CHARLOTTE — As Republicans work to pass President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” before the self-imposed July 4 deadline, North Carolina’s clean energy sector is sounding the alarm about provisions in the bill focused on clean energy they say could undermine job growth in the state and increase the cost of energy.
The bill, which is focused on extending the 2017 tax cuts passed during the first Trump administration, also included significant cuts to clean energy incentives from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act which sought to grow renewable power generation and onshore manufacturing in the EV, battery and solar sectors.
Bill Taylor, the owner of DCE Solar, said when he started the company in Cornelius 16 years ago, he was seeing nearly 20% growth year to year as the solar industry was growing across the country. In recent years, he says it had really taken off thanks both to the tax credits established in the 2022 IRA and a sudden surge in energy demand.
“We’re all plugging in as consumers. We’ve got more devices. We’re trying to create more manufacturing here,” he said. “The grid needs power, and solar is one of the fastest that you can implement.”
The version of the “Big Beautiful Bill” that passed the Senate ends tax credits for solar and wind projects by 2028 unless those projects can start construction one year after the bill is passed or are placed into service before the end of 2028. It also ends tax credits for residential solar in December 2025 and credits for electric vehicle purchases by September 2025.
As Taylor’s business serves both utility and commercial clients, he expects to see a quick shift in demand, rushing to get projects off quickly then a steep drop off as projects grow less likely to meet those 2028 deadlines.
Taylor referred to riding this uncertainty as the “solar coaster.” Practically, he said this means businesses like his need to be conservative when it comes to hiring and accepting projects to avoid cancelations and layoffs.
“It takes a while to get that cog, that wheel, to start turning,” he said. “Here you have so much momentum, the brakes are put on. You lose all that momentum, and then it has to start over again.”
Zach Amittay, the Southeast Advocate for E2, a nonpartisan organization that tracks clean energy jobs, said many of the concerns he’s hearing from businesses are about uncertainty. Many aren’t sure how they’re expected to factor these changes in tax credits into planned projects when they can’t necessarily control when construction starts or when a project is placed into service.
“That requires permitting. That requires being placed in the interconnection queue. It requires action by the utility,” he said. “It’s taking a lot of control out of the developers’ hands, and therefore making it much more difficult to access financing to green light projects.”
That means the cost of projects could end up far higher than expected. Amittay said that likely means utility clients would cancel projects, meaning less power would be added to the grid in the short-term or they’d pass those higher costs onto ratepayers.
“We just think at a certain point, this risks being kind of a self-inflicted wound, not only for the clean energy industry, but the U.S. economy as a whole, because energy is what powers all of the economic activity of our country, and we need every last bit of it we can get,” he said.
Republican supporters of the bill, including Rep. Tim Moore, R-NC, said the “Big Beautiful Bill” is an important response to massive policy mismanagement and excessive spending and many of the cuts included in the bill are an important way to get spending under control.
He also emphasized the need the for expanded energy resources, but Moore sees that future in fossil fuels like natural gas and U.S.-sourced oil.
“We’re finally gonna have a bill that fully unleashes the American energy resource,” he said. “Forces, getting more energy out there which allow gas prices to go down to make us an energy exporter again.”
Critics have also accused the renewable industry of tilting the market in their favor with these tax credits, subsidizing demand for an intermittent resource. Amittay argues that energy storage like fast-growing utility battery projects are quickly counter-balancing concerns about intermittency while baseload and dispatchable projects like nuclear and natural gas, simply can’t meet short-term energy demand alone because they can’t be built fast enough.
“I think the latest forecast is five years at a baseline for new natural gas generation,” he said. “We’ve seen from our neighbors in Georgia that nuclear could be easily a 10 to 15, potentially more, a longer timeframe.”
As for the accusation of his industry relying too heavily on subsidies, Taylor had little patience.
“All energy is subsidized,” he said.
Meanwhile Amittay said if the energy market was really free and fair, it wouldn’t be changing with the political wind.
“It’s hard as it is, under any conditions to build a successful company, and changing the rules every two, three years, it just makes it impossible to succeed and to thrive,” he said.
VIDEO: Is solar threatening North Carolina farms, or is there room for cooperation?
©2025 Cox Media Group
/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/cmg/LH3JSJEF3VBLRJLJQESEAG34AM.png)
