|
Trump’s ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ is bad news for Maine clean energy
On Tuesday morning, hundreds of thousands of Mainers woke up to higher electricity bills. Central Maine Power’s rate hike, its second in as many years, was largely driven by the utility’s need to recover costs from severe storms in the last few years — the type of extreme weather events that are becoming more frequent and severe due to global climate change. The average household’s monthly bill is expected to jump by about $5, or 3.3 percent, one year after a roughly $10 monthly increase.
As Mainers prepared to reach deeper into their bank accounts to help bankroll the mounting impacts of fossil fuel-driven climate change on energy infrastructure, Republicans in Congress advanced a massive budget bill that is likely to further drive up energy costs and deliver a blow to renewable energy projects, energy efficiency programs and climate action in Maine and across the country.
The Senate narrowly passed its version of President Donald Trump’s so-called “one big, beautiful” bill Tuesday, followed by the House on Thursday. The legislation now heads to Trump’s desk. On the energy front, the legislation aims to thwart the nation’s build out of clean energy, including wind and solar, while incentivizing coal, oil and gas production.
In its current form, the bill would rapidly phase out Biden administration-era tax credits for wind and solar projects, requiring those projects to either break ground within one year or come online by the end of 2027 to access the credits; eliminate tax credits for new and used electric vehicles purchased after Sept. 30 of this year; repeal Inflation Reduction Act funding for numerous emission-reduction programs; and terminate tax credits for home energy efficiency upgrades, including rooftop solar, electric heat pumps and insulation, at the end of 2025.
“The passage of this bill is going to raise prices for consumers, it is going to cut wages for workers and it’s going to make us more reliant on natural gas, which is incredibly expensive right now,” Scott Cuddy, a former state representative and current director of membership development at the the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local Union 1253, told The Maine Monitor. “We’re just looking at losing, losing and losing.”
Maine’s entire congressional delegation — Sens. Susan Collins (R) and Angus King (I) and Reps. Chellie Pingree (D) and Jared Golden (D) — voted against the package. Collins cited the bill’s clean energy rollbacks in a statement explaining her ‘no’ vote.
“The tax credits that energy entrepreneurs have relied on should have been gradually phased out so as not to waste the work that has already been put into these innovative new projects and prevent them from being completed,” she said. “The bill should have also retained incentives for Maine families who choose to install heat pumps and residential solar panels.”
Ahead of the Senate vote, dozens of Maine organizations, businesses, community leaders and labor unions sent a letter urging the two Senators to oppose the bill’s proposed cuts to clean energy investments.
Anya Fetcher, federal policy advocate at the Natural Resource Council of Maine, one of the organizations that signed onto the letter, noted that the bill threatens to slow Maine’s transition to local renewable energy and in turn “prolong the amount of time it takes to drive down energy costs for households and for Maine to reach its [climate] goals.”
The Republican push to get Trump’s policy agenda across the finish line comes on the heels of Maine Democratic Gov. Janet Mills signing into law a bill to speed up the state’s transition away from polluting energy sources, with a new target of reaching 100 percent clean electricity by 2040.
To date, clean energy funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act, both of which were passed during the Biden administration, have supported nearly $3 billion in direct and public-private investments in Maine, according to NRCM’s analysis of data from Rhodium Group’s Clean Investment Monitor.
The budget megabill could lead to a loss of 760,000 jobs nationally by 2030 and average household energy costs increasing $170 per year over the next decade according to a recent analysis from Energy Innovations, an energy and climate think tank. In Maine, 1,600 jobs are forecast to evaporate and average household energy costs are expected to rise $80 per year by 2035, Dan O’Brien, a senior modeling analyst at Energy Innovation and one of the authors of the report, told The Maine Monitor after crunching state-level data.
“Maine already has quite high power prices,” O’Brien said in an email. “But by passing a renewable standard last month, the legislature is effectively shielding Mainers from some of the price spikes and volatility of imported thermal fuels. Sure, the cost of adding new renewables will go up due to repealed tax credits, but there will be so much less gas and petroleum use on the grid that power prices won’t increase to quite the same degree as in states with heavy grid fossil reliance.”
Yet Maine began feeling impacts of the GOP budget bill well before this week’s legislative battle on Capitol Hill, with at least two planned solar projects — a 100 megawatt facility in Cherryfield and a 140-megawatt array in Hartland — being put on hold and hours for union electricians quickly drying up, according to Cuddy. Given the climate threat that Maine and the rest of the country is facing, Cuddy views the legislation as worse than the old idiom "cutting off your nose to spite your face.”
“We’re like blasting our nose off our face,” he said. “We’re using TNT up each nostril to blow our nose off of our face here. We are injuring ourselves economically in the short term, and in the long term we are making the problem that is causing some of our economic woes even worse. The bill just confounds me.”
“We’ve been working to sell people on this concept of win, win, win: We fight climate change, we create good jobs, we help the environment and we save people money,” he added. “That’s what we’re doing away with.”
|
