The Terrible Track Record of the New Top Solar Lobbyist

When higher prices become a resume builder

This week, the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) announced it has hired Tim Pawlenty, the former Republican Governor of Minnesota and one-time GOP Presidential primary candidate, as its next President and CEO.

In the press release, Pawlenty stated:

The sun is the safest, most natural, and largest nuclear reactor in the world, and it provides an abundant source of energy we should be using to its fullest potential. That’s why solar is one of the most effective tools we have to meet rising energy demand while lowering costs for families and businesses. At a time when affordability is front and center for Americans, expanding access to low-cost solar and storage can deliver real savings and strengthen our domestic energy supply.

Unfortunately, Pawlenty’s comments about solar lowering costs for families are divorced from the data, and his own energy legacy as the Governor of Minnesota is one of making electricity less affordable for families and businesses.

Why Hire T-Paw?

Before we address how Mr. Pawlenty’s wind and solar mandates drove up electricity prices in Minnesota, it’s worth exploring this key question: Why Tim Pawlenty?

Simply put, the solar industry’s ability to renew the federal subsidies that have bankrolled it is jeopardized by the plummeting favorability ratings of wind and solar among Republican voters and policymakers. Pawlenty was almost certainly hired to stem the bleeding and renew the subsidies.

A recent Pew survey found that support for prioritizing wind and solar development over fossil fuels has dropped from 65 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning voters in 2020 to just 28 percent in April of 2026. It’s interesting to note that support has also dropped slightly for Democrat/Democrat-leaning voters.

Furthermore, Republican voters are far more likely to (correctly) believe that solar is less reliable and more expensive than other energy sources than Democrats and U.S. adults as a whole.

Restoring the subsidies set to expire under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) will first require restoring solar’s image among just enough conservative lawmakers to extend the subsidies in the coming years. This is how the “temporary” wind Production Tax Credit (PTC) has been in place since 1992.

Conservative Lipstick on A Green Pig

Hiring Pawlenty to lead the solar industry lobbying arm continues a longstanding tradition in which left-leaning climate foundations and wind and solar advocates fund conservative-branded advocacy groups to use conservative-sounding language to trick conservative lawmakers into supporting liberal energy policies.

These groups include the Conservative Energy Network, the American Conservation Coalition, Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, the R-Street Institute, and others.

Popular talking points have included “letting the free market decide,” while ignoring the mandates and subsidies that are the lifeblood of the industry, and promoting “all of the above solutions,” while liberal policymakers imposed onerous regulations on coal, nuclear, and, to a lesser extent, natural gas plants.

These groups rely on the fact that many people don’t realize that there is no free market for electricity, especially not when subsidies, mandates, and regulations exist to favor certain energy resources over others and exploit this ignorance for their own financial gain.

Pawlenty’s Energy Legacy: Mandates, Higher Prices

Tim Pawlenty said in the press release that adopting “low-cost solar and storage can deliver real savings.” However, we already have ample evidence that solar has not led to energy savings, and we can use Pawlenty’s history as Governor of Minnesota as an example.

In 2007, Pawlenty signed Minnesota’s Next Generation Energy Act (NGEA), which required electric utilities to generate 25 percent of their electricity from “renewable” electricity sources by 2025. But the legislation was effectively a wind-and-solar mandate because it specifically excluded large hydroelectric power facilities in Canada from qualifying.

At the time, this was significant because it was one of the most ambitious renewable mandates in the country, and the most ambitious in the Midwest, along with Illinois. Only Maine and Connecticut had higher targets, while Oregon and Illinois matched Minnesota’s 25 percent by 2025 mandate.

Prior to enacting the NGEA in 2007, Minnesota’s all-sectors electricity prices were, on average, 18.5 percent below the national average, giving the state’s energy-intensive industries, such as mining, manufacturing, and agriculture, a competitive advantage relative to the rest of the country.

Minnesota met the mandated renewable electricity percentages eight years early, but at a steep price. By 2017, the state’s all-sectors electricity prices were only 2 percent below the national average, residential rates were 1 percent higher, and industrial rates were 7 percent higher—effectively erasing Minnesota’s historic edge as a low-cost electricity state.

While many factors affect retail electricity prices, and Minnesota’s cost premium relative to the national average has shrunk as other states have gotten more expensive, Pawlenty’s mandates locked Minnesota into large-scale wind procurement during the most expensive phase of the modern wind buildout.

Data from NREL show many wind projects entering service between 2007 and 2012 carried costs near or above $80 per megawatt-hour in 2021 dollars before prices declined later in the decade. In other words, Minnesota ratepayers were forced to pay an expensive premium for wind thanks to Pawlenty’s mandates.

These high-priced wind contracts contributed to higher costs for families. From 2007 to 2017, Minnesota families saw their electricity bills rise from $76.40 per month in 2007 to $97.58 per month in 2017—an increase of 28 percent—despite a 10 percent reduction in electricity consumption. In essence, Minnesota families and businesses were forced to pay significantly higher electricity bills even as they used less power.

Based on Pawlenty’s past track record with respect to energy affordability, Americans should be exceedingly skeptical of his claims that solar will reduce energy costs.

Levelized Cost of Solar

As many of our readers know, the solar industry’s claim to affordability rests on its misuse of the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) metric. However, LCOE measures the stand-alone cost of generating electricity at a single facility, but it does not account for the additional transmission and backup power costs needed to maintain grid reliability when the sun isn’t shining.

Always On modeled the LCOE of new resources in Indiana (a future article on this is forthcoming) and found that, including firming costs, the unsubsidized cost of wind increased from $76.79 per megawatt-hour to $159.24 per megawatt-hour, compared with $65.03 per megawatt-hour for new natural gas combined-cycle plants.

There is also the inconvenient truth that, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, solar prices have increased by 25 percent since 2022, falling national average capacity factors since 2016, higher financing costs since 2020, and, most recently, increasing capital costs.

Conclusion

Our modeling shows solar can’t compete with other energy sources without the federal taxpayer handouts Mr. Pawlenty claimed to oppose during his 2012 presidential run.

Back then, he told a group assembled in Iowa “the truth about federal energy subsidies… is that they have to be phased out,” continuing to say that “we simply can’t afford them anymore.” This begs the question: if we could not afford federal energy subsidies when the national debt was a mere $16.4 trillion in 2012, how can we afford them now that it is $38.95 trillion?

Time will tell whether Tim Pawlenty will flip-flop on his previous stance on subsidies at his new job, but if this were a wager on Polymarket, we would smash the over.

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