Wind and solar developers in the U.S. have just a few more weeks to secure lucrative federal tax incentives. After that crucial deadline, the hard part begins.

Last summer, President Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law, creating a drop-dead date of July 4, 2026, for solar and wind developers to lock in tax credits that cover 30% or more of their costs. Those incentives were initially slated to last until at least the early 2030s.

The move threw a wrench into the plans of clean energy developers nationwide. Under the new law, only those projects that can prove they have started construction before July 4 can access the incentives. Developers who were banking on tax credits for a project to make financial sense had only one option: to move fast.

A lot of developers managed to pull that off. Projects with hundreds of gigawatts of solar and wind — essential to meeting the country’s booming demand for electricity — have already started construction, or, in the industry parlance, achieved the ​“safe harbor” status required to secure incentives.

But now the clock will start ticking on a second deadline for these projects: Under the current law, they must plug into the grid within four calendar years of securing safe-harbor status or else they’ll lose the tax credits. Four years may seem like ample time, but that’s not the case given how hostile the Trump administration has been toward renewables, how clogged up the U.S. grid is, and how glacially slow state and local permitting processes move.

If new wind and solar installations get snagged on any of these obstacles and then lose tax-credit eligibility as a result, it could scramble their economics. Projects would likely be abandoned — or at least restructured to command higher power prices. That would mean higher costs for consumers, who are already struggling with high electricity bills.

“I think that the OBBBA — the one not-so-beautiful bill — was a direct hit to the cheapest electricity that we have,” U.S. Rep. Mike Levin, a California Democrat who is co-sponsoring legislation aimed at restoring clean energy tax credits and curbing rising utility costs, told Canary Media. ​“And now we’re expecting these developers to build all this new stuff with a different landscape than when they started and when they made important investment decisions.”

Clean energy is central to the U.S. electricity system. Without it, the nation would almost certainly fail to keep pace with new power demand: Solar, batteries, and wind made up 92% of new generating capacity built in 2025 and 96% in 2024.

For now, it appears that enough wind and solar projects have been safe-harbored for the U.S. to maintain that momentum. Batteries, meanwhile, were spared under OBBBA — they retained their original tax-credit eligibility.

Solar developers will have successfully safe-harbored between 216 gigawatts and 240 gigawatts of installations before July 4, ​“enough to meet forecasted installations through the end of the decade,” according to an April analysis from clean energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie.

The numbers on wind power are smaller but still significant. Onshore wind developers have safe-harbored about 16 gigawatts and have another 7 gigawatts under ​“advanced development, permitting and contracting,” according to the latest data from WoodMac senior analyst Diego Espinosa.

Most of this new clean energy capacity had actually locked in its safe-harbor status well in advance of OBBBA, said Kaitlin Fung, a WoodMac senior research analyst. Of those 216 gigawatts to 240 gigawatts of solar in WoodMac’s safe-harbor estimate, 61% had achieved that status before last July.

Andy Moon, CEO and co-founder of Reunion Infrastructure, a company working in the multibillion-dollar clean energy tax-credit transfer market, has also been tracking ​“a massive volume of safe-harboring that’s happened since mid-2024.”

“The large developers are well positioned. When they saw this coming, they raced to safe-harbor as much as they could,” he said. ​“We know developers that have safe-harbored 10 to 15 gigawatts apiece of pipeline.”

Still, a sizable portion of planned solar and wind projects hadn’t locked in their tax credits when Trump signed the GOP megabill into law last summer. The changes ​“caused an inflection point for the industry for developers to reexamine their pipelines,” Fung said, and assess whether the July 4 deadline was feasible.

Many developers decided to try to make the deadline work. Going that route meant navigating not only a tight timeline but also several new wrinkles from the Trump administration along the way.

The first of those arrived the month after OBBA became law. Under long-standing guidance from the IRS, developers who wanted to lock in tax credits simply had to spend at least 5% of the total cost of the installation. But the U.S. Department of the Treasury eliminated that criteria in August 2025.

With that option gone, developers instead had to rely on the Treasury Department’s more involved ​“physical work test,” which requires them to make investments that prove they’re engaging in ​“continuous construction,” Moon explained.

The physical work test complicated things for earlier-stage projects, Moon said. Instead of buying solar modules or making other more general investments, as they would have under the 5% pathway, they’ve had to sign costly contracts for custom components like main power transformers.

Earlier this month, a federal judge struck down this part of Treasury’s guidance. Though with mere weeks before the July 4 deadline, the impact of that decision will be limited.

Then in January, the Treasury Department instituted new ​“foreign entity of concern” regulations that strip tax credits from projects using equipment from China, and potentially from developers that have financial relationships with entities linked to China, under rules that Treasury hasn’t yet defined. Those regulations could apply to projects that achieve safe-harbor status between the start of 2026 and the July 4 deadline.

Most projects managed to dodge that provision. About 85% of safe-harbored projects managed to claim that status before December 2025, per WoodMac data, in part because developers were eager to lock in tax credits before the Trump administration rolled out additional restrictions.

“Those things really pushed developers to safe-harbor in 2025,” said Elissa Pierce, a WoodMac research analyst. ​“That’s why we’re seeing less of a push in 2026.”

Still, not every project will meet the deadline. That goes especially for installations planned by smaller developers. For this group, the cost of complying with new and ever-shifting rules is especially high, as they may lack the resources or the risk tolerance to commit to projects amid such uncertainty.

“There are definitely a lot of projects that could be placed in service before the end of 2030 but will not, because the effective requirement that they be safe-harbored is a barrier that they can’t get over,” said David Riester, founder and managing partner of Segue Renewable Infrastructure, which is involved in about 200 solar, battery, and wind projects across the country.

Some of the facilities Segue is planning to invest in are ​“obviously going to be placed in service before 2030,” he said. Others, he noted, are ​“way too marginal and might not hit the deadline. And we have a whole bunch of projects in the middle that are probably worth building. But there are risks. And sometimes the risk of safe-harboring is the risk that breaks the decision’s back.”

Wind and solar developers that safe-harbored their projects before the July 4 deadline can exhale — but only for a moment. Then they’ve got to focus on getting built and connected to the grid before their runway for securing tax credits runs out.

Those projects must be ​“placed in service” within four years of the calendar year that they achieved safe-harbor status to actually secure tax credits. But hitting that target could be tough. A total of 59.5 gigawatts of projects face delays to their target commission date because of factors including ​“lengthy permitting schemes, backlogged interconnection queues, and fluctuating prices for key project equipment,” according to the latest U.S. market report from the trade group American Clean Power Association.

And the additional barriers thrown up by the Trump administration could make that harder than it already is. ​“The story for us still remains: We’re ready to deliver these projects, and we’re being stopped from doing it,” JC Sandberg, the association’s chief policy officer, told Canary Media.

One of the administration’s most harmful actions was last year’s Department of the Interior memo that forced all solar and wind projects to undergo an ​“elevated review” by Secretary Doug Burgum — a move that has led to a near freeze on close to 70 types of permits and other actions.

In January, WoodMac counted up more than 22 gigawatts of utility-scale solar and wind projects on public lands that had been canceled or delayed since that memo went into effect. Projects on private land are also being held up because of federal inaction, including 73 gigawatts of solar and 43 gigawatts of battery storage, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.

In April, a federal judge temporarily blocked a series of these Trump administration actions, citing an analysis from consultancy Charles River Associates finding that 57 gigawatts of new solar and wind projects with ​“at least $905 million in sunk investment costs” have been canceled or ​“placed at material risk of delay or cancellation beyond 2029.” Burgum said he would appeal that decision.

The Trump administration has also halted routine Defense Department reviews of wind power projects, which is holding up about 30 gigawatts of projects, according to the American Clean Power Association. A coalition of renewable energy groups has sued to end the delays.

“We spoke to several developers, and they told us this is pretty early in the development process,” WoodMac’s Espinosa said. ​“It wouldn’t make sense for a developer to commit capital if it did not receive this notification.”

WoodMac’s Fung highlighted other Trump administration moves that have put projects at risk, such as its decision last year to cancel a completed environmental review for Nevada’s Esmeralda 7, a multi-project development consisting of 6.2 gigawatts of solar and 5.2 gigawatts of battery capacity. ​“Those were targeting timelines through 2028,” she said, noting that the Trump administration’s decision to force each project developer to undergo a separate process ​“might push them past the 2030 deadline.”

Project developers that have secured the equipment required to safe-harbor projects will be juggling these uncertainties in the years ahead, Segue Renewable Infrastructure’s Riester said. That’s harder for small firms than it is for bigger ones, which ​“have a very large universe in which they can reallocate many of the transformers,” he said — say, from projects that aren’t on track to those that are, or potentially sell them to other developers — ​“if you have the balance sheet and the patience.”

Project developers and their financing partners also need to consider how the Trump administration’s Treasury Department will assess tax-credit eligibility when they actually go to claim their money, Moon noted. Projects will need to ​“document on-site physical work in a way that’s satisfactory” to demonstrate continual construction activity to meet the physical work test, for example.

And the installations that have achieved safe-harbor status by July 4 will also need to gauge the risk of impending foreign-entity-of-concern guidelines on ​“effective control” over a project’s financing by a Chinese company. The yet-to-be-issued requirements could expose tax credits to being challenged and ​“recaptured” by the IRS up to 10 years after they’re used, he said.

These uncertainties weigh more heavily on the earlier-stage projects than they do on those that are closer to completion.

A November report from LevelTen Energy, a clean energy marketplace provider, tracked 33 gigawatts of safe-harbored solar and wind projects set to come online by the end of 2028. But that’s just a fraction of the 195 gigawatts of solar, wind, and battery projects in the U.S. pipeline, according to American Clean Power Association data.

Meanwhile, the clean energy industry and its political supporters are grappling with what will happen to clean energy tax credits after the Trump administration ends.

The OBBBA left in place tax credits for batteries, hydropower, geothermal, and nuclear through 2033, despite cutting them short for solar and wind. Some developers have argued that the underlying dynamics of rising power demand and falling costs for solar and wind make tax credits less important for those technologies.

Fung, for her part, pointed to the continued inclusion of solar and wind in long-term utility resource plans past 2030 as evidence that they remain economically attractive without tax credits.

But others argue that tax credits remain vital to combatting rising electricity costs. Ultimately, both sides of that debate agree on what is most important going forward: stability.

“What we need are durable policies,” Rep. Levin said. ​“That takes a lot of political capital to get across the line, with 60 votes in the Senate.”

Jeff St. John

is chief reporter and policy specialist at Canary Media. He covers innovative grid technologies, rooftop solar and batteries, clean hydrogen, EV charging, and more.