The Senate dealt a series of blows to solar and wind energy in the latest version of President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” bill — taking a page out of House Republicans’ playbook to crack down on green energy tax credits enacted under former President Joe Biden.
The Senate’s new proposal would move up the deadline for solar and wind projects hoping to qualify for production and investment tax credits by requiring them to produce electricity by the end of 2027. The additional cuts to green energy tax credits follows the president’s public broadside against the upper chamber’s initial proposal, which delayed the termination of solar and wind subsidies.
“Windmills, and the rest of this ‘JUNK,’ are the most expensive and inefficient energy in the world, is destroying the beauty of the environment, and is 10 times more costly than any other energy,” Trump wrote in a post to Truth Social on June 21. “It is time to break away, finally, from this craziness!!!”
The upper chamber’s revised bill would also create a new tax on wind and solar projects whose components are sourced from foreign entities of concern, such as China.
Senate Democrats referred to the creation of a new excise tax penalizing the renewable industry’s reliance on Chinese materials as “economic self-sabotage” and an “outright massacre” for the solar and wind industry.
Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee was one of several GOP senators pushing the upper chamber to aggressively crack down on solar and wind tax credits in the president’s landmark bill. The Utah Republican favors a wholesale repeal of green energy subsidies, though Congress is likely to stop short of that given opposition from moderate Republicans.
Republican North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis told reporters Saturday that the Senate finance panel’s decision to accelerate the termination of solar and wind subsidies by the end of 2027 was “disappointing.” He also suggested that failure to maintain the green energy tax breaks would have negative economic consequences for his state.
Tillis is one of several GOP senators that has pledged to vote against the president’s landmark tax and immigration bill, citing the legislation’s reforms to Medicaid.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and former Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) lead, blasted Senate Republicans for rolling back green energy subsidies within their proposal, accusing GOP senators of putting “millions of jobs” on the chopping block.
“The latest Senate draft bill will destroy millions of jobs in America and cause immense strategic harm to our country!” Musk, the founder of the electric vehicle manufacturer, Tesla, wrote on his social media platform, X. “Utterly insane and destructive. It gives handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future.”
Proponents of terminating green energy subsidies argued that the green energy industry’s messaging revealed its dependency on government funds in order to be profitable.
“If, as supporters of the IRA [Inflation Reduction Act] are complaining, repealing these subsidies will ‘kill’ their industry, then maybe it shouldn’t exist in the first place,” American Energy Alliance president Tom Pyle said in a statement Saturday. “Extending green giveaways on the backs of American taxpayers is shortsighted and neglectful.”
The conservative House Freedom Caucus (HFC) has also urged the Senate to adopt the House-passed language that put solar and wind tax credits on a faster route to termination.
Several HFC members, including Republican Reps. Chip Roy and Ralph Norman, suggested they would not vote for the Senate’s proposal if it failed to adhere to the House language accelerating the termination of green energy subsidies.
“That’s got to go,” Norman told the DCNF in an interview Thursday. “The President wants it to go. He wants to abolish all of them. We agree with that.”
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