Restricting New Solar and Wind Would Add $121 Billion to US Energy Bills, a Corporate Buyers’ Study Finds

Constraining new solar and wind from US power markets would cost American energy users an additional $121 billion, according to an analysis NERA Economic Consulting prepared for the Corporate Energy Buyers Association (CEBA). The finding was reported by pv magazine on June 20. The number is large, but the more useful question is who pays it, because the answer is not evenly distributed across the customers who carry it.

The model. NERA compared two futures. In one, new solar and wind compete freely in wholesale markets. In the other, they are held back by permitting limits, siting bans, or policy. The difference between the two paths, spread across households and businesses, is the $121 billion in avoidable energy cost.

The mechanism is merit-order economics. Solar and wind clear wholesale power markets at near-zero marginal cost. Remove the cheapest bids from the supply stack and the system leans harder on dispatchable generation, much of it natural gas, to set the clearing price. The price every buyer pays rises with it. The study does not require a forecast to hold for the logic to hold: pull low-cost supply out of a market and the marginal unit, and the price it sets, both move up.

Whose study this is. CEBA, the Corporate Energy Buyers Association, represents large corporate energy purchasers. The group advocates for renewable access, so it has an interest in the result, and the magnitude of any multi-year forecast built on modeled scenarios is contestable. The direction is not. Removing low-cost supply from a market raises the clearing price. That is arithmetic before it is advocacy, which is why the headline figure matters less than the structure underneath it.

The timing. The analysis arrived as siting restrictions moved through Washington. On June 19, the Solar Energy Industries Association published its own figures ahead of Senate consideration of the 2026 farm bill: utility-scale solar occupies 0.07% of US prime farmland nationally and no more than 0.5% in any single state, a footprint SEIA described as dwarfed by golf courses and suburban sprawl. SEIA released the data as a rebuttal to farm-bill proposals that would limit solar development on agricultural land.

Two trade groups, two data releases, one week, the same argument from opposite ends: SEIA defending the acreage, CEBA pricing the consequence of taking it away.

The policy backdrop. The constrained scenario NERA modeled is becoming less hypothetical. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act phased out the production and investment credits that financed most new wind and solar, with a near-term cliff around July 4 for projects that miss safe-harbor deadlines. Standalone storage kept its credit; wind and solar did not. Slower renewable additions from expiring credits and slower additions from siting bans land in the same place on the supply curve. They subtract the cheapest megawatts. The policy lever and the siting lever push the clearing price in one direction.

Who absorbs it. NERA’s remedy is a national lever. Build more renewables, hold wholesale prices down. No individual commercial customer can pull it.

That is the structural feature buried in the commercial side of the bill. The buyers best equipped to hedge are the ones who least need the protection. The largest corporate buyers, the kind CEBA represents, sign power purchase agreements measured in hundreds of megawatts, locking in renewable supply at fixed prices and insulating themselves from the merit-order shift the study describes. A regional hospital system, a cold-storage operator, or the owner of a six-tenant medical office cannot sign a utility-scale PPA. They take the wholesale price the market sets and absorb it through a retail tariff, marked up by transmission, capacity, and demand charges along the way.

Distributed across the commercial class, then, the cost is regressive. It concentrates on the buyers with the fewest instruments to avoid it. The companies positioned to commission a study like this one are among those most able to route around its conclusion.

What the mid-market commercial buyer controls sits on its own side of the meter. Procurement at utility scale is closed to it, and the generation mix is a regulator’s decision. Load shape is not. Shifting consumption off the peak, trimming the monthly demand spike, and storing energy to discharge when wholesale and capacity prices run highest are the levers that remain when the price of grid power moves against a customer that had no vote in setting it.

That is not the study’s argument. NERA modeled supply, not the demand-side response. The response follows from the same merit-order logic. When the marginal resource shifts toward gas and the clearing price climbs, the value of any tool that reduces a building’s exposure to peak and capacity pricing climbs with it. The study quantifies the cost. It does not address who, among commercial buyers, is positioned to avoid it and who is not.

From wholesale to the meter. A move in the wholesale price is only the starting point of what a commercial customer pays. By the time energy reaches a commercial meter, it carries demand charges and capacity costs set in markets like PJM, where the 2028/2029 Base Residual Auction is due to clear in late June and will feed directly into commercial bills. The wholesale change is the floor, not the ceiling, of what flows through to a commercial rate.

The study frames renewable restrictions as a national cost. The bill, when it arrives, will be itemized by rate class.

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