IRA clean energy gains mostly on track despite OBBBA, says MIT study

A new MIT study looks at how much clean electricity the country will actually get after Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which sped up the phaseout of tax credits from the earlier Inflation Reduction Act. The finding: most of the growth in clean power is still likely to happen. Researchers estimate about 74% of the new clean electricity capacity expected under the old law will still get built, including 82% of utility-scale solar. Battery storage holds up well too, keeping its tax credit access and reaching about 83% of what was originally expected. Onshore wind takes the biggest hit, with only about half the capacity now expected, since it depends most heavily on those credits.

For homeowners, this is background context rather than a direct change to any program you'd apply to. It doesn't affect home upgrade incentives like weatherization (sealing up drafts and insulating) or heat pump rebates. It does suggest that the broader shift toward solar and battery power on the grid will keep moving forward, even if slower than planned, while new wind farms may lag.

The study also notes that even under the original law, limits on permitting and transmission lines (the wires that move power long distances) meant projects could not have moved as fast as planned anyway. The report's author says restoring the lost wind and solar credits would only speed things up modestly, since the bigger bottleneck is how quickly projects can get approved and connected to the grid.