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Small solar-panel kits that can be assembled as easily as an Ikea bookcase and plugged into a regular residential outlet could be coming soon to New Hampshire and Vermont. Lawmakers and advocates in both states are preparing legislation that would make these plug-in solar systems accessible to residents who don’t have the space, money, or inclination to install a larger, conventional rooftop array.
“It’s really about energy affordability,” said Kevin Chou, cofounder of Bright Saver, a nonprofit that advocates for the adoption of plug-in solar. “It’s about access for people who wanted solar but haven’t been able to get it.”
These systems — also called “portable” or “balcony” solar — generally come in kits that even a novice can put together at home. They plug into a standard outlet, sending the power they generate into a home’s wires, rather than drawing electricity out.
Unlike rooftop arrays, plug-in systems don’t generate enough power to meet all, or even most, of a household’s needs, but they offset enough consumption to pay for themselves within four or five years, even without incentives like tax credits or net metering, Chou said. Models now on the market start at about $2,000. If the equipment becomes more popular and prices come down, the payback period could get even shorter.
“You don’t need any subsidies to make this work,” Chou said. “The pure economics are so attractive, it’s one of the best investments you can make.”
These systems have taken off in Germany, where more than a million have been deployed, but have been much slower to catch on in the United States.
Recently, though, the idea has gained traction in the U.S. In March, Utah lawmakers, working with Bright Saver, unanimously passed a law authorizing and regulating the equipment, making it the first state to lay out the welcome mat for plug-in solar. Last month, a Pennsylvania state representative announced plans to introduce a similar law, and Bright Saver is having conversations with lawmakers in about a dozen additional states about possible legislation, Chou said.
All of the legislative proposals follow the same principles as Utah’s law: They would define a new class of small, portable solar systems, and establish the right of households to use the systems without submitting applications or paying fees to the state or utilities. They also define safety standards for the systems, including that they be certified by Underwriters Laboratories, or UL, a company that sets standards and provides safety certifications for a wide range of products.
At the moment, two manufacturers make plug-in solar systems with inverters that have been certified as complying with safety requirements, Chou said. Because the market for portable solar is so new, however, UL has not developed standards for entire systems. Bright Saver and other plug-in solar supporters have been working with the company on this issue and expect a standard to be released in the next month or two, Chou said.
Other startups are waiting in the wings, hoping to launch their own products next year, once the questions about UL standards are resolved, he added.
“Bottom line: Once Vermont’s legislation passes, there will be existing manufacturers ready to sell into the state immediately, along with new entrants waiting for additional UL clarity, who are also preparing to launch,” Chou said.
Supporters hope the benefits of plug-in solar — lowered electricity costs, freedom to make personal energy choices — will help the idea gain support even in states not known for their embrace of renewable energy, and despite federal efforts to slow or stop renewable energy progress. The early and robust acceptance of the technology in deep-red Utah has bolstered this vision.
“I am optimistic that, as in Utah, it’s going to be seen as a commonsense way to just get out of the way and let people do good things,” said Ben Edgerly Walsh, climate and energy program director at the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, an organization backing Vermont’s expected plug-in solar bill.
In New Hampshire, a swing state known for its “live free or die” libertarian streak, Democratic state Sen. David Watters also thinks this dynamic might work in the technology’s favor, despite the state’s historical lack of support for measures boosting solar use.
“We’re really kind of stuck in a rut with anti-renewable-energy sentiment in the House,” Watters said. “This seemed like something that would fit into the ethos of people being able to make individual choices.”
Watters, a member of the state Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, worked with local advocacy group Clean Energy New Hampshire to author a rough draft of a plug-in solar bill based on Utah’s new law. It will be refined in the coming months and formally introduced in the legislature in January.
Notably, Watters said, his proposal would not stop homeowners associations or landlords from imposing their own rules on members and tenants.
“Their authority is not taken away,” he said. “For this state, that’s crucial.”
In Vermont, two Democratic state legislators — Sen. Anne Watson, chair of the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Energy, and Rep. Kathleen James, chair of the counterpart committee in the House — are championing a plug-in solar bill based on model legislation drafted by Bright Saver. Watson is particularly excited for the potential of plug-in solar to reach low-income residents and renters.
“This creates access for folks who might otherwise not have the authority to put something on their roof, or who might need something a little more flexible,” she said.
Vermont, a decidedly left-leaning state, has long welcomed renewables. The state’s governor, Phil Scott, however, is a Republican who has shown reluctance to spend public money on clean energy. Further, the legislature lost its veto-proof Democratic majorities during the last election, so prospects for forward movement on energy and climate issues have been dimmed this year.
However, Watson has already heard a lot of positive feedback from her fellow lawmakers, even though the bill won’t be taken up until the legislature reconvenes in January. Indeed, several colleagues came to her with similar proposals before learning she was already working on it. She has also had initial conversations with the Scott administration and found it willing to consider the idea, she said.
“While I can’t say they are necessarily for it, the reception I’ve received so far is that they are open and interested in learning more,” she said. “I am hoping for broad support.”
Revolution Wind can officially resume. But unlike the last time President Donald Trump ordered construction on an offshore wind project to pause, relief came through the courts rather than politicking.
A federal judge on Monday ruled in favor of the Danish energy giant Ørsted, whose $6.2 billion Rhode Island project was halted last month by the Interior Department without, as the judge put it, any “factual findings.” A similar stop-work order that froze construction on New York’s Empire Wind was lifted by Trump officials in May following one month of heavy lobbying — and reported backdoor deal-making — by lawmakers and diplomats.
Judge Royce Lamberth, a Reagan-era appointee serving the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, granted a motion for a preliminary injunction sought by Revolution Wind to resume turbine construction while its complaint against the Interior Department works its way through the courts, which could take years. The project is 80% complete, and Ørsted released a statement on Monday saying workers will restart “as soon as possible.”
Monday’s decision marked a victory for Revolution Wind and could have broader legal ramifications for Trump’s ongoing war against offshore wind energy, given that several projects are still tangled up in litigation. And, if the recent ruling is any indication, the Trump administration may have a hard time convincing judges that walking away from already-approved wind farms makes sense.
“The Trump Administration’s erratic action was the height of arbitrary and capricious, and failed to satisfy any statutory provisions needed to halt work on a fully approved and nearly complete project. It was not a close call,” Connecticut’s Attorney General William Tong, a Democrat, stated in response to Lamberth’s decision.
Twelve other high-profile lawsuits are actively challenging Biden-era approvals for eight U.S. wind farms, according to the research firm ClearView Energy Partners. Traditionally, the government defends projects it’s already greenlit. Legally, however, it can pick and choose which approvals to stand up for.
For example, three of those projects — New England Wind, SouthCoast Wind, and the Maryland Offshore Wind Project — could soon lose their federal approvals. None of the three have started construction yet, but in the past month, government officials have filed documents in court for each, trying to undo approvals granted by the Biden administration.
“These other cases are different procedurally, but [the Revolution Wind ruling] shows that the courts are taking this seriously and that the Trump administration took these actions without sufficient justification,” said Nick Krakoff, a senior attorney for the Conservation Law Foundation.
The latest blow came on Thursday, when government lawyers filed a motion to reverse its approval of SouthCoast Wind, a massive 141-turbine project slated for federal waters near Massachusetts’s coastline. Krakoff said that the legal argument is nearly identical to one filed in the U.S. District Court of Maryland the week prior seeking to take back approvals from the Maryland Offshore Wind Project.
Both filings invoke a new legal interpretation of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act that argues that the Interior Department must weigh other ocean activities — like commercial fishing and Coast Guard operations — in an “absolutist approach,” said Krakoff, to evaluate potential conflicts with wind farms.
The standard interpretation, employed for almost a decade by past administrations and already upheld in a 2024 court decision, instructs agencies to take a more balanced approach to evaluating multiple ocean users.
“It’s not unprecedented for a new administration to switch positions. But it is unprecedented to seek to remand a permit because of it,” said Krakoff, who called the Trump-era interpretation of the law a “coordinated attack” on thousands of clean energy jobs.
Oddly, the Trump administration appears to be defending some wind projects at the center of these legal challenges while trying to tank the three others.
For example, on Sept. 8, the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management filed a letter signalling that it wants to dismiss a lawsuit brought by the anti-wind group Protect Our Coast NJ that challenges New York’s Empire Wind.
Then there is the exceptional case of Virginia. Earlier this month, E&E News reported that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R) publicly defended Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, which is the only offshore wind farm currently being built in a Republican-led state. ClearView’s analysts believe this GOP support may explain why the Trump administration has not tried to remand approvals for the Virginia project in response to a lawsuit brought by the Heartland Institute and other right-leaning think tanks challenging its construction. Instead, on Friday, government lawyers asked the judge for a 90-day extension on filing a report on the Virginia project’s status.
Being inconsistent in when and how it deploys new legal interpretations could backfire for the Trump administration.
On Monday, Lamberth told government lawyers that “mandating the immediate pause to construction of a project whose approval the Bureau continues to defend in other cases is the height of arbitrary and capricious.”
Meanwhile, Democratic lawmakers are clearly frustrated that most of the offshore wind projects in Trump’s crosshairs are in solidly blue states at a moment when they have little power in Congress to fight back. Many Democrats see the courts as the best hope for surmounting the administration’s continued efforts to block the development of wind power, which they view as necessary for meeting growing electricity demand.
“One of our most important roles right now is to illustrate to people that the actions taken by this administration are creating shortages and … spikes in your [electricity] prices. Second is the litigation pathway,” Sen. Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, said during a press call on Monday.
The longtime climate hawk discussed new data showing that electricity prices in the U.S. have risen by 10% since Trump took office. Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have proposed legislation that would streamline energy project permitting, but that is not a near-term solution for wind developers, Schatz said, adding that litigation is the faster route towards “success.”
Revolution Wind’s stop-work order had been bleeding its developers of “more than $2 million per day,” according to court filings, and posing a risk to New England’s future grid reliability.
“The time frame to get a new law in place and enforce that new law is unlikely to match up with the time frame of a developer who is almost invariably working on borrowed money and can’t wait three and a half years while we sort ourselves,” said Schatz.
For Revolution Wind, Monday’s legal victory may only be temporary — federal officials could appeal the ruling. A spokesperson for the Justice Department declined to comment. A similar but separate lawsuit challenging Revolution Wind’s stop-work order, brought by the attorneys general of Rhode Island and Connecticut, is winding its way through the courts. Last week, the feds requested that this case be transferred to the U.S. District Court in D.C. so that it can be consolidated with the developers’ case.
If the 704-megawatt project reaches completion, its carbon-free electricity will feed into New England’s regional grid, serving utility customers who just endured a winter where power bills skyrocketed.
Microsoft says it will get green steel from a first-of-a-kind facility in northern Sweden as the tech giant looks to curb the climate impact of its data center build-out.
This week, Microsoft announced a two-part deal with Stegra (formerly H2 Green Steel), which is building a multibillion-dollar plant set to be completed in late 2026. Instead of relying on traditional coal-based methods, the Swedish project will produce steel using green hydrogen — made from renewable energy sources — and clean electricity.
The first part of Microsoft’s agreement involves actual coils of steel. Because the company doesn’t directly buy construction materials itself, Microsoft has agreed to work with its equipment suppliers to ensure that Stegra’s green steel is used in some of its data center projects in Europe.
The second part of the deal enables Microsoft to claim green credentials for the infrastructure it builds outside of Europe, where Stegra isn’t planning to operate. Under this scheme, Stegra will sell its “near-zero emission” steel into the European market — except that the metal will be sold as if it had an industry-average carbon footprint and without a price premium. Microsoft will then buy “environmental attribute certificates” that represent the emissions reductions provided by Stegra’s product, helping to cover the extra cost of making green steel.
With the certificates, “We aim to signal demand, enable project financing, and accelerate global production,” Melanie Nakagawa, Microsoft’s chief sustainability officer, said in a Sept. 23 press release. Ultimately, she said, “The end game is to source physical materials with the lowest possible CO₂ footprint. Achieving this requires greater volumes of low-carbon steel available in more regions.”
The world produces roughly 2 billion metric tons of steel every year, most of which is made using dirty coal-fueled furnaces. As a result, the industry is responsible for between 7% and 9% of total global carbon emissions.
Microsoft and Stegra didn’t provide details about the financial value or volumes of steel tied to their deal. Johan M. Reunanen, who leads Stegra’s climate impact work, said only that its contract with Microsoft is neither the biggest nor the smallest offtake agreement that the steelmaker has signed since launching in 2021.
“But it’s very strategic for us,” Reunanen told Canary Media during a visit to New York for Climate Week NYC. “It gives Stegra access to a customer that is in data centers, which is a market that we’ll be developing.”
Stegra isn’t the only Swedish steelmaker chasing Big Tech. Last year, the manufacturer SSAB signed an agreement with Amazon Web Services to supply hydrogen-based steel for one of Amazon’s three new data centers in Sweden. SSAB operates the Hybrit pilot plant in Luleå — the world’s first steelmaking facility to use hydrogen at any meaningful scale, though the Stegra project will be the first large-scale plant to use this approach once completed.
Microsoft’s agreement with Stegra arrives at a tenuous time for developers of green hydrogen.
More than a dozen hydrogen projects have been canceled, postponed, or scaled back in recent months owing to soaring production costs and waning demand for the low-carbon and highly expensive fuel, Reuters reported in late July. That includes ArcelorMittal’s hydrogen-based steelmaking initiative in Germany, which the company shelved in June, as well as U.S. green steel projects formerly planned in Ohio and Mississippi.
Stegra, for its part, is seeking to raise additional cash to complete its flagship project in Boden, Sweden, after a government agency denied the company 165 million euros ($193 million) in previously approved grant funding. The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency reportedly objected to the fact that the steel mill will use some fossil gas during a heat-treatment process — though Stegra claims the project could still cut emissions by up to 95% compared to coal-based steelmaking.
Stegra has already secured 6.5 billion euros ($7.6 billion) from private investors for the project, which broke ground in 2022. The company is installing 740 megawatts’ worth of electrolyzers to convert electricity from the region’s hydropower plants and wind farms into hydrogen gas. The hydrogen will be used in the “direct reduction” process to convert iron ore into iron, which will then be transformed into steel using electric arc furnaces.
The sprawling facility, located just south of the Arctic Circle, is expected to produce 2.5 million metric tons of steel by 2028, before ramping up to make 5 million metric tons by 2030. Reunanen said that more than half of the steel produced during the first phase is already covered by offtake contracts with automakers like Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, and Scania, as well major companies including Cargill, Ikea, and now Microsoft.
The tech firm — which previously invested in Stegra through its $1 billion Climate Innovation Fund — is the first company to commit to buying environmental attribute certificates from a steel facility. Microsoft has struck similar deals to help drum up demand for lower-carbon versions of other industrial materials, including with cement startup Fortera and alternative-jet-fuel producers like World Energy.
RMI, a think tank focused on clean energy, said it helped advise Stegra and Microsoft on their deal, and both companies are part of an RMI initiative that’s working to design tools that track, validate, and account for certificates.
“Agreements like this one signal a wider demand pool for lower-carbon steel, expanding the offtake beyond conventional direct steel purchasers and into sectors where steel is a critical yet buried part of the supply chain,” said Claire Dougherty, a senior associate at RMI. She added that the deal “serves as a proof-of-concept for the role that [certificates] can play in getting first-of-a-kind, near-zero steel projects off the ground.”
Standing alone on a rocky coastline wearing a seaman-style knit hat, Samuel L. Jackson reaches into a snack bag and gazes intensely through binoculars. Wind turbines spin ominously on a watery horizon.
“Motherfucking wind farms. Loud, ugly, harmful to nature,” the “Pulp Fiction” actor says. Then, shaking his head knowingly and shifting his tone, he adds, “Who says that? These giants are standing tall against fossil fuels, rising up from the ocean like a middle finger to CO2.”
The 60-second ad, released in July, immediately went viral. It also ran on television channels in Finland, Sweden, Germany, and other European countries. It’s part of a marketing campaign launched by Vattenfall, a century-old Swedish energy giant whose clean energy portfolio includes a famous 11-turbine project built within view of President Donald Trump’s Scotland golf course.
The ad reached 600 million viewers across 33 countries within four days of its release, according to a Vattenfall spokesperson. Trump isn’t named in the video, but Jackson’s script is a comedic wink-and-nod to the president’s frequent anti-wind rants.
“So, what’s it going to be? ‘Motherfucking wind farms’?” Jackson says in a mock angry voice at the end of the video. He then repeats the question, grinning widely and raising his eyebrows cheekily: “Or ‘motherfucking wind farms’?”
Research shows that comedy plays a powerful role in making climate change information salient for public audiences. That’s especially useful now, as the Trump administration works to derail the clean energy transition, but such efforts also come at a fraught moment for comedy in America.
It’s a tough time for political satire. In July, CBS cancelled “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” after Colbert used the phrase “big fat bribe” to describe a $16 million settlement the network’s parent company, Paramount, agreed to pay Trump. CBS said the show was killed for financial reasons, but the timing led to speculations that the decision may have been politically motivated.
Then in mid-September, ABC pulled late-night host Jimmy Kimmel off the air “indefinitely” after comments he made related to the assassination of Charlie Kirk provoked a veiled threat from Trump-appointed Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr. The network’s parent company, Disney, reversed course on Monday following public backlash, and Kimmel was back on air Tuesday.
“There’s this tragedy of killing freedom of speech. … The reason this is happening is because [Trump officials] don’t have the superpower of comedy,” said Staci Roberts-Steele, a producer for the wildly successful film “Don’t Look Up.” The 2021 Netflix movie used satire to point out the absurdity of delaying climate action.
America now has a president pumping the brakes on the clean energy transition, most recently by attempting to scuttle numerous U.S. offshore wind farms already in development.
Trump has called wind turbines “ugly,” “terrible for tourism,” and responsible for “driving the whales crazy.” His dislike of “windmills” dates back to his unsuccessful court battle in the U.K. to stop a Vattenfall offshore wind farm from being installed within view of his Aberdeen, Scotland, golf course. All 11 turbines were eventually built in 2018.
Some Americans who saw the foul-mouthed Jackson ad on social media relished a major Hollywood movie star poking fun at Trump’s favorite anti-climate talking points. Roberts-Steele said she is glad that big European companies like Vattenfall are turning to humor to call out climate disinformation — and that the content is finding American audiences. She hopes it emboldens U.S. comedians and institutions to follow suit.
“The Europeans have been doing it much longer than us. … That’s totally true,” she lamented, adding that U.S. public relations firms and film studios have been less bold about taking big swings at climate skepticism.
“Don’t Look Up” was a rarity for Hollywood. But its chart-topping success mirrors Jackson’s ad in several ways.
Both employed comedy to tackle the topic of climate change. Casting major Hollywood actors drew loads of viewers. Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, and Jonah Hill all starred in what became Netflix’s fourth most successful movie of all time.
Hollywood hasn’t generated a major climate comedy since.
Roberts-Steele is now leading Yellow Dot Studios, a new nonprofit aimed at keeping the climate jokes coming. The studio hosts live comedy events, develops podcasts, and produces short-form videos that, among other things, mock the fossil-fuel industry.
But mainstreaming this kind of comedy isn’t easy, even with Hollywood director Adam McKay as the group’s founder and board member.
“It hasn’t yet trickled up,” said Max Boykoff, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder who studies the fusion of climate change and comedy. After years researching the topic, he’s now trying to catalyze it.
Boykoff and his students — in collaboration with CU Boulder theater professor Beth Osnes-Stoedefalke — are part of an ongoing collaboration with some of the nation’s top writers’ rooms.
They’ve been working with writers on “The Daily Show,” “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” and Comedy Central to make climate change news funny and memorable. On Saturday, Boykoff and his students produced a climate-themed comedy show with professional comedians in New York City, timed to coincide with Climate Week NYC.
“Comedy has this power to point out the contradictions in which we live,” said Boykoff. “It’s through comedy that people feel like they’re not being talked down to or lectured.”
With late-night shows facing intimidation under Trump, Boykoff said the involvement of independent academics — like himself — is more important than ever. He added that Europe’s role should not be discounted either.
The Samuel L. Jackson ad was the brainchild of the communications team at Vattenfall, a Swedish state-owned energy company that has been around for more than 100 years. It manages a wide range of projects, from hydroelectric dams to offshore wind farms. The company’s long-term goal with its outreach is to spread the idea of freedom from fossil fuels, said Monica Persdotter, vice president and head of brand.
Unlike past campaigns, she said, this one “took off.”
“We’ve always been very bold in the way that we present ourselves to the world, with the messages that we have, which always circles back to fossil-free energy and fossil freedom,” said Persdotter.
The ad hit Vattenfall’s core market — the U.K. and European Union — where the offshore wind sector has grown steadily for decades. For example, offshore wind farms generated 17% of the U.K.’s electricity last year.
Vattenfall operates more than 1,400 wind turbines across 14 wind farms, with a total installed capacity of approximately 6.6 gigawatts in five European countries, according to Persdotter. Several other Vattenfall wind projects are also in the works.
Meanwhile, the U.S. only has one large-scale offshore wind farm in operation. Four others are currently being built in America’s waters. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum abruptly paused construction on a fifth one, Revolution Wind, in August, but this week, the project’s developer, Ørsted, a Danish state-owned company, won a court-ordered injunction lifting the freeze.
Given the contrast between Europe and the U.S., Jackson, a widely recognizable American actor, was a powerful choice for Vattenfall’s ad.
According to Persdotter, her team got a tip that Jackson had studied marine biology in college and, at one point, considered a career in the field. The actor, she said, liked the script, making just a few stylistic tweaks to better align with his voice.
The ad was filmed along the California coast to accommodate Jackson’s schedule. The Golden State has no wind turbines installed in its waters yet — though the Los Angeles Times reports that the state, despite losing some federal funding, has not backed down from its plans to deploy the technology. The ad’s wind turbines were superimposed post-production using video footage of a real Vattenfall wind farm in Denmark.
As for the snack bag Jackson dips into — that’s a nod to the fact that wind farms can provide benefits beyond generating carbon-free electricity, for example, serving as sites for seaweed farming. The seaweed snack Jackson is munching — which he calls “serious gourmet shit” — isn’t commercially available yet, but Persdotter said it was harvested from experimental seaweed farming “lines” strung between wind turbines at Vesterhav Syd, a Vattenfall project in Denmark’s waters. (Vattenfall sent Canary Media a bag of the prototype snack, and a reporter verified that it tasted like conventional seaweed snacks.)
Trump, who famously cannot take a joke, has continued to call for the silencing of comedians critical of his policies, and he’s also been ramping up his attacks on offshore wind.
Last week, during a press conference in England with the U.K. prime minister, the president went on an unprompted rant about the clean energy resource, saying, “We don’t do wind because wind is a disaster. It’s a very expensive joke, frankly.”
Trump may not like jokes. But if the popularity of Vattenfall’s video is any indication, Europeans are clearly having a laugh at him. Roberts-Steele said Americans will keep laughing, too, as long as comedians are free to make the jokes.
LAS VEGAS — There were plenty of reasons to think that this year’s RE+, the U.S. solar industry’s biggest annual gathering, would be a gloomy and downtrodden affair.
The Trump administration had declared an energy emergency, then set about reducing energy supply by going after renewables projects. The massive spending law yanked nearly seven years of tax credits for wind and solar. The White House arbitrarily halted construction on two major offshore wind farms that had all their permits in order, raising the fear that it might block other fully approved projects. Tariffs have changed the price of parts that go into clean energy equipment on a sometimes weekly basis. The cleantech bankruptcies have been relentless: Powin, Sunnova, Mosaic, Northvolt, Li-Cycle, Nikola, to name a few.
“I can’t think of a time when we have been subject to quite as much of a brutal swing as we’ve been in now,” said Abby Ross Hopper, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, which puts on the conference.
But when I got to the exhibit hall at the Venetian Expo, it stretched farther than I’d ever seen at a clean energy show, and I heard rumors of additional halls above and below. The exhibitors even sprawled across a sunwashed bridge to Caesar’s Forum, where vendors of flow batteries and other alternative technologies hawked their wares, quite fittingly, from the periphery of the event.
Final attendance for the show hit 37,000, just shy of the record 40,000 from the previous two years, and other metrics broke records. The mood on the floor, in the halls, and at the myriad Vegas afterparties reflected an industry that had taken some punches, had lost some nice things, but was nonetheless charging forward, resolute and battle-tested.
“If you’d asked me in May how I was feeling about RE+, I would have a very different answer,” Hopper noted at a roundtable with journalists a few days into the show. “But we have more exhibitors than we’ve ever had in our history, and we have more registration revenue than we’ve ever had in our history. … [People] are really, really hungry for information and for a vision for what’s coming next.”
Judging by this year’s dire headlines, the show’s ebullient atmosphere does not seem entirely rational. Of course, even teetering startups try to project confidence among peers, customers, and especially journalists. And the overstimulated Vegas backdrop inspires a particular strain of optimism, the kind that encourages you to light cash on fire and feel lucky for the opportunity.
But after three days of roaming the frenetic halls, I came to see this year’s positive outlook as warranted. The general consensus among conference goers seemed to be that though political headwinds are blowing hard, economic tailwinds are blowing harder. Here are three reasons why I think they are right.
With the federal tax credits cut short, fewer solar projects will get built, and costs will rise for the ones that still go forward, passing on higher energy bills to American consumers.
But, with a little distance from the sting of this summer’s legislative setbacks, many solar and energy storage professionals believe losses in the policy arena are counterbalanced by increasingly rosy outlooks in the marketplace.
“I think people tend to over-orient on the policy story, and under-orient on the economic and financial story,” said Alfred Johnson, CEO of the clean energy financing platform Crux, as we sipped espressos outside the hubbub of the cavernous expo halls.
Johnson’s company launched as a marketplace for tax credit transferability, which was created by the Inflation Reduction Act, but has expanded into other forms of financing, like debt and tax equity. That perch gives him visibility into clean energy project economics and the flows of capital into the sector. He ticked off a series of key factors defining the current energy market: Electricity prices are way up; solar and battery keeps getting cheaper while improving performance; gas prices are rising as the Trump administration promotes exports; gas turbine prices are rising due to intense competition from buyers.
In short, it’s a bad time to be someone who uses electricity in America, despite President Donald Trump’s campaign promise to cut energy prices. That means, though, that it’s a great time to be someone who sells power.
Even better for power producers, the biggest new customers — data centers — have the price sensitivity of a ravenous grizzly bear. They’re trying, with the enthusiastic support of the White House, to win a global arms race to unlock artificial superintelligence, whatever that means. Facing such civilizational stakes, the hyperscalers aren’t going to quibble over nickels and dimes.
Even with elevated electricity prices, hyperscalers still have to pay a lot more for the “graphics processing units” that train and run their AI models, Johnson noted. And once they’ve paid for those GPUs, they want to use them as much as possible, which means gobbling up as much electricity as they can get.
“The value of being faster on delivering the model … is worth so much more … than the additional cost of energy, which means that the marginal demand in a lot of these markets is the data centers, who are not price sensitive,” Johnson said.
Solar is clearly the cheapest source of new electricity production. But what matters most now is speed to market, and here solar and batteries easily trounce all other commercially viable sources of power. Taking mass-produced panels and parts and assembling them in a field is fundamentally easier than constructing a traditional large power plant. And it’s a hell of a lot easier than some of the hyperscalers’ other ideas, like building nonexistent nuclear fusion plants, or nonexistent small modular reactors, or restarting a long-shuttered nuclear reactor at the notorious Three Mile Island plant.
These dynamics led some of my fellow conference goers to muse about a counterfactual choice: Would you rather have strong federal policy tailwinds and an unfavorable market, or booming market fundamentals but unfavorable policy? Nine months ago, the industry enjoyed both. Trump ended those good times, but the robust market serves to mollify the pain of his policy attacks.
SEIA has strived to welcome energy storage into the fold, and diversification from solar alone looks especially prescient these days. Rooftop solar is struggling in a big way, with the federal onslaught and friendly fire from states like California, and large-scale developers are racing to cram in a bumper crop of projects before tax credits disappear next July. (Projects that start construction after that must be operating by the end of 2027 to qualify for the federal incentives.) But storage companies evaded the policy setbacks of their solar-powered brethren, and are building toward yet another record year of construction.
“Right now, we are seeing all of the factors are very supportive to storage,” said Johnson. “Demand is going up, there’s more of a focus on having dispatchable power. It got tax credits for the first time in the IRA … and then it retained the tax credits in [the One Big Beautiful Bill Act].”
The budget law preserves the battery-installation tax credits through 2033, with the stipulation that projects prove they don’t excessively rely on parts or corporate support from China. That sparked initial concerns from some analysts that these Foreign Entity of Concern rules (FEOC) could be enforced in a way that strangles development arbitrarily.
A few months later, many storage developers are encouraged by how clearly the text of the law lays out the boxes to check. Even so, compliance creates extra work for the American companies trying to expand the capacity of the grid, and the law does not explicitly encourage domestic manufacturing, since the rules are anti-China rather than pro-America.
Trump’s tariffs also pose a unique threat to storage, because so many of the battery cells used in these projects come from China. The U.S. has only just begun building supply chains for lithium ferrous phosphate, the battery chemistry now favored for grid storage. LG opened an LFP factory in Michigan this summer; AESC did so in an old Nissan Leaf battery plant in Tennessee, and Tesla is working on one in Nevada slated to start up early next year.
Now, said Brian Hayes, CEO of storage developer Key Capture Energy, it’s common for suppliers to offer three battery-sourcing options: China, Southeast Asia, and domestic. Buyers can toggle based on current tariff rates, U.S. manufacturing premiums, and the FEOC obligations of a particular project. Once the new FEOC rules kick in, though, the industry will need to move away from Chinese-made battery cells.
“I’m feeling a lot more positive today than I was six months ago,” said Hayes, whose company has built 40 megawatts in New York and 580 megawatts in Texas. “We ended up in a good place.”
That’s not to say storage developers can afford to get complacent.
“We can’t rest on our laurels,” Hayes mused. “We always have to be paying attention to what else could come.”
The Biden administration combined trade policy with methodical domestic incentives to reshore the manufacturing of clean energy equipment and other tech, like semiconductors. Trump supports the resurgence of domestic manufacturing in theory, but his primary tactic for that goal has been frequently shifting and legally dubious tariffs. These policies raise the price for materials that American manufacturers need to make their products and for the equipment required to build new factories, and they undermine the long-term certainty that reassures investors.
Still, the reshoring of clean energy supply chains has continued, and signs touting FEOC compliance have become a new form of currency on the expo hall floors.
Nextracker, the homegrown solar-tracking manufacturer and publicly traded cleantech success story, used the occasion of the conference to publicize its acquisition of Origami Solar for $53 million. That marked a refreshing shift in an era when cleantech acquisitions have tended to feature bankruptcy auctions or the kind of firesale where participants abashedly refuse to share the purchase price.
Origami developed a steel frame technology to replace the usual aluminum frames that wrap around solar panels. This enhances structural integrity as solar modules grow ever larger and more powerful. Indiana manufacturer Bila Solar, for instance, recently tapped Origami to frame its new 550-watt solar module.
But beyond preventing bending or buckling, the acquisition is a domestic-production play. The U.S. aluminium industry has cratered since the 1980s, so aluminum frames are now largely an import business, subject to all the vagaries of trade in 2025. The U.S. still makes things with steel though; Nextracker has been working with partners to open steel plants around the country to produce the torque tubes that carry the panels through their daily rotation. Origami manufactures in the U.S. too; now Nextracker can offer a more complete domestic solar package, making it easier for developers to clinch the 10% tax credit adder for Made-in-America content.
Over in Texas, module manufacturer T1 Energy signed a deal a few weeks back with glass producer Corning for a lot more than oven-safe casserole dishes. Corning subsidiary Hemlock Semiconductor will make hyper-pure polysilicon and carve it into solar wafers in Michigan, to supply T1’s forthcoming solar cell factory starting in the second half of 2026.
I tracked down Alex Zhu, CEO of ES Foundry, which in January opened one of the only currently operating solar cell factories in the country. Production from the 1-gigawatt line in Greenwood, South Carolina, is already sold out until 2027, Zhu said. He has greenlit a 2-gigawatt expansion, slated to be fully running by June 2026, to meet demand from domestic panel producers. A digital display by the company’s booth advertised “No FEOC Ownership. No FEOC Board. No FEOC Funding.”
Zhu stressed that it wasn’t easy opening a cell factory when the U.S. lacks a supply chain for some of the industrial inputs that are abundant and cheap in China. One of the key gases used in the process cost him 120 times the rate it sells for in that country’s solar industry centers. But Zhu nonetheless raised investment, launched the company, and built the factory all in the last two years.
Sales of these U.S.-made cells very much depend on the domestic content adder to compete with cheaper imports: “That’s the only drive to make the economic sense to buy a more expensive domestic module and domestic cell,” Zhu noted.
That’s a clear risk factor, because that perk will disappear along with the solar tax credits. But tax rules say that if developers start construction before next July 4, they can take up to four years to finish projects. That means projects could get built with both the credit and the domestic content adder through the end of the decade.
It’s hard to know what context manufacturers will be operating in at that point. But Zhu noted that “after five years, we definitely need to move to the next generation.” Much like semiconductor fabs, solar cell factories must regularly refresh themselves to keep up with technological advancements.
Longer-term certainty would be nice for the generational effort to reshore the solar supply chain, but maybe five busy years of manufacturing is enough to look forward to right now.
Maryland’s first offshore wind farm could have broken ground next year. But now the 114-turbine renewable energy project is all but doomed following the Trump administration’s most recent move in a long line of attacks on the industry.
In a motion filed Friday with the U.S. District Court in Maryland, the Interior Department asked a judge to cancel approval of the Maryland Offshore Wind Project, which was authorized in the final weeks of the Biden administration. The wind farm was expected to power over 718,000 homes in a Democrat-led state facing rocketing energy demands.
Officials claim that the agency’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management made an “error” when assessing the turbines’ potential impact on other activities — like search-and-rescue operations and fishing — within the 80,000-acre swath of ocean where the wind farm would be located.
The project is over a decade in the making, with developer US Wind purchasing the lease in 2014. But after President Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in July and greatly shortened the duration of the wind energy tax credit, Maryland’s first offshore wind farm already seemed impossible to pull off — at least economically.
Harrison Sholler, an offshore wind analyst with BloombergNEF, told Canary Media in July that with the tax credits sunsetting at a much earlier date, the Maryland project would likely no longer be able to offset 30% of its costs. The original rule for receiving the incentives required construction to start by 2033 or potentially even later, but the new law stipulates that wind farms must be “placed in service” by the end of 2027 or begin construction by July 4, 2026, to qualify.
Onshore construction is not supposed to start until next year at the earliest, and at-sea installation not until 2028, so the new deadline for receiving tax credits was crushing. Also, US Wind doesn’t have its financing in place yet to underwrite construction, according to Sholler. Securing financing without those credits guaranteed is a hard sell.
Analysts saw the tightening of the tax credit’s timeframe down to this one-year sprint as the final nail in the coffin for offshore wind farms that were fully approved but not currently underway.
Two projects — MarWin, the first phase of the Maryland Offshore Wind Project, and New England Wind off the Massachusetts coastline — exist in that gray zone. If the judge yanks its approval, MarWin will almost certainly be mothballed for the rest of Trump’s tenure.
Four offshore wind farms are currently being built in America’s waters. A fifth project, Revolution Wind, is 80% complete, but Interior Secretary Doug Burgum abruptly paused its construction in August, citing “national security” concerns. Project developer Ørsted is challenging the federal freeze in court. That saga is part of an escalating war on wind power led by the White House that has thrown the industry into chaos in recent weeks.
US Wind is a joint venture of the Italian corporate giant Toto Holding and Apollo Global Management, an investment firm. A spokesperson for the company said it will fight to maintain its approvals.
“After many years of analysis, several federal agencies issued final permits to the project,” spokesperson Nancy Sopko said in a public statement released Friday. “We intend to vigorously defend those permits in federal court, and we are confident that the court will uphold their validity and prevent any adverse action against them.”
California’s Legislature has approved a slate of policies aimed at curbing high and rising electricity costs, involving everything from short-term relief for high summertime utility bills to public financing of transmission grids — a big accomplishment in the waning days of the session.
The affordability measures emerged as part of a sprawling energy and climate package negotiated by legislative leaders and Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office last week and passed by lawmakers Saturday. Newsom, a Democrat, now has until Oct. 12 to sign the bills into law.
“It’s just a massive end of session,” said state Sen. Josh Becker, a Democrat whose bill, SB 254, was included in the package. “We had all these planes in the air. Are they all going to crash, or are they going to land?”
Becker hopes the provisions in SB 254 will contain rapidly rising costs for the state’s three biggest utilities — Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas & Electric — which are in turn driving up rates for their customers. Those residents now pay roughly twice the U.S. average for their power, and nearly one in five are behind on paying their energy bills.
“Energy affordability was understood to be one of the top issues the Legislature needed to act on, due to massive rate increases and widespread customer outrage,” said Matthew Freedman, staff attorney at The Utility Reform Network, a consumer advocacy group that supported SB 254.
Among other things, that legislation aims to rein in how much utilities spend hardening their grids to reduce the risk of sparking wildfires, a major factor in cost increases. To that end, the bill would prohibit utilities from earning profits on some of the investments they make in wildfire-related upgrades.
It would also create a new “transmission accelerator” that enables utilities to use public financing to expand the state’s high-voltage grid rather than recoup those expenditures by charging customers. Those savings will take longer to kick in but could add up to billions of dollars a year, said Sam Uden, managing director of Net-Zero California, an advocacy group that cowrote a report last year examining how much utilities could save by relying on public financing.
“There’s a strategic role for public-sector investment to drive the clean energy transition,” he said. “We see this transmission financing as an embodiment of that viewpoint.”
SB 254 ended up as a 136-page document with a multitude of energy and climate provisions, Becker told Canary Media last week. But he highlighted one set of key cost-containment measures that the utilities had particularly resisted.
Utilities typically earn a profit by receiving a return on the investments they make in grid upkeep. Now, though, California’s big three utilities will have to finance a portion of what they spend hardening their grids via bonds — a process known as securitization.
Utilities “were kicking and screaming on that,” Becker said.
The amount to be financed through bonds was initially set to be $15 billion for all three utilities. But Freedman suggested that the utilities might have used their political clout last week to negotiate the final securitization requirement down to $6 billion, which is “a pretty big reduction,” he said.
Regardless, securitizing a portion of the growing grid-hardening costs will reduce pressure on utilities to increase rates in the future, said Merrian Borgeson, California policy director for climate and energy for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which supported the legislation. “I don’t know what the rates are going to be next year, but they’ll be lower,” she said.
Enabling public financing of transmission projects could deliver even more savings over time, Borgeson said. The “transmission accelerator” created by SB 254 for that purpose would be based out of the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development (GO-Biz). That entity would be authorized to pool state funds drawn from California’s cap-and-trade program and from a climate bond passed last year to lower the cost of capital for transmission projects.
The California Independent System Operator, which manages the state’s grid, estimates that California must invest between $46 billion and $63 billion into transmission over the next 20 years to meet its goal of achieving a carbon-free grid by 2045. Using public money to offset a portion of utilities’ capital spending on those projects could cut the costs of the currently planned long-range transmission buildout by more than half, saving customers as much as $3 billion a year, according to an October report from Net-Zero California and the Clean Air Task Force.
Just how much money could be saved will depend on how the accelerator structures its public-private financing, Freedman said. “SB 254 leaves open a range of possible outcomes on this front,” he added. “It depends on the ambitiousness of the implementation by this and future governors.”
The final days of this year’s session also saw lawmakers reauthorize the state’s decade-old cap-and-trade program, an initiative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that was set to expire in 2030. AB 1207 and SB 840 would extend the program through 2045 and make a number of changes with significant implications for polluting industries, though regulators and lawmakers still need to work out the exact structures for executing the new rules, Borgeson said.
The bills also take an initial stab at reallocating funds raised by the cap-and-trade system to the myriad state programs and industry sectors jockeying for the money.
For example, one key affordability measure in AB 1207 institutes important changes to the “climate credit” now paid to utility customers out of funds collected from the cap-and-trade program.
Today, those credits are delivered to customers in twice-a-year lump-sum rebates. Under the new structure created by AB 1207, those rebates can be redirected to specifically help lower utility bills during summer months, when air conditioning drives up power consumption.
“Just think about the Central Valley,” Becker said during a virtual town-hall event in June, referring to a region of California that’s both hotter and poorer than the rest of the state. During summer heat waves, “it’s 100 degrees all day — and sometimes all night — in those areas. It’s literally a matter of life and death to keep the air conditioning on.”
AB 1207 will also redirect climate credits issued to gas utilities to support lowering summer electrical bills exclusively, through a process to be worked out by California utility regulators, Borgeson said. (Today, both gas utilities and electric utilities issue climate credits to their customers.)
That provision was strongly opposed by Sempra, the holding company of San Diego Gas & Electric and Southern California Gas Co., the state’s biggest gas-only utility. In an opposition letter, Sempra said the shift would create a “statewide subsidy requiring gas customers to fund bill relief for electric customers, worsening the high cost of living in California for millions of families.”
But climate advocates say the legislation aligns with California’s goal of shifting customers from using gas to using electricity. “This is a good idea, because it doesn’t need any more money,” Juliet Christian-Smith, Western states program director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Canary Media in July. Instead, “it’s redirecting money already in a pot to reduce electricity rates and enable the clean energy transition in a more affordable way.”
We’re in the midst of a global solar revolution. Don’t believe it? Just look at the latest numbers.
In the first six months of this year, the world built 64% more new solar energy capacity than it did in the first half of 2024, according to think tank Ember. The 380 gigawatts’ worth of solar installed through June of this year is roughly equal to the amount of solar installed in all of 2021 and 2022 combined.
The story of this global solar boom is, really, the story of solar growth in China.
The country, which is the world’s largest producer of solar equipment and most other clean-energy technologies, on its own deployed 256 GW of new solar over the first half of this year — more than two-thirds of the global total. That’s double the amount it installed during the same period last year.
China’s rapid buildout of solar is welcome news. The country emits more planet-warming greenhouse gases than any other, in large part because it burns prodigious amounts of coal to produce electricity for its 1.4 billion citizens. But solar and other renewables are now putting enough of a dent in the country’s coal use that some analysts expect China’s overall emissions to decline this year.
Outside of China, the rest of the world installed just 15% more solar capacity in the first half of this year than it did in the first half of last year.
The two next-biggest solar installers over this time period were India, at 24 GW, and the U.S., at 21 GW. The U.S. is still managing to push solar to new heights despite the Trump administration’s attacks on clean energy.
Overall, solar provided just 7% of electricity generated around the globe last year. That percentage needs to increase — fast — so the world can ditch fossil fuels and bend the emissions curve downward. Luckily, solar has so far proven up to the challenge of growing at an astonishing rate.
Solar generated more power than it ever has before on Texas’ grid earlier this month.
That’s impressive, but even more so when you consider that it was the 17th record the power source set in the state this year, according to a new report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.
The record setting started bright and early on Jan. 24, when solar generated 22.1 gigawatts of power. That figure has since steadily risen, and on Sept. 9, solar produced a huge 29.9 GW. Also that day, solar provided more than 40% of the state’s power from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., per data from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s grid operator.
That early September day capped a groundbreaking summer for solar in Texas. From June 1 through Aug. 31, solar met 15.2% of all demand in the ERCOT system. Coal provided for 12.5% of demand during that time.
And solar wasn’t the only top performer this year. Battery storage has already set four discharge records in Texas this month, often charging up on solar power that floods the grid in the mornings and putting it back into the system when the sun sets, per the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.
Texas’ extreme summer temperatures have frequently driven ERCOT to ask people to conserve power, warning that increased air-conditioning use could overwhelm the grid’s energy supplies. But this year, ERCOT didn’t ask customers to conserve power at all, and credited its summertime stability to Texas’ nation-leading deployment of solar and batteries.
This all reveals solar’s growing ability to replace fossil fuels and meet power demand in Texas, especially when the clean energy source is paired with batteries. And it couldn’t be more necessary: The U.S. Energy Information Administration anticipates demand in ERCOT will surge as much as 23% from 2024 to 2026.
Meanwhile, natural gas is failing to meet the moment. Texas developers have proposed building more than 100 new gas power plants in the next few years to meet rising demand from data centers and other heavy industry. The state created a $7.2 billion loan program to incentivize gas plant construction, but more than two years after that fund was launched, just two facilities have been approved for only $321 million in loans. Developers pulled another seven projects from consideration, citing high costs and supply chain challenges.
Solar and batteries, meanwhile, remain among the cheapest and quickest ways to add power generation to the grid — though the Trump administration isn’t making it any easier for communities to yield the benefits of these technologies as it rolls back federal clean energy tax credits and solar-boosting programs.
Even polluters are wary of EPA’s rollback of greenhouse gas reporting
The U.S. EPA proposed late last week to kill its Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, which has required top polluters to disclose their planet-warming emissions for around 15 years. The rule change would end the collection of data from 46 sources, including power plants, and pause data collection from several petroleum and natural gas industry sources until 2034.
The EPA, as well as states and cities, have used Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program data to create emissions-reduction targets and regulations. Still, one oil and gas lobbyist told E&E News that the industry actually pushed for modifications to the program rather than a full repeal, which could complicate trade with the European Union.
A carbon-capture industry coalition is also opposing the program’s end, saying the reporting rules are “inextricably” tied to federal carbon-capture incentives and the repeal would hurt the industry’s growth.
Trump admin targets two more offshore wind projects
A new wave of federal attacks on offshore wind started last Friday as the U.S. Department of the Interior asked a judge to cancel approval of the Maryland Offshore Wind Project, Canary Media’s Clare Fieseler reports. Republicans in Congress had already saddled the project with potentially insurmountable financial challenges by mandating an early end to federal tax credits, and this potential permit dismissal leaves it in even more trouble.
Just yesterday, Interior asked another court to revoke the same approval for SouthCoast Wind, a 141-turbine project off the coast of Massachusetts. The planned project had similarly been facing financial difficulties.
Meanwhile, the fight to continue building the Revolution Wind project carries on. The Democratic attorneys general of Connecticut and Rhode Island, which would receive power from the nearly complete offshore array halted by the Trump administration, are now seeking a court order to let construction resume.
Surprise, surprise: The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine reaffirms that burning fossil fuels is warming the planet, despite the Trump administration’s moves to downplay and even disavow that finding. (E&E News)
DOE’s new energy philosophy: An Energy Department official touts a “best of the above” approach to power generation in a congressional hearing, as an alternative to the “all of the above” energy philosophy. (E&E News)
States’ new climate fight: Four states team up to battle the Trump administration’s attacks on the endangerment finding, which determined that greenhouse gases are a hazard to public health and underpins many federal climate regulations. (CT Mirror)
Rivian presses on: Rivian broke ground on its $5 billion factory in Georgia this week after long delays, and even though federal EV tax credits are set to expire at the end of this month. (Associated Press)
Affordability in focus: California legislators pass a slate of legislation to lower energy bills, including measures to curb utility profits from grid upkeep and to accelerate transmission development via public financing. (Canary Media)
Electrifying your seafood tower: In the coastal waters of rural Maine, some early adopters of electric boats are proving they’re a quieter, cleaner alternative to petroleum-powered vessels that dominate oyster farming and other aquaculture industries. (Canary Media)
Art Deco decarbonization: A former terminal at Newark Liberty International Airport that’s now an administrative building got an all-electric renovation, and could be a blueprint for other historic buildings looking to decarbonize. (Canary Media)
Cooking up contradiction: Top appliance companies have quietly removed comparisons of gas and induction stoves’ air quality impacts from their websites as the industry fights a Colorado law mandating warning labels on gas stoves. (Grist)
That used-car smell: Used EV sales have risen 40% over the last year as buyers find they’re often cheaper than comparable gas-powered cars. (New York Times)
A novel solar power project just went online in California’s Central Valley, with panels that span across canals in the vast agricultural region.
The 1.6-megawatt installation, called Project Nexus, was fully completed late last month. The $20 million state-funded pilot has turned stretches of the Turlock Irrigation District’s canals into hubs of clean electricity generation in a remote area where cotton, tomatoes, almonds, and hundreds of other crops are grown.
Project Nexus is only the second canal-based solar array to operate in the United States — and one of just a handful in the world. America’s first solar-canal project started producing power in October 2024 for the Pima and Maricopa tribes, known together as the Gila River Indian Community, on their reservation near Phoenix, Arizona. Two more canal-top arrays are already in the works there.
In California, the solar-canal system was built in two phases, with a 20-foot-wide stretch completed in March and a roughly 110-foot-wide portion finished at the end of August. Researchers will study the project’s performance over time, while a new initiative led by California universities and the company Solar Aquagrid will push to fast-track the deployment of solar canals across the state.
Proponents of this emerging approach say it can provide overlapping benefits.
Early research suggests that, along with producing power in land-constrained areas, putting solar arrays above water can help keep panels cool, in turn improving their efficiency and electricity output. Shade from the panels can also prevent water loss through evaporation in drought-prone regions and can limit algae growth in waterways.
Plus, solar canals could offer a faster path to clean energy development than utility-scale solar farms, especially in rural parts of the U.S. where big renewables projects increasingly face community opposition. Placing solar panels atop existing infrastructure doesn’t require altering the landscape, and the relatively small installations can be plugged into nearby distribution lines, avoiding the cumbersome process of connecting to the higher-voltage wires required for bigger undertakings.
“Why disturb land that has sacred value when we could just put the solar panels over a canal and generate more efficient power?” said David DeJong, director of the Pima-Maricopa Irrigation Project, which is developing a water-delivery system for the Gila River Indian Community.
The purpose of these early arrays is primarily to power on-site canal equipment like pumps and gates. But such projects could eventually help clean up the larger grid, too. A coalition of U.S. environmental groups previously estimated that putting panels over 8,000 miles of federally owned canals and aqueducts could generate over 25 gigawatts of renewable energy — enough to power nearly 20 million homes — and reduce water evaporation by possibly tens of billions of gallons.
Still, the technology isn’t an obvious choice for many canal operators.
Elevating solar panels over canals is more expensive and technically complex than installing conventional ground-mounted solar arrays on trackers, and it can involve using more concrete and steel. Wider canals may also require support structures for panels within the waterway, which can disrupt the flow of water.
Earlier this year, a senior engineer at Arizona’s Salt River Project recommended that the power and water utility not pursue a solar-canal pilot “based on cost estimates and project concerns,” after comparing the unique design to both rooftop and utility-scale solar alternatives.
Solar-canal developers are hoping they can still gain a toehold in irrigation districts that are grappling with high electricity costs and have limited options for generating cheap power, said Ben Lepley, the founder of engineering firm Tectonicus, which designed the Gila River Indian Community’s 1.3-MW system south of Phoenix.
The initial costs are “definitely higher … but it can actually be really fast as a project,” Lepley said. “By the next year, you can have really cheap electricity, and that gives [irrigation districts] stability over the 30-year life of the project.”
For its part, the Gila River Indian Community is building solar-canal projects as part of its broader mission to “generate enough renewable energy to completely offset the electrical use by the irrigation district,” said DeJong. He noted the district pays about $3 million a year for the 27 million kilowatt-hours of electricity it needs to pump, move, and store water.
The community built its first solar-canal project over the Casa Blanca Canal with a nearly $5.7 million grant provided by the Inflation Reduction Act — part of a $25 million provision that supplied funding for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to design, study, and deploy projects that put panels over waterways. Irrigation districts in California, Oregon, and Utah received the remaining funds to develop their own installations.
The Trump administration is unlikely to support future programs, given its focus on gutting clean energy incentives, but a handful of projects are already moving forward without such grants.
DeJong said that construction is 90% complete on the tribal community’s second solar-canal project, a nearly 0.9-MW array built in partnership with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is slated to go online later this year. The community is self-funding a similar-sized project over the Santan Canal and is developing a floating solar array on one of its reservoirs, with both systems set to be up and running by early 2026. All told, the installations will provide 4 MW in local clean energy generation, he said.
“We have become really familiar with the economics of building these [canal] projects,” said Lepley, whose firm also worked on the Gila River Indian Community’s second and third solar-canal systems. “We have a pretty good playbook of how to continue these projects going forward, even without any grant funding from the federal government.”
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