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If your neighbor tells you they’re a Republican who voted for Donald Trump, where do you assume that person stands on solar power? With the president and many state and federal GOP lawmakers attacking the renewable energy industry on all fronts, you might reasonably conclude that they are a solar hater.
But a new poll of 800 Trump voters, Republicans, and GOP-leaning independents suggests there’s a good chance that’s not true: A little over half of these respondents favor utility-scale solar, finds the poll, which was commissioned by U.S. panel manufacturer First Solar.
The share in support jumps to 70% if the panels are made in American factories, with U.S. materials and no connections to China. And 68% of respondents agree that the country needs all kinds of electricity generation — including solar — to bring down spiking electricity costs.
The data reveals a serious dissonance between Trump’s energy agenda and what many in his party actually want.
Building big solar farms is one of the cheapest, quickest ways to add new electrons to the grid as demand skyrockets and gas plants get harder and more time-consuming to build.
But rather than boosting every form of electricity generation, the White House has pulled out all the stops to kneecap solar and wind energy while bolstering the fossil fuel industry. For example, an Interior Department permitting freeze has resulted in the cancellation or holdup of enough utility-scale wind and solar projects to power roughly 16.5 million homes.
The poll’s findings square with those from a Pew Research Center survey conducted last spring. Six out of 10 Republican respondents said they favor more solar power in the country. For context, nine in 10 Democrats said the same.
Here’s the problem: While a majority of Republicans may support solar, opinion is moving in the wrong direction.
Back in 2020, more than eight in 10 Republicans favored adding more solar in the U.S. Meanwhile, the Pew survey found increasing support among Republicans for fossil-fuel extraction like coal mining, hydraulic fracking, and offshore drilling. (Democrats’ backing for these activities remained roughly the same.)
The more that support for renewables erodes, the easier it will be for the Trump administration to keep blockading the industry.
If this trend continues, there will be a whole lot of losers: The companies that spent years planning and investing in the projects before the second Trump administration came along. The planet and its inhabitants, which will see increasingly severe climate change as we continue to burn more fossil fuels. And, yes, the American households and businesses that will pay higher utility bills if there’s not enough power supply to meet ballooning demand.
Faked local pushback may tank a solar project
It’s notoriously hard to build big solar farms in Ohio. It’s even harder when you have to contend with potentially fake opposition.
That’s the predicament facing Open Road Renewables, which wants to build a big solar farm north of Columbus. Ohio regulators are poised to reject a key permit for the project because of local pushback — but Kathiann M. Kowalski’s latest story flags a big problem: Dozens of the public comments filed in opposition to the solar farm are from people who seem to have given false names or lied about living nearby.
In fact, an Open Road executive found that most comments are in support of the solar farm, once you strip out the apparently fake, anonymous, and duplicate ones.
Offshore wind gets back on its feet
Alexa, play “We Are the Champions” by Queen. That one goes out to the offshore wind industry, which on Monday notched its fifth court win against the Trump administration’s December order halting construction of all five projects underway in the U.S. This week’s ruling allows New York’s Sunrise Wind to restart work, Dan McCarthy reports, and is a rare bit of good news for an industry that’s been under assault for over a year now.
Choppy waters may still lie ahead: The rulings allowing the projects to keep building are preliminary injunctions, which are meant to prevent irreparable harm as lawsuits work their way through court.
Although it’s likely the offshore wind developers will win their cases in district court, the federal government could choose to appeal those decisions. In fact, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum suggested in a Tuesday interview with Fox Business News that it may indeed do so: “There’s always the possibility to keep moving that up through the chain.”
LIHEAP lives on: President Donald Trump signs a spending bill that boosts funding for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program — less than a year after he proposed eliminating it. (Canary Media)
Secret solar: Some U.S. renters and homeowners are secretly installing plug-in solar panels, also known as balcony solar, without utility permission. (Los Angeles Times)
Coal confrontation: Two Colorado co-ops become the first utilities to officially challenge Trump administration orders to keep retiring coal plants open. (Canary Media)
Trump stifles energy: The Trump administration is delaying hundreds of onshore wind and solar projects on both public and private lands, threatening to exacerbate the ongoing energy-affordability crisis by constraining electricity supply. (New York Times)
Solar > coal: China’s top electricity industry group says the country’s solar generating capacity is set to exceed that of coal for the first time this year. (Bloomberg)
Onshore headwinds: Onshore wind energy development has significantly slowed, even in states like Iowa, in the face of community opposition, the phaseout of federal tax credits, and the Trump administration’s attempts to block federal permitting. (Inside Climate News)
EVs for the win: Sales of new fossil-fueled cars hit a record low in Norway last month, as buyers purchased over 2,000 EVs and 29 hybrids, but only 98 diesel-fueled vehicles and merely seven petrol cars. (The Guardian)
Ysabelle Kempe is associate editor at Canary Media.
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