To prevent blackouts, it’s necessary to stop the subsidy-fueled expansion of wind and solar projects — which is what the bill does.
P resident Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill ACT (OBBBA) takes a long-overdue step toward energy realism. It cuts off federal subsidies for new solar and wind projects not underway by a specified date, saving taxpayers billions.
Predictably, green-energy advocates, recognizing that their government gravy train is losing a few cars, are already sounding the alarm. Authors such as David Dayen in the American Prospect are claiming that OBBBA will trigger blackouts. This is not true. The now-passed bill makes blackouts less likely, not more.
OBBBA will eliminate wind and solar subsidies for new projects not under construction by July 4, 2026, saving taxpayers an estimated $500 billion. Subsidies and tax credits will not be granted to any new solar or wind project not connected to the grid and delivering power within four years of that start date.
Dayen never really says why it thinks that’ll cause blackouts, beyond the misleading claim that since almost 96 percent of “all new electrical generating capacity in the U.S.” comes from solar and wind power, presumably a reduction of such sources in the national energy mix will cause some kind of shortage. This definitional sleight of hand is meant to confuse the uninformed and distract from the fundamental reality of how blackouts actually happen.
Having a high nominal solar and wind capacity is not the same thing as actually generating useful power. Green technologies must massively overbuild capacity because the amount of energy generated fluctuates massively throughout the day. Commercial solar panels are around only 20 to 25 percent efficient.
The high nominal capacity of installed solar and wind sounds impressive to the uniformed. But only a tiny fraction of it is being used at any given time. That’s a huge problem for grid reliability. Overreliance on such energy sources contributed to the cascading sequence of problems that caused the mega-blackout in Portugal and Spain in May this year.
Demand for electricity must exactly match supply at all times to avoid a blackout. Green energy makes this task harder. As the Department of Energy itself warns, the “duck curve” problem means that green sources often flood the grid with power when it’s not needed, and they damage the grid when it is. The duck curve describes the shape of the net electricity demand on a grid with lots of solar power, where demand drops significantly during midday but rises sharply in the evening as solar output declines. It resembles a duck’s silhouette, with a deep belly in the afternoon and a steep neck at dusk. The problematic pattern challenges grid operators to manage rapid changes in energy supply and demand.
Power demand is relatively predictable. Conventional power plants, such as nuclear, coal, and natural gas, can adjust output accordingly by simply using more or less fuel as recorded. Solar and wind power, however, cannot easily adjust output since they are dependent on the uncontrollable sun and wind. They therefore provide electricity unpredictably relative to conventional power sources.
This is why, in 2023, wind and solar power provided 1.5 and 0.9 percent of all U.S. primary energy consumption, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Their nominally high capacity doesn’t actually generate much useful energy.
A solar-power plant, for example, may produce a lot of electricity at high noon. But electricity demand peaks in the evening, and electricity is essentially impossible to store economically at grid scale. That excess power has to go somewhere. The result is often negative prices in European countries with green policies: Utility companies are forced to pay consumers to take electricity off the grid in order to avoid blackouts.
In most countries, including the U.S., the power grid operates at a standard frequency that must be maintained within a very tight range to ensure a stable power supply. This is why, for almost a decade now, Germany has been paying wind turbines hundreds of millions of dollars annually not to produce grid-destabilizing electricity at key times.
But confusingly, this nonsensical justification convinced at least one nominally Republican senator, North Carolina’s Thom Tillis, to oppose the bill, over quibbles in the precise wording. Anti-OBBBA advocates dishonestly claimed that ending the subsidies was a “new tax.” In reality, the legislation simply prevents new federal subsidies and tax credits.
Green-energy advocates like Dayen are worried about meeting rising electricity demand. But most of what we’ll need is the kind of steady, consistent, and smooth power that green sources have a hard time providing, because the sun and wind are far less predictable than coal, natural gas, or nuclear power. To a power user like a data center, a major driver of rising demand for electricity, the distortions in the grid caused by solar and wind are immensely harmful. This is why tech companies would rather reactivate even problematically branded nuclear reactors like Three Mile Island than be dependent on green energy.
The rising demand for these services and the power required to run them are large enough that companies are bypassing green energy entirely, since solar and wind power actively damages any device that relies on them for power over time. To compensate for this effect, green energy relies on expensive and unreliable inverters, the failure of which led to the Iberian mega-blackout. These types of inverters are both targets for cyberattacks and are largely produced in China.
Dayen is also deeply concerned that the OBBBA might cut off the flow of Chinese-manufactured (largely slave-made) green energy to the U.S. He complains that Congress “added a restriction on tax credits for projects that use materials from a ‘foreign entity of concern’ (FEOC), which you can mostly read as China” and writes that “joint ventures like the Ford battery plant that licenses technology from a Chinese firm will probably lose tax credits due to these rules.” These are not energy projects our country should want anything to do with.
The truth is that a largely solar-based energy grid is the technology of the future — and it always will be. The environmentalist claim that green energy will soon be viable is at least five decades old at this point. A viable solar-power system capable of providing baseload electricity was the plot device in the 1974 James Bond movie The Man with the Golden Gun. Great film; horrible technology.
The U.S. began massively subsidizing these technologies in the Energy Tax Act of 1978. It introduced huge 30 percent tax credits for solar- and wind-energy equipment on the theory that the green industry would be able to stand on its own two feet any day now. That was 47 years and about $250 billion inflation-adjusted dollars ago.
If the technology can’t stand on its own two feet after that amount of time and effort, how much longer should taxpayers be expected to foot the bill?
To prevent blackouts, it’s necessary to stop the subsidy-fueled expansion of wind and solar projects. Not allowing the subsidies to terminate during Trump’s term would absolutely condemn America to the very blackouts that OBBBA opponents say they want to prevent.