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.
Suicide pact for the United States of America.
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 latest Senate draft bill will destroy millions of jobs in America and cause immense strategic harm to our country!” Tesla founder Elon Musk posted on X on Saturday, extending his split with the administration he served as leader of the U.S. DOGE Service. “Utterly insane and destructive. It gives handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future.”
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 on which 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 such as South Carolina and Georgia, where some local Republicans are expressing concern despite all the crowing by Trump and many of his GOP allies.
Modeling by the research groups Rhodium and Energy Innovation suggests that the clean energy rollbacks will substantially inhibit the economy. It shows that 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 that the administration contends need 24/7 fossil fuel power, warn that cutting clean energy subsidies is bad policy.
These companies say renewable energy is crucial to their efforts.
Very worthwhile piece from Noahpinion on the threat to American Security:
The Ukrainian attack on Russia’s nuclear bombers shows how insane and self-defeating the GOP’s attack on the battery industry is. Batteries were what powered the Ukrainian drones that destroyed the pride of Russia’s air fleet; if the U.S. refuses to make batteries, it will be unable to make similar drones in case of a war against China. Bereft of battery-powered FPV drones, America would be at a severe disadvantage in the new kind of war that Ukraine and Russia have pioneered.
This weekend, clean energy companies were surprised by the sudden appearance of a tax that they hadn’t realized was under consideration. It would apply to wind and solar projects completed after 2027 if they use a certain percentage of components from China, the industry’s primary supplier of everything from critical minerals to batteries.
“At a basic level it is a fundamental break in the compact between Congress and the private sector,” said Jason Grumet, chief executive of the American Clean Power Association, an industry group. “It is truly unprecedented for Congress to design a punitive tax targeting one aspect of the American economy.”
Wind and solar projects would qualify for tax credits only if placed in service by the end of 2027. The prior version of the bill allowed projects to qualify based on their construction start date.
The new guidelines present a much tougher bar to clear. Developers can control construction starts, for instance, by ordering key equipment or building roads on a site. They have far less influence over in-service dates, which depend on being able to connect to the grid, where lines are long.
Neil Bradley, executive vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, called it a “strong, pro-growth bill” on X but added, “That said, taxing energy production is never good policy, whether oil & gas or, in this case, renewables. Electricity demand is set to see enormous growth & this tax will increase prices. It should be removed.”
The power industry is grappling with meeting electricity demand that is rising for the first time in a generation. The growth is largely due to the artificial intelligence craze and rush to build huge, electricity-chugging data centers.
Developers argue that renewables will help meet the rising demand because they account for most of the near-term electricity generation in the works.
The Trump administration, on the other hand, wants to see more 24-7 power generation built. Yet there is a backlog of four to five years for natural-gas power-plant equipment, making it difficult to add many more of those plants quickly.