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July 16 (Reuters) – Clean energy companies are asking California leaders for help getting their projects going before changes to federal subsidies in President Donald Trump’s sweeping new tax and spending law make them more expensive and difficult to build.
In a letter to California Governor Gavin Newsom and state legislative leaders circulated on Wednesday, five trade groups representing solar, wind and energy storage companies called on the state to speed environmental reviews and project approvals, initiate new clean-energy procurement and allow more facilities to be sited on agricultural lands.
The groups said rollbacks to clean energy tax credits and stricter rules on when a project is considered to have started construction threatened billions of dollars in investment and the Golden State’s climate change goals.
“Taken together, the new federal landscape creates a serious risk of delay or cancellation for dozens of utility-scale solar and wind projects across the state, threatening jobs, reliability, and progress toward California’s clean energy targets,” the letter said.
The plea comes two weeks after Trump signed a Republican-passed law that effectively phases out wind and solar energy tax credits after 2026 if projects haven’t started construction. For projects that begin construction after that, they must be placed in service by the end of 2027.
In addition, Trump last week directed the Treasury Department, within 45 days, to tighten the rules on who can claim the incentives that remain.
Democratic-leaning California’s climate change policies are among the most ambitious in the world. The state announced this week that more than two-thirds of its retail electricity sales in 2023 came from renewable and zero-carbon-emitting sources.
Newsom’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The letter was signed by leaders from the Large-scale Solar Association, the California arm of the American Clean Power Association, the Solar Energy Industries Association, the California Wind Energy Association and the California Energy Storage Alliance.
Reporting by Nichola Groom; Editing by Leslie Adler
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