President Trump’s sweeping tax law last year eliminated most federal support for wind and solar energy, electric vehicles and other clean technologies. Now, a group of wealthy investors is coming after its architects, trying to prove that green energy knows how to play hardball politics.
Their first target is Chip Roy, a Republican representative from Texas who led the push to kill subsidies for clean tech in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The investors, who include Chris Larsen, the billionaire co-founder of the cryptocurrency platform Ripple, are pouring money into defeating Mr. Roy’s campaign for attorney general in Texas.
Clean energy backers have already bought $650,000 of TV ads bashing Roy, which helped force him into a primary runoff this month. They plan to announce this week that they’ll put another $500,000 into the runoff and develop a list of other races they’ll engage with this fall, too.
Mr. Roy’s top Republican campaign rival, Mayes Middleton, is no friend to renewables: A Texas state senator, he has introduced bills to restrict wind and solar power. But the clean tech executives said they weren’t worried that they might help elect someone equally antagonistic.
They’re aiming for payback.
“You’ve got to have some fear that if you vote against the clean energy industry, you may pay a political price,” said Michael Brune, a former head of the Sierra Club who now serves as chief executive of the Clean Break Fund, a climate investment group backed by Mr. Larsen, who has contributed $500,000 to the effort.
Mr. Roy acknowledged in a telephone interview that the clean energy spending had an impact in the primary. But he said he took their opposition as a “badge of honor” and promised to try to hurt the industry even more.
“You want to come after me? Then I’m taking two of your guys,” Mr. Roy said. “We got a good chunk of your subsidies removed last year. Just wait until the next go-round.”
Last year was brutal for clean energy. Mr. Trump’s tax law, which Republicans muscled through on party-line votes, dismantled more than $600 billion in tax credits and incentives for electric vehicles, solar and wind projects. The Trump administration also stalled federal approvals for solar and wind and fought to halt five offshore wind farms that were already under construction. This week, officials announced they would pay nearly $1 billion to terminate two offshore wind leases.
But some executives, particularly in the solar industry, said they were done licking their wounds and have started to go on the offensive.
First Solar Inc., a photovoltaic solar and manufacturing company, hired Mr. Trump’s campaign pollster, Fabrizio, Lee & Associates, in February to gauge how Republican voters felt about the technology. The findings: Most of them like solar, especially if the panels are made in the United States and without Chinese materials.
Separately, a group of solar companies formed a coalition called American Energy First and commissioned a poll by Kellyanne Conway, Mr. Trump’s longtime adviser. That survey found that 75 percent of Trump voters supported expanding U.S. solar energy, garnering a headline in Breitbart, a right-wing news outlet.
The solar coalition is also amplifying conservatives who have written recently about the benefits of clean energy, such as Newt Gingrich, the Republican former House speaker and an informal Trump adviser, and Katie Miller, a former administration official who is also married to Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff.
“Solar energy is the energy of the future,” Ms. Miller posted on X in February.
Ms. Miller briefly worked as a top staff member for Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Mr. Musk has supported solar energy for years, and Tesla recently announced plans to manufacture 100 gigawatts of solar panels annually by 2028. That is more than twice as many as the entire country installed last year. Ms. Miller said her posts were unrelated to Tesla’s efforts and that no one had paid or encouraged her to write them.
“My X feed is just my unfiltered thoughts to the public,” she said in an interview, adding that she has not tried to influence Trump officials on clean energy.
“My husband and I did have a conversation about how I felt on solar energy, but at no point did I ever ask him, or anybody in the administration, to take a different perspective than what they already have on this,” Ms. Miller said. “It’s not my place.”
The renewable energy industry has struggled to adjust to Mr. Trump’s hostility. Initially, solar executives tried to mimic his language on “energy dominance.” During the debate over the Republican policy bill last year, solar companies tried to warn that cutting subsidies would cost jobs.
Lately, though, the industry has been arguing that throttling solar power will make electricity less affordable, and it’s finding conservatives to make that point.
“The industry is realizing that it’s not just the message, it’s the messengers that matter,” said Chris Moyer, the founder and president of Echo Communications Advisors, a public affairs firm focused on climate policy.
“I think it’s a realization of the raw politics in Washington these days, where a logical argument doesn’t necessarily win the day in a policy fight,” said Mr. Moyer, a onetime aide to Harry Reid, the former Senate majority leader and Nevada Democrat.
By far the most bellicose strategy has been going after Mr. Roy, one of clean energy’s most vocal opponents in Congress.
Every Republican voted for Mr. Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” but Mr. Roy fought among the hardest to strip away tax credits and incentives for renewable energy that Democrats had passed during the Biden administration. When Mr. Trump signed the measure into law, Mr. Roy boasted that his efforts had helped guarantee that more than 90 percent of planned wind farms, solar arrays, battery factories and other projects would never begin.
“We got completely rolled,” said Peter Davidson, the founder and chief executive of Aligned Climate Capital, an asset management company that invests in clean energy.
When Mr. Davidson read a few months later that Mr. Roy was cruising toward victory in the Republican primary for Texas attorney general, he was furious. Particularly galling, he said, was that Mr. Roy’s state ranks first in wind and second in solar capacity in the country, generating nearly $300 million in state and local taxes annually.
Mr. Davidson got on the phone with other executives and started the Invest in Tomorrow Coalition PAC. In addition to Mr. Larsen, other big contributors include Howard Wenger, the president of Nextpower, a solar technology and energy management company; Summit Ridge Energy, a developer of solar power projects; and operator of commercial solar projects; and Thomas Matzzie, the chief executive of CleanChoice Energy, a renewable energy company. E&E News reported on the effort earlier.
“We want to be a little aggressive,” Mr. Larsen said in an interview.
It was the one strategy clean energy industries hadn’t tried yet.
Mr. Larsen, who made his fortune (estimated at nearly $15 billion) in cryptocurrency, said he thought clean energy could model itself after that industry, which spent heavily in recent elections. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, warned Democrats last month about crossing crypto interests on a key bill, lest they deploy their $193 million war chest.
Renewable energy, by contrast, has been “way too wimpy,” Mr. Larsen said. “Look at what the oil and gas industry does, brilliantly by the way. I mean, give credit how effective they are on lobbying and policy and supporting their allies and punishing their opponents.”
Mr. Matzzie said his initial $50,000 check to try to unseat Mr. Roy was the largest he’d ever written for a political campaign during a decades-long career in climate and clean energy.
“You need to be either feared or needed for politicians to take you seriously, and that’s where the industry has to invest, in my view,” he said.
With its first $650,000 in donations, the group hired Tusk Strategies, a political and strategic consulting firm with Democratic ties, and ran television ads in Texas and digital ones on conservative platforms like Rumble and Truth Social.
The ads didn’t criticize Mr. Roy’s record on renewables. Instead, the group came at him from the right, arguing the congressman is “not MAGA enough for Texas.” Mr. Roy, a fiery members of the House Freedom Caucus, has occasionally clashed with Mr. Trump by threatening to derail the administration’s priorities unless they include spending cuts. Another ad criticized Mr. Roy for voting not to release the Epstein files
His opponent, Mr. Middleton, an oil and gas executive as well as a state senator, put millions of his own money into the race. In the most recent reporting period, his campaign spent $5.4 million, about $2 million more than Mr. Roy’s did. Mr. Middleton did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Roy said he primarily opposed federal subsidies for wind, solar, batteries and other clean energy development. He has also called energy that isn’t derived from fossil fuels or nuclear power unreliable and environmentally damaging.
For more than a century, the tax code has allowed companies to deduct costs associated with drilling new wells and provided incentives for coal production. Mr. Trump’s tax bill delivered $18 billion more to the fossil fuel industry. Yet Mr. Roy said he does not consider most of the billions in tax breaks for coal, oil and gas to be subsidies.
As Texas attorney general, Mr. Roy would not have a direct role in setting energy policy. But he promised to be a voice against what he called a “distorted market” tilted toward renewables, which he argued only enriches companies.
He said that the investors’ attacks are starting to help him win support:
“I explained to people that I’m the radical Marxist left’s nightmare.”
Oil and gas supporters said so far they are unimpressed with clean tech’s political gambits.
Thomas J. Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, a conservative research group that promotes fossil fuels, called the strategy of attacking lawmakers hostile to renewable energy while courting influential Trump allies a typical “carrot and stick” approach that other industries have deployed in Washington for decades.
But Mr. Pyle also accused the solar industry of “buying off MAGA pollsters” and called it a “very transparent move.”
Renewables have a long way to go before they approach parity in political spending with fossil fuels. Oil and gas interests donated $75 million to elect Mr. Trump in the 2024 election, and the fossil fuel industry spent a total of $450 million on a combination of donations, lobbying and advertising.
The renewable energy industry, by comparison, donated about $2.5 million in the 2024 cycle.
Lisa Friedman is a Times reporter who writes about how governments are addressing climate change and the effects of those policies on communities.
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