Energy Secretary Chris Wright has heard a lot of doomsday predictions about the rollback of wind and solar subsidies in President Trump’s sweeping tax cut law.
He has one simple answer: “They’re just wrong.”
Mr. Wright, a former fracking executive with roots in solar and geothermal energy, said intermittent renewables are costly obstacles to the nation’s electrical grid. The sooner they are replaced by reliable sources such as natural gas, coal or nuclear power, the faster costs will come down, he said.
“If you look at the places that have spent the most subsidies and built the largest amount of wind and solar, the more cheap energy you put on our grid, the more expensive the grid becomes,” Mr. Wright said in an interview with The Washington Times.
Mr. Trump’s tax cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act are partly offset by the axing of subsidies for green energy projects, including wind and solar, by 2026.
The Joint Committee on Taxation determined that eliminating the renewable subsidies would save nearly $500 billion over 10 years.
Opponents, however, say the elimination of subsidies will kill jobs, raise energy bills and ultimately weaken the power grid by discouraging new wind and solar projects, slowing the growth of grid capacity as demand rises. They also warn that solar and wind projects will move ahead but at a higher, unsubsidized cost that will be passed along to ratepayers.
Sen. Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat who authored many of the tax subsidies, called the cuts “an outright massacre” for wind and solar energy.
“Not only will hundreds of thousands of Americans who work in clean energy lose their jobs right away, individual families and businesses of all sizes nationwide will get clobbered with higher utility bills,” he said.
The media coverage has been overwhelmingly dire. It has focused on states such as Minnesota that have invested heavily in wind and solar projects and turned to clean energy advocates for assessments on how the cuts will impact these states.
San Francisco-based Energy Innovation, which advocates for ending fossil fuels, calculated that subsidy cuts will increase annual energy bills in Minnesota households by $6 billion from 2025 to 2034.
“This is due to higher dependence on fossil fuels and higher fossil fuel prices,” the organization wrote in an analysis of the legislation.
Mr. Wright said the wind and solar projects have produced “more expensive electricity,” incentivized by lucrative government subsidies.
Natural gas, he said, “is just by far and away the cheapest source of electricity today.”
California, for example, has ditched coal and natural gas for wind and solar power and imports its renewable power from Utah and Nevada, among other states. Florida, on the other hand, has invested in constructing natural gas pipelines.
“California’s electricity prices today are twice as high as Florida’s. California has by far the largest population of any state in the country. They produce less electricity than Florida does,” the energy secretary said.
Onshore wind and solar sources are, on average, cheaper than fossil fuels. Still, they produce power only occasionally and require nuclear, coal and natural gas to rev up at night, when it’s cloudy or when the wind is not blowing. Mr. Wright said this intermittent use raises the cost of energy.
Wind turbines and solar arrays take up more land than nonrenewable energy plants and require new transmission lines.
“You really have to maintain two grids,” Mr. Wright said. “When it’s the middle of the day, when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining, all the other plants have to turn down to accommodate the wind and sun. Then they’ve got to be turned back up. And that is not an efficient way to run huge machinery. You have to operate your existing grid less efficiently than before, and you have to pay for a second grid.”
Mr. Wright said the tax cut legislation will steer states away from adding renewables to the grid and drive them to build reliable sources that run all the time.
“You still have the ability to generate electricity in all these states. They’re just not going to keep adding to that secondary, parasitic, more expensive grid,” he said.
In Minnesota, subsidized costs of wind and solar power climbed even after the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act was enacted. This act implemented many tax credits for new renewable projects, which are now targeted for elimination under Mr. Trump’s law.
Renewables produce more than one-third of the state’s energy. A state law requires utilities to generate 100% of their electricity from non-fossil-fuel sources by 2040.
The Center for the American Experiment, a conservative think tank in Minnesota, found that wind and solar energy have become the state’s most expensive sources of electricity “by a substantial margin.”
It calculated that electricity produced by new wind projects costs twice as much as electricity from existing coal plants.
The cost of electricity from new solar projects in the state was triple the cost generated by existing coal plants, the group found. It blamed rising prices for wind turbines and solar panels.
Many states have shifted to renewables to reduce emissions and convert to clean energy produced by solar and wind sources.
In Connecticut, a significant portion of rising consumer electric bills is dedicated to funding green energy projects. Gov. Ned Lamont signed a bill in 2022 mandating that the state achieve a zero-carbon electrical grid by 2040.
The ambitious plan is blamed in part for the state’s skyrocketing energy bills, although green energy groups say climate change is responsible. They say it has caused severe weather events and extreme summer heat.
Mr. Wright said Mr. Trump’s January executive order blocking most new offshore wind projects along the Eastern Seaboard would spare Connecticut ratepayers even higher utility bills.
He said offshore wind is one of the most expensive forms of energy.
Connecticut’s energy bills are among the highest in the nation and were expected to increase when the offshore wind projects went online. Eversource, a main power provider in New England, projected that offshore wind would cost nearly $100 per megawatt-hour, almost double the cost of energy provided by the state’s Millstone Nuclear Power Plant.
“They are going to be saved the outrageous costs from the additional offshore wind,” Mr. Wright said.
Mr. Wright said the Trump administration’s revival of a natural gas pipeline project extending from the Marcellus Shale gas fields in northern Pennsylvania to New York and into markets in New England, where consumers pay the highest electricity rates in the nation, will reduce the high energy costs in the Northeast.
“New England has expensive energy for choices, and the biggest choice they’ve made is just to not have enough connection to the natural gas pipeline network,” he said.
Critics warn that abandoning solar and wind for natural gas would require years of permitting and construction, and it would take much longer to build nuclear power plants. This could leave electrical grids without enough energy and consumers on the hook for higher prices.
Mr. Wright said states will have to change regulations to allow for the expansion of natural gas now that subsidies for wind and solar are headed for a quick phaseout under Mr. Trump’s tax cut law and executive orders.
“Ultimately, if they don’t build all the offshore wind and all that, you’ll probably see an expansion in natural gas-generated electricity,” he said.
• Susan Ferrechio can be reached at sferrechio@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.