Solar tax credit not affecting refund

[EVNIII]

Installed solar in 2021, entered the cost, form 5695 calculates credit of 2,188, but if I do a sensitivity and change the cost/credit the refund doesn't change.  I'm not in AMT land, this year.

FWIW, my pre-filing Review passes with no issues. 

Any ideas?

[bosso3 · Accepted solution]

Try changing the solar cost amount paid to zero and see what happens.

You may be exceeding the maximum payment allowed, and thus hitting the maximum credit amount.

[RaifH]

Is the $2,188 solar credit appearing on Line 15 of Form 5695 or Line 16? The residential energy credit is nonrefundable, so if you have no tax due after your other nonrefundable credits, it gets carried forward. If it is on line 16, that means it is being carried forward.

[EVNIII]

Thank you.  I ran your experiment, zeroed out the 8,414 solar expenditure (2,188 credit), and the refund stayed the same.  Then compared the results. 

After a lot of tracing have deduced that the credit adjusts as necessary to meet my Tentative Minimum Tax (form 6251, line 9), and the balance is carried forward.  The calculations go through 5695, 8801, and Schedule 3, but the effect is just to enforce the 6241 min tax constraint. 

Ugh. No solar tax credit for me.  What confuses me is that I'd not heard this mentioned anywhere, and while my income is higher than average, approximately $300k, I would expect there are a lot of solar customers with even higher incomes and I assume they would have known and squawked about this.  

Thank you again for the good debugging strategy.