WASHINGTON, D.C. – In the Senate’s budget package, it makes several changes to clean energy tax credits the House passed last month. Solar energy advocates said the changes don’t go far enough to help their industry.
Outside the US Capitol on Tuesday, solar energy industry advocates held a rally regarding the changes to mega bill. According to the Senate text, it proposes a phase out of solar and wind energy tax credits by 2028 but extend the incentives for hydropower, nuclear and geothermal energy to 2036.
Senate Republicans said the legislation eliminates hundreds of billions of dollars of former President Joe Biden’s unnecessary Green New Deal subsidies and stops penalizing fossil fuels in favor of green energy.
Industry advocates said the Senate’s proposal would pull the plug on homegrown solar energy and decimate the American manufacturing renaissance.
“The residential solar community is vibrant, is entrepreneurial, its changing Americans’ lives,” said Abigail Ross Hopper, Solar Energy Industries Association president and CEO. “Both through the manufacturing and the job creation but also it brings customers’ bills down.”
Solar energy advocates are urging Senators to rework the proposal. They said the tax credits help families and businesses have low energy costs and ensure production and manufacturing remains in the US.
“If this bill passes in its current form and it doesn’t give us a little more of a glide path or a bit more time to adjust as an industry and demand is decimated we may have to shut down those factories and lose thousands of American made jobs, American-made energy projects and then we increase our independence again on foreign countries and in certain cases like adversaries,” said Marco Kraples, vice president of Enphase Energy. “So, this is not what we want. We want American made energy and American made manufacturing.”
