There is no better way to celebrate America’s 250th birthday than watching $141 billion worth of taxpayer-funded green energy welfare finally get shut off. As of Saturday, July 4th, federal subsidies for new wind and solar projects are finished. Dead. Done. And not a moment too soon.
Let’s talk about what that number actually represents. $141 billion. Not million. Billion. Extracted from the paychecks of working Americans over sixteen years and funneled into an industry that couldn’t survive a single day without government life support. An industry whose fundamental product — electricity — is supposed to be reliable, affordable, and available on demand. And which, by its own physical nature, is none of those things:
The Trump administration is set to cut subsidies for new solar and wind power projects on Saturday. Estimates suggest the subsidies have cost taxpayers more than $141 billion over the past 16 years, more than any other energy source.
The Working Families Tax Cuts, a signature piece of President Trump’s tax legislation signed a year ago, set Saturday as the deadline for federal tax credit subsidies on any new solar or wind projects not currently under construction.
U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright touted the subsidy deadline and criticized solar and wind energy projects in a video posted to social media Thursday.
“The wind doesn’t always blow, and the sun doesn’t always shine,” Wright said. “They drive up the system costs and increase Americans’ electricity prices.”
He’s right. Intermittent energy sources don’t just fail to replace reliable ones — they actively make the entire grid more expensive and more fragile. Every time a wind farm goes dark because the air is still, or a solar installation goes offline because it’s cloudy, something else has to pick up the slack. And that something else — natural gas, nuclear, coal — has to be kept running in the background anyway, eating costs the whole time, just waiting for the moment the wind dies and the panels go dark.
So what did sixteen years of green energy subsidies actually buy America? Higher electricity bills. Increased grid instability. Hundreds of thousands of acres of land covered in solar panels that can be destroyed by a single hailstorm or sliced apart by a moderately strong tornado. Eagle-killing wind turbines stretching across the landscape as far as the eye can see. And a supply chain so dependent on Chinese rare earth minerals that we essentially handed Beijing enormous leverage over our own energy future in the name of saving the planet.
The Texas Public Policy Foundation ran the numbers, and they’re ugly. Solar and wind received more federal subsidies than any other energy source in America over that period — more than nuclear, more than natural gas, more than anything. And the return on that investment, measured in reliable, affordable electricity for American families? Deeply underwhelming. What it produced instead, as the researchers documented, was artificially distorted wholesale prices, scarcity spikes during periods of peak demand, inefficient use of existing infrastructure, and skyrocketing transmission costs. The entire scheme was a wealth transfer — from ordinary Americans paying their electric bills to politically connected green energy developers collecting federal tax credits.
The Trump administration’s Working Families Tax Cuts set Saturday as the hard deadline for these credits to expire on any new projects not already under construction. Congress put it into law. The president signed it. And now it’s done.
None of this means solar panels or wind turbines are inherently worthless. If a homeowner in Arizona wants to put panels on the roof because the math makes sense for their situation, God bless them — that’s their call to make with their own money. If a company wants to build a wind farm and make the economics work without a federal handout, let them try. That’s called a free market. What it is not called is a free market when the government puts its thumb on the scale to the tune of $141 billion because politically favored industries can’t compete on their own merits.
The green energy lobby spent years telling America that wind and solar were the future — that they were on the verge of becoming cost-competitive, that just a little more subsidy was all they needed to stand on their own two feet. That argument has been running for sixteen years and $141 billion, and the industry still can’t survive without the handout. At some point, the argument stops being an optimistic projection and starts being a scam.
That point arrived a long time ago. The Trump administration just finally acknowledged it.
Affordable, reliable, American energy. That’s the goal. That’s always been the goal. And it’s a goal that doesn’t require picking winners and losers, propping up intermittent energy sources with borrowed money, or pretending that covering farmland with solar panels is the same thing as energy independence.
This Fourth of July, while the fireworks light up the sky, American taxpayers have one more thing to celebrate: the green energy gravy train has finally, mercifully, hit the end of the line.
