Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news. This is not the death of the US renewable energy industry in the United States, but it is a major setback.
I'm Stephanie Flanders, head of Government and Economics at Bloomberg. Welcome to Trumponomics, the podcast that looks at the economic world of Donald Trump. Now he's already shaped the global economy, and what on earth is going to happen next? This week we're talking about the big Beautiful assault on renewable energy. Will the Republican megabill pass last week bring on a
new American energy crisis? What could be the impact on electricity bills, the broader economy, and America's leadership in the race for artificial intelligence. We're recording this on Tuesday, the eighth of July. And of all the elements of the one Big Beautiful Bill, as Donald Trump called it, that he signed going into the July fourth holiday, one I find particularly hard to get my head round is the decision to get rid of tax credits for clean energy.
As a result of that, wind and solar projects will cost more and more likely there will be a lot fewer built. In fact, in an analysis this week, a climate policy think tank called Energy Innovation forecast that the bill would put an end to three hundred gigawatts of wind and solar projects that would have otherwise come online in the next fifteen years. That's the equivalent of about
three hundred nuclear reactors. Now, obviously that set back the fight against climate change and the decarbonization of the US economy. And that may not be much of a worry for the supporters of the big bill, but there could be more concern about another very likely consequence, higher electricity prices. That matters for voters facing rising utility bills, but it also matters for tech firms chasing the next breakthroughs in AI. The country that reigns supreme in AI will rule the world.
Everyone seems to think that these days, including Donald Trump. In fact, you might remember on the day after his inauguration he announced the creation of Stargate, a project to expand AI infrastructure in the US.
But to announce the largest AI infrastructure project by far in history. And it's all taking place right here in America. As you know, there's great competition for AI.
And projects like Stargate need electricity, lots of it, And in fact, that's part of the reason electricity demand in the US is rising faster now than it has at anytime in the last twenty years. The tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act on the President Biden helped the US keep up with that rising demand in theory by
making clean power sources cheaper. Investments in wind, solar, and battery storage had spiked in the years after the IRA was passed, But now the Big Bill has changed all that and a lot of people including me, scratching their heads wondering what the plan is now. And this week I'm delighted to say I'm in the Washington Studio with two guests who have a good perspective on this topic and can help me think through the consequences for the US economy. First up, Ethan Zindler, the head of Country
and Policy Research at Bloomberg NEF. That's the part of Bloomberg Research that's focused on the energy transition. And we should say that before joining US, Ethan served as Climate Counselor to the US Treasury Secretary of Janet Yellen from July twenty twenty three to January twenty five, so he was across a lot of policy efforts then, including helping to write and implement the Inflation Reduction Act.
Welcome Ethan, thanks for having.
Me and also with us Emily Bernbaut, who's a Bloomberg reporter here in DC who covers corporate lobbying and influence. Thank you so much for being on Trumpenomics. Emily.
Thank you.
So people will have heard quite a lot about that bill, but it's probably useful to just take stock of how that turned the tables for the renewable industry. What are the species measures that are going to be painful for that part of the US energy industry.
There was a lot of last minute wrangling over the details of what this bill will do to the clean energy industry. The top line is that it's very bad. It's not as bad as it could have been. What ended up in the bill was pretty aggressive timelines for phasing out tax credits. But elements of the bill would encourage companies to begin construction over the next year, and if they're able to do so, it's likelier that they'll be able to get some of these important tax credits.
But overall, they're going to have to begin construction very quickly, and these tax credits are going away on a more aggressive timeline than had initially been anticipated.
Yeah, And that was what was interesting, because when it went from the House to the Senate, there was some expectation that the Senate would want to extend the time frame a little bit. The investments that drawer have been announced, give them a bit more time to get up and running. But if anything, the bills seemed to get worse.
Yes, and at the last minute there was something that would have dealt a huge blow to the industry, which was this excise tax. There was basically panic in the industry and among moderate Republicans who said this excise tax would so dramatically increase costs for solar and wind projects, it would effectively make it untenable for a lot of
these projects to move forward or begin construction. So right before the Senate passed it, they removed the excise tax, which is a huge relief, but they still are dealing with pretty aggressive phase outs.
Ethan, you were saying just before we started that even though parts of the renewables industry was kind of breathing a sigh of relief or having at least dodged that particular bullet, not having this extra tax that the administration has already of vindicated that it's not done with the renewable industry. Yet what happened earlier this week.
Yeah, things have kind of gone from bad to worse, even within the last less than twenty four hours. Basically, there's been some real questions about whether projects could qualify so long as they were quote unquote under construction, and the irs historically is to find under construction fairly liberally.
And yesterday the White House issue to executive order basically saying that they are ordering the Treasury Department within the next forty five days to rewrite that rule, and if they do that in such a way, they can make it very challenging for projects to qualify. It is not even beyond the realm of the possible that they would write something that is essentially retroactive and effectively make it much more challenging for projects to actually be able to
qualify for the credit. So, from our perspective at Bloomberg f we're trying to go back and sharpen our pencils and try and think about how much stuff is going
to get built. But I think the one thing that's pretty clear as of this morning is that many who are in the wind and solar and storage industry are probably scrambling to get as much stuff as they can essentially under construction at this very moment, while they are concurrently probably lobbying the Treasury Department about what this new regulation is going to look like.
I'm going to come back to you on some of the dynamics on the hill, But Ethan, let's just step back, and I know that's what Bloomerginny f likes doing. They tend to do the twenty five year horizons consider to be quite short term. But if you do take that kind of longer term, you know what has been happening to energy demand and electricity demand within that in recent years? And what was you know, until this bill, what was that basic plan for meeting it?
Yeah, So the United States, like other wealthy developed countries, has been able to grow its economy without growing demand for electricity. Really for twenty years, essentially, we've had flat demand overall, largely because of energy efficiency improvements and new technologies and the desire to save costs. The last couple of years that started to change, and we think that's going to continue to change going forward. The number one driver in the short run has been AI and the
demand from new data centers. We also think electric vehicles, as you look further out, are going to start to play a much bigger role as well. In the US, we think we're going to see demand for electricity double from about forty one hundred tarawad hours at the moment up over six thousand by the time you get to twenty fifty overall, and by twenty thirty five, we think that about eight percent of capacity in the United States is going to go specifically to powering data centers, which
is a really considerable portion overall. One other quick just note in terms of trends, is that really over the last ten years or fifteen years or so, the US has really been rapidly decarbonizing our power generation sector. We went from about half our power coming from coal to well under twenty percent as the last year, could be even under fifteen percent this year depending on conditions. And meanwhile, renewables have grown from almost nothing to about twenty percent
of generation. Nuclear is about twenty percent, so we're about forty percent zero carbon here, and the natural gas is a huge part of the story, which is a lot cleaner than coal overall. So the general trend has been towards cleaner sources of energy going forward. And if you look at what's gotten built in the last several years and what would get built in the next several years
in terms of purely cost, it's renewables. The vast majority of new stuff that's due to come online is renewables, and so that is why it's so questionable that you would go out of your way to essentially raise the cost of those technologies, which is effectively what Congress is now done.
Those of us who kind of looked on the outside and seen the US go from being a net consumer of energy or oil, I should say to an exporter, have been very familiar with a rather different story, which is America had this fracking revolution which was not environmentally friendly, but did bring an enormous amount of gas online, which has brought down the price of energy for US consumers.
So I guess the story that you might tell against your story at least be sort of well, hang on a minute, it's fracking that has made this a kind of golden era for US energy prices, and the renewables is not completely reliable and is more is a sort of side show to that basic story.
So yeah, really good points. I mean, certainly, we have the lowest price natural gas in the world in terms of production, and that has allowed a lot of manufacturing to be very competitive in the United States. I would note though, that first of all, that renewables plus storage gets you maybe not to twenty four hours of generation, but can get you enough production of electricity into the sort of key hours of the evening. And we're starting to see solar plus storage be very cost competitive in
many markets around the world. Not all markets in the United States, but a bunch of markets. But then just purely speaking practically in the United States in terms of what we're going to build over the next five years, You're absolutely right that gas is cheap, and gas is cost competitive in a number of markets in the United States. The problem is you just cannot get your hands on a combined cycle gas at the moment for a number of years, anywhere from three to seven depending on who
you asked. So in terms of what our next mega out of capacity is going to be, it basically has to be renewables because there isn't really any other sources, and if we have rising demand from AI, that means
it's going to probably come from renewables. And again, if you take away essentially what has been a long standing tax credit and subsidy to the clean energy industry that is effectively socialized a discounted electricity production price in the United States, you're just simply going to concentrate it on
certain markets. So the next place where you're going to build wind or solar project, potentially you're going to have to sign a higher price contract in order for the developer to make the return that they need without the tax credit.
But if they're the only short term viable source of additional energy, then it surely must be cost effective to build.
I mean, here's the question, and I think we're going to find this out over the next couple of years, is what's the breaking point for consumers? So, yes, you can pass on some form of higher electricity prices. But if you're a developer of a large scale data center, you're not necessarily entirely wedded to the United States. Just because the most AI has been built not that far from here, maybe thirty miles from here, just outside of Washington, doesn't mean that every next AI data center has to
be here. To some large degree, AI is some the servers, not all To be clear, there's different types of servers and that's not my area of expertise, but some can really be anywhere in the world, and so they will go where the price of electricity is most affordable and reliable, and there are other options. Brazil is about seventy eighty percent hydropower, low cost. They've been trying very much to market Brazil as an AI place. Gulf States have enormous
amounts of sun, very cheap solar. They don't put big tariffs sun solar equipment like we do, can build batteries to go along with it. They are certainly trying to market themselves as hubs for AI as well. So no foregone conclusion that the United States will be the one and only place where we build all this new capacity.
But as far as you're concerned, the only way that this energy that we were expecting to come online, or electricity that we were expecting to come online in the US to meet this demand will actually come online is through higher prices.
I mean, it seems inevitable. And I think one of the questions we're just trying to parse out, given the incredible complexity of what Congress has just done, is how many projects could still qualify for the tax credit if they get under construction basically yesterday, and how many of them will not And those that don't obviously are going to have to figure out some way to get compensated correctly so that they can earn the return that they want.
The best guess at the moment is that if you get under construction sometime in this calendar year, you'll probably be okay. But the White House just created an additional uncertainty with this executive order.
One I saw is that the future clean energy products that don't have these tax credits will cost fifty percent more to get built. Do you think that's in the right ball part?
That feels a little on the high side of me, But we need to do the analysis ourselves. I think historically, if you look around the world, the history of clean energy is you have a number of countries that have put in place very generous supports in the form of feed in tariffs like we've seen in countries in Europe and elsewhere, and when they disappear, it's terrible news for
the industry. But we also find that the industry is incredibly innovative about finding ways to reduce costs the US is really not a low cost market when it comes to putting solar on people's views in particular, but also large scale projects. So there's definitely some room for cost reduction, I think for the industry overall. But there's no question this is going to boost costs. In the case of a typical solar project, the tax credit is thirty percent
of CAPECK. So a billion dollar project, three hundred million right off the top was basically disappearing because of tax credits. That has to be dealt with somehow.
And I've seen the Energy Innovation Thing Tank from what you're saying, suggests that maybe it'd be a little bit on the high side, but their estimate of the impact on bills would be that the average energy bill by twenty thirty five could be nearly five hundred dollars higher in Michigan, similar maybe more in Maryland, and six or seven hundred eight hundred dollars higher in Texas than it would have been if the credits had remained.
Yeah, I can't, I won't. I guess I want to dispute that we haven't done that analysis ourselves. I've seen different numbers from other research firms as well. There's no question, particularly in a market like Texas, which is really deregulated and where pricing can get passed along directly to large scale consumers, there's no question this is going to have a real impact ultimately. I think the interesting question is
what about businesses. I mean, we talk a lot about retail consumers, and eventually they are the ones who get hit, but more immediately and often cases it's wholesale purchases of electricity that feel the effects. And that is one of the puzzling things why in this debate where the utility is not more engaged in this, because ultimately they're the ones who are going to get bigger bills that they're
going to have to pass along to their consumers. Or where were the manufacturers who are going to have to pay higher prices for electricity than they would if you're in the say Ercot market or PJM. I'm puzzled as to why there wasn't a more engage conversation around this, And you're.
Really my mind, even because I was thinking about your title, Emily and the fact that you are a reporter focusing on corporate lobbying and influence. You know, people have focused on the impact and the influence of the fossil fuel lobby in driving part of this bill. And we know that there's some parts of that industry that have been
big donors to Donald Trump. But there were awful lot of people on the other side of the argument, including as Ethan mentions, there's the utilities and sectors that would really be hurt by this, not to mention the tech firms who are lobbying to get more cheap electricity. So why is it those voices just weren't heard in the last few weeks.
Ultimately, the reason this bill goes so aggressively against clean energy is because of House Speaker Mike Johnson's math issue, which was that he could only stand to lose a very small number of Republican votes, and so that made the House Freedom Caucus, the group of hardline conservatives in the House, that made them very powerful in this conversation, and a lot of them, for the most part, really
leaned towards the oil and gas industry. So thinking about Chip roy from Texas, he was one of the most consistent voices saying we really need to phase out these subsidies very quickly. He was in communication very closely with a conservative activist named Alex Epstein who actually shaped a lot of this debate behind the scenes, and basically Alex Epstein's arguments are in favor of natural gas. He says
that solar and wind are unreliable sources of energy. You know, I'll let you debunk some of what he has to say, but essentially that the subsidies artificially lowered the cost of electricity and we're creating lee And so there is a lot of arguments behind the scenes against the clean energy industry and ultimately I think oil and gas just really won in this bill.
To be clear, they're subsidized too.
Yeah, say, I was going to say, there's a hell of a lot of subsidy on that side, but somehow they need subs tody, but the clean energy doesn't. I mean,
even Texas is a surprise, right. I Mean that was one of the things that we said after Donald Trump won the election, and there was obviously this question mark about where would he go on And there was some pushback initially on the idea that he would completely repeal the IRA the Biden era tax credits, in part because of the support from the tech industry, but also because it was noticed that partly because it's easier to build stuff in the red states, that there were a lot
of Republican states that had actually benefited enormously from the RA, including Texas. I think most of its new electricity supply had come from renewables in the last couple of years. So it's interesting that the representat different Texas just doesn't seem to factor that in.
Yeah, it just became such a political talking point, calling the IRA the green new Scam, making it democrat led project essentially that Republicans had to completely nix and create their own path forward when it comes to energy, And an interesting element of the bill is that it's a lot less aggressive when it comes to nuclear energy, which is an area that I know that tech companies have
been investing a lot into. Obviously, that's a lot slower moving and it doesn't address the immediate energy needs of data centers. But the nuclear energy industry came out with far less battle scars than some other parts of the industry. And that's a part of this conversation too, is sort of like weighing things in favor of certain kinds of energy over others.
That was again much conversation about the political fallout from this bill. You know, over the last few weeks people have wondered whether the Republicans are really kind of ready for what happens in their constituencies when the impact of Medicaid cuts and others come through. But you would think if there's a short term big increase in energy prices that hits people's utility bills, they're electricity bills, is there not a fear on the hill the finger will be
pointed to this bill when it comes to that. I mean, it's cost of living is such a big element of the Trump pledge, the promise if you like to voters, do they just think they'll be able to blame other stuff? Yeah?
I think part of the sleight of hand is that tax cuts are coming in more immediately than some of the spending cuts, So meaning in the more immediate term, some people are going to see their taxes decrease, whereas some of the potential added cost to electricity bills or some of the loss of Medicaid coverage comes farther down the line. So it is a lot about timelines as well.
They've written it in a way that at least Republicans hope that people don't see the more negative effects until after the midterms in twenty twenty eight.
If I could jump in, I think you're also maybe ascribing a much higher level of sophistication to this conversation. Then probably actually went on, I don't know that people on the hill understand the economics of power generation at the moment, and the fact that renewables are the most cost competitive, and the fact that it's impossible to get your hands on a natural turbine. These are things that only nerds like me know, So I don't know that stuff that they're kind of across.
Would their argument be, Yeah, it's hard under Biden to get this stuff built, but we're going to lift all of these stupid restrictions, and so that natural gas power station could go up in a year.
So that just I mean, again, hard to not get in the rabbit hole here. But if there's three or four companies that make these we're talking large scale turbine and so these are big things, specialized manufacturing that goes into them. If you're one of the three or four companies in the world that makes them, and you are selling them at a very high price at the moment, and you have a back order. I guess the question is do you ramp up your manufacturing of those turbines?
And if you do, how long is it going to take you to ramp that up? At least a couple of years at the very very least, and then a few more years at least before you can get some more turbines out. And if you're one of those companies and you're looking at the US situation, the political situation here, I think you might very well ask yourself, well, is
this the new world we're living in? Or are we going to see some flip back in two or three years back to renewables and suddenly I've got more gas turbine capacity, manufacturing capacity than I know what to do with. I'd be very surprised if there's big investment. But keep an eye on GE and some of the others to see whether they make announcements around that.
And it is true when you say is that the world we're living in? I mean it's pretty clear that the world we're living in looks very different, looks more like the IRA world. As you noted, there's lots of countries that have got strong incentives in place for renewables, and we also see developing countries moving to electrify large parts of their grid because it is it's certainly cheaper for them if they're reliant otherwise on imported oil and gas.
Yeah.
No, I think you raise a very good question. This is not the depth of the US renewable energy industry in the United States by any means, because of the advancements that we've seen, but it is a major setback, and most importantly maybe at the bottom line, as it means our chances of coming anywhere close to reducing our CO two missions in line with address and climate chains are effectively over at the moment.
I guess there's one argument, which if it's so unstoppable, we've had this period where we've ramped up production with these massive credits, which were extremely expensive. They blew at least a trillion dollar hole in the deficit, and of course we can say there are other things that are now going to blow a hole in the deficit over the coming years thanks to the last week's bill. But there is an argument that says it ought to be able to stand on its own two feet.
No, well, two things the clean energy credits did not, on their own blow a trillion dollar hole in the deficit. They were projected potentially to have done so, but of course now we're living in a different world where they certainly are not going to cost as much as was projected. And even that number I would take a little issue with because it made certain assumptions about hydrogen and other
things that haven't really come to pass. But you're right, they were living in a new world in which these industry is going to have to compete without the benefit of tax credits. Unfortunately, it's going to compete against, you know, some existing sources of generation that have been subsidized for
a very long time. And of course the administration is also going to try and take steps whatever they can to try and make existing coal fire generation more cost competitive, although it's very unclear to me like what they can actually do that changes the economics of coal.
I was going to ask you that actually that's the thing that Donald Trump has held out. You know, yes, it's hard to build a new gas power station, but if you have a coal powered station that you were about to close down, or you've maybe just closed down, how hard is it just to turn that back on? And how hard is it to get the mines up and running again, which is what he's talked about.
Hard, is the short answer. You can issue executive orders to try and order certain plants to keep online, but the reality is that coal is not economically competitive for the most part in the United States, particularly with gas, but also with renewable So you can try and force
operators to keep running plants, but no one. I'm not a lawyer here, but I think it's tough to force people to lose money on every megawat hour of electricity that they produce because you're trying to make a point about what you think the world should look like in terms of energy consumption that looks something like nineteen eighty seven.
It is extraordinary to me as someone who kind of grew up with Margaret Thatcher's defining battle in the nineteen eighties against the uneconomic coal producing mines in the UK, and there was obviously enormous controversy ever trying to shut them down. But to have a republic administration trying to reopen a lot of uneconomic coal mines is an interesting site.
I mean, the question is just is there money to do this right? Ultimately, if you want to mobilize private capital to go out and that then that money has to believe that this is the world that we're going to live in for the next five or ten or twenty years. And I think most investors look at this and say, Okay, certainly, this is a certainly regressive period that we're living through, but the end of the day, climate change isn't going anywhere. It's only going to get worse.
And so if you believe there's an inevitability that eventually policy makers, whether they deal with climate change in the short run of the long run, they eventually deal with it. I think many people would find it very hard to swallow the idea of making a ten or twenty year investment in a new coal mine.
But Emily it seems like there'd be plenty of appetite on the hill for that.
Yes, I think there will be. I think this bill got held up in the House for just a couple of days after leaving the Senate because this group of Republicans said, we want to go harder against clean energy, we want more favorable for oil and gas, and they spent hours and hours in the White House at the eleventh hour trying to extract as many concessions from the administration on this as they possibly could, and they think that is bearing out that bore out yesterday in terms
of this executive order, and we're going to continue to see the deals that were made, the agreements that they hashed out recreating the energy landscape in their image.
So, as Ethan pointedly made clear, this is the end of the story for any expectation that the US would meet its climate change obligations, but apparently not the end of the story when it comes to the assault on renewables. Emily Ethan, thank you so much, Thank you, thanks for listening to Trumponomics from Bloomberg. It was hosted by me Stephanie Flanders and I was joined by Bloomberg reporter Emily
Burnbaum and Bloomberg any Ethan Zindler. Trumponomics is produced by Summer Sadi and Moses and Am with help from Amy Keen and special thanks this week to Rachel Lewis Chrisky. Sound design is by Blake Maples and Sage Bowman is the head of Bloomberg Podcasts and please to help others find this show, please rate it and review it highly Wherever you listen