The moment the clean-energy boom ran into ‘drill, baby, drill'

Mint

3 days ago

Southern Energy Management is bracing for whiplash. The Raleigh-based home-solar-panel installation company grew steadily in recent years, thanks in part to tax credits in former President Joe Biden's landmark 2022 climate law.
Now, Chief Executive Will Etheridge says his 190-person company's residential solar sales could plunge in 2026 by as much as half. President Trump's megabill, which he signed into law Friday, ends the subsidies later this year. Etheridge's plans to buy more supplies from factories in North Carolina and elsewhere are on hold.
'Now, I'm not thinking about that at all," he said. 'I'm trying to think about how to save North Carolina jobs."
A wave of government spending that swept through the U.S. economy in recent years is about to recede.
Biden's climate law threw subsidies behind wind and solar power, electric vehicles and other green projects that federal forecasters said would total nearly $400 billion. Outside analysts projected the ultimate spending would be even greater. Investors jumped into renewables stocks, while local governments and labor unions clamored for new projects.
Trump's 'big, beautiful bill" will turn off that spigot as part of a push to extend the tax cuts enacted in his first term. Credits for EVs and home solar panels are slated to end in the coming months. Incentives to develop or produce renewable energy will wind down within years.
The legislation, meanwhile, boosts the prospects for fossil-fuel production on public lands, a boon to oil-and-gas drillers that are pumping record supplies and posting bumper profits.
Biden's law tried to build a bridge to an economy more oriented around renewable energy, said Tracy Stone-Manning, president of the Wilderness Society, a group that aims to protect public lands.
'What [Trump's] is doing is blowing the bridge up," said Stone-Manning, who was director of the Bureau of Land Management in the Biden administration.
The clashing visions have left many developers and workers around the country in a lurch.
Clean-energy executives expected regulatory changes under any new administration. Some warn, though, that the swift rollback of much of a previously passed law will create a new level of uncertainty for future investment and raise financing costs down the road.
'You're going to strand a lot of capital, and you're going to put a lot of people out of business by changing the chessboard right in the middle of the game," said Reagan Farr, chief executive of solar developer Silicon Ranch. 'That's something as a country that we've been good about until now."
Trump's spending bill—which the Congressional Budget Office expects will cut more than half a trillion dollars in tax incentives over the next decade—isn't as extreme as some renewables advocates feared. A proposed tax on wind and solar projects was stripped by the Senate. Lawmakers also extended through 2027 a phaseout of credits for renewable energy investment and production.
That could give some ongoing construction runway to continue. But deals still in negotiation or in the early stages of development could be caught in no-man's-land, said Farr, whose company's projects include several solar arrays in Georgia and Tennessee to power Meta Platforms data centers.
'They're not things that you just throw up in six months and you're done," he said.
The policy changes could reduce investment by about $500 billion across electricity and clean fuels production by 2035, according to preliminary estimates by the Princeton University-led REPEAT Project. Renewables proponents fear the upshot will be higher bills for Americans living through a once-in-a-generation surge in power demand tied to the mania over artificial intelligence.
Although Trump's campaign pledged to lower Americans' energy costs, some oil-and-gas executives have said privately that they understood his 'drill, baby, drill" rallying cry as an economic organizing principle, rather than a push to bore more wells through shale rock.
Analysts say the new legislation will have limited immediate impact on already record-breaking U.S. fossil-fuel production.
The new bill would help protect fossil fuels from more competition.
Oil drillers last week operated 12% fewer rigs than they did at the start of the year, according to Baker Hughes. Pointing to languishing commodity prices and new tariffs on imported steel, nearly half of the oil-and-gas executives polled by the Dallas Fed in June said they expect to drill fewer wells in 2025 than initially expected.
Longer term, however, measures such as expanded federal leases, cheaper royalties and the end of Biden-era tax credits will help shield fossil fuels from more competition. That could be particularly beneficial to producers of natural gas, who are jockeying with renewables developers to fuel the power-hungry AI boom.
If 'repealing these subsidies will 'kill' their industry, then maybe it shouldn't exist in the first place," Tom Pyle, president of the pro-oil-and-gas group American Energy Alliance, said in a statement.
Already, renewable stocks have been thrashed in recent years by inflationary shock and stubbornly high interest rates.
Arduous permitting processes and supply-chain snafus busted project timelines. Costs spiraled. Local officials have feared a pullback in tax credits—and in turn a disappearing customer base for new manufacturers—for the better part of a year.
Businesses ended or scaled back an estimated $15.5 billion worth of clean-energy projects in the first five months of the year, according to advocacy group E2. Among those affected were a Georgia battery plant, a Washington-state solar supplier and an offshore-wind-cable factory in Massachusetts. The cancellations spanned projects that promised to create roughly 12,000 jobs.
Executives and labor leaders fear turbulence ahead will leave more Americans, including Cierra Pearl, out of work.
The 29-year-old Mainer started an apprentice program last year with her local International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union and was soon building racks and installing panels on solar arrays. At $23.18 an hour plus overtime, the paychecks were her biggest ever.
But Pearl was laid off in early May after developers hit pause. Now, with dimming hope for future projects, she is burning some of her $595 in weekly unemployment benefits on gas to drive to job interviews.
'I've felt hopeless a lot lately," Pearl said. It is not just financial stability that she lost, she added. 'It's dignity."
Write to David Uberti at [e-mail]