On Thursday July 3, the House of Representatives passed the budget bill, known as the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill,’ which included sweeping cuts to renewable energy tax credits and programs.

The bill claws back funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s landmark climate legislation, and changes or cuts energy and manufacturing tax credits. For example, solar and wind energy that are built and come online after 2027 will no longer be eligible for tax credits, significantly reducing the timeline for any projects to get off the ground.

The oil and gas industry, as well as mining, come out ahead in the bill. It reduces royalty rates that operators pay for oil and gas production on federal lands, and includes leasing mandates for federal land and water. There’s also a mandatory expansion of federal land to be made available for mining.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, solar and battery storage made up over 80% of the nation’s new electric generating capacity in 2024. That trend is expected to continue into 2025, with officials saying solar will be driving much of the growth in capacity.

Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) said during a virtual press conference on July 2 that some of the more harmful provisions in the Senate’s bill, like an excise tax on solar panels, were removed, but still, the economic impacts of rescinding tax credits would be devastating.

“We’re going to gut hundreds of billions of dollars in the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy investments,” he said. “This (was) a transformational moment to address climate change, and we weren’t solving it, but this was a major step towards addressing climate change, and now… it’s like running into a brick wall.”

“We got over 8 thousand solar jobs, just in Colorado,” he said.

Nonpartisan think tank Energy Innovation (EI) says these cuts will mean less capacity for the nation’s increasingly strained power grid. The group estimates that by 2030, there will be a 340 gigawatt decrease in generation capacity.

Sara Baldwin, the group’s senior electrification director, says this could harm fast-growing regions like the Mountain West.

“We would see a net loss of generation capacity that we would have otherwise seen built by 2035 in Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado, to the tune of eight gigawatts,” she said. That’s enough energy to power 6 million homes.

EI estimates that because of the increasing reliance on coal and fossil fuels, the nation’s emissions would go up by 160 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2030, or the equivalent of adding 72 million cars to the road. Baldwin says for mountain areas like the Front Range and the Wasatch Front, which struggle with poor air quality, public health would be threatened.

Baldwin says many of the tax credits the bill cuts have been in place for decades, but the IRA expanded their reach, and added supplemental programs. She estimates that across the three states, there would be a loss of over 17,000 jobs by the year 2030.

“When you take something like a longstanding production and investment tax credit away from these businesses that are trying to create jobs in America, you are telling them that you do not respect the business that they have, and you do not want them to do that job creation here in the U.S.”

On average, EI estimates that Colorado and Utah households would see an increase in yearly utility costs of about $300. That number is about $150 in Wyoming.

Josh Shipley owns a small solar company, Alternative Power Enterprises, in Ridgway and Montrose, and he participated in Hickenlooper’s press call on the impacts of the bill.

“It looked like we had an off-ramp to 2032 to see these tax credits dissipate,” he said. “That was imperative in our business plan. That was part of how we were able to afford to continue on this company of now 30+ years. Instantly removing these tax credits at the end of the year is gonna be extremely detrimental. We actually don’t believe we’re going to be able to stay in business.”

Shipley says his business is one of just two installers in the area, and this could hurt the community’s ability to lower their energy costs. He says tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act have allowed his business to expand, helping people on the Western Slope reduce their energy costs.

“In the last handful of years, we’ve actually been able to start helping low income families be able to go solar,” he said. “I think in the last three years, over 120 families have benefitted from that.”

Sara Baldwin says the bill essentially takes the country back in time to a previous era.

“They chose to compromise quality of life, American jobs, domestic energy production, in order to give billionaires more tax breaks and more tax cuts,” she said. “(That’s) also to say nothing of the fact that they’re taking away healthcare from millions of Americans who need it. They’re taking away social safety nets from millions of Americans that count on those.”

Copyright 2025 Rocky Mountain Community Radio. This story was shared via Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a network of public media stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, including Aspen Public Radio.