When Congress enacted President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s signature climate law in 2022, Democrats made a bet. They knew the law would spur billions of dollars of investments in solar arrays, battery factories and other clean energy projects, primarily in Republican-led districts. That was designed to give the law staying power.
But that wager failed spectacularly on Tuesday as Senate Republicans voted to dismantle many of the law’s lucrative tax credits for solar panels, wind turbines, electric cars and other green technologies as part of President Trump’s giant domestic policy bill.
Nearly all Republicans voted for the bill even as industry groups, labor unions and even some members of their own party warned that axing those clean energy credits could erase thousands of jobs in red states and raise electricity prices nationwide.
In the final hours of debate, a few Senate Republicans managed to secure a one-year extension for wind and solar companies to qualify for existing tax breaks. But the overall bill was still expected to force businesses to abandon projects and to slow the growth of clean energy.
When asked whether he heard from businesses about the jobs at stake in the wrangling over the clean energy credits, Senator Jim Justice, Republican of West Virginia, said on Tuesday: “Sure I did. But I think we’ve got a good bill.” Mr. Justice, who owns three coal companies, added that he supported eliminating the clean energy subsidies to “make it a level playing field” for all energy sources, including fossil fuels. (The final bill added a new tax subsidy, however, for metallurgical coal, a fossil fuel used in steel making.)
Senator John Curtis, Republican of Utah and a lead negotiator of the bill’s energy provisions, said that the one-year extension for wind and solar companies would preserve some well-paying jobs. Still, he acknowledged that other moderate Republican senators ultimately had “bigger” priorities in the domestic policy package than clean energy, including changes to support rural health care and nutrition assistance.
The vote dealt a severe blow to the nation’s efforts to slow global warming. And it left Democrats and environmentalists to ponder how they had miscalculated the durability of the 2022 climate law, known as the Inflation Reduction Act.
“It is bizarre that Republicans go home and see high-skill, high-wage jobs in their communities, often for the first time, with clean energy sources, and they pretend it doesn’t matter,” said Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, who played a key role in crafting the clean energy tax credits in the last Congress.
Earlier this year, before debate over the domestic policy bill began, more than two dozen House Republicans and several Senate Republicans had urged their colleagues to preserve many of the law’s green tax credits in order to save jobs.
But in the end, nearly every Republican in the House and Senate voted to drastically scale back subsidies for wind, solar and electric vehicles, although lawmakers did preserve tax breaks for technologies such as batteries, nuclear reactors, geothermal plants and carbon capture.
The Senate bill will still need to pass the House before it can be signed into law by President Trump.
Mr. Trump has been hostile toward efforts to fight climate change, and clean energy companies this year have already halted or canceled roughly $15.5 billion in investments, including a battery recycling facility in upstate New York and a factory to make electric transformers in West Virginia. Now, experts say, hundreds of billions of dollars in additional projects that had been announced in communities large and small may never materialize.
Republicans cited several reasons they repealed large chunks of the law. But perhaps the main driver was Mr. Trump, who has nursed an intense personal distaste for wind and solar power as well as for electric vehicles.
Since returning to the White House, Mr. Trump has told associates that he doesn’t want a single offshore wind project built during his second term, according to a lobbyist briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Mr. Trump has also repeatedly railed against wind and solar energy projects to his associates, calling them inefficient, expensive and ugly, the lobbyist said.
Mr. Trump, who has mocked climate science, has instead worked to ramp up the production of oil, gas and coal, the burning of which is the main driver of global warming. He won election in November with strong backing from the fossil-fuel industry.
Earlier this month, it appeared that the Senate might more gradually phase out tax credits for wind and solar in its version of the policy bill. But on Thursday, Mr. Trump told Senator John Thune of North Dakota, the majority leader, that he would veto the legislation unless it put a quick end to the subsidies, according to two people with knowledge of the discussion who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Mr. Trump mostly got his wish: The Senate bill allows wind and solar projects to claim a tax credit if they begin construction before mid-2026, and then the credit quickly disappears. While that was more lenient than a draft released this weekend, which envisioned an even faster end to the tax breaks, industry groups said the overall effect would still be negative.
“We effectively get an extra six to eight months of projects in the pipeline to keep the factories going,” said Mike Carr, the executive director of the Solar Energy Manufacturers for America Coalition, a trade group. “I’m not going to thank them for missing the kill shot.”
Representatives for Mr. Thune and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.
The legislation also adds new restrictions to tax credits for factories that build wind turbines, solar panels or batteries. And it almost immediately terminates tax credits for consumers to buy electric cars, put solar panels on their roofs or install heat pumps.
At the last moment, senators removed a contentious new excise tax for wind and solar projects built after 2027 that had ties to China.
Some Republicans said renewable energy was a mature sector that no longer needed federal aid. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a former fracking executive, had urged lawmakers to repeal the subsidies, calling wind and solar power, which cannot run at all hours, a “parasite” on the power grid.
The renewable energy credits “have been around for a long time, they need to be phased out,” said Senator John Hoeven, Republican of North Dakota. He added that wind and solar were “variable” and more reliable sources were needed to “stabilize the grid.”
Renewable energy companies were nonetheless surprised by the vote, as many assumed the fast-growing technologies had broader bipartisan support. Wind and solar projects account for nearly two-thirds of new electric capacity expected to come online this year. In Texas, grid operators have credited the boom in solar and battery installations with reducing the risk of blackouts during hot summer months.
Jim Spencer, chief executive of Exus Renewables North America, said his company has invested more than $300 million to build two large wind farms in rural Pennsylvania. Once finished, the projects would generate new revenue for local schools and communities.
“A lot of companies thought that making these investments in deeply red areas would work as a sort of defensive mechanism,” Mr. Spencer said. “But there seemed to be little recognition that it mattered at all.”
Another factor that may have doomed the clean energy credits was that Republicans were juggling several thorny issues in Mr. Trump’s sprawling multitrillion-dollar bill, which included far-reaching changes to health care and the tax code, such as the state and local tax, or SALT, deduction. Energy policy was rarely a top priority for most lawmakers.
“People will lose their elections over Medicaid, and they might lose them over SALT,” said Sarah E. Hunt, president of the Joseph Rainey Center for Public Policy, a conservative think tank. “They’re not going to lose them over electricity price increases three to five years from now.”
On Monday night, several Republican senators, including Joni Ernst and Charles E. Grassley of Iowa and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, floated an amendment that would have slowed the phaseout for wind and solar tax credits. But the senators struggled to find cuts elsewhere in the bill to pay for the extension, which would have cost billions of dollars, and the amendment died.
Some Democrats who supported the Inflation Reduction Act said that it was still a promising attempt to create a durable climate policy in the United States. But they acknowledged that the law was relatively slow to translate into jobs and revenue on the ground.
Since 2022, companies have made plans to invest more than $843 billion in projects across the United States, from wind farms in Wyoming to battery factories in Ohio. But nearly two-thirds of that money has yet to be spent, and many projects were held up by delays in receiving permits or guidance from the federal government on who could qualify for the credits.
“We’ll never know, but if we’d had another four years for these manufacturing investments to take hold, it would be a lot harder for lawmakers to undo them,” said Adrian Deveny, who worked on the climate law as a policy director for Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, and is now president of Climate Vision, a policy advisory firm.
Others pointed out that important parts of the climate law remained intact. The Senate bill, for instance, would preserve tax credits for companies that build battery storage plants, nuclear reactors, geothermal plants, hydropower dams or battery storage through 2033, albeit with new restrictions that could make the subsidies harder to access.
Mr. Wright, the energy secretary, and several business groups had urged lawmakers to keep tax credits for these so-called “clean firm” electricity sources that may take longer to develop but can operate at all hours, unlike wind and solar power. Experts say these technologies could one day turn out to be valuable for fighting global warming, although they may not do as much to cut emissions in the short term.
“Clean firm sources of power are now bipartisan,” said Pavan Venkatakrishnan, an infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress, a nonpartisan research organization. “Republicans had a sledgehammer available to them and decided not to use it on a couple key technologies.”
Maxine Joselow reports on climate policy for The Times.
Brad Plumer is a Times reporter who covers technology and policy efforts to address global warming.
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