How to Kill Jobs and Raise Prices in One Big Beautiful Bill
The US clean energy sector has been the kind of industrial success story most countries can only dream of, providing lots of cheap power at a time of exploding demand and creating hundreds of thousands of jobs. So why is Congress so determined to change that?
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There is no world where raising cumulative annual energy costs in the US by a staggering $16 billion this decade and killing some 830,000 jobs is a good idea.
But that’s exactly what the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill” that recently passed the US House of Representatives would do, according to analysis of the bill’s initial text from Energy Innovation. (And that was before lawmakers added deeper cuts to clean energy programs.)
The bill is now in the hands of the Senate where concerns about the impact of repealing clean energy programs are just one point in a long list of objections.
While there is hope the Senate will blunt the all-out assault of the House text, it would be a mistake to assume senators’ concerns will translate into a fundamentally different bill. After all, 21 members of the House made a splash earlier in the process with a much-publicized letter of support for clean energy initiatives. Only for every one of these members to ultimately vote to repeal them. (At least every member able to stay awake.)
Why is Congress Messing with Success?
The real head-scratcher here is why clean energy programs are even on the chopping block in the first place.
Since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in 2022, clean energy incentives and credits had helped advance over 400,000 jobs and $441 billion in investments across 49 states and Puerto Rico through the end of 2024, according to Climate Power. By any political measure, that’s an incredible success story.
But even for the millions of Americans working in entirely different sectors and living miles away from all the battery and electric vehicle factories sprouting up across the Southeast, clean energy programs have been critical in one very important way: helping hold energy prices down. Not just in the near term either, but also, according to testimony from Center for American Progress (CAP), by shifting the direction of travel of the entire US economy toward more and more cheap renewable energy.
What this means, as the CAP report notes, is that prior to the House budget bill, “household energy costs are on course to drop by one-third by 2035, an annual savings of roughly $2,000 per household.”
Why? The answer is pretty simple: Regardless of where you stand on climate, average electricity costs from clean energy are just cheaper than fossil energy pretty much everywhere.
What this means is that the best way to keep power bills affordable is to add more wind and solar to the electrical grid. (Even accounting for calm days and evenings.)
The cost question becomes even more urgent at a time when demand for electricity is skyrocketing from power-hungry data centers and other users, threatening to boost consumer bills by as much as 70% by 2029.
So far, solar, wind, and battery storage have been instrumental in meeting this moment, providing an incredible 93% of new energy capacity in 2024. So while the fossil fuel industry talks about “energy realism,” the reality is that clean energy – not coal, oil, and gas – is helping the US quickly add new energy to the grid while keeping costs down.
Why mess with that?
A Plan to Kill American Clean Energy
The budget bill passed by the House sends a wrecking ball straight at the US clean energy industry behind this success.
In a nutshell, the bill effectively repeals many of the IRA incentives for wind and solar power, clean technology manufacturing, and electric vehicles.
In its current form, the bill ends the popular credits for new and used electric vehicles for most models at the end of 2025 (and adds a new $250 annual fee for EV drivers).
Credits to help homeowners install solar, heat pumps, and other clean technologies also sunset at the end of this year.
And if that wasn’t enough, the bill also ends advanced manufacturing credits in 2031 for companies investing in US factories to build batteries, solar panels, and other clean energy components while making the credits largely unworkable in the interim
On the generation side, the bill adds such https://www.utilitydive.com/news/inflation-reduction-act-ira-deadline-sixty-days-construction-project-trump/748892/ and short project timelines for renewables – requiring for example, that projects begin construction within 60 daysthe end of 2028 – that few developers will likely be able to use them, including for projects already in progress.
The verdict from Wall Street was immediate. Solar stocks plunged after the House bill passed. One headline spoke of a “nightmare scenario” for the clean energy industry.
Even before the bill’s text was released, major manufacturers who’d invested billions in US factories to feed clean tech demand were warning what repeal of these credits would mean.
As Ford CEO Jim Farley said in February, “We've already sunk capital – even though we've rationalized it – in battery production and assembly plants all through Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky and Tennessee. And many of those jobs will be at risk if the IRA is repealed."
It’s not just major corporations concerned.
For months, Sugar Hollow Solar in Asheville, North Carolina has been working to get back on its feet, after biblical floods unleashed by Hurricane Helene swallowed the company warehouse and over $1 million of equipment. Now the budget bill threatens to erase all that progress and worse.
“After everything our community has been through – especially with the loss of our warehouse during Hurricane Helene – it’s upsetting to see legislation that would take us backward just when we need momentum the most, Doug Ager, Sugar Hollow’s founder and CEO said, “These tax credits don’t just power homes; they help rebuild lives, create jobs, and give families and small businesses like ours a chance to help in the clean energy transition.”
It's a sentiment echoed over and over all across the nation as clean energy companies grapple with this existential threat to their business, with potentially catastrophic effects for workers and the communities that depend on them. All so the wealthiest Americans can get yet another tax break.
One Big Beautiful Bill = Higher Energy Bills
Regardless of where Americans personally stand on clean energy, most will feel the impact of repeal right away in their energy bills.
As the CEO of one of the country’s largest utilities, John Ketchum of NextEra Energy, recently said in an interview with the New York Times, “If you take renewables and storage off the table, we’re going to force electricity prices to the moon.”
How high is the moon? As analysis from Energy Innovation shows, the bill as introduced would lead total annual consumer energy prices to rise by a staggering $16 billion by 2030.
One of the reasons why is the bill creates a whole series of knock-on effects. For one, removing incentives for affordable clean energy means we’ll likely see less new power come online while demand rises, increasing electricity prices and jeopardizing basic reliability.
Alongside what happens in the power sector, writ large, killing these incentives
effectively pushes consumers from clean electric power and technologies (cheap and relatively stable in price) to more fossil fuel alternatives (often more expensive and volatile in price). With fewer Americans driving electric vehicles and installing heat pumps, for example, demand for oil for internal combustion engine vehicles and natural gas for home heating goes up, pushing prices up across the board.
If there is a silver lining in the budget process, it’s that the bill is not a done deal. The Senate now gets a say on what it wants and the full House will have to vote again on the results before anything heads to the president’s desk. Each vote is a chance for Americans to speak up and pressure lawmakers to protect the clean energy investments and programs putting people to work and keeping costs down for all of us. The stakes couldn’t be higher – and it’s up to us to keep the pressure on.
