Renewables In America Will Continue To Rise Despite The Loss Of Incentives – CleanTechnica

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First the good news. Rebecca Elliott, energy reporter for the New York Times, wrote recently that the US will continue to see a surge in renewable energy for the next two years. How is that possible, when the administration is cancelling wind and solar projects at a furious pace? The answer is, there are a lot of them already in the pipeline and developers are rushing to get them started sooner than planned to make sure they qualify for federal tax incentives before they disappear on July 1, 2026 — several years earlier than expected.

The new rules say, in order to qualify, projects must be “started” before that date, although exactly what “started” means is not entirely clear and it will be up to the IRS to make the final determination. That, of course, means the administration can impose its will on the IRS and if the agency doesn’t play along, its leaders will be fired and replaced with people who will bend their knees to the pudgy potentate in the White House.

To hit that deadline, many developers have ordered the power transformers that control the voltage output of solar panels and other equipment much sooner than they normally would. Getting those orders placed will demonstrate that a project is “started,” they hope.

Only relatively big companies can afford to spend such huge sums upfront, and analysts expect them to start buying smaller projects whose backers are strapped for cash, Elliott reported. For example, CleanCapital has purchased about $25 million worth of solar panels even though it doesn’t need them yet and is storing them in a rented warehouse in California at a cost of $145,000 a month.

“This rush is real,” Jennifer Granholm, who was Joe Biden’s energy secretary, told the press recently. “You’ll see an uptick in the next two years, and then you’ll see a diminishment after that, unless something changes.”

What could possibly change? America is in love with its very own fascist dictator. The only change that would matter is if control of Congress were to switch after the mid-term elections a year from now and the Democrats obtained a veto-proof majority. The odds of that happening are about the same as Kate Smith rising from the dead to give us one more chorus of “God Bless America.”

Renewable Energy Momentum

Elliott wrote that the tidal wave of clean energy development “reflects just how much momentum the sector has, not just because of subsidies, but because there is tremendous demand for new sources of energy. Solar and batteries can be installed much faster than natural gas and nuclear power plants. Solar and batteries have also become cheaper, while the cost of building gas power plants has soared.”

This year, renewable energy and batteries will make up around 93% of the capacity added to US grids, according to the federal Energy Information Administration. “We have never seen this kind of demand, ever,” said Sandhya Ganapathy, chief executive of EDP Renewables North America, which is why its development plans have not changed significantly ever after Congress rolled back the tax credits. Nevertheless, some smaller solar companies are laying off staff or preparing to shut down.

Federal tax credits for grid-scale battery storage were not affected by the cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill, so more developers are switching to building batteries, which are in high demand to help balance the wind and solar projects completed in recent years. Still and all, the US has made it a national policy to spike renewable energy, which can be built cheaply and quickly, and favor thermal generation that relies on heat from burning coal or methane or splitting atoms, which is much more expensive and can take a decade or more to build.

Krugman On Renewables

Now the bad news. Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman wrote on Substack this week, “China Has Overtaken America.” He suggested that electrical generation is a good indirect way to measure economic development and noted that China today generates twice as much electricity as does the US. He compared that to a second “Sputnik moment” for America. Yet unlike the Soviet Union, which was a shell of a nation propped up by bluster and bombast, China is a much more potent opponent.

“Rather than acknowledging that the US is in danger of being permanently overtaken by China’s technological and economic prowess, the Trump administration is slashing support for scientific research and attacking education. In the name of defeating the bogeymen of “wokeness” and the “deep state”, this administration is actively opposing progress in critical sectors while giving grifters like the crypto industry everything that they want.

“The most obvious example of Trump’s war on a critical sector, and the most consequential for the next decade, is his vendetta against renewable energy. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill rolled back Biden’s tax incentives for renewable energy. The administration is currently trying to kill a huge, nearly completed offshore wind farm that could power hundreds of thousands of homes, as well as cancel $7 billion in grants for residential solar panels. It appears to have succeeded in killing a huge solar energy project that would have powered almost 2 million homes. It has canceled $8 billion in clean energy grants, mostly in Democratic states, and is reportedly planning to cancel tens of billions more.

“While Trump proclaims “Drill, Baby, Drill”, projected growth in U.S. solar and wind power has been stunted, and perhaps even stalled, by the administration’s hostility.”

Krugman speculated on the source of that hostility and anti-intellectualism and concluded that it is actually deeply ingrained in the American psyche:

“Anti-scientism is a widespread attitude on the religious right, which forms a key component of MAGA. In past decades, however, the forces of humanism and scientific inquiry were able to prevail against anti-scientism. In part this was due to the recognition that American science was essential for national security as well as national prosperity.

“But now we have an administration that claims to be protecting national security by imposing tariffs on kitchen cabinets and bathroom vanities, while gutting the CDC and the EPA.

“Does this mean that the US is losing the race with China for global leadership? No, I think that race is essentially over. Even if Trump and his team of saboteurs lose power in 2028, everything I see says that by then America will have fallen so far behind that it’s unlikely that we will ever catch up.”

That is what should worry people of conscience the most. Ignorance is not a family value. Nor is it a basis upon which to build a nation that leads the world in anything but the number of mass murders that take place each year. If we do not awaken from this national nightmare — and soon — the America we knew and loved will be nothing more than a distant memory.

China shows no intention of slowing its economic push, not only for making renewable energy the mainstay of its own economy, but also for making it one of its most important exports. The US is exporting nothing other than lies and hatred. This is not likely to end well for America, which is now firmly committed to viewing the rest of the world through the wrong end of the telescope.