U.S. Senate negotiators working late over the weekend added a devastating tax on foreign solar parts on top of the House’s elimination of all personal and utility-scale clean energy credits, in a combo that Colorado’s governor, trade groups and advocates said will essentially kill the industry. 

Clean energy advocates fighting the House’s gutting of all Biden-era tax credits were hoping Senate reconciliation talks would restore some subsidies. Instead, they reacted furiously early Saturday morning in tweets and texts when they discovered that an escalating excise tax on solar production from plants using Chinese-made materials had somehow made it into the 950-page budget. 

With Chinese parts everywhere in the surging solar power industry, those taxes would sharply raise costs for utilities and developers who have made solar and wind projects the great majority of all new power construction. And wiping out federal tax credits that had revived domestic manufacturing of solar panels, parts and batteries means developers can’t get what they need in the U.S., either, Democrats and trade groups said. 

“Congressional Republicans just added a new job-killer, tax, and cost increase into the big, cruel bill targeting our thriving wind and solar power,” Polis said in a post on X Saturday evening. “The Republican bill now attacks solar and wind investments, which is bad for Colorado on so many levels, but this is a new low.”

“This bill is insane,” said KC Becker, chief of the Colorado Solar and Storage Association, regional EPA director under Biden and a former Democratic speaker of the Colorado House. “Donald Trump is trying to ruin the clean energy industry, putting jobs and grid reliability at risk and raising energy costs.” 

Colorado Democratic officials and advocates are lamenting the combination of political and economic attacks on the clean energy sector. Colorado’s separate, state-provided tax credits for everything from EVs to e-bikes to heat pumps will be cut in half for the next budget year, after state revenue forecasts came in lower and activated a trigger for the subsidy slash. 

Progressive energy advocacy groups and Democratic governors were getting no sympathy from the more strident voices for returning energy growth to America’s previous fossil fuel base. Starting at the White House, they have labeled Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and other personal and industry clean energy subsidies as the “Green New Scam” instead of a New Deal for an energy revolution. 

“If, as supporters of the Inflation Reduction Act are complaining, repealing these subsidies will ‘kill’ their industry, then maybe it shouldn’t exist in the first place,” Thomas Pyle of the American Energy Alliance said in a statement issued after the latest Senate version went online. 

After voting Saturday to start debate on the so-called omnibus budget and policy bill, the Senate began debating and amending in earnest on Sunday. A final Senate vote could come Monday, according to Capitol reporters, with Trump supporters rushing to meet the president’s July 4 deadline. The House would then have to vote again to accept the Senate-passed version. 

The last-minute insertion of a solar tax on top of speeding up the end of clean energy credits was even too far for some stalwart conservative advocacy groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. 

“Overall, the Senate has produced a strong, pro-growth bill. That said, taxing energy production is never good policy, whether oil & gas or, in this case, renewables,” Neil Bradley, a chamber policy vice president, said in a post on X. “Electricity demand is set to see enormous growth & this tax will increase prices. It should be removed.”

The apparently doomed tax credits that make large-scale utility wind and solar profitable for developers include up to 30% back from the federal government on a project. 

On smaller scale subsidies, the Senate bill phases out tax credits even faster than the House, ending this year  the $7,500 EV tax credit and credits that made clean electric heat pumps and other household equipment affordable. The budget bill also eliminates tax credits for individual rooftop solar installations that helped build up an industry employing thousands of sales people, installers and technical support in many states, including Colorado. 

The added solar-parts tax would make large-scale replacement of natural gas and coal-fired plants more expensive by imposing an excise charge on parts from “Foreign Entity of Concern” nations — read: China — for projects starting after the bill is passed and not finished by 2027. That puts in jeopardy the long-term plans of power utilities in nearly every state, including Xcel, Tri-State and local co-ops in Colorado, to keep building solar farms to meet state-mandated targets of 80% cuts to carbon emissions by 2030. 

Calling the Senate-inserted solar tax a “midnight dumping,” the American Clean Power Association said in a statement from the trade group’s CEO Jason Grumet, “It is astounding that the Senate would intentionally raise prices on consumers rather than encouraging economic growth and addressing the affordability crisis facing American households.”

“These new taxes will strand hundreds of billions of dollars in current investments, threaten energy security, undermine growth in domestic manufacturing and land hardest on rural communities who would have been the greatest beneficiaries of clean energy investment,” Grumet said.