By admin 
Since sweeping to power in 2025, Republicans have waged an all-out war on clean energy. Congress gutted major clean energy and electric vehicle subsidies enacted under Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, killed state-level rules to spur electric vehicle adoption, and blocked legislation to ease permitting for wind power projects. The Trump administration has gone further, paying developers billions to abandon offshore wind projects and invest in oil and gas instead, freezing wind and solar development on federal lands, and terminating $20 billion in clean energy grants (all three moves have been challenged in court). The Republican trifecta could deliver one clean energy priority in the form of a bipartisan permitting reform bill currently taking shape in the Senate, but otherwise stands firmly athwart the decarbonization agenda the White House has the “Green New Scam.”
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In recent months, however, the clean energy industry has started to fight back. A new super PAC organized by solar investors and executives, Invest in Tomorrow Coalition PAC, has made waves in the press by targeting some of the industry’s biggest antagonists in Congress. The PAC reported about $5 million in total spending through August, most of it against three far-right Republicans who led the charge to undo Biden’s clean energy subsidies: Representative Chip Roy in his bid for Texas attorney general; Representative Andy Ogles in his Tennessee reelection campaign; and Representative Ralph Norman in the South Carolina Senate primary. All three lost. After Ogles’s defeat, Politico suggested the PAC “may be showing conservatives the power of clean energy money.”
“We needed to instill fear,” Peter Davidson, CEO of the investment firm Aligned Climate Capital and a founding organizer of Invest in Tomorrow, told me of the group’s philosophy. The industry has historically focused on winning hearts and minds rather than playing political hardball. Now, Davidson wants politicians to understand that “if they cross the industry—just like crypto, just like the NRA—there would be consequences.”
Invest in Tomorrow plans to spend $20 to $30 million by the end of the midterms to send that message. But in our brave new world of unlimited election spending, is that enough to instill fear in Washington? James Carville, the veteran Democratic strategist, ridiculed me for even asking the question. “Twenty million—what the fuck do you think the carbon industry spends in a year?” In the 2024 elections, that number was $219 million. The cryptocurrency industry, which Davidson cites as inspiration, has also paid top dollar for the clout it now enjoys on Capitol Hill, spending over $130 million in 2024 and nearly $200 million so far in these midterms. Fast on its heels are PACs associated with the artificial intelligence industry, which have raised over $200 million in 2026. These are the kinds of numbers that might cause a member of Congress to think twice before crossing an industry. By comparison, Carville told me, clean energy spending “doesn’t even enter their mind.”
For clean energy to become a genuine political force, Invest in Tomorrow will need some backup. So far, the major clean energy trade associations have not stepped up. Davidson told me that before founding Invest in Tomorrow, he approached two of those groups—the Solar Energy Industries Association and the American Council on Renewable Energy—about backing an effort to defeat Roy. Both declined, he said. Tim Pawlenty, the former moderate Republican governor of Minnesota hired as SEIA’s president in May, has explicitly distanced himself from Invest in Tomorrow, telling Politico that “we’re in the business of making friends, not making enemies.”
Individual clean energy firms have hardly rushed in to fill the void. Ironically, $6 million of the $6.8 million the PAC has reported raising through August came not from clean energy companies or investors, but from crypto billionaire Chris Larsen, a climate philanthropist who has witnessed the power of adversarial election spending in his own industry. Most of the rest came from Davidson’s personal network of friends and business associates: Through August, the group had only 23 unique donors.
In short, for all the attention Invest in Tomorrow has attracted, the clean energy cavalry has not arrived. How could an industry suffer the beating Republicans have doled out and not mobilize a major response? With Big Oil and Big Tech spending big to prop up the Republican majorities currently attacking their interests, will Big Green wake up and fight back?
There are structural barriers that would make it difficult for the clean energy industry to invest in elections at the same level as crypto or AI. While the clean energy sector makes up a sizable chunk of the economy, the industry is highly fragmented, and firms focused on different technologies and business models have different policy agendas. Many of the largest clean energy operators also own fossil fuel assets, further muddling the industry’s priorities. Most importantly, clean energy businesses generally have slim margins and generate modest, predictable returns, so the industry has not produced many fabulously wealthy companies or individuals. In contrast, the crypto and AI industries consist of tight-knit networks of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and tech monopoly backers who have large fortunes to play with—and even larger speculative fortunes riding on favorable government treatment.
Still, there is surely more money available for election contributions in an industry that accounts for hundreds of billions of dollars in annual investment. David Roberts, who reports on clean energy politics as host of the popular Volts podcast, believes so. “There’s enough money in this industry that you could have a dozen groups like [Invest in Tomorrow],” Roberts told me.
Roberts sees one obvious explanation for the industry’s pitiful election spending: Fear of Trump. In the current political environment, he said, “with Trump being a mad king who can sort of fuck your industry on a whim if he wants to,” companies may decide “it’s best to lay low and not draw his attention.” An executive who starts “making big threats or taking out people that he’s endorsed,” Roberts said, risks drawing “the eye of Sauron.”
That would be a familiar story of corporate timidity in the Trump era. But in my conversations with clean energy investors, executives, and politicos, I more often encountered confidence: Many believe the industry does not need scorched-earth politics because its technology will win on the merits.
Some expressed faith that the transition to cheap, flexible clean power sources is unstoppable, driven by economic forces that no government action can hold back. Lisa Jacobson, president of the Business Council for Sustainable Energy, pointed out that U.S. clean energy deployment reached record levels in the first half of 2026 despite the volatile policy environment. “The markets are moving here. There will be some policy ups and downs, but the markets are moving, and you can’t stop them,” Jacobson told me.
A related faith is political: That once lawmakers and voters understand the advantages of clean power, they will inevitably support it. “You kind of feel like, once everybody gets the facts, they’re going to be there with you,” Steve McBee, the CEO of clean energy investment firm Huck Capital, told me. McBee does not share that complacency—this year he founded a new advocacy group to bring clean energy executives into direct contact with policymakers—but he understands the temptation to “feel like you’re on the right side of history.” Marissa Gillett, a former vice president at the Energy Storage Association and later Connecticut’s chief utility regulator, has seen the same tendency. “There was always a sense that, because it’s cheaper and better for the planet, people would come around,” she told me.
If anyone in the clean energy space sees a need for clean energy to flex some political muscle, I thought, it would be Tom Steyer. The hedge fund billionaire, philanthropist, and recent California gubernatorial candidate has done more than any single individual to support climate priorities through election spending, having funneled $277 million through his NextGen Climate Action super PAC in the 2010s. But when I asked Steyer whether clean energy should adopt the crypto playbook, he expressed distaste for underhanded tactics such as attack ads that don’t mention clean energy at all. “What we’ve always done is try and just say what we think is the truth, and support the people we think are good,” Steyer told me. “We’ve never been tricky or complicated.”
Steyer expressed faith that the current energy affordability crisis, compounded by President Trump’s war in Iran, would force Republicans to change tack on energy sources that are “cheaper, faster, and better.”
“Republican electeds are going to try and trade off money from fossil fuel companies with the fury of Republican voters,” he said. But as utility bills and gas prices continue to soar, Steyer believes this calculation is becoming untenable: “Money works until people are furious, and then money is irrelevant.”
Even Tom Matzzie, the solar CEO who chairs Invest in Tomorrow, does not think clean energy needs to become as big a player in elections as crypto. “We have a virtuous product that’s beloved by the vast majority of the public,” Matzzie told me. “We do business in lots of Republican states—we’re just different. We have the solution for what America needs for energy.”
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In Matzzie’s view, the current Republican backlash reflects “extreme elements” rather than broad-based hostility to clean energy, leaving Invest in Tomorrow with a narrower political problem to solve than the crypto PACs. “Our strategy at this point is to very much focus on the most extreme elements of the Republican Party,” he said. “I don’t think we need $200 million to do that.”
Putting faith in moderate Republicans has burned the industry before. As early as February 2024, the American Clean Power Association, a leading trade association representing clean energy companies, understood that the Biden clean energy subsidies were at risk of “repeal or harmful revision” if Republicans swept to power, according to a leaked internal memo. There was still plenty of time to mobilize an effort to prevent that electoral outcome–and plenty of money, given the $50 million cash on hand the group reported and its awareness that “$200M+ in philanthropic resources … are being spent with the intent to support and protect the [Inflation Reduction Act].” But the ACP was confident that to defend the subsidies, “success does not require strategic inspiration.” The task was simply to “convinc[e] roughly 10% of Senate and House Republicans to oppose threats to our interests.”
When Republican leaders moved to cut the subsidies in their budget bill, the ACP, the Solar Energy Industries Association, and other clean energy trade groups mounted a historically expensive lobbying campaign. They blitzed congressional offices, flew in solar executives to explain how the subsidies supported jobs in lawmakers’ districts, commissioned studies quantifying those jobs, hired Republican staffers, and even passed out stickers bearing Trump’s “energy dominance” catchphrase on Capitol Hill. It was not enough. The firewall of Republican support never materialized; House moderates who had urged Speaker Mike Johnson not to “prematurely repeal” the subsidies all fell in line when it counted. The final law reduced a decade’s worth of subsidies for utility-scale wind and solar to just one year before an abrupt phaseout.
Nevertheless, many in the industry share Matzzie’s view that most Republicans are supportive of clean energy. “The foundation of clean energy remains firmly bipartisan, despite the appearance of division in recent reconciliation efforts,” Frank Macchiarola, chief advocacy officer at the ACP, told me in a statement. He points to what survived the budget bill: Tax credits for some technologies remained in place, and the Senate gave utility-scale wind and solar a longer phaseout than the House-passed bill had allowed. “When the chips were down, we were grateful to see a dozen Republican senators step up on behalf of our industry and to ensure that the phaseout of tax credits was done in a manner consistent with business principles,” Macchiarola said.
Neil Chatterjee, a former Republican chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and now chief of governmental affairs at cleantech firm Palmetto, argues that the budget bill is a poor proxy for Republican sentiment toward clean energy. Clean energy subsidies had long been authorized on a bipartisan basis, he noted, including during the first Trump administration. Chatterjee believes the Biden administration created partisan polarization around them by passing the Inflation Reduction Act through budget reconciliation rather than trying to make a bipartisan deal with Republicans—and later by celebrating the law as a Democratic climate achievement. “The Biden White House hosted a birthday party for the IRA on the South Lawn,” he told me. “They completely spiked the football.” Still, Chatterjee maintains that as he lobbied Republicans during budget bill negotiations, “there wasn’t an animus towards clean technology.”
Heather Reams, who served as president of Consumers for Responsible Energy Solutions until June, a clean energy advocacy group focused on engaging Republicans, makes a similar distinction. She pointed out that the IRA rollback was not a standalone initiative, but one of many fiscal “offsets” needed to realize the budget bill’s core priority: Extending Trump’s first-term tax cuts. Thus, while Reams agrees that clean energy should become a bigger player in election spending—she called Invest in Tomorrow’s tactics “long overdue”—her belief in bipartisan support for clean energy remains unshaken. “I’d say 80 percent of the Republican members that I would talk to are trying to do the right thing,” she told me.
Whether clean energy enjoys sufficient Republican support depends on what the industry hopes to get from Congress moving forward. Opinion is divided on whether it’s worth trying to bring back solar and wind credits, as Democrats have vowed to do. Some developers believe they are less necessary than they were a few years ago.
Right now, all eyes are on a bipartisan permitting reform deal being negotiated in the Senate. While no legislative text has been released as of this writing, the basic shape of the talks is well known. Republicans want to roll back environmental and preservation laws—namely the National Environmental Protection Act, the Clean Water Act, and the National Historical Preservation Act—which can mire energy projects of all kinds in lengthy regulatory reviews and expose them to obstructionist litigation from third parties. Democrats want to strengthen the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s ability to site and permit new long-distance transmission lines when state and local opposition gets in the way. The industry supports both priorities, but the second is especially key: America’s flimsy electricity grid, with its anemic capacity for carrying electricity to demand centers from clean generators in remote areas, is widely considered the number one constraint on clean energy deployment.
In this context, there is a discernible logic to the sunny attitude industry insiders expressed to me about their relationship with Republicans. Despite the abuse the industry has suffered, it has a chance of getting something constructive out of the current Republican trifecta. Best not to jeopardize that possibility with splashy campaign spending in the general election, or gripes to a reporter at the Washington Monthly.
But permitting reform can only go so far towards delivering the grid transformation the industry needs. That is because the fundamental obstacle to a robust transmission buildout is not regulatory red tape—it’s the fact that utilities have conflicting interests. Building regional transmission is less financially attractive for utilities than building projects within their own service areas, and can even be unprofitable insofar as it exposes incumbent generation assets to competition from cheap clean power. Unsurprisingly, utility spending on regional transmission has plummeted over the last decade as the cost advantages of renewables have grown, and in many states, utilities have successfully lobbied for that make it harder for private firms to build these lines.
Overcoming utility resistance will require a stronger federal role in governing and planning the grid. Legislation introduced by 120 House Democrats in March includes some promising steps: It would compel the utility consortiums that control regional grids to build minimum levels of long-distance transfer capacity, increase federal oversight of regional transmission planning, and empower the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to allocate the cost of large transmission projects among their many potential beneficiaries (utilities often whose projects would trigger constraints in the overall system; many projects are abandoned as a result of these unfair and unpredictable cost burdens). Congressional Republicans have shown no interest in these ideas other than opposing FERC cost allocation authority, which they argue would force inland red states to “foot the bill for [the] climate obsession” of coastal liberals.
While comprehensive transmission reform languishes, other Democratic proposals could help developers get faster, cheaper access to existing grid capacity. A bill from Sen. Martin Heinrich would force utilities to give projects a fast-track pathway to interconnection if they curtail output when the system is congested, allowing developers to defer burdensome grid impact studies and costly network upgrades until after projects begin generating revenue. In contrast, the leading Republican proposal on grid interconnection would do nothing at all for wind and solar developers. Quite the opposite, the House-passed bill would usher “dispatchable” generation projects (mainly natural gas) to the front of the interconnection queue. For wind and solar projects, this could lengthen wait times that already surpass five years on average.
The bottom line is that Republicans support clean energy priorities where they overlap with fossil fuel interests, specifically on deregulatory permitting reform. But where clean energy and fossil fuel interests diverge—in other words, on the major business of the energy transition—the GOP is siding with their oil and gas patrons. Changing that reality will require a much bigger investment in electoral politics than the clean energy industry has committed to so far.
Alternatively, they could focus their limited resources on helping the party that “has backed them and made their industry possible,” as the environmentalist Bill McKibben suggested to me.
“The hope is that at some point they realize that, along with being a collection of individual businesses, they are potentially a key part of the drive to save our civilization,” McKibben added. “I think a number of the people in this industry got into it for those reasons.”
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