A year ago, the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill overhauled clean energy tax credits and set off a rush to safe harbor projects before those credits begin to phase out. At the time, many worried that the bill would have a chilling effect on clean energy development. But in the 12 months since, the sector has instead surged, with wind, solar, and storage dominating new capacity additions to the grid.
Those wind and solar projects that managed to commence construction before July 4 now have four years to build and come online and still qualify for the credits. But the challenges those projects will face between starting construction and connecting to the grid are many — and even still remain in flux.
According to Jason Clark, CEO of policy intelligence platform Power Brief, their main three hurdles are permitting, tariffs, and “foreign entity of concern” rules. Developers and manufacturers should expect movement on each of those fronts in the coming months, Clark explained on a recent Latitude Dispatch — but the landscape in which those updates will land is starkly different to the one in which they were conceived in early 2025.
“We used to live in a world where electricity demand was flat, and as such every new electron was stealing market share from somebody else, and it was who’s winning and who’s losing,” he said. Now though, huge demand to power artificial intelligence and other new loads means that “everyone is going to ‘win’.”
