Canary Media reports on the Senate's version of the Budget Bill, which, in its current form, targets renewable energy projects with punitive tax measures. United's Harry Godfrey spoke to the enormous threat the bill poses to energy affordability, private investments in advanced energy projects, and American energy independence.
Senate Republicans have crafted a tax and spending bill that would create an unprecedentedly hostile landscape for the development of solar and wind power.
If passed in its current form, the Senate version of “One Big Beautiful Bill” released late Friday would crash the rollout of clean energy, which now accounts for over 90% of the new electricity-generation capacity being added to the U.S. power grid. It would also stymie the nascent U.S. solar, battery, and electric-vehicle manufacturing sectors, which experts say are vital to putting the country on competitive footing with China.
The bill would have a profoundly negative impact on the U.S. economy. It would spike energy costs for both households and companies, both of which are already dealing with rising utility bills nationwide. It would make it nearly impossible for utilities to keep up with fast-rising energy demand from AI data centers. It would destroy jobs.
“If enacted, this stands to be the biggest job-killing bill in the history of this country,” Sean McGarvey, president of the North America’s Building Trades Unions, wrote in a Saturday statement. The group estimated that the bill’s cuts to energy incentives could eliminate an estimated 1.75 million construction jobs, translating to $148 billion in lost annual wages and benefits.
The latest Senate version of the bill comes amid intense pressure from President Donald Trump to extend tax cuts he passed during his first term, which would disproportionately benefit the wealthy. In late May, the House passed its version of the bill, which was widely decried as disastrous for the clean-energy industry. The Senate proposed a version earlier in June that was less aggressive in its phaseout of clean-energy incentives, sparking hope that some Inflation Reduction Act provisions would be salvaged.
But on Friday night, Senate Republicans reversed course and introduced a version of the bill that would be worse — for clean energy, consumers, and the energy system as a whole — than even the initial House bill.
The toll of crushing clean energy
Industry experts warn that the excise tax that penalizes companies using materials from China, a spin on restrictions first introduced in House legislation in May, is administratively unworkable. The rules are so byzantine that it would be impossible for solar and wind developers to accurately assess what they would owe, potentially leading to the cancellation of projects unwilling to chance a bigger-than-expected excise tax bill.
Harry Godfrey, head of federal affairs for trade organization Advanced Energy United, said that the placed-in-service requirements constitute a “retroactive change to the law that strands investments, kills jobs, and undermines American energy abundance.” The excise tax, meanwhile, represents “a new tax on energy production, coming at a time of rising prices.”
Sens. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) introduced an amendment on Monday seeking to remove those two provisions from the Senate bill.
Backers of the legislation have claimed that clean energy is inexpensive enough to compete with fossil fuels without federal incentives. “Ending these federal giveaways will lead to a more market-driven allocation of capital, favoring energy sources that are more economically efficient and better suited to meeting growing demand,” Thomas Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research, a right-wing think tank, told The Washington Post in a Sunday email.
However, even fossil-fuel proponent Alex Epstein, who has played a pivotal role in Senate energy policy developments, pushed back on the excise tax on wind and solar in a Saturday X post. “I strongly recommend fully desubsidizing solar and wind vs. placing a kind of new tax on them,” he wrote.
The push to increase reliance on fossil fuels to power the country’s grid faces a serious hurdle — U.S. demand for electricity is growing far more quickly than fossil-fueled power plants can be built to serve it. Manufacturers of the turbines used in gas power plants are now backlogged through the early 2030s with existing orders, leaving no headroom to expand production to build new power plants to add to the country’s resource mix.
King noted that “85% of capacity in the pipeline right now is wind, solar, and batteries — and 86% of the capacity installed over the past three years is wind, solar, and batteries. You’re taking the thing that can actually get built over the next few years, as you’re facing this generationally large surge in electricity demand, and making it more expensive.”
The problem is particularly acute in the regions where gigawatts of new data centers are being planned to support tech giants’ AI ambitions.
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