On Senate Floor, Tillis Offered Inside Look Into the Lobbying Against Clean Energy

Regardless of the fate of the “Big Beautiful Bill,” the political tug-of-war over energy already has damaged an industry and upended business deals.

Sen. Thom Tillis had cast off any election worries by the time he took to the Senate floor this week to provide a rare window into the lobbying that already is slowing down the U.S. transition to cleaner energy sources.

The North Carolina Republican announced Sunday that he would not seek a third six-year term in Congress, “navigating the political theatre and partisan gridlock in Washington.” The decision freed him to break cleanly with his party and oppose the sprawling megabill into which the GOP had stuffed President Donald Trump’s full agenda, including putting the brakes on a transition away from fossil fuels.

The Senate voted 51-50 Tuesday to advance the legislation, with Vice President JD Vance breaking the tie, and after an all-night session of political arm-twisting, the House was expected to vote Thursday to send the “Big Beautiful Bill Act” to the president’s desk.

But we didn’t have to wait for the votes to see what the bill is doing to clean energy. The debate itself has cast a cloud of uncertainty over the sector, drying up financing and throwing into question business deals and corporate planning.

Tillis sought to highlight that issue Sunday night when, having traded his bolo for a blue suit and red-patterned tie, he gave a glimpse of the behind-the-scenes pressure on Senators to choke off federal tax incentives for wind and solar energy.

“It’s another classic example where think tanks and people that haven’t worked a day in business are setting policy in the White House without a clue about what they’re potentially doing to our grid,” Tillis said.

He was referring to an author and fossil fuel evangelist, Alex Epstein, founder of the Center for Industrial Progress, who for a decade has been supplying an intellectual underpinning for those who favor a rapid withdrawal of federal support for clean energy. (In what seemed like a diss upon a dig, Tillis misremembered his last name as “Weinstein.”) Epstein, who once said he “proudly” worked for fossil fuel clients, rejects the scientific consensus on climate change and wrote the 2014 book “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.”

Tillis represents the No. 4 state in solar generating capacity and a top beneficiary of the Inflation Reduction Act incentives—$21 billion in private clean energy project investment has flowed to North Carolina since the IRA’s passage. He described how Epstein’s case withered when he brought the “self-described philosopher” into his office along with three people who work in the industry.

“One of them was someone who specializes in power purchase agreements for large businesses,” Tillis said, giving the example of one of the world’s largest retailers, a giant that only last year was accelerating its clean energy purchases toward its goal of 100 percent renewable power by 2035. 

“Walmart is one of the most sophisticated buyers of electrons in the world,” Tillis said. “They map out their power requirements years in advance. They want to make sure that their food doesn’t spoil and they’ve got power running. They’ve already made several power purchase agreements with projects underway, folks.”

Those projects now may not be there because the Senate bill makes many wind and solar projects ineligible for federal tax credits unless they are “in service” by 2027—an even faster cutoff than the House version, which set a 2028 deadline.

There was a dizzying amount of wrangling in the Senate over the wind and solar language, and Tillis was not the only Republican raising concerns. The version of the bill that first emerged from the Senate Finance Committee called for a graduated phase-out of the tax credits starting at 60 percent for those that begin construction in 2026 to complete elimination for those that start construction after the end of 2027. Then, as Tillis put it, “somebody got cute” and changed the complete phase-out to cover any projects not “in service” by 2027. That was a huge change for developers, who may have some control over construction start dates, but far less control over when a project is actually “in service,” which can change due to supply chain and labor issues, as well as the decisions of permitting officials and grid operators.

Even more alarming, the version of the bill that emerged in the Senate over the weekend would have slapped a new excise tax on wind and solar. Advocates of clean energy had their hands full trying to get the new tax removed. Separate amendments were drafted by Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah) and by Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) to help wind and solar and ease the phase-out of tax incentives but fiscal hawks objected to them reaching the floor.

In the version of the bill the Senate passed, clean energy supporters were able to get the excise tax jettisoned, and Curtis took credit for an added provision that would give an array of clean-energy projects a safe harbor of sorts. They would be protected from the phase-out of tax incentives if they begin construction within the next 12 months. Curtis heralded the provision with a headline: “Certainty Today to Invest in Tomorrow.”

But the spectacle apparently has left financiers of clean energy with little certainty.

“The One Big Beautiful Bill Act has already devastated our business,” one community solar and battery storage company executive told the clean energy lobbying firm Echo Communications. The executive, who wanted to remain anonymous, laid out in the firm’s “Echo Chamber” blog how his company’s finance partners withdrew their backing the day after the House version of the megabill passed.

“Because the OBBB so catastrophically and retroactively changed the rules of the game, our lenders couldn’t be sure we could sell the projects we were developing,” the official said. “As a result, they understandably couldn’t extend additional capital.”

The executive said the firm has had to lay off more than 90 percent of its workers as a result. Only a month ago, its plan was to double in size over the next 18 months. “Those were good, high-paying jobs that Congress destroyed overnight,” the executive said.

The story illustrates that the debate in Washington is not just about the wind and solar industry losing federal dollars. It is about losing the surety that the nation is on a steady path to an energy transition where cleaner sources will overtake the deeply entrenched and well-capitalized sources that are pumping dangerous carbon pollution into the atmosphere.

“The larger issue is the extreme careening of federal policy in the United States,” said Chris Moyer, the founder of Echo Communications and a former Democratic staffer on Capitol Hill who now advises clean energy companies. “There’s no consideration of the business cycle. It’s all about the political cycle.”

Epstein perhaps inadvertently confirmed that point in a lengthy post on X in which he took umbrage at Tillis and explained the push to speed the phase-out to 2027. “The idea was, unless the subsidies truly terminate during Trump’s term, they have not terminated, and they will be extended, just like the [production tax credit] has a million times before,” Epstein said.

In other words, if Democrats take over in Washington in the 2028 election, support for clean energy could rise again. But Tillis argues that in their zeal to prevent that from happening, the fossil fuel ideologues are ignoring some realities, including the fact that they are throttling electricity supply at a time when new data centers and manufacturing—the kind of development Trump says he wants to spur—will require more energy.

“I want that philosopher to tell me that he understands how to plan out power over time when all these projects fail,” Tillis said, referring to the wind, solar and other alternative energy projects that lose federal support in the megabill. “Some will make it, some will get subsidized, some will go bankrupt. It won’t be Armageddon, but it’s going to be a problem.”

Cover photo:  Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) enters the Senate Chamber on June 30 as the Senate works on passing President Trump’s massive tax bill. Credit: Tom Brenner/The Washington Post via Getty Images