How the U.S. clean energy boom could go bust if Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ becomes law
Solar power CEOs believed the billions of dollars that they invested in Republican congressional districts would ultimately shield their industry from President Donald Trump’s threats to end federal support for renewable energy.
But they may have been disastrously wrong. The tax bill that House Republicans passed this week is a “worse than feared scenario” for solar, analysts at the investment bank Jefferies told clients in a note.
The legislation would terminate key tax credits that have supported the industry’s growth, triggering a broad sell-off of solar stocks on Thursday. The bill does still have to pass the Senate, where Jefferies expects the “unworkable” provisions to be undone.
But in its current form, the tax bill effectively takes a “sledgehammer” to President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, the Jefferies analysts said. The legislation would “upend an economic boom in this country that has delivered an historic American manufacturing renaissance,” said Abigail Ross Hopper, CEO of the lobby group Solar Energy Industries Association.
Hopper excoriated the tax bill as “willfully ignorant” of the role that solar power and battery storage is playing in meeting electricity demand from U.S. consumers and businesses.
“If this bill becomes law, America will effectively surrender the AI race to China and communities nationwide will face blackouts,” she warned.
Sunrun CEO Mary Powell told CNBC in an interview Thursday that the legislation could result in the loss of 250,000 jobs and would increase the cost of electricity for consumers. The rooftop solar installer had its worst performance ever Thursday, with shares dropping 37%.
Trump, for his part, called on the Senate to pass what he calls the “one, big, beautiful bill” as soon as possible. “There is no time to waste,” the president said on his social media platform Truth Social Thursday.
Clean energy boom could bust
Companies have invested more than $161 billion in large solar and battery storage projects since the IRA passed in 2022, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Rhodium Group.
Solar and battery storage is the fastest growing energy source in the U.S., making up 81% of expected power additions to the grid in 2025, according to the Energy Information Administration.
But the tax bill would basically kill the two tax credits that have done the most to enable the surge of solar power. It terminates the investment and electricity production credits for clean energy facilities that begin construction 60 days after the legislation is enacted or enter service after 2028. This also applies to wind power, which is growing at slower place in the U.S.
“That’ll put a massive slowdown on the amount of clean energy that gets added to the grid,” said Ben Smith, associate director of Rhodium Group’s energy and climate practice. The deployment of clean energy to the grid could decline by 57% to 72% over the next decade, according to Rhodium.
Clean energy projects also cannot claim the tax credits as early as next year if they receive “material assistance” from prohibited foreign entities. This mostly targets projects that source basic materials from China, such as glass for solar panels or cobalt and lithium for batteries, King said.
“It really does serve in our estimation as a de facto repeal of the credit as early as next year,” he said. The manufacturing tax credit that has supported companies such as First Solar remains in place until 2031, though its also subject to the foreign entity restrictions.
The tax bill is “disastrous” for the rooftop solar industry, Guggenheim analyst Joseph Osha told clients. It terminates tax credits for companies like Sunrun that lease solar equipment to customers. About 70% of the residential solar industry is using lease arrangements, Osha said.
GOP senators could tweak bill
But some Republican senators have pushed back on the legislation, raising at least some hope for the industry that the bill’s harshest provisions will be softened. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.V., told Politico that the tax bill acts like a blanket repeal of the tax credits.
“I would expect that to change,” Capito told Politico on May 13. “There has been job creation around these tax credits.”
Indeed, GOP congressional districts would get hit the hardest if the credits are terminated. Some 81% of IRA investment has gone to Republican districts, according to data from advocacy group E2.
A slowdown in solar deployment would come at the same time that electricity demand is increasing due to the construction of artificial intelligence data centers, reindustrialization and the broader electrification of the economy.
Renewables can be deployed the most quickly to meet demand right now because solar, battery storage and wind represent 92% of the power projects waiting for connection to the grid, according to Interconnection.fyi, an organization that tracks connection requests.
Natural gas demand is also soaring in the U.S., but the wait time for new turbines is five to six years if an order is put in now, said Reid Ramdathsingh, an analyst at consulting firm Rystad Energy. While growth may slow, solar and batteries will continue to be deployed because there really isn’t an alternative, Ramdathsingh said.
“The demand is there for energy,” he said. “Gas is not able to meet this demand in the short term. The biggest alternative to that gas generation that we would need in the next couple of years is renewables.”
There you are, motoring along in your Volvo XC90 PHEV with the Pilot Assist engaged alongside a big 18-wheeler at a comfortable 70 mph cruise when the interstate starts to slowly sweep left. From the drivers’ seat, that semi on your right looks awfully close. As the steering wheel turns itself in your hand, you start to wonder if that truck’s a bit too close. The car isn’t doing anything wrong, but it’s too close for your comfort and you give the wheel a little nudge to hug the inside of the lane just a bit more.
These deeply personal preferences are tough to quantify, and highlight a simple fact about Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) that the industry at-large hasn’t yet to come to terms with: when it comes to self-driving cars, one size does not fit all.
The Volvo experience I outlined above was very real, happening just as the wife and I were arguing about the relative merits of our very different choice in running shoes. She prefers the supportive, cushion-y ride of the HOKA Clifton 9s, which I’ve become convinced are The Devil™, preferring instead the zero-lift, no-cushion feel of my Xero Prio runners. The intervention with the Volvo interrupted that particular argument and started another. Namely, the one about why I had chosen that moment to “interfere” with the Pilot Assist.
“It was too close to that truck,” I explained. “Freaked me out.”
“That’s how I feel in the Honda,” she said. “I’m always afraid that it’s going to try and put me into oncoming traffic.”
That’s when the idea for this post came to me. Because, as a car brand, it’s really not possible to just say that your car has ADAS or doesn’t have ADAS in a binary sense. That’s because these systems are not just proprietary to a given brand, they can vary from vehicle-to-vehicle within that brand, and each one can have distinct lane centering behavior, steering feel, lane change aggressiveness, braking distances, timing for its hand-off warnings, and probably a bunch of other stuff that I haven’t even thought of depending on what kind of cameras, sensors, and software the specific vehicle you are in is equipped with.
It’s a bit of a mess, in other words.
Opinion: Honda Sensing gets it right
I first experienced Honda’s ADAS in 2014, driving a then-new CR-V between Chicago and Bay Harbor, Michigan for an Acura press drive. Even in its early generations, I was impressed with the way it handled stop-and-go traffic, the way it guided you through turns, but didn’t do the turning for you, and the speed and intensity it used in braking very much mirrored my own.
Last month, I had a chance to test out the 2025 Honda Civic Sport Touring Hybrid for a week on Cape Cod. I picked the car up at PreFlight Parking outside Boston Logan, jammed it with luggage, and immediately hit heavy traffic, where the Honda Sensing Low-Speed Follow function took me right back to 2014, ratatouille-style, when my experience in that car had led me to believe that self-driving cars were right around the corner.
In the decade-plus since experiencing that first autonomous Acura, I’ve had the chance to experience Ford BlueCruise, Tesla Autopilot and FSD, and Mercedes-Benz DRIVE PILOT. And all, interestingly enough, in and around the Circuit of the Americas in Austin at one time or another over my three years of hosting Electrify Expo events there.
Each different OEMs’ system had its strengths and quirks. I remember Mercedes DRIVE PILOT as impressively precise, even clinical. The Ford system faded into memory. I couldn’t tell you anything about it, which is probably high praise. The Tesla systems, though, stood out — but for all the wrong reasons. Lane changes came too quickly, it accelerated too late, and too aggressively, and I often found myself bracing for collisions that (in fairness) never came.
More than once in those years I’ve wondered if maybe I’d just got it wrong back in 2014. That the tech was so new, and I had been so wow’ed by it initially, that I had got swept up in the hype of self-driving cars … but that drive in my wife’s XC90, back-to-back as it was with the Civic Hybrid, showed me that wasn’t it. Instead, I just didn’t like the way those other cars drove. Just like I don’t like the way HOKAs feel. And, just like my wife isn’t wrong for liking her gross marshmallow shoes (probably), I’m not wrong for preferring a more restrained digital co-pilot.
It’s a matter of fit, not fact — and that’s going to be a tough sell.
Everyone but me is wrong
As the great George Carlin once asked, “Have you ever noticed that anyone who is driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone driving faster than you is a maniac?”
ADAS systems live squarely in that same subjective space occupied by other drivers. If the bots brake too hard, steer too sharply, or get too close to the car head before changing lanes, they might not be technically doing anything wrong, but they’re maniacs – and right now, there’s no real way to know how one car’s ADAS is going to behave until you’ve spent some significant time behind the wheel. Like, “Uh-oh. I bought a thing and I hate it,” amounts of time.
That’s a problem for both buyers and sellers (to say nothing of manufacturers and software developers), because why would you risk demonstrating a system that might scare someone? How do you sell “confidence” and “convenience” when what feels confident and convenient to one driver feels reckless to another, and milquetoast to a third?
Lucky for you guys, I have a solution.
Jojo’s ADAS scorecard *
| System | Lane centering bias | Lane change distance (car lengths) | Follow distance (default) | Braking force (max Gs) | Hands-off time allowed | Overall “feel” |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ford BlueCruise | Centered | ~3.5 | Moderate | 0.30 G | Medium | Stable |
| Honda Sensing | Slight left bias | ~2.5 | Safe | 0.35 G | Short | Balanced |
| Mercedes-Benz DRIVE PILOT |
Centered | ~3.5 | Moderate | 0.40 G | Long | Confident |
| Tesla Autopilot | Centered | ~1.5 | Close | 0.45 G | Long (varies) | Aggressive |
| Volvo Pilot Assist | Slight right bias | ~3.0 | Moderate | 0.30 G | Moderate | Cautious |
That asterisk (*) is there because these are completely made up, imaginary values. They’re simply there to illustrate one way for manufacturers and dealers to share objective, quantifiable information about how their different ADAS systems behave. If it’s done right, it might help a car shopper get a better feel for how their next car might drive, and prevent them from spending their hard-earned cash on a car that drives like an idiot. Or a maniac.
That’s my take, anyway – what’s yours? Head down to the comments and let us know what values you’d like to see represented on an ADAS scorecard, and how much you’d be willing to base your next car buying decision on how it drives.
As for me, my X handle might be VolvoJo, but if I’m shopping for a car that’s going to drive me instead of the other way around, I might have to see if “HondaJo” is available.
Original content from Electrek.
If you’re considering going solar, it’s always a good idea to get quotes from a few installers. To make sure you find a trusted, reliable solar installer near you that offers competitive pricing, check out EnergySage, a free service that makes it easy for you to go solar. It has hundreds of pre-vetted solar installers competing for your business, ensuring you get high-quality solutions and save 20-30% compared to going it alone. Plus, it’s free to use, and you won’t get sales calls until you select an installer and share your phone number with them.
Your personalized solar quotes are easy to compare online and you’ll get access to unbiased Energy Advisors to help you every step of the way. Get started here.
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
Elon wants the US military to start buying Tesla Cybertrucks – and now they are! The Air Force has ordered two Cybertruck testers for target practice to determine how easy they are to blow up, while Jo makes up a whole new conspiracy theory on today’s explosive episode of Quick Charge!
Today’s episode is brought to you by retrospec—makers of sleek, powerful e-bikes and outdoor gear built for everyday adventure. Electrek listeners can get 10% off their next ride until August 14 with the exclusive code ELECTREK10 only at retrospec.com.
An it doesn’t stop there. We’ve also got exciting new home battery backup and V2X options for Tesla owners, and one Texas EV driver that decided to conquer the Texas floodwaters by harnessing the awesome combined powers of electrons and stupidity (it’s pretty awesome).
Source Links
Prefer listening to your podcasts? Audio-only versions of Quick Charge are now available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, TuneIn, and our RSS feed for Overcast and other podcast players.
New episodes of Quick Charge are recorded, usually, Monday through Thursday (most weeks, anyway). We’ll be posting bonus audio content from time to time as well, so be sure to follow and subscribe so you don’t miss a minute of Electrek’s high-voltage daily news.
Got news? Let us know!
Drop us a line at tips@electrek.co. You can also rate us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or recommend us in Overcast to help more people discover the show.
If you’re considering going solar, it’s always a good idea to get quotes from a few installers. To make sure you find a trusted, reliable solar installer near you that offers competitive pricing, check out EnergySage, a free service that makes it easy for you to go solar. It has hundreds of pre-vetted solar installers competing for your business, ensuring you get high-quality solutions and save 20-30% compared to going it alone. Plus, it’s free to use, and you won’t get sales calls until you select an installer and share your phone number with them.
Your personalized solar quotes are easy to compare online and you’ll get access to unbiased Energy Advisors to help you every step of the way. Get started here.
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
Tesla’s Dojo supercomputer project is reportedly over. Bloomberg reports that CEO Elon Musk is killing the project after a mass exodus of talent from the Dojo team to a competing startup.
Dojo was the name of Tesla’s in-house AI chip development to create supercomputers to train its AI models for self-driving.
Tesla hired a bunch of top chip architects and tried to develop better AI accelerator chips to rely less on companies like NVIDIA, AMD, and others.
It has been running into delays for years.
We previously reported on significant setbacks. In 2018, Jim Keller, the famed chip architect who was first hired to lead Tesla’s chip-making effort, left the company.
Ganesh Venkataramanan succeeded him, but he left Tesla in 2023.
For the last few years, Peter Bannon, who worked with Keller for years, has been leading Tesla’s chip-making programs, but he is now reportedly also leaving the automaker.
Bloomberg reports that Musk has “ordered the effort to be shut down.”:
Peter Bannon, who was heading up Dojo, is leaving and Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk has ordered the effort to be shut down, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing internal matters. The team has lost about 20 workers recently to newly formed DensityAI, and remaining Dojo workers are being reassigned to other data center and compute projects within Tesla, the people said.
DensityAI is a new startup currently in stealth mode, founded by several former Tesla employees, including Venkataramanan.
It reportedly plans to build chips for AI data centers and robots, much like the Dojo program.
The company recently hired 20 former Tesla employees who worked on Dojo.
While the program appeared to be lagging behind for years as Tesla increasingly bought more compute power from NVIDIA, Musk has been claiming progress.
The CEO said in June:
Tesla Dojo AI training computer making progress. We start bringing Dojo 2 online later this year. It takes three major iterations for a new technology to be great. Dojo 2 is good, but Dojo 3 will be great.
During Tesla’s quarterly conference call in late July, the CEO claimed that Dojo 2 will be “operating at scale sometime next year.”
Electrek’s Take
It’s unclear whether the report is accurate or if it’s an extrapolation from the talent exodus to Elon killing Dojo, or if Elon was lying just a few weeks ago.
Alternatively, this development may be so recent that Elon went from being confident in Dojo a few weeks ago to disbanding the team working on it now.
Either way, I think it’s clear that the project has been lagging, and Tesla has been extremely dependent on chip suppliers rather than making its own.
I think Dojo being likely dead is not a big loss for Tesla.
When it comes to chip making, developing its own inference compute for onboard “AI computers” was always the more important project.
TSMC is set to produce Tesla’s new AI5 chip, which is coming soon, and we have recently learned that Samsung will be manufacturing its AI6 chip.
I think the bigger concern from this report is that it’s the latest example of an ongoing exodus of talent at Tesla.
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
-
Sports3 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports1 year agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports2 years agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Sports2 years agoButton battles heat exhaustion in NASCAR debut
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike