How Trump’s ‘One, Big Beautiful Bill’ will impact jobs, investment in rural NC

In the mountains of western NC, local renewable energy company Sugar Hollow Solar is already working through contingency plans to avoid laying off staff.

by Julia Tilton, The Daily Yonder
July 14, 2025

In the mountains of western North Carolina, local renewable energy company Sugar Hollow Solar is already working through contingency plans to avoid laying off staff.

Despite five new hires coming on board in June to install panels in rural communities throughout the region, circumstances have changed for the Asheville, North Carolina, business after the July 4 signing of the One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB), the signature piece of legislation of President Donald Trump’s second term.

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The law includes sweeping cuts to a renewable energy incentive structure established by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) under President Joe Biden in 2022. Tax credits for commercial wind and solar projects will phase out five years ahead of schedule, with the 30% rebate accessible only to projects that either break ground by next summer or come online by the end of 2027.

Such changes are expected to increase the cost of electricity by 9.2% across residential, commercial, and industrial sectors in the contiguous United States, per an analysis from the National Economic Research Associates commissioned by the Clean Energy Buyers Association. For residential ratepayers in states like Wyoming, Illinois, New Mexico, and Tennessee, the analysis found that electricity costs will rise by more than 15%.

Other parts of the new legislation target IRA-era tax credits available to consumers, such as discounts for home energy improvement projects and electric vehicle purchases. Those incentives are set to expire on the shortest timeline of all of the renewable energy credits mentioned in the new law. Customers wanting to install rooftop solar, electric heat pumps, or home efficiency upgrades have until December 31, 2025, to take advantage of the tax credit, while prospective new and used EV buyers have until September 30, 2025, to claim rebates.

Beyond tax policy, the OBBB Act also rescinds billions of dollars of funding for community-level grants and implementation of a host of climate and emissions-reduction programs with money earmarked for rural communities.

For Sugar Hollow Solar, the cuts will almost surely mean loss of business. Sugar Hollow’s Chief Operating Officer, Clary Franko, said one priority right now is to avoid layoffs among the more than 50 employees who live in the city of Asheville and surrounding rural communities.

“We’ll do our absolute best to maintain stability as a company and keep everybody employed,” said Franko. “It’ll be hard.”

Sugar Hollow is not alone in the challenges it’s facing. Lloyd Ritter is a veteran of federal energy and rural development policy, having worked on Capitol Hill before founding Green Capitol, LLC, a renewable energy consulting firm in Washington, D.C. He told the Daily Yonder that the legislation will negatively affect rural America.

“It’s going to hit rural mom-and-pop energy businesses the hardest,” said Ritter.

Beyond the loss of revenue for small-scale businesses, larger projects planned for development in rural communities are also at risk, a Daily Yonder analysis of Atlas Public Policy data found.

At least 271 wind and solar projects slated for development in rural areas in 40 states are affected by the new legislation’s federal tax policy changes. “New wind and solar projects would have brought investment and job opportunities to rural communities across the country,” wrote Rachel Reolfi, senior policy analyst at Atlas Public Policy, in a statement to the Daily Yonder. “With the new law, many of these projects and their economic benefits are now at risk.”

In order to claim the 30% commercial tax credits for clean electricity production and investment, these planned wind and solar projects must break ground on construction by mid-2026 or come online by December 31, 2027. But for developers of distributed and utility-scale projects with timelines that often span multiple years, this phase-out period is still not much time, despite extending beyond the expiration of the residential credits.

“There will be companies that can’t make it because of project logistics or just lack of support from their investors, or maybe just lack of confidence in the market now,” said Raina Hornaday, general manager and co-founder of Caprock Renewables, a utility-scale developer working across Texas and New Mexico. Texas has many more projects on the line than any other state, with 63 planned solar and wind developments totaling more than 16.6 megawatts of added generating capacity between now and 2031, per the Daily Yonder’s analysis.

Together, the planned wind and solar projects analyzed by the Daily Yonder represent 54.2 gigawatts of renewable generating capacity that, before the passage of the federal budget, were slated to come online in rural communities through the early 2030s. These projects represent enough new generating capacity to power roughly 14 million homes and spur tens of billions in capital investment in their host communities, per estimates made by Atlas Public Policy using parameters from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

Amidst the growing need for power supply in the U.S., driven in part by artificial intelligence and energy-intensive data centers coming online, industry experts, including Hornaday and Ritter, told the Daily Yonder they’re concerned about the country’s ability to meet demand under the rollback of renewable energy policy.

“We need more energy, not less, and we shouldn’t be picking winners and losers in that regard,” Ritter said. “Wind and solar have been proven to be rapidly deployable and are making a real dent in the nation’s energy infrastructure.”

This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.