A DEP vehicle charging under one of the solar panels at Gifford Pinchot State Park in Lewisberry, Pennsylvania, on July 22, 2025.
Cambria County Commissioner Thomas Chernisky (left) and Rock Run board secretary Jeffrey Mitchell inspect a windmill being installed at the Patton facility Tuesday, July 1, 2025.
A DEP vehicle charging under one of the solar panels at Gifford Pinchot State Park in Lewisberry, Pennsylvania, on July 22, 2025.
Cambria County Commissioner Thomas Chernisky (left) and Rock Run board secretary Jeffrey Mitchell inspect a windmill being installed at the Patton facility Tuesday, July 1, 2025.
The United States produced more energy in 2023 than ever before. That was until 2024, when the domestic energy sector reset the record.
Natural gas and crude oil led the way, but the boost in production is owed in no small part to renewable sources.
Renewables — wind, solar, biofuels and more — accounted for nearly 10% of all energy produced last year in the U.S., with growing output across sources, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. They accounted for 21.5% of utility-scale electricity generation — topping coal and nuclear.
Energy produced by wind swelled by 8% year over year. Biofuels were up 6%. Solar saw a whopping 25% increase.
That falls in line with global trends, where more than 90% of new energy generation comes from renewable resources.
But, President Donald Trump’s White House favors fossil fuels. Rather than taking an all-of-the-above approach to energy production, the administration — one dotted with appointees with direct ties to fossil fuels — kneecapped the renewable energy industry in 2025.
Trump issued executive orders seeking to halt the development of offshore wind farms. He ordered the termination of subsidies and tax credits for wind and solar energy projects. While working to ease the permitting and siting of projects for fossil fuels, the Trump Administration took the opposite approach by freezing permits for renewable energy projects and raising the hurdles needed to obtain permits in the future.
“In my view, there’s not one single answer to this,” Andrew Tubbs of the Energy Association of Pennsylvania said. “I think we need both and I don’t think it should be viewed in the lens of either-or. I think we need every resource.”
The demand for energy is rising, fueled by a growing push to build out data centers in support of artificial intelligence, along with manufacturing growth and the electrification of transportation.
Utility Dive, an online outlet devoted to utility industry news, cited the National Electrical Manufacturers Association this year that electricity demand will grow 2% annually and 50% by 2050.
Data from the EIA reflects continued annual growth in renewables on the whole as energy production using coal and nuclear power trends down.
Amid all this, the administration plugged the pipeline on congressionally approved renewable energy projects by halting billions in federal funding, with the Department of Energy cutting nearly $8 billion alone this month in clean energy grants in 16 states — almost all led by Democrats, none of which supported Trump in the 2024 election.
“For the world of clean energy, I think the reason for why we see the uncertainty being so bad is this is a collision between the most compelling economics of demand we’ve ever seen colliding with the worst politics we could ever imagine,” Jason Grumet, head of the American Clean Power Association, said Oct. 15 while hosting an industry talk about the future of clean energy manufacturing.
The world is going green. A United Nations report released this summer found the global electric grid grew almost entirely due to renewable energy projects. According to the report, roughly 92.5% of all new electricity capacity in 2023 was derived from renewable sources.
That growth is reflected in investments. The report found that $2 trillion was invested globally in clean energy in 2024, topping that of fossil fuels for the first time in eight years. About 10% of the collective growth in global economies in 2023 is attributed to the clean energy sector, the report states.
The green energy shift is shown in the U.S., too. The Solar Energy Industries Association shows solar installations grew 28% annually on average across the past decade, setting a record in 2023 and again in 2024.
Battery storage — backup for electricity grids when renewables are down — nearly doubled in 2024 and is forecast to do so again in 2025, according to the World Resources Institute.
Roughly 1.3 million electric vehicles were sold in the U.S. in 2024, also a new record, accounting for more than 8% of all new vehicle sales.
The American Clean Power Association touts that the clean energy manufacturing sector pours $18 billion into the U.S. gross domestic product annually, generates $33 billion in annual spending and supports 122,000 jobs nationwide.
EV sales growth is slowing as the buildout of charging stations lags, and a tax credit worth up to $7,500 for the purchase of a new EV, or $4,000 for used, expired Sept. 30 as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — one of several restricted or eliminated.
Solar energy and wind projects are not in favor with the White House, fully evident even before the Department of the Interior moved in early October to cancel the collective review of environmental permits for Esmeralda 7, the largest solar project in the U.S.
Rather than streamlining the reviews as planned for the seven neighboring individual projects that make up Esmeralda, set to be built on federal land in Nevada, the federal government is expanding its bureaucratic oversight by reviewing permits for each individually, likely delaying work and potentially risking the investment.
The U.S. under Trump is leaning on fossil fuels as the administration works to spark investments in energy and manufacturing. For example, Stellantis, which owns Jeep, Dodge and Ram, announced Oct. 15 that it would invest $13 billion in American manufacturing with $100 million devoted toward EV production, or less than 1%.
“I do think over the next two years or so, we’ll continue to see a lot of renewables get built. They’ll still get those tax credits since they were invested by a certain date and if they’re completed by a certain date,” Ted Kelly, director and lead counsel for U.S. Clean Energy at the Environmental Defense Fund, said of the newly restricted credits. “I do think there’s a risk, maybe in 2028, we’ll really start to see a decline as the availability of those tax credits finishes.”
Jessica Lawrence-Vaca, chief commercial officer for Array Technologies, a U.S.-based solar energy firm, said during the American Clean Power Association event that her company and others in the industry are betting that the history and head start of renewable energy research and manufacturing in the U.S. will position them to be cost-competitive and the fastest to deploy for the time being, despite policy shifts.
Though China dominates the global solar supply chain, Lawrence-Vaca the U.S. ranks third and has been rising across the past several years.
“All the (intellectual property) has historically been here. We’ve been a leader in a lot of these technologies and we should want to be a leader again,” Lawrence-Vaca said.
While the demand for energy grows, stagnation in bringing new electric generation online continues, said Tubbs of the Energy Association of Pennsylvania.
Tubbs is president and CEO of an organization that self-describes as the “voice of Pennsylvania’s electric and natural gas utilities.” Still, he’s of the mind that both fossils and renewables are necessary to meet demand.
Dispatchable power sources driven by fossil fuels must be coupled with intermittent sources like wind and solar. Renewables, he said, are part of the “fabric of the energy sleeve and it should be.”
Conversations around energy policy can change with the wind, he said, but investments are made with long-term plans that could sustain sudden shifts in administrative ambition.
“The conversations absolutely change on a dime,” Tubbs said. “When you start making investments in generation, those investments don’t stop in a heartbeat.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first of several stories produced by CNHI on the “Great Green Debate” topic.
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