 2027 to receive the incentives, as opposed to simply being under construction by that time.
The change, if it makes into law, could be a blow to companies such as NextEra Energy Inc., the biggest US developer of wind and solar projects. But the energy tweaks may help get holdout GOP Senator Mike Lee to vote for the bill.
Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer warned Americans in a social media post that Republicans’ plan to phase out the clean energy tax breaks would “jack up your electric bills and jeopardize hundreds of thousands of jobs.”
Senate Republicans also would alter an existing clean energy tax credit so that it would also cover production of metallurgical coal, which is used in steel making.
The new Senate draft raises taxes on all wind and solar projects that haven't begun construction today unless they are placed service by end of 2027 and navigate complex, likely unworkable requirements to prove they don't use a drop of Chinese materials. After that, this bill…
Very satisfying as someone who finds himself doing a slow boil when I notice someone sitting in a car and idling an engine for no reason. In New York City, they pay a bounty on those suckers.
