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It’s been a rollercoaster of a year for clean energy. There’s no better way to show those ups and downs than with a chart, and luckily, we made a lot of those this year.
As 2025 comes to a close, let’s focus on just the ups. Here are 10 charts that prove the clean energy transition is still marching on in the U.S. and beyond.
We started 2025 with news of a big win from the year before. The U.S. added 56 gigawatts of power capacity to the grid in 2024, and nearly all of it came from solar, battery, wind, nuclear, and other carbon-free installations.
Solar, with 34 GW of new construction, made up more than half of the new additions. Batteries had a stellar year, too, nearly doubling the previous year’s total.
March brought a huge victory for clean energy in the U.S. Solar, hydropower, biofuels, and nuclear were all part of a clean team that covered 51% of electric power demand that month, while fossil fuels accounted for the remainder.
It’s not a surprise that this win came when it did. Milder temperatures that arrive with spring mean Americans are starting to switch off their heat, but don’t yet need air-conditioning, creating a low-demand “shoulder season.” Still, this chart shows how quickly the U.S. has closed a yawning gap between clean and fossil fuel power generation.
The U.S.’s steel and ironmakers are recording slow but steady progress toward getting off coal.
Steelmaking’s reliance on coal makes it one of the world’s dirtiest industries, but all new capacity in the works as of May will use technologies that sidestep the need to burn the fossil fuel. That includes several electric arc furnaces capable of producing millions of metric tons of steel each year.
The U.S. does still rely heavily on coal-fired blast furnaces to purify iron ore. But forthcoming projects will all use direct reduction, which uses natural gas as a fuel — and ironmakers could eventually replace that gas with carbon-free hydrogen.
As of mid-year, the world was on track to spend $2.2 trillion on renewable power, low-emission fuels, the power grid, and other clean energy sectors. Fossil fuels were on track to reap half of that: $1.1 trillion.
It’s a big shift from a decade ago, when coal, gas, and oil investments dominated energy spending. But with China leading the way, clean investments have surged.
Europe had a squeaky clean June. For the first time ever, solar provided more of the EU’s power than any other source, beating both gas and coal power combined. Solar power provided 22.2% of the region’s electricity, with nuclear at its heels, and wind also beating gas generation.
Just a decade ago, coal provided a quarter of the EU’s power, while solar generated just a sliver. Now, those electricity sources are on track to trade places.
The first half of 2025 produced a worldwide win for renewables. January through July was the first time in history that renewables produced more power than coal over that stretch.
Solar’s monumental rise is the main reason for the shift: The source more than doubled its share of global electricity production from 2021 to 2025. And while coal still remains the world’s largest source of electricity, it’s declining while solar and other renewable sources are on the rise.
U.S. battery storage deployment has skyrocketed over the past five years, and that progress isn’t stopping anytime soon. Over the next five years, the country will build nearly 67 gigawatts’ worth of new utility-scale batteries, BloombergNEF estimates.
If that comes to fruition, the U.S. will have nearly triple the battery storage capacity it does now. And there’s evidence to suggest it will: The One Big Beautiful Bill largely left utility-scale battery storage incentives intact, for starters.
Energy storage is crucial for renewables to take root, as batteries can store solar and wind power for use when the sun isn’t shining and wind isn’t blowing.
The latest data shows solar and wind made a speedy ascent this year — so speedy that they’re more than covering new power demand around the world.
Between January and September, power demand around the world rose by 603 terawatt-hours compared to that same time period last year. Solar met nearly all of that new demand on its own, and with a boost from wind, was able to cover all of it.
That’s a huge deal for the clean energy transition. When we produce more renewable power than is needed to cover growing demand, that’s when we can start chipping away at fossil fuels.
EVs may have faced a year of setbacks in the U.S. and beyond, but they’re still on an upward trajectory worldwide. Nearly 11 million new EVs were sold around the globe last year, with most of those new EVs hitting the road in China. Sales of plug-in hybrids and hybrid electric cars are on the rise too. Compare that to 15 years ago, EVs and hybrids were practically nonexistent.
Meanwhile, internal combustion vehicles are officially past their peak. At their all-time high in 2017, global sales of pure ICE vehicles hit 79.9 million units. Last year, sales dropped to 54.8 million.
Our final chart of the year is the ultimate bright spot. While the vibes suggested this would be a dismal year for clean energy deployment in the U.S., it simply wasn’t. Solar, wind, and storage accounted for 92% of new power capacity added to the grid this year through November. It all goes to show that while fossil fuels still produce most of the country’s electricity, clean energy’s growth is hard to stop.
The wide expanses of rural America are foundational to one of the nation’s oldest businesses — raising crops and farm animals — along with one of the youngest: producing cheap, renewable energy.
Sometimes in conflict but often in harmony, the two industries are coming together in Raleigh, North Carolina, to form one of the Southeast’s first training facilities for agrivoltaics, in which the same land is used for agriculture and solar photovoltaic panels.
North Carolina State University launched the site last month and next semester will offer hands-on learning that focuses on solar grazing — sheep feeding on grasses and other vegetation beneath large ground-mounted arrays.
At the training ground, engineering students and solar professionals will be able to tinker with three rows of solar panels, learning how to mount and dismount panels from a unique racking system built for hilly terrain. Many might pet a sheep for the first time.
Meanwhile, would-be shepherds studying at N.C. State and practicing farmers could glimpse their first solar panels up close and learn how livestock interact with the equipment and its wires, inverters, and other related contraptions.
“A lot of sheep producers, they might be interested in solar grazing, but they’ve never stood next to a solar panel,” said Andrew Weaver, an assistant professor in animal science at the university. “What do these solar panels look like? How do they work? How do you graze around that panel?”
When it comes to large-scale solar projects, many rural communities in North Carolina and beyond have faced a steep learning curve. Just ask Steve Kalland, longtime director of the North Carolina Clean Energy Technology Center, based at N.C. State.
The center has been conducting outreach sessions in rural North Carolina for years, countering both misinformation and a genuine lack of knowledge about whether solar panels degrade soil or threaten the state’s agricultural lands. Though the answer to both queries is generally no, he believes cooperation beats confrontation.
“We’re top five in the country in solar deployment and under 1% of agricultural land that’s being used for solar,” said Kalland, relaying stats backed up by the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association. “So I’m not worried about using up all of the agricultural land in the short run, the medium run, or even the long run. But finding ways to do things better together is always a better outcome.”
That’s why bringing solar and agriculture together for instruction at the university “is a perfect marriage in a lot of ways,” Kalland said.
Nevados, which produces solar mounting systems engineered for slopes of up to 37%, donated equipment for the Raleigh site and helped design the curriculum. The Oakland, California–based company wanted an East Coast “sandbox” to better connect with the solar developers that buy its product on the other side of the country.
The Nevados technology, which repositions solar panels throughout the day to follow the sun, doesn’t require leveling the ground. That makes it well suited for agrivoltaics: Pastureland often undulates, and cropland is best undisturbed, said Rahul Chandra, vice president of product marketing at the company.
“What makes it special is that we can get away with almost zero grading underneath the array,” Chandra said. “That gives you some advantages, whether it’s for livestock grazing or maintaining crop production [and] natural soil chemistry. Our whole ethos with the technology is ‘don’t touch the topsoil.’”
Many members of the solar industry are risk averse, Chandra said, making exposure to the relatively new Nevados design — which has been on the market for five years — vital to the tech’s takeoff.
“The N.C. State training is two parts,” he said. “You spend a few hours in the boring classroom right next door, and then you get to go hands-on with the tracking system. It’s a proven model in the solar industry.”
Weaver is eager to give his students practical experience, too. A sheep and goat specialist, he teaches a class on managing the ruminants that includes a lecture on solar grazing.
With the new training center up and running, Weaver said, he can better help pupils grapple with the nuances of raising sheep around solar infrastructure. “What can you touch? What don’t you touch? When do you call the solar company?”
Solar developers and operators can also learn some subtleties of sheep management, Weaver said. How do technicians move the livestock away from an area that needs repair while ensuring the animals still have water and a place to graze? When do they need to call a shepherd?
There’s no set formula for solar grazing, Weaver added. An acre of solar field can usually sustain between one and five sheep. Some immense solar projects can host a flock of sheep year-round; others contract with grazers the same way they would a mowing company.
A general rule of thumb is that grazing can cut mowing frequency in half, reducing the need for fossil-fueled combustion engines, Weaver said. “To me, mowing is kind of hypocritical if we want to preach clean energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”
Like all livestock, sheep produce climate-warming pollution of their own, mostly in the form of methane. But solar grazing proponents say some of that can be offset with management practices that enhance a pasture’s ability to soak up carbon from the atmosphere.
Weaver is passionate about how solar projects could help foster a new generation of farmers who wouldn’t need to own land for pasture.
“Unless you come from family ground, it’s just about impossible to afford land these days,” he said. “Solar has really opened a door that the sheep industry hasn’t had for 50-plus years.”
Indeed, solar grazing is on the rise in North Carolina and across the country, with some 113,000 sheep responsible for maintaining the vegetation beneath 129,000 acres of solar panels, according to the American Solar Grazing Association.
The group doesn’t publish breakdowns by state, but the South leads the way, with nearly 62,000 sheep and over 87,000 acres — largely thanks to solar-abundant Texas.
And though the domestic lamb market today is small, with most of the meat Americans consume originating in Australia or New Zealand, that could change if more solar developers and sheep farmers work together, Weaver believes.
“You have a product that is 10,000 miles fresher, potentially has been harvested within the last week, and has a great story behind it,” he said.
Weaver says the future of solar grazing is bright: Many acres of existing solar projects aren’t yet maintained by sheep — meaning there’s lots of room for growth — and he predicts rural communities will increasingly require new arrays to include agrivoltaics.
“There’s a lot of young people that want to farm and don’t want to sit at a desk all day,” Weaver said. “Ten years ago, they didn’t have a choice: Finding that job in town was the only option. Now, with solar grazing, the opportunity exists to raise a large number of sheep at scale and make a good living doing it.”
The New York Power Authority approved a plan Tuesday to nearly double the state-owned utility’s goal for solar, wind, and energy storage projects to 5.5 gigawatts. The new investments would boost clean power in the state as the private market fails to deploy renewable energy fast enough to meet New York’s lofty decarbonization goals.
In a unanimous decision, the board of trustees voted to greenlight the utility’s new strategic plan for renewables. Though the 5.5 GW figure is an increase over the utility’s initial plan, released this January, it also represents a reduction from the 7 GW draft plan NYPA unveiled over the summer.
The utility blamed the slimmer target on private renewable-energy developers pulling out of 16 joint ventures. Activists, however, accused NYPA of dropping projects to boost plans for new fossil-fuel infrastructure recently approved by Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat.
The 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act requires New York to generate 70% of its power from renewables by 2030 and the rest of its electricity from zero-carbon sources by 2040. It’s one of the most ambitious decarbonization goals in the country, but the state is lagging behind on meeting its legally mandated benchmarks in virtually every category of clean power except for distributed energy sources that include rooftop solar.
Today, natural-gas-fired power stations provide about half New York’s electricity. Aging hydroelectric stations, backed up by additional dams in Canada, provide nearly one-quarter of the state’s power, closely followed by nuclear reactors from plants upstate. Solar and wind each account for only a single-digit share of the state’s power mix, below the U.S.-wide share and far below that of California, Texas, and other states.
NYPA, the second-largest state-owned utility after the federal Tennessee Valley Authority, is increasingly being called on to help close that gap.
Two years ago, Hochul approved measures to give NYPA a mandate to invest directly in clean energy projects — an authority modeled closely on a piece of legislation called the Build Public Renewables Act.
This January, NYPA unveiled a plan to build out more than 3 GW of wind, solar, and batteries using its expanded remit. In July, it released a draft plan that more than doubled that target to 7 GW
But NYPA, required by law to take majority stakes in the developments it backs, elected to own just 51% of these projects. So when developers backed out of the 16 joint ventures, due largely to the rollback of federal tax credits for wind and solar projects and a lack of available transmission capacity, NYPA said it was forced to move forward with fewer projects.
In a statement cautioning that the strategic plan “is an iterative document that will be continually re-assessed and updated,” NYPA’s chief executive Justin Driscoll called the latest proposal “a strong portfolio of refined project opportunities that builds on the energy capacity outlined in the inaugural plan.”
“Despite strong headwinds threatening the viability of renewables projects throughout the nation, NYPA continues to leverage its expertise and reputational strength to develop projects that will bolster the energy diversity of New York’s electric grid,” Driscoll said. “This updated plan is only a snapshot of our ongoing efforts, and NYPA will continue to assess the state’s addressable renewables market to identify new projects that can be added into future plans.”
While the state’s climate law sets deadlines for New York to up the share of renewables in its power mix, NYPA is not beholden to completing the full 5.5 GW by a specific date. The plan, though scheduled for an update only every two years, could be revised as early as next year as new projects become viable or existing ones go under.
The finalized plan drew sharp criticism from Public Power New York, a left-wing group that campaigned for the Build Public Renewables Act. Rather than cut back, the group said, NYPA should expand its target to 15 GW of solar, wind, and batteries. The organization helped marshal more than 10,000 public comments supporting the higher-end goal.
In an interview, Public Power New York’s co-chair Michael Paulson accused Hochul of deliberately dampening the state’s renewables potential to bolster the controversial Williams Companies gas pipeline into New York City, a project The New York Times reported would benefit clients of the law firm that employs the governor’s husband, William Hochul.
“This is unfortunately part of a pattern,” Paulson said. “Instead of using the tools to build a more affordable and better future, Hochul is pushing toxic fossil-fuel projects to enrich her utility donors and potentially even enrich her own family.”
In an email, Hochul’s office called the claims “both disingenuous and ludicrous.”
“NYPA’s plan represents a realistic strategy, as required by law, to build out a portfolio of new renewables,” Ken Lovett, a spokesperson for the governor, told Canary Media. “Under Governor Hochul’s leadership, New York continues to be a national clean energy leader. In the face of federal and economic roadblocks, and warnings of energy shortages downstate as soon as next summer, the Governor’s all-of-the-above energy agenda is designed to keep the lights on and costs down.”
In a June press release, Public Power New York also slammed Hochul and NYPA’s plan to build at least 1 GW of new nuclear power upstate by the time New York’s climate law requires a fully decarbonized system in 2040, calling the effort a distraction from wind and solar.
While Paulson acknowledged the real bottleneck the transmission system poses, he criticized the governor for not doing more to approve new power lines and said her administration should support more distributed solar and batteries in the region facing the state’s worst electricity shortages: New York City and its surrounding suburbs.
Paul Williams, the founder and executive director of the Center for Public Enterprise, a think tank that favors expanded state capacity, agreed New York lawmakers need to do more to make building transmission lines — a challenge everywhere in the U.S. — easier.
“What this strategic plan makes clear is that while NYPA was planning on more renewables projects, there are interconnection barriers that are keeping them from moving forward faster,” Williams said. “The question for those of us who want to see NYPA succeed and build more public renewables is, What can we do to help NYPA overcome interconnection barriers? The faster we can help solve that bottleneck, the faster we can build these projects.”
An update and a clarification were made on December 9, 2025: A statement from Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office was added to this piece, and the story has been changed to make clear that NYPA is required by law to take a majority stake in the projects it backs
President Donald Trump’s freeze on approvals of new wind energy projects has been deemed “unlawful” in a federal court.
On Monday, Judge Patti B. Saris of the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts ruled in favor of 18 state attorneys general who had challenged the temporary ban on onshore and offshore wind permitting, which has been in place since Trump issued an executive order on his first day in office.
Led by New York, the coalition of states and the District of Columbia was joined by the Alliance for Clean Energy New York, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Albany. The lawsuit cited, among other things, harms caused by a stop-work order that paused construction of New York’s Empire Wind 1 in April, which had cited the president’s executive order. (The pause was later reversed after a lobbying blitz.)
The attorneys general also claimed that the wind ban on new projects on federal lands and waters impeded their ability to “lower energy costs” and “reduce greenhouse gas emissions” through wind energy generation.
States with ambitious offshore wind plans were especially hard-hit. Almost all offshore projects are built in federal waters, where the government acts as a kind of landlord. The executive order halted seven offshore wind projects that were in the process of being permitted and several others in earlier stages of development, according to data collected by Canary Media from the federal permitting dashboard. In total, roughly 40 offshore wind leases are scattered across the waters offshore of Maine down to the Carolinas, across the Gulf of Mexico, and along the California coast.
Saris ruled that the executive order was “arbitrary and capricious” on multiple grounds. For example, the Department of the Interior had failed to provide a “reasoned explanation” for suddenly changing course from the decades-long practice of issuing wind permits.
“Whatever level of explanation is required when deviating from longstanding agency practice, this is not it,” wrote Saris, referring to four paragraphs of Trump’s presidential memo, which were the basis of the lawsuit.
The ruling is the latest in a series of major losses for the Trump administration as it seeks to defend the president’s anti-wind agenda in court. Last week, a federal judge denied the government’s attempt to revoke approvals for US Wind, a project slated to be Maryland’s first offshore wind farm. In September, a federal judge ruled in favor of the Danish energy giant Ørsted, whose $6.2 billion New England offshore wind project was halted by the Interior Department, which cited the executive order to justify the move but, as the judge put it, didn’t provide any“factual findings.”
The government had defended the order as temporary, pending the completion of a review of permitting and leasing practices. Federal lawyers argued that this assessment was “underway” but submitted no documents to the court to support such claims. Saris struck down this argument, blasting the review for having “no anticipated end date” and creating the risk of a de facto indefinite permitting moratorium.
A former Interior Department official who spoke with Canary Media on the condition of anonymity said that there was little evidence that the agency had even initiated this kind of review, at least within the first half of the year.
“We were ready to support a review at any time we were asked,” said the staffer, who has since left the agency, adding that “no formal request” to start the review described in the presidential memo ever reached the desks of career federal employees.
The Interior Department was not the only agency that harmed the embattled offshore wind sector in the name of Trump’s “day one” order.
The Environmental Protection Agency in March revoked an essential Clean Air Act permit from Atlantic Shores, an offshore wind development slated to be built off the New Jersey coast, using the order as one of the main justifications. An EPA decision based on little more than Trump’s direction — essentially a presidential memo — raised eyebrows among experts.
“It’s not unprecedented,” Stan Meiburg, a former acting deputy administrator of the EPA, told Canary Media, referring to the use of a presidential order to revoke an EPA permit.“But it still seems unusual that you would cite it that heavily in a case.”
Even with the wind order now set aside, the federal government is unlikely to start approving wind farms anytime soon. There is little legal precedent for courts compelling agencies to issue permits. And some see the damage done by Trump’s “unlawful” order as irreversible.
“It’s sad,” said a current Interior Department staffer, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution, but discussed with Canary Media how the permitting freeze had prompted many wind companies to lay off staff and hit the brakes on projects that were years in the making.
“All the regulatory uncertainty … I think that is the goal that this department and this administration is trying to put forward,” said the staffer.
Six years ago, it seemed like the Midwest was well on its way to building the first offshore wind farm in the Great Lakes. Then the project withered on the vine — and a civil lawsuit puts the blame on utility FirstEnergy’s bribery scheme in Ohio.
That corruption scandal is best known for leading to the 2019 passage of House Bill 6, a law that gutted the state’s clean energy standards and forced consumers to pay nearly half a billion dollars in subsidies for uneconomical coal plants.
But the bribes also led to a regulatory decision that effectively killed the Icebreaker wind farm proposed off Cleveland’s shore, claims the lawsuit filed in July by Lake Erie Energy Development Corp. — the nonprofit that spent more than a decade trying to launch the clean energy project.
The group, known as LEEDCo, zeroes in on FirstEnergy’s bribes to Sam Randazzo, who formerly headed both the state’s Power Siting Board and Public Utilities Commission. LEEDCo argues that those payments led to a 2020 ruling that imposed unworkable restrictions on when the Icebreaker project’s turbines could operate. By the time the restrictions were revoked, funding for Icebreaker had collapsed. The nonprofit is suing FirstEnergy for monetary damages that could top $10 million.
Icebreaker “represented a generational opportunity for the region,” said Jay Kelley, managing partner at Elk & Elk and one of the lawyers representing LEEDCo. “It would have positioned Cleveland as a national leader in offshore wind, created a new advanced-manufacturing supply chain, supported jobs, and strengthened the region’s climate-resilience and economic-development goals.”
The Icebreaker demonstration project called for six turbines to be built approximately 8 miles northwest of Cleveland. Although relatively small, its roughly 20 megawatts of clean electricity would have been enough to power thousands of homes. Just as important to LEEDCo was proving that offshore wind generation was feasible in the freshwater lake. If so, proponents in the public and private sectors hoped to leverage the region’s strengths in engineering, steelmaking, maritime, and other fields to help the sector take off.
“The big dream was to build an industry here,” recalled Lorry Wagner, who served as LEEDCo’s first executive director until he retired in late 2019.
By that time, the organization had spent millions of dollars on offshore wind studies, and it had lined up the developer Fred. Olsen Renewables to build Icebreaker once approvals came through. In 2018, the project cleared the federal government’s environmental review process. LEEDCo was also deep into discussions with several Ohio agencies and had applied for a permit from the Ohio Power Siting Board.
By May 2019, LEEDCo had agreed to various permit conditions supported by the Power Siting Board’s staff, two environmental groups, a trade association, and a carpenters’ union. After a hearing that autumn on the fairness of that settlement, the project’s only remaining hurdle was to get the board’s final approval.
When that ruling finally came in May 2020, the board, led by Randazzo, imposed a whole new condition: Every night from March through December of each year, Icebreaker’s turbines would have to “feather,” or shut down.
“When it came out, everybody was shocked,” Wagner said.
LEEDCo appealed to the Power Siting Board to remove the restrictions. A bipartisan group of 32 lawmakers urged Randazzo to reverse the ruling. Republican Gov. Mike DeWine’s office fielded similar complaints. The board finally removed the “poison pill” provision in October 2020, although Randazzo remained highly critical of Icebreaker.
By then, however, Fred. Olsen had withdrawn from the project. According to LEEDCo, that loss of both funding and technical expertise meant it could no longer meet its obligations for a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy. When the Ohio Supreme Court later upheld the permit without the “poison pill” in 2022, LEEDCo still didn’t have new funding. On Dec. 8, 2023, LEEDCo said it was freezing Icebreaker.
Just a few days before LEEDCo paused Icebreaker, the federal government indicted Randazzo on criminal bribery, fraud, and conspiracy charges related to HB 6 and other matters. He also faced criminal charges from the state of Ohio and the prospect of losing his law license.
FirstEnergy admitted in 2021 that it paid $4.3 million to one of Randazzo’s companies shortly before Gov. DeWine nominated him to lead the Public Utilities Commission. According to that federal court filing, the payment was in return for Randazzo taking official action on HB 6, along with “other specific FirstEnergy Corp. legislative and regulatory priorities, as requested and as opportunities arose.”
LEEDCo claims that stopping the Icebreaker project fell into the general category of other opportunities in which Randazzo furthered FirstEnergy’s interests. The nonprofit alleges in its filings that FirstEnergy thought competition from the Icebreaker project would cost its subsidiaries more than $5 million in lost revenue per year.
LEEDCo wants the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas to make FirstEnergy pay monetary damages to make up for the alleged wrongdoings: interference in LEEDCo’s contracts and business relations, along with corruption and conspiracy in violation of Ohio law.
“Pursuing relief is not only justified — it is necessary to make LEEDCo whole for the years of investment, planning, and opportunity lost,” Kelley said, adding that when wrongful conduct delays or derails a project like this, it doesn’t just hurt one company. “It holds back an entire region’s ability to compete and innovate.”
FirstEnergy asked the court to dismiss the case in August, arguing that LEEDCo’s allegations are based on insufficient evidence and that too much time has passed since the alleged wrongdoing. FirstEnergy spokesperson Jennifer Young said the company has no further comment beyond its case filings.
LEEDCo filed its brief against the motion to dismiss in October. Judge Cassandra Collier-Williams has scheduled the next case conference for late January.
If the case moves ahead to pretrial fact-finding, called discovery, LEEDCo will gain access to various FirstEnergy documents, and the nonprofit’s lawyers will be able to question people under oath. But LEEDCo may need to make its case without testimony from some key witnesses.
Randazzo died in April 2024, so he can’t testify about his arrangements with FirstEnergy or any documents concerning Icebreaker. Randazzo forwarded at least one Icebreaker-related document to himself, using an email connected to one of his companies that received money from FirstEnergy.
The Fifth Amendment would likely protect former FirstEnergy executives Chuck Jones and Michael Dowling from making statements that could be used as evidence against them in criminal cases. FirstEnergy’s lawyers identified Jones and Dowling as people who paid the bribes in the HB 6 scandal. The two men still face charges in state and federal court.
Icebreaker, for its part, has changed hands.
Maryland-based developer Mighty Waves Energy, which is not part of the lawsuit against FirstEnergy, acquired the remaining permit rights for the project last year and is working on meeting the Power Siting Board’s preconstruction conditions. But even if it can do that and get enough people to agree to buy the project’s power, Mighty Waves may well face headwinds, including high interest rates and the Trump administration’s persistent attacks on renewable energy.
David Stevenson stood in a circle of friends and colleagues in an Orlando, Florida, hotel lobby. Everyone but him wore a lapel pin that read “I ♥ Fossil Fuels.”
“You want one?” asked a conference attendee, offering me the pin with a smirk. “It can be a souvenir.”
Stevenson, with a soft wave, gestured to the man to leave me alone. I was the only credentialed member of a legacy news organization attending this gathering, covering it for South Carolina’s largest newspaper, The Post and Courier, where I worked at the time. One organizer of the meeting, the Heartland Institute’s 2023 International Conference on Climate Change, blamed the media’s “constant lies” for the ban on some members of the press.
But Stevenson, then a policy director for the conservative think tank the Caesar Rodney Institute, had personally advocated for me to cover the event. He favored transparency and had no problem talking to me for hours about his primary political cause: making sure no offshore wind farms were ever built in U.S. waters.
The conference drew luminaries from the world of climate skepticism, from Alex Epstein, author of “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels,” to Judith Curry and Ross McKitrick, a cherry-picking duo of marginal researchers more recently known for authoring a controversial 141-page government report downplaying the effects of human-caused climate change for the Trump administration. Rep. Lauren Boebert gave a keynote speech, mocking Democrats’ climate concerns. She held court next to the hotel pool that night, smoking a cigar with leaders from major conservative think tanks underneath palm fronds swaying in the breeze.
Stevenson saw himself as an outlier there. He leaned over during one session to tell me, cheekily, that he might be the “only person here who believes in climate change.”
And yet, despite that belief, Stevenson has dedicated the better part of a decade to obstructing a source of clean energy that can help replace the fossil fuels that are baking the planet. In fact, that’s why he was at the Heartland Institute’s conference: to rail against offshore wind farms.
The following day, Stevenson laid out his case in an expansive and mostly empty ballroom. It’s too expensive, he argued from a lectern, and the United States was not effectively assessing its environmental impact. He suggested a plan to get the public to care about this issue: putting whales front and center.
Stevenson stopped short of blaming wind companies for the spate of whale carcasses that had washed up on New Jersey and New York beaches just weeks prior. He agreed with the scientific evidence that “vessel strikes” — not wind development — were the biggest threat in that region. Still, the potential for harm to whales could be a powerful tool in federal court, he speculated, as well as in the court of public opinion.
At the time, Biden officials were approving new offshore wind projects at “breakneck speed.” Republican opposition was somewhat scant; GOP lawmakers in deep-red South Carolina had just put forth a pro–offshore wind bill. However, nuclear power — the energy sector Stevenson wanted to see advance — appeared to be on the downswing, with many U.S. facilities having recently shuttered.
We parted ways after two days together at the conference, and I ultimately decided not to write a story about Stevenson. He seemed like little more than a gadfly to an increasingly powerful, multibillion-dollar offshore wind industry. I didn’t think much of it when he told me at the time that the industry would “crumble” before it even reached South Carolina.
I should have believed him; Stevenson was right.
The once high-flying offshore wind industry has been brought to its knees this year by President Donald Trump. In just the past few months, the Trump administration halted a nearly finished wind farm, clawed back $679 million in offshore wind grants, and moved to cancel permits for three other massive wind farms. Multiple fully permitted projects have been shelved. New development in the U.S. seems impossible.
The stakes are high, particularly for the Northeast, where offshore wind was meant to not only slash emissions but also lower power bills, shore up grid reliability, and revitalize down-on-their-luck port towns with well-paying jobs. Strangling the sector for four years will be a devastating blow to these hopes.
Trump himself has a deep disdain for offshore wind, sparked by his failure to block a project from being built within view of his Scotland golf course a decade ago. But there is perhaps no other single person more responsible for watering the seeds of offshore wind opposition than Stevenson.
A January 2025 study by a Brown University research group placed Stevenson at the center of the network of activists and political operators driving America’s anti–offshore wind movement. The data showed he had an outsize influence in galvanizing lawsuits and public protests against wind farms. The analysis also tied Stevenson to a larger web of “dark money” networks that are financially backed by the fossil-fuel industry.
“The Brown study actually was fairly accurate about writing down all the people involved. … I was probably the common denominator for those groups,” Stevenson told me earlier this year.
Stevenson doesn’t fit into the neat box of being a climate denier. He doesn’t think we should continue burning fossil fuels forever. Instead, he’s someone who seeks to block certain solutions that address climate change, for reasons of his own — namely, “affordable and reliable” energy sources like nuclear and solar are better options, in his view. But scholars I spoke to about this discordance weren’t surprised at all.
“Outright climate denying seems to be decreasing,” said Alaina Kinol, a PhD candidate at Northeastern University who studies resistance to climate policy. “What we’re seeing more is obstruction … and tactics that delay action.”
Stevenson, now 75, describes himself as “a lifelong conservationist.”
In the driveway of his Lewes, Delaware, home sits the hybrid vehicle he often drives to a nearby beach. Solar panels glint atop the roof, which Stevenson custom-designed in 2013 to be at the “optimum angle” to soak up the sun. A framed newspaper article about one of his cross-country bike rides hangs on the wall of his home office, nestled alongside photos of his seven children and 19 grandchildren.
His career has intersected with clean energy — and even wind — at various points.
While working for DuPont in the 1980s, Stevenson helped the chemical giant develop the long-lasting coatings used to make first-generation solar panels and wind turbine blades. In 1999, after leaving the company, he started his own construction business and acquired certifications in energy efficiency and home weatherization. He said he eventually co-founded the Delaware Green Building Council to promote this kind of work.
But despite Stevenson’s environmentally minded career and interests, he’s built a reputation as someone dedicated to preventing, rather than enabling, renewable energy.
After selling his construction business to one of his sons, Stevenson became interested in shaping state policies. A self-described libertarian, he found a home around 2010 at the Caesar Rodney Institute, a Delaware affiliate of the State Policy Network, which the Brown University researchers call “the nation’s most prominent network of conservative state-level think tanks.”
According to the D.C.-based research firm Energy Policy Institute, CRI is among a half dozen “front groups” backed by fossil-fuel interests that regularly attack renewable energy in their local regions.
For a few years, Stevenson worked on a variety of issues at CRI, from data centers and solid-state fuel cells to pipeline infrastructure and Delaware’s carbon-emissions fee. His initial brush with offshore wind came in 2010, when he sent a measured letter to the Obama administration regarding Bluewater Wind, the first proposed wind farm off the coast of Delaware. He voiced opposition to wind tax credits but acknowledged “one of the benefits of windmills” is how quickly they can be built.
It wasn’t until 2017 that he focused deeply on offshore wind, and by then his stance on the energy source was more firmly negative.
Plans for Skipjack Wind Farm — a 966-megawatt Danish-led project slated for waters off Maryland’s coastline with onshore stations in Delaware — were advancing quickly. They took Stevenson by surprise. “My initial response was just the high cost,” he recalled, though he also worried about the turbines ruining the “pristine view.”
The project was led by Ørsted, the world’s largest developer of offshore wind, which had bought the lease from the developers of Bluewater Wind. Stevenson said he tried to enlist help to fight the company, turning to Washington connections he’d forged during his time serving on Trump’s first transition team for the Environmental Protection Agency.
“I knew a lot of people; we had a lot of conversations,” Stevenson recalled. “They told me that I was nuts for taking on offshore wind.”
At the time, Trump officials were actively backing the sector. Former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke described himself as “very bullish on offshore wind” and executed key lease auctions put forth by the Obama administration — first near North Carolina, then near Massachusetts. Anti-wind policies wouldn’t emerge until the latter half of Trump 1.0, when Zinke’s successor, David Bernhardt, began slow-walking federal permits for offshore projects.
Stevenson received little response from his Washington connections. Undeterred, he simply led an anti-wind campaign on his own.
He attended town hall meetings and submitted public comments. He and fellow residents of local coastal communities organized against the wind project under the name Save Our Beach View, mailing over 35,000 letters and posting constantly to Facebook.
The messages contained several misleading statements. Independent journalist Michael Thomas reported that the letters, for example, “falsely claimed that the project could cause coastal residents’ property values to drop by between 20% and 30%; power costs could rise by 400%; key industries like tourism could see their revenues fall by 50%.”
Nevertheless, Stevenson’s efforts delayed the permitting process for an onshore substation, which in turn delayed wind turbine construction off the Delmarva coast from a planned 2022 start date to 2026 at the earliest. In January of this year, days after Trump took office for his second term, Ørsted moved to refinance the project, likely kicking it even further down the road.
Ultimately, Stevenson said, he “won the battle.”
In 2019, emboldened by his win against Skipjack Wind, Stevenson started searching on social media platforms and in news articles for the names of other residents across the Northeast who were resisting offshore wind farms. He reached out to some of them by phone — “just cold-called them,” he said with a laugh.
He found that there were plenty of individuals, as well as some small groups, protesting with little experience. For example, a handful of activists known as Protect Our Coast NJ didn’t know how to establish themselves as a nonprofit entity. Stevenson said he helped them do it.
Stevenson also started to organize monthly calls among activists from different states. His reach slowly grew from Massachusetts down to North Carolina, with the idea of spreading the tactics he honed in Delaware to other states. What Stevenson would bring them — as the Brown University researchers put it — was “political power.” Filings show that Stevenson’s employer, the Caesar Rodney Institute, also accepted donations from the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers in both 2019 and 2020.
His network of grassroots activists evolved into the American Coalition for Ocean Protection, which made its public debut in 2021 with a press conference in front of the Massachusetts Statehouse. Four other State Policy Network think tanks had also joined by then.
There, wearing a blue sport coat and flanked by maps of planned wind farms, Stevenson announced that the Caesar Rodney Institute had set up a $75,000 legal fund to support residents along the east coast who wanted to sue to halt offshore wind development. He publicly set a goal of raising $500,000 for the campaign.
Stevenson would later admit that while the coalition’s fundraising “did pretty well,” it never reached anywhere close to his financial goal. No matter. It was the coalition’s relentless messaging and coordination, not so much the money, that would become its greatest weapon.
In January 2023, right-wing media took an interest in whales. There had been a slew of marine mammal deaths along the east coast of the U.S. in prior weeks — and conservative media put the blame on seismic surveys for the future offshore wind developments ramping up along the New Jersey coast. Fox News host Jesse Watters interviewed a leader of Protect Our Coasts NJ, a founding coalition member that Stevenson had helped become a nonprofit.
This wasn’t the first time the media had amplified baseless speculation about wind power killing whales. The Daily Caller, a conservative news site, had run a similar story in 2017. But in early 2023, the claims were getting attention from Fox, local news, and even the Associated Press.
Stevenson was in near disbelief when he heard Tucker Carlson, then a commentator on Fox News, mention offshore wind and whales in multiple segments.
Still, even then, Stevenson refused to repeat blatantly false claims about the sector’s impact on whales. He posted statements on CRI’s website that the exact harm to the critically endangered North Atlantic right whales by wind development was still “unknown” and told me that his official position was to “wait and see” what federal scientists find after investigating the recently washed-up whale carcasses.
I asked at the time if he thought the explosion of attention on whales and wind power would peter out. He replied that it would, adding that eventually all these newcomers would oppose wind farms because of “the economics.”
But if Stevenson didn’t personally amplify the message, he didn’t swear it off. Nor did he discourage the groups he collaborated with from peddling it. In fact, he nearly won an award for elevating the issue: In June 2023, his campaign against offshore wind was a finalist for the Best Issue Campaign award presented at State Policy Network’s annual meeting. (The nomination highlighted that the campaign prompted a U.S. General Accountability Office report into the matter. That analysis, released earlier this year, found no evidence that the wind industry harms whales.)
Over time, the whale issue metastasized, coming to define political debate over offshore wind farms.
Eventually, Stevenson himself embraced some of its more conspiratorial claims. In a statement posted to the Cesar Rodney Institute website in summer 2024, he wrote: “We have patiently waited for indisputable evidence that offshore wind is killing whales despite federal agencies repeatedly stating that no such evidence exists. It does now.”
The “evidence” was two documents posted online, neither of which had been peer-reviewed. One report, by the consultant Robert Rand, looked at the acoustic output of wind vessels in the U.S. — during both seabed surveys and pile-driving activities — and claimed that the underwater noise levels were much higher than federal scientists had estimated and could result in hearing loss and “harassment” of whales. The second report, by a retired computer science professor, used correlation alone to link the timing of New Jersey whale deaths to local wind farm survey work.
Douglas Nowacek, a professor at Duke University leading a multiyear investigation of wind farm impacts on wildlife, discredited these conclusions.
As it stands, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “there is no scientific evidence that noise resulting from offshore wind site characterization surveys could potentially cause whale deaths. There are no known links between large whale deaths and ongoing offshore wind activities.”
In fact, government data overwhelmingly links whales’ deaths to other causes. For nearly a decade, agencies have carefully documented humpbacks in the North Atlantic washing ashore at an increasing rate. The species is not endangered, but in 2016, its plummeting population warranted a government-assigned designation: an “unusual mortality event.”
In this ongoing phenomena, 40% of the dead humpback whales autopsied by experts revealed injuries that only vessels or fishing gear could inflict. The rest, according to government data, were too decomposed to determine the cause of death. Scientists generally agree that climate change, which is driving up ocean temperatures and pushing whale prey farther north, could also be playing a role in the die-off. The whales are expending more energy than ever just to catch a meal. Some juveniles have washed up emaciated.
I asked Stevenson, soon after Trump’s second inauguration, if he still trusted NOAA’s ability to objectively assess the impact of turbine development on whales, and he was clear: “No.”
Trump wasted no time coming after offshore wind when he took office in January 2025. On day one, he issued an anti-wind executive order that paused all permitting activity and derided the installations as “big” and “ugly” to an indoor stadium full of supporters.
For Stevenson and a dozen others in his influential cohort, the executive order was a good step — but it wasn’t enough to simply block new projects from advancing. In February, they petitioned Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to issue stop-work orders to the installations already being built, alleging that the projects posed a risk to whales. This piggybacked off legal complaints guided by Stevenson and coalition members against Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, South Fork Wind, and Vineyard Wind 1.
And it wasn’t long before the Trump administration tried to give the Stevenson-led coalition what it wanted. All five of the offshore wind projects under construction in America either have been delayed by recent stop-work orders or are reportedly under threat of receiving one.
Some in the coalition opposed such moves, recognizing that stopping projects already underway would raise energy costs. Steve Haner, a senior fellow at the Virginia-based conservative think tank Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy, refused to endorse Stevenson’s petition to pause the five projects under construction — objecting especially to halting America’s largest project, a 2.5-gigawatt wind farm being built off the Virginia coast.
Under a hypothetical cancellation, according to Haner, “the ratepayers are on the hook” for the billions in sunk costs.
Empire Wind, one of the two projects ordered to pause this year, has since resumed construction — but only after the developer, Norwegian energy firm Equinor, launched a monthlong lobbying blitz. According to Norway’s largest newspaper, the company mobilized “500 phone calls and meetings” — an effort employees dubbed “Operation Gandalf” — which helped secure a reversal from Trump.
Still, Stevenson pushed for more wins, advocating for a complete overhaul of the Interior Department’s approval process for wind. In May, he penned another letter with some coalition members to Burgum requesting those changes.
At the time Trump was reelected, BloombergNEF expected 39 gigawatts of offshore wind generating capacity to come online in America by 2035. The research group hedged that number to 21.5 gigawatts if Trump managed to repeal wind tax credits during his term.
Today, with tax credits already sent to an early grave and no new permits issued, that prediction has fallen off a cliff. BNEF downgraded its projection two months ago to just 6 gigawatts. In other words, Trump’s assault has been so effective that it’s likely no new offshore wind farms will be built in America for the next decade — save for the five already under construction.
Opponents of the sector have won the war on wind in the near term.
“They are clearly feeling emboldened by Donald Trump,” said J. Timmons Roberts, a professor of environmental studies and sociology at Brown University who led the study that placed Stevenson at the heart of America’s anti-wind movement.
It’s not just Trump: Over the past year, more Republicans have grown verbally hostile to offshore wind. Burgum has played up reliability concerns, which lack evidence, and raised alarm bells about the impact to tourism and fishing, while peddling false claims that climate change predictions were overblown. This fall, the defeated Republican candidate for New Jersey governor, Jack Ciattarelli, made banishing wind farms a core agenda item, selling anti-wind tote bags and koozies on his campaign website.
Under Trump, government officials are rolling out more eyebrow-raising narratives — ones that go beyond whales — for halting wind projects. Some defy science and logic, like Burgum’s claims that New England’s Revolution Wind, the other project paused by Trump, makes the U.S. vulnerable to underwater drone attacks. (A federal judge has since lifted the stop work order.)
Kinol, the Northeastern University researcher, says these kinds of narratives fit under the umbrella of “climate obstruction.” The term, she said, describes “the intentional use of misleading, misinforming, or misdirecting narratives to slow or prevent climate action.”
The concept has been around since the 1990s, when scholars first investigated the American Petroleum Institute’s downplaying of climate change. But as the debate about climate change — and what to do about it — evolved, so did the opposition. Kinol said talking points that preach wind farms as bad news for whales or national security are “a known and studied strategy.”
“This is an example of ‘downside emphasis.’ … A wind farm opponent emphasizes the downsides of renewable energy,” said Kinol. “The reason why it’s a well-known tactic of obstruction is because the same emphasis on protecting species is not present for the same groups when they’re talking about fossil-fuel build-out.”
These kinds of arguments are “disingenuous,” said Kinol, ultimately in service of a phenomena she and her colleagues call “climate delay.”
Stevenson is one example of what is now a clear trend: The denial of climate change is being steadily replaced by attacks on solutions to address it. This twist is detailed in a new book written and edited by Roberts and three colleagues titled “Climate Obstruction: A Global Assessment.” The book came out in early fall — just in time for its authors to witness their ideas play out in real life with a decade-long delay of U.S. offshore wind farm development now becoming reality.
Nowadays, Stevenson seems to have mixed emotions about his achievements. On two of our most recent phone calls, his tenor had changed.
“Well, I think it was the right move,” he said in early fall, referring to the Trump administration’s stop-work order pausing the building of Revolution Wind, which was still in effect when we spoke. “But it is not something I’m going to dance around the table happy about, because there are people that get hurt by this, that are losing their jobs.”
All his efforts have “paid off,” he said. America’s elevated reliance on cheap natural gas — which, when burned, releases fewer carbon emissions than coal — was “better policy” for now. He views gas as an essential bridge fuel until nuclear, geothermal, and solar can be built. But he expressed some “disappointment” that Trump has increasingly gone after solar and wants to now expand coal production.
Republican moderates in Washington have expressed similar sentiments. Meanwhile, utility bills, which Stevenson called his “primary motivation” for his anti-wind work, have skyrocketed in the Northeast and are projected to only climb higher if Trump’s policies continue to strangle the offshore wind sector.
Stevenson has increasingly drifted from the direction that other coalition members are taking. Protect Our Coast NJ — which first fanned the flames of misleading claims about whales — has embarked on a different disinformation campaign: spreading the false idea that offshore wind cables cause cancer. Embracing outlandish claims — whether it’s whale-killing “windmills” or cancer-causing cables — is a broader trend among Republicans who buy into conspiracy theories with their party’s rise to power.
Conspiratorial sentiments are plaguing other clean energy sectors, too, from exaggerated claims of bird-killing onshore turbines to markedly false statements about toxic solar panels. Anti-renewables talking points circulate online, penetrate town hall meetings, and are taken up by groups pushing back against renewables now more than ever. A June study released by Columbia University identified 498 contested wind and solar projects across 49 states in 2024, marking a 32% jump in opposed projects, compared to just one year prior.
“You want a healthy amount of skepticism in a democracy. … You don’t want 100% believers,” said Dietram Scheufele, a social scientist at the University of Madison–Wisconsin who studies public perspectives on science and technology. But he warned that skepticism in the U.S. is “on steroids,” pushing people from the middle into polarized political camps and toward conspiratorial thinking.
Stevenson, for his part, is stepping away from his work in the anti–offshore wind movement, and seemed relieved to be doing so.
On our most recent call, in late November, Stevenson told me that he had resigned from CRI and that his anti–offshore wind coalition was, for all practical purposes, disbanded. (He remains a named plaintiff in four lawsuits opposing wind development.)
He’d rather be “solving the nuclear waste problem,” Stevenson told me. The energy source has long had a toxic-byproduct issue, not to mention cost overruns, which, to be sure, eclipse any expense associated with offshore wind over the long run. The Trump administration is looking to revive America’s nuclear industry — and that’s where Stevenson wants to build his legacy.
Even this work advocating for nuclear power could be seen as a form of “climate delay,” according to a popular research framework used by Kinol and Roberts. Nuclear plants put forth today can take a decade or more to start providing power; many of the proposed offshore wind projects that Stevenson’s coalition targeted would have come online well before then.
Stevenson also told me on the phone that he is starting a new position. Soon, he’ll become the director for energy and environmental policy at the Michigan-based Mackinac Center for Public Policy. This think tank, like CRI, is part of the State Policy Network. Exxon Mobil and the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation are among the center’s funders.
I congratulated Stevenson on his new job. He thanked me. His tone warmed as he reminded me that we’d probably had a dozen phone calls over the years.
I said it was quite possible that his legacy would be as the man who helped crush a renewable energy sector that could have done much to address the planet’s biggest problem. I asked Stevenson what he thought about that view — that readers might see it that way.
“I don’t care if people hate me or not,” he said. “I’m doing what I think is right.”
Meghan Wood, CEO of Raya Power, thinks solar and batteries should be as easy to install as a typical household appliance, durable enough to provide backup power for critical devices during storms and heat waves, and sophisticated enough to help lower everyday energy bills.
“Solar can give you a return on investment; it can give you resilience — and I want that to be as normal as getting Wi-Fi,” Wood said.
The Raya Power unit that Wood and cofounder Nicole Gonzalez designed is meant to hit all those marks. Think of it as a portable alternative to rooftop solar, one that looks a bit like an external cellar door from the space age.
The white triangular boxes are topped with 1.35 to 1.8 kilowatts of solar panels and contain 2.5 to 5 kilowatt-hours of battery storage. That blended solar and battery power can be fed into appliances using typical 120-volt or 240-volt plugs, or wired directly to air conditioning systems — all without touching broader household wiring and triggering the need for electrical permits.
In essence, Wood said, it’s a backyard solar “all-in-one box — a hybrid inverter, battery, communications, and electronics.” It even comes with enough ballast to keep it solidly on the ground in Category 3 storms. And unlike rooftop solar systems that can take days or weeks to install, permit, and interconnect under utility supervision, a Raya Power installation takes about two hours, “and then you’re running dedicated appliances.”
Rooftop solar and battery systems are great for those who can afford them, she said. But they’re out of reach for low-income households and people who rent their homes, like Wood does — an early inspiration for her research into alternative solar-battery combos.
Meanwhile, do-it-yourself balcony solar systems, which are popular in Germany, aren’t yet compatible with current U.S. electrical codes and standards, and that bars them from being plugged into household power sockets — at least for now.
Wood and Gonzalez, who met at a wedding during graduate studies at Stanford University, thought they could design a product that married the best of both those worlds. Gonzalez, who has Puerto Rican roots and was working on the NASA Mars Rover project when Hurricane Maria hit in 2017, wanted something her family could have used to keep their lights on and communications up and running after the storm devastated the island’s electrical grid.
And Wood, a Stanford Impact Founder fellow at the university’s Doerr School of Sustainability, wanted a system that could avoid the “soft” costs of labor, permitting, and interconnection, which constitute about two-thirds of the total price tag of a typical U.S. rooftop solar and backup battery installation.
“That was the whole goal from the start: How do we eliminate the soft costs?” Wood said. “What can you do that avoids any type of permitting, and then go from there?”
Now, with $1 million in pre-seed funding, Wood and Gonzalez are ready to put the technology into the field. Over the coming months, the startup will deploy its first 20 or so units at homes in Puerto Rico and California.
Those units will draw from the grid to power the air conditioners, refrigerators, and other devices they’re connected to when that’s the cheapest option, Wood explained. When the sun is shining, they’ll switch to using solar power for those appliances. But they’ll never push power back to the utility grid, which obviates the need to win utility interconnection approvals.
As for the battery, it’s there for when the power goes out, which is still a common problem in Puerto Rico, Wood said. But it’s also available to store up solar power for use later in the day to offset peak time-of-use rates in California. Raya Power’s software will control the mix of grid, solar, and battery power.
The startup’s first systems are being installed in partnership with philanthropic organizations looking for solar-battery options for low-income communities. That includes the Environmental Defense Fund, which has spent the past few years helping the island of Culebra, Puerto Rico, move toward 100% carbon-free power.
That project has put rooftop solar-battery systems on some commercial buildings and homes, said Dan Whittle, who leads the Environmental Defense Fund’s work in the Caribbean. “But without subsidies, public or private, it’s just too expensive to cover 100 percent of low-income homes,” he said.
“Lo and behold, we ran into Nicole and Meghan. They’ve sort of found the missing piece,” he said. Their unit “doesn’t provide as much backup power as the conventional systems, but it’s significantly lower cost. And it provides what Culebrans want most, which is peace of mind — resilience.”
The Environmental Defense Fund has won backing from private donors to install eight Raya Power systems in Culebra as a proof of concept. “If it works — and I believe it will work — then a lot of lower-income people might have access to it without subsidies, perhaps with a low-interest loan,” Whittle said.
Wood conceded that Raya Power’s pricing has to come down to make the product a good fit for its target customers. Right now, the startup’s systems can be preordered for $6,790 up front, which is competitive with a similarly sized rooftop solar and battery system, she said. Customers can also finance systems for $125 per month at a 6.5% annual percentage rate with a $500 down payment.
To be clear, diesel-fueled backup generators have lower upfront costs for backup power. But they pollute the air, make a racket, and need regular refueling, which isn’t easy during widespread power outages or in the wake of severe storms, particularly on an island like Culebra, Wood said. And setting up generators to power an entire home requires installation of a transfer switch and separate circuit breakers, which can be a costly project.
Portable batteries from companies like Jackery and EcoFlow are another affordable choice, and can power air conditioners or refrigerators for hours at a time. Many now can be purchased with foldout solar panels that recharge the units, though slowly. But as with generators, these systems are primarily meant for emergencies, not as always-on tools for storing solar power and reducing home energy costs.
Raya Power’s systems, by contrast, can lower monthly utility bills by using solar-charged battery power to replace costly on-peak grid power for air conditioning, refrigeration, and other connected loads, Wood said. The company estimates that customers of Puerto Rico utility Luma Energy could save about $50 per month and that customers of California utility Pacific Gas & Electric could save about $80 per month.
That’s roughly equivalent to the savings from a rooftop solar and battery system of the same size, according to Wood. But unlike rooftop solar, a Raya Power system can go with someone when they move or be sold to someone else.
That portability also makes for simpler financing, given that Raya Power systems could be repossessed if the owner can’t make the payments. “You’re not buying a construction project that’s never leaving your home,” Wood said.
These are important factors in markets where many households lack credit ratings that would qualify them for traditional rooftop solar loans or power purchase agreements, Wood added. “We’re getting a lot of excitement from solar installers in Puerto Rico,” where a lot of potential customers “can’t do a rooftop solar system because they lack an adequate FICO score,” she said.
Raya Power is exploring lower-cost financing mechanisms such as loans offered by Puerto Rico’s “cooperativas,” community-owned lending institutions that have played a central role in the island’s solar and battery renaissance in the wake of Hurricane Maria. “They have flexible terms and rates in the 4% to 7% range,” Wood said. Community development financial institutions and green banks could play similar roles in California and other early markets, she added.
For its first round of deployments, Raya Power will use professional installers but is developing a “roadmap … to get it to a do-it-yourself system,” Wood said.
In Puerto Rico, it’s enlisting local installers coming out of the training centers run by the nonprofit Grid Alternatives. Of the 161 trainees that have graduated from the program in the past two years, 41% are women, said Gabriel Pacheco, Grid Alternatives’ regional manager for Puerto Rico.
“Some of the women that have taken our course connected with Raya, and they’ve secured mostly part-time or contract jobs to set up the pilot” in Culebra, he said. “That’s an awesome initiative on their end.”
Raya Power’s system “might not fulfill all the energy needs of a family.” But it’s great for “providing backup power without the cost of permitting [or] a constraint on time,” Pacheco said. “Having systems like those Raya is developing that you can plug and play, and take with you to wherever you live, anywhere you have space — it addresses the needs of what I think is a big segment of the population.”
An update and a clarification were made on Dec. 12, 2025: Members of Raya Power co-founder Nicole Gonzalez’s family live in Puerto Rico, but Gonzalez was not born in Puerto Rico and her parents do not live there.
Ten years ago, I embedded in the war on coal.
I spent a month inside the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, watching an organization renowned for tree-hugging, grassroots activism use boring legal and economic strategies to shut down coal-fired power plants in red and blue states. In the Politico Magazine article I subsequently wrote, I called the effort “the most extensive, expensive and effective campaign in the club’s 123-year history, and maybe the history of the environmental movement.” Its litigators and organizers had quietly helped retire one-third of America’s coal fleet in five years — 190 plants in all, about one every 10 days — driving some of the first significant emissions reductions on Earth.
The main point of “Inside the War on Coal,” and the key insight of the campaign, was that coal power, historically dirty but cheap, was no longer cheap. In fact, merely operating most existing coal plants had become more expensive than building new clean wind and solar farms as well as less-dirty natural gas plants. That’s why the Sierra Club was waging its war alongside unlikely business allies in obscure utility commission hearings, making the case that less coal would mean lower electricity bills. That’s why Beyond Coal attorneys like Kristin Henry, whose bio identified her as “one of the few environmentalists who would never be caught wearing Birkenstocks,” kept getting utility executives to admit under oath that coal was gouging their ratepayers. That’s why the billionaire mogul Michael Bloomberg, who had always seen the Sierra Club as a group of shrill anti-capitalist radicals, agreed to finance its coal campaign, although he insisted on a businesslike, analytical approach.
The article went viral, presumably because of its unexpected blast of good climate news. The war on coal’s successes had enabled President Barack Obama to pledge U.S. emissions cuts of 28% from 2005 levels by 2025, which had enabled the world to commit to even deeper reductions in the Paris climate accord. Humanity was still addicted to oil, but killing coal looked like a kind of gateway drug rehab.
“For the next decade,” I wrote, “our climate progress depends mostly on reducing our reliance on the black stuff.”
Now, a decade later, President Donald Trump has declared war on the war on coal — or, as he insists everyone in his administration call it, “clean, beautiful coal.” So it seems like a good time to see how things are going on the battlefield.
The short summary is that Beyond Coal is still winning, and America is continuing to reduce its reliance on the black stuff. But Trump and the artificial-intelligence boom are complicating the war on coal’s endgame.
The overall trajectory has been remarkable. Coal now generates about one-seventh of U.S. electricity, down from one-half in 2010; solar and wind, little more than rounding errors when the campaign began, currently produce more power than coal and employ far more American workers. Utilities have retired or committed to retire 390 coal plants, leaving less than a third of the original fleet in operation. U.S. carbon dioxide emissions are down by about 20% from 2005 levels — not quite Obama’s goal, but not too shabby — largely because emissions from electricity generation are down by about 40%. Beyond Coal has helped shutter all but one of the 25 plants it initially declared the most dangerous to local communities, and says the retirements have prevented over 1 million asthma attacks and 60,000 premature deaths. California and New England just went coal-free. While the larger Sierra Club has faced some rough internal and external criticism for straying from its core environmental mission, Beyond Coal is still quietly plugging away and kicking ass.
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And yet. Trump is on a mission to prop up his coal industry pals, exempting polluting plants from environmental regulations, pouring hundreds of millions of tax dollars into retrofitting them, and opening up millions of acres of federal land to new mining leases while reducing federal royalties from mining companies. Trump’s Department of Energy has even ordered an obsolete Michigan plant that was scheduled for retirement to remain open and is preparing to order other coal plants to do the same. Trump is also blocking new wind and solar just as the AI frenzy is upending expectations of mostly stagnant electricity demand. So some utilities that intended to replace old coal plants with new renewables are rethinking those plans — and Beyond Coal is now working as hard to get them to say yes to clean power as it has to get them to say no to coal.
Unlike gasoline-powered cars, which face competition from electric vehicles but still dominate the global automotive fleet, or natural gas, which is on the upswing, coal is in terminal decline in America. The average U.S. plant is 45 years old. The last new one came online 12 years ago — and even that youngish plant just broke down and had to suspend operations until 2027. With electricity prices around the country rising much faster than inflation, the affordability case for wind and solar has never been stronger, especially since the batteries that can store that clean energy when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining have never been cheaper.
But after 15 years in the trenches of the war on coal, Henry isn’t sure the final victory is as imminent as she once hoped, because proving that coal no longer makes sense is easier than making it go away. Sure, it’s a dinosaur, but dinosaurs walked the earth for millions of years.
“We win on the law. We win on the economics,” she told me recently. “But sometimes we lose on the politics.”
The pivotal battle in my 2015 war-on-coal story was “a dry hearing in a drab courtroom in Oklahoma City,” where Henry cross-examined a hapless Oklahoma Gas & Electric executive about the utility’s request for the largest rate increase in state history to upgrade a wildly inefficient coal plant. She got the executive to admit that the coal he was importing from Wyoming already cost more per kilowatt-hour than the Oklahoma wind that came sweeping down the plains — and that in-state competitors as well as Florida and New Mexico utilities were already buying that Oklahoma wind for less.
Henry’s best Perry Mason moment came while she was dismantling the assumptions the utility had used to justify burning more coal. She pointed out that even though the Obama administration was finalizing four new coal regulations that very year, OG&E’s model had assumed there would be no new coal regulations for decades. When the executive hemmed and hawed, Henry pinned him down: “Isn’t it true you’re assuming zero over the next 30 years?” she asked.
The executive paused for a few seconds, then confessed: “That’s right.”
Henry didn’t ask a single question about coal’s impact on the climate, or even on public health. She just argued about electricity rates, which was why lawyers representing Walmart, the state’s hospitals, and a coalition of industrial users that included a factory owned by Koch Industries all echoed her arguments. Beyond Coal’s lawyers are “not burning bras. They’re fighting dollar for dollar,” an attorney for the hospitals told me. “They’ve become masters at bringing financial arguments to environmental questions.” Sure enough, later in 2015 the state’s rate-setting commission rejected OG&E’s costly plan to upgrade the coal plant.
But that did not turn out to be the end of the saga.
Oklahoma’s then–Attorney General Scott Pruitt — a Republican fossil-fuel booster who would go on to lead the Environmental Protection Agency during Trump’s first term — appealed the ruling, even though he was supposed to be advocating for lower rates for Oklahoma residents. Under intense pressure, the all-Republican commission reversed its decision. So Henry appealed to the Oklahoma Supreme Court, and in 2018, she won the case. But it didn’t matter, because OG&E went ahead with the coal upgrades, and the commission eventually approved massive rate increases to pay for them.
It’s not fun to spend years on a case, win on the merits, then lose anyway.
“That’s just reality,” Henry said. “You still have to keep fighting.”
In Ohio, the utility FirstEnergy bribed legislators to pass a bill forcing customers to spend hundreds of millions of dollars propping up two aging coal plants — and even after the scandal erupted in 2020, the subsidies continued until this summer. Now Trump is threatening to prevent any coal plants from retiring; his order invoking an imaginary “energy emergency” to keep that clunky Michigan plant in operation is costing ratepayers millions of dollars per day. His energy secretary, Christopher Wright, recently complained that coal is “out of fashion with the chardonnay set in San Francisco, Boulder, and New York City.”
The chardonnay set isn’t what’s throttling coal generation in fossil-fuel-friendly Republican states like Utah and Texas. It’s math. The economics of coal plants have continued to deteriorate as they’ve gotten older and creakier. A Sierra Club report on the Oklahoma facility that OG&E kept afloat found it brought in $1.2 billion less revenue over five years than the utility had predicted, because it was so often either down for repairs or unable to produce competitively priced power. The Trump administration just held the largest coal-lease auction on federal land in more than a decade, but had to postpone it after receiving only one bid for less than one cent per ton. The last similar lease sold for more than a dollar per ton.
Meanwhile, the costs of wind, solar, and batteries have continued to plunge; they made up 94% of the U.S. grid’s new capacity in 2024. They now generate more than a quarter of the electricity in California — and a third in Texas. And battery storage is expanding even faster, growing by two-thirds in 2024.
Still, Beyond Coal’s job keeps getting harder. That’s partly because the most egregiously indefensible coal plants are already shuttered, partly because the Trump EPA does not seem to care whether the remaining plants comply with environmental laws, and partly because Trump’s brazen war on renewables has slashed subsidies for existing wind and solar farms while making it much harder to develop new ones. There’s also a less political reason: It suddenly looks like America might need a lot more electricity.
The Sierra Club’s war on coal began in the early 2000s, after a White House energy task force led by former Vice President Dick Cheney called for the construction of 200 new coal plants. That would have been a climate disaster, locking the grid into decades of dependence on the dirtiest fossil fuel, so the club’s leaders mobilized volunteers and lawyers to fight the proposed projects all over the country.
They managed to stop almost all of them, but that feat wasn’t just a triumph of passion and grit. It also turned out no one needed that many new plants of any kind. After the financial crisis of 2008, utilities began scaling back their projections for future electricity demand and struggled to justify a building binge. That’s when the club shifted its focus from blocking new coal plants to shuttering old ones, and Bloomberg cut the organization a $50 million check to launch Beyond Coal as a formal campaign.
The combination of coal getting expensive and power demand remaining flat gave the campaign a huge boost as it targeted the least efficient plants. The club’s ultimate goal was a fossil-free grid, but back then it was laser-focused on killing coal. In Oklahoma, Henry did not object to OG&E’s proposal to convert one of its aging coal boilers to natural gas, and I sat in on a closed-door strategy meeting between Henry and a gas-industry group that shared most of her objectives in the case. At the time, the Sierra Club was under fire for accepting gas-industry donations.
Today, Beyond Coal is fighting the buildout of gas as well as coal, but the AI frenzy has changed the context, now that American utilities have proposed a total of 200 new gas plants to meet the surge in demand they expect from new data centers. Many experts estimate that AI will increase power demand as much as 10% nationally, but the Sierra Club has calculated that the various utility proposals would increase power capacity by more than 100%.
“It’s a lot like the coal situation 20 years ago, with a real threat of digging the hole even deeper with new fossil infrastructure,” said Holly Bender, who oversees Beyond Coal as the club’s chief program officer. “We’ve got to be even clearer about what we’re fighting for, not just what we’re fighting against.”
Meanwhile, global coal generation hit a record high last year, even though it continued to decline as a share of electricity. Worldwide the vast majority of new electric capacity came from wind and solar, but that wasn’t enough to meet ballooning demand. So the race is on: The world needs more juice, and unless we can build out an extraordinary amount of clean stuff, we’ll keep burning the dirty stuff.
Before the AI boom, when Laurie Williams was a frontline attorney with Beyond Coal, she helped pressure Xcel Energy to commit to retire all its Minnesota coal plants by 2030. Now she’s the head of Beyond Coal, and she was appalled in 2023 when Xcel Energy, which the Sierra Club had ranked the nation’s most responsible utility, proposed to meet soaring demand from AI by building out nearly as much new gas as wind, and hardly any new solar or storage. But with gas prices spiking and gas plants taking much longer than renewable plants to get up and running, her team eventually worked with Minnesota regulators to get Xcel to delay all but one small gas plant, while committing to twice as much wind, three times as much storage, and five times as much solar as its initial plan.
“We maximized clean energy, and we saved customers $1.5 billion,” Williams told me. “We’re facing serious headwinds these days, even with the best utilities, even in progressive states. But we know how to win these fights.”
The Sierra Club still has NIMBY elements, and its local chapters sometimes care more about protecting turtles than expanding renewables, but it supported the controversial Grain Belt Express transmission line that would have distributed wind to Midwestern cities before Trump and Republican senators killed it. Beyond Coal is now as focused on the beyond part as it is on the coal part, because utilities are going to need more capacity, even if they’re exaggerating how much, and it really matters whether that capacity is zero-emissions.
So Beyond Coal is sticking to its affordability message, at a moment when Democratic candidates around the country just won big by talking about rising costs, especially rising utility bills. The campaign is trying to remind Americans that Trump’s fossil-fueled war on wind and solar makes power more expensive, even though that war also makes existing coal (as well as new gas) marginally more competitive. It’s continuing to challenge outdated industry talking points portraying coal as what keeps the lights on — the aging fleet is increasingly unreliable — and renewables as a woke green scam. You can still find its lawyers at rate-setting commission meetings, arguing the facts and the law and the math.
These days, though, facts and law and math will only go so far. The war on coal is just one theater in the larger political culture war, and public opinion is just one weapon; most people want cheap and clean power, but it’s not yet clear whether voters in red states will punish politicians and utilities that keep them from getting it. It now seems unlikely that Beyond Coal will achieve its goal of ending U.S. coal by 2030. Closing the last 140 plants might be even harder than closing the first 390.
But of course this stuff is hard. If it were easy, it would’ve been done already. A key lesson of the Beyond Coal campaign is that the energy transition isn’t going to happen on its own. People have to do the work to make it happen.
“It’s a lot of Whac-A-Mole,” Henry said. “We stop them over here; they try to come back over there. But we’ll keep showing up. We’re built for this.”
Exxon Mobil has pulled the plug on what would have been one of the world’s largest hydrogen plants, the latest setback for the effort to scale production of low-carbon versions of the fuel.
In 2022, the oil giant announced plans to build a facility at its refining and petrochemical complex in Baytown, Texas, with the capacity to produce 1 billion cubic feet per day of so-called blue hydrogen, which is made using natural gas and carbon-capture equipment. It won a nearly $332 million grant from the Biden administration’s Department of Energy to finance the project.
But the Trump administration yanked that funding this spring. Since blue hydrogen typically costs about one-third more than the “gray” version of the fuel made with unmitigated gas, Exxon Mobil CEO Darren Woods said the company could not find enough buyers willing to pay the premium.
“There’s been a continued challenge to establish committed customers who are willing to provide contracts for off-take,” Woods said in an interview with Reuters.
Exxon Mobil Corp. did not return Canary Media’s call Wednesday requesting comment.
The pullback highlights mounting problems for the clean hydrogen industry. Green hydrogen, the zero-carbon version of the fuel made with clean electricity and water, costs even more than the blue or gray types. In October, the Trump administration terminated federal funding for two regional hydrogen hubs on the West Coast that were meant to help bring down the cost of the green fuel. Blue hydrogen, in theory, was seen as less politically vulnerable since its production ensures a market for gas. But that, too, now appears to be running into similar problems.
“Exxon’s decision reflects a broader reality: Large-scale hydrogen projects depend on long-term market signals, stable policy environments, and customers ready to commit,” said Roxana Bekemohammadi, the founder and executive director of the United States Hydrogen Alliance, an industry group. “These dynamics take time to mature.”
But it’s not just the Energy Department’s decision to shutter its Industrial Demonstrations Program, which had given Exxon Mobil the grant, and the cuts to the 45V federal tax credits, which support low-carbon hydrogen production, that have put the industry on shaky ground.
Trump administration moves have also undermined demand for low-carbon hydrogen. In October, the U.S. government thwarted an effort at the United Nations’ International Maritime Organization to put a price on carbon emissions from the shipping sector, pressuring foreign delegates to back off a proposal that would have expanded the market for low-carbon hydrogen.
Blue hydrogen also faces some specific headwinds.
Late last month, the European Parliament passed legislation outlining rules for low-carbon hydrogen that require producers to demonstrate not only that carbon-capture equipment catches at least 70% of emissions but also “pretty rigorous accounting of upstream methane leakage,” according to Pete Budden of the Natural Resources Defense Council. A study published last year in the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy found that carbon-capture equipment could reduce emissions by 60%, below the threshold set in the European Union law.
“Based on the work we’ve done tracking emissions from blue hydrogen, it’s going to be really tough for U.S. hydrogen producers to meet that reduction with fossil fuels and [carbon capture and storage],” said Budden, the lead hydrogen advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It’s a really ambitious emissions reduction because you need a really, really high capture rate, and you need to minimize all your upstream leakage.”
In the U.S., California remains the biggest market for the fuel. While state regulators slashed their 2030 forecast for hydrogen-powered vehicles, a giant power plant in Los Angeles just received approval to convert from gas to hydrogen.
“Yes, there have been significant reductions to federal funding for programs. Yes, we took a hit this year. Yes, it caused uncertainty in the markets. And yes, it caused some projects to pause,” said Katrina Fritz, the chief executive of the California Hydrogen Business Council, the nation’s largest and oldest statewide trade group for the fuel. “But in California, we still have offtake markets that are moving forward. There’s still demand. And we still have new production projects moving forward.”
Among those projects: a solar-powered green hydrogen facility. Its owner? Chevron.
See more from Canary Media’s “Chart of the week” column.
If you had to guess which country gets the largest share of its electricity from solar, you might understandably toss out the name of a balmy island nation. Or perhaps you’d pick a country with swaths of blistering desert. At the very least, somewhere notoriously hot and sunny. Right?
Well, you would be wrong. The global leader is Hungary, according to a recent report from think tank Ember that pulls from full-year 2024 data and only considers nations that generated over 5 terawatt-hours of solar.
The Central European country got nearly one-quarter of its electricity from solar panels last year, leapfrogging Chile, which had held the top spot since 2021. Hungary’s win is no fluke: From January through October this year, solar grew to account for about one-third of power generated in the nation of 10 million.
It’s quite the shift. Just five years ago, Hungary got only 7% of its power from solar. Ember attributes the rapid growth to robust policies supporting both utility-scale and residential installations.
Rounding out the top five countries on Ember’s list are Greece, Spain, and the Netherlands. The top 10 is dominated by countries in the European Union, which is chipping away at coal- and gas-fired electricity.
To be clear, Hungary is not producing more electrons with solar panels than any other country. That distinction goes to China, which generates far more terawatt-hours’ worth of clean power than anywhere else, even if it only gets about 8% of its electricity from solar.
We’ll check back in next year to see if Hungary has retained its improbable title. The competition will be stiff. After all, the solar boom is a worldwide phenomenon.
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