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Europe’s largest wind energy company was brought to its knees last week by a market it helped create.
Ørsted, the Danish energy giant that constructed the first wind turbines in U.S. federal waters just five years ago, needs $9.4 billion to complete its two remaining U.S. offshore wind projects and to continue to be financially sound enough to build wind farms elsewhere — likely in places far away from the United States.
During its Aug. 11 earnings call, Ørsted blamed its funding needs on “adverse developments” in the U.S. market, referring to the political risk, red tape, and tax credit changes created in recent months by Trump administration policies. Ørsted’s investor presentation described these MAGA headwinds as “unexpected developments outside our control.”
The announcement follows a series of setbacks for foreign offshore wind developers that were once seen as essential to fulfilling the decarbonization goals set by the U.S. government and many Northeastern states.
In January, the U.K.’s Shell exited the now-defunct Atlantic Shores wind project slated for the waters near New Jersey, absorbing a $996 million loss. In late July, Norway’s Equinor announced a $955 million impairment from unexpected changes and delays to its Empire Wind project, which President Donald Trump tried — and failed — to cancel.
Though intensified by the current administration, the industry’s financial troubles began even before Trump took office. One year ago, Ørsted announced a $575 million impairment due in part to delays on its 704-megawatt Revolution Wind project near Rhode Island. Two years ago, it booked a more than $5 billion impairment from its scrapped Ocean Wind 1 and 2 projects off New Jersey’s coastline.
“‘Come to America and lose a billion dollars’ should be the headline of your article,” said Elizabeth Wilson, a wind energy expert and professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth College, in an interview with Canary Media.
Denmark, which owns half of Ørsted, is backing the new fundraising effort in which the company will issue new shares worth about 45% its total value. It’s a fallback plan resulting from Ørsted’s failure to sell part of its ownership stake in Sunrise Wind, a 924-megawatt wind farm under construction near Long Island, New York. The project is more than one-third of the way built and is slated for completion by the end of 2027, but no one wanted to buy into it at a workable price.
Selling off a stake of Sunrise Wind was always part of the plan; the proceeds were meant to cover a large chunk of its construction. Now that would-be buyers are avoiding Trump’s chaos, Ørsted is left footing the entire bill. The firm’s other active U.S. project, Revolution Wind, is 80% complete and is expected to be fully operational by the second half of 2026, the company announced during the call.
But despite assurances that both Revolution Wind and Sunrise Wind will be finished, even at a steep cost to the firm, Ørsted — according to Wilson — is unlikely to invest in American offshore wind again. Ørsted did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.
“What developers really need is market certainty,” said Wilson, who wasn’t surprised that Ørsted could not find a buyer for Sunrise Wind. Trump’s presidency has brought too much risk, she explained.
Trump issued an executive order on Inauguration Day that froze all offshore wind permitting and leasing pending a federal review. Seemingly safe at the time were eight projects, including Ørsted’s Sunrise Wind and Revolution Wind, that already had all their federal permits in hand. Of those fully permitted projects, the 2.8-gigawatt Atlantic Shores project off the New Jersey coast has since fallen apart. Two more are likely to be mothballed — MarWin near Maryland and New England Wind off the Massachusetts coastline — since they probably won’t qualify for the wind-energy tax credits that Trump’s July megabill sent to an early grave.
Trump did not kickstart the sector’s problems — he simply poured gasoline on the fire.
The financial struggles offshore wind developers faced in 2023 and 2024 were caused not by political headwinds, but instead by inflation, high interest rates, pandemic-related supply chain issues, and the U.S.’s lengthy approval process for new projects compared to Europe or Asia. Beyond Ørsted and Equinor, other foreign developers like BP and Avangrid also canceled or attempted to renegotiate contracts during this time.
By fall 2023, it was already clear that the industry would struggle to meet the Biden administration’s ambitious goal of building 30 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030 — a target that helped spark the rush of European investment into U.S. wind lease auctions and projects. Analysts at BloombergNEF predicted at the time that just 16.4 GW would be built by the decade’s end.
Soon after Trump took office, Barbara Kates-Garnick, a professor of energy policy at Tufts University, told Canary Media that America would fall short of 5 GW of offshore wind power generation — less than 20% of former President Joe Biden’s original goal. Now, with major European wind developers losing billions and looking for the door, reaching even that figure will be an achievement.
Canary Media’s “Electrified Life” column shares real-world tales, tips, and insights to demystify what individuals can do to shift their homes and lives to clean electric power.
Heard of Earth Day? Get ready for Sun Day.
On Sept. 21, a Sunday of course, thousands of people will gather across the U.S. to spread the message that the clean energy revolution is here. By harnessing the sun — whose thermal energy also gives rise to wind — instead of burning fossil fuels, we can all enjoy cleaner air, lower utility bills, and a host of other benefits.
The day of action is the brainchild of climate journalist and activist Bill McKibben and is being spearheaded by nonprofit communications lab Fossil Free Media. They and a coalition of dozens of advocacy groups are bringing people together on Sun Day to celebrate the progress humanity has made in advancing and adopting renewable energy — and to push for a faster transition away from fossil fuels.
Helping Americans understand all that clean energy has to offer is more urgent than ever, as the Trump administration continues to target renewables, rapidly phasing out tax credits for solar and wind, halting offshore wind development, and maligning battery projects.
Meanwhile solar and wind power are booming globally. And even in the U.S., more than 90% of new power capacity installed last year came from solar, wind, and batteries. Everywhere, the cost of building renewable power is plummeting, making solar and wind the cheapest sources of new electricity.
“We still think of photovoltaic panels and wind turbines as ‘alternative energy,’ as if they were the Whole Foods of power, nice but pricey. In fact — and more so with each passing month — they are the Costco of energy, inexpensive and available in bulk,” writes McKibben in his new book “Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization,” which shines a light on the growth of renewables.
“The general public just isn’t aware of how far clean energy has come,” said Jamie Henn, a longtime climate activist and now head of Fossil Free Media.
Individuals and groups have planned more than 150 community events around the country for Sun Day so far. In New York City, organizers are hosting a festival with informational booths, performances, and face-painting. Around Clemson, South Carolina, residents with homes powered by rooftop solar are throwing open their doors to public tours. In Moscow, Idaho, people will be able to test-drive their neighbors’ zero-emissions cars at an electric-vehicle fair.
“It’s going to be a beautiful day,” said Antonique Smith, a Grammy-nominated singer and actress who cofounded the nonprofit Climate Revival and has assumed the role of Sun Day ambassador.
Inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.’s organizing in churches for the Civil Rights Movement, Smith visits houses of worship to explain that there’s an alternative to the fossil fuel plants that spew cancer-causing pollution disproportionately in disadvantaged neighborhoods.
“Clean energy and solar are so important, especially to communities of color and poor communities,” Smith told Canary Media. “How wonderful is it that we have this solution? … It’s not a luxury anymore.”
At climate events, Smith often sings a slowed-down version of The Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun” to honor the power of activism and clean energy. Her rendition is also the anthem for the upcoming day of action, and she’ll be performing the song at Sun Day extravaganzas in Brooklyn and Times Square, she said.
Sun Day will also give people a chance to reflect on the risks of a rapidly warming world, according to the Rev. Fletcher Harper, executive director of GreenFaith, a global interfaith environmental coalition. GreenFaith is working with more than 30 partner groups, representing a couple hundred congregations, that are hosting Sun Day gatherings, including a climate-justice pilgrimage in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
“When you look at the impacts of climate change — dangerous levels of heat, drought that forces small farmers around the world off of land that sustained their families for generations, fires that destroy people’s homes, and floods from severe storms — it’s the destruction of the environment that creates enormous human suffering,” Harper said. “It’s just wrong. … And the crime is that it’s preventable.”
The fossil fuel industry, having peddled its products while knowing the existential threat they pose, is a candidate for “one of Dante’s inner circles,” he noted wryly.
Sun Day’s organizers aim to spark a widespread popular movement whose influence is felt long after the day of action.
“People power is just this incredible way to unlock progress more quickly,” Henn said. “And that’s what we need to meet the kind of climate targets that we have in place.”
With all of its economic and societal advantages, clean energy might be inevitable, but “we can’t let this take 40 years,” he noted. “We need it to happen over the next five to 10 years, [which] will require a real mobilization.”
Solar and wind projects are increasingly hitting resistance at the local level.
“We’re just getting completely outplayed,” Henn said. The fossil fuel industry has “invested in front groups [and] field campaigns” to spread misinformation through Facebook and organize people against clean energy, he noted.
Sun Day will bring together people who can call on local leaders, regulators, and representatives to deliver clean energy now. Indeed, Fossil Free Media is already helping build those local grassroots networks, said Deirdre Shelly, who’s leading organizing efforts for the big day.
Want to participate but not sure where to jump in? Start by checking out Sun Day’s map to see if an event is already scheduled in your area. If you want to plan your own shindig, organizers have pulled together a toolkit to help you realize your vision, be it a solar-panel show-and-tell, an e-bike parade, or a clean energy rally turned block party. You can also tap one of the dozens of climate, justice, and grassroots groups that are core partners for the day of action, including 350.org, EcoMadres, Sierra Club, Solar United Neighbors, and Third Act, to see if they’re looking for Sun Day volunteers.
“We definitely will need everyone to be a part of this fight,” Shelly said. “Join us for Sun Day.”
Eager to hear more about Sun Day and the meteoric rise of clean energy? I’ll be interviewing McKibben about both in our discussion of his new book, “Here Comes the Sun.” Register to join us on Wednesday, Aug. 27, at 2:30 pm ET — and bring your questions!
The U.S. is still on track to build a record amount of new solar capacity this year, even as the Trump administration works to obstruct renewables.
As it stands, the power industry is building more solar than any other type of power plant, which has been the case for several years running. Roughly 12 gigawatts of new solar capacity joined the grid in the first half of the year, and 21 gigawatts more are slated for completion by the end of the year, according to a recent survey by the federal Energy Information Administration.
Solar thus will contribute more than half of the expected 64 gigawatts of new power capacity additions this year. Adding in battery storage and wind installations, clean energy is on track to deliver 93% of new power-plant capacity this year, the EIA predicted in February. Moreover, 2025 could set the U.S. record for new power-plant construction, beating the 58 gigawatts added in 2002 at the height of a natural-gas plant boom.
Those facts reflect a set of hopeful trends: The U.S. is building power plants at a record pace; nearly all of those new plants will not emit carbon emissions; and, since renewables and batteries cost far less to operate than fossil fuel plants, they exert downward pressure on electricity costs. These are all good things to see at a time when demand for new power production is soaring — thanks to electrification, industrial growth, and an AI computing bubble — and consumers are grappling with steadily rising electricity rates.
Of course, these trends could prove short-lived, because the Trump administration is actively working to obstruct the buildout of clean and cheap energy.
This summer’s signature Republican domestic policy law targeted wind and solar with early termination of their tax credits, effectively raising the cost to deploy these types of power plants. The executive branch has sought to halt or inhibit offshore wind and renewable development on public lands. Simultaneously, the Trump administration is giving an artificial boost to fossil-fuel plants. The Department of Energy is invoking emergency powers to block the planned shutdown of the J.H. Cambpell coal-fired plant in Michigan, forcing customers to pay millions of dollars extra to preserve an outdated, uneconomical facility. Analysts fear the DOE could repeat this tactic with other uneconomic fossil-burning plants that are scheduled to retire.
Any clean power plants coming online this year were planned, permitted, and undergoing construction before Trump’s policy shifts took effect (though his officials have found ways to interrupt construction that was fully permitted, like the Empire Wind project off the coast of New York). In that sense, this year’s buildout offers the last snapshot of what it looks like when the electricity industry serves market demand with modern technologies absent active resistance from the U.S. government.
It’s still possible that momentum will carry the solar industry to another record year in 2026. Developers effectively need to start construction by the first half of 2026 to claim the full tax credit, and the administration recently tightened the longstanding tax rules on what counts as “starting,” further upping the pressure to get going. Historically, an impending tax-credit cliff incites a temporary rush to begin solar projects in time to qualify.
It will take a few years, then, for the Trump-era energy policies to fully remake the market landscape for solar. There’s little hope that the pace of gas-plant construction will match the current one for solar installations. Absent some reworking of U.S. energy policy, the country is heading for a time of decreasing power-plant construction just when we desperately need it to accelerate.
For years, anti-renewable-energy advocates have opposed solar and wind projects on the grounds that they take up too much land. Now those talking points, popularized by groups linked to the fossil-fuel industry, have made their way into a sweeping new directive from the Trump administration.
On Aug. 1, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum mandated that federal leasing decisions factor in “capacity density” for solar and wind projects.
His order defines “capacity density” as the amount of electricity a proposed facility is expected to produce, as a share of the maximum “nameplate” amount, divided by the site’s total acres. An appendix to the order shows that nuclear and combined-cycle gas plants rank highest on this measure, while renewables come in last.
The Interior Department will now have to consider the density measure in environmental reviews. With that in mind, the order questions whether the law allows any federal land use for wind and solar projects, “given these projects’ encumbrance on other land uses, as well as their disproportionate land use.”
Only a small portion of solar and wind projects are located on areas owned and managed by the U.S. government, but there is vast potential for development. A January 2025 report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory found that 1,300 gigawatts of solar and 60 GW of onshore wind could be cost-effectively built on public lands, and that significant deployment in those spaces would be needed to meet grid-decarbonization goals.
It’s unclear whether the order might also block some projects on private property if they require reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act.
The directive is yet another example of the Trump administration’s push to slow the development of solar and wind, which together with batteries will account for more than 90% of new utility-scale energy-capacity additions this year. But more broadly, it illustrates how the administration is elevating fossil-fuel-backed misinformation about land use into federal energy policy.
“This is the latest sign that the Trump administration is really just relying on political talking points to push back on renewable energy that have little or no basis in fact,” said Dave Anderson, policy and communications manager for the Energy and Policy Institute, a watchdog group that focuses on the fossil-fuel and utility industries.
Before “capacity density” became a factor in federal leasing decisions, anti-renewable-energy groups were using the argument to build local opposition to utility-scale clean-power projects across the country.
The battle over a now-approved solar project in central Ohio provides a case in point.
In November 2023, a group called Knox Smart Development held a town-hall meeting to stoke opposition to the proposed 120-megawatt Frasier agrivoltaics project.
Canary Media (then the Energy News Network) confirmed last year that one of the main funders of the group was Tom Rastin, former vice president of Ariel Corp., which makes compressors for the oil and gas industry. Rastin and his wife, Karen Buchwald Wright, who is the company’s board chair, also play large roles in The Empowerment Alliance, a pro-natural-gas group.
Steve Goreham, a policy advisor to conservative think tank The Heartland Institute, was one of the speakers at the 2023 event.
In addition to denying that climate change requires a shift away from fossil fuels, Goreham told people at the Knox County meeting that solar farms require much more land than nuclear, gas, and coal-fired power plants. He also focused on “power density” in a 2023 opinion piece for the conservative-leaning Western Journal, warning that “environmental devastation” will result from policies that aim to accomplish net-zero carbon emissions. Goreham repeated this land-use argument in a Real Clear Energy post in March.
A Heartland Institute policy brief released this spring also relied on information about the land areas needed for solar and wind energy to conclude that large-scale electricity production from those sources “requires substantial ecological damage and impact.” The institute’s funders have included Exxon Mobil, coal-mining company Murray Energy (now American Consolidated Natural Resources), and foundations supported by the Koch brothers.
Another speaker at Knox Smart Development’s town hall, a lobbyist named Mitch Given, had previously represented The Empowerment Alliance in a 2023 presentation to the Ohio legislature’s Business First Caucus. His slides on the “nonsense of turning corn fields into solar fields” compared 6,050 acres for an Ohio solar project to just 5 acres for a similar-sized combined-cycle gas power plant.
A 2024 rally against the Frasier agrivoltaics project then brought in Robert Bryce, a former Manhattan Institute fellow who spent an entire chapter of his 2010 book arguing that wind and solar energy are not green because of their land use and power density. The argument is also featured in an anti-solar video he released this month.
The Manhattan Institute has received funding from fossil-fuel interests, such as Exxon Mobil and organizations linked to the Koch brothers. The Checks and Balances Project, a pro-clean-energy watchdog group, has criticized Bryce multiple times for failing to disclose those links. Bryce did not respond to Canary Media’s request for comment for this story.
“Everybody needs to come to this debate with a full picture of who they’re talking to and why they’re saying what they’re saying,” said Ray Locker, executive director for the Checks and Balances Project. Companies in the fossil-fuel industry “have a vested interest in preserving their business,” so when they present renewable energy “as somehow dirty, then that furthers their interest.”
This month’s Interior Department order is not the only recent federal attack on clean energy based on the land-use argument. Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said that the agency’s longstanding Rural Energy for America Program would no longer fund large solar projects on “prime farmland,” a major shift for a program whose main use case has been helping farmers install solar energy.
Burgum’s order to the Department of the Interior is “really implementing an ideological agenda,” said Brendan Pierpont, director of electricity modeling at think tank Energy Innovation. In his view, the mandate’s definition of capacity density is an “absurd metric,” with multiple flaws.
Among other things, the capacity-density measurement does not capture the full picture of what it takes to produce electricity from a fossil-fueled or nuclear power plant.
The metric focuses only on the step where electricity is generated. A full life-cycle analysis would consider all stages for producing equipment, obtaining and transporting fuel, and dealing with waste. The Interior Department’s recent order is “entirely designed to make these [renewable] resources they don’t like look bad,” Pierpont said.
The definition of capacity density also fails to account for the fact that renewable projects can coexist with other activities, such as livestock grazing or farming certain crops, noted Matthias Fripp, global policy research director at Energy Innovation.
Additionally, land used for solar or wind energy can produce electricity for decades, he said, unlike fossil fuels, where the industry must “keep finding new land” for resource extraction. Researchers made a similar point in a 2016 study in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS One, which found the land requirements for coal-fired electricity could equal or exceed those for renewable energy within two to 31 years.
Anderson at the Energy and Policy Institute called the rationale for the Interior Department’s order “a red-herring argument to focus on just one of the impacts of different energy sources.”
Nowhere does the order address environmental and health concerns about mining for coal or uranium, drilling for oil and gas, or transporting and burning those fuels. Waste disposal, particularly for coal and nuclear plants, also poses a challenge.
Renewables “are obviously leaps and bounds ahead of fossil fuels in terms of their net benefits,” Anderson said.
Discover the best places to build new clean energy to maximize the benefits to people and climate.
In order to accelerate global decarbonization and run the world’s power grids free of fossil fuel power plants and their pollution, where new solar and wind farms get built matters. A lot.
To reduce air pollution and tackle the climate crisis faster, the best places to build new clean energy are where the electricity grid still depends on heavily-emitting fossil fuel power plants.
Brought to you by WattTime, with support from The Nature Conservancy and Project Drawdown.
The Trump administration has set up yet another roadblock for wind and solar power in the U.S. — one that will make it harder for clean-energy developers to qualify for federal tax credits before they expire next summer.
Treasury Department guidance released Friday puts new restrictions on the “safe-harboring” rules that have for decades guided whether solar and wind developers are considered to have “commenced construction,” a key milestone required to secure tax-credit eligibility.
The rules, which will go into effect on September 2, are likely to further slow the rollout of wind and solar power — two of the fastest-growing sources of energy in the country, both of which have been under siege by President Donald Trump since January.
Clean-energy industry advocates attacked the guidance as an improper use of executive authority that will make it harder for the U.S. to meet growing electricity demand and will further drive up electricity bills. But industry analysts noted that the new rules, though restrictive, could have turned out even worse.
Under the big new tax and spending law passed by Republicans last month, solar and wind projects must commence construction by early July 2026 to access tax credits.
For projects larger than 1.5 megawatts in size, Treasury’s new guidance eliminates one way for developers to prove they’ve started work: spending at least 5% of the total cost of the project by the deadline. That new restriction won’t apply to residential and commercial solar installations, so companies in that space such as Sunrun, Freedom Forever, SolarEdge, and Enphase, saw their share prices rise on Friday.
But it will apply to most other clean-energy developments, from community solar farms to massive utility-scale solar and wind projects. Starting in just a few weeks, projects larger than 1.5 megawatts will have only one option for proving they’re under construction: They must demonstrate that they are undertaking “physical work of a significant nature” on a continuous basis.
The test is not new, and project developers have relied on it in the past. But it is less straightforward than the 5% safe-harbor rules, creating uncertainty that could make it harder or more expensive for developers to lock down financing for a project.
“Unless you’re pretty far along, you’re not going to go build some roads and install racking overnight,”said Andy Moon, CEO and cofounder of Reunion Infrastructure, a company that manages clean-energy tax-credit transfers. “It’s not so easy to change your plans and accelerate something that fast.”
Clean-energy industry groups declined to speculate about how the changes would impact the hundreds of gigawatts of solar and wind projects now under development across the country. But these industries are already reeling under the much-shortened timeline for securing tax credits under last month’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act; previously, under the Inflation Reduction Act, developers had until at least 2032 to commence construction and thereby secure tax credits. Analysts have said the drastically shortened tax-credit window will cut clean-energy growth by more than half over the coming decade.
That’s a problem for a country facing rising demand for power for data centers, factories, and broader economic growth. Solar, batteries, and wind made up 96% of new capacity added to U.S. grids last year and will remain the primary option for new power in the next few years, given that there are five- to seven-year wait times for new gas turbines and even longer construction timelines for nuclear and geothermal power plants.
“This is yet another act of energy subtraction from the Trump administration that will further delay the buildout of affordable, reliable power,” Abigail Ross Hopper, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, said in a Friday statement.
Since Trump signed the megalaw in July, his administration has taken a host of anti-wind and anti-solar actions, including subjecting projects to byzantine Interior Department reviews, setting “capacity density” restrictions for projects on federal lands, and potentially halting already permitted wind farms both onshore and offshore.
Shortly after the law passed in July, Trump ordered the Treasury Department to review the safe-harbor rules. The directive came after pressure from the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus members in the House of Representatives, who were upset that the law preserved tax credits for wind and solar projects at all. In that same executive order, Trump also told Treasury to develop rules governing “foreign entity of concern” restrictions; those rules, which are still in development, could be even more disruptive to the industry.
“The Treasury Department’s decision to accelerate the phaseout of clean energy tax credits undermines the integrity of our energy grid and our legislative process,” Jason Grumet, CEO of the American Clean Power Association trade group, said in a Friday statement. “Congress explicitly chose to provide energy companies with one year to phase out tax credits to keep energy prices low while meeting growing power demand.”
Friday’s guidance came despite entreaties from Senate Republicans Chuck Grassley of Iowa and John Curtis of Utah, who negotiated the tax-credit amendment to the final bill. Though both senators voted for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which cleared the Senate by just one vote, earlier this month they placed holds on three of Trump’s Treasury Department nominees in an attempt to force the administration to negotiate a less harmful change to the safe-harbor rules.
Grassley’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday afternoon.
“Frankly, I think the intervention worked,” said Pavel Molchanov, a Raymond James analyst covering cleantech companies. “Treasury could have gone really far in the direction of making life difficult.”
Molchanov cited rules left unchanged in Friday’s guidance, such as the four-year window for projects that commence construction by July 2026 to complete their work to secure their tax-credit eligibility. “Imagine if they had said, ‘Oh, did we say four years? It’s actually two.’”
Similarly, the “physical work” requirements listed in Friday’s guidance are not outside the bounds of what a large-scale solar or wind project developer can reasonably take on over the next year, he said. Exemptions for extreme weather, permitting delays, and other obstacles to continuing work should shield developers from risks of being declared out of compliance with those requirements, he said.
“The good news is that it’s still almost 11 months until July 2026, so developers have plenty of room to make adjustments before starting construction,” Molchanov said. “From my perspective, it’s actually better than expected. But maybe my expectations were just so low to begin with.”
Jeff Cramer, CEO of the Coalition for Community Solar Access, a trade group that represents companies building smaller-scale solar and battery projects, decried the new guidance as a violation of the deal Republicans made in crafting the megalaw. But he also said that simply knowing the rules of the game is a help.
“I think the only good news is that there may now be less uncertainty,” he said. “The onus is now on the states to ensure that any projects that can meet that July 2026 deadline can do that.”
President Donald Trump’s crusade against wind energy is intensifying — and it could come with some serious costs.
As much as $317 billion in lost investment, to be exact, per new analysis from research firm Cleanview. That figure is based on the 790 projects totaling 213 gigawatts that developers plan to build in the years to come — all of which are at risk of delay or even cancellation under the administration’s policies.
To be clear, those figures represent the high end of what’s at stake — they’re based on what’s currently in the interconnection queue, and projects drop out of that process all the time for various reasons.
But if even a fraction of that investment is canceled or delayed, it will be painful for the regions that miss out on the tax revenue and jobs, with Texas, Illinois, and New Jersey standing to lose the most.
It would also be bad timing: Electricity demand is on the rise nationwide, largely due to the boom in AI data center construction. Delaying or blocking the buildout of gigawatts worth of wind projects when the U.S. is in the midst of an energy-supply crunch would drive up already-climbing power bills. Wind produced just over 10% of U.S. electricity last year.
And, of course, any slowdown in the construction of clean energy is a setback for efforts to transition the U.S. away from fossil fuels, a task that grows more urgent with the passage of every hot summer day.
Trump entered office in January with promises that not a single new “windmill” would be constructed during his second term. Though he’s not managed to carry out that vision in its most literal sense, he has certainly operated with its spirit in mind.
On his first day, he issued an executive order calling for an end to offshore wind leasing and a review of leases and permits for all wind projects. In the spring, Trump tried — and ultimately failed — to quash the Empire Wind offshore installation that had just begun construction near New York’s coast. After GOP lawmakers rammed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act through Congress, Trump signed the megalaw on July 4, mandating the swift phaseout of tax credits for wind (and solar) projects.
In recent weeks, his administration has stepped up its attacks even further and undertaken an all-out blitz on wind power, issuing a barrage of far-reaching orders that, at least in theory, could jeopardize every wind project underway in the country.
State leaders and clean energy groups across the country are pushing to build more wind and solar projects before the window to claim federal tax credits slams shut.
The new GOP megalaw rapidly phases out incentives for clean energy, years before the Biden-era tax credits were set to lapse. The shortened timeline is expected to slow the construction of wind and solar projects at a moment when states are grappling with soaring power demand that is raising both utility bills and greenhouse gas emissions.
Many local lawmakers and utility regulators were already working to modernize their grids and streamline energy permitting before President Donald Trump signed the budget bill last month. Recently, decision-makers in a handful of places have taken steps to expedite those efforts so that more large-scale renewables projects can qualify for the tax credits before they expire.
Under the megalaw, wind and solar farms must either start construction by July 4, 2026, or be placed in service by Dec. 31, 2027, to qualify for the full production or investment tax credits. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act previously allowed developers to access credits if they began construction either by 2033, or by the time the U.S. power sector cut emissions by 75% compared with 2022 — whichever came later.
For states, “The question then becomes, what can they do to try to maximize the benefits they’ll get from those [clean] technologies between now and then — the jobs, clean air, and power?” said Nathanael Greene, director of renewable energy policy for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
In Maine, state utility regulators have responded by fast-tracking plans to procure nearly 1,600 gigawatt-hours of renewable energy, so that projects can get started before tax credits phase out. Residential and community solar developers in California’s Orange County and Minnesota say they’re focused on installing as many solar arrays as they can, including by tapping into state and municipal incentives that still remain.
Meanwhile, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) has directed state energy regulators to conduct “a high-level review” of the budget law and its “specific impacts to New Yorkers.” However, clean energy developers in the state are calling for more specific actions to expedite wind and solar development, such as speeding up the yearslong process for issuing construction permits and improving coordination among state agencies.
For now, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) is the only state leader to issue an executive action to prioritize deployment of clean electricity projects in response to Trump’s budget law.
Earlier this month, Polis penned a letter that directs state agencies to “move quickly and secure success” for large-scale wind, solar, and battery storage resources, as well as community solar projects. The letter calls for eliminating “administrative barriers and bottlenecks” and “prioritizing expeditious review of projects as they come into the queue for state consultation and permitting.” It also raises the idea of invoking the Public Utilities Commission’s authority to override local permit denials.
“When we look at the new generation that is being built in Colorado, the vast majority of it is wind and solar,” Will Toor, executive director of the Colorado Energy Office, told Canary Media. “Getting as many projects as possible able to move forward on a timeline that allows them to receive those [tax] credits is very much in the interest of the state — not only for clean energy goals, but very much for reducing costs to ratepayers.”
Alana Miller, who leads NRDC’s climate and clean energy policy team in Colorado, said the governor’s letter “is a key first step and provides a lot of urgency at this specific moment.” Still, “There’s a lot to be seen how it plays out and how agencies actually implement it,” she said, noting that state legislative action could follow next year.
In Colorado and beyond, officials are largely waiting to outline more concrete plans until the Treasury Department issues its new tax-credit guidance, which is expected to tighten the rules on which projects can claim incentives. Policy experts say they’re watching closely to see how the leaders of other major energy-producing states, including Pennsylvania and California, step in to support renewables in their backyards.
In June, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) warned legislators that the House’s version of the budget bill — which proposed even deeper cuts to clean energy incentives than the final version — would undermine more than $3 billion in direct investment in Pennsylvania energy projects. The impact would be most severe on the “nearest-term energy sources,” namely wind, solar, and batteries, that are coming online to meet surging demand in the state, his letter said.
Shapiro has made building “next-generation power” a key priority as power-hungry data centers strain the state’s grid and drive up electricity costs. His sweeping six-part energy strategy released in January includes policy proposals to increase the amount of electricity that comes from renewable sources in the state, and to establish a “cap-and-invest” program that reduces carbon emissions while also lowering electricity bills.
In California, a leader on clean energy deployment, the industry is urging Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) to help blunt the megalaw’s impact on utility-scale wind, solar, and energy storage developments.
Five trade groups sent a letter last month asking Newsom’s office and state legislative leaders to create a “coordinated action plan” to address the shortened tax-credit timelines, as well as the Treasury Department’s forthcoming guidance. The groups proposed steps such as streamlining environmental reviews and making it easier to build projects on agricultural land.
Another measure that California officials could immediately take is to enable wind, solar, and batteries to access “surplus interconnection” at existing gas-fired power plant sites — a concept that state legislators are currently considering.
Gas power plants in California are running less often as the state works to slash its planet-warming emissions, Mike O’Boyle, director of electricity policy at Energy Innovation, explained in a recent opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times. That leaves gas plants’ transmission wires mostly unused. Wind and solar projects could use this existing surplus to immediately connect to the grid, rather than wait years for system upgrades.
A working paper by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, estimates that this pathway could allow California to cost-effectively integrate 24 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity by 2030. For context, the state currently has nearly 90 GW of total generation capacity.
Clean energy developers in every state will need all the bureaucratic fixes and outside-the-box solutions they can get in order to maintain momentum for the energy transition. Early estimates found that Trump’s megalaw could shrink new clean capacity additions to the grid by up to 62% over the next decade compared to the baseline scenario. By 2035, national average household energy bills could be $78 to $192 higher than if Biden-era policies remained in place, according to Rhodium Group.
“We still anticipate that clean energy will be built and will likely still be able to compete [with fossil fuels] despite the headwinds,” said Miller of NRDC. But the cost of electricity will be higher without the tax incentives.
The humble streetlight doesn’t look like a particularly attractive target for theft. But in Los Angeles, a mind-boggling 27,000 miles of copper wire connect those lights to the power grid — and thieves are tearing that wire out at an alarming rate. Public employees can’t keep up with repairs, leaving frustrated neighborhoods in the dark for months on end.
The sun-drenched city has recently discovered a promising new solution: It’s swapping out traditional streetlights for solar-powered versions that are not attached to the larger power system and thus have no copper wire to steal. Instead, the new lights are equipped with batteries that fill up on solar energy during the day and discharge it after dusk falls.
“It’s been tremendously successful,” said Miguel Sangalang, executive director and general manager of LA’s Bureau of Street Lighting.
While copper-wire theft isn’t a new plight for LA, it’s become more prevalent in recent years as rising prices have made it more lucrative to sell the stolen metal. In the last decade, theft and vandalism have jumped from representing just a few percent of the Bureau of Street Lighting’s service requests to 40% today, according to a spokesperson for the department. Since 2020, the city has spent over $100 million repairing such damage. On Reddit, residents complain of “pitch black” neighborhoods that feel unsafe.
The city isn’t about to replace all of its more than 220,000 streetlights with solar. So far, it’s only deployed around 1,100 of the new fixtures, and plans to install at least 400 more this fiscal year. The Bureau of Street Lighting is still figuring out its long-term strategy, but for now, it’s focused on rolling out solar lights where they can immediately do the most good: areas with lots of theft.
“[We’re] testing it in incremental steps,” Sangalang said. “But we see ourselves going into it much harder and much faster in the near future.”
Other U.S. cities are thinking along the same lines. Clark County, home to Las Vegas, began testing solar streetlights last summer after dropping more than $1.5 million over two years to fix vandalized lights. St. Paul, Minnesota, decided to install the city’s first solar streetlights this year, fed up after spending over $2 million in 2024 on repairs only for thieves to strike again days later. San Jose, California, which had about 1,000 streetlights out due to copper theft in early July, is currently planning a pilot, pending funding availability.
These are small-scale experiments, but they still reduce planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions by introducing more clean energy into major cities. One of the solar lighting companies that LA is working with estimates that deploying 10 of its sun-powered streetlights in Europe would cut carbon emissions by 60 metric tons over four decades — the same pollution footprint as seven flights around the Earth.
Inspired by a suggestion from a field electrician, LA began testing off-grid solar lights in 2022 with $200,000 in grants from the city’s innovation fund. In early 2024, the city rolled out its first concentrated, large-scale deployment of 106 solar lights in the Van Nuys neighborhood — a hotspot for theft that is located far from the Bureau of Street Lighting’s headquarters downtown.
“We’d spend two hours on the road trying to do a repair if we had to go back and forth,” Sangalang said.
The goal in Van Nuys was to create a “maintenance-free zone,” said a spokesperson for the Bureau of Street Lighting. It’s working: In a year and a half, the department hasn’t had to deal with a single instance of damage related to theft and vandalism. Among community members, “the sentiment continues to be that they’re great and that we need to see more of them in the city,” said LA Councilmember Imelda Padilla, a Democrat who represents Van Nuys.
With that track record, the city has since rolled out hundreds more solar lights in the Watts, Boyle Heights, and Historic Filipinotown neighborhoods.
“This is one of those things where, across the board, whether you care about the environment or not, lighting is the best deterrent to crime, right?” Padilla said. “It makes it so that families and single women and children can enjoy the Southern California weather late into the night.”
For the record, LA is also taking other steps to deter copper-wire theft, such as encasing wire enclosures in concrete, replacing copper with less valuable aluminum wiring, and standing up a special police task force.
What sets solar lights apart are their benefits unrelated to theft, Sangalang said: The systems cut the city’s energy bills and can stay lit during blackouts. Plus, they each take only about 30 minutes to install on average (after prep work), since the new lighting fixture, solar panel, and battery pack are often simply attached to an existing streetlight pole.
The big catch with solar streetlights has always been their up-front cost. According to the LA Bureau of Street Lighting, a single solar- and battery-equipped lighting unit can cost around $3,250 — a huge jump from the $300 to $500 price tag for standard equipment.
It’s not easy to sell city leaders stressed about budget shortfalls on the idea of spending thousands of taxpayer dollars replacing perfectly fine grid-connected streetlights with their solar counterparts. But copper-wire theft is completely upending the calculus.
A single repair to address copper theft can cost between $750 and $1,500, Sangalang explained, meaning that “in a place where I would have had to go repair two, maybe three times, the solar light itself would have paid for itself in that same time frame.”
Despite the momentum toward solar streetlights, infrastructure-scale deployment is still just beginning in the U.S., said Hocine Benaoum, CEO of Texas-based Fonroche Lighting America, one of the companies supplying LA with solar lights.
City governments in this country are often risk-averse when it comes to new technology. Fonroche, which was founded in France in 2011, lights highways and communities around the world, but its municipal customers in the U.S. typically insist on first trying out just a handful somewhere like the back parking lot of a public works building, he said. Once they find out that works, the lights often get tested on a slightly more public site like a dog park or a pickleball court before — finally — a city feels comfortable installing them on residential streets.
“We were lighting whole countries in Africa, highways, whatever,” Benaoum said with a smile. “And in the U.S., you meet with the city manager and public works, and they tell you, ‘OK, yeah, we love your product. Let’s put it in the dog park.’ So there are a lot of dogs that are happy with Fonroche in the U.S.”
In LA, Sangalang is gaining confidence in the technology, although sun-fueled fixtures don’t yet meet the city’s brightness standards for major streets. Other areas aren’t good candidates for solar lights because tall buildings block the sun for much of the day.
Off-grid solar lights also can’t support the EV chargers and telecom equipment that LA hooks up to grid-connected lights, according to the Bureau of Street Lighting. While Sangalang is considering the potential of solar-powered lights that also feed into the grid, he said that technology is less developed.
“[Solar lights are] a great tool in the toolbox for the larger system,” Sangalang said, “understanding that you must use different tools for different places.”
Alicia Brown, director of the Georgia Bright Coalition, wants people to know that the $7 billion Solar for All program is starting to bring affordable solar power to her home state — even as the Trump administration threatens to kill it.
With the $156 million Solar for All grant the coalition won last year, it’s installing no-cost rooftop solar for low-income homeowners and expanding a two-year-old pilot program that offers low-cost solar and battery installations for thousands more residences. It’s also planning to back community solar projects and is helping finance solar and batteries at churches that promise to use the cheap power to lower utility bills for disadvantaged households and provide shelter during grid outages.
Now this program and others being actively developed by state agencies, municipalities, tribal governments, and nonprofits that received Solar for All grants are in jeopardy. The Environmental Protection Agency, which administers the grant program, is preparing to send letters to all 60 awardees informing them that their funding will be terminated, according to news reports this week citing anonymous sources.
The National Association of State Energy Officials (NASEO), a group representing the state agencies responsible for managing a large chunk of Solar for All funding, also widely circulated an email warning that the EPA could be on the brink of ending the program.
“We do not have any additional details or validation of the news that has been reported,” NASEO President David Terry wrote in the email, which was shared with Canary Media. “Yet, the information received yesterday comes from a credible source.” (NASEO did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)
Cutting Solar for All funding would be a mistake, said Michelle Moore, CEO of Washington, D.C.–based nonprofit Groundswell. Over the next five years, the program promises to deliver more than $350 million in annual electric bill savings to more than 900,000 low-income and disadvantaged households — desperately needed relief in a time of high and rising utility costs.
And the more than 4 gigawatts of solar power the program aims to bring online, much of it backed up by batteries, could help utilities across the country meet growing demand at a time when the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress have undermined the policies supporting clean energy growth.
Groundswell is using its $156 million Solar for All grant to launch the Southeast Rural Power Program, open to municipal utilities and rural cooperatives across eight Southeastern states to develop more than 100 megawatts of distributed solar and battery projects.
Those projects could cut electricity bills in half and improve local resilience for more than 17,000 households. That’s a vital source of new grid capacity for a region facing unprecedented growth in demand for electricity, Moore said.
“This country is short on power right now. We need every electron we can get,” she said. Terminating Solar for All at this stage would equate to “this administration raising electricity bills for more than 1 million families. Now is not the time.”
Solar for All, an initiative of the Inflation Reduction Act’s $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF), had its funding frozen in January as part of a broader attack on Biden-era climate and environmental programs.
In the face of court orders declaring these freezes unlawful, in February the EPA reopened funding for Solar for All and other congressionally mandated programs. Since then, Georgia Bright hasn’t experienced any difficulty accessing its Solar for All funds, Brown said.
But because of the way that reimbursement is structured under the program, the coalition and other Solar for All awardees need the EPA to continue to make funds available to cover ongoing expenses. “It’s not like there’s $156 million in our bank account,” she said.
Other EPA-administered programs haven’t fared so well. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin is still blocking $20 billion in funding for the broader GGRF program and is appealing federal court orders to release the money. EPA is also facing a class-action lawsuit demanding it release the billions of dollars in environmental justice block grants it terminated.
Solar for All has been something of a bright spot amid these roadblocks, Brown said. In recent months, grantees like Georgia Bright have begun rolling out their first rounds of funds.
In May, Vermont’s Department of Public Service announced $22 million in grants for low-income-housing solar projects. Last month, Michigan’s Office of Climate and Energy announced eight projects, ranging from an agrivoltaics installation near a municipal airport to solar panels on a multifamily building serving low-income seniors. And the Nevada Clean Energy Fund, a nonprofit green bank, last month announced its first project — nearly $1 million to help a sober living facility in Reno install rooftop solar.
“It seems like this program has bipartisan support — it certainly does in Nevada — because there’s a big need for it. Reducing energy costs is important, particularly in our economic environment,” said Kirsten Stasio, CEO of the Nevada Clean Energy Fund. “If an affordable housing owner needs to pay more for their utility bills, it means they are paying less on supportive services for their tenants.”
The EPA’s initial funding freeze was concerning, said Chris Walker, head of national policy and programs for Grid Alternatives, the country’s largest free solar installation nonprofit and prime contractor for more than $300 million in Solar for All grants. Still, “we were confident we were on a solid legal footing to continue the work, and continued staffing and contracting processes, with a bit of nervousness about what might be coming,” he said.
Now, as Grid Alternatives prepares to launch its first Solar for All projects, he said, “We’re in capacity-building mode and compliance mode.”
Rumors that the EPA plans to terminate Solar for All have been swirling for months, said Jillian Blanchard, vice president of climate change and environmental justice at Lawyers for Good Government, a nonprofit coalition of attorneys, law students, and activists that’s challenging other EPA funding cuts.
“There are many, many Solar for All grantees doing everything in their power to move things forward,” she said. “But EPA is not making it easy.”
Cutting off Solar for All grants would almost certainly draw a legal challenge, given that the funds were awarded by the EPA last year under contracts that cannot be terminated without cause.
“If leaders in the Trump administration move forward with this unlawful attempt to strip critical funding from communities across the United States, we will see them in court,” Kym Meyer, litigation director for the Southern Environmental Law Center, told Canary Media. “We have already seen the immense good this program has done on the ground, and we won’t let it be snatched away to score political points.”
Complicating matters, Blanchard said, is the megalaw passed by Republicans in Congress last month, which officially repealed statutory authority for the GGRF and rescinded unspent funds from the program. The law, however, does not claw back obligated funds, she said.
An EPA spokesperson declined to say if the agency intends to terminate Solar for All grants, but told Canary Media in a Tuesday email that “with the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill, EPA is working to ensure Congressional intent is fully implemented in accordance with the law.”
Blanchard said that language in the megalaw clearly indicates that the intent of lawmakers was to retain obligated spending from the GGRF. “If EPA does this unilaterally, it will be pulling a complete bait and switch on the American people, increasing utility bills, and flouting congressional intent,” she said.
Terminating Solar for All funds wouldn’t just harm the communities burdened by high and rising electricity prices, said Sachu Constantine, executive director of nonprofit advocacy group Vote Solar. It would also hurt utilities struggling to meet rising electricity demand.
A growing body of research shows that low-income neighborhoods and communities of color face greater risks of power outages and grid failures, partly due to decades of underinvestment in the grids that serve them. Solar for All “targets frontline underinvested communities, which means it’s targeting weak spots on the grid,” Constantine said. “It’s infrastructure in the right places for the right people.”
And solar and batteries are the right technology to solve the problem, he contended. Solar panels and lithium-ion batteries are not only the cheapest and fastest-to-deploy sources of new grid supply; they’re also capable of lowering peak electricity demands that drive the lion’s share of utility costs, by serving as virtual power plants.
“When we don’t have to deploy the most expensive peaker [power plants], when we can better utilize the distribution lines, we’re saving the cost for everyone,” he said. “We’re taking the entire system and making it run better.”
That’s a role Georgia Bright wants to play with its community-benefits solar program, Brown said. Last month, the Georgia Public Service Commission approved a long-term resource plan from Georgia Power, the state’s biggest utility, which has been criticized by environmental and consumer advocates for extending the life of aging coal-fired power plants and opening the door to building up to 8.5 gigawatts of new fossil gas–fired turbines.
But the plan also includes a pledge from Georgia Power to develop a pilot program that will seek up to 50 megawatts of solar and battery capacity from customers. Georgia Bright worked to get that program included in the utility’s plan, Brown said — and it plans to use its community-benefits solar program to help churches, nonprofits, businesses, and multifamily housing properties install the solar and batteries to participate in it.
“I think we’ll hit the 50 megawatts pretty quickly — and the commission is open to raise that limit,” she said. “They recognize if you need to serve all this new load, you can’t wait on natural gas plants that have a five-year backlog to get a turbine.”
Groundswell’s Southeast Rural Power Program offers similar fast-start options for utilities struggling to meet growing demand for power, Moore said. “It’s a straightforward way to work across the Southeast in very diverse states with very diverse needs.”
SECO Energy, a rural electric cooperative in Florida, is one of the potential partners for Groundswell’s new program. About 80,000 of SECO’s roughly 250,000 customers are low and moderate income, and “Solar for All checks a lot of the boxes for us to serve that segment of the population,” SECO CEO Curtis Wynn said.
“We’re in a high-growth area, and during the last two or three days, the heat index was over 100 degrees — it puts a strain on our system,” he said. “If there’s a way we can use grant dollars to buy down the cost of generation today that’s going to remain stable in the next 20 years in a rising-cost environment, that’s a huge advantage.”
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