Red States–And AI–Are Big Losers From Trump's Clean Energy Massacre
The biggest hit: The bill would quickly phase out federal tax credits that have for years enabled wind and solar developers to offset 30% or more of project costs. Yes, it could have been even worse. At the last minute, the Senate's Republican leadership ditched a proposed excise tax on wind and solar projects using Chinese components which could have added 20% to the cost of many projects. But it left in a fast phase-out of the tax credits.
Moreover, there are lots of other anti-green, pro-fossil fuel bullets the industry didn't dodge. The bill would open more federal lands to oil and gas leasing at lower royalty rates; end tax credits and other subsidies for electric vehicles; and refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. There's also a new tax break to incentivize mining metallurgical coal, now to be considered a strategic mineral.
Uncertainty, and the looming end of federally subsidized tax equity financing, could plunge renewables investing into a deep freeze, says Sandhya Ganapathy, CEO of Houston-based EDP Renewables North America (which operates wind and solar plants). 'It severely hamstrings the U.S. ability to meet skyrocketing power demands and dilutes its economic competitiveness on the global stage,' she says.
Ironically, the impact will hit especially hard in Republican areas–a fact that Forbes (and others) thought last November might protect the industry from such savage cuts. A map (below) created by Michael Thomas, founder of Cleanview, shows that 78% of renewable energy projects underway are located in Red districts.
Why is Trump so determined to kibosh economic growth in Texas, where last Saturday afternoon solar power met 31% of the grid's 77 gigawatts of power demand and wind power provided 15%? Sure, gas-fired generation still led with 35%, but coal provides merely 13% of the state's electricity needs. The trend is clear: Growing, power-hungry states like Texas and states where the sun shines or the wind blows, have been increasingly relying on solar and wind power.
The How Green Is Your State? map makes clear that geography matters more than ideology when it comes to the adoption of green energy. Windy, sparsely populated and Republican South Dakota (Trump won 63% of the vote in 2024) gets an enormous portion of its retail electricity from renewable sources. Tiny, densely populated Delaware, Joe Biden's home state, gets almost none of its retail electricity from green sources.
Complaints about the bill's assault on green energy have come from all quarters. Elon Musk calls the energy components of the bill 'insane and destructive,' saying they will destroy millions of jobs. Sean McGarvey, president of North America's Building Trades Unions, compares the impact to 'terminating 1,000 Keystone XL' pipelines (Biden, of course, terminated just the one). The U.S. Chamber of Commerce in a statement said 'taxing energy production is never good policy.'
But that hasn't swayed Trump, who in an interview last weekend with Fox's Maria Bartiromo made clear his determination to undo the Green New Deal aspects of Biden's Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. His dislike for both Biden's legacy, and wind and solar energy in particular, seems almost visceral. 'We're doing coal,' Trump declared. 'I don't want windmills destroying our place. I don't want these solar things where they go for miles and they cover up half a mountain and they're ugly as hell.' And, he said, 'They're made in China.'
So get ready to pay more for electricity, and to compete with big tech and artificial intelligence for the power supply. Recent growth in electricity demand from data centers has been stunning. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab data shows that in 2018 data centers used 76 terawatt hours (TWh), or 1.9% of domestic electricity; they project that will hit at least 325 TWhs (6.7% of the total) by 2028. Consultancy Rystad Energy eyes a 16% rise in overall U.S. power demand by 2035.
But without affordable renewables (or rapid breakthroughs in nuclear fusion) the electricity to feed all those AI data centers may not arrive in time. Most are integrated energy projects. Meta, for its Sucre data center in Louisiana, is partnering with Entergy to invest $3.2 billion in gas turbines to provide reliable electricity for its computers, and another $1.5 billion into wind and solar–to reduce its carbon footprint.
In Abilene, Texas, the Stargate consortium of OpenAI, Oracle and Microsoft is erecting its first data-gigacenter for its proximity to plentiful wind power, yet for redundancy they are also erecting 10 onsite gas turbines from GE Vernova. But 'more natural gas' is not the answer that Trump might think it is. That's because, while the U.S. is rich in gas, there's a shortage of gas turbines. Get on the waiting list for a new gas turbine now and you'll be lucky to get it in five years. 'We see many facilities that are slated to enter service in 2028, but newly built turbines are not going to be delivered until 2030,' says Zack Krause, an analyst at East Daley Analytics.
'Without growth in rapidly deployed solar, the U.S. economy will grind to a halt,' warns Ed Hirs, a lecturer in energy economics at the University of Houston. Last year, 81% of new power projects nationwide were solar and batteries. A third of that solar build out, some 11 gigawatts, was in Texas, to power data centers. California and Florida each installed about 5 GW.
'Humans are already competing against AI and crypto for electricity,' says Hirs, who credits crypto miners with raising Texas' wholesale power prices by 5% in 2023.
Data centers like Stargate have so far been welcomed to rural Texas with compliant permitting and tax abatement packages. But it won't take much more than a heat wave or two to spark a showdown between AI's needs for reliable power and humans' desire that their air-conditioning not go out in the middle of summer.
The pushback has already begun, with a new Texas law (S.B. 6) set to allow grid managers to disconnect data centers when electric demand is high. That makes it a good time to own irreplaceable power plant assets in Texas, like Constellation Energy and Vistra Corp., do.
The Senate bill's excise tax was dropped after Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski–the last holdout needed for the 51 to 50 passage (with Vice President J.D. Vance voting)— called it 'just entirely punitive to the wind and solar industry.' She had joined Iowa's Republican Senators, Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley, in pushing an amendment designed to protect green credits for longer, which never got a vote. It's no mystery why Ernst and Grassley led the effort; Iowa gets an outsized 83% of its electricity from wind and solar. In the latest version, it appears that developers will need to start their wind or solar projects within 12 months of the bill's enactment in order to get full tax credits with no deadlines. Projects starting later must be completed by year end 2027 in order to claim credits before they sunset.
Other unintended victims of Trump's demolition of Biden's green energy incentives could be the so-called Southeast Battery Belt across the Carolinas and Georgia. Large scale battery storage deployments nearly doubled last year to 30 gigawatts nationwide due to demand from solar projects to balance intermittent loads. But if this bill goes through as expected, there could be less demand than expected for Toyota's $13 billion lithium ion battery plant under construction in North Carolina and Hyundai's $8 billion combination battery and car factory in Georgia.
The Big Beautiful Bill does support advanced nuclear power, including $125 million to develop small modular reactors for military use. The AI industry loves the low-carbon, small-footprint potential of nuclear fusion, with billionaires Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Bill Gates and Sam Altman (and even Secretary of Energy Chris Wright) all startup investors.
Not all of them are happy with the shifting sands. Houston energy trading billionaire John Arnold has invested heavily in long-distance transmission lines as well as geothermal, lithium and fusion startup Helion. Arnold reflected the energy industry's collective consciousness when he tweeted Monday about Trump's Big Beautiful Bill: 'Reversing which fuels get subsidies and which get penalized every time control of Washington shifts is about the stupidest way to run an energy system that needs long term planning and stable supply chains.' More from Forbes Forbes How An Unassuming Geologist Cracked The Global Fertilizer Cartel By Christopher Helman Forbes Gold To Top Bitcoin And Silver On Way To $4K Per Oz, Says Goldman Sachs By Christopher Helman Forbes Meet The Tiny Startup Building Stargate, OpenAI's $500 Billion Data Center Moonshot By Christopher Helman
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