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Wind and solar are out. Clean, firm power is in.
The Senate Finance committee published its highly anticipated tax proposal for Trump’s One Big, Beautiful Bill on Monday night, including a new plan to revise the nation’s clean energy tax credits.
Senate Republicans widened the aperture slightly compared to the House version of the bill, extending tax credits for geothermal energy, batteries, and hydropower, and preserving “transferability” — a crucial rule that allows companies to sell their tax credits for cash — for years to come.
But the text would still slash many of the signature programs of the Inflation Reduction Act. It would be particularly damaging for Republicans’ goals of creating a domestic mining industry, because it kills incentives for refining critical minerals while yanking away subsidies for the electric cars and wind turbines that might use those minerals.
Consumer tax credits for energy efficiency upgrades, including heat pumps, would still be terminated, as would credits for homeowners to lease or purchase rooftop solar. The Senate bill also cuts a tax deduction for energy efficiency upgrades in commercial buildings one year after the bill’s passage, which was not in the House version.
There was no mercy for the IRA’s tax credit to produce clean hydrogen, despite a last-minute appeal from more than 250 organizations in early June. That policy would still be terminated this year.
Here’s a rundown of the rest of the major changes.
Like the House bill, the Senate’s proposal would terminate tax credits for new, used, and leased electric vehicles. But while the House had extended the program by one year for automakers that had yet to sell 200,000 eligible vehicles, the Senate version would simply end the program in 180 days — or roughly six months — after the bill’s passage.
Depending on when the bill is passed, the Senate version could work out better for some experienced EV automakers, such as Tesla and General Motors. These automakers are set to lose their eligibility for tax credits on December 31 under the House text. But the Senate bill’s 180-day period could allow them to eke out another month or so of eligibility — especially if congressional negotiations over the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act go late into the summer.
Newer EV automakers, such as Rivian or Lucid, come out worse under the Senate text as compared to the House bill since they haven’t sold as many vehicles.
Homeowners interested in electric vehicle chargers would get a longer runway than the House had proposed — but a much shorter one than is on the books right now. Under current law, homeowners can claim the charger tax credit through 2032. The Senate version would terminate the 30% tax credit for installing a home charger one year after the bill is enacted.
The Inflation Reduction Act achieved massive greenhouse gas reductions by including a set of new “technology-neutral” tax credits that subsidized any new power plant as long as it didn’t emit carbon dioxide. Under current law, these new tax credits will remain effective and on the books for decades to come — expiring only when emissions from the country’s power sector fall about 95% below their all-time high.
The Republican reconciliation bills have dismantled these provisions. The House text proposed immediately winding down tax credits for all clean energy sources — except nuclear — and allowed just a 60-day “grace period” for new projects to start construction to claim the credits. Even then, new power plants would have to enter service by 2028 to qualify.
Senate Republicans have countered with a plan that is designed to maintain support for every electricity source that isn’t wind and solar. The GOP Senate caucus favors technologies that can provide power on demand around the clock — such as geothermal, nuclear, hydropower, and batteries — but technically the Senate text allows any zero-carbon, non-solar, non-wind source to qualify for the clean electricity tax credits for the next decade.
The Senate draft erases the provision in the Inflation Reduction Act that would have kept these tax credits in place until the entire United States power sector reduces its emissions. Instead, it adopts the IRA’s alternate phase-out period, with the tax credits beginning to wind down for projects that start construction in 2034.
Tax credits for wind and solar, however, would begin to phase down for projects that start construction next year, and terminate after 2027, with one big exception.
An odd addendum to the wind and solar phase-out would exempt projects that are at least 1 gigawatt, are at least partially on federal land, and have already received a “right-of-way grant or lease” from the Bureau of Land Management as of June 16. It’s unclear which, if any, projects would be helped by this provision. According to the BLM website, it has not granted a right-of-way to any projects that are 1 gigawatt or larger except for the Lava Ridge wind farm, which has been canceled. If the Senate changes the date, however, the Esmeralda 7 solar farm in Nevada may benefit, as the project is more than 6 gigawatts, and is in the final stages of its environmental review.
The Senate text would not do anything to change the eligibility timeline for existing nuclear plants to claim a tax credit, called 45U, designed to keep them solvent. It would keep the schedule written into the Inflation Reduction Act, which has the credit terminating at the end of 2031. It would, however, impose new foreign sourcing restrictions on nuclear fuel, forbidding existing power plants from claiming the tax credit if their fuel comes from Russia, China, Iran, or North Korea. (It makes an exception for power companies that signed a long-term contract to buy foreign fuel before 2023.) The United States formally banned the import of nuclear fuel from Russia last year.
The Inflation Reduction Act subsidized the production of certain clean energy equipment — including solar panels, wind turbines, inverters, and batteries — as well as some of their subcomponents. Under current law, those tax credits will begin to phase out by 25% increments in 2030, so companies can claim 75% of the credit in 2030, 50% in 2031, and zero in 2033.
The IRA also created a new permanent tax credit that covered 10% of the cost of refining or recycling critical minerals.
The new Senate text changes these phase-out deadlines, often for the worse. First, as in the House bill, wind turbines and their subcomponents would no longer qualify for the tax credit starting in 2028. Second, the tax credit for critical minerals would start phasing out in 2031. Under the new calendar, companies would be able to claim 75% of this credit in 2031, 50% in 2032, and zero in 2034.
In practice, this means that the Senate GOP text would end the IRA’s permanent tax credit for producing many critical minerals, which would damage the financial projects of many mineral processing and refining projects. Other types of equipment remain on the Inflation Reduction Act’s original phase-out schedule.
The new Senate text also slightly expands the type of battery components that qualify for the credit. And — in a potentially significant change for some companies — it forbids companies from stacking tax credits for their vertically integrated production process starting in 2027.
While the House did not touch the tax credit for carbon sequestration, the Senate has put forward a key change favored by many proponents of the technology. Under current law, project operators get the highest-value credit if they simply inject captured carbon underground for no other purpose than to keep it out of the atmosphere. Smaller amounts are available for projects that use captured CO2 to nudge more oil out of the ground, also known as “enhanced oil recovery,” or if they use the CO2 in products like cement.
Under the Senate proposal, all carbon sequestration projects, no matter the nature of the carbon storage, would qualify for the same amount.
The biggest clean energy killer in the House-passed bill was a strict sourcing rule for the tax credits that would disqualify projects that use any component, subcomponent or mineral from China. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote last week, the rules appeared “unworkable” to many companies because they seemingly disqualified projects even if they used a relatively small amount of an otherwise irrelevant Chinese-sourced material — such as a spare bolt or a gram of steel.
Under the House bill, manufacturers would also not be allowed to license a Chinese company’s technology. This measure appeared to directly target Ford, which has proposed manufacturing electric vehicle batteries using technology licensed from the Chinese firm CATL, one of the world’s best producers of EV batteries.
The Senate proposal changes the House provision by adding a complicated new set of definitions about what might qualify as a federal entity of concern. It also introduces a new “safe harbor” formula describing the amount of Chinese-sourced material that can keep a project from receiving a tax credit. We’re still figuring out how these new rules work together, and we’ll update this article as we understand them better.
The House bill also would have severely curtailed a crucial component of the tax credit program called transferability, which allowed developers that couldn’t take full advantage of the subsidies to sell their credits for cash to other companies. The text stripped this option from the tax credits for clean manufacturing (45X), carbon sequestration (45Q), and clean fuels (45Z) beginning in 2028. Without transferability, most carbon sequestration projects will struggle to pencil out, my colleague Katie Brigham reported.
The Senate proposal would restore transferability for the duration of all remaining tax credits.
But it throws another wrench in plans to scale up nuclear, geothermal, and other large capital-intensive projects, because it restricts zero-carbon power plants’ ability to use modified accelerated cost recovery to fund their projects.
The Inflation Reduction Act created a technology-neutral tax credit for low-carbon transportation fuels, like sustainable aviation fuel and biodiesel (45Z). This was the only tax credit that the House GOP had proposed extending, giving projects four more years to qualify. The House bill also said that producers did not have to account for indirect land-use changes as a result of turning crops into fuel — a provision that would enable the corn ethanol industry to claim the credit.
The Senate proposal retains both of those provisions, but reduces the credit amount by 20% for fuels produced from feedstocks sourced from outside the United States. It also introduces a new rule that would prohibit companies from claiming their fuel has a “negative emissions” rate — which some environmental groups warn would subsidize established technologies and distort the market. Proponents of several forms of biomethane have tried to claim they are net-negative because they prevent methane emissions that would have otherwise happened — like when methane is captured from landfills or manure pools.
Confusingly, though, the text makes an exception, allowing negative emissions rates for fuels made from manure — which is the feedstock environmental groups are most concerned about.
This article was updated on June 17 to include the breakdown of 45Z.
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Current conditions: The remnants of Tropical Storm Chantal will bring heavy rain and potential flash floods to the Carolinas, southeastern Virginia, and southern Delaware through Monday night • Two people are dead and 300 injured after Typhoon Danas hit Taiwan • Life-threatening rainfall is expected to last through Monday in Central Texas.
Jim Vondruska/Getty Images
The flash floods in Central Texas are expected to become one of the deadliest such events in the past 100 years, with authorities updating the death toll to 82 people on Sunday night. Another 41 people are still missing after the storms, which began Thursday night and raised the Guadalupe River some 26 feet in less than an hour, providing little chance for holiday weekend campers and RVers to escape.
Although it’s far too soon to definitively attribute the disaster to climate change, a warmer atmosphere is capable of holding more moisture and producing heavy bursts of life-threatening rainfall. Disasters like the one in Texas are one of the “hardest things to predict that’s becoming worse faster than almost anything else in a warming climate, and it’s at a moment where we’re defunding the ability of meteorologists and emergency managers to coordinate,” Daniel Swain of the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources told the Los Angeles Times. Meteorologists who spoke to Wired argued that the National Weather Service “accurately predicted the risk of flooding in Texas and could not have foreseen the extreme severity of the storm” ahead of the event, while The New York Times noted that staffing shortages at the agency following President Trump’s layoffs potentially resulted in “the loss of experienced people who would typically have helped communicate with local authorities in the hours after flash flood warnings were issued overnight.”
President Trump announced this weekend that his administration plans to send up to 15 letters on Monday to important trade partners detailing their tariff rates. Though Trump didn’t specify which countries would receive such letters or what the rates could be, he said the tariffs would go into effect on August 1 — an extension from the administration’s 90-day pause through July 9 — and range “from maybe 60% or 70% tariffs to 10% and 20% tariffs.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent added on CNN on Sunday that the administration would subsequently send an additional round of letters to 100 less significant trade partners, warning them that “if you don’t move things along” with trade negotiations, “then on August 1, you will boomerang back to your April 2 tariff level.” Trump’s proposed tariffs have already rattled industries as diverse as steel and aluminum, oil, plastics, agriculture, and bicycles, as we’ve covered extensively here at Heatmap. Trump’s weekend announcement also sent jitters through global markets on Monday morning.
President Trump’s gutting of the Inflation Reduction Act with the signing of the budget reconciliation bill last week will add an extra 7 billion tons of emissions to the atmosphere by 2030, a new analysis by Climate Brief has found. The rollback on renewable energy credits and policy means that “U.S. emissions are now set to drop to just 3% below current levels by 2030 — effectively flatlining — rather than falling 40% as required to hit the now-defunct [Paris Agreement] target,” Carbon Brief notes. As a result, the U.S. will be about 2 billion tons short of its emissions goal by 2030, adding an emissions equivalent of “roughly the annual output of Indonesia, the world’s sixth-largest emitter.”
To reach its conclusions, Carbon Brief utilized modeling by Princeton University’s REPEAT Project, which examined how the current obstacles facing U.S. wind and solar energy will impact U.S. emissions targets, as well as the likely slowdown in electric vehicle sales and energy efficiency upgrades due to the removal of subsidies. “Under this new set of U.S. policies, emissions are only expected to be 20% lower than 2005 levels by 2030,” Carbon Brief writes.
Engineering giant SKF announced late last week that it had set a new world record for tidal turbine reliability, with its systems in northern Scotland having operated continuously for over six years at 1.5 megawatts “without the need for unplanned or disruptive maintenance.” The news represents a significant milestone for the technology since “harsh conditions, high maintenance, and technical challenges” have traditionally made tidal systems difficult to implement in the real world, Interesting Engineering notes. The pilot program, MayGen, is operated by SAE Renewables and aims, as its next step, to begin deploying 3-megawatt powertrains for 30 turbines across Scotland, France, and Japan starting next year.
Satellites monitoring the Southern Ocean have detected for the first time a collapse and reversal of a major current in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. “This is an unprecedented observation and a potential game-changer,” said physicist Marilena Oltmanns, the lead author of a paper on the finding, adding that the changes could “alter the Southern Ocean’s capacity to sequester heat and carbon.”
A breakthrough in satellite ocean observation technology enabled scientists to recognize that, since 2016, the Southern Ocean has become saltier, even as Antarctic sea ice has melted at a rate comparable to the loss of Greenland’s ice. The two factors have altered the Southern Ocean’s properties like “we’ve never seen before,” Antonio Turiel, a co-author of the study, explained. “While the world is debating the potential collapse of the AMOC in the North Atlantic, we’re seeing that the Southern Ocean is drastically changing, as sea ice coverage declines and the upper ocean is becoming saltier,” he went on. “This could have unprecedented global climate impacts.” Read more about the oceanic feedback loop and its potential global consequences at Science Daily, here.
The French public research university Sciences Po will open the Paris Climate School in September 2026, making it the first school in Europe to offer a “degree in humanities and social sciences dedicated to ecological transition.” The first cohort will comprise 100 master’s students in an English-language program. “Faced with the ecological emergency, it is essential to train a new generation of leaders who can think and act differently,” said Laurence Tubiana, the dean of the Paris Climate School.
A fifth of U.S. counties now restrict renewables development, according to exclusive data gathered by Heatmap Pro.
A solar farm 40 minutes south of Columbus, Ohio.
A grid-scale battery near the coast of Nassau County, Long Island.
A sprawling wind farm — capable of generating enough electricity to power 100,000 homes — at the northern edge of Nebraska.
These projects — and hundreds of others — will never get built in the United States. They were blocked and ultimately killed by a regulatory sea-change that has reshaped how local governments consider and approve energy projects. One by one, counties and municipalities across the country are passing laws that heavily curtail the construction of new renewable power plants.
These laws are slowing the energy transition and raising costs for utility ratepayers. And the problem is getting worse.
The development of new wind and solar power plants is now heavily restricted or outright banned in about one in five counties across the country, according to a new and extensive survey of public records and local ordinances conducted by Heatmap News.
“That’s a lot,” Nicholas Bagley, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, told us. Bagley said the “rash of new land use restrictions” owes partly to the increasing politicization of renewable energy.
Across the country, separate rules restrict renewables construction in 605 counties. In some cases, the rules greatly constrain where renewables can be built, such as by requiring that wind turbines must be placed miles from homes, or that solar farms may not take up more than 1% of a county’s agricultural land. In hundreds of other cases, the rules simply forbid new wind or solar construction at all.
Even in the liberal Northeast, where climate concern is high and municipalities broadly control the land use process, the number of restrictions is rising. At least 59 townships and municipalities have curtailed or outright banned new wind and solar farms across the Northeast, according to Heatmap’s survey.
Even though America has built new wind and solar projects for decades, the number of counties restricting renewable development has nearly doubled since 2022.
When the various state, county, and municipality-level ordinances are combined, roughly 17% of the total land mass of the continental United States has been marked as off limits to renewables construction.
These figures have not been previously reported. Over the past 12 months, our energy intelligence platform Heatmap Pro has conducted what it believes to be the most comprehensive survey of county and municipality-level renewables restrictions in the United States. In part, that research included surveys of existing databases of local news and county laws, including those prepared by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.
But our research team has also called thousands of counties, many of whose laws were not in existing public databases, and we have updated our data in real time as counties passed ordinances and opposed projects progress (or not) through the zoning process. This data is normally available to companies and individuals who subscribe to Heatmap Pro. In this story, we are making a high-level summary of this data available to the public for the first time.
Restrictions have proliferated in all regions of the country.
Forty counties in Virginia alone now have an anti-renewable law on the books, effectively halting solar development in large portions of the state, even as the region experiences blistering electricity load growth.
These anti-solar laws have even begun to slow down energy development across the sunny Southwest. Counties in Nevada and Arizona have rejected new solar development in the same parts of the state that have already seen a high number of solar projects, our data show. Since President Trump took office in January, the effect of these local rules have become more acute — while solar developers could previously avoid the rules by proposing projects on federal land, a permitting slowdown at the Bureau of Land Management is now styming solar projects of all types in the region, as our colleague Jael Holzman has reported.
In the Northeast and on the West Coast, where Democrats control most state governments, towns and counties are still successfully fighting and cancelling dozens of new energy projects. Battery electricity storage systems, or BESS projects, now draw particular ire. The high-profile case of the battery fire in Moss Landing, California, in January has led to a surge of local opposition to BESS projects, our data shows. So far in 2025, residents have cited the Moss Landing case when fighting at least six different BESS projects nationwide.
That’s what happened with Jupiter Power, the battery project proposed in Nassau County, Long Island. The 275-megawatt project was first proposed in 2022 for the Town of Oyster Bay, New York. It would have replaced a petroleum terminal and improved the resilience of the local power grid.
But opposed residents began attending public meetings to agitate about perceived fire and environmental risks, and in spring 2024 successfully lobbied the town to pass a six-month moratorium on battery storage systems. The developer of the battery storage system, Jupiter Power, announced it would withdraw after the town passed two consecutive extensions to the moratorium and residents continued agitating for tighter restrictions.
That pattern — a town passes a temporary moratorium that it repeatedly extends — is how many projects now die in the United States.
The Nebraska wind project, North Fork Wind, was effectively shuttered when Knox County passed a permanent wind-energy ban. And the solar project south of Columbus, Ohio? It died when the Ohio Power Siting Board ruled that “that any benefits to the local community are outweighed by public opposition” to the project, which would have generated 70 megawatts, enough to power about 9,000 homes.
The developers of both of these projects are now waging lengthy and expensive legal appeals to save them; neither has won yet. Even in cases where the developer ultimately prevails against a local law, opposition can waste years and raise the final cost of a project by millions of dollars.
Our Heatmap Pro platform models opposition history alongside demographic, employment, voting, and exclusive polling data to quantify the risk a project will face in every county in the country, allowing developers to avoid places where they are likely to be unsuccessful and strategize for those where they have a chance.
Access to the full project- and county-level data and associated risk assessments is available via Heatmap Pro.
And more on the week’s biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects.
1. Jackson County, Kansas – A judge has rejected a Hail Mary lawsuit to kill a single solar farm over it benefiting from the Inflation Reduction Act, siding with arguments from a somewhat unexpected source — the Trump administration’s Justice Department — which argued that projects qualifying for tax credits do not require federal environmental reviews.
2. Portage County, Wisconsin – The largest solar project in the Badger State is now one step closer to construction after settling with environmentalists concerned about impacts to the Greater Prairie Chicken, an imperiled bird species beloved in wildlife conservation circles.
3. Imperial County, California – The board of directors for the agriculture-saturated Imperial Irrigation District in southern California has approved a resolution opposing solar projects on farmland.
4. New England – Offshore wind opponents are starting to win big in state negotiations with developers, as officials once committed to the energy sources delay final decisions on maintaining contracts.
5. Barren County, Kentucky – Remember the National Park fighting the solar farm? We may see a resolution to that conflict later this month.
6. Washington County, Arkansas – It seems that RES’ efforts to build a wind farm here are leading the county to face calls for a blanket moratorium.
7. Westchester County, New York – Yet another resort town in New York may be saying “no” to battery storage over fire risks.