A renewable-energy-backed political operation has now spent against three Republicans who pushed to kill the industry’s tax credits. All three lost. The people running it say out loud that the point is deterrence.
From the Craig Bushon Show Media Team
Andy Ogles lost his Republican primary in Tennessee’s 5th Congressional District on August 6, falling to former state Agriculture Commissioner Charlie Hatcher by roughly 53 percent to 47 percent. The easy explanation is that another Trump-endorsed incumbent went down despite having powerful national Republicans behind him, and that explanation is true as far as it goes. It also misses the more consequential story, which is not really about Andy Ogles at all.
Ogles entered an election in which a renewable-energy-backed political committee called the Invest in Tomorrow Coalition spent roughly two million dollars trying to remove him from Congress, more than both candidates spent on their own campaigns combined. That committee was launched earlier this year by solar executives and climate investors for the express purpose of imposing electoral consequences on politicians who work against the industry’s interests, and the people financing and directing it have been remarkably candid about what they are trying to accomplish. Their stated objective is not merely winning individual elections. It is making elected officials understand, in advance and without anyone having to say a word to them, that opposing an industry’s financial interests can end a career.
Whether that spending decided the Tennessee race is a separate question, and an honest examination has to concede that it may not have. Ogles carried real political baggage, his district had been redrawn almost beyond recognition, and Hatcher was a credible challenger with deep establishment support. All of those factors matter, and we will come back to every one of them. But the strategy being executed here does not actually require that any single race turn on the money. It only requires that other members of Congress watch what happened and draw the obvious conclusion.
What the Money Was Protecting
To understand why an industry would spend two million dollars on a congressional primary in rural Tennessee, it helps to understand what that industry believes it lost.
The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 created two technology-neutral tax credits that carry most of the economics of American wind and solar development, one rewarding the production of clean electricity and the other rewarding investment in the facilities that generate it. Under the original law, those credits were not scheduled to begin phasing out until 2034 at the earliest, and billions of dollars in project financing, manufacturing commitments and investor return models were built on that timeline. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the signature Republican tax law signed in July 2025, cut that timeline to the bone. It terminated both credits for wind and solar facilities placed in service after the end of 2027, with an exception only for projects that began construction within twelve months of enactment, a deadline that expired on July 4 of this year. A developer who cleared that construction deadline retained a longer runway to finish building. Everyone who did not now faces a hard cliff at the end of 2027, and an incentive structure that was written to run into the middle of the next decade was compressed into a window measured in months.
That is the event that created the Invest in Tomorrow Coalition, and it explains why the committee’s early target list looks the way it does. The members it has spent against were among the loudest voices inside the Republican conference pushing leadership for an even faster phaseout than the one that survived negotiations. Andy Ogles was one of them, and he had gone further than most. On January 3, 2025, he introduced H.R. 191, a two-page bill whose entire operative text repealed the Inflation Reduction Act outright, and he had introduced similar legislation in the previous Congress. Fifteen House Republicans signed on as original cosponsors, including a Texas congressman named Chip Roy, whose name becomes important shortly.
Follow the Money
The Invest in Tomorrow Coalition is an independent-expenditure committee funded substantially by renewable-energy executives, climate investors and technology money, and its financial network runs deeper into federal energy policy than the phrase “solar super PAC” suggests.
Its chairman is Tom Matzzie, chief executive of the solar company CleanChoice Energy, whose political résumé predates his energy career by two decades. Before running a solar company, Matzzie directed the Washington operation of MoveOn.org and worked on the AFL-CIO’s electoral efforts. One of the committee’s co-founders is Michael Brune, who ran the Sierra Club for eleven years. Peter Davidson, chief executive of the investment firm Aligned Climate Capital, launched the political committee and contributed roughly twenty-six thousand dollars to it.
The names in the donor file are where the story sharpens. Jigar Shah, the founder of SunEdison who directed the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office under President Biden, gave fifty thousand dollars in March. Mark McCall, who was appointed by President Obama to run that same office from 2015 to 2017 and now works at a private equity firm focused on energy, gave two hundred thousand. Davidson held that same job immediately before McCall did, and McCall’s own farewell message at the department referred to Davidson as his predecessor. Three of the men who have run the federal government’s largest clean-energy lending operation — every Democratic appointee to lead it since 2013 — are now financing a political committee designed to punish members of Congress who voted against clean-energy subsidies, and that is a fact worth sitting with regardless of what anyone thinks about solar power.
The largest check writer is neither a solar executive nor a former federal energy official. Chris Larsen is the billionaire co-founder and executive chairman of Ripple, one of the most prominent cryptocurrency companies in the world, and he has contributed six million dollars of the roughly six point eight million the committee has raised, including a single five-million-dollar check. Federal Election Commission records show the committee registered on January 29 of this year and reported total receipts of $6,780,352 through June 30, meaning one man supplied close to nine of every ten dollars it had taken in. His political history is not ambiguous. In 2024 he gave nearly five and a half million dollars to Future Forward PAC in support of Kamala Harris, and he has since said publicly that he intends to back California Governor Gavin Newsom.
None of that makes the Invest in Tomorrow Coalition a Democratic Party operation in any formal sense, and the group has supported Republicans as well as opposed them. Renewable-energy politics increasingly cross conventional party lines, and there is nothing unlawful about any of this. But voters are entitled to know where the money in their primary elections originates, particularly when the money is being spent to determine which Republican appears on their November ballot.
Where the Playbook Came From
The most useful thing to understand about this operation is that it is not improvising. It is copying something that already worked.
Ripple helped finance Fairshake, the cryptocurrency industry’s political committee, which spent roughly $196 million across the 2024 elections and saw the overwhelming majority of the primary candidates it backed win. Larsen has described that effort in plain terms as a bipartisan exercise in punishing opponents and rewarding allies, and he has said explicitly that he saw no reason the climate side could not do the same thing. The tactical resemblance runs deeper than the money: Fairshake, too, routed much of its spending through affiliated committees whose advertising never mentioned the industry paying for it.
He went further than that in a recorded conversation at a climate summit in May, alongside Brune, while the Texas campaign was still underway. Rejecting the idea that the industry should simply make its case on the merits, Larsen said flatly that what they were engaged in was “political warfare,” describing the objective as figuring out what will remove a particular person and adding that the point was to make an example of him. He acknowledged in the same breath that the effort might fail. Michael Brune, the former Sierra Club chief, later described the committee’s work to POLITICO as a retribution tour that needs to continue until a few more members who voted the wrong way have been removed.
That language is not being leaked or inferred. It is being said on the record, to national reporters, by the founders of the organization. Matzzie framed the purpose about as directly as it can be framed when he said the goal is “to make sure people choose not to cross the industry,” and after Tennessee he added that the result demonstrated the group’s deterrence is real.
Nobody involved is pretending otherwise, which is precisely why this deserves scrutiny rather than outrage.
Texas First, and What That Race Actually Showed
Before Tennessee there was Texas, and the Texas race requires more honesty than it has generally received from people on my side of the aisle.
Chip Roy, the Freedom Caucus member who cosponsored Ogles’ repeal bill and led the push to sunset the tax credits, ran for Texas attorney general this year. The Invest in Tomorrow Coalition spent roughly one point seven million dollars against him, and the mechanics of that spending are genuinely revealing. The advertising did not attempt to persuade Republican primary voters that Roy was wrong about solar tax credits. It ran on platforms that reach conservative audiences, including Truth Social and Rumble, and it attacked Roy from the right by questioning his alignment with Donald Trump. Reporting on the campaign indicates it never mentioned clean energy at all.
Roy lost the May runoff to state Senator Mayes Middleton, 55 percent to 45 percent.
Here is where an honest accounting matters more than a satisfying narrative. Middleton, an oil and gas executive, put roughly seventeen million dollars of his own money into that campaign, and his operation ultimately spent close to twenty-five million dollars against Roy’s twelve million. Against those numbers, the renewable-energy committee’s contribution was a rounding error, and Matzzie himself conceded afterward that his group had played only a small part in the outcome. Roy had also finished a distant second in the March primary, before most of that outside money arrived. Anyone who tells you a solar PAC took down Chip Roy is selling something.
What the Texas race actually demonstrated was the method rather than the muscle: an industry with a policy grievance discovered it could finance messaging tailored entirely to Republican identity, delivered on Republican platforms, without ever raising the subject that motivated the check.
Then South Carolina, Then Tennessee
The committee also spent against Representative Ralph Norman of South Carolina in his campaign for governor, which he lost. Norman is an instructive case, because he had co-chaired the Congressional Solar Caucus before becoming one of the leading advocates for ending the industry’s tax credits, a reversal Matzzie characterized as hypocrisy deserving of retribution.
Tennessee was the largest investment of the three and the one that drew national attention. The Invest in Tomorrow Coalition committed roughly two million dollars to the 5th District Republican primary, including an additional seven hundred thousand dollars in paid media during the final week alone. As in Texas, renewable energy was not the message Republican voters heard. The committee’s advertising presented Charlie Hatcher as a fifth-generation Tennessee farmer and “America first conservative who gets things done”, describing him as pro-gun, pro-life and pro-Trump, and closing with an appeal to send a farmer to Congress.
That was politically sophisticated, and it was also perfectly legal. Hatcher did not have to persuade Republican voters to abandon Trump or conservative politics. He simply had to appear as an acceptable conservative alternative, and the committee financing the advertising had its own reasons for wanting one to exist.
Ogles understood exactly what was happening to him and said so during the campaign, telling the Washington Examiner afterward that “Republicans across the country should take notice” and warning that outside money capable of meddling in a Tennessee primary would do the same in any red state where it believed it could buy an outcome.
On August 6, the committee got the outcome it wanted.
We Need to Be Fair About Charlie Hatcher
There is a distinction here that cannot be skipped, and it matters more because so much of the commentary since Thursday has skipped it.
We have found no evidence that Charlie Hatcher coordinated with the Invest in Tomorrow Coalition, entered into any agreement with the organization, or made commitments to its donors regarding renewable-energy policy. Independent-expenditure committees are legally separate from candidate campaigns, and Hatcher addressed the question directly in a CBS interview, saying he was “as surprised as anybody” by the support and noting that his campaign was not permitted to coordinate with the group. Nor have we found a detailed Hatcher renewable-energy agenda suggesting he campaigned as a champion of wind or solar subsidies. He talked about reliable energy, lower costs, Tennessee agriculture and economic development, and he ran an aggressive retail campaign in a district full of voters who had never met their congressman.
Characterizing Hatcher as the renewable-energy industry’s candidate would therefore go well beyond what the record supports, and doing so would be unfair to a man who appears to have won a primary the old-fashioned way while a super PAC happened to be spending on his behalf.
The documented story is different and, frankly, more interesting. Renewable-energy interests viewed Ogles as sufficiently hostile that they were willing to spend more than both campaigns combined to defeat him, and Hatcher gave Republican voters an alternative they were comfortable with. The industry did not need to own the replacement. It only needed to remove the opponent.
The Carrot Matters as Much as the Stick
The strategy is not purely punitive, and the committee has gone out of its way to demonstrate that.
It has spent at least a hundred twenty-five thousand dollars supporting Republican Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa, who chairs the Conservative Climate Caucus. Miller-Meeks voted for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, but she also worked to prevent a harsher termination of the wind and solar credits inside it, and Matzzie has described her as a consistent ally of the industry. He was explicit that supporting her a week after helping defeat Chip Roy was meant as a contrast.
That gives us both halves of the system. Oppose the industry’s policy interests and substantial money may be deployed against you. Work constructively with it and money may help you. Neither half requires a phone call, a promise or a meeting, and neither half is against the law.
The scale being contemplated is the part most people have not absorbed. The committee has taken in roughly six point eight million dollars but reports twenty million in pledges, and it operates alongside an affiliated nonprofit holding more than ten million dollars with an additional nine million pledged. Matzzie has spoken about eventually assembling an effort of one hundred to two hundred million dollars every election cycle.
Ogles Was Vulnerable Long Before the Money Arrived
None of this means Andy Ogles would otherwise have won, and the case for outside money as the decisive factor is considerably weaker than his allies have suggested.
Ogles entered the primary carrying genuine liabilities. The Office of Congressional Ethics concluded in January 2025 that there was “substantial reason to believe” he had omitted or misrepresented required information in his disclosures and that his campaign may have accepted excessive contributions reported as personal loans, and it recommended a full Ethics Committee investigation. That was a preliminary finding rather than a criminal conviction, and Ogles has consistently denied wrongdoing. He told reporters in May that the Justice Department returned his cellphone, which he took as a signal that the separate federal investigation had ended without charges. But the material was available to his opponents, and it had been in circulation since a Nashville television investigation first raised questions about the loan in November 2023.
He had also drawn sustained criticism for statements about Muslims and about homosexuality, including a post he later deleted while attributing it to a staffer.
Most decisively, his district no longer existed in any recognizable form. Tennessee Republicans redrew the congressional map this year to strengthen the party statewide, and the new 5th District retained only about seventeen percent of the previous version, stretching from Memphis along the Mississippi River toward the Kentucky border before dipping into Middle Tennessee. Roughly four in five of his voters had never had a congressman named Andy Ogles. Hatcher, a veterinarian and dairy farmer who had served as the state’s agriculture commissioner, was well suited to that new electorate and carried endorsements from Governor Bill Lee, former Governor Bill Haslam and former Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue.
Ogles was not abandoned financially, either, and the coverage suggesting he faced outside money alone is incomplete. The Freedom Caucus Fund spent approximately seven hundred eighty thousand dollars on his behalf. He was outspent, not unarmed.
So the accurate claim is narrower than the one his defenders are making, and it is still substantial. A renewable-energy-backed political committee identified Andy Ogles as an opponent, spent roughly two million dollars against him, and watched him lose. It had previously spent against two other Republicans who pushed to end the industry’s tax credits, and both of them lost as well. It has spent to protect a Republican it considers cooperative. And the people running it have said publicly that creating political consequences—and making other lawmakers take notice—is part of the point.
Those facts do not require exaggeration to be alarming.
This Isn’t Really About Solar Panels
It would be easy to turn this into an argument about whether renewable energy is good or bad, and that argument would miss everything that matters here.
Renewable-energy companies have every right to participate in political life, and so do oil companies, pharmaceutical manufacturers, labor unions, trial lawyers, defense contractors, banks and cryptocurrency firms. They employ people, they invest enormous sums, government decisions directly determine whether their businesses survive, and their executives retain the same constitutional rights as everyone else. A clean-energy strategist quoted this spring, Chris Moyer of the firm Echo Communications Advisors, argued that the industry needed to learn to play hardball and “instill fear” so that anyone considering an unfavorable vote would think twice. He does not work for the committee, but he was describing the same theory of politics its founders act on, and he was describing something every well-financed interest in Washington has attempted at one time or another.
The concern is not that an industry has opinions. The concern is what happens when financial power becomes concentrated enough that an industry can reliably demonstrate to elected officials what will happen to their careers if they vote the wrong way. There is a meaningful difference between telling politicians you will support the ones who agree with you and constructing a system in which every member of Congress understands that a policy vote could summon millions of dollars into their next primary. The legal mechanisms may be entirely legitimate, and the democratic implications still deserve examination.
The Bigger Question for Congress
Consider the position of a Republican member of Congress reading the results this week.
You watched what happened to Chip Roy, and you may fairly conclude that the money had little to do with it. You watched what happened to Ralph Norman. Then you watched roughly two million dollars land on Andy Ogles in a district he barely recognized, and you watched him lose to a challenger you had never heard of. Perhaps you represent a district where solar manufacturers, battery plants or wind projects employ hundreds of people. Perhaps legislation is coming that would further restrict those incentives, and perhaps you genuinely believe the subsidies are bad policy.
Nobody has to call your office. Nobody has to threaten you or offer you anything, and no one will ever be able to point to a conversation that took place, because none will have taken place. The incentive already exists, and it works on you whether or not the spending would actually have changed any of those outcomes. That is what makes electoral deterrence so much more efficient than lobbying. The possibility of consequences shapes behavior without anyone ever requesting a particular vote.
Ogles said as much himself on Nashville radio during the campaign, arguing that the effort against him was designed to make an example that would have a chilling effect on conservatives in Congress. He may have lost for a dozen reasons that had nothing to do with solar money. That does not make him wrong about the message other members received.
Reading Between the Lines
The headline says Charlie Hatcher defeated Andy Ogles in a Republican congressional primary, and that headline is accurate.
Reading between the lines reveals considerably more. Ogles had directly challenged the legislation containing the renewable-energy industry’s most valuable federal incentives, and he had helped force a phaseout that pulled the industry’s federal support forward by the better part of a decade. A political committee financed by solar executives, former federal energy officials and a cryptocurrency billionaire identified him as a target, spent more than both campaigns combined, and ran advertising built around conservative political identity rather than the policy dispute that motivated the spending. He lost, alongside two other Republicans the same committee had targeted, and the committee’s founders described the pattern as a retribution tour with more names still on the list.
Maybe redistricting was decisive. Maybe his controversies finally caught up with him. Maybe Republican voters in a district that was eighty percent new to him simply preferred a farmer they could talk to at the county fair. Those explanations are not mutually exclusive with anything written here, and I suspect all of them are partly true.
But Washington does not need to determine which factor moved the final six percentage points. Politicians only need to see what happened, and they have seen it.
Political power has never been measured only by how many officials agree with you. Sometimes it is measured by how many look at what happened to someone who crossed you and quietly decide they would rather not be next.
On The Craig Bushon Show, we don’t just follow the headlines… we read between the lines to get to the bottom line of what’s really going on.
And when we read between the lines of Andy Ogles’ defeat, the question is not simply why one Tennessee congressman lost his job. The question is whether Washington just received a two-million-dollar warning, and whether it was listening.
Sources: Federal Election Commission filings; Congress.gov (H.R. 191, 119th Congress); U.S. House Office of Congressional Ethics report and findings, January 2025; E&E News by POLITICO; Axios; Washington Examiner; Fox News Digital; CBS News; Roll Call; Nashville Banner; Tennessee Lookout; AdImpact advertising records; published summaries of the clean-energy tax provisions of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Editorial Disclosure: This article is commentary and analysis based on publicly available campaign-finance records, congressional records, election results and published reporting. References to political spending or industry influence do not allege illegal coordination, bribery, corruption or other unlawful conduct by Charlie Hatcher, the Invest in Tomorrow Coalition, its donors, Andy Ogles or any other individual or organization unless expressly supported by an official finding. Independent political expenditures are lawful when conducted in accordance with applicable campaign-finance law. Where this analysis draws conclusions from document
