Tucked deep within President Biden’s landmark climate bill sits a seemingly small tweak to IRS rules that, for the first time, lets companies sell their clean energy tax credits.
The change accounts for just a fraction of the 100,000 or so words in the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, which Congress passed in 2022. But experts say that, by making clean energy tax credits more accessible, the move will help drive most of the government’s investment in the sector over the next decade and supercharge the industry.
“It’s pretty unprecedented,” said Jorge Medina, an attorney who specializes in renewable energy and tax policy at the firm Shearman & Sterling. “There hasn’t been a program quite like this, and not on this scale.”
After President Biden signed the IRA into law last summer, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that…