For decades, clean energy in America was carried forward by subsidies. The ITC and PTC helped solar and storage scale, creating an industry that might not have survived without them.
Those subsidies worked. They gave renewables the time and capital to prove themselves. But they also distorted markets. Developers planned pipelines around political timelines, not project efficiency. Investors prioritized tax certainty over technology. And because subsidies softened the cost of delays, too many projects could afford to crawl through slow, sequential steps. Deployment slowed down. Marginal projects survived. Projects lived or died not on their merits, but on how Congress voted.
That era is over. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) made sure of it.
OBBBA changed the rules
By accelerating the phaseout of credits and adding complex new sourcing requirements, OBBBA created a hard clock. Projects must start construction by July 2026 or come online by December 2027 to qualify. Miss either date and the subsidy disappears.
For an industry used to long cycles, these deadlines mark an upheaval to “business as usual.” Permitting and interconnection alone can stretch five to ten years. Billions in potential investment will now be stranded.
And the contradiction couldn’t be sharper: just as policymakers champion an AI-fueled economic boom, they’ve made it harder to build the energy systems needed to support it. At the very moment demand is exploding and OBBBA is choking supply.
Solar and storage don’t need subsidies anymore
That’s the reality on the policy side. On the market side, the outlook is different. Solar and storage no longer need policy lifelines. In many cases they are the best technology for deploying power. Combined, they’re cheaper, more flexible and more scalable than thermal power.
Renewables were once the underdogs, but soon they’ll become the incumbents. Not because of subsidies, not because of mandates, but because they’re better business.
The only real barrier left is time, because demand isn’t waiting.
The AI-energy arms race
Data centers are rapidly becoming the anchor tenants of the grid. The International Energy Agency projects their demand will nearly double by 2030. Deloitte estimates U.S. AI load could rise 30x by 2035. Entire regions are being reshaped by the scramble for power.
This is the AI-energy arms race. And while everyone is cheering the digital boom, few are reckoning with the energy bottleneck it creates.
You can’t scale digital infrastructure on fossil power alone. New gas and coal plants take too long to build. They also come with high costs, complex siting and volatile public opposition.
The reality is clear: clean energy is the only supply-side solution capable of meeting digital demand, but only if we change how fast we build it. Unlike fossil fuels, which are locked into decade-long timelines and massive capital projects, clean energy can scale at speed if we modernize deployment to match pace with innovation.
Speed is the real subsidy
The old development model was sequential: site selection, then permits, then interconnection, then financing. Each stage took months or years. Most projects never survived.
No startup would survive that kind of product development cycle. Why should energy?
We now have the tools to build differently. Automation and better data allow developers to work in parallel, collapsing weeks into hours, months into days. Hidden pockets of time across siting, permitting and diligence can now be unlocked.
Speed is efficiency, market advantage and economic survival. A one-year delay can slash investor returns, strand capital and let fossil fuels capture demand. In project finance, time is everything.
That’s why speed has replaced subsidies as the decisive variable. Subsidies once reduced the cost risk. Now speed reduces the time risk. Both make projects viable. The difference is that subsidies depended on politics. Speed depends on how quickly developers embrace a technology-forward approach.
From subsidy-led growth to speed-led scale
The energy system is changing. Some say the answer is more gas. Others argue for flexible load.
There’s no debate about whether clean energy works. The question is whether we can build fast enough. The real pivot is from subsidy-backed growth to speed-led scale.
Not speed for its own sake, but:
- Speed that unlocks the technologies we already know will win.
- Speed that turns solar and storage from the best option into the default.
- Speed that helps us meet skyrocketing demand without doubling down on fossil fuels.
OBBBA didn’t kill clean energy, it forced the transformation the industry was avoiding. The next wave of innovation is about new technologies and applying the pace of software to the world of infrastructure.
Speed is the new subsidy. And it’s the only one that matters now.
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