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Unlike in 2025, almost no states have passed laws that make it harder to permit and site renewables this year, a report finds. What’s driving the shift?
Solar, wind, and batteries are the cheapest, fastest ways to add much-needed electricity to America’s grid. And across the country, more state legislatures are passing laws to streamline renewable development than are enacting policies to prevent clean energy from being built.
That’s the good news from the Siting Solutions Project, a nonprofit that tracks state energy permitting and siting policy. According to its new tally of more than 200 bills put forward in over 40 states in 2026, the results have been “more balanced — and more encouraging — than the surge in restrictive siting bills that defined 2025.”
Both this year and last, a flurry of proposals in Republican-controlled states aimed to make it harder to build clean energy. But while many of those bills passed into law in 2025, similar attempts have largely failed so far in 2026.
In fact, out of the 86 bills that would have hampered solar, wind, and battery siting and permitting this year, just one became law: a relatively scaled-back measure in Utah that limits state tax credits for large-scale solar projects on certain farmland. Only eight states have yet to conclude their legislative sessions for this year, making it unlikely that other restrictive bills will pass in 2026.
Last year, by contrast, 10 restrictive measures passed across Arkansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Montana, Oklahoma, and Texas.
Most of the restrictive bills proposed in 2026 didn’t even make it out of initial hearings, said Nelson Falkenburg, siting policy manager at the Siting Solutions Project and a co-author of the report. Several bills that would have singled out solar, wind, and battery projects for sizable property setbacks and zoning constraints were defeated in floor votes. And one bill that did pass in Oklahoma, which would have rescinded property-tax benefits for solar and battery projects, was pocket-vetoed by Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt.
Today’s energy economics are driving the shift away from measures that stymie renewables, Falkenburg said.
“Energy demand is skyrocketing, driven in large part by AI and the buildout of data centers in a lot of these states,” he said. “At the same time, we’re in an affordability crisis,” with electricity costs rising rapidly in many parts of the country.
While the causes of these energy price spikes differ from region to region, experts agree that adding new, cheap generation to the grid is an effective way to help bring rates down. Solar, wind, and batteries cost less than new gas plants, and can get online years sooner, as the gas industry faces a turbine supply crunch.
“Legislators are responding to constituents, whose electricity prices are through the roof, and trying to provide relief,” Falkenburg said.
The need for electricity has led to what Falkenburg described as “a concerted effort from environmental groups, industry, and business groups, and in some cases folks from agriculture and labor communities, to defend against these restrictive bills and make sure they didn’t pass,” he said.
He pointed to a bill in Alabama that would have put a one-year moratorium on solar projects. The measure faltered in the face of pushback from not just solar developers but also the state’s steel industry, chambers of commerce, and lawmakers representing poorer districts seeking economic development.
Similar broad-based coalitions helped defeat clean-energy restrictions last year in Texas, the nation’s solar and battery leader.
“One of our assumptions is that legislators may be introducing more of these restrictive and punitive bills as signals to their constituents or to the broader politics of the time,” Falkenburg said, nodding to the role that clean energy opposition has taken as part of broader “culture war” politics. “But even in conservative states, legislators and governors’ offices are looking at how to get as much energy on the grid as possible.”
That imperative has driven an impressive showing for what Siting Solutions describes as “permissive” clean-energy siting and permitting policies this legislative season. These provisions include simplifying state permitting processes and setting criteria for how local governments manage project siting.
Siting Solutions chalked up significant wins in Illinois, Oregon, Virginia, and Washington state, as well as moderate policy gains in Maryland and New Jersey — all states controlled by Democrats.
But it also highlighted some positive policies passed in the Republican-controlled states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Oklahoma. For example, Oklahoma approved what Falkenburg described as a “really reasonable” bill that sets best practices for closing down and cleaning up old solar and battery projects without putting unreasonable burdens on developers.
That record of success comes with a caveat, however: The permissive legislation that passed isn’t as heavily tilted in clean energy developers’ favor as the restrictive bills that failed were tilted against it. If anything, the report notes, “Democrats tended to introduce and advance bills that provide minor improvements to the status quo, rather than proposing changes that will substantially move the needle on clean energy deployment.”
One big reason for this is that pro-renewables legislation tends to focus on giving state bodies more control over how local governments manage siting and permitting — and that’s a political challenge. Local opposition has become a primary cause of failure for solar, wind, and battery projects across much of the country. But residents of counties, cities, and townships slated for clean-energy development don’t like having authority taken away from them.
Over the past half decade or so, Democratic-controlled states including Illinois and Michigan have passed laws limiting local governments’ ability to block energy projects on private land. This year, Virginia joined their ranks, passing a law that prevents local governments from instituting community-wide bans on solar projects.
To be clear, Virginia’s law doesn’t bar local governments from denying permits to solar developers. Rather, it prohibits blanket bans on all solar projects, sets statewide guidelines for assessing individual projects, and requires local governments to tell state regulators their reasons for rejecting proposals.
That law was something of a compromise between solar advocates and local officials, said Jim Purekal, a director at Advanced Energy United who heads the trade group’s legislative work in Virginia. “The dealbreaker was taking authority away from localities,” he said. “Once you move off that, I think the bill was structured in a very reasonable fashion. It just said, ‘You don’t have to accept these projects — but this is what a good project looks like, for those who are asking.’”
Illinois took up its own revisions to state versus local control over solar and battery siting in a major energy bill passed in late 2025, which Siting Solutions included in the 2026 roundup because its provisions will go into effect this year. In Pennsylvania, which has a year-round legislative session, a proposal remains in play that would take a state-level standard-setting approach similar to Virginia’s.
The 2026 laws passed in Oregon and Washington aim to streamline slow and cumbersome state permitting processes, Falkenburg said. The intention is to lower costs for clean-energy developers and, in Oregon’s case, allow projects to get done fast enough to earn federal tax credits set to expire under the megabill passed by Republicans in Congress last year.
Clean energy still faces major barriers. Despite the progress tracked by Siting Solutions, lots of jurisdictions still make it very difficult for renewables to get approved. Plus, several states have backslid on clean energy policy in recent months, including New York, which rolled back its emissions-reduction targets, and California, which made major changes to its carbon cap-and-invest program that critics say will threaten the state’s ability to meet its climate goals. Siting Solutions’ report does not account for those measures because it purely focuses on siting and permitting issues.
And then there’s the Trump administration, which has essentially frozen federal permitting for renewables, threatening nearly 100 gigawatts of wind, solar, and battery projects. Those include over 20 gigawatts of projects on public lands, as well as more than 150 wind power projects awaiting a Department of Defense review.
Those barriers highlight the fact that it’s almost always easier to block clean energy projects than it is to craft laws that smooth their way to being built, Falkenburg said.
“Local governments should have some authority over the projects being proposed in their jurisdictions, absolutely,” he said. “At the same time, there’s a need to balance the energy goals of the state, the climate goals of the state if they exist, and the private landowner rights to be able to develop their land as they see fit. … This is a tough nut to crack.”
As consumer interest surges and state legislators get on board, a few businesses have jumped into the domestic market.
A hands-on form of solar power has electrified the U.S. in the past year. Plug-in solar lets anyone hang a few panels in the sunlight and send the power straight into their wall sockets to partially offset their utility bill. It extends the benefits of clean energy, a little bit at a time, to renters and anyone else who hasn’t been able to access traditional rooftop solar.
This do-it-yourself energy production has operated in a regulatory gray area, though some intrepid customers have experimented with it anyway. But voters are demanding action to lower their soaring energy bills, and state leaders have responded with a wave of legislation to carve out explicit allowances for plugging solar panels into home outlets.
Last year, the Republican-controlled legislature in Utah became the first to legalize plug-in solar. In just the last few months, 10 more states passed plug-in solar laws, and several more are still considering bills.
The plug-in phenomenon originally took off in Germany as “balcony solar” in the late 2010s, and it accelerated when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 spiked energy prices in Europe. German households had installed more than 4 million systems as of 2025, by some estimates, though only 1 million were officially registered.
But eager U.S. customers are not able to use the exact products sold across the Atlantic.
“We unfortunately can’t take one of those systems from Germany and bring them here and plug it into the wall, because we just have a different electrical system,” said Cora Stryker, co-founder of Bright Saver, a nonprofit that seeks to expand balcony solar access.
The business ecosystem is racing to catch up to this surge of consumer interest. But vendors looking to stake a claim in the U.S. market need to grapple with state-by-state rules and a shifting regulatory landscape. The venerable safety lab UL Solutions only started testing full plug-in systems in January, and no complete setup has officially cleared its certification yet. The National Electric Code is undergoing a multiyear update that could make plug-in more accessible — when the 2029 edition takes effect.
Given the swirling uncertainties, established rooftop solar providers are hanging back, for now at least, but a handful of new players are already selling to an eager public.
The only companies with direct experience navigating the plug-in solar market got that head start in other countries.
“The goal is to get those big German manufacturers here [in the U.S.] selling their systems, competing against each other, and lowering prices to the consumer,” Stryker said. “That will happen. It’s a question of how fast that will happen.”
CraftStrom launched in Germany in 2019. Its product fits naturally with how most people live in cities, said CEO and co-founder Stephan Scherer: German urbanites typically rent compact apartments that have balconies and that don’t use a ton of energy. They thus have the physical setup for hanging a few panels, and the opportunity to generate enough power to make an appreciable dent in their monthly consumption.
To make its panels easier for people to install, CraftStrom decreased the weight by replacing the typical glass and aluminum framing with special laminations to protect the silicon cells. The company has already gone through three iterations of microinverters and eight iterations of solar panels.
“The good thing about the German market was that we got to play around, test, improve in time for the U.S. market to start,” Scherer said.
CraftStrom has been selling thousands of systems across all 50 states for several years, Scherer said. But it had to change the equipment to match the design parameters of the U.S. grid, and then navigate safety standards that are evolving in real time.
CraftStrom, for instance, built its U.S. products around language in the National Electric Code that allows larger plug-in systems, provided that customers get an electrician to wire them into a dedicated circuit on the breaker box. For regular circuits, customers can buy a CraftStrom power meter that throttles solar production, depending on what else is on the circuit, to stay within National Electric Code stipulations.
These adaptations to U.S. rules add cost and complexity, as opposed to the truly plug-and-play German experience. The country’s plug-in market remains in the early-adopter phase before exponential growth kicks in, Scherer said.
Another major player in Germany’s market, EcoFlow has reengineered its products to sell in the U.S., starting with Utah. The company added software that ensures the equipment stays within the confines of a given state’s legislation, said Ryan Oliver, head of communications for North America. For instance, Utah has a cap on the total wattage a plug-in system can send to the house, which EcoFlow’s software can enforce. EcoFlow also sells integrated batteries to let customers eke out more solar generation without violating the cap.
One of the most enthusiastic evangelists for plug-in solar policy has now become a vendor for unusually low-priced systems.
Earlier this year, Bright Saver started selling plug-in panels on its website: one 180-watt panel for $499 or two for $699. Then last week, the nonprofit slashed its prices to sell the same systems “at cost,” discounting the 180-watt kit to $285.30 and the 360-watt one to $414.17, provided that customers pay a $29 membership fee.
Bright Saver chose this limited wattage for a particular reason: “The technical experts have already decided that 360 watts is the safe level to plug into any outlet,” Stryker said.
She’s referring to a proposed amendment to the National Electric Code concerning the level of solar production that can safely plug into any outlet; Bright Saver chose what system to sell given that analysis.
Bright Saver is not a manufacturer but assembles systems from parts it deems safe — panels and microinverters that have the necessary safety certifications individually. In a June interview with Canary Media, Stryker noted that Bright Saver was losing money on each unit that it sold, given the small volume and the overhead involved. The nonprofit is willing to stomach those losses in the near term, she said, because its mission is to get solar into the hands of more people, so they can lower their energy bills and carbon emissions. The offering quickly sold out. New inventory is expected in late August.
Numerous companies have proved themselves capable of making and selling solar panels for residential rooftops. Others make consumer-oriented off-grid solar panels and batteries for camping, van life, and prepper living. Both sets of businesses could leverage their brands and expertise to corner the plug-in market, but they have yet to commit to that.
Qcells manufactures 8 gigawatts of solar modules in north Georgia, and sells more residential panels than any other company in the U.S. Those qualifications could set the company up for success with a specialized line of made-in-America plug-in panels, but so far, Qcells has not entered the plug-in market.
“The excitement over balcony solar shows people see solar as key to cutting skyrocketing energy bills,” Patrick Sterns, Qcells director of grid services policy, said in an email. “It’s true, renewable energy can deliver lower, stable bills to all kinds of ratepayers, and programs like virtual net energy metering and community solar prove that. The problem is these programs face regulatory bottlenecks around the country at a time when accelerating access is key to delivering these benefits at scale.”
Established players have more to lose if they get caught on the wrong side of the regulatory gray areas. There’s also a scale mismatch: A company that sells gigawatts of panels in a year won’t be as taken by the potential to sell plug-in panels a few hundred watts at a time.
Rooftop-panel manufacturers typically sell to other companies that do the work of customer outreach and installation. The off-grid vendors may have a more natural inclination toward selling plug-in.
“I expect some quick movement from the portable-solar-generator players. Most of them have European products for balconies,” said Luke Bahl, who launched the website Simple Plug-In Solar to collect and share information about the phenomenon. “It’s their bread and butter to sell direct to consumer, with easy setup.”
The camping and off-grid solar businesses can’t immediately sell plug-in solar, because their products don’t have the eponymous plug. They are designed to feed electricity into a battery unit, which the customer connects to electronics to receive the charge. Plugging directly into a wall socket demands specific microinverter controls that the off-grid systems aren’t built for.
EcoFlow sells off-grid products alongside its new U.S. plug-in solar line. Jackery, one of the preeminent suppliers of personal solar-battery backup systems, has “successfully launched” balcony solar products in Europe, a spokesperson said. But the company does not offer a plug-in solar option in the U.S., and does not have an official timeline for bringing that technology to American consumers.
Plug-in solar’s niche is to reduce electricity use and hence utility bills. Off-grid solar is, by definition, designed for customers who aren’t connected to any utility. But it wouldn’t take much to add the right plug and controls to a product line that already gives people direct control over their energy.
The Department of Defense has essentially frozen permitting for new wind installations over the last year, preventing more than 155 projects from moving forward.
A coalition of 18 states and Washington, D.C., has moved to join an industry lawsuit challenging the Department of Defense’s freeze on onshore wind projects in America.
It’s the latest in a nearly yearlong saga during which the Trump administration has obstructed more than 155 land-based wind projects across the country, according to data from the American Clean Power Association.
President Donald Trump has vowed to block the construction of wind farms during his second term, going as far as to claim that his administration would “try and have no windmills built in the United States.”
The administration has done its best to live up to that edict, waging an all-out war on wind farms, which last year generated more than 10% of the country’s electricity. The blockade has occurred against the backdrop of fast-rising utility bills, the product of high electricity demand that can only be met by building more energy capacity.
Trump’s attacks on offshore wind have been the loudest and most brazen, but onshore wind has not been spared. Last July, the Interior Department created a “choke point” for permitting new wind and solar projects on federal lands. One month later, in August 2025, the Defense Department quietly stopped issuing national-security approvals to onshore wind projects — a move that has impacted dozens of gigawatts of wind projects across both public and private land.
In April, a federal judge ordered the Interior Department to lift its blockade while a lawsuit led by industry groups makes its way through court, though the agency appealed the decision in June. In May, industry groups and wind developers filed suit against the Department of Defense’s permitting freeze, arguing that the delays created by the agency may threaten the viability of certain projects by causing them to miss deadlines to lock in expiring federal tax credits or to interconnect to the grid.
Nineteen attorneys general, all Democrats, filed a motion on Thursday to intervene in that suit and join the industry in requesting a court injunction against the DoD freeze. The motion argues that the DoD’s delay tactics could negatively affect grid reliability, energy affordability, climate goals, and jobs — and undermine state sovereignty.
The Trump administration claims the pause is necessary due to national security concerns. It provided a similar justification when halting work on all five in-progress offshore wind farms last year, but the argument was swiftly rebuked by federal judges five different times.
The DoD process is indeed meant to review wind projects for national security risks. Following the review, it is not uncommon for developers to take certain mitigation steps as directed by the military.
“For more than a decade, DoD engaged in a predictable review process and worked with developers to mitigate potential concerns,” according to a news release from the office of Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell. Now, “wind projects across the country have been frozen at various stages of the review process, including those that had already completed mitigation negotiations and were awaiting only final DoD approval.”
Even as renewables lose federal incentives and face other hurdles, Lazard finds onshore wind and large-scale solar again have the lowest levelized cost of energy.
Pretty much every type of energy is getting more expensive in the U.S., but clean energy is still a better bet than fossil fuels.
That’s the topline from investment bank Lazard’s latest annual report on the levelized cost of energy, or LCOE — a metric widely used to compare how expensive different sources of electricity are. Put simply, it expresses the present-day price of generating a megawatt-hour of electricity from a solar farm, a gas plant, or another power source, all while accounting for that source’s full lifetime operating costs. For example, it takes into consideration that a solar farm’s fuel and operational costs are tinier than a fossil fuel plant’s.
For the last decade, Lazard’s reports have basically reached the same conclusion: Onshore wind and utility-scale solar have a lower LCOE than fossil fuels. While that’s still true this year, the average LCOE of onshore wind and solar did surge by 11% and 18%, respectively, from last year, thanks to the loss of federal renewable energy tax credits, increased tariffs, high interest rates, and other challenges.
But the fossil fuel sector also faced headwinds over the past year, as a supertight market for turbines drove up the cost and timeline of building a gas plant. The LCOE of gas power from modern “combined-cycle plants” — which was already about $20 higher per megawatt-hour than solar’s and onshore wind’s in 2025 — rose by 15%. Still, those higher prices and construction delays haven’t stopped developers from pursuing ambitious gas projects as the AI boom sparks a scramble for on-demand power.
Although LCOE is a pretty handy way of comparing energy costs across sources, it has its limitations, the Clean Air Task Force argued in a report last year. The climate advocacy group says LCOE isn’t a good method for long-term decarbonization planning because it doesn’t account for many real-world concerns, like a power source’s land and health impacts or its ability to generate nonstop electricity.
Even so, plenty of evidence indicates that renewables will retain their cost-competitive edge. For one, they’re not subject to rocky fuel prices like oil and gas are — something that’s been on full display as conflict in the Middle East continues. And while solar and wind power generation remain at the mercy of the weather, batteries are making their fatal flaw of intermittency a thing of the past.
A first-in-the-nation data center ban
New York has become the first state to enact a moratorium on building hyperscale data centers. After a few weeks of will-she-won’t-she uncertainty, Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) signed an executive order barring data center construction for up to a year as the state hammers out regulations.
The move comes as data centers face criticism from both sides of the political aisle over their power use, and especially their potential to drive up electricity costs for residential utility customers. But despite the facilities’ widespread unpopularity, other governors have been reluctant to go as far as Hochul. In April, Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) vetoed a bill that would have halted construction through November 2027. And just this week, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) asked data center developers to pledge they wouldn’t raise power costs for state residents, but stopped short of calling for a total ban on construction.
Clean energy beats the heat
This week was another hot one in the Northeast, though temperatures weren’t quite as bad as they were earlier in July, when a major heat wave tested — but didn’t knock out — the power grid.
As I wrote last week, clean energy played a big role in meeting soaring demand while millions of people cranked up their air conditioners. Some New York City households even kept cool without adding to the grid’s burden. Our reporter Maria Gallucci is one of a few hundred New Yorkers participating in a pilot program that provides apartment dwellers with a small battery pack to plug their window AC into, reducing stress on the electric system, helping prevent blackouts, and even earning them a little cash.
Maria stayed on the heat wave beat with a look at how offshore wind tackled spiking power demand in New England. The region had to turn to oil power last year when it faced a similar hot spell, but this year, the emergence of more offshore wind meant the grid didn’t need as much of the dirty fossil fuels.
Endangered again: The Trump administration finalizes a change to how the Endangered Species Act is enforced, opening up critical wildlife habitats to oil and gas drilling and other development. (NPR)
Google’s big clean bet: Cypress Creek Energy breaks ground in Arkansas on what could be the largest solar and storage project in the U.S., with power from its first two phases purchased by Google to offset its data center demand. (Canary Media)
Weatherization win: A federal housing law that recently passed with bipartisan support will require the Trump administration to enact stronger energy conservation standards for manufactured homes, which aren’t subject to local and state building codes and are often inefficient. (Canary Media)
Fast food, fast charge: EV chargers are proliferating especially quickly in the South, including at fast-food chains like Bojangles and convenience stores. (New York Times)
Smoking out solar: The wildfire smoke that turned skies orange and hazy in much of the Northeast this week also caused solar production to plummet in New England. (WBUR)
A balcony solar deal: Nonprofit Bright Saver is selling zero-markup balcony solar packages starting at around $300 as more states pass laws allowing residents to use the plug-in panels. (Canary Media)
Turbines torpedoed: The Trump administration has delayed 155 new wind energy projects across 24 states over allegations that turbines threaten drone detection and national security. (Grist)
The region has added dozens of turbines off the East Coast since last summer. They and other clean energy sources cut the need for oil power amid recent hot weather.
America’s offshore wind farms have already shown their ability to keep electricity flowing during brutal winter storms. Now, the clean energy resource has proved it can also bolster the grid during major heat waves.
Earlier this month, as dangerously hot and humid temperatures settled over the eastern United States, two wind projects near New England consistently delivered hundreds of megawatts to the grid as residents cranked up their air conditioners. The influx of wind reduced utilities’ reliance on dirty, expensive oil-burning peaker plants, which operate only when electricity demand is through the roof, according to the data firm Grid Status.
Analysts compared how the regional system performed during the July heat wave and a sweltering stretch in June 2025, before much of the current offshore wind capacity came online. Oil provided nearly 10% of the region’s total power supply during peak-demand conditions on July 2, 2026 — that period’s hottest day — down from nearly 15% at the highest point on June 24, 2025. That’s a drop of more than a gigawatt in oil-fueled generation between those two days.
Part of the decline was due to slightly weaker overall demand during the July 2 peak than during last year’s event. But Grid Status said that stronger generation from the region’s utility-scale offshore wind farms was a key factor. The projects are coming online despite repeated attempts by the Trump administration to block them.
The surge of hydropower delivered via the New England Clean Energy Connect power line, which started carrying electricity from Canada to Maine in January, also reduced peak oil use. Meanwhile, an abundance of rooftop solar installations significantly eased overall electricity demand during the heat wave.
“Even if total demand was in line with last year, we would still be hundreds of megawatts below what the total [peak oil] burn would’ve been,” said Tim Ennis, a Grid Status analyst in Boston. “We didn’t have to turn the oil on as hard at lunchtime because we had the wind and [hydropower line] online as well.”
Ennis noted that offshore wind is often touted by experts for its ability to bolster grid reliability during winter. New England’s power system is becoming increasingly constrained in colder months, owing to the shift to electric space and water heating systems. Ocean winds in the region are at their strongest and steadiest during the season, meaning offshore turbines can help meet some of that growing electricity demand and reduce stress on gas-fueled power plants.
While wind speeds are generally lower during summer, the recent heat wave confirms that the projects still play a meaningful role on the hottest days — more of which are headed for the region this week.
The 806-MW Vineyard Wind, off the coast of Massachusetts, finished construction in March, and its developer had activated 49 of its 62 turbines as of early May. The 704-MW Revolution Wind, near Rhode Island, started sending power to the grid in March and is set to reach full commercial operations by the second half of 2026.
Ennis said data shows that the commissioned offshore turbines relieved grid stress from July 1 to 4, during periods when air-conditioning use was at its peak, offsetting some of utilities’ need to turn on oil plants, a step that adds to customers’ already high utility bills. All told, New England operators produced 42.2 gigawatt-hours of oil-fired power during that four-day heat wave, down 37% from the total oil burned from June 23 to 25, 2025.
Outside New England, the already completed 132-MW South Fork Wind farm had a strong showing off the coast of New York. The project, which came online in 2024, operated at nearly full capacity on July 2, sending electricity into the heat-stressed grid on Long Island, Mikkel Mæhlisen of Ørsted, which jointly owns South Fork Wind with Skyborn Renewables, recently wrote on LinkedIn.
The Independent System Operator New England has previously stressed the role that offshore wind can play in supporting the grid during extreme heat events. The regional grid operator spoke out last August after the Trump administration halted construction of Revolution Wind, which was then 80% complete.
“Recent heatwaves in New England drove demand for electricity to very high levels and demonstrated that our region needs all generation resources with market obligations to be available to meet demand and maintain required reserves,” ISO New England said in an Aug. 25, 2025, statement, noting that delaying Revolution Wind “will increase risks to reliability.”
A federal judge overturned the stop-work order in September. But its developer Ørsted was forced to hit the brakes again in December after Trump’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management paused the leases for all five large-scale U.S. offshore wind projects under construction. Though judges later lifted those orders as well, the delays still cost some developers millions of dollars and threatened projects’ viability.
The Trump administration has since adopted a new tactic for kneecapping America’s fledgling offshore wind industry: paying developers to abandon plans for future wind farms, using billions of dollars in taxpayer funding. The strategy makes it highly unlikely that any new projects will be built in the next few years.
However, when all five wind farms are fully up and running, they will add nearly 6 GW in clean capacity to help the East Coast navigate days of bone-chilling cold or life-threatening heat.
“The potential costs and benefits of offshore wind have been debated for decades,” said Fara Courtney, who consults on offshore wind policies and research projects for Outer Harbor Consulting, in Gloucester, Massachusetts. “Now we have the first projects up and producing, [and] the data is clear: Offshore wind is a new American energy sector with a big role to play in meeting this region’s skyrocketing energy demand.”
Plug-in panels can lower your bills. To boost the American market for the tech, nonprofit Bright Saver is selling kits with no markup, starting at around $300.
Do you live in the U.S. and want balcony solar? A new initiative could help you get a deal on one of these small but mighty systems that plug into a standard outlet and push clean power into your home.
Today, California-based nonprofit Bright Saver announced it’s selling zero-markup DIY solar kits starting at about $300. The move is intended to kick-start the U.S. market for the tech, which is already cheap and widespread in Germany. Residents in 47 states can now pre-order, with shipping expected in August.
“Only a nonprofit like ours will ever give up our margins completely to pass along to consumers the savings from clean energy,” said Cora Stryker, co-founder of Bright Saver. “Someone’s got to do it, or we are up the creek in terms of energy affordability and climate.” The nonprofit has sold balcony solar kits before, but not at cost.
Plug-and-play solar can go in virtually any sunny outdoor spot. That flexibility opens up solar access to the four in 10 U.S. households who can’t, for financial or logistical reasons, put an array on their roof. With every watt generated, the tech lowers household electricity bills and reduces planet-warming emissions.
As spiking energy prices squeeze Americans, balcony solar is becoming wildly popular. Legislatures in more than half of U.S. states have introduced measures to encourage and regulate plug-in solar, and so far eight governors have signed such bills into law. Bright Saver estimates deployed systems number in the thousands nationwide.
But balcony solar in the U.S. has a long way to go to reach the scale seen in Germany. There, plug-in solar installations grew from roughly 40,000 systems in 2017 to as many as 4 million in 2025.
Bright Saver wants the tech to take off faster stateside.
That’s why the nonprofit is selling systems for “what it costs us to purchase in bulk from the manufacturers,” Stryker said. She declined to name those manufacturers, noting that the organization is brand-agnostic and could switch at any time.
Bright Saver sells a 180-watt kit for about $285 and a 360-watt kit for $414. To access these prices, you first have to become a member, which costs $29 annually (with renewal optional). Otherwise, a 180-watt kit is $499, and a 360-watt kit is $699.
The organization aims to be the Costco of clean energy; only members can access the deep discounts. And more product deals are coming. Bright Saver plans to offer plug-in home batteries that work with balcony solar kits as soon as next year.
With the membership, the 180-watt kit works out to $1.74 per watt. The 360-watt system, which is just 5% the size of a typical 7,200-watt rooftop array, is significantly better priced at $1.23 per watt.
That’s a good deal in the U.S. Nationally, the average rooftop system costs $2.60 per watt before local and state incentives, largely because of the high “soft costs” of marketing, permitting, and installation. Balcony solar kits sold domestically by companies such as CraftStrom, APsystems, and EcoFlow hover around $1.50 to $2.50 per watt, although it’s possible to find systems on sale for less.
But even Bright Saver’s 360-watt-kit price is more than three times what Germans can pay. There, balcony solar through Ikea is a stupefying $0.35 per watt. Clean energy really is cheap energy, especially outside the U.S.
A lower up-front price means a faster payback from energy savings. Bright Saver says that if you live in an area with high electricity rates and your home uses all the power as the panels produce it, its kits would save enough on electricity bills to pay for themselves in as little as 2.5 years.
Bentham Paulos, senior research associate for the national nonprofit Clean Energy States Alliance, calculates that with California’s average electricity price at 32 cents per kilowatt-hour, Bright Saver’s 360-watt kit would save a household in the state about $150 per year; that translates to a payback of about three years. The timeline can stretch from seven to 10 years in places like North Dakota, where electricity rates are lower.
You can run the numbers for your situation with Paulos’ payback calculator. Bright Saver also has a tool, which accounts for potential increases in utility rates.
Households could reap savings for decades. Solar panels and inverters can last 25 to 30 years, quietly producing power from sunlight that falls free on everyone on earth.
“The solar revolution is the great sunny hope of our time,” said Bill McKibben, longtime environmental journalist and co-founder of nonprofit advocacy group Third Act. With plug-in systems, “now everyone can participate.”
Bright Saver’s annual membership fee covers some of the nonprofit’s overhead; the group runs mainly on donor funding and says it can keep the discounted sales going for up to six months without more cash. But membership is also a way to rally balcony solar supporters.
“We’re building a constituency,” said Kevin Chou, co-founder of Bright Saver. “Joining a movement that’s actually winning is its own kind of power. Every Bright Saver member makes the case for saving money and fighting climate change a little harder for lawmakers to ignore.”
Regulations to ensure the consumer safety of balcony solar are still evolving in the U.S. But Bright Saver states that its kits are safe to use, as the individual components — the panels and inverters — have been certified by a nationally recognized testing laboratory, even though the system as a whole has not. (No system yet has.)
That limitation impacts where the nonprofit sells its kits. Some states are requiring complete-system certification. Bright Saver said it will block shipping to Maine, New York, and Vermont, which have passed bills with that mandate, according to the nonprofit. Other states, like Utah, which in 2025 became the first to legalize balcony solar, require only that the kits’ individual components are certified.
Still, component-level standards have been a concern to some because balcony solar injects power into a home’s wiring. In a worse-case scenario, a portable solar device could overheat a section of a home circuit if other appliances are drawing power from the system at the same time. If the circuit breaker — the safety mechanism — fails to detect what’s going on, then a fire could break out.
But a technical amendment that experts have proposed adding to the National Electrical Code, rules that all states use to safeguard people from electricity hazards, points out that the electrical wires in U.S. homes have some buffer built in. This margin isn’t enough for a larger 1,200-watt balcony solar setup, but it is sufficient to accommodate Bright Saver’s system.
Plugging 360 watts into a typical 15-amp circuit “can never damage” the 14-gauge copper wires commonly used, per the amendment’s explanatory notes. While the proposal hasn’t been adopted yet, Stryker expects it will be by September 2028, before the next scheduled update to the code is released.
“We designed our systems to be 360 watts because of what the NEC amendment tells us is safe,” Stryker said.
Balcony solar is still a new technology in the U.S., and not everyone is going to feel comfortable with it yet, Stryker said. But sentiment could shift “once we have tens of thousands of these [deployed], demonstrating that there are no house fires, even with the component-level certified systems,” Stryker said.
“And let’s not forget, Utah has had up to 1,200-watt systems in the wild for more than a year now,” she added. “We have no major safety incidents.”
Over 200 major clean energy projects were canceled over the first year and a half of Trump’s term. A report says that’s left nearly half a million jobs on the table.
President Donald Trump’s attacks on clean energy haven’t spelled disaster for the energy transition — but they have definitely hurt job prospects for Americans.
Between January 2025, when Trump took office for his second term, and May 2026, a total of 216 major clean energy generation and manufacturing projects were scrapped, closed, or downsized, according to a new report from the business-focused advocacy group E2.
Those cancellations, driven in large part by the Trump administration’s hostility toward clean energy, have resulted in the loss of nearly half a million potential jobs, E2 found. Just over a tenth of those would have been permanent roles at clean energy facilities, while the rest would have been either temporary construction jobs or steady work in roles supporting the sector, from selling building materials to serving food at restaurants near a new factory.
Trump took office amid an unprecedented surge in the clean energy economy. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act spurred the rapid construction of both renewable power projects and domestic factories intended to build solar panels, electric vehicles, batteries, and other crucial cleantech.
But the boom went bust pretty much as soon as Trump won the election in late 2024. Even before Trump and congressional Republicans gutted the Inflation Reduction Act one year ago, companies began reevaluating and stepping away from investments given Trump’s favoritism for fossil fuels and opposition to renewables, particularly wind.
When it comes to jobs, most of the damage to date is in the EV sector, which in the U.S. was already plagued by high costs and weak demand prior to the Trump administration ripping away key discounts for car buyers.
Still, new clean energy continues to be built in America, and while EV sales have taken a hit, they haven’t ground to a halt. The country’s solar manufacturing industry is notching new milestones, and EV makers are pivoting their battery-making factories to serve the red-hot storage sector.
The clean economy has had some real setbacks since Trump took office last year — but it’s still poised to grow even without support from the federal government.
Now the legislature must hammer out the differences between the Senate text and the House version, which includes major cuts to energy-efficiency funding.
The Massachusetts Senate yesterday passed a sweeping energy-affordability bill that aims to save residents $14 billion over 10 years in a state that has some of the country’s highest utility costs.
The legislation includes measures that would change the state’s energy procurement process, put guardrails on the activities of third-party electric suppliers, and allow utilities to securitize certain spending, essentially lowering the cost they pay to borrow money. Other provisions aim to cut energy costs by decreasing residents’ reliance on fossil fuels. The bill would authorize the use of plug-in solar systems and phase out a major source of gas infrastructure spending.
“We believe if we can reduce our overdependence on gas … then we’ll be better off,” said Sen. Michael Barrett (D), chair of the Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities, and Energy, and a major voice on climate and energy issues in the legislature, during yesterday’s debate. “These high bills are all fossil fuel–driven.”
Several amendments were approved during the debate. One specifies that data centers will not be eligible for state tax credits unless they meet requirements for clean energy procurement, energy efficiency, and load flexibility. Others call for an investigation into whether utilities’ guaranteed rates of return on investment are excessive, and would close a loophole that might otherwise allow a contentious wood-burning power plant to go forward in western Massachusetts.
The goal of the legislation was to dig into the complexities of the sprawling electric and gas systems to find and eliminate unnecessary fees and costly inefficiencies, Barrett said.
“You cannot save people money, fundamentally, without going after the status quo,” he said. “What we don’t want to see is legacy overcharges that you pay every month.”
The legislation, notably, would not lower spending for Mass Save, the state’s energy-efficiency program, in sharp contrast to the controversial $1 billion reduction the House version calls for. The House’s proposed cut would represent about two-thirds of the roughly $1.5 billion remaining in Mass Save’s three-year budget. Supporters say the move would quickly bring down customers’ bills, but opponents argue that these savings would be small — and that every dollar spent on energy-efficiency programs lowers overall costs for everyone.
The House and Senate now have to hammer out the differences between their versions, and each chamber will need to vote on the final legislation.
One year ago, President Donald Trump signed a massive bill into law and ripped away clean energy tax credits. Renewables have rolled with the punches.
One year ago, President Donald Trump got his Fourth-of-July wish. Republicans rammed a massive tax and spending bill through Congress before his preferred July 4 deadline, allowing Trump to sign it into law during a showy holiday ceremony at the White House.
Alongside huge cuts to Medicaid, food stamps, and other programs aiding America’s neediest residents, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act repealed large swaths of the Inflation Reduction Act — the only significant piece of climate legislation the U.S. has ever managed to adopt.
That law would have marshaled as much as $1.2 trillion to transition the U.S. economy away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy, largely through tax credits that make it cheaper to build wind turbines and solar panels. But Trump’s big bill sunsetted those incentives; as of Saturday, they will no longer be accessible to clean energy developers unless they have already hit certain construction benchmarks.
Still, despite the tax credits’ looming demise, and the Trump administration’s myriad other attacks on clean energy, developers have continued building renewables at a stunning pace over the past year. More than 90% of the power plants brought online in America in 2025 were solar, wind, or battery farms, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. And the agency projects that these clean resources will account for 93% of new additions to the power grid this year.
There’s a simple reason for clean energy’s unstoppable rise: America needs more energy fast, and only renewables and batteries can deliver it.
After decades of staying flat, energy demand is surging. Big Tech firms are building new data centers that use as much electricity as small cities. Homeowners are switching to electric stoves and heating. People are swapping gas vehicles for electric ones.
Meeting this new demand requires building more supply: more power plants, batteries, poles, wires, and transformers that can produce, store, and transport more electrons. And as gas power faces yearslong supply-chain delays, clean energy is the only thing that can be built quickly and cheaply enough to keep up.
It’s not as if clean energy will escape unscathed from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — or from the Trump administration’s continued clean energy onslaught.
Over the long term, the disappearance of tax credits will take its toll: One estimate suggests the U.S. will build less than half as much clean energy between 2025 and 2035 as it would have with the incentives in place, with the biggest hit happening in the latter years of that range.
In the near term, the Trump administration’s blockade on federal permitting for wind and solar projects, its payouts to cancel offshore wind leases, and other attacks are having a real negative impact.
This past year has proven that clean energy can roll with some punches — and also that the Trump administration is prepared to keep on taking swings at the industry.
Independence nay: The U.S. Supreme Court rules the president can fire regulators at independent federal agencies, including FERC and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. (E&E News)
Another wind payoff: The Trump administration says it will pay Duke Energy $129 million to abandon its offshore wind project off North Carolina, which the utility says it will reinvest in gas and nuclear power projects. (New York Times)
Farming the sun: Solar opponents in Ohio have used alleged threats to agricultural land to derail projects, but a new report makes clear that arrays only take up a fraction of a percent of prime farmland both in the state and beyond. (Canary Media)
Permitting plateau: Trump administration policies holding back clean energy permitting are putting 92 GW of projects at risk, representing $121 billion in investments, a new Wood Mackenzie report finds. (Reuters)
Sunrise, sunset: Connecticut passed a law that authorizes the use of plug-in balcony solar panels, expands the state’s community solar program, and extends solar incentives, while also instituting new restrictions on solar development. (Canary Media)
Steel’s clean opportunity: It’s been a year since Japan’s Nippon Steel acquired U.S. Steel, but former steelworkers and other residents in Northern Indiana are still waiting to see if the acquisition turns into clean, job-creating investments. (Canary Media)
Grid funding disconnect: A Government Accountability Office audit finds Puerto Rico has only received about 25% of the $14 billion it was allocated for grid repairs and a solar and battery buildout after 2017’s Hurricane Maria destroyed much of the island’s energy system. (Associated Press)
Gov. Josh Green, a Democrat, wants to import LNG to slash energy bills. But the move might not lead to savings — and it could trip up the state’s climate goals.
On June 8, 2015, Gov. David Ige sat under the great seal of the state of Hawaiʻi and signed the nation’s first legal commitment to run an entire state’s grid system on 100% renewable electricity.
Ige, a Democrat, lamented that Hawaiʻi was “the most oil-dependent state” in the U.S.; unlike others, it relied on oil to produce nearly all of its electricity.
“Making the transition to renewable, indigenous resources for power generation will allow us to keep more of that money at home, thereby improving our economy, environment and energy security,” he said at the time.
Two months later, he shot down a pricey proposal to use another imported fossil fuel — natural gas — to reduce the islands’ dependence on oil imports. Ige’s reasoning was clear: “It’s time to focus all of our efforts on renewables,” he said.
Now, Ige’s successor, Gov. Josh Green, is abandoning that all-out focus on renewables — and throwing his support behind a natural gas import scheme that critics contend would threaten the state’s climate targets while delivering marginal savings, at best, to residents.
Green, also a Democrat, is backing a $2 billion bid by Japan’s largest energy company, JERA, to construct a floating liquefied-natural-gas import terminal called Longboard LNG. In May, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission granted JERA’s request to begin the review process for the project.
This vessel would ride the surf near Barbers Point, an industrial zone in west Oʻahu that’s home to several power plants. LNG tankers would pull up every three to four weeks to unload the gas, which would flow via undersea pipeline to shore and then fuel a new 500-megawatt power plant to serve Oʻahu, the state’s most densely populated island.
The proposed plant could comfortably meet about 40% of the island’s highest recorded electricity demand and has a target commercial operations date of 2030. Green contends that natural gas can help the state wean off costly and polluting oil without undermining its legal mandate to fully decarbonize its electricity system by 2045. In June, he told Hawaiʻi Public Radio that while the state needs solar and other renewables, it also should have pursued natural gas a decade ago.
“We made a mistake not having a more balanced energy plan,” he said.
The state’s renewables buildout has been buffeted by a once-in-a-century pandemic, multiple global conflicts, and a catastrophic fire. A decade into the transition, utility customers in Hawaiʻi remain mercilessly exposed to the whims of the global oil market, which saw prices spike this spring after Iran cut off most shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
To date, the energy transition has not sufficiently addressed the primary concern of many of Green’s constituents: Their energy rates are the highest in the nation. JERA, meanwhile, claims it can cut Oʻahu households’ electric bills by $500 a year on average.
But critics say that it makes no sense to tether the state to yet another internationally traded fossil fuel — one whose price also shot up thanks to the war in Iran.
“You can’t solve this problem of a reliance on imported oil by moving to another import that we don’t control,” said Chris Lee, a Democratic state senator who authored the 100% clean energy law and stood beside Ige as he signed it. “And that’s just very painfully obvious.”
This isn’t just a problem for the 50th state. Hawaiʻi started a trend with its 100% clean energy law; nearly half of all states followed with similar measures, and many of them have struggled to build renewables as fast as they hoped, too. Now, elected leaders of these states are also grappling with rising energy costs and, in many cases, a slower-than-expected buildout of renewables.
In New York, long a self-styled leader in the fight against climate change, Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) just eliminated binding interim carbon-reduction targets due to concerns about affordability. Several other Northeastern states considered weakening or undoing their own climate policies in spring legislative sessions, signaling a broader shift toward a less hopeful era of the clean energy transition.
While Hawaiʻi has not yet touched its marquee climate laws, the politics of affordability are clearly having an impact: The biggest energy conversation over the last year in one of the nation’s bluest states has revolved around a massive fossil fuel investment. If Hawaiʻi locks in this natural gas infrastructure, it would mark a significant change from the path it first laid out when it bet on the clean energy transformation.
Lee, who represents part of Oʻahu’s eastern coast, spent three years arguing on behalf of the 2015 climate legislation before skeptical colleagues, hesitant state agencies, and a reluctant utility. When it finally passed, Lee recalled it signaled a “paradigm shift.”
“We realized this is very possible, and not only possible, but inevitable,” he said recently from his office at the Hawaiʻi State Capitol.
Ultimately, advances in renewable energy technologies, like wind and solar, helped make the case for decarbonization, Lee said. The goal also tapped into a broad desire to make Hawaiʻi more self-sufficient.
“For a long time here in Hawaiʻi, we’ve been dependent on imports — food, energy, pretty much everything we consume — and that’s been one of our Achilles’ heels,” Lee said. “We spend billions of dollars that we send overseas every single year to import these things that we rely on, bare necessities.”
In 2018, Hawaiian Electric, the investor-owned utility that supplies power to 95% of customers in the state, awarded bids to four new large-scale solar projects to move Oʻahu toward the 2045 target. The utility mandated the projects come online by the end of 2022.
Only one of those projects, Clearway Energy’s Mililani I Solar, hit that deadline. The others stumbled amid COVID supply chain disruptions and the state’s notoriously slow permitting process. The last of the batch, Hoʻohana Solar, came online last year.
The utility was just beginning to move on from the challenges of the pandemic when a deadly blaze burned through the town of Lahaina on Maui on Aug. 8, 2023, killing 102 people and damaging or destroying thousands of buildings. A local and federal investigation implicated Hawaiian Electric’s equipment; the utility subsequently confirmed that broken power lines had ignited dry vegetation and started a fire, which later rekindled and spread out of control.
In the wake of the fire, Hawaiian Electric’s credit rating dropped to junk status, leading Clearway to cancel three major solar projects and other developers to raise their electricity prices.
Despite the sluggish large-scale solar buildout, Hawaiʻi is technically on track to meet its interim targets under the clean energy law. Hawaiian Electric hit 37% qualifying renewable generation in 2025, mostly due to broad adoption of rooftop solar. Hawaiʻi has the highest rooftop solar penetration of any state in the U.S.; around half of single-family homes on Oʻahu boast panels.
Rooftop solar delivers substantial savings for those with the means to install it, and has reduced the overall volume of oil the state needs to burn to meet electricity demand. But that progress isn’t translating into savings for most customers: Families without solar on their homes are still paying the highest electricity rates in the nation and remain susceptible to dramatic shocks in the global oil market. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, for instance, power prices for average Hawaiʻi households jumped by more than 20%.
In May 2015, an Oʻahu residential customer who used 500 kilowatt-hours of energy in a month paid $140.48. In May 2026, that same customer using the same amount of energy paid $256.27, according to Hawaiian Electric’s estimates. In a state that also has some of the nation’s highest food and housing costs, Hawaiʻi’s most vulnerable residents are often burdened with more bills than they can reasonably pay.
At a local energy conference in May 2024, Green suggested publicly that LNG could reduce the state’s reliance on oil — and thus energy bills — while it worked toward the 2045 clean energy mandate. Last October, the governor’s office announced a strategic partnership with JERA.
“On the table, I have the offer of over $2 billion of private investment,” Green told Hawaiʻi Public Radio in March. “We have an opportunity, if I’m constructive and pragmatic, to help our next generation have a lower cost of energy.”
Aside from the governor, the loudest local champion of the JERA project has been the Hawaiʻi State Energy Office, led by Chief Energy Officer Mark Glick.
In March, Glick appeared before the state’s House energy committee to discuss a study his office conducted on alternative energy pathways for the state. The study, which came out in January 2025, concluded that switching to imported gas power could save residents hundreds of dollars a year on energy costs, or a total of $700 million in net present value compared to sticking with oil.
He was followed at the podium by Matthias Fripp, an electrical engineer who taught at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa for a decade and now conducts energy policy analysis at Energy Innovation, a San Francisco–based think tank that advocates for decarbonization.
“It’s an honor to be here — it’s my first time speaking in front of a legislature, so I’m a little bit nervous, but thank you for having me,” said Fripp, sporting dark-frame glasses and an aloha shirt adorned with green leaves and orange flowers.
Fripp had pored over the spreadsheets the Energy Office had shared with him, and in doing so, he told the committee, he had uncovered a series of errors that collectively inflated the supposed benefits of LNG by $1.2 billion. Most glaringly, a spreadsheet formula left out the fuel cost of LNG in comparison to fuel oil, such that the projected benefits would only accrue if Hawaiʻi miraculously got LNG delivered for free. Removing those errors, Fripp said, reversed the administration’s top-line finding: Instead of saving money, LNG would actually cost consumers around $300 million.
Rep. Nicole Lowen (D), the committee chair, pressed Glick to acknowledge these errors. He initially called out “the way that this is transpiring,” adding that “we received no ability to even look and understand what the differences are, because we’re being delivered this in real time.”
Fripp then testified that he had emailed Glick’s team about the errors some three weeks prior, and never heard a response. Glick challenged that assessment, but under subsequent questioning, his colleague Monique Zanfes confirmed receipt of the email in question and acknowledged that the team had not followed up on it.
The next day, March 13, the Energy Office posted a defensive Instagram message calling Fripp’s assertions “INCORRECT” and stating “HSEO unequivocally stands by its work on the study.” Six days later, the office officially acknowledged an “unintentional algebraic syntax error” and retracted the scenario that had shown the greatest net benefits, to the tune of $700 million.
The Green administration and the Hawaiʻi State Energy Office continued to push for natural gas despite the collapse of their official case.
Within days of the committee hearing, administration officials coordinated the release of a sleek slide deck laying out JERA’s project proposal. Emails obtained by the environmental groups Earthjustice and Life of the Land through public records requests show that throughout that time, the governor’s office and the Energy Office collaborated on a media campaign to promote the LNG proposal with iQ 360, a public relations firm contracted by JERA.
One email chain from March 16 shows state press officers working alongside a rep from iQ 360 to craft responses to questions from a journalist with Bloomberg News.
“I think we do need to add something to the effect that this program aligns with our 2045 aspirations. Both Mark and Erik spoke to it tonight and national story must carry this aspiration,” wrote the Energy Office’s Strategy and Marketing Officer Yvonne Hunter, referring to an event in which Glick appeared alongside JERA Americas Vice President of Development Erik Montague.
Life of the Land, founded in 1970, regularly intervenes in regulatory proceedings involving new energy projects. Executive Director Henry Curtis said that with the JERA LNG project, the Energy Office has stepped well outside its usual role.
“We’ve never seen the State Energy Office handpick a specific technology and a specific company and throw their weight behind it,” he told Hawaiʻi Public Radio.
The Energy Office has since revised its non-retracted scenarios, which currently show more substantial benefits from LNG. In the scenario the state is leaning on now, net present values jumped from $150 million to $651 million in the republished study.
While that may sound impressive, experts at Hawaiʻi Natural Energy Institute, the state’s primary academic body researching and modeling the energy transition, say those savings are negligible. HNEI Director Rick Rocheleau said that after spreading $651 million out over the proposed 15-year timeline for burning gas and then breaking it down by the energy Hawaiian Electric sells, it boils down to less than a penny per kilowatt-hour in savings.
“We would effectively be breaking even,” Rocheleau said.
JERA has run its own calculations on what LNG could save customers and produced a figure higher than that in the Energy Office’s study: It claims that by burning gas instead of oil, it can lower energy costs by 20% and provide Oʻahu households with an average of $500 off their bills each year.
Rocheleau called those numbers a “mirage.” He said that JERA is calculating its savings per meter, not per household, and neglected to distinguish between commercial and residential meters. Large commercial customers will see higher savings, whereas residents would get a much lower return — closer to 2 cents per kilowatt-hour, or 5% of the average customer’s bill, according to Rocheleau’s calculations based on JERA’s assumptions.
“To put it in perspective, total fuel cost is only about 20% of our electricity costs now, so LNG and the infrastructure would have to be free for us to save 20%,” Rocheleau said.
Even if the case for savings was airtight, the JERA proposal makes other questionable assumptions. It has little margin for error in its projected timeline, especially if the LNG facilities will indeed comply with the 2045 clean energy deadline, as Green insists is the case.
JERA is offering to front roughly $2 billion to build the gas infrastructure, and plans to profit from this investment by charging Oʻahu residents for the gas-fired electricity. JERA hopes to have its LNG terminal and power plant fully constructed in 2030, an extremely optimistic timeline that would still allow only 15 years to make money burning gas before that becomes illegal.
But gas power plants are hefty investments, so developers or utilities typically run them for decades to recoup what they spent; JERA’s calculation for the supposed household savings assumes a 40-year power plant operating life, which would stretch into the 2070s.
“Once you build the infrastructure, unless you’re going to keep it for a very long time, anything you do to amortize it quickly is going to drive up the cost,” said Jay Griffin, who chaired the state utility regulatory commission from 2019 to 2022. “If you’re really intent on saying ‘We’ll only do this for 15 years,’ now it’s a 15-year mortgage on a $2 billion loan, versus 30 or 50 years.”
To hit that 2030 target date for commercial operations, JERA would have to make quick work of permitting this complex and multifaceted project, and shepherd the controversial plan swiftly through approvals at the Public Utilities Commission.
“That alone can take years because the PUC takes its job very seriously. These are very technical issues,” said Isaac Moriwake, the environmental attorney who leads Earthjustice’s Mid-Pacific Office.
Navigating PUC approval will also require some degree of buy-in from Hawaiian Electric, the electric monopoly that actually runs the Oʻahu grid. JERA needs the utility to either solicit bids for the project or request a waiver from the competitive bidding process on JERA’s behalf. Thus far, the utility has played no formal role in JERA’s proposal, and one of its press statements about LNG exuded a rare degree of saltiness for the typically bland genre of utility communications, noting how the state has zigzagged in its approach to LNG over the past quarter century. Hawaiian Electric confirmed to Canary Media and Hawai’i Public Radio that it has not formed a partnership with JERA.
Even after the PUC rules on the proposal, community members have a right to appeal up to the state Supreme Court, an eventuality Moriwake said was “almost guaranteed.”
And even if the project wins all the necessary approvals and deflects legal incursions, it still wouldn’t be out of the woods.
“We have an extensive track record of projects going over budget and taking too long,” Griffin said of construction efforts in Hawaiʻi. “After all the infrastructure, the build, and any delays, who’s going to guarantee those savings?”
JERA’s Montague acknowledged in an email that 2030 completion would be “an aggressive timeline,” but added that “we fully believe it can be accomplished.” The company’s slide deck stressed that it still expects savings for customers if the project is delayed by three years or its cost grows by 20%.
Crucially, though, its expected savings depend on “assuming thermal plants switch to renewable fuel at 2045.” JERA asserts that the power plant’s turbines could burn renewable natural gas, clean hydrogen, or clean ammonia with limited upgrades to comply with the clean energy law.
When asked to name power plants burning green hydrogen, Montague said that JERA upgraded a turbine in New Jersey to be capable of burning a 40% blend of hydrogen with natural gas, and noted that GE Vernova sells turbines it says can handle a 100% hydrogen fuel.
Testing is one thing, but power plants have not yet adopted hydrogen as a sole fuel for regular operations. Staking Oʻahu’s grid on clean fuels entails betting on specialized generator equipment not yet in widespread production and an uninterrupted supply of fuels that remain niche and expensive.
Renewable natural gas does exist — it can be siphoned off landfills and manure ponds so it doesn’t hit the atmosphere as unabated methane. But the Energy Office study, for instance, made clear that “RNG is not scalable or widely available enough to meet Hawai‘i’s energy demands.”
Should Oʻahu find itself in a position where the LNG plant eventually gets approved, but comes online years late due to the predictable community challenges or construction delays, or both, and then cannot actually deliver a quick and easy switch to burning hypothetical clean fuels by 2045, JERA would have to make its money back in that compressed timeframe, with the captive customers on Oʻahu footing the bill.
“This project’s a loser, and for it to make any kind of sense, they’re going to have to sprinkle some fairy dust on it,” Moriwake said. “If you sign up for this long-term fossil-fuel commitment, you’re going to be pushing back cleaner and cheaper renewable resources and forfeiting our clean energy and climate goals.”
JERA and the Green administration counter those unresolved questions with a sense of urgency. They paint a binary picture: the expensive, polluting, oil-burning status quo versus a cheaper, cleaner future powered by natural gas. On April 16, the 48th day of the Iran war, Green told listeners of Hawaiʻi Public Radio that the state’s dependence on oil had to change.
“Right now, the idea of continuing to rely on oil from places like Libya or worry about what happens in the Middle East when you have a war with Iran, it’s just insanity,” Green said. “And I’m just not going to be a governor that sits on my butt and doesn’t do something when I can try to make things more affordable.”
Of course, Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz didn’t just stop oil flows; it cut off shipping access for about one-fifth of global LNG supply, too. Iranian missiles damaged Qatar’s primary gas facility so badly it will take years to repair, creating a long-term constraint on gas markets in Europe and Asia.
Even if Green wasn’t pursuing gas import dependence at a historically volatile time for the commodity, his oil-versus-gas dichotomy overlooks another option: solar.
Clean energy advocates argue that the state should instead fast-track investment in solar and batteries to drastically reduce Oʻahu’s need for imported fuel. If anyone wanted to see receipts from a natural experiment that tested this exact strategy, all they’d have to do is hop on a 40-minute flight from Honolulu to Līhuʻe, Kauaʻi.
Neighboring Kauaʻi is the only island in the state served by an electric utility outside of Hawaiian Electric’s purview. Member-owned Kauaʻi Island Utility Cooperative (KIUC) built enough solar and batteries that it routinely runs solely on renewable power for portions of sunny days. Its leaders aren’t worried about hitting the 2045 deadline — they expect to entirely forgo fossil fuels by 2033, 12 years ahead of schedule.
When KIUC formed in 2002, electricity rates on Kauaʻi were 70% higher than on Oʻahu, according to KIUC president and CEO David Bissell. Today, the island has the lowest rates statewide, and Bissell said customers are far more insulated from the vagaries of the oil market.
Solar investments have been key to KIUC’s success. One-fifth of KIUC’s members have rooftop solar on their homes. Utility-scale solar currently accounts for roughly a quarter of Kauaʻi’s annual generation. Two recently approved solar and battery farms will bring that up to around 60%, each providing electricity at a rate of about 15 cents per kilowatt-hour, a steep discount compared to oil-fired generation.
These projects, together with KIUC’s other renewable facilities, will help Kauaʻi avoid more than 300 million gallons of fossil fuel use over the next 25 years.
“It’s helped our greenhouse gas emissions get radically reduced, and it uses Kauaʻi’s abundant resources to produce energy and benefit the island,” Bissell told state lawmakers in April.
Oʻahu has a much higher energy demand and more land constraints than Kauaʻi, but some experts say the island can overcome those hurdles. In that same April meeting, Fripp appeared alongside Michael Roberts, an economist and fellow at the University of Hawaiʻi Economic Research Organization, to discuss how Oʻahu might achieve comparable results to Kauaʻi.
Roberts and a Ph.D. student updated a model originally designed by Fripp and ran more than 100 scenarios comparing energy project and fuel costs to determine the most affordable path forward for Oʻahu utility customers. This analysis concluded that investments in solar, not natural gas, presented Oʻahu’s best bet at mitigating electricity costs. In late June, Roberts published a report on the Economic Research Organization’s website that built on the initial analysis.
That case for solar became muddied on July 7, when Roberts withdrew his study, noting errors made in the rush to publish, including one in a correction that relied on data points hallucinated by an AI assistant.
Roberts is conducting an internal audit of the report, which he plans to reissue soon. So far, his top-line takeaway stands: “Building no new fossil-fuel plant remains the least-cost path for Oʻahu in every corrected case,” he said in a statement.
Gov. Green, in an emailed statement, commended the Economic Research Organization for recognizing the “flaws and bias” in the research. “The faulty study and analysis, deeply compromised by vested interests, threatens to set back our collective opportunity to build a sane bridge to a fully renewable future.”
Prior to the retraction, the Energy Office had contested Roberts’ expectation that solar will maintain its cost advantage over other sources. The Energy Office had pointed out that Hawaiian Electric recently submitted power purchase agreements to the Public Utilities Commission for two new Oʻahu solar and battery farms, Puʻuloa Solar and Mahi Solar, at price points of about 21 cents and 23 cents per kilowatt-hour, respectively.
That’s double what grid-scale solar has cost in Hawaiʻi in the past. In the contract document, Mahi Solar developer Longroad Energy noted concerns about Hawaiian Electric’s tenuous financial position since the Maui fires and the rollback of federal incentives for solar projects. That price jump, though, is anomalous in the broader trend of solar costs, which have a long track record of declining over time, while the cost to build gas power plants has been rising amid roiling demand.
Griffin, who as a regulator sparred with Hawaiian Electric to pick up the pace of clean energy to avoid surging oil costs when the state’s last coal plant closed, maintains that much of the delay in Hawaiʻi’s renewables buildout “is self-inflicted.”
“Can we do things better here? One hundred percent,” he said. “Do we have more potential to improve the clean energy pathway? Absolutely.”
Amid these conflicting reports on Oʻahu’s energy pathways, state lawmakers have called on the Public Utilities Commission to step in. Lee, in the state Senate, and Lowen, in the House, introduced resolutions that their respective chambers approved requesting that the commission conduct its own analysis on how to cut costs for residents.
The commission has until the end of the year to return its preliminary findings to lawmakers. In the meantime, Lee said the state shouldn’t tether itself to yet another imported fossil fuel.
“Unless somebody can guarantee the price of an imported fuel at a rate that is far lower, or at least comparable to investing in local renewables, … then I don’t see how the math maths,” Lee said.
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