This is a simplistic understanding. Competing industries: solar, oil & natural gas, wind, nuclear, hydro etc.
Cancel tax rebates, subsidies, grants, etc. for one of your competing industries and your own benefits because your costs and supply is relative to the others. Your own price is never evaluated in a vacuum where those other energy options are not relevant.
But the US government is not replacing the grants with grants to anyone else. Instead of the EPA giving out 7B in grants to their friends, each company will now have to fairly compete in the free market.
But you would definitely bribe so your competitors don't get money and your services are required for longer. Existing coal and various other fossil fuel power generating and supply chain companies would be very happy to have less competition from solar.
See Boeing managing to get the KC-45 tanker contract awarded to Airbus cancelled (for a plane that mostly existed and needed some US specific updates), to get a new one they won, that not only have they still not managed to deliver on, but they're also losing money.
Bribes here are likely donation based to PACs and they would be by fossil fuel interests who want to see the share of energy production from renewables slow or decline to maintain their own business. This is frankly akin to subsidizing cigarette smoking, a habit that fouls the air and kills people, but on a global scale. Sigh.
This particular bribe was reported on over a year ago, when Trump was raising money from oil execs for his campaign. It seems likely that the overall push against clean energy (pushing for dispatchable generation, canceling tax credits for green energy projects) is related.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/09/trump-asks-oil-exec...
Rivian execs gave money to the Biden/Harris campaign and their causes, and they gave Rivian a ~6.6 billion dollar taxpayer subsidized loan. The idea an executive might have personal political opinions is not enough to claim it's corruption.
It feels like your argument is they will have to compete in the free market instead of just being given free money, which isn't corruption. Corruption would be giving companies 7B in grants through the EPA or 6.6B dollar loans through the DOE. Letting people plan on a fair playing field isn't corruption
I don’t know if I buy that this is a conspiracy with bribes but killing the grants reduces the rate of growth of energy generation which reduces its future supply.
Adding energy capacity reduces the prices at which firms can sell energy since there would be more supply. Removing the grants means that existing energy generation firms need to worry less about how increased supply would harm their prices.
