How Oregon’s solar industry is faring after the end of federal tax incentives

Since 2022, homeowners have been able to get up to 30% off the cost of installing solar panels through a federal tax credit. But President Trump rolled back those incentives as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The residential credit officially expired on Dec. 31, 2025. The administration also changed how it defines the start of construction for large-scale wind and solar projects, meaning developers have less time to access federal tax credits for those projects.

Angela Crowley-Koch is the executive director of the Oregon Solar and Storage Industries Association. Eric Hansen is the owner of True South Solar, a solar installation company based in Ashland. They both join us to talk about how the rollback of federal incentives is reshaping Oregon’s solar energy industry.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. We turn now to a solar industry check-in. The industry has had huge whiplash in recent years because of changes at the federal level. Since 2022, homeowners have been able to get up to 30% off the cost of installing solar panels through a federal tax credit. But President Trump rolled back those incentives as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The administration also changed the rules for large-scale wind and solar projects, effectively giving developers less time to access federal tax credits for those projects.

Angela Crowley-Koch is the executive director of the Oregon Solar and Storage Industries Association. Eric Hansen is the owner of True South Solar, a solar installation company based in Ashland. They both join us now. It’s great to have both of you on the show.

Angela Crowley-Koch: Thanks for the invite.

Eric Hansen: Thanks, Dave.

Miller: Angela, first – before the big changes in that big tax and spending bill passed last year, can you just give us a sense for the various incentives that were available at the residential level for homeowners who wanted to put solar panels on their roofs?

Crowley-Koch: Sure. Here in Oregon, we have a number of different incentives. If you’re a PGE or a PacifiCorp customer, you have incentives from the Energy Trust of Oregon, both for solar and for battery backup storage. And then there is a small program at the state level, the Oregon Solar and Storage Rebate Program, that the Oregon Department of Energy runs; that’s available to every Oregonian. Unfortunately, there’s not a ton of money left in that fund, although I will give kudos and thanks to President Wagner, others in the legislature that approved releasing some additional funds. So this year we’ll have about $1.5 million from that statewide fund.

But it has to be said that [the] 30% federal tax credit was the biggest incentive and it is really a shame to see that go away.

Miller: Eric Hansen, can you give us a sense for what that federal tax credit meant for your customers?

Hansen: Yeah, thanks Dave. It was a way to predictably get into solar with assurances that you would be able to recoup some costs. We’re trying to bring the cost of solar down to make it on par with grid electricity which is, in my neighborhood, dominantly coal and natural gas produced. So people that were getting into it for either financial or environmental reasons were really banking on that.

In terms of our energy policy, fighting climate change, a lot of folks are in the fight and they’re invested, they’re proud. To take away that tax credit has seen a real drop in our business. It’s got people on the fence, confused, waiting for something else to surface here to motivate them to get into the game.

Miller: How much money, if you can give us an average, did your customers save with those tax credits?

Hansen: Well, the 30% Federal Solar ITC [Investment Tax Credit] was incredibly helpful, as the lion’s share. But depending on the different incentives and different routes that homeowners and businesses were taking, it was about half of the retail costs to install the solar plus storage; some municipalities, less. Here in the city of Ashland, we have a humble incentive that can’t compare to the Energy Trust, but that was a little $600 bonus. So it really was the 30% federal tax credit that helped change the game, in terms of growing the solar industry in the United States.

Miller: Angela, what went through your mind when you heard that that tax credit was expiring? When you heard definitively that the bill was going to pass?

Crowley-Koch: It was so disappointing and pretty shortsighted. Solar is a way that we can protect ourselves against rising energy costs. We can protect ourselves from what’s happening overseas. And it’s an energy source we don’t have to worry about getting oil from other countries or pollution that comes along with it. So it did feel very shortsighted to see that tax credit go away, especially in Oregon.

In Oregon, most solar customers on the residential side are either moderate or middle-income customers. The wealthy are not our major solar customers. They make up about 8% of solar customers in Oregon. So for those moderate middle income customers, that tax credit was really important. So it did feel shortsighted.

Miller: How do you explain that? I mean, it does seem surprising to me that a capital intensive addition to your existing home, or if you’re going to put it on, something that ends up costing more … I guess I just would have thought that in general, that would be something that wealthier people would do. You’re saying that that’s not the way it works in Oregon. Why not?

Crowley-Koch: That’s right. It’s a common misperception. But there’s federal research that backs this up. In my early days of my career, I was one of those folks from OSPIRG Environment Oregon that would go door to door. And the same thing was true. You’d see higher donations in middle-income areas and fewer in wealthy areas. I’m not really sure. I’m not part of the high-income bracket.

Miller: So I’m asking the wrong person [laughs]. But Eric, that does make it seem that your customers, if they’re very price sensitive because they’re moderate or middle income households, would be the exact people who would then be priced out if major incentives; if 30% of the cost of the project that you didn’t have to pay, now you do have to pay.

Hansen: Yes, simple answer.

Miller: OK, but I’ve also heard that the way this works is that a lot of folks, who were on the fence about this or had been planning to get this work done, they saw that the federal tax credit was going to disappear and so they said, “OK, we’re gonna move faster.” What was the second half of last year like for you as an installer?

Hansen: I have that answer plus an anecdote. We saw a huge uptick after the Big Beautiful Bill was signed and passed. And we basically borrowed from future customers for last year, in that folks that were maybe thinking about it, who would have done it in 2026 or 2027, rushed to get it done in 2025. So we preloaded last year of future sales. And we saw this happen in 2018 when the Oregon tax credit that was pretty substantial went away. In 2019, the next year, after the tax credit went up … We had a banger year in 2018 in terms of a bumper crop of sales. But then in 2019, it was devastating to our small, struggling business. We made it through, but we learned a lot of lessons.

I was sitting down at the title company when the Big Beautiful Bill was getting voted on and my company had been looking for another location, to expand into in the Rogue Valley, for two years. We finally found a building that suited our needs. And Trump was president, but it was just talk at that point, taking away the ITC. It was a gamble. It looked like it was a 50/50 vote.

I’m sitting there at the title company signing papers going, I hope that doesn’t pass because everything is up and to the right. Our business has been growing. We need to expand. Sure enough, we got this additional resource, we put all our money on Russian roulette chip number eight, let’s go, and we lost in terms of the Big Beautiful Bill passing. So now we had an investment that we don’t know what to do with. It’s been a real setback for our company in many ways.

Miller: I’m wondering about your role as an employer. I mean, if you had a ton of sales and also installations in the second half of last year that you knew was sort of the bumper crop before the bust, how did you think about how many people to employ?

Hansen: Well, that’s a great question, Dave. I mean, ethically, we’re trying to navigate taking good care of our industry, our neighborhood and our workforce development. We did the best we could in terms of getting as many customers in by the end of the year. But we did not blow up our payroll in order to take advantage of every single opportunity. We did hire a couple extra folks at the beginning of 2025 because we anticipated our growth. Then by July, we knew we needed to keep everybody we had, all hands on deck. But we built our installation model trying to do everything we could. We had a stretch goal and we beat it, but no, we didn’t go hire a bunch of people only to lay them off.

I will tell you that we started 2025 with 30 employees, and by the end of the year, we had to start laying off … the first person was our HR manager. We didn’t need an HR manager because we’re not hiring. Eventually, we went through the chain of command, really right-sized our company and ended up with 20 employees at the beginning of this year. And, fingers crossed, we’re doing our best to keep everybody, but it is kind of pins and needles Q1 and Q2 here.

Miller: Wow, if my math is right, it’s striking that the 30% tax credit went away and you cut your staff by 33%.

Hansen: There’s a correlation there.

Miller: So Angela, let’s turn to the utility scale side of this right now. How much have federal rules changed in the last year-and-a-half?

Crowley-Koch: A lot. Before I completely answer that though, I want to say one more thing about residential solar. And that is, because of the unfortunate situation we find ourselves in with utility rates climbing almost every year, solar is not going away. We are just going to keep looking better and better to customers who are tired of seeing their electric bills go up.

So I don’t want this to be too doom and gloom. There’s a lot of homegrown Oregon solar companies that are still operating. It is not a bad time to go solar. I just got my email from PGE yesterday telling me to look out for rate increases coming on my bill in April. So it will continue to be a good investment to get solar, going forward.

Miller: I appreciate you bringing that up. But, in a sense, what you’re saying is that one of the reasons that the future is bright for solar is that electricity prices are just going to keep climbing. They’ve gone up 25% or so in a recent four-year period. And you’re saying that the fact that they’re likely to keep going up is one of the reasons that solar is here to stay, among plenty of other reasons. It’s not good news for customers. It’s just the reality of the grid and of the price of electricity.

But to turn to the utility side of this right now, how are utility scale solar developers doing right now?

Crowley-Koch: They are now in the position that Eric’s company, True South Solar, was in last summer. There’s new deadlines and new requirements set out in that HR1 bill and folks are scrambling to meet those. The first deadline is coming up here in a few months, the deadline of July 1, to start construction of your project. Now, starting construction and solar development doesn’t necessarily mean shovel-in-the-ground. It can mean parts being assembled off-site and ready for that particular project. But it does mean a substantial investment. So that’s the first deadline you have to meet if you want to take advantage of tax credits.

If you don’t meet that deadline, you only have, I think, one-and-a-half years to get your project ready and built before that tax credit goes away for you. If you do meet that July 1 safe harbor deadline, then you have until 2030 to build your project. Now, those four years might seem like a long time, but for these utility scale solar projects, they’re basically a power plant. And as you can imagine, it’s a long process, from working with landowners to negotiating with utilities, how you’re going to do the upgrades to the substation, to the actual construction and the permitting process. That’s a lot of work that just needs to be condensed now.

So, we are happy at OCEA to see the governor’s executive Order 25-25. That really tells agencies we need to move faster in order to meet these deadlines. There was also a piece of legislation passed at this short legislative session, HB4031, that allows for temporary streamlined siting for projects that would normally be cited at the state level, to instead go through the county process, which is much faster. So Oregon is taking some good steps to help these projects meet the new deadlines.

Miller: OK, but just briefly, a lot of what you’re talking about is about existing projects being able to somehow go forward. But will these federal changes mean that, overall, there are fewer solar installations, solar arrays at a utility scale, in the state in the coming years? You have a minute for that.

Crowley-Koch: Not necessarily, but it does mean the cost is going up. You’ve heard a lot of talk about that bill, HR1, making electricity prices go up. And this is one of the reasons why. Without that 30% tax credit, now that solar project – solar’s still the cheapest form of energy on the market – is going to cost 30% more.

Miller: Angela Crowley-Koch and Eric Hansen, thanks very much.

Crowley-Koch: Thank you.

Hansen: Thank you, Dave.

Miller: Angela Crowley-Koch is the executive director of the Oregon Solar and Storage Industries Association. Eric Hansen is the owner of True South Solar – that is a solar installation company based in Ashland.

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