The reforms in the big beautiful bill set the conditions for future “lifesaving care” on the electric grid.
When providing lifesaving care to a wounded comrade, a key first step is to “stop the bleeding” in order to stabilize the patient and set the conditions for additional forms of care to be administered.
With respect to the American energy sector, we are currently “bleeding” from multiple self-inflicted wounds, including “green energy” ambitions that put the nation at risk of future blackouts.
Fortunately, the nearly 900-page H.R. 1 — known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act (“OBBBA”) — contains provisions to “stop the bleeding” by improving energy-related fiscal responsibility, energy reliability, and energy security.
These actions set the conditions for additional “lifesaving care” for our electric grid — like protecting it from known hazards such as solar weather.
Energy-Related Fiscal Responsibility
Robert Bryce, a thirty-year veteran energy expert, author, and filmmaker, recently applauded the OBBBA as “good news for taxpayers” in his latest blog titled “The Big Beautiful Bill Torpedoes Big Solar & Big Wind.” Bryce points out the bill’s positive impact on taxpayers by exposing how the 1992 “Production Tax Credit” (PTC) — which was supposed to help “kickstart” the wind industry — has been extended year after year, with President Biden’s 2022 “Inflation Reduction Act” (IRA) making these subsidies “permanent giveaways to Big Wind and Big Solar.” He recently wrote:
“In short, canceling the alt-energy subsidies is good news for taxpayers. It will end decades of corporate welfare that has benefited a handful of big companies at the expense of American taxpayers. If solar and wind are, as we’ve been told, cheaper than conventional forms of electricity generation, it’s time for them to prove it — without federal tax money.”
Not only did those subsidies cost taxpayers well over $100 billion over the past two decades, they also massively distorted the energy playing field and helped put baseload power generators such as nuclear, coal, and natural gas out of business.
This “green energy” trend — the combined overpenetration of wind and solar and shuttering of baseload generators — was the main contributor to the 2025 Iberian Peninsula Blackout, which should serve as a cautionary tale for America.
Energy Reliability
The OBBBA includes provisions to help boost energy reliability by providing incentives to resurrect America’s coal power generation industry. This improves reliability because coal power generation not only provides baseload power but also uses “on-site” fuel rather than needing to rely on vulnerable pipelines. This is why President Trump’s first Secretary of Energy — Rick Perry — ordered fast-track rulemaking at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in 2017 to incentivize the storage of at least ninety days’ worth of fuel “on-site,” a move applauded by energy security experts.
The OBBBA includes provisions to make more of this form of power generation available. It amends the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 by directing the Secretary of Interior to “make available for lease known and recoverable coal resources of not less than 4,000,000 additional acres of federal land.” And the bill also authorizes the mining of this coal.
Because domestic steel manufacturing is a critical capability to build out America’s energy infrastructures and achieve President Trump’s “nuclear revolution,” the bill also provides tax incentives for a form of coal that is suitable for use in the production of steel. Specifically, it provides for the inclusion of “metallurgical coal” as an “applicable critical mineral for purposes of the advanced manufacturing production credit.”
Energy Security
The bill also takes aim at many of the incentives that have driven America’s energy industry to depend on foreign adversaries such as Communist China for the build-out of our energy infrastructure.
For example, the bill removes the “zero-emission nuclear power production credit” if “the taxpayer is a foreign-influenced entity.” Similarly, it sets restrictions on the existing “clean electricity production credit” for wind and solar facilities receiving “material assistance from prohibited foreign entities.” The bill disqualifies any facility for which construction begins after December 31, 2025, from receiving those credits if “such facility includes any material assistance from a prohibited foreign entity.”
These “foreign entities” include designated terrorist organizations and those “owned, controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction or direction of a government of a foreign country listed in section 2533 of title 10, USC” — which includes China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran.
Thus, the OBBBA takes a positive step in decoupling our energy industry from China.
Setting Conditions for the Future “Lifesaving Care” of the Electric Grid
In addition to “stopping the bleeding” by making major policy course corrections, the OBBBA repeals and reforms the accumulated regulatory and subsidy “scar tissue” that has, for years, limited energy production and disincentivized true improvements in infrastructure resilience. These are vital first steps in “caring” for our electric grid.
Still, the American electrical grid will almost certainly “die” — from natural causes.
Mother Nature still threatens the electric grid with solar weather. And a future blackout from a massive solar storm will likely be long-lasting and catastrophic.
Warnings about the solar weather hazard and the transparently defective government-approved solar storm protection standard were explained in great detail to former Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and her “Secretary of Energy Advisory Board” (SEAB) in June 2022 and then again two years later in April 2024.
As was explained to Granholm’s SEAB, protecting the grid against the solar weather threat would also go a long way to protecting it against the harmful ground-induced currents (GICs) also produced by nuclear electromagnetic pulse (EMP). And this protection is affordable.
The nonprofit Foundation for Resilient Societies estimated it would cost America about $4 billion to protect the entire nation against the GIC threat, a cost validated in Senate testimony by Scott McBride of Idaho National Laboratory.
Four billion dollars was just a third of one percent of the “2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill,” and yet President Biden’s Department of Energy decided against using any of that funding to address the solar weather threat — despite being informed about a known and tested solution.
Fortunately, after the passage of the “Big Beautiful Bill,” President Trump’s newly appointed leaders will have a much clearer path to focus on the next level of “lifesaving care” not administered by the previous administration.
Let’s hope they do.
About the Authors: Tommy Waller and Douglas Ellsworth
Lt. Col. Tommy Waller is the President & CEO of the nonprofit Center for Security Policy. Waller retired from the U.S. Marines after two decades of service in both active duty and the reserves as an Infantry and Expeditionary Ground Reconnaissance Officer with deployments to Afghanistan, Iraq, Africa, and South America and with cross-assigned service to the U.S. Air Force’s Electromagnetic Defense Task Force (EDTF). His formal education includes numerous military schools and colleges, a B. A. in International Relations from Tulane University, and executive education from the Wharton School. In addition to running the Center for Security Policy, he also manages the nationwide bipartisan Secure the Grid Coalition.
Douglas Ellsworth is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Policy and serves as the Co-Director of the Center-sponsored Secure the Grid (STG) Coalition — an ad hoc group of policy, energy, and national security experts, legislators, and industry insiders who are dedicated to strengthening the resilience of America’s electrical grid. Through the support of the Center for Security Policy, the STG Coalition aims to raise awareness about the national security threat of grid vulnerability, and encourage the steps needed to neutralize it. The STG Coalition brings a wide variety of expertise in cybersecurity, physical security, public policy and expressly serves the public interest. Mr. Ellsworth’s full bio can be found here.
Image: Shutterstock/ Lia Koltyrina
