Congress Is Raising Electricity Bills to Pay for Tax Cuts

The Atlantic

14 hours ago

Of all the elements of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, perhaps none is as obviously self-defeating as getting rid of tax credits for clean energy. That decision will not simply set back the fight against climate change. Congressional Republicans could also be setting America up for the worst energy-affordability crisis since the 1970s. Unlike then, this time we'll have imposed it on ourselves.
Electricity demand in the United States is rising faster than it has in at least two decades. AI data centers are using huge amounts of power to train new models. More Americans are plugging their electric cars and hybrids into the grid. Rising temperatures mean more air-conditioning use. Failure to meet this rising demand with adequate supply results in higher prices. From 2000 to 2022, U.S. electricity prices rose by an average of about 2.8 percent a year; since 2022, they have risen by 13 percent annually.
Fortunately, the timing of this demand spike coincided with a boom in renewable energy. According to the federal Energy Information Administration, 93 percent of the electricity capacity added to the grid this year will come from a combination of wind, solar, and battery storage. That trend was set to accelerate dramatically in the coming years thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, which provided tax credits that made building clean power sources cheaper. Investment in those sources has accordingly spiked, and hundreds of new projects could begin generating power over the next decade. The IRA is generally seen as a climate bill, but it was also an energy bill. It provided a jolt to the American power sector at a moment when the sector desperately needed new supply.
Or so it seemed. The Senate version of Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill repeals the clean-energy tax credits in the IRA for all wind and solar projects that don't begin construction within a year of the bill's passage or become fully operational by 2028. (And even if a project begins construction in the first half of 2026, it will need to meet extremely onerous domestic-sourcing requirements that many experts believe will be nearly impossible to satisfy.) As a result, future clean-energy projects, including many that have been announced but not yet built, will cost about 50 percent more than those that received the credits, according to an analysis by Jesse Jenkins, who leads the Princeton ZERO Lab. The inevitable result is that far fewer will come into existence. 'It's hard to think of a bigger self-own,' Jenkins told me. 'We're effectively raising taxes on the country's main sources of new power at a time when electricity prices are already rising.'
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The purported justification for these cuts is that renewables are unreliable energy sources pushed by woke environmentalists, and the country would be better served by doubling down on coal and natural gas. 'More wind and solar brings us the worst of two worlds: less reliable energy delivery and higher electric bills,' wrote Trump's Energy Secretary Chris Wright in an op-ed last week. In fact, renewable energy is cheap and getting cheaper. Even without the tax credits, the price of onshore wind has fallen by 70 percent, solar energy by 90 percent, and batteries by more than 90 percent over the past decade. The IRA, by making these sources even more affordable, was projected to save American consumers an average of $220 a year in the decade after its passage.
The cost savings from renewables are so great that in Texas— Texas, mind you—all of the electricity growth over the past decade has come from wind and solar alone. This has made energy grids more reliable, not less. During the summer of 2023, the state faced several near failures of its electricity grid; officials had to call on residents to conserve energy. The state responded by building out new renewable energy sources to stabilize the grid. It worked. 'The electrical grid in Texas has breezed through a summer in which, despite milder temperatures, the state again reached record levels of energy demand,' The New York Times reported last September. 'It did so largely thanks to the substantial expansion of new solar farms.'
In fact, the energy secretary's description of wind and solar—as unreliable and expensive—is more aptly applied to fossil fuels. Coal is so costly relative to other energy sources that investment in building new plants has dried up. The natural-gas industry is facing such a crippling supply-chain crisis that the wait time for a new gas turbine—the combustion engine that converts natural gas to usable energy—can be as long as seven years. 'What we've consistently heard from the industry is that, right now, there is just no way to get a new natural-gas plant running before 2030, and quite possibly even later,' Robbie Orvis, the senior director for modeling and analysis at the think tank Energy Innovation, told me. The cost of actually building one of those plants, meanwhile, has more than doubled in the past few years, pushing utilities to invest heavily in renewable sources, which can be built much faster and often at a lower cost.
Now Congress has decided to kneecap the energy sources that are available to meet rising demand. Orvis predicts that this could result in one of the fastest, sharpest rises in energy prices since the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s, which featured record-high oil prices, long lines and rationing at gas stations, and a nationwide inflation spike. An Energy Innovation analysis of an earlier, similar version of the bill found that, by 2035, the average yearly energy bill will be $473 higher in Michigan, $590 higher in Maryland, $668 higher in California, and $777 higher in Texas than it would have been if the IRA credits had remained in place. (Several other sources have produced similar results, including analyses of the final Senate bill.)
Blackouts and grid outages will become more frequent. Power-intensive industries such as AI and manufacturing will struggle under the weight of higher energy costs. China will solidify its dominance over clean-energy supply chains. 'Just think of Trump's own priorities: lower energy prices, becoming an AI superpower, reindustrializing America, outcompeting China,' Princeton's Jenkins said. 'Getting rid of these credits hurts all of those goals.'
But there is one priority missing from that list: owning the libs. Partisan polarization around clean energy has grown so extreme since the passage of the IRA that Trump and many other Republicans apparently see destroying it as an end in itself. An earlier version of the Senate bill went further than repealing subsidies. It included an excise tax on solar and wind energy—the Republican Party, taxing energy—that would have added an additional 10–20 percent cost onto most projects. That provision was scrapped after a handful of moderate senators objected, but the fact that it ever existed is stunning enough. As the bill headed to the House of Representatives for final consideration, some members claimed that they wouldn't support it without even harsher restrictions on clean energy. Representative Chip Roy of Texas attacked the Senate bill for not targeting clean-energy tax credits more aggressively, calling it 'a deal-killer of an already bad deal' and setting up the absurd possibility that the IRA would be saved only by Republicans' inability to agree on how badly to eviscerate it.
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The desire to stick it to liberals is so intense that Republicans are evidently willing to inflict disproportionate economic pain on their own voters. The Energy Innovation analysis found that the states that will experience the sharpest increase in electricity costs as a result of the bill are Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Missouri, and Kentucky. A separate analysis found that of the 10 states that will lose the most total renewable energy capacity as a result of the repeal, nine voted for Trump last year.
Congressional Republicans might be betting that the consequences of their legislation will take long enough to materialize that they won't be blamed. Thanks to the numerous clean-energy projects in the pipeline today, the sharpest energy-price increases won't come into effect until after 2030. By that time, a Democratic president could very well be in office, stuck with the higher energy costs sown by their predecessor, reaping the political whirlwind.