ICYMI: E&E News: Meet the Republicans who killed solar subsidies — after using them

Washington, D.C. – E&E News reported that at least three Republican lawmakers who supported eliminating solar tax credits took advantage of those credits to save money on solar panels on their properties. Utility bills are skyrocketing, with household electricity prices up 11% nationally since Trump took office. Instead of delivering on lower costs, Trump and Republicans are taking a sledgehammer to the clean energy industry, which would have lowered utility bills. Republican members of Congress are benefiting from cost-saving measures that they voted to deny to their constituents. While GOP Rep. Mike Lawler saved “a few thousand bucks” on electricity costs through his solar panels, he voted to spike energy costs for Americans across the country.

E&E News: Meet the Republicans who killed solar subsidies — after using them

At least three Republican lawmakers took advantage of a decades-old rooftop solar credit that will end in January due to President Donald Trump’s megalaw, according to a review of property records and satellite imagery by POLITICO’s E&E News.

The lawmakers — with solar arrays on a California villa, a $3 million Utah manse and an off-the-grid Kentucky homestead — all supported ending the perk this summer that sliced thousands of dollars off the cost of installing their panels.

California Rep. Ken Calvert, a long-serving Republican who was thrust into a race next year with a member of his own party when the state redrew his conservative district, defended voting to end the solar credit that he used about 15 years ago to offset the cost of putting two rows of panels on the back roof of his ranch-style house in Southern California.

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E&E News examined the rooftops of 112 members of Congress: every Senate Republican and 59 House GOP lawmakers who are in leadership or facing tough reelection races.

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The revelations come at a time of rising utility rates and increasing politicization of energy as the Trump administration scraps grants, loans and permits for solar, wind and other renewable energy technologies. The president has dismissed solar panels as part of Democrats’ “green new scam” and called them “a blight on our country.”

Trump’s megalaw reinforced the partisan divide on energy. While the legislation primarily extended tax cuts passed in the president’s first term and provided $300 billion for border enforcement and military programs, it also slashed over $484 billion in clean energy incentives. Despite the megalaw’s deep cuts for climate programs, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that it would add $3.4 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.

The law was a double-whammy for the solar industry. It speeds up the phase-out of both the rooftop solar subsidy tapped by Calvert, Curtis and Massie as well as another credit relied on by project developers to cut the price of leased panels. At the same time, it boosted an oil subsidy created in the early 1900s and included other provisions to increase the production of fossil fuels that are primarily responsible for global warming.

“There has been a push, as you know, for a long while to get rid of those tax credits,” said Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, whose Capitol Hill rowhouse roof has been layered with solar panels for about a decade. “And then when you had Trump come into office, he made it very clear that this was not something that he was going to continue supporting.”

A key swing vote on the megalaw, Murkowski couldn’t recall if she received the credit, which can save homeowners thousands of dollars by refunding 30 percent of the cost of buying and installing panels. Analysts say almost everyone who buys a new solar system — the average cost of which is now about $30,000 — files for the benefit.

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[T]he so-called residential clean energy credit has been extended and broadened in scope several times, most recently when Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022 with no Republican votes. The clean energy spending package would have allowed homeowners to claim tax credits of between 22 and 30 percent of the cost of qualifying solar, wind, geothermal and battery projects through 2034.

Then on July 4, Trump signed the megalaw that moved up the expiration of the residential clean energy credit by nearly a decade.

The legislation also accelerated the end of a 30 percent investment tax credit that’s used by solar installers to lower the cost of leasing panels for their customers. That solar credit will now largely disappear at the end of 2027, at least five years earlier than it would have.

New York Rep. Mike Lawler lives in a suburban home in the Hudson River Valley with rooftop panels that he leases from Vivint Solar. His district narrowly supported former Vice President Kamala Harris in the last presidential election, making him one of the most vulnerable Republicans in Congress.

Lawler was among a group of GOP lawmakers who repeatedly urged House leaders to protect clean energy subsidies when the party was overhauling the tax code this year. Those efforts were largely unsuccessful, and Lawler voted for the bill.

“We didn’t get everything we wanted, but we were able to keep a lot of the provisions and labor standards, etc.,” he said in an interview.

The panels on Lawler’s house have helped him avoid the impacts of rising electricity costs. Since he began leasing the solar system in 2016, it has saved him “a few thousand bucks,” he estimated.

“Look, they were going to expire,” Lawler said of the solar subsidies. “And it was phased out — a little more accelerated than some would like — but people are still able to utilize them.”

Lawler indirectly benefited from the investment tax credit, analysts say, because it helps companies reduce the costs their customers pay for leasing rooftop solar systems. After 2027, when the investment tax credit disappears, it could be harder for people to lease panels or buy electricity from community solar projects, according to Zoë Gaston, an analyst at the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie.

“Solar will definitely be more expensive,” she said. “It could be as much as a 30 percent increase. I know from talking to lots of installers that they’re trying to find other opportunities to cut costs.”

California Reps. Darrell Issa and Young Kim, both Republicans who voted for the megalaw, also had solar panels on homes they once owned. Public records show Issa sold his property last year. Kim transferred hers to a family trust in 2024 that now operates it as a rental property. She is facing a primary from Calvert.

Their offices did not respond to questions about whether the lawmakers had taken advantage of federal subsidies to purchase or lease the panels.

Dampening a solar boom

The use of rooftop panels by Republicans illustrates the growing economic appeal of solar energy, industry data shows.

A renewable energy trade group estimated in 2004 that the nation installed enough panels that year to produce a total of 58 megawatts of power, enough for about 8,000 homes. Installations have exploded in popularity since then. Last year, the U.S. added over 50 gigawatts of solar capacity — 865 times higher than 2004 levels — with 4.8 GW of that annual growth coming from the residential sector alone, according to solar industry data. Seven percent of U.S. homes now have solar systems.

The megalaw is likely to blunt the solar boom as it amplifies other challenges facing the industry, such as high interest rates and Trump’s tariffs, according to analysts. Three large companies have already filed for bankruptcy protection this year, with more expected to become insolvent in the coming months. Wood Mackenzie estimates that solar installations over the next decade would be 17 percent lower than it had previously forecast.

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New fossil fuel subsidies

Republicans’ justification for killing rooftop solar credits are undercut by their continued support for incentives that go to the fossil fuel industry, argued Jesse Lee, a former senior adviser to the National Economic Council during the Biden administration.

“We’ve had subsidies and tax credits for oil production for more than a century. So I don’t really understand this argument that all clean energy tax credits must come to an end,” said Lee, who is now a spokesperson for the environmental advocacy group Climate Power.

“And not only did they leave the century-old oil industry subsidies untouched, they gave new tax loopholes to the oil industry,” he added. For instance, the megalaw established a 2.5 percent production tax credit for steel-making coal, cut royalty rates for coal mining and oil drilling on federal land, and eased restrictions on tax deductions for oil drilling costs — a subsidy that dates back to 1913.