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This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
SHENANDOAH, Iowa — First viewed from a pickup truck driving south on U.S. 59, the wind turbines seem small and delicate.
The newly constructed wind farm is a matter of pride for Gregg Connell, the man behind the wheel of the truck. He is a former two-term mayor of this southwestern Iowa city and an official with the local chamber of commerce.
The turbines are “beautiful,” Connell said, looking out the driver’s-side window. “You’re capturing energy, you’re helping the environment.”
But the sight of a new wind farm is increasingly rare, even in Iowa, a state that trails only Texas in electricity production from wind.
Wind energy development has all but ground to a halt in the face of community opposition, a phaseout of federal tax credits, and the Trump administration’s actions to slow the approval of federal permits.
Some of the administration’s most notable moves on wind power have been attacks on offshore development, including a stop-work order in December that halted construction on five projects. But land-based wind projects — often described in the industry as “onshore wind” — are a much larger contributor to the nation’s electricity supply and are struggling to make even modest gains. Without robust growth in onshore wind, the United States will be severely limited in its ability to build enough power-generation capacity to meet rising demand and combat climate change.
One of Iowa’s few new developments, the Shenandoah Hills wind farm, illustrates what it takes to build in the current political and regulatory environment.
The developer, Chicago-based Invenergy, faced years of blowback from residents who raised concerns about damage to the visual landscape along with concerns about potential harm to human and animal health and effects on property values. The opposition campaign dragged on into court cases and led to one county supervisor losing his reelection bid.
Though controversial, Shenandoah Hills still had the advantage of obtaining all its federal permits before the Trump administration returned to office in January and began using federal agencies to slow or halt new projects.
If the Shenandoah Hills ordeal is what success looks like for the wind industry, then it’s understandable that investors, developers, and others see few reasons to pursue new projects.
“U.S. onshore wind is in its weakest shape in about a decade, not because the technology has stopped being competitive, but because the policy and, to an extent, the macro-environment have turned sharply against it,” Atin Jain, an energy analyst for the research firm BloombergNEF, said in an email.
In 2024, the most recent full year for which data is available, wind energy produced 7.7 percent of the nation’s electricity, more than any other renewable source, according to the Energy Information Administration. Since the country has only three operational offshore wind farms, onshore wind accounts for nearly all this production.
New projects peaked in 2020, when 14,878 megawatts of onshore wind farms came online in the United States, according to the EIA. This number has decreased steadily since then, bottoming out at 5,026 megawatts in 2024.
The industry had a slight rebound in 2025, with 7,804 new megawatts of capacity — including completed projects and those that were projected to be operational by Dec. 31 — and will grow more in 2026, with 10,044 megawatts listed by EIA as planned for completion.
After that, things are likely to get much worse. Developers and analysts expect a drop-off in 2027 and beyond, when the current chill in development stemming from the Trump administration’s actions will lead to fewer completed projects.
Meanwhile, electricity demand is soaring as utilities and grid operators determine how to meet the needs of large users such as AI data centers.
There is a disconnect in the market when demand is surging while wind power development is slowing, a situation that bodes poorly for the future of clean energy in the U.S., said Michael Thomas, CEO of Cleanview, a market intelligence platform focused on power plants and data centers.
“The decline in wind energy development is one of the trends that I’m most concerned about when it comes to climate progress in the United States,” Thomas said in an email. “I’m not aware of a single model that shows us meeting our climate targets or avoiding significant warming without a huge buildout out of wind power.”
Connell, 76, parked his truck on the gravel lot that the wind farm’s construction crew has used as a staging ground for the past year. Workers installed the last of 54 turbines in November, bringing the total generating capacity to 214 megawatts.
Acting as a tour guide for two reporters, Connell had spent much of the day discussing his work as mayor and now as executive vice president of the chamber of commerce to attract jobs and investment to Shenandoah.
A city of about 4,900 residents, Shenandoah was the childhood home of the Everly Brothers, the musical duo behind hits such as “Wake Up Little Susie.” The main street has a vitality that many other cities of this size would envy, with a first-run movie theater and a recently renovated mill that now hosts an indoor farmers market.
Still, such vibrance is a challenge to maintain.
The median age in Page County, which includes much of Shenandoah, is 45 years, the 12th highest of Iowa’s 99 counties. To grow and prosper, the community needs to attract new residents, and to do so, it needs to maintain and expand a tax base that can support schools and government services.
“We need more young people,” Connell said.
The Shenandoah Hills wind farm is one of the largest investments in the county’s history. Payments to landowners and local governments are projected to total $234 million over the life of the project, according to Invenergy.
For context, the Shenandoah school district has an annual budget of $28.4 million, with $6.2 million from local property taxes. The wind farm is expected to generate an additional $1.3 million in property taxes annually for the district, based on a 2022 estimate from a consulting firm on behalf of Invenergy.
Invenergy’s plans for a wind farm in the area had been underway since the mid-2010s. The company already had the support of landowners willing to lease their property and of government officials who were moving forward with permit approval.
Then, in the late 2010s, something changed. In both Iowa and nationwide, wind energy projects began to face local opposition that was more aggressive and better organized than before.
Some of the shift was due to the boom in wind energy, which had already changed the landscape in parts of Iowa, contributing to backlash from residents who disliked the look of the turbines.
Some of the changing tide was partisan, fueled by the hardening of beliefs that Democrats support renewable energy and Republicans — the large majority in rural Iowa — support fossil fuels. President Donald Trump helped popularize this view with his use of the unfounded term “wind cancer” and other criticism of wind and solar energy.
The upshot was that the development of Shenandoah Hills turned bitter.
The opposition organized on social media, including a Facebook group, Page County Horizons, which served as a forum to encourage attendance at public meetings and to share video clips and articles portraying wind energy as dangerous and unreliable.
Todd Maher, who lives within view of the wind farm, opposed the project and decided in 2022 to run for the county Board of Supervisors because he felt that officials weren’t listening to concerns. He won in the Republican primary, defeating the incumbent, who supported the wind farm, and then ran unopposed in the general election.
“A lot of people want to live where they can see the sunrise and sunset without having to look at a wind turbine,” he said in a recent interview.
Maher, 55, lives on an acreage with a donkey, chickens, cats, and dogs. He has worked for most of his adult life at the Pella Corp. window plant in Shenandoah.
One of his main concerns with the wind farm was the disconnect he observed between the landowners who would receive lease payments and residents who would actually see the turbines every day. Most of the owners don’t live near the turbines, and many of them don’t live in the county or the state, he said.
This isn’t unusual, with the heirs of farmers and investment companies owning a large share of U.S. farmland. But it’s frustrating, said Maher, that people who live in the area will have their views spoiled while somebody else is paid for the leases.
Once Maher took office, he found it wasn’t easy to stop the project. The board passed a moratorium on wind energy development that was to include Shenandoah Hills. Invenergy responded by suing the county, arguing that the sudden change should require taxpayers to reimburse the company for the money it had already spent.
Legal counsel warned county officials that there was a decent chance of losing in court and then facing a judgment so large that the government might need to file for bankruptcy.
Maher was unwilling to take that risk. In November 2024, he was in the majority in a 2–1 vote to accept a settlement with Invenergy that would allow the project to move forward.
“It was the toughest vote I’ve ever made,” he said. “I lost a lot of friends over it. I lost a lot of people that supported me.”
Iowa, especially its western half, has some of the richest wind resources in the country.
Early developers capitalized on this, with the completion of Storm Lake 1 in northwestern Iowa in 1999, the first wind farm in the state, with a capacity exceeding 100 megawatts. By 2010, wind farms were a familiar part of the landscape, with more than 3,500 megawatts of capacity, including some large installations along Interstate 80, the major east–west highway that bisects the state, connecting California to New Jersey.
For years, Iowa’s leadership in wind energy was a point of pride, with the silhouette of a wind turbine appearing on the state’s license plate next to images of city skylines and farm buildings.
Wind power enjoyed bipartisan support in the state, with proponents including Democrats such as former U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin and former Gov. Tom Vilsack and Republicans such as former Gov. Terry Branstad and U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley. They viewed wind farms as an opportunity to increase incomes in rural counties.
Their vision paid off. As of 2024, Iowa led the country in the share of electricity produced by wind farms, with 63 percent.
But the era of growth in Iowa’s wind industry is almost certainly nearing its end. Shenandoah Hills was one of just three wind farms to be completed in the state in 2025, and only one was completed in 2024, according to the EIA. The last significant year of development was 2020, when 12 projects went online.
The contraction of the industry is a grave concern for Jeff Danielson, a Democrat who served four terms in the Iowa Senate and now is vice president of advocacy for Clean Grid Alliance, a clean energy business group.
“Iowa is essentially closed for business when it comes to wind development,” he said.
The resistance comes almost entirely from the local level. His organization lists 58 of Iowa’s 99 counties as having rules designed to limit wind power development, including many of the counties with the strongest wind resources.
He described the opposition as formidable in its ability to organize at the local level and then throw out a large number of objections in the hope that one of them will stick. It’s not a fair fight, with one side repeating a litany of claims found on anti-wind websites, and the wind power companies obligated to stick to facts that will stand up in court, said Danielson.
“It’s not even really an adult conversation anymore,” he said.
If Iowa’s legislature and governor wanted to encourage wind energy development, they could pass a law to expand state authority to approve projects, limiting the ability of local governments to pass restrictions. The state has previously done this on hot-button issues such as regulating large animal-feeding operations, but there’s little indication they’ll intervene when it comes to wind.
“One thing you find out about legislators is they like local control when they like it, and they don’t always like it,” said Iowa Rep. Brent Siegrist, a Republican whose district is a short drive from Shenandoah.
Siegrist supports wind energy and thinks it is important for making Iowa an attractive location for providing plentiful, affordable electricity for data centers. But he doesn’t expect any push at the state level to make it easier to build wind farms. Republicans control both chambers of the legislature and the governor’s office.
“I’m not sure that we would step into that,” he said.
If Iowa isn’t building much wind power, it’s a bad sign for the industry as a whole.
But local opposition in rural areas is just one of several obstacles for wind developers.
The passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in July included a rapid phaseout of the production tax credit, an important federal policy that had helped encourage development.
Developers are now on a tight deadline. Projects must be completed by the end of 2027 or begin construction by July 4, 2026, to qualify for the tax credit.
Amid the rush to begin construction, the Trump administration has issued executive orders to slow development of wind and solar. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has taken additional steps, requiring that he personally sign off on new wind or solar projects subject to his agency’s jurisdiction.
Jain, the BloombergNEF analyst, said the global wind energy market faces challenges tied to local acceptance and slow progress in building enough power lines to serve new projects.
The United States deals with those same problems, as well as the obstacles created by its federal policies.
The U.S. outlook, Jain said, “now looks so much weaker than the global picture.”
In Shenandoah, the wind farm is up and running, but the debate over its approval has left scars.
In February 2025, Invenergy sold the project to MidAmerican Energy, Iowa’s largest electricity utility. Invenergy quietly walked away from the wind farm while MidAmerican inherited a community relations crisis.
MidAmerican has attempted to smooth things over, hosting events for landowners and community members and meeting with supervisors and engineers of Page and Fremont counties.
Outside the two counties, MidAmerican’s publicity for the wind farm has been scant. However, in recent correspondence with Inside Climate News, the company expressed no regrets over its decision to take on the project.
“The Shenandoah Hills wind farm is an economic success story for both Page and Fremont counties,” Geoff Greenwood, media relations manager for MidAmerican, wrote in an email. The company projects paying nearly $87 million to Fremont County and $65 million to Page County in property taxes over the life of the project, said Greenwood.
“Wind energy has helped us create relationships with partner landowners and helps Iowa attract new companies to the state. It also provides direct, long-term economic benefits to our rural areas,” Greenwood added.
But as the very last turbines were erected outside Shenandoah, the atmosphere hardly felt triumphant.
The closest thing to a celebration was a ribbon-cutting held in September 2024 when Invenergy opened an office in downtown Shenandoah to manage the construction and community relations.
Connell, who has been unabashed in his support for the project since the beginning, was one of the people holding the ribbon. But his words that day didn’t feel like a victory lap.
“This has been a difficult project,” he said, quoted by KMA, the local radio station. “There are people that oppose wind, and there are people for wind. But I admire the fact that Invenergy, in my estimation, has taken the high ground on everything.”
The office closed a few months later, around the time of the sale to MidAmerican.
Maher, the county supervisor, wishes the wind farm had never happened. But since it’s here, he is hopeful that he and his neighbors can learn to live with the change.
“Maybe things will not be as bad [as we fear, and] we can find a good common ground to where we can coexist.”
This story was first published by the Missouri Independent.
The conversion of Missouri farmland from food to solar power production creates feuds among neighbors, pits residents against developers, and raises questions about property rights.
Those tensions were on full display Tuesday in the Missouri Senate commerce committee, which held hearings on two bills aimed at halting solar power development and a third that would impose new regulations and taxes on large-scale development.
No votes were held on any of the bills.
Laura Stinson told the committee her parents’ Callaway County home, once a peaceful respite, is now plagued with construction noise, dust, and blinding glare from a new development surrounding their 16 acres.
“They are running full steam ahead, and they don’t care who they run over,” Stinson said, pleading with members to pass the bills.
But Dane Reed of Vernon County said his decision to lease land to a solar developer is the best use of his property.
A moratorium, he said, “strips landowners of our fundamental right to choose our most profitable crop. And right now, solar energy generates twice the revenue of any other crop we can produce.”
Thousands of acres across the state are being used to construct large-scale solar projects, some for commercial sale of power and others that will be dedicated to supply other new developments like data centers.
State Senate President Pro Tem Cindy O’Laughlin, a Shelbina Republican, and state Sen. Sandy Crawford, a Republican from Buffalo, are sponsoring the moratorium bills. The bills would halt all work on commercial-scale solar power installations and direct the state Department of Natural Resources to issue rules on their “construction, placement and operation.”
The moratorium would expire Dec. 31, 2027, or when regulations become effective, whichever is later.
The goal of the moratorium, O’Laughlin said, is to force developers to make their plans known so residents can judge for themselves whether the project will benefit the community. Currently, she said, the public becomes aware of projects only after contracts are signed with landowners and the result seems predetermined.
“Communities become divided as the neighbors are pitted against one another, those who signed and those who don’t, and those who bear the environmental, visual, and infrastructure impact versus those who are being paid and receiving compensation,” O’Laughlin said.
The bill establishing regulations, sponsored by state Sen. Travis Fitzwater, a Republican from Holts Summit, would not halt current construction.
Instead, it creates a process for public notice and local approval at the county level that must take place before an application to proceed with a project is submitted to the Public Service Commission.
Without approval from a county commission, the application could not move forward.
Fitzwater’s bill would also tax solar power equipment, currently exempt from property taxes, as personal property. The land would also be taxed as commercial real estate instead of the cheaper designation as farmland.
The bill would cap the amount of land used for solar power production to 2% of the cropland in a county and block the Public Service Commission from granting solar power developers the right to condemn property for energy generation.
“I’m passionate about my constituents that come to my office that are crying over the fact their American dream is being stunted, and I want to provide a solution,” Fitzwater said.
There are 36 states that currently regulate new commercial solar power projects, said Kurt Schaefer, director of the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. Because the Public Service Commission regulates only investor-owned utilities, he said, his agency could be the regulatory agency because its authority can also be extended to electric cooperatives and municipal utilities.
The rules should govern both the setup and operation of solar facilities and what happens when their useful life is over, Schaefer said.
“In the state of Missouri, we require financial assurance for a whole lot of things — land reclamation, for mining activities, wastewater systems,” Schaefer said. “You really can’t even put in a small wastewater system for a trailer park without posting a bond.”
One of the most controversial projects is in Henry County, where there is a 5,000-acre solar farm under construction. The project was developed over several years but only revealed publicly at the start of 2024.
In December 2024, after two incumbent commissioners were defeated for reelection, the Henry County Commission approved an incentive package for the solar project that included $650 million in public-sponsored financing.
With the filing of the moratorium bills, construction has picked up pace, said former Henry County Prosecuting Attorney Richard Shields.
“These moratorium bills would give the state the opportunity to tap the brakes on these projects and get some rules in place,” Shields said.
A moratorium would end solar development in Missouri for years, said David Bunge of Azimuth Renewables, a solar energy development company in St. Louis.
“That’s not stability, that’s not good governance, and it’s not fair to the communities of Missouri that have engaged with developers like Azimuth,” he said.
And Mark Walter, a consultant for solar developers, said the moratorium bill is so broad it would prevent individuals from installing new solar panels on their home. The need for regulation is real, he said, but must be targeted against bad practices.
“There are plenty of bad developers out there,” Walter said. “I joked for a long time that I had a job in policy because of those folks, and I had to clean up their messes when they would make bad projects that upset local people and end up with state legislation like this.”
As large solar fields proliferate across America, pushback to them in rural communities is growing, fueled by a mix of disinformation and genuine concern about losing open land to development.
The tension is perhaps nowhere more evident than in Virginia, which has ambitious clean energy goals but is also the land of Thomas Jefferson — where many residents take pride in their rolling hills, winding rivers, and agrarian roots.
Today, nearly two-thirds of Virginia’s counties effectively prohibit utility-scale solar, according to the renewables industry. But legislation rocketing through the state’s Democratic-controlled General Assembly would help change that, preventing outright bans while still allowing localities to reject large-scale solar projects on an individual basis.
Senate and House versions of the measure have already cleared their respective chambers, with most Democrats for and most Republicans against. The proposal is backed by solar developers and a powerful government advisory commission on energy policy, and is poised to reach the desk of Gov. Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, in the coming weeks.
Still, most environmental and climate advocacy groups in Virginia have no position on the bill, and some conservationists are opposed — exposing the conflicts that can arise even among interests that all support the clean energy transition.
And the renewables industry acknowledges that if the bill does become law, wary local governments will still need to be convinced that solar fields are a net positive.
“This bill is a relative light touch to address solar siting in a way that we hope will result in more projects getting to make their case to a community, while preserving local control,” said Evan Vaughan, executive director of Mid-Atlantic Renewable Energy Coalition, a nonprofit that represents over 50 large-scale solar, storage, and wind developers and manufacturers.
In many ways, Virginia is primed for utility-scale solar development. The state is the data center capital of the world, with a growing number of facilities needing more and more electricity. Large solar is one of the cheapest and quickest ways to satisfy that demand.
There’s also the Virginia Clean Economy Act. Adopted in 2020, the law requires both of the state’s investor-owned utilities to decarbonize by midcentury and sets a target of at least 16 gigawatts of solar and land-based wind farms to help them do so. Already on the uptick, utility-scale solar exploded after the law was adopted, with the state averaging more than 1 gigawatt of installations each year through 2024, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. Virginia now ranks ninth on the group’s list of states with the most utility-scale solar.
But in tandem with this explosion, county resistance to solar has risen — spurred in part by solar developers that fail to control sediment runoff during construction and operation, contributing to pollution in the Chesapeake Bay and other waterways.
Local project approvals peaked in 2022 and declined after that, according to the Mid-Atlantic Renewable Energy Coalition. The group says that 64% of Virginia counties now bar large-scale solar in practice, either through outright bans or unworkable and costly restrictions.
For instance, Greenville County allows solar only on industrial or business property. Accomack, Appomattox, and Powhatan counties prohibit solar on agricultural land. Washington County bans solar on land that has been clear-cut or heavily timbered in the last five years and land within five miles of an airport.
“Virginia should be an attractive market, and it certainly has attracted a lot of development interests in the past,” Vaughan said. But the prohibitions are helping to change that. “We are seeing many solar companies looking at Virginia and saying, ‘We don’t see a lot of opportunity here anymore.’”
Indeed, large solar in the state has stalled dramatically, with new installations plummeting in 2025. The slowdown is especially salient as already-high electricity rates continue to push upward, Vaughan said.
“Utility-scale solar is still the cheapest source of new electricity generation, period,” he added. “So, this difficulty of bringing new solar projects online does have a direct link to affordability.”
The legislation nearing Spanberger’s desk builds on an unsuccessful measure introduced two years ago by Democratic Sen. Schuyler VanValkenburg of Henrico County, just outside Richmond. That proposal would have simply outlawed blanket bans on solar, along with size and density restrictions, while retaining local authority over permitting. It was approved by the Senate but languished in the House.
Since then, VanValkenburg explained to colleagues in committee last month, he’s endeavored to address the proposal’s critics. This year’s bill, backed by the state’s influential Commission on Electric Utility Regulation, would still prevent outright and de facto bans. But it would also establish a host of statewide standards for solar farms, including setbacks from roads and wetlands, height limitations, and measures to limit water pollution during construction. Plus, it would require solar developers to pay for equipment removal and land restoration when a project is decommissioned.
“Local governments complained — correctly, by the way — about bad solar projects and bad solar developers coming in,” VanValkenburg said. The edited legislation, he said, gives locales guidelines for stopping those bad actors.
Even if the criteria are met, the bill wouldn’t force approval of solar fields, VanValkenburg stressed in committee. Developers would still need a special-use permit or siting agreement from local governments.
“They can reject every single project that comes before them,” VanValkenburg said. “They just need to take them up one at a time. They can’t outright ban solar.”
Utility-scale renewable developers in Virginia have made the proposal one of their top priorities: It is not a silver bullet, they say, but an important foot in the door with some locales. And though communities may still rebuff large solar fields, they would have to submit their reasons for doing so to state utility regulators, keyed to the new siting standards.
“The bill improves transparency and fairness,” said Evangeline Hobbs, a deputy director at the American Clean Power Association, “by requiring that project denials be documented and publicly explained.”
VanValkenburg’s efforts at compromise, meanwhile, seem to have borne fruit. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation, for instance, testified in favor of the new legislation last month, despite having had “reservations” about the bill in the past.
“The draft that we’re moving towards incorporates more robust boundaries for our wetlands and tributaries,” Jay Ford, Virginia policy manager for the group, said in remarks to the committee. “This is a really important step.”
“Groups like us,” Ford continued, “we’re always in an awkward place here because we know we need to accelerate the clean energy deployment. And we also know we need to take care of our natural resources. We don’t think it should be an either-or proposition. And we’re really grateful to the senator for helping us get to that point.”
Sen. Danica Roem, a Democrat who represents rapidly developing Prince William County and has prioritized tree conservation, also praised VanValkenburg.
“He’s worked in good faith with me repeatedly on legislation … willing to try to meet me halfway,” she said. “The local option part of this,” she said, whereby governments still have the ability to reject projects, “is a pretty non-offensive way to go about dealing with the issue.”
VanValkenburg’s bill, Senate Bill 347, cleared committee and the full Senate last week. A similar proposal by House Majority Leader Charniele Herring, a Democrat representing parts of Alexandria and Fairfax County, passed committee last week and the House of Delegates yesterday. That measure, House Bill 711, includes stricter setbacks from Chesapeake Bay wetlands.
At least one of the versions must clear the other chamber to reach the governor’s desk — though no more action is expected until at least the latter half of the month.
Not everyone is on board with VanValkenburg’s and Herring’s proposals. The Virginia Farm Bureau, which advocates for farmers and the agricultural industry, and the Virginia Association of Counties oppose the legislation, representatives said during the Senate committee debate last week.
Most environmental advocacy groups haven’t prioritized the legislation one way or another: It’s not part of the community’s shared list of priorities before the General Assembly.
Two conservation organizations, meanwhile, spoke against the bill in committee: Friends of the Rappahannock, a river protection group, and The Piedmont Environmental Council, a promoter of solar panels paired with crops.
“We fully recognize and agree that we must not allow a patchwork of local ordinances to become a de facto ban on solar energy development,” the council said in an email to Canary Media. “If we desire science-based best management practices, and we absolutely should, we must initiate a process through our state agencies,” the statement continued, one that is “inclusive” of environmental advocates, subject matter experts, and local governments.
This continued skepticism is one reason the solar industry isn’t 100% sanguine, even as the legislation looks primed for passage by the General Assembly. Spanberger could try to amend it before signing it into law — her prerogative under the Virginia legislative process.
And no matter what, the solar industry knows it has to earn back trust from some locals.
“Developers are always going to have to do the hard work of convincing a community that their project is a good addition,” Vaughan said. “That’s not going to change.”
Rye Development secured a federal license to build a massive new pumped hydro energy storage facility in Washington state. The company could become the first to construct this type of grid megaproject in the U.S. since 1995.
Long before lithium-ion batteries reshaped the power sector, utilities stored electricity by pumping water uphill when energy was abundant and later letting it descend, turning turbines to generate power when needed. This technique depends on gravity and heavy construction, and the U.S. pumped hydro fleet got built when utilities could unilaterally invest in long-term assets. In the country’s modern, largely deregulated, and rapidly changing power markets, nobody has pulled off the expensive and time-consuming feat.
Until now — potentially. On Thursday, Rye secured a license from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to build and operate a planned pumped storage project just north of the Columbia River Gorge, near the town of Goldendale (population 3,500). It’s the final regulatory step, meaning that Rye can now finalize plans and begin building.
“With electricity demand and energy costs on the rise, this type of pumped storage project represents a huge step forward,” said Erik Steimle, director of development at Rye. He added, “It’s a fully domestic source of energy storage: The major components are concrete, steel, and labor.”
That effort joins two others Rye is working on, which Steimle said could start construction sooner: Swan Lake in Oregon and Lewis Ridge in Kentucky. So far, though, none have broken ground.
At Goldendale, Rye plans to excavate two 60-acre reservoirs separated by 2,000 feet of vertical gain. The company will pipe in water from the nearby Columbia River, then circulate the water up and down to store and discharge power.
This will have a nameplate capacity of 1.2 gigawatts, bigger than any battery storage installation thus far. But pumped storage really shines in how long it can discharge power for — in this case, 12 hours. The cost of building a bigger reservoir scales much more favorably than stacking more batteries does to achieve the extended storage.
The project is a bet on increased demand for long-duration storage as intermittent renewable production surges. The Pacific Northwest has built ample solar and wind generation but has struggled to expand its transmission network, which produces congestion on the wires. So a major storage plant like Goldendale could help: charging up when solar or wind floods the network and then discharging back when demand is high.
The project will typically pump water for 12 to 16 hours a day and generate eight hours a day, but it could push that to a maximum of 12 hours, according to the license document.
Individual power plants seldom need to petition FERC for permission, but Goldendale fell under that body’s jurisdiction because it will connect with federal land and pump water from a navigable waterway. Notably, the new reservoirs will not even touch the Columbia, drastically limiting environmental impacts, compared with those from America’s earlier dam-building spree.
The layout covers about 680 acres, largely private land that used to house a decommissioned aluminum smelter, but it connects to transmission infrastructure overseen by the federal Bonneville Power Administration. Up on a ridge, the high reservoir will be nestled among a series of wind turbines. Between that power plant and the smelter, Rye won’t need to build any new access roads, Steimle said.
The approval stipulates certain environmental mitigations: Rye has to schedule its filling of the reservoirs to avoid altering the river flow during salmon smolt migration, for instance; plant native vegetation on disturbed land; and purchase 277 acres elsewhere to dedicate to golden eagles’ nesting and foraging.
With federal permission secured, Rye now needs to lock down customer contracts (much like another capital-intensive long-duration storage project, Hydrostor’s recently approved compressed-air effort in California). This type of infrastructure is too costly to build without a guarantee of revenue. But Rye needed to win its license before it could finalize contracts with customers, Steimle noted. The project can serve utilities in the Pacific Northwest as well as in California, where state regulators have mandated that power providers buy long-duration storage to balance a massive supply of solar generation.
Rye has already secured a financing partner for Goldendale: Danish firm Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, which also bought Rye’s Swan Lake project, back in 2020. Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners will supply the estimated $2 billion to $3 billion needed to build Goldendale once Rye finds buyers for the clean power.
Now, Rye will finalize construction planning alongside its commercial efforts. The FERC license stipulates that construction must commence within 24 months, so the countdown is on.
Even Rye’s successful licensing journey underscores the challenges of leaning on pumped hydro to support the transition to clean energy. The company filed for its license in June 2020. It took five and a half years to get the green light, and it will take up to two years to finalize plans and then four or five more to actually finish building the thing.
That ponderous pace explains why such a large-scale plant hasn’t been built in the U.S. since the Rocky Mountain Hydroelectric Plant came online in Georgia in 1995. A few other companies have tried, like Absaroka Energy, which is developing the Gordon Butte plant in Montana. Globally, a new pumped hydro site opened in Switzerland in 2022; it took just 14 years.
To put it simply, pumped hydro construction isn’t a nimble response to a rapidly changing electricity mix. Batteries, on the other hand, are — they’re mass-produced in factories and can be installed swiftly in prepackaged containers.
But pumped hydro works extremely well when built. It has a far longer duration than the typical four-hour lithium-ion battery. These facilities also last far longer than lithium-ion cells, which degrade with use. The Goldendale license covers 40 years of operation, but the system is designed to last 100, Steimle said; the owner of the Rocky Mountain plant sought a license extension for another 40 to 50 years.
“Pumped hydro is a battery you can cycle over and over again with little to no degradation over a very long period of time,” he said.
And it clearly works at a massive scale: The U.S. has more than 22 gigawatts already running.
As Paul Denholm, a clean grid modeler at the institution formerly known as the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, told Canary Media previously, “Utilities with pumped-storage plants love them — they’re awesome.”
For nearly two years, Century Aluminum has been searching for a site to put a giant new U.S. smelter — a decision that largely hinged on where it could strike a deal with utilities to access cheap, reliable electricity.
On Monday, the Chicago-based manufacturer finally unveiled its plans. Rather than build its own power-hungry facility, Century is partnering with Emirates Global Aluminium to jointly develop a smelter near Tulsa, Oklahoma, the companies announced. The facility will be America’s first new aluminum smelter in nearly half a century if completed as planned by the end of the decade.
“Together we will make a huge contribution to rebuilding American aluminum production for the 21st century,” Abdulnasser Bin Kalban, CEO of the Dubai–based EGA, said in a statement.
Century had previously identified northeastern Kentucky as its preferred location for a $5 billion smelter, though the company was also evaluating sites in the Ohio and Mississippi river basins. In 2024, the Biden-era Department of Energy selected Century to receive up to $500 million to build a “green” smelter powered by 100% renewable or nuclear energy.
Century didn’t immediately return Canary Media’s questions about the status of the federal award or how energy issues factored into its decision to join forces with EGA.
But on Tuesday, Century CEO Jesse Gary told Fox Business, “That grant is going to underlie the total investment … to help build this new smelter.”
Aluminum production contributes about 2% of greenhouse gas emissions globally every year, and the majority of those emissions come from generating high volumes of electricity — often derived from fossil fuels — to power smelters.
Emirates Global Aluminium first proposed building its own Oklahoma smelter last May. Up until this week, EGA and Century seemed to be racing each other to fire up their new facilities. The fact that the companies teamed up reflects how difficult it is for manufacturers to secure power at the volumes and prices they need, not only in the United States but globally — a challenge that’s getting even harder with the competition from AI data centers.
Building a smelter “is very expensive and very complicated, so I take it as good news,” said Joe Quinn, who leads the Center for Strategic Industrial Materials for SAFE, which advocates for policies to enhance U.S. energy security.
“There was a scenario where both could have failed,” he added. “But now they’re getting together, and I think that strengthens the likelihood of a new smelter being built in the United States.” He said the news was “a little surprising, but then again not that surprising” given the challenges of opening a multibillion-dollar greenfield smelter.
Under this new agreement, EGA will own 60% of the joint venture and Century will own the remaining 40%. The Tulsa-area facility is expected to produce 750,000 metric tons of aluminum per year, an amount that is 25% larger than previously envisioned — and more than double the current U.S. production of primary aluminum.
A facility that massive will require over 11 terawatt-hours of power, or enough electricity annually to power the city of Boston or Nashville, according to an Aluminum Association report.
America’s output of the versatile metal has sharply declined in recent decades, in large part owing to rising industrial electricity rates. Today, the country operates just four smelters — down from 33 in 1980 — and it imports about 85% of all the aluminum it needs each year. At the same time, the U.S. is using more aluminum in solar panels, power cables, infrastructure, and electronics. By 2035, U.S. demand for primary aluminum is expected to rise by as much as 40%, the advocacy group Industrious Labs said in a report last year.
Annie Sartor, Industrious Labs’ senior campaigns director, said that “two smelters would have been ideal” for boosting U.S. aluminum production. “One is better than none, but neither can succeed without affordable, clean power,” she said in a statement.
Construction on the Oklahoma smelter is set to start by the end of this year, the companies said. Negotiations are still underway with the Public Service Company of Oklahoma, which is a subsidiary of utility giant AEP, and the state of Oklahoma to secure a competitive, long-term power contract.
Last year, EGA signed a nonbinding agreement to build its proposed smelter with the office of Republican Gov. J. Kevin Stitt, a deal that includes over $275 million in incentives, including discounts for power. Oklahoma’s “energy abundance” was a key factor in selecting the state for the new aluminum smelter, Simon Buerk, EGA’s senior vice president for corporate affairs, previously told Canary Media.
More than 40% of Oklahoma’s annual electricity generation comes from wind turbines spinning on open prairies, while about half the state’s generation comes from fossil-gas power plants. Last summer, the Public Service Company acquired an existing 795-megawatt gas plant south of Tulsa to meet the rising energy needs of its customers, potentially including EGA.
Buerk said last year that the Oklahoma smelter’s annual power mix “will be based on EGA’s decarbonisation objectives, market dynamics, and market demand for low-carbon aluminum.” He confirmed that Monday’s announcement doesn’t change any of the options being discussed in ongoing negotiations with the utility. That includes a potential tariff structure that gives the smelter dedicated long-term access to a proportion of renewable energy.
The news that Century Aluminum is investing in Oklahoma comes as a major letdown for some environmental and labor groups in Kentucky, who had advocated for bringing the project to their state. Century already owns two aging smelters in western Kentucky, and the new facility was supposed to create thousands of construction jobs and more than 1,000 permanent positions — jobs that will now go to Oklahoma.
“This is a disappointing loss for Kentucky, but it should serve as a wake-up call,” Lane Boldman, executive director at Kentucky Conservation Committee, said in a statement. “For Kentucky to remain an energy leader and meet the needs of industries looking for reliable and affordable power, it must modernize its energy infrastructure more quickly, such as grid modernization, energy storage, and diversifying with renewables.”
An update was made on Jan. 27, 2026 to include a response from EGA and comments from Century CEO Jesse Gary.
U.S. solar manufacturers start 2026 in an odd position. They have made real strides toward reshoring production, but still have a long way to go — and federal and trade policies are layering new uncertainties onto the task.
The U.S. is now actively producing all the major components in the solar supply chain: polysilicon, ingots, wafers, cells, and modules. That hasn’t happened in over a decade, since SolarWorld closed its wafer-production plant in Oregon in 2013.
“Except for the glass, everything we have in the module could be domestic, should the client choose that,” said Martin Pochtaruk, CEO of Heliene Solar, which manufactures in Minnesota. “The main issue is the limitation on capacity.”
The U.S. can make almost 65 gigawatts of panels annually, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. But it can’t yet build enough of the precursor components to meet the demand for panels. (SEIA expects the U.S. will install 44 gigawatts of direct-current solar capacity this year.)
Major factory construction now underway takes aim at that shortfall, even as factory owners grapple with upheavals in federal domestic and trade policies.
Congress created new rules last year that block tax credits from going to “foreign entities of concern,” or FEOC. Those regulations technically kicked in on Jan. 1, but the Treasury Department still needs to release preliminary guidance and launch formal rulemaking.
Separately, an anti-dumping investigation could raise tariffs on solar imports from India, Indonesia, and Laos, as part of a long-running Commerce Department effort to block imports by China-linked companies that build in other countries to avoid steep tariffs.
And last year, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick launched an investigation into the national security implications of the polysilicon supply chain, which could impose global tariffs on products that contain polysilicon — including solar panels and their components.
Here are the three biggest storylines to follow for the state of domestic solar manufacturing in 2026.
As of last year, U.S. factories have officially been able to make enough solar modules to meet domestic demand.
Cell capacity, however, lags far behind, at just 3.2 gigawatts. This year, companies are pushing to catch up.
“If we want to have the manufacturing here, we have to have the cell manufacturing here, because that’s the most difficult step, in many ways; it’s where a lot of the innovation happens,” said Tim Brightbill, a lawyer at Wiley Rein LLP who has brought numerous trade cases on behalf of domestic manufacturers. “We can’t just outsource that to China and hope the rest of the industry will be OK.”
Newcomer T1 Energy started building its cell factory in December in Rockdale, Texas, and should open 2.1 gigawatts of cell production by year’s end.
“This is the year of execution for us,” said Russell Gold, T1’s executive vice president for strategic communications. The 100-acre facility will cost $400 million to build and will generate 1,800 jobs. A planned second phase would add another 3.2 gigawatts.
Qcells, the subsidiary of Korean conglomerate Hanwha, is still plugging away on its ingot, wafer, and cell factory in Cartersville, Georgia. The site started producing modules in 2024; it was supposed to produce ingots, wafers, and cells — the more complicated precursor steps — in 2025, but that build-out fell behind schedule. Qcells is aiming to get Cartersville fully operational by the end of 2026, said Marta Stoepker, head of corporate communications at Qcells North America.
Norway’s NorSun had planned a $620 million, 5-gigawatt ingot and wafer factory near Tulsa, Oklahoma, set to open in mid-2026 and supply Heliene and others. But the company’s website returns a 404 error code, and NorSun told Heliene that the Tulsa factory is not moving ahead, Pochtaruk said.
Heliene had wanted to build a cell factory to supply its 1.3-gigawatt module production in Minnesota, but it froze development amid the market turbulence when President Donald Trump took office in 2025. In the coming weeks, Pochtaruk said, Heliene will begin large-scale production of panels using Suniva cells made with domestic wafers, supplied by Corning, which are sliced from domestic polysilicon created by Hemlock Semiconductor in Michigan.
Then there’s an important outlier: First Solar, which has long been the only solar manufacturer with a homegrown supply chain.
First Solar is also unique in that it eschews silicon in favor of thin-film deposition of cadmium and telluride. It’s able to produce a fully functioning solar panel without the separate steps of carving wafers or etching silicon cells. That advantage allowed the company to grow and thrive behind protective U.S. tariffs in the years when the silicon-solar industry collapsed.
First Solar has built 14 gigawatts of domestic manufacturing capacity across Alabama, Louisiana, and Ohio and is building a new site in South Carolina.
The Republican budget law passed last year forces companies that want to claim the solar manufacturing tax credit, or tax credits for installing solar panels, to prove that they aren’t overly beholden to control or support from prohibited Chinese entities.
Weaning any high-tech supply chain from Chinese influence is challenging, but the task is further complicated because the federal government hasn’t finalized its rules yet. In theory, any panel coming off the line since New Year’s Day needs to comply, but doing so requires a bit of extrapolation, or perhaps luck.
Some companies should have no problems. Heliene is headquartered in Canada. Qcells hails from Korea. First Solar is homegrown. Still, they need to pay for the legalistic accounting to prove they qualify.
Some manufacturers that had ties to China, however, have taken steps to reverse that status. China’s JA Solar sold its Arizona factory to Corning. Trina Solar sold its Dallas factory in 2024 to the company that became T1; in December, T1 released a detailed breakdown of the steps the U.S.-headquartered company took to clear itself of FEOC-related risk.
“We want to show investors, hey, we’re prepared for this, we did our work,” Gold said.
Others have slightly more complicated arrangements, like Canadian Solar, which, despite its name, operates largely out of China; and Illuminate USA in Ohio, a joint venture between U.S. developer Invenergy and Chinese solar giant Longi. These firms have not yet completed the kind of sell-off that Trina did with T1, so it’s harder to see how their 2026 production could qualify for tax credits.
In another category are clearly Chinese-owned factories in the U.S., including JinkoSolar in Florida and Hounen Solar in South Carolina, which seem sure to fail the FEOC test.
The quest for FEOC compliance will be a dominant theme for the industry this year — especially once the rules are actually released.
U.S. solar manufacturing has long depended on trade protections, and two major proceedings could reshape the global playing field this year.
Historically, the U.S. has levied tariffs on China’s solar exports in order to offset government subsidies that helped drastically lower the cost of panels made there. Major Chinese manufacturers responded by building module assembly factories in other countries that did not face such tariffs.
Last year, the U.S. added tariffs on solar modules from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam after concluding a Biden-era trade case.
A subsequent petition by U.S. manufacturers could extend tariffs to India, Indonesia, and Laos. Such requests used to draw an outcry from solar developers, who would face higher prices for their materials. But last year, at the U.S. International Trade Commission’s preliminary hearing for the latest case, nobody testified in opposition, Brightbill said, though some parties later filed opposing statements.
The Commerce Department’s investigations could wrap up over the next few months and lead to preliminary duties, with a final determination coming in the early fall.
A different trade action could take a more global approach than this country-by-country effort.
“It’s not only tax credits you have to look into,” Pochtaruk said of planning new factory investments. “Any and all business plans have to have in consideration what the heck the 232 [outcome] is.”
He’s referring to the ongoing investigation into the national security implications of the polysilicon supply chain, under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. Trump previously used this mechanism to push for tariffs on things like steel and aluminum; it’s different from the authority he invoked for the so-called Liberation Day tariffs last year.
“The courts have largely upheld Section 232 actions by the president, because they tend to defer to the president on national security issues,” Brightbill said.
The Section 232 investigation could produce a far-reaching global tariff on products that contain silicon — not just raw polysilicon but also finished solar cells and panels.
Such a global tariff could drive up costs for the domestic module makers that still have to import cells, since the U.S. is not yet self-sufficient in that step. Then again, it would also raise the cost of foreign modules competing with domestic ones.
“It could be a way to address this Whac-A-Mole problem that we’ve been dealing with for some time,” Brightbill said.
By statute, the Commerce Department must send recommendations to the White House by March 28, which then gives the president 90 days (until late June) to formulate a response.
“All of this contributes to a level of uncertainty around your solar supply chain, and makes building a reliable, transparent, domestic solar supply all the more important,” said Gold, of T1. “The fact that we have a supply deal with Hemlock and Corning gives us a lot of comfort.”
New Hampshire Republicans are attempting to do away with a 50-year-old property tax exemption for households and businesses with solar, contending that the policy forces residents without the clean energy systems to unwittingly subsidize those who have them. Supporters of the exemption, however, say this argument is misleading, insulting, and at odds with New Hampshire’s tradition of letting communities shape their own local governments.
The focus of the debate is a bill proposed in the New Hampshire House this month by Republican Rep. Len Turcotte and several co-sponsors in his party. The measure would repeal a law, established in 1975, that authorizes cities and towns to exempt owners of solar-equipped buildings from paying taxes on whatever value their solar systems add to their property. As of 2024, 153 of the state’s municipalities – roughly two-thirds – had adopted the exemption, one of the only incentives offered in support of residential solar power in the state.
The exemption means that homeowners without solar must pay more property tax to make up for the money not being collected from the “extreme minority” who have solar panels, Turcotte said while presenting his legislation at a hearing of the House Science, Technology, and Energy Committee last week. This “redistribution” of the tax burden is unfair, he said.
The solar property tax exemption is a fairly common policy: Nationally, 36 states offer some version of it. While legislators in many states have targeted pro-solar policies like net metering, property tax exemptions have so far avoided similar attacks. New Hampshire, therefore, could end up as a proving ground for whether this approach can find traction.
New Hampshire does not have a sales tax or an income tax and leans heavily on local property taxes for revenue; its rates are among the highest in the country. That makes changes to property tax policy a particularly sensitive subject. The solar exemption bill has Republicans, who are typically tax averse, walking a fine line between championing what they say is fairness for all and pushing a policy that will inevitably raise taxes for some.
The state authorizes 15 other property tax exemptions — including for elderly residents, veterans, and those with disabilities — but Turcotte’s bill targets only the one for solar.
The exemption is a “local option” policy, meaning cities and towns must opt in through a vote in each municipality. Turcotte, however, doubts the average resident realized that they were signing up to pay more on their own taxes.
“They see a feel-good measure,” he said. “Do they truly understand? I don’t believe they do.”
After Turcotte presented his bill, the remaining speakers — about a dozen clean energy advocates, lawmakers, business leaders, and local solar owners — uniformly opposed his proposal.
Removing the exemption would be an unfair rule change after homeowners invested in solar systems with the understanding they’d be getting a tax break, many argued. Businesses using solar could face a “significant tax increase,” said Natch Greyes, vice president of public policy at New Hampshire’s Business and Industry Association. The change could cost homeowners with solar hundreds of dollars per year while barely reducing the property tax rate for everyone else, others said.
In the town of Hudson, for example, $2.2 million in property value isn’t taxed because of the exemption, out of a tax base of $5.1 billion, its chief assessor James Michaud testified. Removing the exemption would have virtually no effect on the tax rate, he said.
“It’s almost incalculable how small it is,” he said.
Whatever tiny tax shift the exemption creates is worth it, others argued, saying that it provides an incentive for the public good: More solar means lower greenhouse gas emissions and less burden on the grid. Turcotte countered that these broader benefits of solar — many of which have been well documented — are “subjective.”
The question of local control also loomed large in the testimony. In New Hampshire, whose motto is “Live Free or Die,” the right of individual towns to decide on their own rules and regulations has long been a point of pride. Repealing the exemption would mean overriding decisions made by voters. Turcotte’s claim that residents didn’t understand what they were getting into is not only condescending but also just plain wrong, several witnesses said.
“You are essentially, with this bill, substituting your judgment about what is proper at the level of local taxation for that of town meetings and city councils throughout the state,” said Rep. Ned Raynolds, a Democrat, while questioning Turcotte.
The bill now awaits a vote in committee before it can face a floor vote from the full House. It would then advance to the Senate. Republicans control both chambers of the state Legislature and the governor’s office.
But the bill’s opponents hope that lawmakers will heed their arguments and give weight to the mass of voters who have approved the exemption across the state.
“This is the reason two-thirds of the towns have adopted it: They can see it’s a good thing,” testified David Trumble, a solar owner from the town of Weare. “Solar is a good thing.”
In the United States, the Trump administration is waging a relentless war on offshore wind, taking an all-of-government approach to thwarting construction of turbines at sea.
On the other side of the Atlantic, however, 10 European countries have formed an alliance to build out 100 gigawatts of offshore wind power and transform the North Sea into what German Chancellor Friedrich Merz called “the world’s largest clean energy reservoir.”
On Monday, officials from Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and the United Kingdom met in Hamburg to sign a declaration vowing to collaborate on construction of enough offshore wind capacity to power nearly 150 million households by 2050. The document, dubbed the Hamburg Declaration, affirms a goal of building a total of 300 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity in the region, although only a third of that would come from international projects that involve cross-border collaboration. The remaining two-thirds would come from national projects built by countries to send power to their own grids.
At least 100 companies signed onto an accompanying industry declaration in which they promise to cut the costs of offshore wind installations and hire upward of 91,000 workers.
“This is a move not just to establish European energy independence, but to support a strategic sector that’s had a very difficult few years,” said Ollie Metcalfe, the head of wind research at the consultancy BloombergNEF.
Europe has faced energy shortages since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, forcing Kyiv’s allies to wean themselves off the cheap natural gas the Kremlin had shipped westward for decades. The continent ramped up imports of American liquefied natural gas, but that proved very expensive and has left Europe vulnerable to the Trump administration’s bullying on issues such as Greenland’s sovereignty. Nuclear power produces roughly one-quarter of Europe’s electricity, but building new reactors can take well over a decade and some countries, including Luxembourg, remain firmly opposed to atomic energy. In cloudy Northern Europe, with its limited solar potential, harnessing the fierce gusts on the North Sea with offshore turbines represents one of the best options to produce large volumes of power.
Implementing the pact will prove harder than signing it. Countries with lower electricity prices are likely to encounter pushback over a cross-border compact with nations whose energy-market policies have driven up rates. Norway boasts relatively low electricity prices thanks to its vast system of hydroelectric dams. Already, exports of Norwegian electricity to the continent, where Germany’s decision to shut down its nuclear power plants helped push its rates to some of the highest levels in the world, have stirred political blowback in the Nordic nation.
“Sometimes the technical stuff sounds like the most difficult to overcome, but in reality it’s the political and regulatory barriers that end up being the most difficult to solve,” Metcalfe said.
Norway may contribute the fewest turbines under the pact, BloombergNEF forecasts, because its continental shelf drops sharply into deep water, making it difficult to site traditional turbines bolted to the seafloor. Norway has experimented with floating turbines, but the technology is much less mature. And the country’s offshore energy industry has traditionally focused on oil and gas. (Landlocked Luxembourg, which lacks a shoreline, is contributing financing to the deal.)
Europe’s homegrown offshore wind giants, such as Norway’s Equinor and Denmark’s Ørsted, are likely vendors for the buildout, said Gaurav Purohit, the Germany-based vice president of European asset finance at the credit-ratings agency Morningstar DBRS. With the U.S. government bearing down on projects such as Ørsted’s Revolution Wind in New England and Equinor’s Empire Wind in New York, he said the North Sea buildout would allow the companies to redirect capital back to Europe.
Other likely winners of the offshore wind push include the German utility RWE, German transmission giants TenneT and Amprion, and the French energy giant TotalEnergies, which has committed to a big renewables buildout — a contrarian move among oil majors. While China’s soaring offshore wind companies are looking to enter the European market, “I do think European developers will benefit more,” Purohit said.
But he cautioned that the high cost of building offshore wind, particularly when interest rates are elevated and inflation is driving up the price of materials, means that projects would likely “need financial institutions to take a stake.”
Increasing the transmission connections is key, said Matt Kennedy, an executive who heads up sustainability issues for IDA Ireland, the government agency that attracts foreign investment. Right now, the island nation on the EU’s western fringe is connected to other grid systems only by power lines to the United Kingdom. In 2028, the Celtic Interconnector, a 700-megawatt power line connecting Ireland to France, is set to come online, establishing the first direct transmission between the Emerald Isle and the continent. Kennedy said the two-way line will likely hasten construction of offshore wind in Ireland, where the industry has been stunted by planning bottlenecks and, like Norway, a steep continental shelf dropoff. Ireland, which already has a large onshore wind industry, has 7 gigawatts of offshore turbines approved.
Establishing a link to France “really sets the pace for us to be able to deliver on our commitment,” Kennedy said.
“This is a radical step,” he added. “It’s a massive step for Ireland in terms of providing that enabling architecture to access the European market. This will allow us to export an abundance of renewable energy that we plan to have, but also in times of need allows us to import.”
The pact is not renewable energy for the sake of going green, said Ed Miliband, the British secretary of state for energy security and net zero.
“Our view on offshore wind energy is hard-headed, not soft-hearted,” he said, according to Euronews. “I think offshore wind is for winners. Different countries will pursue their national interests, but we are very clear where our interests lie.”
Clean energy foes, from the Trump administration to state legislators to some community members, have long complained that large solar installations are threatening farmland and rural America’s pastoral way of life.
The claims are especially salient in North Carolina, which is both a top-five state for solar deployment and a behemoth in agriculture. Fighting “Big Solar” has become a passionate cause among a small but vocal group of conservatives in this purple state, where lawmakers recently advanced anti-solar legislation dubbed the Farmland Protection Act.
But a new analysis finds that, in actuality, solar fields occupy a tiny fraction of farmland in North Carolina — less than one-third of a percent of the nearly 11 million acres classified as agricultural.
The report by the nonprofit North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association, now in its third edition, draws on data from the U.S. Geological Survey, satellite imagery, and state registrations of solar projects with 1 megawatt or more of capacity. The previous version, from 2022, found similar results: Solar that year took up 0.28% of agricultural land.
“A narrative we run into pretty regularly is that solar is taking up a lot of farmland,” said Daniel Pate, director of engagement for the association and a report contributor. But, he said, “the number continues to be minuscule.”
The study comes as Trump officials invoke similar criticisms to stymie large-scale solar, including by kneecapping a program that helps farmers install their own solar arrays.
It also comes as local restrictions on renewable energy, including solar, gain steam around the country.
In North Carolina, a looming threat to solar is the Farmland Protection Act pending in the Republican-controlled state legislature. Sponsored by a longtime solar critic and onetime farmer, Republican Rep. Jimmy Dixon of rural Duplin County, House Bill 729 included a complete ban on large-scale solar on agricultural land when it was filed last April. The provision was later removed, but the bill now phases out county property tax breaks for large solar, a deal-breaker for many developers. With backing from the state Farm Bureau and the state’s agricultural commissioner, the measure has cleared two House committees and awaits a hearing in two more before it can advance to the floor.
Organized opposition, often funded by fossil fuel interests, has unquestionably helped stoke such resistance to renewable energy. But in rural communities, the lingering perception that large-scale solar installations are overtaking the landscape can also come from a place of good faith.
Without doubt, the vast majority of utility-scale solar fields in the state — about 34,000 out of 40,000 acres — are on agricultural land, according to the report. Arrays that have replaced crops and trees are often visible from the road, since that puts them closer to power lines and substations, creating a starker perception of loss. And in some places — especially in wide, flat eastern North Carolina — the concentration of large-scale solar on farmland is substantially higher than the statewide figure. In Halifax County, for instance, solar takes up a full 1% of agricultural land and is on pace to triple its share in the next few years, according to the Center for Energy Education, a local nonprofit.
But despite concerns about its footprint, solar can also help rural communities — to say nothing of its benefits for the climate. Even with the incentives Dixon seeks to abolish, counties are earning vastly more property tax revenue from farmland with solar than from farmland without, researchers say.
Plus, farmers who lease their land for panels have reported earning about $750 to $1,400 per acre per year, according to the report. That steady income can provide a critical supplement to the boom-and-bust revenue inherent in raising crops and animals. That’s one reason Halifax retreated from a proposal last year that would have effectively prohibited new projects: Elected officials heard from constituents who said they would have lost their family farmland but for solar.
Some in the state’s farming community are also enthusiastic about the promise of agrivoltaics, which would allow them to collect revenue from solar while using the land underneath photovoltaic panels for crops, pollinator-friendly plants, or grazing.
Even so, many in the state’s powerful $111 billion agricultural industry remain deeply skeptical of solar. Their distrust is likely exacerbated by decades of bitter battle with environmental advocates — some of the same groups promoting clean energy — over pollution from hog and poultry factory farms.
Jerry Carey, market intelligence specialist for the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association and another contributor to the report, came face-to-face with some of those skeptics when presenting the findings at a recent meeting with “influential farmers.”
“They’re willing to have a conversation. But they don’t want to hear the numbers. They know what they know. They know what they see,” Carey said. As for the dream of agrivoltaics, he added, “One guy literally said, ‘I don’t want to hear about bees and butterflies.’”
See more from Canary Media’s “Chart of the Week” column.
Two decades ago, the European Union got basically none of its power from wind and solar. Now, those are the leading sources of electricity in the bloc.
In 2025, wind and solar produced more electrons for the EU than fossil fuels did, per a new Ember report — the first time that’s ever happened over the course of an entire year.
It’s a watershed moment. Back in 2015, just under 13% of the EU’s electricity was generated from whirling wind turbine blades and sun-soaking photovoltaic panels. Fossil fuels, meanwhile, produced almost 43% of its power; coal alone accounted for nearly one-quarter of electricity.
Flash forward to 2025: The share of electricity from fossil fuels dropped below 29% while that from wind and solar jumped above 30%.
Though wind still produces more power for the EU than solar does, it was the blistering growth of the latter that drove last year’s achievement. In fact, wind generation actually declined slightly in 2025 from the year prior, but that was offset by a 20% increase in electricity from solar. All 27 EU nations saw solar generation grow last year — and globally, seven EU nations are among the countries that depend most on solar for electricity.
At the same time, coal has entered structural decline, the result of ever-cheaper renewables, an increasing reliance on natural gas, and a suite of policies discouraging coal use. Last year, coal accounted for just 9.2% of the region’s electricity, and several EU nations have already phased it out entirely or committed to doing so before 2030.
That leaves gas, a fuel that provided 16.7% of the EU’s power last year but which the region produces little of.
Europe had heavily depended on gas from Russia until 2022, when the nation invaded Ukraine and prompted a reckoning around domestic energy security in the EU. The bloc is now aiming to quit Russian gas completely by next year. It has turned to two sources to make up for that lost energy: domestic renewables and imported liquefied natural gas from the U.S.
But now, with the Trump administration destabilizing the EU-U.S. relationship, the bloc would like to reduce reliance on the U.S., too. The upshot: Expect renewable energy to keep winning in Europe.
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