Trump’s Legislation Will Constrict the Growth of Texas’ Clean Energy

Provisions in President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act phasing out tax breaks for solar and wind projects would stunt such development in Texas and make these renewable energy sources more expensive, industry representatives and energy experts said Wednesday. 

They said those rollbacks, passed as part of the legislation by the Senate 51-50 on Tuesday and by the House 218-214 on Wednesday, would also increase the demand for, price of, and reliance on natural gas. 

Texas’ two Republican U.S. senators, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, voted in favor of the legislation. The state’s House members approved the bill 25-12 along party lines, with all 25 Republicans voting in favor. 

Abigail Ross Hopper, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), a trade group with more than 1,200 members and a strong lobbying presence in Texas, said the reconciliation bill would set back America’s global competitiveness and weaken industries powering our economy and national security. 

“It will strip the ability of millions of American families to choose the energy savings, energy resilience and energy freedom that solar and storage provide,” Hopper said in a statement.

The association that represents all U.S. investor-owned electric companies, the Edison Electric Institute, estimates that in Texas, the repeal of federal credits would raise annual energy costs per household for both electricity and fuel by more than $90 a year in 2030 and by more than $370 a year in 2035. 

It’s not just costs going up in Texas as a result of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, said Doug Lewin, a Texas energy consultant. It would spike risk, too, of conservation alerts and energy emergencies faced by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) at times of peak power demand on the state’s power grid.  

As triple-digit temperature days approach, Lewin remembers what grid reliability looked like without significant contributions from solar. Today, solar makes up nearly 20 percent of ERCOT’s capacity and continues to break records during peak demand. There were multiple days in June that solar, coupled with wind, met more than half of the state’s peak energy demand. 

In 2019, solar made up less than two percent of the grid’s fuel mix. Low power reserves that summer resulted in two afternoon occasions of emergency conditions. It was the first time ERCOT had declared an emergency since 2014. 

“For a while, we’ll be OK at that time of day, because we have so much solar already—there’s quite a bit of buffer,” Lewin said. “But over time that buffer will…