By Robert Bradley Jr.
The wind/solar narrative shifts as the polls do. The latest message is that wind and solar are cost-effective and the natural choice for energy affordability. Yet the renewable industry pleads for evergreen help with the outsized subsidies of the Production Tax Credit (PTC) and Investment Tax Credit (ITC), which are on track to end at the end of next year for any new project.
As the free world turns toward natural gas in the new era, consider the following narrative quotations, aspirational and wrong.
“Some critics of solar facilities have falsely claimed that they are expensive and inefficient….” – Maxine Joselow, “As Trump Obliterates Climate Efforts, States Try to Fill the Gap,” New York Times (February 19, 2026)
“Solar is now the cheapest energy source in human history, yet rollbacks are spreading from California to Virginia as officials blame high costs and a hostile Trump administration.” – Haley Zaremba, “Solar Is the Cheapest Power in History, but States Are Retreating from It,” OilPrice.com (June 19, 2026).
Desperation is the word as “House Democrats Want Clean Energy Tax Credits Back ,” according to Inside Climate News, (March 18, 2026). Reports Arcelia Martin:
A new bill would reinstate incentives from the Inflation Reduction Act and provide assistance for consumer electricity costs…. The “Energy Bills Relief Act,” signed by more than half of House Democrats, 122 in all, seeks to establish new incentives for renewable projects and to protect consumers from rising electricity costs due to grid demands from large energy users such as data centers.
In addition to re-upping clean energy credits introduced in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, the sweeping legislation would reinstate grant money for renewable energy projects that the Trump administration terminated and authorize $2.1 billion to address shortages of transformers and other grid technologies.
Fake Republicans are also in on the act.
House Republicans have introduced the American Energy Dominance Act (April 2026) to reverse tightened deadlines on wind and solar tax credits (45Y/48E) imposed by the 2025 “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBBA). The new bill aims to remove the July 4, 2026, construction deadline and 2027 operational deadline for solar and wind projects, citing lost investments.
And this from C3 Solutions. States co-founder Drew Bond in “Solar Doesn’t Need Subsidies Anymore” (April 27, 2026):
Solar power is now among the cheapest forms of electricity on Earth. Yet the industry still behaves as if it can’t survive without government support.
It cannot. One can only wish that Bond is right and the industry will raise the white flag regarding subsidies.
The solar industry doesn’t have a subsidy problem. It has a confidence problem. July 4 isn’t a deadline to fear but a milestone that signals American solar is ready to compete without training wheels. The numbers tell the story. According to the International Renewable Energy Agency, the cost of utility-scale solar has fallen roughly 90% since 2010—from about 46 cents per kilowatt-hour to roughly 4.3 cents today. Solar is now one of the cheapest sources of new electricity generation in the world, trailing only onshore wind. Over the past decade the industry has grown at an average annual rate of about 28%.
The U.S. now has roughly 262 gigawatts of installed solar capacity—enough to power about 45 million homes, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association…. Solar is one of the fastest and least expensive ways to meet much of [increasing demand] and that advantage doesn’t disappear on July 5.
So what? The above statistic demonstrate how outsized subsidies (state-level too) propelled an economically incorrect energy into existence en masse. Bond incorrectly concludes:
All of this means solar is no longer a fragile startup industry. It is one of the most remarkable energy scale-ups in modern American history. The industry simply hasn’t fully accepted that reality…. After decades of public support, policymakers aren’t sending the solar industry to its funeral. They’re celebrating its graduation.
This is a strange article. Yes, solar costs have come down (as have other energy technologies). Yes, solar was enabled by special government favor. But no–solar for the grid and at large scale is not competitive with natural gas combined cycle, as the current dash-for-gas demonstrates. In a recent news piece in the New York Times, “New Amazon Data Center Stokes Worry It Would Be the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S., Hiroko Tabuchi stated:
To avoid years of potential delays in hooking up to electrical utilities, data-center developers are increasingly choosing to build their own dedicated, on-site power plants instead. And gas-burning plants are usually the fastest and easiest to build.
To recap. The PR narrative is that solar is now cost-competitive. But behind the scenes, the lobbying frenzy by solar trade groups, led by the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) nationally and in Texas, the Texas Solar Energy Society (TXSES), speaks for itself. It is continued subsidies or bust for the utility-scale solar industry.
