William Boyd (UCLA; Google Scholar), The Tax Struggle and Renewable Power, 79 Tax L. Rev. ___ (2026):

This Article shows how the tools of public finance have been deployed over more than forty years to promote a privatized and financialized model of renewable energy ownership in the United States and what this means for the clean energy transition. In contrast to mainstream theories of public finance, the Article develops a more critical political economy of public finance that emphasizes the conflicts and struggles that shape tax policy and the ways this has affected patterns of investment and ownership across the economy. The overall goal is to show how law and legal arrangements, operating through the tax code and specific regulatory and accounting rules, have enabled certain logics to unfold that have in turn created and sustained an approach to renewable energy finance and ownership that is increasingly dominated by a handful of banks and other large financial institutions, specialized infrastructure funds, a rising class of so-called clean energy supermajors, and, increasingly, large technology companies seeking to feed the voracious power demand of data centers. 

To that end, the Article makes three main contributions. First, it elaborates a conceptual framework for understanding and explaining how tax expenditures, and the broader fiscal regime of which they are part, operate as switching devices for channeling capital into key sectors, creating distinctive kinds of assets and ownership patterns in the process. Second, the Article shows how the fiscal history of renewable energy and the electric power industry provides a muchneeded complement and, in some cases, corrective to the more well-known regulatory history of the industry. Third, it develops a series of normative claims regarding the limitations of the privatized and financialized model of renewable energy and the concomitant need for more public control of renewable energy through both regulation and government ownership.

Editor’s Note:  If you would like to receive a daily email with links to tax posts on TaxProf Blog, email me here.