Trump Orders Treasury To Hunt Down Any Wind Or Solar Project That Survived His Tax Law, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That The Cheapest New Power In America Might Slip Through A Loophole And Get Built

WASHINGTON. Three days after signing a law that eliminated three and a half decades of federal support for wind and solar power, President Trump signed an executive order Monday evening directing the Treasury Department to make certain that no wind or solar project anywhere in the country manages to survive it.

The order instructs Treasury to strictly enforce the termination of the clean electricity production and investment tax credits, the incentives known in the tax code as 45Y and 48E, and to issue new guidance within 45 days ensuring that developers cannot qualify by claiming their projects have already begun construction. Under the new law, a wind or solar farm must break ground within a year or be finished by the end of 2027 to claim any credit at all. The president's concern, according to the order, is that some of them might still find a way to do so.

Officials explained that existing rules had long allowed a project to lock in eligibility by completing a modest portion of the work, a safe harbor the order now directs Treasury to narrow so that only projects that are almost entirely built may count as having begun. The administration described the change as necessary to prevent the artificial acceleration of projects that would otherwise go on to generate electricity.

"Windmills are very expensive, and they kill the birds, and they ruin your beautiful fields," said the president, reprising a critique he has delivered for the better part of a decade, most memorably about a wind farm once visible from one of his golf courses in Scotland. The order itself describes wind and solar as expensive and unreliable, language it applies to the two fastest-growing and lowest-cost sources of new electricity in the United States.

A source within the administration said the goal was simply to protect the American taxpayer, who under the new arrangement will pay more for power generated by older and more expensive plants. The source added that any project still hoping to qualify was welcome to try, provided it could finish building before the government finished writing the rules explaining that it could not.

At press time, Treasury officials had begun the 45-day process of determining precisely how little of a half-built solar farm still counts as a solar farm.