President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill on July 4. It’s already paying dividends to taxpayers a mere three weeks later by burying green boondoggles in government paperwork.
Reuters reported this week that: “Singapore-based solar panel manufacturer Bila Solar is suspending plans to double capacity at its new factory in Indianapolis. Canadian rival Heliene’s plans for a solar cell facility in Minnesota are under review. Norwegian solar wafer maker NorSun is evaluating whether to move forward with a planned factory in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And two fully-permitted offshore wind farms in the U.S. Northeast may never get built.”
Also reported this week from the New York Times: “The Energy Department on Wednesday said it had terminated a commitment to provide a $4.9 billion loan guarantee to a company building a contentious transmission line across the Midwest. The cancellation may imperil the $11 billion project, known as Grain Belt Express, which would cross 800 miles of farmland and is designed to carry electricity generated by wind farms in Kansas to population centers in Illinois and Indiana.”
What’s going on? Why are these developers reconsidering and canceling their projects when there’s still hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of Inflation Reduction Act subsidies to be had?
President Trump pulled a surprising fast one on subsidy-seeking swamp creatures.
Much to the surprise of many, the penultimate Senate version of the OBBBA drastically slashed subsidies for wind and solar projects even more than the House did. But Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski, Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley were able to recoup much of subsidy cuts and had them included in the final version that passed the Senate. This outraged the House Freedom Caucus, whose votes were needed to pass the final bill.
To get those votes, President Trump privately promised Freedom Caucus members he would issue an Executive order to give teeth to the OBBBA’s spending cuts. President Trump followed through with the July 7 Executive order, “Ending Market Distorting Subsidies for Unreliable Foreign Controlled Energy Sources.” The aim of the Executive order is to terminate taxpayer subsidies (market distortions) for wind and solar (unreliable energy sources) that are supplied by Communist China (“foreign controlled”) in furtherance of the goal of the One Big Beautiful Bill.
Then on July 15, the Department of Interior issued a directive to implement the July 7 Executive order mandating that virtually every document, decision and policy associated with the permitting process for wind and solar must be reviewed by the Office of the Deputy Secretary and then the Office of the Secretary. What the President accomplished with all this is to sentence the wind and solar industry to the endless and lengthy review of bureaucratic hell.
“The Secretary of the Interior will apparently now be personally reviewing thousands of documents and permit applications for everything from the location and types of fences to the grading of access roads on construction sites across the country”, an unhappy wind and solar trade association chief told the Washington Post.
Sen. Murkowski expressed her frustration: “I feel cheated, I feel like we made a deal and then hours later, a deal was made to somebody else.”
How did all this mollify the Freedom Caucus enough to cast a vote for the watered down Senate version of the One Big Beautiful Bill? A convincing precedent came from President Joe Biden.
When Biden became President, he issued a flurry of anti-fossil fuel/climate Executive orders. These sent a clear message to the oil, gas and coal industries that they were targeted for extinction. Investor profits in fossil fuel projects were going to be hard to come by on any foreseeable schedule. Profit uncertainty kills investor interest. So now it’s the turn of wind and solar industry investors to be served up a heaping helping of project discouragement.
“The Interior Department said this measure would level the playing field for coal and gas, after years of assault under the previous administration,” reported the Washington Post.
It’s conceivable that very few, if any, new wind and solar projects will be started in the near future so as to be eligible for the remaining Green New Scam subsidies. Even though all the subsidies weren’t repealed by the One Big Beautiful Bill, if you can’t get your wind and solar project started you can’t collect your subsidies.
Steve Milloy is a biostatistician and lawyer, publishes JunkScience.com and is on X @JunkScience.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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