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 bill.
He has one simple answer: “They’re just wrong.”
Mr. Wright, a former fracking executive with roots in solar and geothermal, said intermittent renewables are a costly impediment on the nation’s electrical grid, and the sooner they are replaced by reliable sources such as natural gas, coal or nuclear, the faster costs will come down.
“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.
The cost of cutting taxes in Mr. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill is paid for in part by axing a slate of subsidies for green energy projects, including wind and solar, by 2026.
The elimination of the renewable subsidies, the Joint Committee on Taxation determined, will save nearly $500 billion over ten years.
But opponents warn it will kill jobs, hike energy bills and ultimately weaken the power grid by discouraging future wind and solar projects, which will slow the growth of grid capacity as demand rises. Or, they warn, solar and wind projects will move ahead but at a higher, unsubsidized cost that will be passed along to ratepayers.
Sen. Ron Wyden, who authored many of the tax subsidies, called the cuts “an outright massacre” for wind and solar.
“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,” the Oregon Democrat said.
The media coverage has been overwhelmingly dire, honing in on states like Minnesota, which have invested heavily in wind and solar projects, and turning to clean energy advocates for assessments on how these states will be impacted by the cuts.
San Francisco-based Energy Innovation, which advocates for ending fossil fuels, calculated that subsidy cuts would increase annual energy bills in Minnesota households by $6 billion between 2025 and 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, ditched coal and natural gas for wind and solar, and imports its renewable power from Utah and Nevada, among other states. Florida went in the opposite direction, investing in the construction of 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,” said the energy secretary.
On average, the cost of onshore wind and solar is cheaper than fossil fuels, but they only produce power some of the time and require nuclear, coal and natural gas to rev up at night, when it’s cloudy or when the wind is not blowing. This intermittent use raises the cost of energy, Mr. Wright said.
Wind turbines and solar arrays take up more land than non-renewable 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 climbed even after passage of the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act, which implemented many of the tax credits for new renewable projects now targeted for elimination in Mr. Trump’s bill.
More than a third of the state’s energy is produced by renewables. A state law requires utilities to produce 100% of their electricity from non-fossil fuel sources by 2040.
The Center of the American Experiment, a conservative think tank in Minnesota, found that rising wind and solar prices have made them the most expensive sources of electricity in the state “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.
In Connecticut, a significant portion of rising consumer electric bills is dedicated to funding green energy projects. Gov. Ned Lamont signed a law 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 the real blame lies with global warming, which they say has caused extreme weather events and ultra-hot summers.
Mr. Wright said Mr. Trump’s January executive order blocking most new offshore wind projects along the eastern seaboard will spare Connecticut ratepayers even higher utility bills in the future.
Offshore wind is one of the most expensive forms of energy on the planet, he said.
Connecticut energy bills are among the highest in the nation and were expected to increase when the offshore wind projects went online. Eversource, a main provider of power in New England, projected offshore wind would cost nearly $100 per megawatt hour, which is 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 high energy costs in the northeast will be reduced by 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.
“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 if states abandon solar and wind for natural gas, it would take several years for the permitting and construction of new natural gas plants and 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, which could happen faster now that subsidies for wind and solar are headed for a quick phase-out under the new tax cut law and Mr. Trump’s 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.
