Trump’s attacks on clean energy come at a bad time for North Carolina | Opinion

President Donald Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill” will limit the development of solar and wind power at a time when they offer the fastest and cheapest ways to meet a rising demand for electricity.

The new law phases out tax credits and other incentives for producing and using renewable energy that were adopted under former President Joe Biden.

The timing is particularly bad for North Carolina, where growth in population and manufacturing are increasing the demand for energy.

While Trump is stifling clean energy, there are also setbacks at the state level. The legislature has dropped interim targets for sharply reducing utilities’ carbon emissions by 2050, and the state’s largest utility, Duke Energy, has put off plans to tap the state’s bountiful offshore wind resource.

To check on how these developments are affecting clean energy in North Carolina, I spoke with Steve Kalland, executive director of the North Carolina Clean Energy Technology Center at N.C. State University. He had just finished attending last week’s renewable energy trade show in Las Vegas, which drew more than 40,000 participants and 1,300 exhibitors.

The clean energy industry is thriving nationally, though it will be slowed once tax breaks and other incentives expire in 2026, Kalland said.

In practice, making it harder to expand clean energy will undermine Trump’s push to expand U.S. manufacturing. It will actually limit the ability to quickly increase the electricity supply, drive up energy costs and slow the emergence of industries built around renewable energy, a growing part of the North Carolina economy.

“In general, it does seem counterintuitive that the attacks on clean energy — which are clearly and demonstrably the lowest-cost options right now — just seem to run directly in the face of the goals of the administration, which is to cut energy costs and make America energy dominant,” he said.

Utilities say they can meet increasing electricity demand with new natural gas-powered plants and smaller-scale nuclear units, but Kalland said bringing those power sources online can take five years or more while the demand is rising now and expanding clean energy can happen quickly.

“So the expectation is that either we are going to build solar and wind over the next five to seven years nationally and in North Carolina in order to meet increasing demand, or we are not going to meet increasing demand, which is going to be a problem,” he said.

As demand presses the energy supply, prices are rising, he said.

“We’re seeing energy prices climb faster than the rate of inflation. In some places maybe as much as twice the rate of inflation,” he said. “That’s not a good sign for anything because energy touches every single part of the economy.”

Kalland is worried by legislation passed this year that removed the 2030 carbon emissions reduction target for North Carolina utilities, though the goal of achieving net zero emissions — an even balance between emissions released and emissions reduced — by 2050 remains.

“If people are not working steadily toward that 2050 goal, it creates an opportunity for folks to not be making the steady progress that’s necessary because they think some new technology will come in,” he said. “Because of that, we could easily wind up at 2045 with a fairly sizable distance to go.”

Not committing to offshore wind power is also a setback, he said. “The offshore wind thing may be the biggest loss for North Carolina’s economy because we really had just started to capture it. It was really coming,” he said.

Disruptions in the advancement of clean energy are hardly new. Kalland has witnessed the ups and downs since began working with solar power in 1993. “We affectionately call it ‘the solar coaster,’ “ he said.

Kalland said the clean energy industry will rebound from the loss of incentives.

“I think that there is hope that once everybody lets the dust settle from what’s going on with the ‘big’ – it’s hard for me to call it the ‘beautiful bill’ – once that dust settles I think the industry will evaluate where things stand, get out their spreadsheets and come up with a new way of doing things. It will be slower but it will continue to go forward.”

Associate opinion editor Ned Barnett can be reached at 919-404-7583, or nbarnett@newsobserver.com