This is exactly what Project 2025 proposed

Analysts called it "extreme" and "unlikely." Now, it's almost reality.

Photo sources: Getty Images/Brendan Smialowski/AFP

Here’s the good news: Before Senate Republicans passed the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” this afternoon, they removed the surprise tax on solar and wind that was “designed to fully kill the industry,” as HEATED reported on Sunday.

Here’s the bad news: Almost everything else. See, I have a theory that Republicans never intended to pass that tax—they just added it at the last minute so it wouldn’t look as extreme when they decided to wipe out lucrative tax incentives for renewable energy, thereby erasing thousands of jobs, raising electricity prices, and worsening the climate crisis. Which, by the way, is exactly what they did.

The Senate-passed version of the megabill, which now goes back to the House for approval, ”significantly curtails clean energy tax credits” that were part of President Joe Biden’s 2022 landmark climate law.

Republicans did add an exception that will allow wind and solar projects that begin construction within the next year to take advantage of the tax credits. But overall, this bill does exactly what Project 2025 proposed far before Trump was elected President—and what analysts told us at the time would probably never happen.

Project 2025, the blueprint for Trump’s second term published by the conservative Heritage Foundation, included many proposals for dismantling U.S. climate and environmental policy. But the most extreme and potentially impactful was its proposal to eliminate all government incentives and tax credits for solar, wind, and battery projects, while keeping the existing billions in subsidies for the fossil fuel industry.

Despite Trump’s insistence that he knew nothing about Project 2025 and had “nothing to do” with it, we took its proposals seriously. And in October, before the election, we were the only media outlet to report on a detailed study looking at how that proposal would affect the U.S. transition to climate-friendly energy.

Published by one of the world’s largest dedicated power market analytics companies, Aurora Energy Research, the study predicted that removing tax credits for renewable energy would hinder solar, wind, and battery deployment by 212 GW by 2040. 212 GW is, for context, a huge amount of renewable energy development to lose out on, enough to power 159 million homes—more than all the homes in the country. We reported:

Preventing these renewable projects would also have a massive impact on the climate. According to the analysis, simply removing those tax credits would add 1.8 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalent to the atmosphere by 2040. That’s the equivalent of running 463 coal plants for one year, or running 31 coal plants for the next 15 years.

That amount of pollution “would basically make it impossible to meet the global warming reductions under the Paris Climate Accord,” said Johanna Neumann, senior director for the renewable energy campaign at the climate nonprofit Environment America.

But here’s the kicker: We were told, at the time, that this represented both an “extreme” and “unlikely” scenario.

Aurora’s researchers deem the Project 2025 scenario “extreme,” in part because they don’t believe it’s a likely outcome. “We do not think this will be feasible or likely, given the Republican party's low likelihood of gaining a Senate supermajority and the bipartisan support these clean energy subsidies enjoy,” report co-author Lizzie Bonahoom told HEATED via email.

If Trump did this, researchers note, he would have to “ignore opposition from red state communities” who have benefitted from incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s landmark climate law. Red states are currently the biggest beneficiaries of the law’s renewable incentives.

Repealing tax credits for renewables also “may not prove popular with consumers,” the analysis says, “since fewer renewables leads to an increase in wholesale power prices up to 22 percent in the most impacted regions like Texas.”

There was only one reason Aurora’s researchers could think of that Trump would repeal clean energy tax credits: If he wanted to extend massive tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy.

But Trump could do this, Aurora explains, if he feels “pressure to finance a massive $4.6 trillion extension of 2017 tax cuts.” Many of the tax changes that Trump implemented during his presidency are expiring at the end of 2025. The implication is that Trump could increase taxes on renewable developers to finance an extension.

This is, of course, exactly what is now happening. The entire purpose of all the spending cuts in so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” is to pay for an extension of tax breaks that overwhelmingly benefit the ultra-rich.

And now, some analysts are predicting an even bigger consequences for the renewable energy sector should the bill pass. On Tuesday, Reuters reported that research firm Energy Innovation projected that the bill “would result in a fall of 300 GW of electricity capacity at a time of soaring demand due to data center and AI growth.”

To be sure, it’s not like Aurora was the only entity predicting that Trump would never touch renewable energy tax credits—far from it. After all, the whole idea behind Biden’s signature climate law was that if renewable energy incentives were concentrated in red states, Republicans would never eliminate them. Even if Republicans gained power, most Democrats figured, they wouldn't willingly eliminate good jobs and tax revenue and cheap power in their own states and districts. Why would they knowingly hurt their own constituents?

Turns out, they only needed one reason: Because daddy asked them to.

But even with the Senate’s passage, the budget megabill can still be changed again in the House, which means it would have to be sent back to the Senate again before going to Trump’s desk. Weirdly enough, that’s exactly what Senator Lisa Murkowski from Alaska—who voted for the bill—is now calling for. "My hope is that the House is gonna look at this and recognize that we're not there yet," she said following the bill’s passage on Tuesday.

That would seem like the most rational move, based on polling showing that the vast majority of Americans still oppose this bill. But clearly, what’s rational is not a reliable predictor of the future. We’d all be wise to remember it moving forward.