Cancelled clean energy projects already cost $90.8 billion and 468,000 jobs

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed July 4, 2025, terminated the §45Y and §48E clean-electricity tax credits for any wind or solar facility placed in service after December 31, 2027 — unless construction began within twelve months of the law's signing.▸ Treasury's implementing guidance set that deadline at July 4, 2026. It has now passed. Any project that hadn't broken ground by then has permanently lost the credit, regardless of when it's finished.

Developers didn't wait for the deadline to start pulling back.▸ Since January 2025, 216 major solar, wind, EV, and battery-storage projects have been cancelled, closed, or downsized nationwide, according to new modeling produced for E2 by BW Research Partnership, published one day before this piece. The retreat isn't a projection about what the tax change might do — it's an accounting of what has already been pulled off the table.

Every cancelled project was, at minimum, a construction contract: site work, equipment, a crew.▸ BW Research's modeling puts the value added lost during that one-time construction phase at $18.15 billion a year for five years — $90.8 billion in total — split across six sectors. Battery storage carries the largest single share, at $6.3 billion a year, ahead of solar ($4.73 billion), EV manufacturing ($4.30 billion), and wind ($2.74 billion). Of the total, $10.7 billion a year would have been wages and payroll costs, and $3.91 billion a year would have been federal, state, and local tax revenue — money that instead simply wasn't generated.

Construction work ends when a plant is built.▸ The jobs to run it don't — and that's where the cancellations bite hardest. The same modeling estimates 343,490 operations-phase jobs are no longer supported annually, for as long as those plants would have run. Three in four of them — 254,782 — sit in electric-vehicle manufacturing and its supply chain, dwarfing battery storage (63,663), solar (18,860), and wind (5,874) combined. Those jobs would have paid $31.1 billion in annual wages and generated $12.0 billion a year in tax revenue that governments will now not collect, on top of the $19.6 billion in construction-phase tax revenue already forfeited.

Add construction and operations together and the two phases combine to $55.1 billion in lost GDP every year the projects would have run, on top of the $90.8 billion already gone from construction — a bigger annual hit, per the report, than the entire U.S. spectator sports industry generates in a year.

Figures cover 216 large-scale clean energy and clean-vehicle manufacturing and generation projects publicly announced as cancelled, closed, or downsized between January 2025 and May 2026, modeled by BW Research Partnership using IMPLAN input-output and NREL's JEDI tools; smaller or unannounced project changes are not captured, so the true toll is a floor, not a ceiling.