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As the White House and viral influencers push misleading info about solar, New York says the facts show the clean energy source and agriculture can thrive together.
In rural areas across the U.S., solar power opponents keep leaning on the argument that utility-scale arrays are gobbling up valuable farmland. But plenty of evidence proves that’s just not true, and now, New York is tackling the misinformation head-on.
After the Trump administration accused the state of fast-tracking solar farms on prime farmland, New York leaders fired back last week, saying that renewables “empower our farmers to keep their land in use and in their family, while avoiding the threat of permanent conversion or abandonment.” That’s because farmers can lease a plot to solar developers and return it to agricultural use at the end of the array’s life, as the state officials explained in their 11-page letter.
“A recent study by Cornell found that the overwhelming majority of farmers who received solar lease payments used that income to continue or even expand farming on their land, not to exit farming or scale back operations,” the leaders wrote. “Discouraging or inhibiting property owners’ ability to independently make choices about what they can and cannot do with their land can cause financial harm and undermine fundamental property rights.”
The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority has more proof that solar and farming can work hand in hand, and outlined all that in a major guidebook it released last year. Sheep and cattle are munching below panels on several New York farms, the guidebook notes, and the state has zoning rules and protections in place to preserve undeveloped land.
New York’s pushback squares with the findings of a recent report from the Solar Energy Industries Association. That study shows solar farms currently take up a mere 0.13% of New York’s roughly 13,000 square miles of federally designated prime farmland, a stat that resonates across the country. Solar covers just 0.07% of all U.S. farmland, according to SEIA. That’s three times less than golf courses and six times less than suburban development.
And yet solar panels, not cul-de-sacs, are the focus of a particularly potent campaign from upstate New York influencer Alexandra Fasulo. Fasulo has amassed more than a million followers across TikTok and other social platforms, where she’s constantly posting videos that inflate solar’s threats to agricultural and undeveloped land. Similar sentiments are being spread on social media by John Rich. He’s one half of the “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy” guys, and was recently hired by the White House to advocate for landowners on a national scale.
These and other anti-solar advocates often ignore the good that the clean energy source can do for farmers nationwide. In California’s Central Valley, for example, years of drought have led hundreds of thousands of acres of agricultural land to go fallow. Economics and water availability have driven farmers to stop growing there, but they can still make money and hold on to their land by leasing their plots to solar developers.
Plus, as New York’s guidebook points out, farming is still happening alongside solar installations. I recently visited an Illinois solar farm where sheep were grazing underneath and around panels — an arrangement that the sheep’s owners love because they don’t have to maintain expansive pastures back at home. Meanwhile, researchers have found that tomatoes, saffron, and other crops can thrive below panels, and so can native plants.
That’s not to mention the climate benefits of ditching planet-warming fossil fuels, which are driving droughts, floods, and other weather disasters that are legitimately threatening farms in the U.S. and beyond.
Trump’s coal crusade has real-world consequences
The Trump administration keeps checking items off the coal industry’s wish list — with dire consequences for Americans’ health and wallets.
Over the past year and a half, the federal government has used its emergency powers to keep coal plants from shutting down and pledged $850 million to prop up existing coal facilities or build new ones, Jeff St. John reports. It’s also weakened regulations meant to protect air and water quality, and paved the way for more coal mining in the U.S.
Americans are already suffering the fallout, as Kari Lydersen reports from Indiana. The Department of Energy has forced two aging coal plants there to stay open — a move that is costing plant owners millions of dollars that could soon be passed on to utility customers. Meanwhile, the rollback of federal regulations around coal ash means the toxic byproduct of coal burning will continue to threaten water supplies in the state and beyond.
More data highlights gas stoves’ dangers
Federal funding clawbacks stopped a group of scientists from fully studying gas stoves’ impacts on people with asthma, but they still produced some pretty profound results.
Back in late 2024, researchers from Case Western Reserve University received $18 million from the U.S. EPA to replace gas stoves with electric models in 1,200 Ohio homes whose residents have asthma. Although the grant was canceled a few months into the Trump administration, some people still got their electric stoves — and their asthma symptoms significantly improved.
Gas stoves are risky even for those without asthma. Mixed in with the methane the stoves burn is the cancer-causing carcinogen benzene, along with other toxic pollutants. Those dangers even prompted Colorado to require that gas stoves come with a health warning label — until a federal judge blocked enforcement of the rule shortly after it was implemented.
Big money for fusion: Commonwealth Fusion Systems raises another $1 billion from investors, bringing its total funds raised to $4 billion as it seeks to commercialize nuclear fusion technology. (Canary Media)
Courtroom confessions: The Trump administration admits in court documents that it canceled $7.6 billion in clean energy for 16 states solely because those states voted for Democrat Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. (Associated Press)
A road map for cleaner factories: It can be hard for factories to justify swapping fossil fuels for more expensive electric power, but a new report suggests that colocating renewable energy generation and reforming electricity rates can help make the case. (Canary Media)
EVs come back around: Global EV sales remained slow in the first three months of the year but rose 35% in the second quarter even amid lackluster growth in China and the U.S., the world’s two biggest EV markets. (International Energy Agency)
Inverters diverted: The Trump administration’s ban on new models of foreign-made inverters, which are critical for connecting renewable power to the grid, won’t impact projects now, but could delay development in the future. (Canary Media)
Electric or bust: California will soon offer hefty rebates to first-time EV buyers, betting on the fact that most drivers who make the switch from gasoline cars don’t turn back. (Canary Media)
Batteries have your back: Small, portable plug-in batteries can help people power critical appliances and devices during outages — and they’re cheaper and more flexible than whole-home systems. (Canary Media)
Restart reservations: A wave of setbacks continues to delay the reopening of Michigan’s Palisades nuclear plant, and suggests similar challenges may befall companies looking to restart other dormant facilities. (New York Times)
No major economy had previously received over half its electricity from solar across an entire month. Thank the mild, sunny spring weather, and batteries.
While the Trump administration is busy pointing out that the sun doesn’t shine at night, solar is breaking records around the world, including in sunny California.
Solar panels produced 51% of California’s electricity in May, the first time the clean energy source surpassed the halfway mark for an entire month. The data counts both large-scale installations and the state’s bounty of rooftop arrays.
This isn’t just a milestone moment for California; it’s a milestone for the entire world. Think tank Ember says the state is the globe’s first major economy to cross the 50% threshold. (Hungary, at 47% in June 2025, is knocking at the door, though it has a far smaller GDP.)
Solar’s rise has helped California cut polluting energy sources out of its power mix. Natural gas is the only fossil fuel that California power plants burn at appreciable levels, and solar is steadily squeezing it out of the system. Case in point: Solar outproduced gas not only during its record month of May but throughout every month in 2026 leading up to it, too.
Solar could not have reached these heights alone. It needed batteries to get here — and California has that crucial energy storage in spades. The California Independent System Operator, which manages most of the state’s grid, now boasts 16 gigawatts of batteries that can shift abundant midday solar production to later in the evening. It’s not uncommon for batteries to meet over one-quarter of the state’s electricity demand for a portion of the night.
All this solar and storage would have been hard to imagine a decade ago. Back then, in its best month — also sunny, mild May — solar accounted for just 17% of electricity. That number is well above the current national average for solar, but a far cry from 51%. CAISO’s battery fleet, meanwhile, was a measly 61 megawatts. So, storage has grown by, uh … 26,129% over the last decade, a number so cartoonishly large that I’m almost hesitant to print it.
Expect California to see more months break the 50% threshold soon. And in the coming years, expect more states and countries to cross the halfway mark, too.
No major economy had previously received over half its electricity from solar across an entire month. Thank the mild, sunny spring weather, and batteries.
While the Trump administration is busy pointing out that the sun doesn’t shine at night, solar is breaking records around the world, including in sunny California.
Solar panels produced 51% of California’s electricity in May, the first time the clean energy source surpassed the halfway mark for an entire month. The data counts both large-scale installations and the state’s bounty of rooftop arrays.
This isn’t just a milestone moment for California; it’s a milestone for the entire world. Think tank Ember says the state is the globe’s first major economy to cross the 50% threshold. (Hungary, at 47% in June 2025, is knocking at the door, though it has a far smaller GDP.)
Solar’s rise has helped California cut polluting energy sources out of its power mix. Natural gas is the only fossil fuel that California power plants burn at appreciable levels, and solar is steadily squeezing it out of the system. Case in point: Solar outproduced gas not only during its record month of May but throughout every month in 2026 leading up to it, too.
Solar could not have reached these heights alone. It needed batteries to get here — and California has that crucial energy storage in spades. The California Independent System Operator, which manages most of the state’s grid, now boasts 16 gigawatts of batteries that can shift abundant midday solar production to later in the evening. It’s not uncommon for batteries to meet over one-quarter of the state’s electricity demand for a portion of the night.
All this solar and storage would have been hard to imagine a decade ago. Back then, in its best month — also sunny, mild May — solar accounted for just 17% of electricity. That number is well above the current national average for solar, but a far cry from 51%. CAISO’s battery fleet, meanwhile, was a measly 61 megawatts. So, storage has grown by, uh … 26,129% over the last decade, a number so cartoonishly large that I’m almost hesitant to print it.
Expect California to see more months break the 50% threshold soon. And in the coming years, expect more states and countries to cross the halfway mark, too.
Panamint Capital broke ground on a $1.7 billion solar and storage project at the Calvert coal mine. The mine and an adjacent coal plant will stay online.
Construction is underway on a $1.7 billion solar and battery storage project in Texas that will turn existing coal mining land into a hub of clean energy generation.
Panamint Capital announced last week that it broke ground on the 1.2-gigawatt Big Rooter Power solar farm in Bremond, about halfway between Dallas and Houston. The project will use some of the land and assets from the adjacent Twin Oaks coal-fired power plant and Calvert surface coal mine, both of which will continue operating.
Panamint’s clean energy project will be among the largest in the nation — and, the developer claims, the biggest solar array ever built at a brownfield site in North America.
“We believe deploying new capacity at existing energy sites is the clearest way to benefit communities, ratepayers, and the environment alike,” said Apolka Totth, CEO of Panamint, a Nevada-based investment firm.
The giant installation will further boost Texas’ thriving solar sector, which this year is expected to generate more electricity than coal in the Lone Star State. The renewable resource is helping meet the state’s energy demand from data centers, manufacturing facilities, and rising air-conditioning use amid more frequent and extreme hot weather.
Panamint, which is backed by the private equity firm KKR, launched in 2019 with the goals of squeezing more life out of existing fossil-fuel infrastructure while building lower-emission facilities on the same sites. In 2023, Panamint acquired the 310-MW Twin Oaks coal plant and Calvert mine “with the express intention of leveraging the site’s existing characteristics to massively and rapidly expand generating capability at the lowest possible cost,” Totth said by email.
Work has started on the first phase of the solar farm, a 491-MW section that is set to go online in August 2028. Construction will begin in December on the remaining 658 MW, which could start producing power in August 2029.
The 10,000-acre Big Rooter site will also include 1.6 gigawatt-hours of battery storage and 20 miles of new extra-high-voltage transmission lines. The investment firm says it also has the infrastructure and natural gas access needed to build at least 800 MW of gas-fired generation, either for the grid or customers like data center developers.
“Big Rooter is a landmark project that reflects the scale of investment being made in America’s energy future,” George Hershman, CEO of Solv Energy, said in a news release. The contractor is building the site’s solar array, substation, and transmission infrastructure.
Big Rooter’s pairing with active coal operations makes it unique within the nation’s small but growing coal-to-solar subsector, which has mainly focused on putting panels on former mine lands and retired industrial sites.
The largest of these projects is the 186-MW Tilden Solar Project in southern Illinois, followed by the 111-MW Martin County Solar Project in eastern Kentucky, which both went online last year atop abandoned coal mines.
In Louisiana, the 240-MW Dolet Hills Solar Project is now being built on a former coal mine property. And the developer BrightNight is advancing the Starfire installation on remediated mine land in Kentucky.
In 2023, when BrightNight announced the Appalachian project, electric truck startup Rivian signed on as the anchor customer, with a 100-MW power purchase agreement. Starfire was initially envisioned as a roughly 800-MW project, but is now on track for 410 MW, with construction slated for late 2027 and planned operations in 2030.
“Earlier descriptions of a larger project reflected a broader long-term vision for the site, but as development has progressed, BrightNight has focused on the configuration that best aligns with current interconnection, permitting, site, and customer considerations,” a BrightNight spokesperson said by email. “We remain very enthusiastic about Starfire and its importance as a major redevelopment project on former coal mining land in Eastern Kentucky.”
Repurposing old mining sites for solar power has an obvious appeal. As opposition breaks out in rural areas over using prime farmland for solar — concerns stoked by Trump administration officials, including U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins — brownfield projects allow developers to sidestep those conversations and put sullied land to use. Doing so has typically proved more complicated and expensive than placing solar panels on flat or uncontaminated fields.
The 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law and 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act provided incentives to make it easier to finance clean energy installations on mine lands, while a $500 million Department of Energy program allocated funding for projects on current or former mines.
But last year, the Trump administration and Congress added more hurdles by phasing out tax credits for solar and wind energy, effectively ending the tax bonus for brownfield developments. And the administration scrapped at least one DOE mine-land award, for Mineral Basin Solar Power, as part of its sweeping cancellation of $7.6 billion in clean energy grants in the 16 states that voted for Democrat Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.
“The federal policy landscape for developing clean energy on mines has changed, but the opportunity hasn’t,” said Jessica Wilkinson, the North America renewable energy team lead for The Nature Conservancy, a global nonprofit.
“In many parts of the country, wind and solar are the cheapest forms of energy and are succeeding on economics alone,” she added. “And if building on mine lands, brownfields, and landfills has fewer community conflicts, they may be seen as very enticing.”
The nonprofit and its partners plan to develop 25 solar and battery storage projects on former mine lands that The Nature Conservancy manages in the Cumberland Forest, which spans parts of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. The first project, the 10-MW Wildcats Solar in Virginia, is expected to break ground this fall and could start delivering power to the grid next year.
Wilkinson noted that despite the federal pullback, states have continued to show support for what her group calls “mining the sun” projects. For example, Ohio and Colorado passed laws to incentivize renewable energy development on former industrial sites. And a handful of federal programs continue providing financial support for cleaning up coal mining areas — a crucial step for enabling future solar development.
“Communities still want to see these lands become economic engines again,” Wilkinson said.
Panamint, for its part, said it was able to secure clean energy incentives for Big Rooter Power before Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 4, 2025, repealing large swaths of the Inflation Reduction Act.
“We ordered long-lead time equipment such as transformers and circuit breakers well before last summer’s OBBBA, so we were largely insulated from those impacts,” Totth said.
She noted that Panamint is partnering with U.S. firms First Solar and Nextpower (formerly Nextracker) to procure domestically made solar modules and racks. Big Rooter is also located in an “energy community” — the Department of Energy’s term for brownfield sites and areas affected by coal plant and mine closures. For those reasons, the company says it will receive a federal investment tax credit worth 50% of total project costs.
Yet as Panamint begins installing millions of solar panels in Texas, it has no plans to wind down production at the neighboring Twin Oaks coal plant.
“Twin Oaks is an economically competitive unit that provides low-cost reliability to Texas ratepayers, and we see no reason for an early retirement,” Totth said. She added that the company is also investigating both expanding the Calvert mine area and building a terminal facility to rail in coal for continued operations.
As Totth sees it, the new solar array will produce enough carbon-free power to “negate” the coal plant’s emissions profile on an annual basis.
It’s an example of the all-of-the-above approach to energy in Texas. Despite the massive amounts of solar, storage, and wind the state has built, it continues to cling to fossil fuels.
As the California firm boots up a giant thermal battery system in South Dakota, fresh funds will help it build a second U.S. factory and more large-scale projects.
The startup Antora Energy just raised $550 million to build and deploy more of its heat-storing batteries for powering data centers and cleaning up factories.
On Thursday, San Jose, California–based Antora said it closed a Series C funding round co-led by climatetech investor G2 Venture Partners and the VC firm Eclipse, which backs manufacturing-focused startups. That brings Antora’s total corporate and project financing to around $1 billion, the company says, adding that the latest infusion will enable it to expand domestic production of its thermal batteries and accelerate the buildout of large-scale projects.
Eight-year-old Antora has likened its technology to an enormous toaster. Electricity runs through a large resistance heater to warm big blocks of solid carbon to extremely high temperatures for days on end. The blocks release controlled blasts of high-intensity light that can be used to either produce power on demand or generate steam for industrial processes.
Just two months ago, Antora began booting up its first commercial-size system: a 5-gigawatt-hour thermal battery at Poet’s biofuels plant near Big Stone City, South Dakota. The project will turn cheap wind energy into steam the plant needs to convert corn into ethanol, displacing some of the facility’s reliance on coal-fueled boilers.
Antora says this system will be one of the largest battery storage projects in the world when it’s fully operating later this year. Meanwhile, its San Jose manufacturing campus ranks among the country’s largest battery factories.
But the firm is hardly alone. Dozens of thermal energy startups in the U.S. and worldwide are developing systems with a variety of heat-trapping materials, including ceramic bricks, crushed rocks, and “stonelike” industrial waste.
The sector is expanding as countries are scrambling to meet power demand from data centers and industrial facilities — and struggling to limit the growing strain on grid infrastructure and household utility bills. In the U.S., high electricity costs have also hindered manufacturers from adopting cleaner, electrified heating technologies.
Energy storage systems in general can address those challenges by charging up when power is cheap and abundant, then dispatching that stored energy when it’s needed, such as by sending electricity to the grid during hours of peak demand. Thermal batteries can also deliver heat directly to factories to keep them from drawing lots of costly peak power.
“From factories to data centers, energy is the bottleneck to industrial growth,” Andrew Ponec, co-founder and CEO of Antora, said in a news release. “Antora has shown we can help break that bottleneck — delivering energy fast, at massive scale, with American innovation.”
The company launched its first pilot project in 2023: a 5-megawatt-hour system installed at a facility owned by the utility Wellhead Electric near Fresno, California. Months later, Antora raised $150 million from corporate and venture investors to scale up thermal-battery production at the San Jose factory, which it has expanded into a three-building manufacturing campus.
Antora built over 200 battery modules for the South Dakota storage system. But the project is notable for more than its technology. Antora is also pioneering an electricity tariff, designed with the local utility Otter Tail Power, that rewards Antora for charging up during periods of surplus local renewable energy production. The idea is to improve the bottom line for thermal energy systems while also ensuring they benefit everyone on the grid. Antora said it’s working with utilities across the country to develop similar rate structures for future projects.
With the $550 million fundraise, Antora said it plans to build a second U.S. manufacturing hub and to start fulfilling its “growing pipeline of signed agreements” with some of the nation’s biggest data center operators and industrial companies, including biofuels and chemical producers and food and beverage manufacturers. The company declined to share more specific details.
“We’re in the process of developing many more projects, very similar to the Big Stone project [with Poet], and those projects span a variety of sectors and are sort of a similar size,” Justin Briggs, Antora’s co-founder and chief operating officer, told Canary Media in a May interview.
“We’re also developing projects in the power sector that would provide the ability for data centers to come online much faster than they otherwise would,” he said, noting that those systems could be anywhere from five to 10 times the scale of its 5-GWh system at the South Dakota ethanol plant.
“Our energy system is at an inflection point, and very few companies can meet soaring power demand,” Jake Tauscher, partner at G2 Venture Partners, said in the news release. “Antora is meeting that demand today. They’re deploying at scale, on budget, and on the rapid timelines customers need.”
Panamint Capital broke ground on a $1.7 billion solar and storage project at the Calvert coal mine. The mine and an adjacent coal plant will stay online.
Construction is underway on a $1.7 billion solar and battery storage project in Texas that will turn existing coal mining land into a hub of clean energy generation.
Panamint Capital announced last week that it broke ground on the 1.2-gigawatt Big Rooter Power solar farm in Bremond, about halfway between Dallas and Houston. The project will use some of the land and assets from the adjacent Twin Oaks coal-fired power plant and Calvert surface coal mine, both of which will continue operating.
Panamint’s clean energy project will be among the largest in the nation — and, the developer claims, the biggest solar array ever built at a brownfield site in North America.
“We believe deploying new capacity at existing energy sites is the clearest way to benefit communities, ratepayers, and the environment alike,” said Apolka Totth, CEO of Panamint, a Nevada-based investment firm.
The giant installation will further boost Texas’ thriving solar sector, which this year is expected to generate more electricity than coal in the Lone Star State. The renewable resource is helping meet the state’s energy demand from data centers, manufacturing facilities, and rising air-conditioning use amid more frequent and extreme hot weather.
Panamint, which is backed by the private equity firm KKR, launched in 2019 with the goals of squeezing more life out of existing fossil-fuel infrastructure while building lower-emission facilities on the same sites. In 2023, Panamint acquired the 310-MW Twin Oaks coal plant and Calvert mine “with the express intention of leveraging the site’s existing characteristics to massively and rapidly expand generating capability at the lowest possible cost,” Totth said by email.
Work has started on the first phase of the solar farm, a 491-MW section that is set to go online in August 2028. Construction will begin in December on the remaining 658 MW, which could start producing power in August 2029.
The 10,000-acre Big Rooter site will also include 1.6 gigawatt-hours of battery storage and 20 miles of new extra-high-voltage transmission lines. The investment firm says it also has the infrastructure and natural gas access needed to build at least 800 MW of gas-fired generation, either for the grid or customers like data center developers.
“Big Rooter is a landmark project that reflects the scale of investment being made in America’s energy future,” George Hershman, CEO of Solv Energy, said in a news release. The contractor is building the site’s solar array, substation, and transmission infrastructure.
Big Rooter’s pairing with active coal operations makes it unique within the nation’s small but growing coal-to-solar subsector, which has mainly focused on putting panels on former mine lands and retired industrial sites.
The largest of these projects is the 186-MW Tilden Solar Project in southern Illinois, followed by the 111-MW Martin County Solar Project in eastern Kentucky, which both went online last year atop abandoned coal mines.
In Louisiana, the 240-MW Dolet Hills Solar Project is now being built on a former coal mine property. And the developer BrightNight is advancing the Starfire installation on remediated mine land in Kentucky.
In 2023, when BrightNight announced the Appalachian project, electric truck startup Rivian signed on as the anchor customer, with a 100-MW power purchase agreement. Starfire was initially envisioned as a roughly 800-MW project, but is now on track for 410 MW, with construction slated for late 2027 and planned operations in 2030.
“Earlier descriptions of a larger project reflected a broader long-term vision for the site, but as development has progressed, BrightNight has focused on the configuration that best aligns with current interconnection, permitting, site, and customer considerations,” a BrightNight spokesperson said by email. “We remain very enthusiastic about Starfire and its importance as a major redevelopment project on former coal mining land in Eastern Kentucky.”
Repurposing old mining sites for solar power has an obvious appeal. As opposition breaks out in rural areas over using prime farmland for solar — concerns stoked by Trump administration officials, including U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins — brownfield projects allow developers to sidestep those conversations and put sullied land to use. Doing so has typically proved more complicated and expensive than placing solar panels on flat or uncontaminated fields.
The 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law and 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act provided incentives to make it easier to finance clean energy installations on mine lands, while a $500 million Department of Energy program allocated funding for projects on current or former mines.
But last year, the Trump administration and Congress added more hurdles by phasing out tax credits for solar and wind energy, effectively ending the tax bonus for brownfield developments. And the administration scrapped at least one DOE mine-land award, for Mineral Basin Solar Power, as part of its sweeping cancellation of $7.6 billion in clean energy grants in the 16 states that voted for Democrat Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.
“The federal policy landscape for developing clean energy on mines has changed, but the opportunity hasn’t,” said Jessica Wilkinson, the North America renewable energy team lead for The Nature Conservancy, a global nonprofit.
“In many parts of the country, wind and solar are the cheapest forms of energy and are succeeding on economics alone,” she added. “And if building on mine lands, brownfields, and landfills has fewer community conflicts, they may be seen as very enticing.”
The nonprofit and its partners plan to develop 25 solar and battery storage projects on former mine lands that The Nature Conservancy manages in the Cumberland Forest, which spans parts of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. The first project, the 10-MW Wildcats Solar in Virginia, is expected to break ground this fall and could start delivering power to the grid next year.
Wilkinson noted that despite the federal pullback, states have continued to show support for what her group calls “mining the sun” projects. For example, Ohio and Colorado passed laws to incentivize renewable energy development on former industrial sites. And a handful of federal programs continue providing financial support for cleaning up coal mining areas — a crucial step for enabling future solar development.
“Communities still want to see these lands become economic engines again,” Wilkinson said.
Panamint, for its part, said it was able to secure clean energy incentives for Big Rooter Power before Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 4, 2025, repealing large swaths of the Inflation Reduction Act.
“We ordered long-lead time equipment such as transformers and circuit breakers well before last summer’s OBBBA, so we were largely insulated from those impacts,” Totth said.
She noted that Panamint is partnering with U.S. firms First Solar and Nextpower (formerly Nextracker) to procure domestically made solar modules and racks. Big Rooter is also located in an “energy community” — the Department of Energy’s term for brownfield sites and areas affected by coal plant and mine closures. For those reasons, the company says it will receive a federal investment tax credit worth 50% of total project costs.
Yet as Panamint begins installing millions of solar panels in Texas, it has no plans to wind down production at the neighboring Twin Oaks coal plant.
“Twin Oaks is an economically competitive unit that provides low-cost reliability to Texas ratepayers, and we see no reason for an early retirement,” Totth said. She added that the company is also investigating both expanding the Calvert mine area and building a terminal facility to rail in coal for continued operations.
As Totth sees it, the new solar array will produce enough carbon-free power to “negate” the coal plant’s emissions profile on an annual basis.
It’s an example of the all-of-the-above approach to energy in Texas. Despite the massive amounts of solar, storage, and wind the state has built, it continues to cling to fossil fuels.
The Trump admin is propping up the aging coal fleet despite the financial and environmental costs — and also making far-fetched plans to build new coal plants.
The Trump administration seems to be doing all it can to give the coal industry everything it wants. Those efforts may not succeed, but they could keep the dying industry on life support, and soak U.S. citizens with the financial and environmental costs of doing so — unless legal challenges compel it to change course.
The National Coal Council, an advisory group that includes executives from coal mining companies and major U.S. utilities, met with Trump administration officials last week and delivered 19 recommendations. One of its key requests is for the government to issue grants and loans to build the first new U.S. coal plants in over a decade. But the industry also seeks intervention to keep existing coal plants running, including federal government power purchase agreements and the suspension of environmental protections.
Trump administration officials were on the same page. “There’s no road for a great, prosperous America without saving the coal plants we have and doing everything we can to remove barriers that can open up the possibility to expand our coal fleet,” said Energy Secretary Chris Wright.
Already, Wright’s agency has committed to invest $850 million in existing or new coal facilities and has used emergency authority to force coal plants on the verge of shutting down to keep running indefinitely. The Trump administration has also issued executive orders that free plants from regulations for air pollution and coal ash, lift restrictions on coal mining, and open coal leases on 13 million acres of federal lands.
As EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin told attendees, “Many of the items that were on your wish list are now done.”
Overall, the aim is to halt the coal industry’s ongoing decline in the face of cheaper and cleaner alternatives to provide electricity, said Ted Kelly, director and lead counsel for U.S. clean energy at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund. EDF is one of several environmental groups and a handful of state attorneys general challenging the administration’s environmental rollbacks in court.
Coal has fallen from supplying nearly half the country’s electricity in 2011 to just 15% in 2024, but it rose slightly last year amid increased power demand and rising natural gas prices.
The Trump administration is “openly admitting that it’s their goal to increase profits and increase operations of fossil fuel in any way these companies want, without the interests of ratepayers or Americans at large in mind,” Kelly said.
The administration has plenty of tools at its disposal to achieve those goals — particularly when it comes to keeping old coal plants online past their planned closure. But certain other goals, like building new coal plants, will prove much harder to achieve.
New coal plants are the most far-fetched item on the coal industry’s wish list, but that’s not stopping the Trump administration from bankrolling such projects.
In June, the U.S. Department of Energy announced plans to spend about $425 million under the 1950 Defense Production Act to retrofit and support 13 existing coal-fired power plants it deems vital to national security. It also directed about $100 million for the engineering and design of two new coal plants: a 1.2-gigawatt facility in Alaska and a 1.6-gigawatt plant in West Virginia.
But that federal contribution is a drop in the bucket for coal plants of that size. According to reporting from CNN, based on an analysis prepared for the Wyoming Energy Authority, it would cost $10 billion to build the West Virginia plant and $8 billion for the Alaska facility, assuming both use carbon-capture technology as currently planned. Those totals are roughly twice the cost of building equivalent natural gas power plants with carbon capture.
The electricity from those plants would, in turn, likely be far more expensive than competing alternatives such as gas, solar, wind, or batteries, said John Miller, a managing director and energy transition policy analyst at investment bank TD Cowen.
Utilities and independent power generation companies are “very happy to take federal money to extend the life” of aging coal plants, he said. But beyond the projects in Alaska and West Virginia, “nobody’s proposing to build new coal-fired power plants,” he said.
The newest major coal plant in America is the Sandy Creek facility, located in Texas and completed in 2013 — and it’s been offline since 2025 due to “catastrophic failure,” he said. The Texas grid operator reported last year that Sandy Creek is expected to be back online in 2027. Similarly, the Comanche 3 plant in Colorado, which opened more than a decade ago, has been offline since August 2025, and remains idle after missing a projected July restart date.
“It doesn’t seem within the realm of possibility that coal plants will open,” Kelly said. “But money has been allocated to that, and we could see the loss of taxpayer money before we come to that conclusion.”
More money could be wasted in attempting to restart coal plants that were purposefully shut down, he added. DOE last month offered $78 million to AES, the owner of the Warrior Run coal plant in Maryland, which shuttered the facility in 2024 but has recently explored reopening it to meet growing demand for power.
“That’s a plant that was shut down because it was not just uneconomic but extraordinarily uneconomic to run,” Kelly said, citing comments from the independent market monitor for PJM Interconnection, the regional grid operator for 13 states including Maryland, which protested AES’s restart plan.
Subsidizing its reopening “could not only cost a lot of money and increase pollution, but also interfere with the opportunity to have a better, more economic way to improve reliability and address system needs,” he said.
Building or reopening long-shuttered coal plants may be a stretch, Kelly said, but the administration has demonstrated that it is able to keep old, costly, and unreliable coal plants open past their planned closure dates.
Through July, the Trump administration has “preserved more than 13 GW of coal capacity that would have closed by now absent intervention,” according to a new report from the National Coal Council.
That tally includes just under 10 gigawatts of coal plants whose closure dates were voluntarily extended by their owners, as well as roughly 3.2 gigawatts of coal plants forced to keep running past retirement via Department of Energy emergency orders issued under Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act.
These interventions for coal plants in Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Michigan, and Washington state have slowed the pace of coal-plant closures. Only 2.6 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity shuttered in 2025, the lowest amount in the past 15 years, according to an April report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
The DOE could force more coal plants to stay online this year. In a February briefing paper, EIA tallied 6.4 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity scheduled to retire in 2026, or about 4% of the U.S. coal fleet. But “renewed or new emergency orders could affect retirements planned for this year as well,” it noted.
Indeed, environmental advocates have little expectation that the DOE will stop issuing stay-open orders.
“The Trump administration is going to continue to renew them until a court stops it,” said Tyson Slocum, director of the energy program at nonprofit watchdog group Public Citizen, citing the legal challenges brought by his group and others.
The first stay-open order to see its day in court will be that concerning the J.H. Campbell power plant in Michigan. Environmental groups and the state itself are seeking to undo the DOE’s orders, arguing that the agency has failed to prove that a true grid emergency exists — and pointing out that the utility Consumers Energy, Michigan regulators, and the regional grid operator have all determined that closing the plant would not threaten reliability.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit heard oral arguments on the case in May, and could issue a ruling as early as next month, Kelly said. “If we get a good decision from the D.C. Circuit, laying out what the standard is for these — and it clearly hasn’t been met in the case of Campbell — that can start to be used to start short-circuiting DOE using these 202(c) orders to keep plants online,” he said.
Meanwhile, the cost of keeping these coal plants open is mounting. The Sierra Club estimates that U.S. utility customers have paid a collective $415 million and counting in excess costs caused by forcing six coal plants and one oil- and gas-fired power plant open under DOE emergency orders. It could balloon further: Consultancy Grid Strategies has estimated that, if unchecked, DOE’s use of 202(c) emergency orders could increase energy costs by nearly $6 billion by 2028.
“It’s very clear this is not doing anything to lower energy costs,” said Patrick Drupp, the Sierra Club’s climate policy director.
In fact, many of the power plants under the DOE’s must-run orders “are not functional and costing lots of money to get functional and back online,” said Michelle Solomon, a policy analyst at think tank Energy Innovation who co-wrote a 2023 report finding that clean energy and batteries are a cheaper alternative to operating 99% of the U.S. coal fleet. “That means they are not contributing to reliability.”
Gutting Biden-era protections would help dirty plants run longer in the historically coal-centric state, despite big environmental risks.
Indiana — a state with a long history of coal mining and coal-fired power — has started undergoing a clean energy transition in recent years. It was among the top three states for solar installation last year, and more than a dozen coal plants have closed since 2010.
But the state government’s eager embrace of data centers and the Trump administration’s deregulation efforts might be shifting the needle back toward coal.
Last year, the U.S. Department of Energy issued emergency orders to keep two Indiana coal plants open, despite the grid operator saying it had an adequate supply of power. And now, two rules proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency could make it easier for aging coal plants to keep running.
On April 9, the EPA proposed a major rollback of regulations governing coal ash, which can contain heavy metals such as arsenic, lead, and mercury. The change would affect dozens of sites at more than 20 plants in Indiana, including areas where coal ash was dumped or scattered in decades past, as well as landfills and ponds holding ash.
Then on May 14, the EPA moved to gut Clean Water Act regulations requiring toxins to be removed from wastewater seeping out of coal ash repositories.
The proposals undercut specific Biden-era environmental protections that industry sources had asked the Trump administration to address in January 2025. In both cases, the companies would see their financial responsibilities reduced and find it easier to keep storing coal ash on-site as coal plants continue to run.
More than 100 environmental and consumer groups weighed in to vigorously oppose the proposals during public comment periods this spring and summer. But leaders say they still expect both rules to be finalized without substantial changes in coming weeks or months.
“This EPA is eradicating environmental and health protections and will make Americans sicker [and] poorer, and destroy irreplaceable water resources,” Lisa Evans, senior attorney for the environmental law firm Earthjustice, said in a news release. “And Trump’s EPA is doing this because the coal industry asked them to.”
The EPA wants to change the Effluent Limitation Guidelines under the Clean Water Act to exempt companies from having to treat contaminated wastewater that leaches out of coal ash dumps and into lakes or rivers, which in many cases are sources of drinking water. Such leachate often contains mercury, arsenic, lead, and other hazardous compounds. This undoes protections instituted in 2024 that required plants to retire if they can’t meet the new standards by the end of 2029.
“This has been a longstanding problem,” said Thom Cmar, a deputy managing attorney at Earthjustice. The Biden administration changes were “a huge deal,” he said. “It was finally forcing utilities to reckon with this significant contamination issue that had gone largely unaddressed for decades.”
Under the proposed rule change, only water that is intentionally pumped out of coal ash repositories would need to be treated; fluid that leaches out would go unaddressed.
About a dozen sites in Indiana could have leachate from coal ash that will be exempt from regulation by the proposed rule change, according to an EPA document. That would likely help the bottom line of these coal plants.
“Certainly to the extent that any of these sites are making decisions about how much more to invest and whether to continue to operate, anything that reduces costs is going to affect that decision,” Cmar said.
Mining and power plant industry representatives praised the move, which the EPA says will lower electricity prices and improve grid reliability.
“The AI and data center revolution is creating an electricity and baseload power demand that cannot be met under the overly restrictive policies of past administrations,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said of the proposed rule change.
As Cmar sees it, the agency is prioritizing the development of data centers over its historical mission, which includes protecting drinking water.
“EPA is, under this administration, pulling every possible lever when it comes to every possible environmental rule to try to keep coal plants running for as long as possible,” Cmar said.
While effluent from coal plants has been subject to regulation for decades, the Trump administration’s proposed rule change governing coal ash would significantly alter federal standards that took effect in 2015 and were updated during the Biden administration.
Indra Frank, coal ash adviser for the Hoosier Environmental Council, said the change would mean at least half the coal ash units in Indiana would face no federal regulation at all.
Indiana is believed to have millions of tons of ash that was scattered or dumped on or near coal plant sites with little recordkeeping or oversight.
Such ash repositories — known as “legacy ash” or coal combustion residual management units — were exempt from the 2015 federal coal ash rule, and faced federal oversight only thanks to 2024 updates adopted in response to legal action by environmental groups. An analysis by Earthjustice found more than 70 specific sites at 22 closed or operating power plants in Indiana that potentially have such coal ash.
Frank noted that at the Harding Street Station coal plant in Indianapolis, coal ash is in contact with groundwater in the floodplain of the White River, according to environmental groups’ analysis.
“To remove requirements from those units is just unthinkable,” Frank said.
As she sees it, the proposed rule change “really sets us back” to the days when coal ash was dumped in the state with little accountability or transparency — to the benefit of coal power producers.
In addition to removing oversight of coal ash dumped before the federal rules took effect, the EPA proposal weakens requirements for more recent coal ash repositories. It allows companies to leave coal ash in contact with groundwater, loosens monitoring requirements, and removes restrictions on the use of coal ash as fill material.
Indiana did not join an eight-state effort in June led by neighboring Illinois to oppose the rule changes, and instead asked the EPA for permission to run its own coal ash permitting program.
While states can demand stricter standards than the federal government through their permitting processes, environmental advocates say they are not hopeful Indiana will do so, given its history of favoring industry.
“It’s a total punt to the states because [the EPA is] saying, ‘We’re not mandating anything,’” Cmar said. “There’s a risk a state like Indiana would not require significant cleanup.”
The Town of Pines, on Indiana’s Lake Michigan shore, was declared a Superfund site and underwent a massive, expensive cleanup after the 2002 discovery that ash was causing dangerous pollution in drinking water wells.
A few miles away, about 2 million tons of coal ash are held back by aging metal seawalls that environmental and health advocates fear could eventually fail and release the toxic mixture into Lake Michigan — the source of drinking water for millions of people in the Chicago area. The 2024 updated rule would have forced the utility Northern Indiana Public Service Co., which owns the Michigan City coal plant, to monitor and clean up the ash; the revamped rule would relieve the utility of that responsibility.
The proposal “opens the floodgates for more Town of Pines situations across the country,” said Ashley Williams, executive director of the community organization Just Transition Northwest Indiana and a resident of Michigan City.
“It’s a dagger in the heart on an issue we as JTNWI have worked so hard on. It’s the reason I launched JTNWI, to bring visibility to what we saw as this invisible crisis,” she said.
“It’s just mind-boggling what EPA is proposing with the stroke of a pen,” she added. “That’s how residents have been treated. We’re sacrificed time and time again because corporations see us as disposable, history continuing to repeat itself.”
A just-issued national security ban appears to exclude existing inverters for solar and battery projects — but future models could face restrictions, experts say.
Citing national security concerns, the Trump administration has banned the import and domestic use of new power inverters made outside the United States. The move could throw sand in the gears of gigawatts’ worth of planned solar, wind, and battery installations — projects that make up the vast majority of new electricity being built in the country.
On Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission announced it had updated its “Covered List” to include “connected power inverters produced in foreign countries.” The list includes equipment and services considered to pose a threat to national security, meaning that these inverters “are generally prohibited from receiving FCC authorization to be imported, marketed, or sold in the U.S.,” the agency stated.
However, the ban currently applies only to future new models of inverters, not those already available in the market or being installed today — a distinction that could limit the immediate impact on the clean energy industry.
The FCC stated that its action was prompted by a “White House-convened Executive Branch interagency body with appropriate national security expertise,” which determined that foreign-made inverters, “regardless of the nationality of origin, “‘pose unacceptable risks to the national security of the United States or the safety and security of United States persons.’”
Inverters — devices that convert direct current electricity into alternating current suitable for transmission over power grids — are an irreplaceable component of utility-scale solar, battery, and wind power projects, home solar and battery systems, electric vehicles chargers, heat pumps, and other electricity systems.
The vast majority of inverters in use today are connected to communications networks, which puts them under FCC regulatory purview. And most inverters used in large-scale solar projects are built outside the U.S. — many of them in China, which has been the primary target of national security concerns.
The FCC’s new restrictions do come with that important caveat, though: They only “apply to new device models.” That qualification appears to exclude foreign inverter models that have previously won FCC approval.
The FCC also specified that the new restriction “does not impact a consumer’s continued use of devices they previously acquired,” or “prevent retailers from continuing to sell, import, or market relevant models approved previously through the FCC’s equipment authorization process.”
Those two statements have tempered some of the more drastic interpretations of the potential impact of the FCC’s announcement among energy industry market participants.
“In our world, investors are currently seeing this as kind of a non-event” due to this interpretation, John Miller, a managing director and energy transition policy analyst at investment bank TD Cowen, told Canary Media in a Wednesday morning email. “If either of those conditions were to change, this becomes a much bigger issue.”
This point was echoed by Julien Dumoulin-Smith, head of equity research for power, utilities, and clean energy at investment firm Jefferies, in a Wednesday morning statement. “[T]his has a minimal impact today. There seems latitude to continue to purchase existing inverter models on the market,” he wrote.
On the other hand, Dumoulin-Smith pointed out that any Trump administration steps to restrict new models of foreign-made inverters could create a “long, gradual shift in market share.”
Threats of the Trump administration targeting foreign inverters were first reported in late June by Reuters, which cited unnamed sources stating that a ban on Chinese-made inverters was in the works.
Last year, Reuters reported that technology experts investigating Chinese inverters had discovered communications devices that could be a security risk, citing anonymous sources. Later in 2025, Republicans in the House of Representatives wrote a letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick asking him to use the Commerce Department’s authority to “block future imports of Chinese equipment used in critical infrastructure nationwide.”
Chinese companies such as Sungrow and Chint Power Systems provide the majority of inverters for utility-scale clean energy and battery projects in the U.S., while U.S.-based Enphase Energy and Israel-based SolarEdge provide the majority of inverters for residential rooftop solar systems.
The FCC’s update targets any new inverters not made in the U.S., including those that U.S.-based companies produce in other countries. That could encompass inverters from other major providers to the solar market, such as Germany-based SMA Solar Technology and Austria-based Fronius International, as tracked by clean energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie.
If the FCC’s ban were to be expanded to include inverters currently being manufactured and sold for use in the U.S., the impact could be drastic. The U.S. built 50 gigawatts of new wind, solar, and battery capacity in 2025, more than any year prior, making up roughly 92% of new generating capacity. And the U.S. Energy Information Administration forecasts these trends will continue in 2026, with solar set to provide 51% of the new utility-scale electricity capacity, batteries 28%, and wind 14%.
In the immediate future, projects likely won’t have to abandon the inverters they’ve already purchased or plan to install, said Joe Shangraw, a solar research analyst at Wood Mackenzie. But he also cautioned that, as with any other industry, “eventually, currently approved products will become obsolete.”
That means inverter manufacturers will ultimately have to bring new products to market and submit them for FCC approval, at which time they’ll have to contend with the agency’s new rules. At that point, any inverters made outside the U.S. will be barred from sale and use unless they undergo a distinct conditional approval or waiver process, he said.
Shangraw also noted that the need to bring new products to the market could be accelerated if the federal government sets new requirements on cybersecurity, grid functionality, or other inverter capabilities.
“If that would require a significant hardware or software update, that would be something where you’d have to request some permissive change from the FCC, or ask for a totally new FCC ID” designating a new model of device for the agency’s review, he said. “So it’s certainly relevant and impactful — probably not in the next couple of months but in the next year or so.”
This growing uncertainty over the federal government’s classification of foreign-made inverters could increase industry interest in securing domestic inverter supplies, he said. On that front, “the storage space looks a lot healthier,” with companies such as U.S.-based EPC Power and Tesla operating significant domestic manufacturing capacity, and others such as Spain-based Power Electronics scaling up U.S. manufacturing.
Residential solar inverters are “in a good place,” Shangraw said, with SolarEdge, Enphase, and Tesla providing about 80% of the U.S. market needs. But the domestic manufacturing capacity for solar inverters for utility-, commercial-, and industrial-scale projects is less clear, he said, given that Chinese inverter makers hold about 60% of U.S. market share in that sector.
Large-scale solar developers could hope to earn waivers from the FCC on foreign-made inverters from non-Chinese companies such as SMA and Power Electronics, he noted. They could also anticipate expanded domestic manufacturing from U.S.-based Nextpower, which is acquiring the inverter and power conversion business of Spain-based Zigor and its U.S. subsidiary Apex Power; or from GE Vernova, which has opened an inverter factory in Pittsburgh and could expand capacity there, he said.
“The main thing is, we don’t know how impactful this is until we learn a bit more about the timeline for when these actual changes to the requirements” for existing inverters might occur that would “force companies to release new products,” he said. “I’d say if this was a hard deadline, and if there were no new imports allowed, we’d be in trouble.”
Despite Trump’s attacks, renewables are set for big growth over the next few years, a new Rhodium Group study says. Whether it lasts depends on some key variables.
So, how’s that clean energy transition going?
It’s the essential inquiry that drives anyone reporting on climate solutions, and it got considerably more difficult to answer after President Donald Trump returned to the White House. He’s done everything in his power (and some things that legally aren’t) to undercut the propulsive growth of renewables, which had accelerated under his predecessor. But real-world clean energy construction has kept rolling right along, policy setbacks be damned: The U.S. built 50 gigawatts of new wind, solar, and battery capacity in 2025, more than any year prior.
That achievement raises the possibility that the sheer strength of clean power technologies will carry the U.S. forward in its transition away from fossil fuels, despite the Trumpian interventions.
Now, we have a new glimpse into where this mess of positive and negative signals could be heading over the long term. The energy analysts at the Rhodium Group just released their annual “Taking Stock” report, which charts the likely trajectory of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions on the basis of factors including clean energy buildout, AI demand surge, America’s rise as a global oil and gas exporter, and the repercussions of the ongoing war with Iran.
The good news, for those in the clean energy camp, is that solar, wind, and battery construction is still on track to bust records through the end of the decade. The bad news: After 2030, all bets are off; the spectrum of plausible outcomes runs from clean energy maintaining record installations to new construction nearly drying up in the face of competition from natural gas plants.
Rhodium models a vast range of inputs governing the power sector and the broader U.S. economy, and assembles three distinct future scenarios. The high-emissions scenario reflects a world with higher prices for clean power and electric vehicles, and lower prices for oil and gas, for instance. The low-emissions scenario inputs more aggressive cost declines for low-carbon technologies, and higher fossil fuel prices. The middle option more or less splits the difference.
“Our goal with the scenarios is to form a reasonable bound around where emissions are headed,” said lead author Hannah Kolus, a senior analyst at Rhodium. “But we take no position on where within the range we might be falling.”
By 2030, Rhodium expects total carbon emissions to fall by 26% to 29% below the 2005 baseline; by 2040, the range swells from a 27% reduction (essentially flat emissions through the 2030s) to a 41% reduction.
In Rhodium’s 2023 report, which incorporated the effects of President Joe Biden’s recently passed Inflation Reduction Act, analysts predicted emissions would fall by 29% to 42% by 2030. The country could still hit the low end of those expectations even after Trump dismantled many of the policies that made those predictions possible. That’s something of a win, but it’s tempered by the impossibility of hitting Biden’s Paris Agreement pledge of 50% reductions by 2030.
The certainty of renewables growth through the 2020s derives from a tax policy quirk that benefits solar and wind developers.
Although Trump snatched away the solar and wind industry’s beloved tax credits, projects that officially commenced construction by July 4 can still avail themselves of “safe-harbored” tax credits if they wrap up over the next four years. Rhodium expects developers will complete around 50 GW of solar, storage, and wind annually during this time. That outlook holds steady even in the more conservative scenarios, although it’s worth noting the firm’s model might not capture the extent to which the Trump administration’s permitting blockades may thwart development.
Past the bonanza of the late 2020s, those supporting tax credits disappear for wind and solar, and the predictions diverge wildly. The 2030s will come down to a battle for power sector supremacy between renewables-plus-storage and natural gas.
“When you have tax credits, you push up on what’s possible,” Kolus said. “Without them, you let energy markets take over, and then it becomes really a matter of what does clean technology cost and what are natural gas prices — those are the two things that are really driving the divergence in outcomes after 2030.”
In Rhodium’s low-emissions scenario, the low-carbon sources continue to romp, reaching 53 GW of annual installations through 2040 while holding new gas plants to just 5 GW annually. In the high-emissions scenario, the inverted price dynamics elevate gas to 16 GW of annual deployments and suppress clean energy construction to just 3 GW per year. In the middle scenario, renewables fall to an average of 16 GW annually in the first half of the 2030s, then rebound to 45 GW for the second half; annual gas additions meanwhile sit at about 9 GW over the course of the decade.
That high-emissions case would be devastating to the clean energy industry: The plummet from 50 GW of annual construction to 3 GW would decimate the pace of industrial activity, slashing construction jobs, infusions to local tax bases across the country, and new clean power for the states and customers that want it.
Rhodium’s findings square with what I’ve heard while interviewing clean energy professionals: There’s a ton of building to do in the next four years, but anything beyond that is too far off to predict. The energy landscape post-2030 will hinge on who’s in the White House. If that person restores supportive policies, the outlook will shift radically once again.
In the meantime, there are a few reasons to be optimistic that clean energy will avoid the worst-case scenario.
First and foremost, solar, wind, and batteries have a yearslong track record of beating the expert predictions of how cheap they’ll get. Given a range of cost projections, this history would suggest you bet on the low end. That alone could stave off the more dour scenarios described in the report.
Then there’s the changing nature of the U.S. fossil fuel industry. The country has been shipping more and more of its natural gas overseas via liquefied natural gas terminals. So much new export capacity has been approved and entered construction that LNG exports will rise dramatically in any of Rhodium’s scenarios. So far, this growth has had a muted effect on domestic gas prices, because producers have extracted more each year in lockstep with new export demand. But if the industry hit a bust cycle and couldn’t keep pace, basic economics suggests the domestic price would surge as U.S. consumers compete with foreign buyers willing to pay far more. That could weaken the case for gas generation in the 2030s.
Another source of hope for the clean energy contingent is that the modeling may underestimate how fast battery storage will reshape the power sector.
Rhodium notes that storage meaningfully takes off only in its low-emissions case, when lots of new renewables are getting built. But Kolus acknowledged that the analysis focuses on picking the lowest-cost option for new power capacity, whereas developers may build batteries for other reasons. For example, a firm could opt for batteries because they are less polluting than gas combustion turbines, or because they can be built more quickly. Batteries have already appeared in many deals specifically serving demand for data centers, to help tech giants with their climate goals and bring AI computing online faster.
When batteries do arrive in large numbers, they reliably take market share from gas plants. Gas generation in California is plummeting now, because stored solar power is a much cheaper source of nighttime electricity than burning fossil fuels. The broader cleanup of the U.S. power sector, then, will hinge on how quickly other states go the way of California in making batteries a prime source for on-demand energy.
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