Clean energy stakeholders descend on Capitol to lobby for IRA credits

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Clean energy stakeholders descend on Capitol to lobby for IRA credits

Dive Brief: As Congress weighs clawing back Inflation Reduction Act funds to pay for other items in its upcoming 2025 budget, the Solar Energy Industries Association and other groups led a Wednesday lobbying blitz on Capitol Hill, bringing industry representatives there for “over 100 meetings,” the group said. SEIA also sent a letter signed by […]

Dive Brief:

As Congress weighs clawing back Inflation Reduction Act funds to pay for other items in its upcoming 2025 budget, the Solar Energy Industries Association and other groups led a Wednesday lobbying blitz on Capitol Hill, bringing industry representatives there for “over 100 meetings,” the group said.
SEIA also sent a letter signed by around 1,500 solar and storage companies to each congressional office, urging lawmakers to “keep in place the solar and storage energy and manufacturing credits in any tax package that may move forward in the 119th Congress.”
“With support from federal clean energy policies, American solar manufacturers can now produce enough modules to meet all demand for solar in the United States,” said Abigail Ross Hopper, president and CEO of SEIA. “It’s critical that our elected leaders understand the impact of these policies and the jobs and investments they bring to their constituents.”

Dive Insight:

President Donald Trump issued an executive order to freeze IRA funding soon after he took office, and is expected to urge the Republican-controlled Congress to make cuts to the legislation as lawmakers approach their March 14 shutdown deadline.

Since Trump’s election, the clean energy industry has been pushing for the president to consider the IRA’s private sector benefits while urging lawmakers to protect the IRA investments in their districts. “In the last two years, 70-80% of all federal clean energy investments have flowed to Republican districts, and 90% of all those investments are in the manufacturing sector,” SEIA noted in a Wednesday release.

In August, 18 House Republicans sent a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., urging him to prioritize “business and market certainty” as he examines options for repealing or reforming the IRA.

While the lawmakers said they felt the “partisan process of passing the IRA created a deeply flawed bill,” they also said that a full repeal “would create a worst-case scenario where we would have spent billions of taxpayer dollars and received next to nothing in return.”

In their letter, members of the solar and storage industry noted that their sector “currently supports more than 280,000 jobs as it has expanded in response to critical power needs, and a rapid onshoring of clean energy manufacturing.”

SEIA said that other organizations with member companies participating in the Wednesday lobbying blitz include the National Hydropower Association, Oceantic Network, Climate Power, U.S. Green Building Council, Clean Energy for America, E2, Business Council for Sustainable Energy, Impact Capital Managers, and “dozens of utilities and businesses across the energy sector.”

“Businesses across America right now are just breaking ground or finalizing plans for hundreds of factories and projects that will manufacture the solar panels, batteries and other Made-in-America equipment and deploy the energy we need to meet the exploding demand for electricity across the economy,” said Bob Keefe, executive director of E2. “Now’s not the time to undermine the federal policies driving this economic boom and the hundreds of thousands of jobs it’s creating.”

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Community solar agreement aims to cut electricity costs, emissions across 31 Illinois fast food outlets

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OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

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