A solar plant in Mona, Utah. The U.S. Energy Information Administration says solar will account for just over half of new power generation that will get built in the U.S. this year.
Rick Bowmer/AP/AP
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Rick Bowmer/AP/AP
Despite the Trump administration’s wide-ranging attacks on renewables like wind and solar power, the clean-energy industry is on pace for record growth this year, according to government analysts.
The buildout of big solar and battery plants is expected to hit an all-time high in 2025, accounting for 81% of new power generation that companies will add to America’s electric grids, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) said in a recent report. Including wind projects, the share of new power capacity that’s expected to come online this year from renewables and batteries jumps to 93%, the EIA said.
The U.S. needs all the power it can get, because electricity demand is surging for the first time in decades, industry analysts and executives say. That means kickstarting development of nuclear power and geothermal projects, burning more natural gas and, in some cases, delaying retirement of old coal plants. But in the scramble for electricity, renewable-energy and battery plants are crucial, analysts and executives say, because they’re quick to build and provide electricity that’s relatively cheap.
“There is no doubt that the increased demand for electricity over the next decade, coming from data centers and advanced manufacturing, will continue to require vast amounts of renewable energy and batteries,” Andrés Gluski, chief executive of The AES Corporation, a power company that owns both clean-energy and fossil-fuel plants, told Wall Street analysts recently.
Still, the renewables industry faces potential upheaval. The Trump administration tried to withhold federal funding Congress previously approved for climate and clean-energy projects. Trump also ordered the government to temporarily stop issuing or renewing leases for offshore wind projects in federal waters. The Department of the Interior limited who at the agency can issue permits for renewable energy projects on public lands, which could slow permitting. And conservatives are pushing Congress to wipe out tax incentives for clean energy.
If the disruptions spread, companies could abandon plans to build new power plants. That could dampen economic growth and hamstring efforts to develop data centers for artificial intelligence, a priority of the Trump administration. In an interview that aired Sunday on Fox News, Trump declined to rule out the possibility of an economic recession this year.
“At a time when we’re all very concerned about energy abundance and this administration’s broad goal of re-establishing energy dominance, just the idea that we’d be constraining the build of new energy [infrastructure] really feels like it’s rowing in the wrong direction,” says Rich Powell, chief executive of the Clean Energy Buyers Association, whose members range from Amazon to ExxonMobil to Walmart.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum chairs the Trump administration’s National Energy Dominance Council. An Interior Department spokesperson, Elizabeth Peace, said in a statement that the agency supports renewable-energy development “where it makes sense while ensuring that all energy sources contribute to a reliable and affordable power grid.”
Electrical transmission lines run through grass lands to power Meta’s Facebook data center in Eagle Mountain, Utah. The data center is a complex of five large buildings each over four football fields long and totaling 2.4 million square feet.
GEORGE FREY/AFP via Getty Images/AFP
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GEORGE FREY/AFP via Getty Images/AFP
Demand for clean energy ‘is certainly not going away’
The clean-energy industry has exploded over the past decade. Solar, in particular, has accelerated. Meanwhile, growth in the wind industry has slowed because of problems ranging from inflation to pushback on siting projects.
The industry overall has boomed thanks to falling technology costs, federal tax incentives and state renewable-energy mandates. The market got another big boost in 2022, when President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which provided hundreds of billions of dollars in federal funding for clean-energy projects, among other climate investments.
Corporations like Amazon, Meta and Google have also played a role, signing contracts to buy ever-larger amounts of renewable energy.
“I expect that that will continue,” says Powell of the Clean Energy Buyers Association. “The demand is certainly not going away.”
Some big investors seem to take a similar view. Led by Trump supporter Steve Schwarzman, the investment firm Blackstone said in February that it raised $5.6 billion for its “energy transition” business, which in the past has invested in companies that work in the renewable energy industry. Also last month, Brookfield Asset Management agreed to buy a U.S. renewable energy business for more than $1.7 billion.
“Renewables will be the biggest beneficiary of growing electricity demand because they are the cheapest option, and [electricity buyers] will always absorb as much of the cheapest source of power before turning to more expensive forms of power,” Brookfield’s chief executive, Bruce Flatt, told Wall Street analysts in February.
Congressional Republicans have backed Trump’s pro-fossil fuel agenda. But a group of 21 GOP lawmakers recently called for Congress to preserve tax credits that support the renewable energy industry. “As energy demand continues to skyrocket, any modifications that inhibit our ability to deploy new energy production risk sparking an energy crisis in our country, resulting in drastically higher power bills for American families,” the lawmakers wrote to the Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Jason Smith of Missouri.
Wind turbines along a highway in Andrews, Texas.
Julio Cortez/AP/AP
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Julio Cortez/AP/AP
Key conservatives call for backing natural gas instead
Clean energy’s draw could wear off as Trump’s policies take effect, says Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. The Heritage Foundation produced a governing agenda called Project 2025 that aligns with many actions Trump has taken so far. Among its dozens of recommendations, the plan calls for Congress to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, which could eliminate tax incentives that lower the price tag for clean-energy projects.
“I think that what you’re seeing [right now] is people operating with the old prices” in U.S. power markets, Furchtgott-Roth says. “But I think that that might change.”
Rather than renewables and batteries, Furchtgott-Roth says natural gas is “the wave of the future for the United States.” After all, she says, the country has “an almost infinite supply.” The U.S. has huge reserves of natural gas, but its main component, methane, is a big contributor to global warming.
Natural gas fueled about 43% of America’s electricity last year, according to a report from BloombergNEF and the Business Council for Sustainable Energy. The country will almost certainly burn more gas to meet growing power demand, industry analysts say. Gas plants can produce electricity when it’s needed, which regulators say is becoming more important because large parts of the country are expected to face a growing risk of blackouts as coal plants retire.
“We are unabashedly pursuing a policy of more American energy production and infrastructure, not less,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Monday at an energy conference in Houston, where he touted the importance of natural gas, according to a copy of his prepared remarks. Wright downplayed the role of renewables and called climate change a “side effect of building the modern world.”
The natural gas-fired Bastrop Energy Center Power Plant in Cedar Creek, Texas.
Brandon Bell/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
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Brandon Bell/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
Executives say it will take years to build a lot of new gas plants
A problem with gas plants, though, is that the cost to build them has risen, industry executives say. Gas turbines are also on backorder, and that means companies can’t build plants fast enough to meet rising electricity demand in the next few years.
“Renewables and storage are ready now to meet that demand and will help lower power prices. Gas-fired generation is moving forward but won’t be available at scale until 2030,” John Ketchum, chief executive of NextEra Energy, told Wall Street analysts days after Trump’s inauguration. NextEra runs one of the world’s top renewable energy developers and also has a big natural gas business.
The EIA says solar will account for just over half of new power generation that will get built in the U.S. this year. So far, the Trump administration hasn’t targeted solar like it has the wind industry, and developers are moving ahead with projects, says Paula Mints, chief analyst at SPV Market Research, which tracks the solar market. But she says companies are nervous.
Sweeping tariffs from the Trump administration could increase costs across the U.S. energy industry, making it more expensive to build new power plants of all kinds, says John Hensley, senior vice president of markets and policy analysis at American Clean Power, a trade group.
And if Congress gets rid of clean-energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act, power prices for homeowners, renters and businesses would go up, and the country would build fewer clean energy projects, according to a study commissioned by the Clean Energy Buyers Association.
The result is confusion in the market, leading some businesses to rethink U.S. investments. Days after Trump’s inauguration, an Italian company called the Prysmian Group cancelled plans to build a factory in Massachusetts that would have supplied undersea cables for offshore wind projects. An Indian solar manufacturer, Premier Energies, recently told investors that it paused plans for a U.S. plant until it knows what will happen to federal tax incentives. And Aspen Aerogels, an American firm, stopped construction of a factory in Georgia where it planned to make components for electric vehicles, citing an “evolving environment.” In a recent report, Climate Power, an advocacy group, says more than 42,000 announced clean-energy jobs have been “threatened or eliminated” since Trump took office.
In the face of rising power demand, the last thing the country needs is to slow down clean-energy development, Ketchum told analysts in January.
“We can’t afford to take any options off the table,” he said.
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