This story appeared on Big Pivots on June 3, 2025. We are sharing it in two parts.
Higher electricity rates? In Colorado as elsewhere, that’s a given if the U.S. Senate adopts the recent budget reconciliation bill passed by the House of Representatives that would end a whole host of federal tax credits.
Tax credits shorn by the bill include those now available to consumer who purchase electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids
How exactly will that impact Glenwood Springs-based Holy Cross Energy? In the short term, the legislation adds uncertainty as the electric cooperative works to move from 80% emission-free energy in 2025 to its goal of 100% in the next five years. It serves the Aspen- and Vail-dominated resorts valleys.
Brighton-based United Power has a different problem posed by the sharp-elbowed bill if it remains intact after review by the U.S. Senate. An electrical cooperative also, United serves one of Colorado’s fastest growing areas for population growth, but the electrical demand from new homes is dwarfed by that from new industrial and commercial development.
By a one-vote margin, the House approved the sweeping tax and spending bill on May 22. In addition to other sweeping provisions, the bill largely guts incentives created by Congress in 2022 in the Inflation Reduction Act to advance clean energy and storage. The IRA is widely regarded as the most significant climate change legislation ever adopted in the United States.
Supporters of the controversial bill included two Republicans from swing districts in Colorado, Rep. Gabe Evans of Fort Lupton and Jeff Hurd of Grand Junction. Two Republicans and all 212 Democrats voted against the bill. Another two Republicans did not vote and one merely registered presence.
Evans and Hurd were among 21 House Republicans who signed a letter in March that calls for preserving energy tax credits as necessary to “increase domestic manufacturing, promote energy innovation and keep utility costs down.” Hurd, but not Evans, was among 26 who signed a May letter calling for preservation of tax credits necessary to accelerate deployment of next-generation nuclear power technologies.
After the vote, Evans posted a press release that said the bill “eliminates Green New Deal-style giveaways.”
Two days before the vote, President Donald Trump visited Capitol Hill to inform on-the-fence representatives that they could face primary opposition if they voted against what the president had called his “one big beautiful bill.” Big Pivots requested comment of both Evans and Hurd but without response.
The Senate, where Republicans hold a three-vote advantage, may act on the budget bill as early as July. However, the Washington Post on Monday noted that four Republicans senators in April sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune cautioning against “the full-scale repeal of current credits.”
“We just hit half-time. We’re still very much in the middle of this game,” said Harry Godfrey, who manages federal priorities for Advanced Energy United, a national industry association that monitors Colorado and 16 other states.
Differences would be negotiated by a conference committee before being returned to the two chambers for review.
“They really went after just about everything that they could in the realm of clean energy and electric vehicles,” said Will Toor, who directs the Colorado Energy Office.
“I would certainly hope that cooler and wiser heads will prevail in the Senate,” Toor added. “The benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act are widespread, not just for clean energy but for consumers and for jobs, especially in red states and districts. We’re hopeful that the Senate will reject this incredibly unwise bill that was adopted by the House of Representatives.”
Mike Johnson, speaker of the House, had described the bill as being “somewhere between a scalpel and a sledgehammer” approach to the IRA. Abigail Ross Hopper, head of the Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group, called it a “sledgehammer masquerading as a scalpel.”
The IRA along with the earlier Bipartisan Infrastructure Law have produced a proliferation of announcements about expanding battery production and other business ventures along the Front Range.
For example, Louisville-based Solid Power is developing next-generation solid-state batteries and has agreements with EV manufacturers Ford and BMW. The company’s business model assumes continued rapid expansion of the market for EVs.
Employment at the Vestas factories in Brighton and Windsor may suffer if clean energy incentives get gutted. The manufacturer of blades and nacelles for wind turbines invested $40 million at its plants. In the last year it hired 700 people in anticipation of orders for 1,000 turbines during 2025. Orders for wind turbines would be impacted by loss of the manufacturing production tax credit, according to Advanced Energy United.
At Namaste Solar, chief executive Jason Sharpe said he is unsure whether to plan for expansion or constriction.
“As a business owner, how do you plan a business with this amount of uncertainty, trying to thread the needle between coping with political change and not creating panic among my employees? It’s challenging,” he said.
Namaste sees the bill having a target on residential solar because it would eliminate tax credits that homeowners can apply for directly.
The bill also has a provision that would disrupt the transfer of tax credits, harming existing renewable energy and storage projects and making funding more difficult for other, less proven technologies.
“If Xcel Energy, for example, builds a large solar project, they might not have enough tax obligation to fully utilize the tax credit. So, they could sell that, or transfer it, to other investors to monetize the tax credit.”
Advanced Energy United’s Godfrey says that a conventional big bank will be more risk adverse, but the transferrable tax credit enlarges the pool of potential investors. As such, this sweetener, as the Economist describes it, will also be lost for nuclear energy and carbon capture and storage, technologies currently absent in Colorado but which remain theoretically possible. The State Land Board has leased subterranean rights to several parcels for carbon capture.
As for Colorado’s solar sector Sharpe says Namaste will survive if the bill becomes law but with fewer employees. Now 20 years old, the company has 200 employees “We will have a smaller market but not a zero market,” he said.
Allen Best publishes the e-journal Big Pivots, which chronicles the energy transition in Colorado and beyond.