On Thursday (May 22) the House of Representatives passed, by a narrow margin of 215-214, what is referred to as the “Big Beautiful Bill” — a massive compendium of taxing and spending measures that can now seek to avoid the filibuster in the Senate on grounds of being a “budget reconciliation.”  The BBB is well over a thousand pages long (go here for full text), and covers a huge range of subjects.  

Most summaries of the BBB that I have seen never get to the important subject of subsidies for so-called “green” energy — wind turbines, solar arrays, grid-scale batteries, hydrogen production, and so forth.  That is understandable given the large number of important issues covered in the bill.  However, the green energy subsidies are a gigantic issue.  They consist of generous tax credits for wind and solar facilities that have been around for a long time, plus a barrage of subsidies and handouts created by the so-called Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.  In a post that I wrote at the time of enactment of the IRA, I linked to an analysis that estimated the green energy handouts of just the IRA alone at approximately $370 billion (although I noted that the IRA handouts were un-capped and could end up being far more than that).

Since the wind and solar generators can never contribute meaningfully to the electrical grid, the hundreds of billions in subsidies are basically a dead weight loss to the economy and the people.  Getting rid of them needs to be a top priority for the Republican Congress.  And yet there has been serious doubt as to whether the Republicans could muster the political will to rescind them.  So I thought I would take my own look at the bill to see how they are treated.

Somewhat to my surprise, the BBB as passed by the House appears to repeal and rescind essentially all of the green energy handouts from the IRA.  The IRA had added a collection of new sections to the Clean Air Act to create various massive funds for handouts to “greenhouse gas reduction” efforts.  Go to section 42101 et seq. of the BBB (you will need to scroll down a long, long way to get there), and you will find that one by one these handouts will be repealed.  Excerpt: