For decades, clean energy in America was promoted by subsidies. The ITC and PTC helped scale solar and storage, 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 disrupted the markets. Developers planned pipelines around political timelines, not project efficiency. Investors prioritized tax certainty over technology. And because subsidies softened the costs of delays, too many projects could afford to go through slow, sequential steps. Implementation has been delayed. 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 that.
OBBBA has changed the rules
By accelerating the phase-out of credits and adding complex new purchasing requirements, OBBBA created a hard clock. Projects must begin construction in July 2026 or come online in December 2027 to qualify. If you miss either date, the subsidy will disappear.
For a sector accustomed to long cycles, these deadlines represent a revolution in ‘business as usual’. The granting of permits and interconnections alone can take five to ten years. Billions in potential investments will now fail.
And the contradiction couldn’t be starker: Just as policymakers favor an AI-powered economic boom, they have made it harder to build the energy systems needed to support it. Right now, demand is exploding and OBBBA is choking supply.
Subsidies are no longer required for solar energy and storage
That is the reality on the policy side. On the market side, the prospects are different. Solar energy and storage no longer need policy-relevant lines. In many cases they are the best technology for energy deployment. Combined, they are cheaper, more flexible and more scalable than thermal energy.
Renewables were once the underdogs, but will soon become the incumbents. Not because of subsidies, not because of mandates, but because they are better things.
The only real barrier that remains is time, because demand doesn’t wait.
The AI energy arms race
Data centers are quickly becoming the anchor tenants of the electricity grid. The International Energy Agency predicts that their demand will almost double by 2030. Deloitte estimates that the US AI tax will increase 30 times by 2035. Entire regions are being reshaped by the struggle for power.
This is the AI energy arms race. And while everyone welcomes the digital boom, few take into account the energy bottleneck it creates.
You cannot scale up the digital infrastructure with fossil energy alone. Building new gas and coal-fired power stations takes too long. They also entail high costs, complex siting, and volatile public opposition.
The reality is clear: clean energy is the only supply-side solution that can meet digital demand, but only if we change how quickly we build it. Unlike fossil fuels, which are locked into decades-long timelines and massive capital projects, clean energy can scale quickly if we modernize deployments to keep pace with innovation.
Speed is the real subsidy
The old development model was sequential: site selection, then permitting, then interconnection, then financing. Each phase lasted months or years. Most projects never survived.
No startup would survive such a product development cycle. Why would energy?
We now have the tools to build differently. Automation and better data allow developers to work in parallel, turning weeks into hours, months into days. Hidden time slots related to location, permitting and due diligence can now be unlocked.
Speed is efficiency, market advantage and economic survival. A one-year delay could reduce investor returns, strand capital and capture demand for fossil fuels. In project financing, time is everything.
Therefore, speed has replaced subsidies as the decisive variable. Subsidies once reduced 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-centric approach.
From subsidy-driven growth to speed-driven scale
The energy system is changing. Some say the answer is more gas. Others argue for flexible taxation.
There is no debate about whether clean energy works. The question is whether we can build fast enough. The real pivot is from subsidy-supported growth to speed-based scale.
Not speed for its own sake, but:
- Speed that unlocks the technologies we already know will win.
- Speed that makes solar energy and storage from the best option to standard.
- Speed that helps us meet skyrocketing demand without doubling the use of fossil fuels.
OBBBA did not end clean energy, but forced the transformation that 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 that’s all that matters now.
