This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
Natural gas price spikes, grid transmission bottlenecks, and a data center construction boom are already straining America’s power grid. The Republican Party just passed a budget bill that might break it.
Donald Trump and the GOP’s irrational energy agenda deliberately sidelines wind and solar energy — the lowest cost, fastest-to-deploy sources of energy generation available — to prop up a dying fossil fuel industry that won’t be able to meet rising demand.
The consequences will be severe: hundreds of billions in clean energy investment will evaporate, hundreds of gigawatts of power won’t get built, and hundreds of millions of metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions will be produced. By 2035, according to Princeton’s ZERO Lab for energy research, the U.S. will have added 45% less clean electricity to the grid than it would have if Trump had not been reelected.
All of this comes as America’s electricity demand is accelerating for the first time in decades. A report last year from the Clean Grid Initiative projected up to a five-fold increase in demand on the grid. Meanwhile, the U.S. added 64 TWh of solar generation to the grid in 2024 — enough to meet fully half of the record-breaking growth in electricity demand last year, according to independent energy think tank Ember Energy.
The only way America can meet rising energy demand and keep costs down is by building more wind and solar. Clean energy means lower utility bills, more good jobs, and cleaner air.
The Republicans don’t care. It’s a tale as old as the party. The GOP campaigns on one thing — lowering the cost of energy for Americans — and does the opposite.
The GOP Plot to Raise Your Energy Bill
The final version of the GOP’s bill, which Trump signed into law on July 4, phases out clean energy tax credits by the end of 2027, a year earlier than the timeline in the original House version.
Rather than “unleash” American energy, the Republican Party just kneecapped it. The loss of renewable subsidies threatens to disrupt or cancel a combined capacity of 547 GW of wind and solar by 2027 or later, according to Cleanview’s tracker. That’s not “leveling the playing field” with the massively-subsidized fossil fuel industry — it’s rigging the game.
While the bill does give some juicy handouts to the fossil fuel industry, it’s hard to see who else benefits. U.S. automakers will definitively lose the global electric vehicle race. Big Tech will have to pay a premium to power their AI data centers. Advanced manufacturers now face insurmountable regulatory hurdles. An estimated 2.3 million jobs in clean energy and associated industries will vanish over the next 10 years. The nascent battery manufacturing boom is over. And American households will soon face steep price hikes on their utility bills,