Landscape Analysis: One Year Out From the One Big Beautiful Bill Act

It’s been just over a year since the Trump administration passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. What does the clean energy market look like now?

On July 4, 2025, Republicans passed the One Big Beautiful Bill, a tax and spending bill through Congress that gutted Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act - one of the most significant pieces of climate legislation in US history.

The IRA had provided a plan to help the economy transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy through tax credits. The tax credits took a two pronged approach, providing incentives at the consumer level and also at the production and infrastructure level. Since its passage in August 2022, renewable energy has broken record after record. According to the Environment American Research & Policy Center, since September 2023, Solar has been the largest source of new generation. In November 2025, solar and wind combined for 93% of all new capacity. In 2025, renewable energy accounted for 88% of new U.S. electrical capacity. As energy demands rise year over year, and this is without accounting for the hugely energy intensive data centers that are trying to make their way onto the grid, renewables are a clear and obvious solution.

Despite this reality, the OBBBA terminated nearly all of the tax credits that had incentivized this historic growth.

A year out, what does the climate and energy landscape look like now?

LARGE SCALE UTILITY LEVEL

So far, it’s been a good year for large-scale utility projects.

According to the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Investment 2026 report, of the projected $3.4 trillion dollars of projected spend on global energy, $2.2 trillion is expected to be towards clean energy (renewables, nuclear, grids, storage, efficiency, and electrification). 

Energy storage also saw explosive growth. When it comes to energy storage, a Wood Mackenzie and American Clean Power Association report study found that 39% of the 8.4GWh of battery energy storage systems were installed in the first quarter of 2026 - a 54% increase from Q1 2025. While much of this growth can be attributed to finishing delayed projects from 2025 as developers pursued other projects in their pipeline in the latter half of 2025 in order to meet tax incentive deadlines, battery energy storage system installations are on the rise. 

It’s projected that these projects will make up nearly a third of cumulative installed energy storage capacity by 2031. This momentum is heavily driven by the utility sector, which will increasingly rely on the flexibility that energy storage provides to stabilize the grid.

SMALL SCALE CONSUMER LEVEL

But what about the energy transition at the consumer level? 

After the passage of the OBBBA, many organizations that promoted themselves as energy efficient and helping the energy transition at a consumer level found themselves in a lurch. For many startups and non-profit organizations, funding dried up or was frozen indefinitely.

Still, many of these smaller organizations were nimble enough to exploit loopholes, such as pursuing the third party ownership model, as Kelvin did. Additionally, in New York, robust state-level infrastructure, such as NYSERDA, provides funding and incentives to help finance the local mandates that steer the state towards cleaner technologies and building efficiency.

Take for instance PON 6037 in New York. This program provides heavily subsidized heat pumps to multifamily buildings as a way to increase energy efficiency in high home density areas. The result of this will be highly efficient heating and cooling for large multifamily buildings - a housing segment that is usually that last to see the benefits of proptech innovation, while also providing a boost to the local heat pump market. Widescale adoption of heat pumps through bulk buying for multifamily homes sends clear signals to the market that heat pumps are here to stay and that the grid should adjust accordingly to accommodate the rise of demand.

LONG TERM FUTURE:

Ultimately, the energy transition can only happen when the large utility scale projects and smaller consumer level initiatives work in tandem and support each other. The smaller scale efforts signal to the market that there needs to be more power, and that stimulates clean infrastructure. While the OBBBA has made the transition more difficult, there are strategic ways to circumvent this hurdle.