Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 82. Sunrise is 5:30 and sunset is 8:12, for 14 hours, 42 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 86.5 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1527, the Florentines drive out the Medici for a second time and Florence re-establishes itself as a republic.
On 5.5.25, FREE WHITEWATER published a post on the tariff hit that solar projects will take. See Solar Takes a Tariff Hit. There’s another economic blow that solar projects, generally, may face: elimination of federal subsidies for solar projects.
(While there is a proposed Whitewater Solar Project, it’s only one of about twenty in the state. I’ve no prediction about how any single project will fare economically, either from tariffs or federal subsidy cuts. Some projects will have more dependable economics than others; some, however, are likely to succumb to changes in fiscal policy.)
Eric Gunn reports on the elimination of solar subsidies in a proposed congressional budget:
To help pay for the extension of tax cuts enacted in the first Trump administration, the GOP-led House Ways and Means Committee is proposing to repeal clean energy tax credits, Politico reported this week. The tax credits were among the measures enacted in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
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In addition to the tax credits that the U.S. House proposal would repeal, President Donald Trump in his second term has frozen federal clean energy grants that were part of the 2022 legislation. Those include grants to establish a network of electric vehicle charging stations — prompting a lawsuit by 15 states, including Wisconsin.
See Eric Gunn, Advocates say U.S. House tax cut proposal would kill clean energy investments, jobs, Wisconsin Examiner, May 16, 2025.
Although the Wisconsin Examiner story is written from the perspective of proponents of solar projects, I present it here for another reason: a Wisconsin trend that seemed certain a few years ago is now in doubt.
See also Joe Schulz, Trump tariffs expected to increase costs, limit options for Wisconsin solar (‘Combination of tariffs on China, steel and southeast Asia could make some projects ‘economically unfeasible’ ‘), Wisconsin Public Radio, May 5, 2025.
Tornadoes and severe weather in Wisconsin, parts of the Midwest: