How the renewable energy industry lost a massive lobbying fight over Trump's agenda bill

CNN

4 days ago

In May, over a dozen solar CEOs gathered at the Capitol Hill Club, the watering hole of choice for Republican lawmakers and lobbyists just steps from the Hill.
Gulping coffee to fuel up for another long day of meetings, they sported pins that said 'support energy dominance' in front of a gleaming solar panel – borrowing the macho phrasing President Donald Trump uses to talk about oil and gas.
They were there to cajole Republicans to protect clean energy tax credits from Trump, who had spent his 2024 campaign vowing to kill them. The first draft of the president's sweeping tax and spending bill had just been released, and it made steep cuts to the subsidies.
Nevertheless, the renewables industry was bullish. They believed they had an ironclad argument to present to pro-business Republicans: Wind and solar had beaten the competition from a pure cost perspective. Utilities couldn't build it fast enough to keep up with surging demand from Big Tech needing to power AI and data centers. And best of all, new factories building renewables, batteries and electric vehicles were supporting tens of thousands of new manufacturing jobs in red Congressional districts – so killing them could be a political third rail.
'This industry supports the president's full agenda,' Costa Nicolaou, CEO of solar roof mounting company PanelClaw, told CNN. 'We are part of their American energy dominance solution. We're a part of their steel, aluminum and manufacturing job solution.'
But on Capitol Hill, their argument ultimately fell on deaf ears, a sign of the steep obstacles the industry faced in a Washington run by Trump's Republican Party.
'They all cried chicken little,' GOP Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio, who helped craft the agenda bill's language around the energy tax credit phaseout, told CNN. 'Everybody who has any government handout comes here and says the apocalypse will occur if we don't get this money. And the reality is, none of that's true.'
Often referring to the subsidies as a 'Green New Scam,' Republicans could not get past the notion that the tax credits were created under former President Joe Biden and did not want to admit that there were parts of the Democratic-led legislation that they could also champion.
With Trump adamantly against the continuation of these credits, most Republicans saw it as inevitable that the over two-dozen members who voiced support for the tax credits would ultimately have no choice but to fall in line – even if that meant killing energy jobs and factories in their districts and raising energy costs around the country.
As CNN has reported, the law is expected to raise energy prices in every state in the continental US over the next decade, in large part because there will be less wind and solar on the electric grid, which will be replaced by more expensive gas and coal.
Retiring GOP Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who voted against the tax bill, told CNN he is 'absolutely' worried about the job losses that could come.
'It's not a very business-like in its approach,' he said.
In the end, the biggest obstacle for the clean energy tax credits proved to be Trump himself, according to interviews with more than a dozen lawmakers, lobbyists and business leaders.
Asked whether the clean energy industry underestimated Trump's opposition to the tax credits, GOP Rep. Dan Newhouse of Washington told CNN, 'They shouldn't have.'
'He was signaling pretty strongly, but maybe it was too late for them to do anything about it,' he added.
Wind and solar have enjoyed decades of bipartisan support for their tax credits; Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa is the self-proclaimed 'father' of the wind tax credit, having written it in 1993.
Recently, the clean energy industry has argued its tax credits should continue because US energy demand suddenly skyrocketed, owing to data centers and new manufacturing. The subsidies, they said, kept the overall cost of US energy lower, while quickly getting new clean energy on the grid. They also pointed to long-standing tax breaks for oil and gas, some of which have been around since the 1910s.
Solar and wind got their biggest break in 2022, when Biden and Democrats extended them for a decade, among a suite of other generous subsidies for clean energy.
Axing the tax credits during Trump's term became the rallying cry among the party's right wing, amplified by the House Freedom Caucus, Trump administration officials and pro-fossil fuel activist and author Alex Epstein. Epstein has written books arguing that 'human flourishing' depends on the continued use of fossil fuels, and that outweighs any negative climate impacts from burning them. He spoke at a Senate Republican luncheon in June, urging the conference to zero out clean energy tax credits.
In an email to CNN, Epstein said he was 'in the fortunate position of being a trusted independent advisor who was consulted by many members of the House, Senate, and the Administration.' He added he 'made a lot of effort to educate anyone who would listen' to his argument about phasing out tax credits for 'for all subsidies but above all for grid-destroying solar and wind subsidies.'
When the dust settled, Trump's tax bill had shrunk a decade's worth of technology-neutral clean energy tax credits for utility-scale wind and solar to just one more year before a sharp phaseout. Other more nascent clean energy like geothermal and advanced nuclear got a reprieve, with longer timelines to claim subsidies.
At nearly every iteration of the Republican bill, the clean energy industry got more to worry about. Just days before the bill's passage, the Senate released a new bill text that contained a surprise excise tax for wind and solar projects. One source familiar with the discussions said the excise tax came from the Trump administration and was 'part of its hatred on all things Biden.'
The excise tax set off yet another industry-wide panic attack.
'When the House mark came out, it was worse than I thought it would be. When the Senate mark came out, it was worse than I thought it would be,' said Sam Ricketts, co-founder of clean energy consulting firm S2 Strategies. 'At every turn, I was surprised – perhaps I should not have been – that Republicans in Congress were electing to commit economic self-sabotage.'
Last-minute language, lobbied for by Republican senators including Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Joni Ernst of Iowa, removed the excise tax and allowed companies one year to claim the full tax credit without having to almost immediately get their projects up and running – a narrow window that would have been near impossible for developers to meet.
'All they did was continue the actual law as it's existed for the last decade, one more year before they made all the changes,' said Jason Grumet, CEO of trade group the American Clean Power Association.
But adversaries of the tax credits were also not happy.
'It did not come close to the President's stated objective — which I agree with — to 'terminate the Green New Scam,'' said Epstein, the pro-fossil fuel activist.
While a sizable contingent of conservative lawmakers were in favor of ending wind and solar tax credits altogether, some, like Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, wanted to strike a balance.
'Republicans are the business party. We are about creating jobs. If somebody has made significant investment because of a certain received business environment, you don't pull the rug beneath them,' Cassidy told CNN.
GOP Rep. Joe Wilson's South Carolina district is home to electric vehicle company Scout Motors' first US factory, which the company says will support thousands of jobs. Now, EV factories like Scout could be more vulnerable to job losses, with consumer EV tax credits going away in September. With the credits going away, Wilson counts himself as a future EV customer.
'I've signed up to buy one,' Wilson told CNN. 'I want them to succeed.'
Some in the clean energy industry are pointing fingers back at themselves, saying the industry and trade groups that lobby for them needed to be more aggressive.
'We're zero for every policy fight we have attempted to contest since Trump was elected,' said Steve McBee, CEO of clean energy investment platform Huck Capital. 'We were begging for table scraps from a really weak and defensive position, instead of shifting the battle space by redefining what this vote was actually about – the price of energy and the reliability of it.'
McBee and others said they believed the industry didn't have a unified message or do enough to define the fight in the public domain – especially around the issue of rising energy costs.
'We are not organized for power, and we need to be as an industry,' McBee said. 'The American Petroleum Institute, they're just stealing our lunch money every morning before our head is even off the pillow.'
The oil and gas industry 'actively engaged for more than a year' with Congress on the GOP tax bill, said API's senior vice president of policy, economics and regulatory affairs, Dustin Meyer, who added the industry applauded Congress for a final bill that 'encouraged' fossil fuel investment and development.
Big tech companies who are looking for electricity supply wherever they can get it to power AI and data centers, were not closely involved in the tax credit negotiations until the very end, according to three people familiar with the discussions – in part because they had other priorities and in part because they didn't want to cross Trump and risk retribution.
Grumet, the CEO of the American Clean Power Association, didn't dispute that the clean energy industry wasn't always speaking with one voice.
'The industry is a broad expression of big utilities and oil and gas companies and renewable developers and banks and manufacturers,' Grumet said. 'So many industries were so threatened on so many fronts, that you did have a dilution of advocacy.'
Some felt the final bill text could have been worse. Rich Powell, CEO of the Clean Energy Buyers Association, a trade group representing large companies that buy vast amounts of energy, said the final bill gave enough business certainty to projects over the next few years.
'It's a pretty damn good outcome given the pressure from the White House and chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee to zero the whole thing out,' another energy lobbyist said, adding the final bill gave wind and solar projects a 'four-to-five-year runway.'
But many in the industry said there is no denying the move is a huge blow that will raise electricity prices and kill energy jobs around the country. And interviews with some business leaders revealed existential fears about whether the US will have enough electricity to meet the rising demand from AI and data centers.
Powell said the bill's passage could force AI and manufacturing companies to move their operations abroad, if they can't get cheap enough electricity in the United States.
Companies 'are going to have to look at the jurisdictions, both within the US and around the world, that can supply them energy very quickly,' he said. 'They would prefer to build in the US. But if that's not possible, they will have to look to other places.'
In the meantime, Democrats say they will try to use Republicans' votes against them in the midterms.
'As far as accountability goes, you better believe that any time a facility closes in one of these members' districts, there's going to be accountability on that member for taking the vote on this bill,' said Adrian Deveny, founder of consulting firm Climate Vision and a former top Senate Democratic staffer who led the Inflation Reduction Act clean energy negotiations. 'Any time there's a blackout in a member's district, they're going to own that they voted to kill cheap energy investments in this country. They're going to own the rate increases on their constituents.'