Adam Pack
Congressional Reporter
The Senate dealt a series of blows to solar and wind energy in the latest version of President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” bill — taking a page out of House Republicans’ playbook to crack down on green energy tax credits enacted under former President Joe Biden.
The Senate’s new proposal would move up the deadline for solar and wind projects hoping to qualify for production and investment tax credits by requiring them to produce electricity by the end of 2027. The additional cuts to green energy tax credits follows the president’s public broadside against the upper chamber’s initial proposal, which delayed the termination of solar and wind subsidies. (RELATED: Trump Calls On Waffling Congress To Crush Biden’s Green ‘SCAM’)
“Windmills, and the rest of this ‘JUNK,’ are the most expensive and inefficient energy in the world, is destroying the beauty of the environment, and is 10 times more costly than any other energy,” Trump wrote in a post to Truth Social on June 21. “It is time to break away, finally, from this craziness!!!”
The upper chamber’s revised bill would also create a new tax on wind and solar projects whose components are sourced from foreign entities of concern, such as China.
Senate Democrats referred to the creation of a new excise tax penalizing the renewable industry’s reliance on Chinese materials as “economic self-sabotage” and an “outright massacre” for the solar and wind industry.
Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee was one of several GOP senators pushing the upper chamber to aggressively crack down on solar and wind tax credits in the president’s landmark bill. The Utah Republican favors a wholesale repeal of green energy subsidies, though Congress is likely to stop short of that given opposition from moderate Republicans.
Republican North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis told reporters Saturday that the Senate finance panel’s decision to accelerate the termination of solar and wind subsidies by the end of 2027 was “disappointing.” He also suggested that failure to maintain the green energy tax breaks would have negative economic consequences for his state.
Tillis is one of several GOP senators that has pledged to vote against the president’s landmark tax and immigration bill, citing the legislation’s reforms to Medicaid.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and former Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) lead, blasted Senate Republicans for rolling back green energy subsidies within their proposal, accusing GOP senators of putting “millions of jobs” on the chopping block.
“The latest Senate draft bill will destroy millions of jobs in America and cause immense strategic harm to our country!” Musk, the founder of the electric vehicle manufacturer, Tesla, wrote on his social media platform, X. “Utterly insane and destructive. It gives handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future.”
Proponents of terminating green energy subsidies argued that the green energy industry’s messaging revealed its dependency on government funds in order to be profitable.
“If, as supporters of the IRA [Inflation Reduction Act] are complaining, repealing these subsidies will ‘kill’ their industry, then maybe it shouldn’t exist in the first place,” American Energy Alliance president Tom Pyle said in a statement Saturday. “Extending green giveaways on the backs of American taxpayers is shortsighted and neglectful.”
The conservative House Freedom Caucus (HFC) has also urged the Senate to adopt the House-passed language that put solar and wind tax credits on a faster route to termination.
Several HFC members, including Republican Reps. Chip Roy of Texas and Ralph Norman of South Carolina, suggested they would not vote for the Senate’s proposal if it failed to adhere to the House language accelerating the termination of green energy subsidies.
“That’s got to go,” Norman told the DCNF in an interview Thursday. “The President wants it to go. He wants to abolish all of them. We agree with that.”
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No, it is a big, beautiful DOGE chainsaw.
It is not hard enough on wind and solar subsidies.
BTW: Thom Tillis announced he is not running for reelection. Another RINO down.
Another RINO down.
I never understood how he got nominated – he was in the State legislature before and wasn’t liked then, either.
My worry is: what damage will he do before the end of his term, now that reelection isn’t a concern?
My hypothesis is just an old layman’s observation, but I’d be interested to hear from “qualified experts” about this.
It applies particularly to proponents of utility-scale, intermittent wind & solar electricity supply
My observation / hypothesis is –
“Rationality and ideology cannot operate in the same mind space at the same time”
(Hence we get proponents of wind & solar)
Even If democrats win in the future, they won’t be able to fix this. Green energy requires consistent government support, so long as at least one party threatens to pull the pin any time they are in office the game is up.
Or so one can hope.
This is one reason why I continue to post about the unsoundness of the core claim that incremental CO2 must be expected to drive sensible heat gain down here. With all the political pinball on energy and “climate” policy, eventually the public needs to know there was never any good scientific reason to think hydrocarbon fuels cause harm through emission of CO2.
It’s okay, the best of breed utility scale solar will watch as all the tax credit miners fade away (finally). It beats the crowded field of losers supported by Obama and Biden and the pay to play legislation for rooftop solar lobbyists.
Hopefully this becomes known as the Great Subsidy Drought for ALL Subsidy Farms.
My version:
Hopefully this becomes known as the Great Subsidy
DroughtBlackout for ALL Subsidy Farms.“… best of breed utility scale solar …”? Please provide one example.
First Solar up $10 in premarket based on the latest Senate version. Their 3 new US mfg plants will have an advantage.
And some 45x mfg tax credits were retained.
I want wind and solar to show what they’ve got. Let’s see what you can do without government money, mandates or environmental forgiveness.
They’ve got nothing. Their only economically feasable aplication is where it is impossible to run an extention cord from the existing grid..f.e. space.
With or without government money all they can do is burn cash, kill birds, saturate landfills and waste energy, resources and time.
Okay, the invention and patent by the serial inventor Harold McMaster will now show you in the absence of all those subsidy dependent players headed for the exits. That CVD-on-glass technology is the basis for the largest panel producer in the western hemisphere and all of its foreign and subsidized US competition is now toast. The loss of tax credits for this leader is a hit to margins but maybe not so bad with stabilized or rising price per watt sold.
‘Green’ subsidies produce the wrong kind of jobs. Unsustainable and low economic value.
pardon to correct you a litte: NO economic value at all.
Since the creation of these kind of jobs requires stolen money and thrives of the forced extinction of a tenfold of existing jobs with great economic value.
In accounting/bookkeeping, black is positive cash/value and red is negative.
Therefore these are “Red” subsidies and “Red” energy.
Thanks for the $90mill chumps to discover there’s no quid in it-
Developers dump Gladstone’s Central Queensland Hydrogen Project CQH2
Any other bright ideas you’d like us to investigate and consult on?
Please do not kill my highly subsidized wave action project, which will save mankind and make me a multi billionaire, who is not allowed to exist, according to the faux-illegal alien, Communist, aspirant for New York City mayor
One double backflip with full pike coming up-
‘Short answer is no’: Government faces reality behind green dream
Why is that news to anyone capable of actual thinking?!
Hydrogen is “The Elizabeth Taylor of Elements.” It is always “married” to something else here on Earth, and the ” divorce” will always consume more energy than will ever be produced by burning the hydrogen.
Hydrogen is an energy SINK, not an energy SOURCE, and that is never going to change.
And the energy required to produce hydrogen will come mainly from coal, oil and gas in any event. Nuclear is the only other way, and I don’t see a crash program to bud huge numbers of new reactors to use that.
*build*
Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.
So are billions beating a path to the door of solar voltaic and wind turbine generators?
Only when coerced. So much for a free economy.
If these technologies are as economically valuable as claimed, then they should be able to be economical without tax payer funded subsidies.
Command economies always fail.
It’s about time these handouts were ended, anyway. It’s been long enough for the proponents of wind and solar in particular to be able to show that their product is reliable and cost-effective; but when most of the opposite has become evident, it’s up to the renewable providers to be able to show that what they’re offering is a good deal without subsidies and high consumer prices to prop them up.
The handouts never should have been started; they can’t end soon enough.
Grid connected wind and solar are idiotic. All they do is make the grid LESS reliable, LESS stable, and MORE expensive. Lose-lose-lose.