A looming July deadline to qualify for tax incentives has triggered a rush among renewable power developers to get their projects launched — but the longer-term outlook for wind and solar is looking cloudy.
The impending expiration of the federal incentives represents the latest hurdle for the clean energy sector, which survived the sunset of tax incentives in previous years after Democrats and Republicans in Congress struck deals to extend them. Those extensions helped make wind and solar power two of the fastest growing sources of electricity in the country.
This time, however, experts say the rollback of the investment tax credit and the production tax credit included in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act looks likely to be more permanent — even if it doesn’t pose the type of existential threat to the industry that it would have in years past.
“There’s this argument out there that if there’s going to be a time where we need to literally lift the bandaid off when it comes to tax subsidies of the ITC and PTC for renewables, this might not be the worst time,” said John Miller, an energy transition policy analyst at investment bank TD Cowen.
