When Boviet Solar opened a new factory in Greenville this year, Will Etheridge, owner and CEO of Raleigh’s Southern Energy Management, was excited for his company to buy solar panels built in North Carolina and install them on North Carolina homes and businesses. Etheridge, who is from eastern North Carolina, called it an “American success story” in one of the most business-friendly states in the country.
Then President Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” changed everything.
“We switched from planning for [expansion] to planning for job protection and layoffs,” Etheridge told a roundtable hosted by Representative Deborah Ross in Garner last week. “Now I’m going to be laying off North Carolinians.”
That’s because Trump’s sweeping domestic policy bill guts the tax credit programs that Democrats muscled through in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The Inflation Reduction Act paid 30 percent of renewable energy-related homeowner expenditures (including installation of solar panels, solar water heaters, and related battery storage technology), provided a tax credit for builders of energy efficient homes, and provided tax incentives for investments in clean energy.
Those provisions were set to continue through 2034, making renewable energy a pretty attractive industry for investors. And the vast majority of those investments were in red districts.
It’s easy to tune out some sweeping numbers (the Clean Investment Monitor estimates that 18,100 North Carolinians work in operational and construction jobs created as a result of energy and manufacturing investments, with 20,000 potential jobs based on planned investments), but harder to ignore the impact on individual North Carolina companies.
That residential solar tax credit “supports probably 50 percent of our total business and employment,” Etheridge tells INDY. Matt Abele, executive director of NC Sustainable Energy Association, pointed out that North Carolina is “number one in the country for rural clean energy jobs.”
While Democrats like Ross have openly railed against the bill (the Raleigh-area representative calls it the big ugly bill), business owners were gentler in lobbying legislators like Senator Thom Tills to try to soften the impact by phasing out the energy provisions over time.
“We knew the writing was on the wall,” Etheridge told INDY after the event. “But instead of having any kind of multi-year phase down, which would let the market and our teams adjust and prevent a lot of job loss and a lot of investment loss, we got a cliff at the end of this year.”
Tillis ultimately voted against the bill. But he didn’t, or couldn’t, help with that cliff. Ted Budd, North Carolina’s other senator, voted for the bill.
Shasten Jolley manages the Greentech Renewables branch in Garner. Jolley’s 70,000 square-foot warehouse, just next to Amazon’s RDU1 warehouse on Jones Sausage Road, is stocked with solar panels, inverters, and electrical components that Greentech sells to companies like Etheridge’s.
Jolley told INDY that Republican legislators might not fully understand the utility of renewable energy at a time when data centers and AI server farms have helped push the American thirst for energy to all-time highs.
“Solar and renewables are the quickest way to deploy, the cheapest way to deploy, new electrons to the grid,” Jolley said. “I think back in the olden days of solar and renewable energy it was a very hippie liberal movement [about] carbon reduction and climate change. And although it does help offset carbon, it is so much bigger than that now. This is an economics play, this is a manufacturing play. This is grid resilience and energy independence.”
The rollback is obviously a failure for Democrats like Ross, who had hoped that landmark legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act would help them hold the presidency in 2024. Now, they’re openly admitting that they didn’t really communicate its impact to the American people.
“It had a funny name, right?” Tampa-area congresswoman Kathy Castor said at the roundtable event. “It didn’t really convey that it was the single largest investment in clean energy and community resilience in history, bigger than anything any other country in the world had done.”
“We’re working really hard on being better messengers,” Ross said in response to an INDY question on the matter. “We’re not great because we still always speak in paragraphs and want to qualify everything, but we’re getting better.”
North Carolina businesses, meanwhile, will be scrambling to figure out how to survive after the sudden policy change.
“It’s about, for me, the jobs and the skills and the people and how we help them grow,” Etheridge told INDY. “And I think that’s obviously bipartisan.”
Reach Reporter Chase Pellegrini de Paur at [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].