The economic cost of Trump’s clean energy rollbacks has been enormous—and it’s still growing

It’s been a little more than a year since the One Big Beautiful Bill Act began dismantling federal clean energy incentives—just one part of the Trump administration’s broader attacks on renewables, from freezing funds and canceling permits to paying developers to cancel plans for offshore wind. A new report tallies what the policy shift has cost the economy.

More than 200 major clean energy projects were cancelled, closed, or downsized between the beginning of 2025 and May 2026, according to a report from E2, a nonprofit that tracks the clean energy economy, and the research and consulting firm BW Research. That includes factories like a $1.4 billion battery plant that Natron planned to build in North Carolina—creating more than 1,000 jobs—or $2.57 billion battery plant that Freyr, now called T1 Energy, planned to build in Georgia, along with solar and wind farms, and EV factories including a cancelled $3 billion Stellantis plant in Illinois.

In total, the report calculates that nearly half a million jobs have been lost as a result, including 343,000 permanent roles and 125,000 construction jobs. $68 billion has been lost in private capital investments during construction phases. $91 billion has been lost in in GDP growth from cancelled construction work, along with another $55 billion in annual GDP growth from ongoing operations. Local and state governments, along with the federal government, have foregone $20 billion in tax revenues from construction, and another $13 billion in annual tax revenues. $31 billion has been lost in annual wages from permanent jobs.

That’s not to say that the clean energy economy has come to a stop. In fact, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that more than 90% of new power plants in the U.S. last year were solar, wind, or battery plants; this year, that’s expected to climb to 93%. Many of those projects were already underway, and a deadline this month to qualify for expiring tax credits helped accelerate some others. The surge in demand for electricity favors clean energy, which can be built more quickly than gas plants. Still, the pace is much slower than it otherwise would have been.

“Clean energy will continue to grow,” says Michael Timberlake. “There will be an increase of jobs. It’s just going to be a lot slower and the U.S. is going to miss out on a lot of investments and a lot of manufacturing opportunities.” Foreign companies that were planning to build solar panel factories in the U.S., for example, may still build those factories—just somewhere else. When new projects are announced in the U.S., they now tend to be much smaller than in past years, he says.

For companies, policy uncertainty is a major challenge. “They don’t even know if this is going to be the status quo for the next five, ten years,” says Timberlake.

In many communities in the Rust Belt and Southeast, the cancelled or closed projects would have had an outsized impact. “A lot of these communities were former manufacturing hubs that manufacturing jobs had left,” he says. Where new clean energy factories are in place, the changes are evident. In Georgia, for example, in a former hub for carpet manufacturing that lost jobs to automation and globalization, a QCells battery factory has brought back thousands of jobs, boosted local businesses, and helped build a new industrial base in the area.

Beyond the immediate economic impact of lost or downsized projects, the report points out another loss: at a time when electric grids are under intense strain, more than 9 gigawatts of battery storage has been lost over the last year.