Over the past year, the Trump administration and Congressional Republicans have waged a sweeping campaign against renewable energy, throwing a fast-growing industry into turmoil.
The administration has used federal agencies to try to slow or stop the development of wind and solar projects. And this summer, the GOP-controlled Congress voted to get rid of tax credits for renewable energy, threatening to drive up the cost of projects.
As a result of those moves, the United States is forecast to add a lot less power from renewables in the coming years than analysts previously expected, according to the International Energy Agency.
All this is occurring as electricity demand is rising faster than it has in decades. Some experts warn that limiting new power supplies could have broad economic consequences, including higher electricity costs and slower business growth. So far, it's unclear what the Trump campaign against renewables will mean for consumers or grid reliability.
The Trump administration "may not love renewable technologies, but they're going to need them to meet the data center demand [and] also maintain energy affordability for all consumers," says Pavan Venkatakrishnan, policy advisor at The Foundation for American Innovation, a technology-focused research group.
A White House spokesperson, Taylor Rogers, said in a statement that renewables drive up power prices. President Trump is trying to boost resources like natural gas, coal and nuclear power, Rogers said, in order to "lower energy prices, increase grid efficiency, and win the AI race." In a study this fall, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory said wind and solar projects, on their own, do not in general raise power prices.
With the Administration pushing to rein in renewables amid growing power demand, natural gas will likely be the big economic winner. Already the biggest source of U.S. electricity, natural gas generation is poised for dramatic growth by the end of the decade. Its continued dominance comes at a time when climate scientists have urged nations to sharply cut fossil fuel use to reduce climate pollution.
Trump is attacking renewables as power demand surges
For now, at least, clean energy is still booming in the U.S. The amount of electricity the country produces from big solar plants is projected to grow by about a third this year and by almost 20% in 2026, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said in a recent report. All told, the country is on track to add a record amount of power capacity this year from solar, wind and battery plants, according to American Clean Power, a trade group.
"It is not climate goals or imperatives primarily driving the need to build out renewables," Venkatakrishnan says. "It is literally, 'What are you able to get on the grid as quickly as possible?'"
The Trump administration has moved to derail the renewables industry using a multipronged attack across the federal government.
The Environmental Protection Agency has tried to terminate billions in grant funding to help low-income households and communities install solar. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management has targeted offshore wind projects with stop-work orders and legal maneuvers to strip companies of construction permits. And the Interior Department limited who at the agency can issue permits for renewable energy projects on public lands.
In a letter to Congressional leaders in December, nearly 150 solar companies said the Interior Department has created "a nearly complete moratorium" on project permitting.
"We feel it's good policy for government agencies to be supporting power generation of every stripe that wants to come online, as long as it's not damaging something," says Dan Shugar, chief executive of Nextpower, one of the solar companies that signed the letter.
The attacks on renewables are happening at a time when U.S. electricity demand is surging, in large part because power-hungry data centers are being built around the country. Electricity usage is expected to increase by an average of 5.7% annually over the next five years, according to Grid Strategies, a consulting firm. Over the past two decades, demand grew by less than 1% per year.
Renewables and batteries are critical to meet rising power demand, according to industry executives and analysts, because the projects can be built quickly and produce electricity that's relatively cheap. While wind industry growth has slowed in recent years due to problems ranging from inflation to local pushback on siting projects, solar has taken off.
"There can be talk about nuclear or other technologies. Those take years to build," Andrés Gluski, chief executive of The AES Corporation, told Wall Street analysts in November. AES owns both clean-energy and fossil-fuel plants. "So what is going to meet the majority of the demand? Well, this year, it is probably going to be 90% as [renewable energy] and batteries. It very likely will be next year, as well."
The Trump administration's attacks risk further weakening a renewables industry that may already be headed for a slowdown as power companies boost spending on natural gas.
'The golden age of power demand'
Big battery projects have been flooding U.S. energy markets in recent years, allowing companies to store electricity from renewables projects and deliver the power when it's needed most — like after sunset.
But with data centers increasing demand for around-the-clock electricity, power companies are ramping up investment in a resource they've worked with for decades: natural gas.
"We may still have a year or two where [renewables and batteries] are going to be the majority of additions" to U.S. electric grids, says Sophie Karp, managing director of utilities and alternative energy at KeyBanc Capital Markets. "But that's not because we don't need gas in this timeframe. It's just because it takes longer for this momentum to pick up and for major gas generation [projects] to come on the grid."
Orders for gas turbines have been accelerating since 2023 and are on pace to triple this year compared to 2024, according to Steve Piper, director of energy research at S&P Global Energy. As companies add more gas generation, growth in the country's renewable energy industry is expected to slow, Piper said in a recent presentation.
That doesn't mean power companies will walk away from renewables and batteries, industry executives and analysts say.
"The golden age of power demand is creating the need for all forms of generation," Michael Dunne, the chief financial officer at the power company NextEra Energy, said on a December call with Wall Street analysts.
It's still unclear how much families and businesses will have to pay to meet that growing demand. The loss of federal tax incentives could increase costs for wind and solar projects, and some state renewable energy mandates have been linked to rising power prices. Meanwhile, increased exports of liquified natural gas are expected to push up domestic gas prices, the Energy Information Administration said this summer.
ICF, a consulting firm, has said it expects residential retail power prices to increase between 15% and 40% by 2030.
"The biggest thing, both at kind of the local grid level but also at the national level, is how much transmission we're building, which is not very much," says Alex Trembath, deputy director of The Breakthrough Institute, a technology-focused research group. Transmission lines are the backbone of the electric grid, connecting power plants to local distribution systems that deliver power to homes and businesses. "That constrains the ability to get electrons around — to get electrons from where they're being generated to where they're needed," Trembath says.
How the country's power system evolves in the coming years could also have big implications for climate change. In a recent report, the United Nations said average global temperatures are on track to rise by about 5 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, compared to the pre-industrial temperatures of the mid-1800s. With that amount of warming, climate change impacts like more-extreme rainfall, hurricanes and heatwaves become much more damaging.
While natural gas creates less heat-trapping pollution than coal when it's burned, producing and transporting gas can release huge amounts of methane, a potent climate pollutant. So, a dramatic increase in gas generation to meet rising power demand could fuel a lot more warming.
However, Trembath says the scramble for electricity may also pave the way for cleaner technologies, like nuclear and geothermal, that could help drive down emissions.
"Not over the next five years," Trembath says, "but over the next 50 years."
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