After more than A continuous debate day, the US Senate passed its version of the Megabill budget on Tuesday afternoon – with potentially disastrous implications for the future of renewable energy in the country.
Between struggling bad news for climate initiatives, including a new tax credit for coal and the sunset of electric vehicle tax credits, the bill forces aggressive extermination for tax credits for wind and solar. The bill ends credits for projects placed in service – a term meaning, essentially, that a project is ready to provide power to the grid – after 2027, putting hundreds of planned projects around the country in settlement.
“This is a bill to punish renewal,” says Costa Samaras, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. “There is a real need to add a clean energy supply to the grid – select our cars, select our homes, select our buildings, select our factories, and AI’s requirements will all require new clean energy. What this bill makes more difficult and more expensive.”
Incredibly, the original version of the bill presented Monday evening was even worse news for renewable. This text contained a new tax on wind and sun, which would have taxed companies that source materials from some foreign countries, including China – a charge that would essentially have both industries. The new text also gives some leisure time to projects that start construction in the next year, allowing them to keep tax credits even if they do not serve the deadline of 2027.
President Donald Trump, who has a long soul for windmills, has campaigned to end the law of inflation reduction, and the original House bill has been good for that promise. But the more extreme last-minute additions made over the weekend in the Senate text alarmed energy analysts, environmentalists, working unions, Silicon Valley theococrats, and even some Republicans of Senate.
The addition of the stock tax especially seemed to be a whole surprise. As nbc Reported On Monday, several GOPs Senate said they had no idea that added in the supply.
Alex Epstein, an energy “philosopher” who pushed a story around fossil fuels being essential for a “human flower” and who was Influential voice For Republicans in creating the end of the IRA tax credits, claimed about x This weekend that he did not support the stock tax.
Elon Musk, whose companies have benefited from various tax credits on climate and clean energy, posted a tweets of tweets on Sunday and Monday, removing the renewable energy supplies of the bill.
“The latest Senate project bill will destroy millions of jobs in the United States and cause huge strategic damage to our country!” he wrote. “Totally crazy and destructive. It gives manities to industries of the past for severely damaged industries of the future.”
According to Politico, Trump reportedly pushed Senate leadership last week to write a more aggressive text in removing tax credits for renewable than the version of the bill passed in the room. “I hate” green tax credits “in the big, big, beautiful bill,” Trump Posted About TruthSocial at the end of June, launching a paragraph-long, error-ridden renewable energy subsidy.
