Given New England’s abundant clean energy resources, it doesn’t have to be that way. New analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) underscores the potential of offshore wind to bolster winter reliability. And the numbers are just the latest strong vote in favor of standing up that offshore wind power in a serious way, and soon.

Winter Storm Fern comes

When Winter Storm Fern swept across the country around the weekend of January 24-25, 2026, it brought with it arctic temperatures. In New England, temperatures dropped below freezing (and, as of this writing, more than a week later, haven’t made it back up in the Boston area).

Under conditions like that, the energy scene in New England follows a familiar pattern, and it stayed true to form during the recent storm:

• The low temperatures drove up demand for heating in homes and businesses. In New England, pipeline gas for furnaces and boilers accounts for the largest share of home heating (40% of households).
• The storm also drove up demand for electricity, including to drive the pumps and fans associated with those furnaces and boilers, as well as to power electric heat (electric baseboards and, increasingly, heat pumps). New England is a heavy user of gas for electricity too, with that fuel accounting for more than half of in-region electricity generation.
• That overreliance on gas put the power sector’s fuel appetite on a collision course with demand from the gas distribution companies that serve New England’s homes and businesses. Because gas companies contract for that gas far ahead of time, while gas power plants look to buy gas only as they need it, when push comes to shove, the power plants lose out.
• The lack of gas pushed grid operator ISO New England (ISO-NE) to “Plan B.” Many of the gas power plants in the region have dual-fuel capabilities, the ability to burn oil instead of gas. Gas is not a clean option for electricity generation, but oil is even dirtier, in terms of both carbon pollution and emissions of pollutants such as particulate matter (i.e. soot) and sulfur dioxide (SO₂). The fuel is dirty enough that, a generation ago, communities fought protracted—but ultimately successful—battles to rein in pollution when oil is burned. To meet the critical need for power during this cold snap, however, ISO-NE sought, and received, waivers on pollution limits from the Trump administration during Winter Storm Fern.

The result of the fallback to an even dirtier fuel, running with no pollution control equipment, was, to quote my colleague Susan Muller, “like an oil spill in the sky”. The lights stayed on, but at a high potential cost to public health.

That chain of events could easily have been much worse this time around. As UCS has detailed elsewhere, a similar winter storm eight years ago led to an emergency declaration by then-Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker  because of the danger of oil not showing up in sufficient measure. The “Plan B” for reliability was in danger of failing. And “Plan C” in a case like that might feature rolling blackouts, which no one should have to face in such weather.

A much better plan for reliability

A familiar pattern, with familiar—and untenable—consequences. So how do we break free of that pattern?

Experience and data show that more pipelines are not the answer. Even gas-producing regions had trouble keeping gas power plants operating during Fern, as has happened in other winter storms, because of the many ways that electricity generation with gas fails in the cold. New England’s energy portfolio is also already way too concentrated on that one fuel, one that the region doesn’t produce and for which it is at the far, far end of the pipeline.

A better plan is to draw much more on the resources that are already in the region, and that often get more abundant when we need them, not—like gas and oil—less abundant.

That’s where offshore wind comes in. Twenty years of data from ISO-NE show that, in most cold snaps, the same cold-weather systems that strain our grid have delivered large amounts of offshore wind energy to the region at the same time.

That’s also where the new UCS analysis comes in. It focuses on last winter (2024-25) in analyzing offshore wind power’s potential contribution to electricity reliability. It starts with ISO-NE’s own framework for assessing the risk of an “energy shortfall,” when energy supply falls short of energy demand. On a weekly basis in the winter, ISO-NE considers a large set of factors, on both the supply and the demand side, in order to determine when a shortfall is likely.  One important risk factor is “daily energy demand,” which the ISO summarizes with a gauge graphic to illustrate increasing levels of risk. As shown in the graph below, last winter had plenty of days when electricity demand (the black line) was in the yellow elevated-risk zone, and some even in the orange higher-risk levels.

The analysis then uses hourly wind speed data offshore throughout the winter to calculate what wind turbines could have produced.

So how much could offshore wind have helped? The analysis assesses two levels of offshore wind capacity: 1,500 megawatts (MW), which is the total of the two projects under construction/almost completed that will feed power into the New England electric grid under contracts with utilities in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island; and 3,500 MW, which adds in the two other projects selected by Massachusetts and Rhode Island for the next round of contracts.

Even those levels of offshore wind would have made a real difference. The analysis found that 1,500 MW would have cut elevated demand-related risk by 55%, and 3,500 would have reduced it by 75%. That higher level would have kept demand out of the higher-risk zone on all but one day.

That would have meant many fewer days when the old pattern would have been followed, and a lot more days with greater reliability and lower pollution.

Keeping your lights on—without hurting your wallet

Keeping oil burners from firing up matters for more than just for avoiding oil-spill-in-the-sky phenomena, and the reliability challenges that lead to using oil-fired power plants more. Because oil is a really expensive way to generate electricity—even if gas becomes even more expensive at times like those—it also matters for our wallets. A study last year for RENEW Northeast showed that having 3,500 MW of offshore wind online could have saved New England ratepayers $400 million just in Winter 2024-25.

But reliability alone should be a powerful incentive to tear up the dogeared script that has, at times like these, tossed us from one fossil fuel to another. In the lead-up to this past weekend—days after Fern had swept through the region—ISO-NE was again warning of “tight operating conditions,” with peak daily energy demand solidly (and worryingly) in the orange “higher risk” zone, fuel supplies closer to red than green, and gas demand all the way on the red end.

There are all kinds of reasons why the move toward offshore wind makes sense, for New England and far beyond. And why poor policy decisions and still more delays—and the fossil-fueled disinformation that helps fuel those—are a disservice to all electricity users, airbreathers, billpayers, job-doers, and people-lovers.

This won’t be the last winter with extreme cold in New England. If the folks building offshore wind farms off our coast—the pile drivers, electricians, millwrights, pipefitters, ship crews, and so many others—are allowed to do their work, though, this may be the last one that we have to weather without a solid amount of offshore wind at our back.

We can’t change the weather, but we can change how we plan our power system to run smoothly through it all. In New England and beyond, offshore wind can be a central pillar of that plan.

In the clean energy space, the Trump administration launched attack after attack to slow down the clean energy in favor of fossil fuels, killing projects, investments, and jobs. By rescinding clean energy funding, pushing to abolish tax credits, coordinating across the administration to interfere with wind and solar, and so much more, they’ve set us up for bitter harvests for years to come.

And yet…

Clean energy is strong. And in 2025, it showed its strength in some really notable ways, as momentum, economics, policies, and people carried clean energy progress forward, despite it all. And it seems all the more important to celebrate it this year.

So, here are clean energy bright spots worthy of resounding cheers.

Powering up

One pillar of progress has been growth in renewable energy capacity, for more clean electricity and all the other benefits clean energy brings. And one clear shining star for 2025 is the US solar sector:

• 2025 looks set to land just a hair’s breadth away from breaking the record for new US solar installations set in 2024. Texas continued to be the leader in new solar, followed by California and—wait for it—Indiana (up from 15^th two years ago). Overall, July to September 2025 was the third best quarter ever for new solar installations.
• Solar accounted for almost 80% of new electrical generating capacity through September (and 58% of all new electrical capacity, with energy storage included).
• All that installation progress helped push solar electricity to new heights: solar generation from January to September 2025 was 29% higher than in the same period in 2024.
• US solar manufacturing also grew: module manufacturing capacity increased 42% over the first three quarters of 2025, new capacity to make the solar cells that go into modules came to life in South Carolina, and new capacity to make the wafers that become the solar cells sprang forth in Michigan.

Energy storage was another fount of progress in 2025, with installations for the year projected to be more than 50% higher than in 2024, led by Texas, California, and Arizona.

All told, says the American Clean Power Association, 2025 looks “firmly on pace to surpass 2024 as the biggest clean power deployment year in history.”

Realizing possibilities

Where solar, storage, and other clean energy technologies really shine is in what they make possible in electricity markets around the country. Some examples:

• In California, gas electricity generation has fallen as solar generation has risen, and solar in the state, up 13% year-over-year for the first three quarters of 2025, looked set to surpass gas on an annual basis for the first time.
• In Texas, where electricity demand is growing fastest, clean energy played a huge role in meeting that increased demand in 2025. Solar generation January-September was 42% higher than in the same period in 2024, and solar seems poised to overtake coal in the state in 2026. The grid operator covering most of the state reported having added 20 times as much battery, solar, and wind capacity as new gas in its service territory since last winter.
• In New England, having clean energy available to meet peaks in electricity demand helped send the region’s last coal plant out to pasture. New England solar generation was almost a fifth higher in Q1-Q3.

Even on the water

Though the challenges were unprecedented for offshore wind, 2025 also brought noteworthy happenings in that space. Construction progressed on the next generation of projects, aimed at serving Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, and Virginia, and several large-scale ones should reach full power in 2026 (if I didn’t just jinx it…). In service in Virginia to aid the work is the Charybdis, the brand-new wind turbine installation vessel that is the first built in the United States (Texas). Virginia’s offshore wind project will be one of the world’s largest when completed next year, capable of producing enough energy for more than 600,000 Virginian households.

As some of the Trump administration’s spurious excuses to halt under-construction offshore wind projects failed to stand up to legal scrutiny, the importance of offshore wind for economies—not just as a source of clean electrons—was even clearer than usual in the range of voices pushing back and speaking out in opposition to the administration’s monkeying. Those included labor unions, business networks, and even the Republican member of Congress for the Virginia project staging area and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.

Meanwhile, the first operating large-scale US offshore wind project, serving Long Island, showed strong results in its first year—including in the winter months, when offshore wind power comes in particularly handy. New England too was benefitting from offshore turbines, before the projects themselves even reached completion: injections of electricity into the region’s grid led to wind generation from January to early December 2025 that was 26% higher than in the same period in 2024, and led in mid-December to a record for peak wind production that was 29% higher than 2024’s peak.

Lots more to come

As technology moves forward, so do some leading states. Despite—or because of—the federal moves in the wrong direction, multiple states doubled down on their moves toward a clean energy economy in 2025. Maine, for example, committed to 100% clean electricity by 2040. California extended and strengthened its “cap and invest” program. Illinois passed a comprehensive clean energy package. And, because clean energy matters at all scales, it’s worth celebrating Michigan’s moves to make it easier for customers to connect distributed renewable energy systems (think rooftop solar) to the electric grid, and Utah’s embrace of balcony solar.

And there’s a lot more to come for clean energy, despite the even rougher seas ahead in the near term under this administration. Continuing affordability concerns will guide even some slow-to-come-around people to recognize solar and wind as often the cheapest source of new electricity generation. Decision makers and the rest of us who care about good jobs and economic development will continue to push for more policies to accelerate the move to clean energy. Innovation, economies of scale in products and projects, and continued international progress will all make clean energy even more attractive.

There’s a lot about 2025 I’d really like to be able to undo, or forget. But clean energy’s progress despite all that the Trump administration threw at it is notable, and it seems important to celebrate those accomplishments as we go into the new year. Not least to keep reminding ourselves of the enormity of what’s already possible and what’s yielding dividends right now, today, and will be long into the future.

And now, New England’s last coal plant—Merrimack Station—has just closed. Here’s why, and a look at where things go next. 

Coal’s rise and fall 

The first generator at the Merrimack Station power plant in Bow, New Hampshire, fired up in 1960. The second one arrived in 1968. Six decades of operation meant the plant was long in the tooth, even by the standards of the aging US coal fleet.  

But it wasn’t age, per se, that led to the plant’s demise. It was economics.  

When a regional electric grid operator is looking to serve electricity demand, it calls on the cheapest power plants first for electricity. As demand increases in a region, it works its way through increasingly more-expensive ones. The economics of coal generation have been collapsing for years, in the face of not just the rise of gas generation, but the advent of larger and larger amounts of increasingly cheap solar and wind power, and energy storage. Being among the most expensive options has resulted in coal plants getting called on less and less for power. 

Merrimack Station’s decline mirrored what has happened with coal across the country, with the plant getting called on very little in recent years. A coal plant could, in theory, run almost the whole year round, meaning it has a high capacity factor—the hours it is used divided by the number of hours in the year. While Merrimack Station’s capacity factor was 70-80% two decades ago, though, it didn’t crack the 8% mark in any of the last six years. In 2024, one of its two generating units operated for a total of only 25.4 hours, and the plant as a whole accounted for less than a quarter of 1% of the electricity generated in New England. 

The economics for the plant owner got even worse when, in 2023, Merrimack Station for the first time failed to secure a contract in the region’s forward capacity auction, for next year. The capacity market is the mechanism that pays power plants to be ready to fire up, even if they don’t end up being needed. Merrimack Station lost out to other, cheaper sources for meeting high electricity demand, such as other fossil fuel plants, nuclear, renewable energy, and customers willing to dial back their electricity use during the “peak-iest” times.  

But electricity isn’t the only thing that comes out of fossil fuel plants like Merrimack Station. Even with the addition of pollution control equipment over the years, the plant continued to burden the surrounding community with its emissions. And its carbon pollution declined only because its generation did: in its peak years two decades ago, the plant emitted the equivalent of as much as 800,000 of the average gasoline-powered cars of today. While the electricity might have been welcome, the pollution never was. 

What takes its place? 

In recent years, Merrimack Station had been called on for electricity primarily in the cold season. Winter months accounted for eight of the 10 months of highest use of the plant over its last five years. In its last three years, even when Jack Frost hit the region particularly hard, its monthly capacity factor hit 30% only twice. 

It’s increasingly evident, though, that New England in particular has a much better, cleaner, cheaper response to electricity demand during winter storms: offshore wind power. Winter storms tend to come with hefty winter winds, which drive up electricity demand. But they also provide loads of kinetic energy just waiting to be turned into electricity by offshore wind turbines.  

That strong correlation between peak demand and high levels of potential offshore wind generation is visible in the graph below from a recent analysis of the economic value of offshore wind for the region. That correlation means that turbines will be well positioned to supplant not just the small amount of coal generation from Merrimack, but generation from oil peaking plants, which are also expensive and highly polluting, and from gas plants–you can see the offshore wind in green, doing away with the share otherwise provided by coal (the very thin strip in light green) and eating into the shares from oil (in yellow) and gas (in red).  

Source: Daymark Energy Advisors 2025  

Because they drive the grid operator to turn to the most expensive generators, those peak periods driven by extreme winter weather can significantly drive up the cost of electricity. By displacing that other generation, offshore wind farms can save households money on their monthly electric bills even taking into account that those facilities are more expensive to construct.  

Those winter peaks also represent periods of high risk of power outages, as gas plants (that currently supply half of the region’s electricity) get outcompeted for gas supplies by homes and businesses using gas for heating, and as backup oil plants run out of limited onsite fuel. That means that having a solid amount of offshore wind capacity can dramatically reduce the demand-driven risk of a winter blackout (see below). 

Source: UCS 2024  

Meanwhile, the ever-growing cadre of willing solar arrays in New England is doing a bang-up job of meeting the summer peaks that Merrimack might once have been called on to help with. 

The future gets clearer 

New England is done with coal plants.  

Aside from a paper mill in Maine that occasionally feeds coal into the generator usually fueled by its own waste products, the region’s remaining connection to the fuel is solely via its neighbors that still have some coal generation, and the connections between the different regional electricity grids. Coal can be in the mix of power that comes into New England over those lines (and coal pollution can also cross into the region). 

This retirement is a watershed moment. The fact that New England’s last coal plant was used very seldom before it was gone for good is a testament to the changing face of electricity generation in the region and the country. The fact that its power output will be easily replaced with cleaner and cheaper sources shows how far innovation and scale in renewable energy and energy storage have come. 

Some of that replacement may happen at the very site of the now-closed coal plant, restoring some of the jobs and tax revenue that disappeared with the plant: the owners of the Merrimack Station site are looking to install solar and storage there. 

And there’s a lot more transformation to come.

Years of clean energy progress, month by month 

The graph of progress on clean energy from the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) shown below says a lot about where we’ve come from, over the long term and in recent times.  

Based on data from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) and UCS calculations, the graph shows the portion of total US electricity generation that came from solar and wind each month for the last two and half decades. 

Here’s some of what I see in that virtuous spiral of clean energy progress: 

• The early days represented in the data had very little generation from wind, and very very little from solar; combined, wind and solar generation reached 1% on a monthly basis for the first time only in 2007. 

• But then things heated up: wind and solar generated more than 5% of monthly electricity for the first time in 2013, passed the 10% point in 2017, leapt past 15% in 2021, and soared past 20% just one year later, in 2022. 

• Wind and solar have supplied at least 10% of US electricity in every single month since September 2021. 

• In April 2024 solar and wind hit a record 23%—meaning that almost one in every four kilowatt-hours of electricity used in this country flowed from wind turbines and solar panels. The combined generation that month was 15% higher than the previous April’s. 

A large part of what drove those latest leaps was the tremendous recent progress with solar big and small. US solar had a record-breaking year in 2023—and quickly went on to even greater heights; it had its strongest year ever in 2024.  

According to data from analytics firm Wood Mackenzie and the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), the total solar capacity installed during 2024 was 24% above the previous record, and well more than double any other year’s tally. On average US installers put in more than one new solar project every single minute of the year; by the end of the year the country had more than 5.4 million solar photovoltaic systems installed in total, the vast majority of which were small-scale ones on rooftops and over parking lots. 

Overall, US renewable energy generation, principally from wind, solar, and hydro, was 10% higher in 2024 than in 2022, and accounted for more than 24% of our nation’s electricity, vs. 13.4% in 2014. 

So much momentum. 

Changing winds 

So… about that momentum. An appreciation of all the recent progress with clean energy has to be viewed in the context of 2025’s reality. This year is not last year, and the environment for clean energy progress has changed drastically. In so many ways. 

Here are just a few: 

• Administrative actions – Many of the actions of President Trump and his administration have underscored his decidedly unhealthy obsession with promoting fossil fuels and degrading renewables. Those include issuing executive orders that seek to hit wind power hard both offshore and on land and to prop up coal power plants, which are increasingly uneconomic (and have always been bad for public health). They include the president proposing, in his 2026 budget, to slash billions of dollars in funding for energy efficiency and renewable energy. And they include wide-ranging regulatory rollbacks—not least, the remarkable step of proposing to repeal the existing safeguards against carbon and toxic pollution from gas- and coal-fired power plants, which would be another heavy thumb on the scales in favor of fossil fuels over renewables, and of pollution over people.  

• Tariffs – The president’s chaotic and punitive trade policies, a blow to many dimensions of the US economic wellbeing, may hit renewable energy especially hard. Included in the insults are his dramatically ramped-up taxes on imported aluminum and steel. Solar will also be hit by a recent decision by the Department of Commerce to levy tariffs of 14.64% to 3,500% (no, that’s not a typo) on imports from the Southeast Asian countries that have been principal solar suppliers to the United States. While investments in US solar manufacturing soared after the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, imported solar cells are still important inputs for a lot of that manufacturing.  

• Reconciliation – And then there’s the budget reconciliation bill that the House of Representatives just passed, which would cause massive additional disruptions to our ongoing clean energy progress by undoing key clean energy incentives. A failure by the Senate to fix or reject the House version’s attacks on clean energy provisions would lead to staggering drops in clean energy investment and jobs, and unacceptable increases in energy bills and pollution. 

And yet… 

These are dark days in terms of the federal policy environment for the United States’ move to a cleaner, fairer electricity system. Even so, there are bright spots to keep in mind.  

One is the data so far in 2025 about US renewables: 

• According to EIA data, renewable electricity generation in the first quarter of this year was 10% higher than in Q1 of 2024.  

• March 2025 is the new reigning champion for wind and solar generation, with just shy of 24% of electricity supply coming from just those two sources; we’re likely to see a new monthly champion once the April data become available.  

• March was also the first month in history in which non-fossil resources (renewable energy and nuclear power) supplied more than half of US electricity. 

• While new solar installations were appreciably lower than in Q4 of 2024, January-March was still the fourth highest quarter ever. Texas alone installed 2,700 megawatts (MW) of solar that quarter, or enough to serve several hundred thousand households. Also according to Wood Mackenzie/SEIA, technical advancements and other savings offset the initial cost increases for imported solar panels. 

• Solar, wind, and storage accounted for 99% of the electrical capacity installed in Q1—an even higher portion than the 94% tally from 2024. 

• This year has also seen another leap in domestic supply, with another 20% increase in US solar panel manufacturing capacity in Q1 alone. That leap brought the total manufacturing capacity in the country to 51,000 megawatts per year. 

Another reason for hope is the powerful signs of new growth and innovation, often driven by states. Even as another large-scale offshore wind project has just been suspended, construction continues at five other large-scale offshore wind projects in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. The first such project, due to be finished by soon off New England’s coasts, will by itself add 800 megawatts (enough to serve some 400,000 households) and more than quadruple the amount of offshore wind currently serving this country, and provide a powerful new resource for winter reliability in the region. And the largest project under construction, off Virginia, will add another 2,600 megawatts when it is completed next year. 

Also encouraging is the continued commitment of much of the rest of world to pushing renewables forward, with projected investment in solar, wind, and other renewables totaling hundreds of billions of dollars in 2025 alone—several magnitudes greater than the expected investments in coal and gas.   

The most powerful reason for optimism around US renewable energy, though, is the clear advantages that renewables can offer. Massive natural resources in the wind, the sun, the earth, and water. Electricity generation without carbon emissions, or toxic pollution. Resilient energy that isn’t laid low by fuel-line disruptions or a lack of cooling water. Job creation and local economic development. In the case of solar and wind in many parts of the country, often the lowest-cost new electricity, at a time when energy affordability is a key concern for many homes and businesses.  

Onward 

Despite the abdication of leadership on clean energy in Washington, or downright hostility, renewables’ considerable momentum will carry it through to new records in 2025; we have only begun to taste the fruits of all the solar and wind installed over the last year. And its many advantages mean that much more renewable energy will be coming, even with the assaults, and even if it takes a little longer. 

The facts are on our side, even when the politics and the federal level aren’t, and the fundamentals of clean energy are stronger than ever. Clean energy is here to stay. 

Some gas plant developers and their backers are talking up the prospect of burning hydrogen in the plants as a way to address carbon pollution and keep the plants from becoming irrelevant as we make the necessary transition to a low-carbon economy.  

But how much would adding hydrogen actually address the problems of gas plants—carbon pollution and more? And how would that approach compare to using renewable energy? While the answers can get a little numbers-heavy, they can be really illuminating. Like the fact that—spoiler alert—using solar panels or wind turbines directly is three times more efficient than an approach involving hydrogen production and gas plants.  

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) interrogated hydrogen cofiring as one possible approach to cutting gas plant carbon pollution in our recent report Beyond the Smokestack, and in the related free, publicly available Gas Plant Alternatives Tool (GPAT), which can help you do interrogation of your own.  

Before you approach hydrogen cofiring as an alternative, here are seven important questions to ask, and understand the answers to—numbers and all. 

1. Does burning hydrogen in a gas plant cut carbon? 

In its basic molecular form, hydrogen (H₂) consists of two hydrogen atoms, and nothing else. It’s flammable, and it doesn’t emit carbon when it combusts. This means that burning it in place of some of the fossil methane typically used in a gas plant, a process sometimes referred to as “cofiring,” can reduce the carbon pollution coming out of the plant’s smokestack. 

But there’s a lot more to the picture, and those complications must be part of any conversation around using hydrogen in a gas plant.  

One issue is the reduction in smokestack carbon pollution that hydrogen cofiring can actually offer. Hydrogen packs a lot less energy—about two-thirds less—than the same volume of methane gas. That means that, for a plant to generate the same amount of electricity, it needs to burn more of a gas-hydrogen blend. In turn, this means a given percentage of hydrogen (by volume) blended in doesn’t lead to the same percentage reduction in the amount of gas—or to the same reduction of carbon emissions. A blend with 50% hydrogen by volume, for example, gets you only 23% less smokestack carbon pollution. The graph below from Beyond the Smokestack underscores the non-linearity of that relationship.  

Cofiring a certain amount of hydrogen gets you a lot less carbon reduction. (Source: Beyond the Smokestack) 

An even bigger issue arises when it comes to sourcing the hydrogen itself—it has to come from somewhere, after all. Hydrogen atoms are almost always found tied up with other atoms, and there are real implications from the energy-intensive process of separating out the H₂ for subsequent use. For a carbon-free molecule, hydrogen can sure come with a lot of carbon. 

2. Does hydrogen production cause carbon pollution? 

While hydrogen burns without emitting carbon, producing hydrogen can be carbon intensive, sometimes very carbon intensive. Almost all hydrogen production in the United States right now is actually from gas, produced via a process known as steam methane reforming (SMR). SMR involves using steam to separate the hydrogen from the carbon in methane (CH₄).  

In addition to producing hydrogen, this process results in emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and other heat-trapping gases. In fact, a typical SMR operation results in 12 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂e) emissions for every kilogram of hydrogen produced, while each kilogram of hydrogen displacing gas in a gas plant would cut CO₂ by only 6 kilograms. Given that math, the carbon pollution from producing hydrogen would be twice the amount reduced via burning hydrogen. 

Some fossil fuel industry proponents have pitched coupling carbon capture and storage (CCS) with the methane reforming process to limit the resulting carbon pollution. However, as our Beyond the Smokestack report details, CCS can have significant implications of its own. 

Another way to produce hydrogen is through the electrolysis of water. The carbon implications of electrolysis vary widely depending on the specifics, as discussed in the next section. 

3. Does electrolysis make carbon-free hydrogen? 

Electrolysis involves using electricity to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen. Water itself (H₂O) is carbon-free. So far, so good. But where that electricity comes from—how it’s generated—matters. A lot. Because electrolysis requires large amounts of electricity. 

Hydrogen can be made with zero-carbon electricity, including renewable energy like solar or wind (the result is sometimes referred to as green hydrogen). But an electrolyzer might instead be powered by sources that emit a lot more carbon. The resulting hydrogen, then, carries with it a lot of carbon baggage.  

An electrolyzer powered by electricity with the average carbon intensity for the US grid (roughly equal to that from a gas plant) could produce hydrogen with a carbon intensity that is 70% more than that of SMR-produced hydrogen—and more than 45 times what low-carbon options would produce. 

Even “green hydrogen,” however, can have carbon implications, as discussed below. 

4. Is green hydrogen carbon-free? 

Producing hydrogen via solar- or wind-powered electrolysis produces hydrogen, water, and no carbon. But there can still be carbon implications from using renewable energy, even if the energy itself is zero-carbon.  

This possibility has to do in part with the implications of diverting existing renewable energy for the electrolysis—electricity from solar or wind farms that had already been in place before the electrolyzer came into being. If that electricity powers the electrolyzers, then it isn’t available to meet the other electricity needs it had previously served. That means the other electricity demand has to be supplied from other power sources, as this great UCS animation explains. Those other sources are typically gas or coal plants, meaning that “renewables diversion” comes with a sizeable carbon pollution cost. 

The graph below from UCS’s report uses results from GPAT’s assessment of a 250 megawatt plant operating 60% of the time and targeting 90% reductions in smokestack carbon emissions with hydrogen cofiring, which would require cofiring with 97% hydrogen. It shows the potential carbon implications of different hydrogen production scenarios, including that renewables diversion effect. 

Carbon emissions involved with producing hydrogen can easily outweigh carbon pollution reductions at the plant. (Source: Beyond the Smokestack)  

There are ways to ensure that green hydrogen can live up to its carbon-reduction potential, including by addressing that diversion effect. UCS and others have been pushing strongly to make government support for hydrogen production, like tax credits, contingent on it being powered by new/incremental low-carbon sources, in the same general region, and with renewable electricity produced at the same time as the particular electrolyzer needs it. My colleague Julie McNamara explains more about those “three pillars” for clean hydrogen here. 

5. How many solar panels does green hydrogen need? 

Electrolysis is power hungry, and GPAT shows the renewable energy implications of that hunger. Take, for example, our hypothetical 250 megawatt gas plant, running 60% of the time with 30% hydrogen and 70% gas. Powering electrolysis to produce that much hydrogen could take 500,000 solar panels (500 watts each), or more than 50 wind turbines (3 megawatts each). 

Renewable energy goes a lot further if it isn’t routed through an electrolyzer and burned in a gas plant, given the inefficiencies inherent in both the electrolyzer and the power generation stages in the renewables-to-hydrogen-to-cofiring pathway. Using solar or wind energy to power an electrolyzer with a typical efficiency of 75%, and then using the resulting hydrogen in a gas plant with an efficiency of 45%, for example, would mean losing two-thirds of the original electricity in the process. Using that same solar or wind energy directly could meet three times as much electricity need as the hydrogen-to-gas-plant approach. 

6. What are other costs from burning hydrogen in gas plants? 

While carbon reductions are the main driver of discussions of burning hydrogen in gas plants, and overall heat-trapping emissions should be a major consideration, the hydrogen use brings other potential concerns. Those include: 

• More NO_x – The higher fuel flow rate (faster use of fuel, given hydrogen’s lower energy content) and the higher temperatures produced by gas-hydrogen blends produce more nitrogen oxides (NO_x), which can cause and exacerbate asthma and other respiratory diseases. A plant cofiring with 30% hydrogen, for example, could generate around 17% more NO_x than the plant being fueled with only gas. Keeping the NO_x from adding to the pollution burden of the surrounding community would require changes in operation or pollution controls. 

• More water use – Hydrogen production consumes water. With a 30% blend using electrolytic hydrogen, the water consumed in producing that hydrogen could be almost 1.3 times as much as the power plant itself consumes in its operations. Hydrogen production via SMR is even more water intensive, consuming potentially almost 1.7 times as much for that same case. 

• More costs – At low levels of hydrogen cofiring, the added NO_x would need to be addressed, potentially with investments in new controls. Higher blending levels would require upgrades to other pieces of the plant. Any level of hydrogen use would require investment in pipelines or storage for the fuel. And, given that hydrogen costs several times more than gas, hydrogen use would likely involve higher fuel costs for the foreseeable future. At current costs, a 30% blend could almost double a plant’s fuel costs.  

• More electricity use – This is one of the more surprising facts about the gas-hydrogen approach to power generation: it may actually consume more electricity than it offers. Producing the hydrogen for 80% cofiring via electrolysis would use up almost twice as much energy as the gas-hydrogen plant itself would generate with that hydrogen. Even making the hydrogen for 30% blending would require the equivalent of two-fifths of the resulting electricity from the plant. 

• Perpetuation of gas use – This one tops all the others. Investing in hydrogen burning for a gas plant presupposes that the full, ongoing use of that plant—perpetuating a range of negative aspects while introducing new ones, and potentially failing to address the carbon pollution—is the right way to go. None of those other issues would be in play if we chose a route that is less polluting, more efficient, and lower cost.  

That leads to one more really important topic: what better options do we have? One big answer, it turns out, lies in those same wind turbines and solar panels. 

7. Are there better options than hydrogen cofiring for cutting gas plant pollution?  

Renewable energy can directly displace gas generation. Using the renewable electricity to serve homes and businesses directly, rather than channeling it into producing hydrogen for burning in a gas plant, can lead to much greater reductions in the gas plant’s carbon pollution. And it can do it without all the problems that come with the hydrogen, with renewable energy’s own impacts paling in comparison with those of hydrogen burning.  

That should be the key takeaway from this type of Q&A. When you compare cutting gas plant pollution by cofiring with hydrogen, on the one hand, to cutting the plant pollution by simply obviating the need for that generation by offering a better option, on the other, the math is clear. And so is the solution: use gas plants less by using renewables more. 

1. Offshore wind provides abundant, zero-carbon electricity 

I think most folks understand that wind turbines generate electricity by harnessing the power of the wind (for a handy primer on the mechanics, see here.) Offshore wind turbines work the same way as other turbines, but have the advantage of having access to winds that are generally much stronger and more constant (because the sea, unlike land, has no mountains or other topographic variations that might impede wind flow.)  

The United States has abundant offshore wind resources, off the coasts and in the Great Lakes. This includes some of the most-attractive wind resources in the world off both the East and West Coasts. Tapping into that renewable energy is made easier along most of the East Coast and in the Gulf of Mexico by the fact that the water depth is relatively shallow for tens of miles from shore, meaning that the support structures for each turbine can be placed directly on the seabed. And for places where the water gets deep quickly as you move away from land, like off the West Coast and in the Gulf of Maine, floating offshore wind technology is maturing rapidly. 

This geography and these technologies mean that offshore wind can be a great resource for meeting electricity demand in our many coastal states, as well as other states and regions connected to them by electric transmission. 

Source: NREL

2. Offshore wind cuts power plant pollution 

Harnessing abundant offshore wind can bring real benefits for cutting pollution and improving public health. The use of fossil fuels in the power sector, via gas, coal, and oil plants, is a major source of pollutants that harm people and communities. Offshore wind provides a ready solution, with more electricity from offshore wind farms directly leading to less generation from fossil fuel plants.  

A recent analysis from research firm Synapse Energy Economics of New England states’ current offshore wind requirements (9,000 megawatts, which would generate enough electricity for more than 4 million households) found that by avoiding emissions of three key pollutants (nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxides, and particulate matter), the offshore wind would provide almost $400 million in public health benefits each year. 

Reducing carbon emissions is another significant benefit of avoiding the burning of fossil fuels with offshore wind. In fact, in some parts of the country, offshore wind may become the largest zero-carbon generation source for cutting power plant carbon emissions and achieving net-zero carbon emissions across the economy. Massachusetts, for example, “anticipates offshore wind will be the primary source of electricity for its decarbonized energy system.” The Synapse analysis projected that New England’s current commitments alone would cut the region’s power plant carbon emissions by more than 40%. 

3. Offshore wind means jobs, economic development 

Offshore wind generates even more than clean electrons and pollution reductions: it generates jobs. The economic potential of this technology—both the jobs and the economic development that comes with standing up a whole new industry in this country—is one of the aspects that has many policymakers and their constituents most excited.  

Those jobs come from progress in all the different ways that people help make a wind farm a reality. There’s the pre-construction project development work, including surveying to determine where the turbines might go and designing the project. Then there’s the work of manufacturing the various components, such as the cables, foundations, towers, nacelles (the core of each turbine that sits on top of the tower), blades, and all the materials that go into them. There’s the work at the ports to collect all the components and load them for the journey out to sea. There’s the work of putting it all together at each turbine and project site, putting each foundation in place, a tower on each, and a turbine on each tower, and connecting them together. And once it’s turned on, there’s the operations and maintenance work to keep the turbines spinning and the projects producing electrons. 

The Carpenters Union is one of the various parts of organized labor excited about offshore wind (Source: Carpenters Local 346) 

That manufacturing sector is particularly job-rich. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has estimated that the push to meet the Biden administration’s goal of 30,000 megawatts could mean that the US offshore wind workforce growing to 15,000-58,000 people. The range depends in large part on how much of the components are made in this country (which in turn depends in large part on the degree to which states and the federal government send clear signals about how much we value offshore wind). Labor unions and supporters have highlighted the importance of the manufacturing opportunities in particular for creating high-paying US jobs—and have urged states to dramatically increase their offshore wind targets to help realize this potential. 

Port revitalization is another important benefit of offshore wind. New Bedford, MA, was the first in the nation to equip itself as a staging area for towers, turbines, and more. Various other ports have followed suit as states have compete to put out attractive welcome mats for all the economic development that comes with being a center of offshore wind activity. 

The positive effects of offshore wind aren’t limited to coastal areas near a project’s site, or even to the states served by the electricity. Some offshore wind project components are already being manufactured in various parts of the country. And the first American-made offshore wind installation vessel, built in Texas with steel from Alabama, North Carolina, and West Virginia, was launched a few months ago; it’ll be put into service this year off Virginia. Dozens more ships are being built or retrofitted to be part of the offshore wind revolution. 

4. Offshore wind makes electricity more reliable, particularly in winter 

While offshore wind power can’t be turned on with the flip of a switch, it does provide a relatively steady supply of electricity. Offshore wind projects can have high capacity factors—a measure of the portion of the year a project generates. With current technologies, those capacity factors can be close to 50% where the winds are strongest.  

More importantly, for coastal regions with cold winters, is when that offshore wind electricity is most abundant. Wind is often strongest when cold weather systems move in, increasing the demand for energy to keep us warm and the lights on. In fuel-limited regions like New England, power plants can run out of gas or oil, as my colleague Susan Muller detailed here, with a case from New England in 2018.  

As it happens, that same wind is really good at spinning offshore wind turbines. More electricity from them means less call for electricity from conventional power plants—which, in turn, reduces the risk that those power plants will run out of fuel supply. As Muller showed with her analysis of what abundant offshore wind capacity would have meant in New England during that winter and over two decades of winters, “The timing of that energy delivery, when the grid is strained by high demand and fuel supply challenges, makes it especially valuable as a way to maintain winter reliability.” More offshore wind means greater reliability. 

5. Offshore wind stabilizes energy prices 

Offshore wind can also have important, beneficial implications for energy costs. All of the projects already in operation or under construction are tied to specific contracts with utilities for the electricity they’ll produce over many years. While the contract prices were considerably higher under more recent contracting, given increases in the costs associated with financing, constructing, and maintaining the later projects, they still provide considerable value—or even overall savings. That’s largely because fossil gas generally drives overall electricity prices, fossil gas prices fluctuate wildly in response to weather or geopolitical circumstances, and offshore wind displaces fossil gas use.  

The recent Synapse assessment of near-term offshore wind targets for New England, using an average of the lower and higher contract costs to date, projected cost savings for electricity customers in the region. With 9,000 megawatts of offshore wind, they found net electricity cost savings could average $630 million a year under a mid-case gas price scenario—or more than $1 billion in a high-gas scenario.  

The utility behind the largest US offshore wind project, currently under construction off Virginia, recently said that if the project had been in operation when Winter Storm Elliot hit in 2022, it would have saved customers $10 million in a single day. Over the first 10 years of the project’s operation, they expect to save $3 billion from avoided fuel expenses. 

As Susan Muller has explained, having offshore wind for winter reliability can also avoid costly and polluting options for reliability, like the ones that New England’s regional grid operator had turned to: “…the resource is big enough that it can provide winter reliability benefits on a scale that could allow us to stop subsidizing oil and gas just to keep the lights on in winter.” 

How to realize the benefits of offshore wind 

So many benefits. But offshore wind doesn’t just happen. Here are a few ways you can help: 

• Push for strong offshore wind targets. Given the incoming US president’s lack of appreciation for the incredible opportunities offshore wind power represents, states will need to be even bigger drivers of progress on offshore wind. State requirements have been major drivers of action in this space, and stronger state requirements will help make up for any slowdown in federal progress in the next few years. 

• Be a force for offshore wind done right. Just as important as strong targets is strong ambition in how the offshore wind development happens. States have included some good environmental, equity, and labor standards in more recent offshore wind legislation, and more action on those fronts will be important for maximizing benefits for all. 

• Support good decision making. While federal and state action is key, so are good decisions around offshore wind projects at more local levels. City and town governments, for example, have public comment opportunities when considering approving an offshore wind project’s cable, necessary for getting the electricity to where we need it. Whether you have a background in a particular aspect of the matter at hand, or knowledge of the area, your perspective is important. 

• Help combat misinformation. Offshore wind has operated well for decades elsewhere in the world, and projects here go through years of rigorous study to make sure the net benefits are as strong as possible. But you wouldn’t know that based on disinformation pushed by the fossil fuel industry about the technology and projects’ supposed effects on endangered wildlife. Researchers at the Brown University Climate and Development Lab traced the network of dark money behind the recent burst of local offshore wind opposition groups and how dishonest claims have made their way into Congress. While some people who repeat these false claims don’t realize they’ve been duped, ultimately spreading bad information works to the benefit of fossil fuel companies at the expense of our public health and economy. A good way to combat misinformation is ask where the information is coming from, and who is backing those sources. And a good strategy is not to repeat or pass on those dubious or false claims, via social media, for example. 

And in these challenging times, one more thing you can do to is to celebrate and help highlight the real progress we are making. Last year saw the first commercial-scale US offshore wind project come online. While that project brought the US total to only 174 megawatts, another 6,000 megawatts are under construction. Several other projects are through the federal permitting process. Thousands of people are working in offshore wind in this country. And millions of people, including in coastal areas, recognize the value a whole lot more offshore wind will bring. 

New heights for US clean energy

The United States entered 2024 with a lot of momentum, and that momentum carried us to greater heights by many metrics.

Solar

• US solar looks set to come very close to almost match, or even surpass, the record it set in 2023 for new installations. That surge was led by large-scale solar, which data/analytics firm Wood Mackenzie projects will have grown even more in 2024 than in 2023, which itself was already a huge increase over the prior year’s total. 2024’s growth was led by Texas, Florida, and California.
• Installations of commercial solar—systems on businesses, schools, and government buildings, for example—were potentially 13% higher in 2024, per Wood Mackenzie. While the amount of new solar capacity going on residential rooftops was down (substantially: potentially 26% below 2023’s total), new community solar, which is a way of reaching residential and other customers with solar produced nearby but offsite, may have been 10% higher than in 2023.
• All of the recent solar additions translate into strong increases in solar generation. The latest data from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) suggests that solar large and small may have generated 27% more in 2024 than in 2023, and that solar might have accounted for 7% of US electricity—more than double its contribution in 2020.

Wind

• While the amount of new wind turbine capacity installed looked to be the lowest in at least six years, wind power continued to set records for generation in different regions of the country. According to the latest EIA data, wind power, the leading source of US renewable electricity, may have supplied 7% more generation in 2024 than in 2023, and accounted for almost 11% of the country’s total electricity.
• Offshore wind also made important progress, even with some strong headwinds. 2024 saw the first commercial-scale project come online, serving New York from the waters east of Long Island/south of New England. Even its modest (by current offshore wind standards) 132 megawatts of capacity quadrupled US offshore wind total.
• Two other projects under construction nearby will add a combined capacity of 1500 megawatts, and generate enough electricity for the equivalent of 800,000 households. And further south, construction was well underway on one of the country’s largest proposed offshore wind projects, off Virginia.
• Progress on the next rounds of offshore wind projects in 2024 included five more offshore wind projects receiving final federal approvals, others advancing through the federal permitting process, another offshore wind lease sale happening off the Central Atlantic coast, and the first-ever lease sale happening for the deep waters of the Gulf of Maine.

Renewable energy

• The amount of electricity supplied by US renewable energy overall (counting solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, and wood biomass) is expected to be 10% higher in 2024 than in 2023. It added up to 24% of total electricity generation in 2024, compared with 23% in 2023.
• Also in 2024, for the first time ever, solar and wind combined to generate more than coal, which was the largest source of US generation as recently as 2015.

Energy storage

• Batteries in the power sector are another shining star in the 2024 energy firmament, and have had another year of stunning growth. This EIA graph (below) shows that trajectory nicely—and, given that it’s from a few months ago, is already appreciably out of date. The 23.6 gigawatts of battery capacity as of October 2024, according to preliminary EIA data, was 23 times more than the US had installed by the beginning of 2020.
• Storage represented 20% of the new US electrical capacity installed in the first three quarters of 2024, up from 14% in 2023 (and 1% in 2019).

Foundation boosts

2024 is also notable for progress in areas that lay the groundwork for a lot more clean energy in the years to come.

Policy drivers

State leadership has been important in driving the development and adoption of clean energy for decades, and remains key to accelerating the move toward clean energy and away from fossil fuels.

• In this vein, 2024 included advances like Massachusetts’s new clean energy law, which will streamline equitable siting for clean energy projects. And like California’s strengthening of its target for reducing carbon emissions and its new program to procure substantial amounts of offshore wind, plus new geothermal energy and long-duration energy storage, to help meet that target.
• 2024 also saw many fruits of federal policy, notably the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, including tax credits for households, businesses, and renewable energy project owners.

Transmission and grid operation

Strengthening transmission networks within and between regions of the country is key to unlocking greater amounts of renewable energy and creating a stronger, more resilient electricity grid across the country.

• 2024’s progress in this area included federal approval of an agreement between two regional electricity grid operators—the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) and the Southwest Power Pool—to add substantial additional transmission connecting them. And it included MISO’s approval of “massive investments” in transmission within its territory.
• The year also saw progress in developing an independent governance structure for energy markets in the West, which could help reduce costs, improve reliability, and speed up the transition to clean energy.

Manufacturing

Building up US capacity to make more of the tools of the clean energy revolution, including solar panels and batteries, is another key part of the transition, in part because of the jobs that come with new manufacturing.

• Substantial new manufacturing capacity in 2024 means that US factories can now crank out more than five times as much solar module capacity as before the passage of the IRA in 2022. It also means, per the Solar Energy Industries Association, that “at full capacity, U.S. solar module factories can produce enough to meet nearly all demand for solar in the United States.”
• And for the first time since 2019, the United states is now manufacturing the solar cells that are the building blocks of solar panels. Overall, solar was one of the top targets for investment in 2024 in clean technology manufacturing and deployment.
• Manufacturing capacity for key wind project components was also on the rise, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory reported.

Global parallels

The wider world offers similar signs of progress in 2024:

• Each of 2023’s top markets for solar installed at least as much solar in 2024, projected think tank Ember. Ember also projected that overall installations of solar globally during the year would be 29% higher than in 2023, which itself had a total that was way ahead of the prior year’s.
• Renewable energy generated more than half of the UK’s electricity in the third quarter of 2024, the fourth quarter in a row that it did so. And for one stunning December day, wind power alone generated more than 68% of the country’s electricity—and broke its record for total wind output just days after setting the previous record.
• Spain is expected to set its own record in 2024, with renewable energy expected to account for 56% of the country’s electricity during the year.
• The International Energy Agency (IEA) reported that global investment in renewables, electricity grids, energy storage, and energy efficiency and electrification in 2024 will have far exceeded investment in fossil fuels.
• The IEA also reported that global investment in solar power for 2024 was greater than the investment in all other electricity generation technologies combined.

Looking ahead

The future is hard to predict, but I can say with certainty that 2025 will be different from 2024 in some ways, and similar in others. What won’t be different will be the readiness of clean energy technologies, policies, and people to continue making a difference in how we make and use electricity. And the need to keep this momentum going, in every corner of the country and beyond.

So the conversation around how to rapidly drive down gas plant pollution has been (rightly) heating up.  

While maximizing energy efficiency is crucial, there will still be enormous amounts of electricity needed. Renewable energy like wind and solar is a clear solution: generate more electricity from renewables, and you can use less gas, and minimize the range of harms that come with that gas. 

But instead of taking the renewables-based approach, some in the fossil fuel industry and utilities with a vested interest have insisted that they can continue forward with the full, ongoing use of gas—or even an expanded role for gas—while nodding to one of three possible future approaches: cofiring with hydrogen, adding carbon capture and storage (CCS) to the plant, or blending biomethane.  

If it sounds too good to be true—that the best possible approach to addressing gas plant pollution relies on the full, ongoing use of gas plants—that’s because it is. 

Bringing fuller context to the conversation is the rationale behind a new analysis from the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). Our new release, consisting of a one-two punch of an issue brief and a publicly accessible tool, is aimed at helping you understand and explore for yourself the varying implications of each approach—including the complicating factors for hydrogen, CCS, and biomethane that point strongly to renewables as the best option. 

Behind first impressions 

Some of the non-renewables approaches may seem attractive at first glance. Take cofiring with hydrogen, for example. A molecule consisting solely of a pair of hydrogen atoms, with no carbon in sight, that can be used as fuel in place of gas in a power plant? Sounds like a no-brainer of a deal, right?  

That’s what project proponents would have you believe. 

But it turns out there’s a lot more to the story of adding hydrogen to gas plants, and when you pull the lens back, you see a much more complicated reality. There’s the fact that hydrogen packs a lot less energy than the gas it’s supposed to replace, for example. The fact that hydrogen has to come from somewhere. The fact that the fuel has the potential to bring along lots of other baggage, as described below. 

That more-to-the-story reality also applies to CCS and biomethane, which are also garnering industry attention for their potential carbon-cutting abilities, including in gas plants. Assessing those approaches similarly requires attention to the bigger picture. 

That’s what UCS set out to document and what we share in our new analysis: the details behind the headlines and press releases, and the critical need for those details to inform deliberations about which approach to take—and how each of those details strengthens the case for a renewables-centered solution. 

Beyond the headlines 

Our new issue brief, Beyond the Smokestack: Assessing the Impacts of Approaches to Cutting Gas Plant Pollution, examines hydrogen co-firing, CCS, and biomethane use, applying three different scopes for assessing each, and for weighing them against renewables.  

One scope is the narrow carbon picture, the one that you’ll hear about most readily: what these approaches mean in terms of how much carbon dioxide (CO₂) comes out of a gas plant’s smokestack, or how much less a plant can be said to be emitting. This is the one that might show up in an announcement or a press story about a proposed project for a new gas plant or a retrofit of an old one, where they’ll talk about a specific percent reduction in CO₂ that their proposed changes will bring about. 

Even in this narrowest view, they might not actually do some of the basic math for you. Announcements around using hydrogen, for example, sometimes talk just about the cofiring portion (the percentage of the fuel that would come from hydrogen). Because hydrogen provides less energy, though, the reductions in carbon pollution from the plant’s smokestack can be a lot less than that blending percentage. Mixing in 30 percent hydrogen by volume, for instance, would work out to only an 11 percent drop in smokestack CO₂ emissions. In the case of CCS, an often-obscured issue is the energy it takes to drive that carbon capture and prepare the carbon for storage, which can make a gas plant produce less electricity, or run longer to produce the same amount. Good decision making starts with having good information about details like those. 

Then there are the broader climate implications of these approaches. The second perspective we offer in our new analysis comes from pulling back the lens to take into account not just carbon at the smokestack, but also the carbon from other steps in the process, as well as other gases that also trap heat when thrown up into the atmosphere. Notably for a discussion of gas plants, that includes methane, which traps many times more heat than CO₂. 

The fuller-climate-pollution view reveals the CO₂, methane, and other heat-trapping gases associated with the plants, their fuels, and these proposed approaches. The impacts in this category could be from leakage of the fuel—the hydrogen, the biomethane, or the ongoing use of methane gas. The added pollution could also come from producing the fuel, which can vary widely depending on the process used. Hydrogen with a high carbon intensity, for example, can be even more carbon-intensive than methane gas. That means hydrogen use in a gas plant could reduce CO₂ at the smokestack but ultimately be responsible for an overall increase in heat-trapping emissions.  

An important third perspective for assessing project proposals captures impacts beyond the climate pollution, at a plant and from the broader system that each approach involves—other dimensions that decision makers need to be using to weigh the merits of a given proposal.   

One such critical dimension includes other pollution that can harm people’s health. Burning hydrogen increases the production of nitrogen oxides, for example, which if not addressed can increase harms for people living near a plant. An approach that potentially leads to more gas use (as with CCS) can mean more impact to not just people living near a gas plant, but also people living near gas wells serving that increased demand. And biomethane use, in risking driving production of more biomethane, can mean more air and water pollution hitting people living near the sources of that fuel. of that fuel. 

The broader suite of issues also includes things like safety, water implications, land use, and impacts on customers’ electricity bills. And the risk of perpetuating inequities, given that people of color and people with low incomes are disproportionately likely to live near gas plants, spend more on energy as function of their incomes, and be left out of decision-making processes.  

Similar consideration of renewable energy like solar and wind shows, by contrast, how it can offer electricity without CO₂ emissions, without methane emissions, with much less land use than those of many gas plant-oriented scenarios, and with minimal life cycle carbon, air, and water impacts.  

Into the numbers 

Beyond the Smokestack steps through a range of issues revealed by each of those perspectives for each approach, provides resources for more information about those issues, and offers specific examples. The accompanying Gas Plant Alternatives Tool lets you test different scenarios of your own to better understand possible implications.  

Concerned about these issues in general, or confronting a particular gas plant proposal you want to better understand? Want to see for yourself how different carbon intensities for the hydrogen or assumptions about the biomethane change the overall climate math? Want to have a sense for the implications and magnitude of other issues that are—or that should be—part of the conversation? And, given that renewable energy should be the first choice for generating electricity for cutting gas plant use: want to see how much solar or wind it might take to make the green hydrogen—and how much further the renewable electricity could go if the electricity got used directly instead? 

The tool can shed light on all those issues. With just a few pieces of basic information about a particular scenario, the tool can offer a better understanding of the potential—and the pitfalls—of different approaches to cutting gas plant CO₂ pollution. 

Toward good decisions 

The tool and the issue brief are aimed at making clear how critical it is to evaluate different approaches fully to see how they stack up, especially when it comes to potentially investing in long-lived gas-oriented solutions rather than  directly displacing gas use by ramping up renewables instead. The multiple perspectives in the fuller picture have to be on the minds of electricity sector decision makers, from the prospective project proponents to the public utility commissioners and environmental regulators in charge of assessing a project on behalf of the public. 

We can help those decision makers make good decisions about gas plants and carbon cutting by sharing our understanding about what needs to be in the picture. That’s particularly important in these cases because some others engaging in the process are motivated to keep those details out. We know that the fact that some of the approaches to cutting CO₂ could keep gas in a central role for a long time makes them favorites of the fossil fuel industry and electric utility allies—and that whenever the fossil fuel industry is involved, you can bet that obfuscation and disinformation are close at hand. 

And we don’t need to have all the answers to make a difference. We can still push to get the right questions asked—and answered—to make sure that decision making is centered on, and engaging with, the people who will be most affected by the decisions, and that good decisions get made. That includes making sure that renewable energy—which is the overwhelmingly better choice when it comes to rapidly driving down gas plant pollution harms—is on the table when proposals are being considered and decisions are being made. 

“The extensive range of complicating effects of using hydrogen, CCS, or biomethane to reduce gas plant carbon pollution points strongly to the value of using truly clean energy to the fullest to displace generation by gas plants,” our issue brief concludes. “For communities and the climate, the imperative is clear: use renewables more, use gas plants less.” 

A new graphic from the Union of Concerned Scientists charts the portion of electricity coming from solar and wind over time in the United States. Drawing on data from the US Energy Information Administration, it depicts solar and wind generation as a fraction of total US electricity generation, for each month over the course of more than two decades (see below).

Monthly US electricity from large-scale solar, small-scale solar, and wind divided by total monthly generation. Total generation in spring and fall is consistently lower because of lower electricity demand for heating and cooling in the shoulder seasons.

Here are some of the main takeaways I see in the hypnotically spiraling progress and the underlying data:

• In the early years, the fraction of electricity nationally from wind and solar was practically indistinguishable from zero. It didn’t pass the 1% mark on a monthly basis until 2007.
• Then came a crescendo: Solar and wind generated more than 5% of monthly electricity for the first time in 2013, passed the 10% point in 2017, and soared past 15% in 2021.
• Every month in the past two calendar years—and in 45 of the 48 months of 2020 through 2023—solar and wind supplied at least 10% of US electricity.
• Solar and wind hit their current peak on the graph in April 2023, at more than 21%. Given the recent pace of progress, though, it’s likely that they’ll break that record this spring.

Those percentages matter. Every additional 1% served by solar and wind generation means zero-carbon energy is meeting the electricity needs of the equivalent of 4 million additional US households. On an annual basis, that progress means those two technologies have gone from contributing 1 of every 23 kilowatt-hours’ worth of electricity in 2013 to 1 of every 6.4 kilowatt-hours in 2023.

What’s driving progress

If the graphic makes you think of tree rings, that’s actually a good analogy. Some years bring faster growth, some slower. And, of course, as with trees, weather matters. But in this graphic, it’s the overall trend toward increasing percentages from solar and wind that’s the most striking aspect, reflecting a number of factors.

Capacity. The biggest factor is simply the growth in the number of solar arrays and wind farms. Wind and solar have been major sources of new electric generation capacity in recent years. In 2023, for example, taken together, they accounted for two thirds of the total new megawatts installed. The United States now has more than 73,000 utility-scale wind turbines in service, 26% more than it did in 2018. Solar capacity has grown more than 160% in that time, and solar photovoltaic panels are now working away across the United States in large-scale systems, in community solar systems, and on more than four million rooftops.

Good policies at local, state, and federal levels, including renewable electricity standards and federal tax incentives, have accelerated that growth. Less-good policy decisions, as when supportive policies have expired or policy uncertainty has rattled markets, have at times slowed progress. In recent years the economics has been a key driver, as solar and wind have increasingly become the lowest-cost options for new electricity.

Generation. With all that new solar and wind capacity has come additional solar and wind generation and those numbers are equally impressive. Wind is now the leading source of renewable electricity, accounting for fully 10% of all US electricity generated in 2023. And offshore wind is increasingly looking to do its part.

Solar, meanwhile, supplied nearly 6% of the country’s electricity in 2023. That’s almost twice what it contributed five years earlier (and its annual increase in 2023 more than made up for some wind lulls last year).

Instead of despair, determination

We modeled this chart after a similar (but very different) one from the realm of climate science that presents global temperature increases over the months and years. That temperature chart conveys a decidedly less uplifting message, depicting the dangerous trend toward higher and higher temperatures.

Perhaps this new chart can serve as a partial counterbalance. Not to take the pressure off ourselves; there’s plenty to be worried about when it comes to global warming, and much we still need to do. But there’s also a lot we can do, and this graphic should help to help make clear that, while climate change is serious, we are mounting serious responses too.

So, this spring, enjoy sunshine and the wind as heralds of the new season. But also appreciate their power to make a real difference at cleaning up our energy use and helping our economy and the planet—as well as recognizing that there’s a lot more to come. Let’s keep that spiral growing.

But the fact that 2024 is a leap year seems apt for a period in which the US clean energy market seems poised to leap to a whole new level, in exciting and even startling ways. Here are a few predictions about what to expect in the coming year.

Solar will have its biggest year ever

Solar and wind have been clean energy generation superstars for a while now, and 2024 should be no exception. While preliminary year-end data from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) show solar’s impressive 2023, EIA projects that 2024 will be even bigger for solar installations, with an anticipated 63 percent more than the 2023 tally. That growth would increase total US solar capacity (including rooftop solar) by more than 30 percent. And EIA projects the capacity of wind power, already the largest source of renewable electricity in the country, to grow 4.7 percent.

Solar and wind together will leap past coal

With all that new generating capacity, wind turbines and solar panels will be producing appreciably more electricity than in years past. Solar could generate 41 percent more in 2024 than in 2023, and wind 7 percent more, according to EIA. For wind, that would be two and a half times as much electricity as it produced in the United States in 2014, and would increase its generation to 11 percent of the US supply. For solar, the decade will have brought it from well below one percent of US electricity supply in 2014 to 7.5 percent in 2024 (again, with rooftop solar).

All that points to a watershed moment for solar+wind: EIA says, “We expect solar and wind generation together in 2024 to overtake electric power generation from coal for the first year ever.” In fact, solar and wind could overtake coal by a sizeable margin. Taking small solar into account, solar and wind together could generate almost 30 percent more electricity than coal this year.

Renewables will reach one-quarter of US electricity

The growth in wind and solar also suggests another watershed moment is in the offing for US renewable electricity. While hydroelectric generation depends at least as much as some other renewables on the vagaries of the weather (precipitation and snowpack, in hydro’s case), EIA projects production closer to the long-term hydro average, after a few down years. It also suggests that US geothermal plants may generate at close to their recent average.

Add hydro and geothermal generation to that from wind and solar and you can see another notable milestone in clean energy’s progress: those four renewable energy sources could account for fully one-quarter of US electricity this year, or even a little more. That would be double their contribution of a decade ago. And that progress could set up fossil-fuel generation (chiefly gas and coal) to drop below the 50 percent mark soon after.

US offshore wind will produce a record amount

This one doesn’t exactly involve going out on a limb, but 2024 should mark a notable leap for offshore wind in the United States. The two projects that were under construction at the end of 2023—off the coasts of Long Island and Massachusetts—should reach full power in 2024.

And when they do, they’ll represent a celebration-worthy increase in the number of US offshore wind turbines (from 7 to 81) and offshore wind megawatts (from 42 to 980, given more powerful turbines). Those leaps should get us enough electricity generation to meet the needs of the equivalent of more than a half million Northeast households. And they should pave the way for the many other US offshore wind projects under development.

Through 2024, and beyond

None of this progress is a done deal, and each of the renewable energy technologies faces a lot of headwinds, despite the sector’s many clear benefits. Higher interest rates, for example, hit capital-intensive renewables harder than some other options. Even if things do roll out as projected, EIA projects generation from gas plants—the largest single source of electricity on our grid—will increase in 2024, albeit at an appreciably lower rate than in recent years. Making real—and accelerated—progress is going to take continued action: ramping up the US clean energy workforce and the capacity to manufacture and install solar panels and wind turbines, pushing for ever-stronger state/regional/federal policies to remove barriers and drive efficiency, pushing back on disinformation about all these technologies, and making sure equity is central to the clean energy transition.

But those leaps are also just a taste of the surges and crossover points we can expect in 2024. There’s also plenty more to watch for. Montana, for example, is about to have more installed wind capacity than coal. Energy storage capacity (think batteries) may grow a stunning 80 percent nationally. And, since electrification is also key to our transition, keep an eye on heat pumps, which are now outselling gas furnaces in the United States and are set to keep driving oil and gas out of our homes and businesses.

Clean energy has a lot going for it and has long been well worth serious attention. This leap year should be no exception.

Sin embargo, las centrales eléctricas que usan como combustible el gas metano (tradicionalmente conocido como gas natural) siguen siendo hoy una gran parte del suministro de electricidad en Estados Unidos. Y eso puede crear problemas serios.

Un nuevo informe de la Unión de Científicos Conscientes (UCS, por sus siglas en inglés) detalla los problemas asociados a estas centrales eléctricas y las soluciones a las mismas.

Las centrales eléctricas de gas pueden fallar tanto por el frío como por el calor

Las centrales eléctricas de gas metano presentan problemas cuando enfrentan condiciones meteorológicas extremas, sea durante invierno o en verano.

En invierno, las centrales pueden padecer de impactos directos, principalmente debido a la congelación de componentes como las válvulas y las líneas para el suministro de agua. El frio en sí también puede afectar a otros componentes, como los alambres o los sellos hechos de caucho o silicona.

Las centrales eléctricas de gas también sufren en invierno por la falta del gas en sí:  

• A diferencia de otras centrales eléctricas, como los de carbón o nucleares, las de gas generalmente no almacenan su combustible en el sitio de la central, sino que cuentan con los gasoductos de gas para cuando lo necesitan. Durante periodos de frío extremo, el suministro de gas puede fallar debido a problemas con su producción o transporte.
• También pueden salir perdiendo las centrales cuando el suministro de gas se prioriza para la calefacción en hogares y negocios.
• Los sistemas de gas también necesitan electricidad tanto para la producción del gas como para su procesamiento para uso. Los apagones pueden provocar una reducción en el suministro del gas.

En verano, los problemas para las centrales de gas pueden venir del calor extremo o de la sequía:

• Temperaturas más altas reducen la capacidad de las centrales, incluso de las de gas.
• También hay mayor riesgo de fallas de las centrales durante periodos de mayor uso continuo, como cuando las olas de calor suben la demanda de electricidad.
• Muchas centrales de gas usan agua para enfriamiento como una parte clave de la generación de electricidad. La falta de suficiente agua o de agua suficientemente fría puede dejarlas sin la capacidad de producir la cantidad de electricidad esperada, o incluso apagadas hasta que haya suficiente agua de nuevo.

El fracaso de las centrales de gas puede contribuir a fallas a gran escala

La vulnerabilidad de las centrales eléctricas de gas a condiciones meteorólogas extremas, especialmente en casos de frío o congelación, puede inducir a fallas. Y la situación se pone mucho peor debido a las creencias equivocadas que tienen sobre la confiabilidad de las centrales de gas las compañías de electricidad, los operadores de las redes eléctricas regionales y los reguladores de servicios públicos responsables del buen funcionamiento del sistema eléctrico.

Durante las cinco tormentas invernales más extremas desde el 2011, hubo amplias fallas en las centrales eléctricas de gas, muchas veces acompañadas por apagones de gran escala. Durante la Tormenta Invernal Uri en la parte central de Estados Unidos en 2021, falló la cuarta parte de la capacidad eléctrica en esa área. Las centrales de gas representaron la mayor parte, y una parte desproporcional, de fallas en capacidad de generación. Solo en Texas, más de 4,5 millones de clientes quedaron sin servicio eléctrico y murieron 246 personas.

Falló una capacidad eléctrica aun mayor durante la Tormenta Invernal Elliott en 2022, y las centrales de gas representaron desproporcionadamente esa fallida capacidad. En el área servida por la red eléctrica regional del medio-atlántico, las centrales de gas representaron más del 70 por ciento de la capacidad que falló.

Podemos hacerlo mejor

La respuesta a los desafíos de las centrales eléctricas de gas no es agregar más centrales de gas. Hay como hacerlas más fuertes contra el frío mediante “climatización”. Pero hacer eso no resuelve muchos de los problemas fundamentales, como la dependencia excesiva en un solo combustible, los conflictos del gas durante tormentas invernales y la dependencia en el agua que hace que la generación sea vulnerable tanto a la congelación como a la sequía.

Tampoco enfrenta a los riesgos de la contaminación que viene de la extracción y la quema de gas, ni los contaminantes aéreos que perjudican a la salud pública en las comunidades cercanas a las centrales, ni el dióxido de carbono que es uno de los contribuyentes principales al cambio climático. Y es ese mismo cambio climático que está empujando el aumento en la frecuencia y fuerza de las condiciones meteorológicas extremas que amenazan a las centrales de gas (y muchas más).

Una de las soluciones que sí tiene sentido es prestar mejor atención al cálculo de la confiabilidad de las centrales eléctricas de gas. Ese cálculo debe tomar en cuenta los varios problemas que pueden tener esas centrales cuando la generación más se necesita, durante condiciones extremas. Y debe incluir el hecho que las centrales pueden salir perdiendo cuando el suministro de gas se prioriza para otros usos.

La mejor solución para los problemas de las centrales de gas, ante todo, es la priorización de fuentes limpias de electricidad, y una transición más rápida hacia la energía limpia. Eso involucra un portafolio de recursos de energía renovable, combinado con el almacenamiento de energía (en baterías, por ejemplo), la eficiencia energética, la promoción del uso flexible de electricidad para que corresponda más a tiempos de mayor generación y la modernización de la red eléctrica para aumentar el aprovechamiento de energía renovable en otras regiones.

Un futuro más fiable, sin los problemas de gas

El nuevo informe y un resumen, ambos disponible aquí (en inglés), tienen más detalles sobre los modos de fallo de las centrales eléctricas de gas, los incidentes de los últimos años y las soluciones que sirven tanto ahora como a largo plazo.

Como dice el resumen: “Es cada vez más claro que los consumidores no pueden confiar en el gas cuando más lo necesitan, y la transición a la energía limpia brinda la oportunidad de construir una red eléctrica más fiable y a la vez hacerle frente al cambio climático”.

The good news-bad news balance, though, would seem to tip decidedly in favor of a whole lot more offshore wind. Why? There are five good reasons: power, place, people, policy, and price.

Power

Offshore wind is powerful, including when we need it most. The winds off our coasts are some of the strongest in the world. That’s particularly true off the Northeast, West Coast, and Hawaii, but includes parts of the Gulf Coast and the Great Lakes, too.

Equally important is when that wind is likely to blow. In the Northeast, for example, offshore wind is strongest in winter. That timing makes it a hugely important potential resource when winter hits hard and fossil fuels fail. And it will make it even more important when winter electricity demand increases because more households are using electric heat pumps. It also makes offshore wind an important seasonal complement to the region’s abundant and growing solar power capacity.

Place

Offshore wind has the distinct advantage, for many of us as consumers, of being close to where a lot of electricity demand is. The topography of the US Outer Continental Shelf means shallow waters for tens of miles off much of the East and Gulf coasts, which makes for easier wind turbine installation. And more than 60 percent of US residents live in coastal states, with another 20 percent in states bordering one of the Great Lakes. Plus, offshore wind power can stretch far beyond the coasts, given regional electric grids and electricity flows between regions.

Contrast the “location, location, location” attractiveness of offshore wind with the fact that many of the potential offshore wind hotspot regions are at the other end of the pipeline (literal or figurative) when it comes to fuels—as with New England and supplies of gas (or coal, or oil).

While new transmission lines are never easy, getting the power back to shore can involve a straighter shot with a connection cable than is often the case on land, even when projects are sited far enough offshore to be mostly or fully invisible from land. The ocean bed has a diverse landscape with plenty of challenges, but dealing with a single entity—the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM)—for federally controlled waters does have advantages over the potential patchwork of landowners for land-based transmission. (Project developers do, however, need to also work out the pieces in state waters and on land.)

People

A strong consideration for many in advocating for offshore wind is its potential to address the harmful effects of fossil fuels in the power sector, which disproportionately impact Black and Brown communities. Offshore wind generation directly displaces coal, gas, and oil power and the various pollutants from those power plant smokestacks, and reduces impacts upstream (from fuel extraction, for example) and down (including water pollution).

Offshore wind development also is driving economic development and revitalization, as well as providing strong potential for lots of quality jobs. Unions and their allies, including the Union of Concerned Scientists, have called for strong labor standards in state offshore wind requirements, as in the important offshore wind law Maine passed earlier this year. Our coalitions also have pushed for workforce diversification.

Policy

Another important driver of offshore wind has been targeted commitments from coastal states around the country, often in the form of requiring local utilities to contract with offshore wind developers. These mandated requirements alone total more than 40,000 megawatts (MW)—enough to supply the equivalent of more than 15 million typical US households. And the requirements plus broader state offshore wind goals have been strong signals to utilities and the industry that states are serious about having offshore wind as a big part of their electricity mixes for decades to come.

Many of those same states also have strong climate and clean energy goals, and commitments to increase renewable energy and cut carbon emissions—in many cases aimed at zeroing out emissions from their electricity use or even across their economies. Offshore wind offers one of the best opportunities for large-scale, zero-carbon electricity production in some regions, and is an important tool for diversifying the sources of clean electricity.

Price

While this one may be a little harder to envision given trends of late, there are strong reasons why price also is part of what’s likely to continue to drive offshore wind. The prices associated with projects New York approved in October will have twice as much impact on household electricity bills as ones approved two years earlier, before the pandemic recovery and related economic effects kicked in, the state estimates. And we’ll certainly see prices on the higher end for contracts awarded next year around the country. But offshore wind’s many benefits were attractive even before prices started coming in much lower and dropping much more quickly than expected. Some of the same factors that made those prices possible, including the scale of projects and the scale of the industry, should ultimately help push prices back down.

Offshore wind also offers much needed price stability. Contracts between projects and utilities or states offer 15 to 20 years of price certainty, something that would have been welcome indeed when methane gas prices shot upward in the wake of global turmoil and drove up electricity prices with them. Even with states now allowing bids to include adjustments for inflation before construction, the turbines—once up and spinning—will offer valuable predictability.

Where Things Stand

So, there are lots of reasons why offshore wind is attractive and has generated a lot of attention and support—and why it is making real progress. Here’s a taste of what all that attractiveness, attention, and support is delivering:

• Projects are getting through the permitting process. The federal government issued final approval to a fifth offshore wind project in October and a sixth in November. BOEM also has just issued a final environmental impact statement for another project, the final stage before it issues a permit.
• States are looking for more offshore wind right now. New York’s October selections of new renewable energy projects it was contracting with included three offshore wind projects totaling 4,000 MW, and the state is currently seeking 4,300 MW more in bids, due in January 2024. Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island have issued a joint request for proposals totaling 6,000 MW, also due in January. And New Jersey will be issuing its own request next month for as much as 4,000 MW—another sizable step toward meeting its nation-leading target of 11,000 MW.
• It’s happening! Most important for the seeing-is-believing crowd, construction is underway for the first turbines in two projects, and a third has begun construction on the onshore transmission it will need. The first two projects will add almost 1,000 MW of offshore wind—enough to meet the equivalent of a half a million households’ electricity needs. Earlier this month one of those projects, off Long Island, delivered its first power into New York’s electric grid. The first turbines from the other advanced project, off Massachusetts, should begin feeding power into New England’s grid in the next couple of weeks.

US offshore wind has faced its fair share of obstacles, and the economic effects of the pandemic recovery and a war in Eastern Europe haven’t helped. But some of the challenges, at least (supply chain issues, for example), are thankfully temporary.

Most important, so much is riding on figuring out how to keep making offshore wind happen, and happen well, that the smart bets will be on offshore wind emerging in a big way, and soon.

But solar’s growth, especially in large arrays, has made it much more visible in communities and landscapes across the country, sparking a lot of conversations about land use, technology options, community engagement, and how best to site the many more megawatts of solar we need.

That’s why it’s great to have a new “collaboration agreement” on large-scale solar, the result of a multi-year effort with scores of experts, nonprofit groups, and solar developers to address issues of siting and technological considerations in the hopes of developing a set of best practices. The agreement, which the Union of Concerned Scientists is a party to, is part of an “Uncommon Dialogue” sponsored by Stanford University that aims to both accelerate large-scale solar in the United States while “simultaneously addressing conservation and community opportunities and challenges.”

Climate, conservation, community

Working on this project has powerfully reminded me how much has changed since I started in the solar energy field more than three decades ago. Back then, my focus was on small (really small) systems, measured in tens of watts. At that time, even the largest solar arrays in the world measured only in the hundreds of kilowatts, enough to generate the equivalent of the electricity needs of just a few tens of thousands of US households. I can distinctly remember how wacky it seemed when I first heard someone propose a one-megawatt (1000-kilowatt) solar array.

We’ve come a very long way since then: solar costs have come down, solar panels have gotten more efficient, solar arrays and solar farms have gotten much bigger, and solar has grown to be a noticeable piece of US electricity supply. Instead of the 50 watts that was standard in my early days, solar panels now commonly exceed 300 watts each. Single projects can be hundreds of megawatts. Last year, solar accounted for almost 5 percent of US electricity. The industry is projecting the US sector to grow by 32,000 megawatts this year—50 percent more than in 2022, and enough to increase solar’s portion of the US electricity supply to well more than 6 percent.

Rooftop solar is an important piece of the sector’s success. Solar systems now grace the roofs of more than four million US households, institutions, and businesses. Onsite solar allows people to generate electricity right where it’s needed, and, when combined with batteries, it offers reliable backup power.

But solar also has the advantage of being deployable at a range of scales, and that range is another key to solar’s success. And, it turns out, most of solar’s megawatts—both current and projected—are in large-scale systems: in fields, on landfills, or in deserts. Larger systems offer greater economies of scale, and with the ability to optimize performance in terms of orientation and tilt, for example, they can offer increased energy production. Those factors combine to make large solar a very attractive prospect, one that potentially offers the lowest costs for customers.

The challenge lies in finding sites that work. A site of course needs to offer good sun and the right terrain and access to transmission lines to get the electricity to market at a reasonable cost. But successful siting also needs to take into account other aspects of the environment, such as: whether the land is currently used for crops or grazing, covered with trees, or part of a fragile desert ecosystem. And good siting must also consider the needs and wishes of people nearby—tribal communities, farmers, or other residents, for example.

Hence this uncommon dialogue effort, led by Stanford, the Nature Conservancy, and the Solar Energy Industries Association, to bring together a wide range of stakeholders. Those stakeholders have included solar developers and investors, land conservation and environmental non-profit organizations, tribal nation representatives, agricultural interests, environmental justice and community groups, and government agencies.

Finding common ground through uncommon dialogue

The effort spotlighted some important realities of where we stand today in solar’s development. For example, the United States added more than 20,000 megawatts of solar energy to the grid in 2022—making up more than half of all new electricity capacity that year. By 2033, forecasts cited by the group suggest solar energy will grow to at least 700,000 megawatts of capacity “assuming no new major policy hurdles or commercial challenges”—more than a fivefold increase over today’s US solar deployment.

As for the land implications, the agreement cites the US Department of Energy’s Solar Futures Study, which suggested that a buildout of solar commensurate with the need and the opportunity could involve siting on some 10 million acres, meaning 0.5% to 0.6% of the land area of the contiguous United States. That’s a good deal of land, but it’s notably much less land than is used for, say, livestock grazing or feed production, oil and gas leasing on federal lands, or even for growing corn to make ethanol.

Given the land implications, this new agreement offers suggestions about the best areas for exploration and investment of time and resources to help maximize benefits and minimize conflicts. In particular, the participants identified six areas where working groups might constructively go much deeper in addressing issues and opportunities: community and stakeholder engagement, siting-related risk assessment and decisionmaking, energy and agricultural technologies, information tools, tribal relations, and policy solutions. The idea is to “create best practices that solar companies, local governments, and other stakeholders can use to effectively site solar projects.”

Along with helping to shape the agreement, I was involved in the technologies subgroup, which looked at how technological advances could be brought to bear—specifically, how research, development, demonstration, and deployment of energy and agricultural technologies and practices could help “to advance large-scale solar development while also protecting important working and natural lands.” That group considered, for example, different approaches to integrating solar into a landscape, through “dual-use” solar and agricultural approaches (“agrivoltaics”) or siting on former mining sites (“brightfields”). And it proposed having a greater focus on identifying ways to build and operate solar arrays that offer conservation/ecological and agricultural benefits such as healthier soil.

The agreement, after more than a year and a half of dialogue, offers a launching point for that working group as well as the others to continue their work, and a call for additional parties who might be interested in engaging in one or more of those groups.

Finding the best way forward

Solar is different from the technologies that have dominated our power systems for many decades. Other energy development, in this country and elsewhere, has most often gotten it wrong with respect to local communities and the environment, not to mention climate change. For example, think of the siting of fossil fuel plant smokestacks and their pollution that disproportionately affects Black and Brown neighborhoods, or the many landscapes (and communities) ruined by fuel extraction. With solar, there are no smokestacks, no fuel extraction. Large-scale solar has a chance to be a shining star when it comes to fitting into the landscape too, to avoid perpetuating the injustices of the power sector with strong stakeholder engagement and good siting.

Solar’s growth from my early days in the sector—and particularly in recent years—has led to less power plant pollution. It has also helped to diversify our electricity sources, created more reliable electricity grids, while stabilizing and increasingly lowering electricity costs. Figuring out how to get more solar power in the best way possible—with due consideration of climate, conservation, and community—is very much in our collective best interest. This agreement marks an important step in the right direction.

Related UCS materials:

• Can California Cropland Be Repurposed for Community Solar?
• Where is California Going to Site Its New Solar Power?
• How Much Land Would it Require to Get Most of Our Electricity from Wind and Solar?
• Solar Panels Should Be Reused and Recycled. Here’s How.
• Progress Continues for US Residential Solar: Reviewing the Latest Numbers
• Solar Energy’s Latest Record Breaker: 5 Takeaways
• Climate Justice and the Debate about Community Solar on Farmland

The direct health impact of heat stress is bad enough, and dangerous. But extreme heat also hits our electricity system in ways that make it more expensive, more polluting, and less reliable. Here’s how.

Extreme heat means more expensive electricity

Extreme heat can sharply increase electricity consumption as people turn up their air conditioners for relief. For example, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the electricity grid serving much of the Lone Star State, has already set new records for power demand 11 times this sweltering summer.

As demand rises, grid operators turn for extra capacity to power plants that they don’t use frequently. They use—or “dispatch”—plants based on their operating costs, starting with the cheapest sources first, as this UCS video explains:

This approach means demand is met first by resources that don’t require fuel—particularly solar and wind—or have low fuel costs—nuclear. Combined-cycle gas plants typically come next. If even more capacity is needed, at the higher or later end of the curve are such supply options as coal plants, simple-cycle gas “peaker” plants, or even oil-fired ones (even though that fuel fell out of favor in the power sector decades ago). Using more of these more expensive sources means higher wholesale electricity costs, which translates to higher retail rates for customers.

Extreme heat means dirtier electricity

Going further up the dispatch curve drives up not only costs, but also pollution. One factor is the dirtiness of fossil fuels. Coal, oil, and gas are major sources of a variety of pollutants that threaten public health and the environment.  

Resources at the higher end of the cost-dispatch curve also tend to be less efficient. Even plants with the same fuel might use it differently. A combined-cycle gas plant might have an efficiency of 60 percent, while a gas peaker plant might be 20- to 35-percent efficient—that is, waste as much as 80 percent of the energy in its fuel. The average US coal plant is only about 33-percent efficient. For a given kilowatt-hour of electricity, lower efficiency means more fuel, which means more pollution.

So the extra power demand that often comes with extreme heat doesn’t just make electricity more expensive, it also makes it a lot dirtier.

Extreme heat means less reliable electricity

You might think that having extreme heat hit us in our pocketbooks and our lungs would be enough damage, but there’s more: Higher heat also can make our electricity less reliable.

One reason for that extra unreliability is that high power demand. When skyrocketing heat leads to skyrocketing demand, grid operators eventually run out of working power plants to turn to. And, while blackouts can have various causes, something has to give when demand outstrips available supply.

Extreme heat also exacts a toll on power plants directly, potentially exacerbating that supply shortage, and hits other parts of the grid. Many types of power plants become less efficient at higher temperatures. A gas turbine rated at 60 degrees F might be able to generate only 85 percent of that capacity when ambient temperatures reach 100 degrees F, for example. Many power plants that make steam to generate electricity, including nuclear and coal plants, most gas plants, and a small number of renewable energy plants, also take a hit when their cooling water temperatures climb. In addition, wildfires intensified by extreme heat can destroy transmission lines and other parts of the electricity grid.

That’s the supply part. But keeping our lights—and air-conditioners and cooling fans—running also requires delivering power from the plants to our homes and businesses, and high heat hits there too. Transmission lines’ ability to carry electricity drops as temperatures increase, and lines sag more at higher temperatures, potentially leading to short circuits. Transformers, meanwhile, can overheat and fail.

What we can do

Extra burdens from extreme heat that come via the power sector are serious, but there are serious responses we can bring to bear.

One important step is to recognize that the impact of extreme heat via the power sector doesn’t hit everyone equally, or equitably. Energy burdens are on average heavier for Black, Hispanic, and Native American households, for example. Peaker plants are located disproportionately in or near low-income communities and communities of color. And power outages hit some families much harder than others.

Given these inequities in the US power system, one important, near-term answer is making sure that we have and use systems that protect those most at risk. That means, for instance, having options not just for people who don’t have home access to air conditioning when it’s needed most, but also for those who can’t afford the extra electricity costs that the heat brings. Cooling centers and utility bill assistance, for example, can be lifesaving.

Grid operators have a range of tools they can use, in both the near and long term, to address extreme heat’s power sector impacts, and other energy sector decisionmakers can help make those tools more of a reality. Incentives and technologies can encourage and help customers shift demand to off-peak times, and investments in energy efficiency can help reduce demand overall, including during peaks. Energy storage, such as well-sited batteries—charged with clean electricity when demand is lower—can provide additional supply when demand escalates. Meanwhile, stronger transmission connections to other parts of the country, done right, can allow an area getting hit hard by extreme heat to draw on extra resources elsewhere in ways that reduce costs and pollution burdens.

Another key tool is renewable energy, at a range of scales, and recent experience has definitely shown the value of more wind, solar, and other renewables, as in Texas (repeatedly). Deploying more renewables—and having adequate transmission capacity for them—can shift the more expensive, dirtier power plant options farther to the right in dispatch curves and avoid or delay their use. Rooftop solar and other distributed renewables can reduce pressure on the electricity grid by supplying power where it’s needed. When paired with on-site energy storage, these resources can also help address transmission constraints, provide critical backup power in key locations in communities, and even do away with peaker plants. And using zero-carbon resources instead of fossil fuels can, over the long term, slow the climate change driving so much of the extreme heat.

Extreme heat can hit us hard through the power sector, hitting our finances, our health, and the reliability of that power, and it can hit some much harder than others. For the sake of everyone, we can hit back.

A few recent examples for that last love: California scored a new record for total generation from renewable energy in mid-April and a new record for solar production in mid-May. New York just broke its solar record. Texas, which set nine new records for renewables generation from March through June last year, set a new one in April. That same month, New England recorded its lowest demand ever for electricity from the regional grid, which the grid operator attributed to record rooftop solar production. And there’s been plenty of proof that this spring-is-great phenomenon isn’t confined to the United States.

Here are three reasons why we keep seeing records like these in the spring, and why they’ll keep on coming.

1. Sun, wind and water

One obvious reason for strong spring performances is the seasonal abundance of sources that drive renewable energy generation.

For solar, spring brings longer days and luscious sunlight that not only wake up the flowers, trees and birds, but also ramp up generation from solar photovoltaic (PV) panels in fields and on rooftops. Spring also offers still-cooler temperatures than what will come in summer, providing an additional boost. (PV panels, like electronics in general, operate more efficiently with less heat.)

For wind, spring is also famously “a breezy, blossomy season,” as one of my kids’ favorite books, on seasons, talked about, and the data bear that out: While wind patterns vary by location and region, wind is strongest in spring for the country as a whole.

For hydropower, patterns vary by region, as with wind, and generation also depends on dam operators’ decisions about when to release water and when to store it for later generation. But April showers (bringing May flowers) and rainfall later in spring can combine with early melt from winter snowpack to boost hydropower, so spring tends to be the time when there’s the most hydro generation.

More sun, wind and water means more power from the three largest sources of renewable electricity in the country.

2. Between heating and cooling seasons

Headlines about renewable energy records also highlight how much of electricity demand renewables are meeting at a given time. Those numbers look better in spring not just because of stronger generation, but also because of changes to the “denominator”—the overall demand for electricity.

Spring tends to be a time when there is lower electricity demand. While that, too, varies by region (and I know the cold stuck around for longer than usual in my part of the country this year), households generally turn down their furnaces and heat pumps, and they haven’t yet turned on their fans and air conditioners in full. That means that any renewable energy generation will supply a larger portion of demand.

That lower-than-expected electricity demand also makes spring (and the other “shoulder” season, fall) the go-to seasons for fossil fuel and nuclear power plants to go offline for scheduled maintenance—or refueling, in the case of the nuclear plants. That means that there are fewer of them competing to supply demand. While solar, wind and hydro win on price (their marginal cost is zero), they sometimes get pushed out of the market, or “curtailed,” when demand is lower. That’s due in part to coal plants’ inflexibility for reducing their output. A 2021 Union of Concerned Scientists-commissioned analysis found that that kind of inflexibility led ratepayers in the Southwest region of the country to pay an extra $40 million per year because utilities curtailed wind to make way for more expensive (and dirty) coal power.

3. Reaping harvests from a year of growth

The biggest factor behind renewable energy records in the spring, though, is new renewable energy installations. New records are a direct result of the new renewables—solar and wind, in particular—built over the previous year. Solar and wind generation grew by an average of 16 percent a year over the past decade and was 18 percent higher in 2022 than in 2021.

Growth in US renewable energy capacity last year alone set the stage for new records this spring. Solar capacity grew by almost 17 percent, while wind capacity finished the year more than 6 percent higher than in 2021.

How climate change plays a role

One of the reasons to be so excited about tangible renewables progress is its implications for addressing climate change. The more renewables grow, the more we can move away from fossil fuels and reduce their emissions to stop making the climate problem worse—as well as roll back their threat to public health.

Climate change, however, also has implications for renewables—including in spring—as the summer Danger Season gets longer and longer, extending into the shoulder season. Along with being affected by extra heat (as most power generation is), PV panels can be undermined by extra smoke and soot from wildfires. Climate change is altering wind patterns in various ways, and whether wind speeds (and therefore wind production) increase or decrease may vary by region. Hydropower in spring can be affected by changes in snowpack, changes in the timing of its melt, and changes in spring rainfall. Climate change also affects electricity demand, with increased periods of extreme heat or cold when we don’t expect them.

More renewables, not less

None of those realities of climate change are reasons to focus less on renewable energy and new renewable electricity records, especially in light of the wide array of fossil fuel power plants’ own vulnerabilities to climate change and extreme weather. Indeed, they are good reasons to focus even more. Noting, and celebrating, new records is a good way to remind everyone of our progress in our transition to clean energy, and to motivate everyone to do a whole lot more. And those new records are yet another reason to love springtime.

There’s good news in the recently released official data on electricity generation in the United States in 2022: renewable energy has continued to grow, coal power has continued to drop, and renewables are now firmly ahead of coal for the first time ever. The numbers also have important things to say about how much more needs to happen.

The progress in the numbers

The new numbers are from the federal Energy Information Administration (EIA), which collects data from power plant operators from across the country. They offer a lot of good news about clean energy progress . Here’s a taste:

• Wind power, the largest single source of renewable electricity in the country, grew the most of any renewable energy source in overall generation from 2021 to 2022. It supplied 10.5 percent of the country’s electricity supply (up 1.1 percentage points).*
• Solar power increased the most among renewable electricity sources in percentage terms, up 24 percent. Its contribution to our electricity rose to 4.9 percent (up 0.8 points).
• Solar’s increase came from progress with both the large-scale solar featured in EIA’s topline calculations, and the small-scale solar (think panels on rooftops) that it started measuring a few years ago, when that sector got too big to ignore. Large solar provided 3.5 percent of the 2022 generation, and small solar 1.4 percent.
• With small solar included, renewable electricity all together provided 22.7 percent of US electricity, up 1.9 points from the year before. Wind, hydroelectric, and solar power accounted for 95 percent of renewables’ 2022 generation.

Renewables up, coal down

More renewable energy is desirable for a lot of reasons. Some of those, such as the public health and climate benefits, depend on the clean energy displacing the dirty stuff—avoiding increases in fossil fuel generation or, even better, displacing existing generation. From a public health perspective, displacing coal is particularly important.

So it’s good news that the 2022 numbers also show coal generation dropping, and renewables clearly surpassing coal. Renewables (including small solar) had squeaked past coal in 2020, before a rebound put coal back on top the following year. But, in 2022, renewables generated 14 percent more than coal, as renewables rose and coal fell (7.7 percent). That crossover is consistent with the long-term trend for both renewables and coal: renewable generation increased every year of the last decade, while coal dropped in seven of those years.

These improvements didn’t happen by chance

The numbers show progress, but they also testify to the power of the policies that have helped drive the clean energy transition—policies such as federal air and water pollution protections, federal and state tax credits for clean energy, and state renewable electricity standards and clean energy standards. These policies have helped increase focus on renewable energy which, in turn, has helped drive down the costs of renewables.

In particular, the economics of wind and solar, are such that renewable energy is now often the cheapest option for new power capacity (and cheaper even than existing coal power plants). That means, all else being equal, economics can increasingly drive their adoption.

But all else is not equal, and just as those improvements didn’t happen by themselves, further progress isn’t automatic. Entrenched fossil fuel interests, disinformation about climate change and clean energy, and outdated electric grid rules and practices all make continued progress on the policy front essential  to our continued progress replacing fossil fuels with clean energy in the power sector.

That progress in both numbers and policies is indispensable. One reason is climate change, and the increasingly dire news on that front. Another is the areas of continued concern that the 2022 generation data reflect. Coal generation, while down last year and down from 40 percent of total generation a decade ago (and 50 percent just a few years before that), still accounted for almost 20 percent of the electricity generated in the United States last year. Gas generation, after dropping in 2021, bounced back to its highest level yet in absolute terms, and accounted for 38 percent of US supply.

Keep it coming

So, a major takeaway is that we need continued attention on the factors critical for clean energy progress. That means more attention to community perspectives on siting new electricity generating capacity and on the clean energy transition (including for communities and workers moving away from fossil fuels); increased focus on public health; more progress on the technologies, the economics, and the policies driving the change. We need to live into the promise of laws like the federal Inflation Reduction Act and the leadership of states that are showing the way. And we need strong federal power plant carbon rules (plus strong implementation by the states).

But we also need to celebrate the progress we do make, and what’s coming because of the groundwork we’ve laid. As the latest numbers suggest, there’s a lot of momentum in favor of clean energy. And EIA is projecting coal to lose more ground in 2023 (dropping three percentage points), and gas to fall in 2024 (two percentage points), while renewables rise two percentage points in each of this year and next. That growth in renewables isn’t the 4-5 percent per year we need to see to reach 80 percent low-carbon electricity by 2030 and 100 percent by 2035. But it is a solid foundation to build on.

The latest data on US electricity generation show real progress on the clean energy transition. Understanding how we got here and what more needs to happen will help us make sure the numbers keep getting even better in the years ahead.

*Electricity generation calculations in this post reflect the inclusion of small-scale solar in the denominator.

More turbines in the water

I’ll definitely be watching for more foundations, towers, and turbines in US waters. There’s a strong possibility that this year we’ll see not just one but two large-scale projects taking shape off our shores before the year is up.

One will be in the waters south of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket. Vineyard Wind is a 62-turbine, 800-megawatt (MW) project—enough to generate the equivalent of more than 400,000 homes’ electricity use—that will supply Massachusetts and support New England’s electricity grid.

The other will be located east of Long Island. The South Fork Wind project, consisting of 12 turbines totaling 132 MW, will feed into New York’s electricity grid.

Those two projects alone will provide more than 20 times the power of the 42 MW (seven turbines) installed in US waters to date.

More permitting for responsible projects

Shepherding projects through state and federal permitting processes isn’t quite as visually stunning as steel in the water, but it’s crucial for making sure those projects happen well. Thanks to lots of movement in 2022 by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), the agency in charge of coordinating the federal process, several offshore wind projects have draft environmental impact statements (EISs) out for public comment—a key step for project approvals. BOEM also has initiated a “programmatic” EIS (PEIS) for the New York Bight, the area south of Long Island and east of New Jersey. The PEIS will look at the effect of the multiple projects expected for that region to streamline project-specific assessments. Watch for final EISs this year.

Part of the design process is determining how to make projects fit best with other stuff happening in the ocean, as well with other pressures on those environments. For the East Coast, one aspect to watch this year in that regard is how we make sure that offshore wind avoids and minimizes its effects on the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale, whose population continues to decline due to ship strikes and fishing gear entanglement. And for fish, keep an eye on BOEM’s coordination with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries, the federal agency in charge of marine species, for minimizing impacts.

Also worth watching are efforts to help make offshore wind and fishing itself fit together. Notable in this regard is a December 2022 announcement by nine East Coast states seeking input on setting up a fund “for potential impacts to the fishing community” from offshore wind development.

More contracting and stronger targets

State policy has been a major driver of offshore wind procurements, and states will be working to meet their requirements—and potentially upping them.

Look for states and electric utilities to request proposals and negotiate contracts with offshore wind developers for the next rounds of projects to meet state goals, and the Biden administration’s offshore wind goal of 30,000 MW by 2030. A key piece of contracting to watch for will be strong labor and environmental provisions, such as those included in New York’s procurements and required under a 2022 Massachusetts law.

Watch for leading states to continue to increase their levels of ambition for offshore wind. Massachusetts’s brand-new governor, Maura Healey, for example, pledged in her inauguration speech to double the state’s offshore wind target, from the current 5,600 MW to 11,200 MW. The Union of Concerned Scientists and its Massachusetts allies will be working to help make that happen.

More offshore wind leasing

Earlier in the process of making offshore wind a reality is defining where projects might go. Last year saw BOEM lease auctions in several areas: in the New York Bight in February, off the Carolinas in May, and off California in December. The New York sale was a record-breaker, bringing in $4.37 billion in total revenue from six leases, with enough area for turbines to meet the electricity needs of some 2 million households. California’s sale of five leases was the first in US Pacific waters, the first for projects that will involve floating offshore wind, and—at $757 million—the second-highest in revenue.

An earlier stage for figuring out where leases would make most sense is defining broader possible areas. BOEM defined two “Wind Energy Areas” (WEAs) in the Gulf of Mexico in October 2022, has asked for public comments on ones in the Mid-Atlantic, and is gauging interest in waters off Oregon.

I’ll be watching for projects to take shape in lease areas, and lease areas to take shape in WEAs.

Watch for progress on equity in how offshore wind happens; equity considerations are important throughout the offshore wind development process. One thing that stuck with me from the industry’s annual offshore wind conference last fall was the clear call from Native American nations about consultation early and often, starting with how offshore wind areas are defined and through to how the projects happen.

More technical advances, cost progress

In recent years, part of the growing interest in offshore wind has stemmed from the strong progress in making the technology more competitive, and it’ll be important to see how wind fares along with the rest of the economy. While some existing contracts have bumped up against the challenges of unexpectedly high inflation and supply chain crunches, other areas to watch are more positive.

One way to lower costs is scale, and one thing to watch for driving scale is implementation of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. While important for our move toward clean energy in so many ways, the legislation included specific, important provisions for offshore wind around leasing, transmission, and tax credits.

Cost progress is also driven by technical advancements. One area I’ll be watching in 2023 is floating offshore wind. That technology will be key particularly for wind farms off the West Coast and in the Gulf of Maine, both places where water depths quickly get too deep for placing foundations directly on the seabed. That underwater topography helps explain the Biden administration’s strong additional targets it announced in September 2022 for floating offshore wind: 15,000 MW and 70-percent cost reductions by 2035.

I’ll be watching offshore wind for continued progress in cost effectiveness and technology developments.

Making 2023 a year to remember

There’s so much potential in offshore wind. Not just in the wind itself, though the United States does have some of the best resources on the planet. But also in areas like job creation, economic development, reliability, and public health benefits, along with progress in avoiding the worst consequences of climate change and reducing other risks by cutting our use of fossil fuels.

So watch offshore wind in 2023. With strong attention to getting it right, we can make a lot of gains for realizing the technology’s potential this year in ways that set us up for a whole lot more success in years to come.

The new Tracking the Sun report from LBNL covers solar photovoltaic (PV) systems for the “grid-connected, distributed” piece of the solar story for both residential and “non-residential” up to a certain size.

The report charts continued progress in several important categories in 2021, including PV module efficiency, system costs, and the prevalence of batteries, which are a more and more important piece of the solar picture.

PV modules keep getting more efficient

One finding is that the efficiency of PV modules keep climbing. Median values for modules in residential systems rose from 13.6 percent for systems installed in 2002 to 20.1 percent in 2021—that’s a 48 percent increase, much of it in the last decade. Non-residential systems showed similar increases.

Part of that progress is due to the increasing dominance of more-efficient mono-crystalline technologies (the ones with smooth-looking single-crystal cells). For residential systems, their share rose from 41 percent in 2016 to 98 percent in 2021. LBNL also mentions the increasing use of passivated emitter rear-cell technology, or PERC.  

Note that those figures are median efficiencies; modules are actually available with efficiencies considerably higher. The (non-PERC) ones on my own roof, for example, are 22 percent efficient.

Solar keeps getting cheaper

A second takeaway is that impressive price drops have continued for the systems included in LBNL’s analysis. For residential systems,  they found that median prices per watt fell 63 percent from 2007 to 2021. And for small and large non-residential systems, the price drops were even more pronounced: 72 and 77 percent, respectively. LBNL found additional drops from 2020 to 2021 of 3.4, 3.9, and 11 percent for residential, small non-residential, and large non-residential systems, respectively.

While earlier price drops came largely from reductions in the cost of PV modules, progress in recent years has come from improvements in what LBNL calls “residual BOS+soft costs” categories. The BOS, or balance of system, is the equipment other than the module and the inverter, the piece that converts the DC power from the modules to AC for the home and the electricity grid. These soft costs include all the other things that go into making a system happen, such as permitting and installation.

PV systems are getting larger

The lower prices and higher efficiencies have helped fuel another trend revealed in LBNL’s data: residential systems are getting larger. The median size in 2021 was 7 kilowatts, up 39 percent from a decade before.

To be clear, all this doesn’t mean that systems need to get larger—just that maybe they can. A 5-kilowatt system, the standard for a home system not long ago, still produces just as much as a 5-kilowatt system used to. A system that size just might be that much cheaper. But the price drops also mean that a given solar budget can likely get you more solar.

Economies of scale also come into play: for residential systems, LBNL found that an 8-to-9 kilowatt system in 2018 was on average 13 percent cheaper per watt than a 4-to-5 kilowatt one.

And the higher efficiencies mean that a given roof area can fit that much more. (I know: I maxed out my roof area squeezing every kilowatt of solar I could up there.)

Energy storage comes on strong

As for resilience: solar modules have been plenty strong for years. Even early in my solar career manufacturers would say their products would withstand one-inch hailstones. And the warranties for most panels lengthened to 25 years a while back.

What’s different now is the prevalence of energy storage that can make the systems themselves more resilient. From 2016 to 2021 storage leapt from 0.1 to 10 percent for residential systems in LBNL’s sample, and from 1 to 4.9 percent for non-residential.

Hawaii leads the pack in adoption, with storage included in 93 percent of residential installations and 59 percent of non-residential, because of strong incentives for self-consumption (using your own solar production for your own needs). California leads for overall numbers of systems with storage; the Golden State has storage on 11 percent of residential systems and 5 percent of non-residential—driven, says LBNL, by the state’s energy storage rebates and “resilience concerns” (think extreme weather and blackouts). And Texas was notable for its increase in interest in storage after its severe February 2021 winter storm.

Much more to come

The latest report covers just a piece of what’s happening in solar; LBNL reports on large-scale systems elsewhere. And it focuses on the technology and the economics, not on, say, who solar is reaching.

But the happenings in the residential, commercial, and institutional market segments are really important for our vital move to clean energy. And there’s a lot more solar activity underway and on its way—especially with the new federal Inflation Reduction Act’s 10-year extension of the tax credits that have been so powerful for driving renewable energy, including solar.

With higher efficiencies, lower prices, and more resilience, solar just keeps getting better.

One state legislature is poised to send a strong signal that it’s not taking any of that lying down.

In Massachusetts, this near-term opportunity would drive progress on clean energy, clean transportation, and equity. With a legislative session that’s about to wrap up, getting the bill into law will require diplomacy and ambition.

Here’s where things stand, what’s at stake, and where things go next.

Where things stand

Both the Massachusetts House of Representatives and the Senate have passed good, solid clean energy bills. In March, the House passed the “Act Advancing Offshore Wind and Clean Energy.” The Senate responded in April with a broader climate and energy bill, the “Act Driving Climate Policy Forward.”

In May those competing—or complementary, actually—visions were routed to a conference committee, where a set of six legislators, three members of each chamber, is tasked with reconciling the two bills and coming up with a unified one that both chambers could support. The conferees are working to do just that.

What’s at stake

What’s on the table includes provisions to:

• Drive robust air quality monitoring so that targeted interventions can have the greatest impact, and we can more easily track progress in air quality improvements for residents most burdened by the harmful localized air pollution. It’s not the full provisions of the air quality bill that we and our allies have pushed this session, but it would be an important next step in improving equity around transportation and power generation in the commonwealth.
• Accelerate electric vehicle (EV) adoption. One provision would nail down 2035 as the date when all new car sales in the state have to be electric, and another would set a date for converting to all-electric the bus fleet of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, which serves the greater Boston area, which would be huge for reducing tailpipe pollution in urban areas. Another provision would codify point-of-sale rebates for EVs, so that prospective buyers would pay only the portion of the purchase price that a rebate wouldn’t cover, rather than having to wait to get reimbursed for that portion.
• Accelerate responsible clean energy. There’s great language in the House bill to strengthen labor and environmental provisions, and the Senate bill would let the administration increase the state’s offshore wind target from the current 5,600 to 10,000 megawatts, which would make Massachusetts even more of a leader for driving offshore wind market development. (For context, New York and New Jersey are currently targeting 9,000 and 7,500 megawatts, respectively.) Other provisions would do more to encourage energy storage, strengthen the prospects for rooftop solar, and let communities engage directly in supporting large-scale renewable energy development.

That’s just a sampling. There’s even more good stuff in each chamber’s bill that deserves to make it into the final package.

What’s next

For that final package, what we’re looking for from the conference committee is ambition. Ambition in clean energy, so that whatever emerges demonstrably moves the ball forward on our transition to clean electricity and clean transportation, accelerates our move off of fossil fuels. Ambition in equity, with a bill that underscores the commonwealth’s commitment to addressing—and doing away with—the long-standing inequities regarding who is most harmed by power plant and vehicle pollution. Ambition in excellence, with strong attention to making the transition as right as possible, with regard to workers, public health, and the environment.

While I don’t doubt the Legislature’s commitment to coming back next session with decisive actions, we need to decarbonize our economy, and we need to send clear signals, now. So, in this bill, this session, we need as much we can get, and a clear rejection of obstructionism and wrongheadedness in Washington, D.C.

What we’re also looking to the conference committee for is a successful negotiation. Getting those and other good pieces into law is dependent on coming up with a strong bill soon. Massachusetts’s two-year legislative session ends July 31, so the committee needs to present its compromise bill in the next few days to give each chamber time to approve the new version and to leave time for any negotiations with the governor (potentially via a veto, then an override).

State ambition, state action, and state leadership clearly aren’t a substitute for responsible governance from Washington. But there’s so much leadership that can and must come from states, including their legislatures. And at a time when those forces of obstructionism are rampant, Massachusetts is poised to weigh in on the side of climate action, and to add to the momentum in favor of sanity.

Massachusetts needs a climate and energy bill, and it needs a good one. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It does have to be a fitting response to this moment.

1. Wind power is big, and getting bigger

Wind is impressive. I’ve felt that most explicitly when sidling up to an offshore wind turbine in a boat, or when standing on top of a land-based one, hundreds of feet in the air. Offshore wind turbines are particularly impressive. The ones that’ll soon be gracing areas over the horizon are powerful enough, each one, to generate the equivalent of an average home’s daily electricity use in just a few seconds.

Even more important, though, wind is an impressive piece of our electricity supply. In 2021, 9 percent of US electricity came from those graceful kinetic sculptures, up from less than 3 percent in 2011. Eight states generate more than 25 percent of their electricity from wind. Wind is now the largest source of renewable energy in the country.

And a lot more big-ness is coming. Turbines will be getting larger, both on land and in the water. Wind power generation will continue to rise, including in the near term as a result of one of the US wind industry’s best years ever in 2021. Offshore wind power, still at an early stage in the United States, is poised to grow by leaps and bounds in respond to states stepping up and an ambitious federal administration doing its part.

And US wind jobs, currently totaling more than 100,000, should grow right along with the technology and the market.

2. Wind power is a bargain

An important part of wind power’s success in recent years has been its low cost. From 2010 through 2020, the cost of electricity from wind fell more than 60 percent, according to the Department of Energy. Wind power is now cheaper than fossil fuels—even existing coal plants—in many parts of the country.

Particularly important at a time of swings in energy prices and inflation concerns, wind power pricing is also stable. Once it’s installed, no fuel costs at play means wind power can offer fixed prices over the long term.

Like wind power’s growth, wind power’s bargain-ness seems set to improve with greater scale, with experts predicting substantial cost reductions for both land-based and offshore wind.

3. We need a modern grid

Our electricity grid is old, outdated, and in desperate need of an upgrade, and while we’re upgrading it, part of what we want to do is make it easier to integrate wind and other renewables. There’s a lot standing in the way of progress that has nothing to do with wind power itself.

The good news is that there’s work being done in the right direction. The operators of our nation’s electricity grids in different parts of the country are working toward that modernization—and advocates like UCS are working to make sure they do this on the scale we need.

4. We want more wind power

Wind power has a lot of room to grow, and we want plenty more. Wind and other renewables are key for cleaning up the power sector. They’re also key for cleaning up other sectors, such as transportation—when we electrify cars, trucks, and buses—and home heating—through the rapid adoption of heat pumps.

Modeling by UCS (here and here, for example) and others shows just how big a role wind power might play in getting the country off fossil fuels.

Globally, too, wind stands to be a leader in what’s to come for fighting climate change. The most recent report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change showed that wind and solar had by far the greatest potential for cutting climate pollution in the energy sector, with lots of each that could be available more cheaply than the fossil fuels they’d displace.

5. We can do wind power right

As wind power continues to grow, we’re going to want to continue to find ways to do it in the best ways possible, including with regard to:

• People: That includes making sure people are at the center of our considerations as we think about how the power sector will evolve, and making sure we take advantage of opportunities for equity as we stand up new industries, like offshore wind.
• Wildlife: The best ways also include making sure we’re bringing science to bear to avoid and minimize impacts to wildlife from wind and other renewables.
• Lifecycle: And we want to make sure we keep track of the equipment involved in making wind power happen, from how we get the raw materials through to end-of-life needs and opportunities.

Celebrate

So go ahead, celebrate. Global Wind Day comes but once a year, and there’s a lot worth noting about what we’re doing right, and about what more is to come.

The solar trade case

In February, a small California-based solar panel manufacturer filed a complaint with the Department of Commerce alleging that China, the subject of other US trade tariffs for solar, was illegally bypassing tariffs by channeling solar products through a few neighboring countries. The manufacturer was seeking tariffs of potentially hundreds of percent on products from those other countries.

Those taxes, or anything similar coming out of the Department of Commerce investigations, could not only have dramatically changed the economics of future projects, but also have been applied retroactively. Those potential financial hits have made it really hard for solar project developers to commit to projects, with serious consequences for solar power’s continued development. The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) had tallied up hundreds of projects cancelled or delayed, totaling more than 50 gigawatts—more than twice what the US solar industry installed during 2021. And it had warned of 100,000 jobs at risk, meaning almost half the US solar workforce. A letter from a bipartisan group of 22 US senators had expressed their “serious concern” about the investigation, and its effect on solar developers and ratepayers.

What the federal government will do

And now a just-announced plan from the Biden administration looks set to unstick the logjam, and save those projects and jobs while encouraging more domestic production of solar components. It proposes to do that through three pieces:

1. “Authorize use of the Defense Production Act (DPA) to accelerate domestic production of clean energy technologies, including solar panel parts”—plus building insulation, heat pumps, equipment for making “clean electricity-generated fuels”, and “[c]ritical power grid infrastructure like transformers.” The administration says that the effort will involve encouraging strong labor standards, and attention to good “environmental justice outcomes” through a focus on the clean energy transition in communities “historically overburdened by legacy pollution.”

2. “Put the full power of federal procurement to work spurring additional domestic solar manufacturing capacity by directing the development of master supply agreements, including ‘super preference’ status”—using the power of the federal purse to boost “made-in-America” solar products, and “partner[ing] with state and local governments and municipal utilities” to drive more demand.

3. “Create a 24-month bridge as domestic manufacturing rapidly scales up to ensure the reliable supply of components that US solar deployers need to construct clean energy projects and an electric grid for the 21st century, while reinforcing the integrity of our trade laws and processes”—this is the part that most directly addresses the uncertainty that had brought so much solar to a standstill. By waiving new tariffs for two years, the administration aims to let solar panels flow again without fear of surprise or retroactive costs.

How industry and supporters are reacting

Reactions to the surprise announcement have been very positive. SEIA, which chiefly represents developers and installers, celebrated the jobs saved and the continuation of solar’s job-creation potential, and praised the president’s “thoughtful approach to addressing the current crisis of the paralyzed solar supply chain.”

The American Clean Power Association (ACP), which represents a range of clean energy technologies, similarly applauded, calling the announcement “a bold act of leadership.” ACP CEO Heather Zichal said that the moves “will rejuvenate the construction and domestic manufacturing of solar power by restoring predictability and business certainty…”

Many lawmakers were equally enthusiastic. Sen. Jacky Rosen of Nevada, one of the leaders on the letter urging the administration to act, called the proposal a “positive step [that] will save US solar jobs, strengthen domestic solar manufacturing, and help us achieve our clean energy goals.”

What’s next

Where does it go from here? Commerce will continue assessing the merits of the original case. The industry is “confident that a review of the facts will result in a negative determination,” meaning that no new tariffs will come into place. Some US manufacturers see it differently, and seem likely to challenge the administration’s move in the meantime.

Meanwhile, we’ll be looking for the administration’s announcement to get solar back on track. A successful effort will give the US industry a couple years of breathing space, and investments in domestic manufacturing with strong labor standards may well boost our capacity to produce solar panels here at home.

Resolution of the uncertainty that has threatened solar’s considerable momentum is a key piece of keeping that momentum going. It’s not the only piece—we’re still looking to Congress to extend the tax credits that have been so powerful for driving renewable energy as part of a broader budget reconciliation package—but it’s a welcome one. Solar can get back to doing what it does so well: reducing our dependence on polluting sources of electricity, giving us better options for powering our homes and businesses, and creating jobs.

1. El 2021 fue el mejor año para la energía solar

La energía solar tuvo un año excepcional. Según el informe anual más reciente de los analistas de Wood Mackenzie (WoodMac) y de la Asociación de Industrias de Energía Solar (SEIA, por sus siglas en inglés), la industria solar en EE UU instaló un total de 23,6 gigavatios (GW, o millones de kilovatios) en el 2021. Eso superó en un 19% al año 2020, un año que a su vez batió un récord, y superó en un 77% al año 2019. Esto permitió que la energía solar superara la marca acumulativa de 100 GW en el 2021.

El año pasado, la energía solar fue la mayor fuente de nueva capacidad de generación eléctrica en Estados Unidos, representando un total de 46%, según WoodMac/SEIA. Este es el tercer año consecutivo durante el cual la energía solar ocupa el primer lugar.

2. La energía solar ha progresado mucho en todos los sectores

La energía solar se destacó no solo en conjunto, sino que también en todos los sectores, según WoodMac/SEIA:

• Residencial – La energía solar en los hogares estableció su propio récord, con 4,2 GW instalados en el 2021, un 30% más que en el 2020. El número de sistemas instalados batió otro récord: más de 500.000 instalaciones en un año. Y según el reporte, “casi el 5% de las viviendas viables [para los sistemas de energía solar] habitadas por sus propietarios en Estados Unidos tienen instalado un sistema de energía solar residencial”.
• No residencial – La energía solar comercial y la solar comunitaria/compartida en conjunto también aumentaron. La energía solar comercial se mantuvo básicamente en el mismo nivel (un 1% menos) con respecto al 2020, pero la energía solar comunitaria compensó ese descenso (con un 7% más). En conjunto crecieron un 2%.
• A gran escala – También se vio un aumento importante en la energía solar a gran escala, (“servicios públicos”) que creció por una quinta parte desde el 2020. Sus 17 GW representaron más del 70% del total en el 2021.

3. Más energía solar = más generación solar

El año pasado también demostró los frutos de los esfuerzos del año anterior. Los resultados de fin de año proporcionados por la Administración de Información Energética de los Estados Unidos señalan un 25% más de energía solar adicional que en 2020. De hecho, la energía solar representó un 3,9% de la generación de electricidad en los Estados Unidos, más de cuatro veces su participación en el 2015.

4. La energía solar es popular en todo el país

El año pasado también fue notable debido a los estados (tanto azules como rojos) que instalaron la mayor cantidad de megavatios, según WoodMac/SEIA.

Por ejemplo, Texas le arrebató el primer lugar al perenne líder California. Esto no se debe a que el Estado Dorado haya fallado (instaló aproximadamente lo mismo que en los años 2020 y 2019), sino a que el Estado de la Estrella Solitaria tuvo un fuerte impulso: Texas instaló un 77% más de energía solar en el 2021 que en el 2020, y más de cuatro veces que en el 2019. La energía solar había tardado mucho en llegar a Texas, y el 2021 demostró que ya está ahí.

Otros cambios notables: Virginia pasó de la posición 19 en el 2019 al 4^o lugar en los años 2020 y 2021, ya que el año pasado instaló 11 veces más que en el 2019. Indiana se llevó el 6^o lugar en el 2021, comparado con el 32º puesto que tenía en el 2020. Illinois logró estar entre los 10 principales después de haber ocupado el 21er puesto en el 2019.

5. Debemos mantener el impulso

La energía solar tiene un gran impulso, y el 2021 fue un año para celebrar. Sin embargo, definitivamente hay factores que influyen en la dirección opuesta.

Un ejemplo son los costos, los cuales (como era de esperarse debido a los problemas de cadena de suministro a nivel mundial) aumentaron en el 2021, después de haber bajado año tras año. También hay incertidumbre en las políticas estatales, ya que la comisión de servicios públicos de California ha contemplado realizar cambios en el tratamiento de la energía solar de los techos y esto ha preocupado a la gente (aunque han quedado suspendidos los cambios por el momento). En otro ejemplo, los legisladores de Florida aprobaron un proyecto de ley que hubiera debilitado drásticamente la economía de la energía solar en los techos en ese estado, y solo falló el esfuerzo debido al veto del Gobernador Ron DeSantis.

A nivel federal, está la política comercial, en cuanto a los impuestos a la importación de componentes de energía solar. Los que fueron implementados por la administración Trump siguen vigentes, y ahora otros nuevos impuestos potenciales están causando verdaderas preocupaciones. También está el Congreso, y la necesidad de que se encuentre una manera de extender el crédito fiscal a la inversión (ITC, pos sus siglas en ingés) que ha sido tan importante para impulsar la energía solar.

Más récords solares por venir

Así pues, aunque hay cuestiones un poco preocupantes, también hay mucho que festejar. Vale la pena celebrar el progreso de la energía solar, y es importante reconocer que los factores fundamentales siguen siendo sólidos a favor de esa tecnología. Las tendencias hacia mayores eficiencias, paneles más grandes, proyectos más grandes y mayores economías de escala en todo el sector sugieren una reducción en los costos y una mayor accesibilidad. La energía solar es la fuente de energía más popular que existe y es probable que sea una herramienta sumamente importante para la descarbonización del sector energético. Sabemos que la necesitamos, ahora más que nunca.

Mientras tanto, la energía solar seguirá rompiendo récords. Tomemos como ejemplo a California: el día 30 de abril, por la primera vez generaron las energías renovables, principalmente la solar, un monto equivalente a más del 100% de la demanda del estado durante unos momentos. Queda mucho más por venir (en cuanto se solucionen los problemas de la transmisión eléctrica).

Manténgase al tanto.

1. 2021 was the biggest year ever for solar

Solar had a banner year. According to the latest from analysts at Wood Mackenzie (WoodMac) and the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), the US solar industry installed 23.6 gigawatts (GW, or million kilowatts) in 2021. That’s 19 percent more than in 2020, which itself had been a record breaker, and 77 percent more than in 2019. And it took solar soaring past the 100 GW cumulative mark in 2021.

Last year solar was the biggest source of new US electric generating capacity, accounting for 46 percent, according to WoodMac/SEIA. That makes the third year in a row that solar was number one.

2. Solar made serious progress across the board

Solar didn’t just shine overall: It sparkled across the different sectors, according to WoodMac/SEIA:

• Residential – Solar on homes set its own record, with 4.2 GW installed in 2021—30 percent more than in 2020. The number of systems installed was another record: more than 500,000 installations in one year. And, they report, “[n]early 5% of [solar] viable owner-occupied homes in the US have residential solar installed.”
• Non-residential – Commercial solar and community/shared solar combined were up, too. Commercial solar was basically flat (down 1 percent) from 2020, but community solar (up 7 percent) made up for that. Combined, they grew 2 percent.
• Large-scale – Another big leaper: Large (“utility”) solar grew by a fifth from 2020. Its 17 GW accounted for more than 70 percent of 2021’s total.

3. More solar=more solar generation

Last year also showed the fruits of the prior year’s labors. The year-end results from the US Energy Information Administration show that solar generated 25 percent more in 2021 than in 2020. In fact, solar accounted for 3.9 percent of US electricity generation, more than four times its 2015 share.

4. Solar is popular across the country

This past year was noteworthy too because of which states—both blue and red—ended up on the leaderboard for megawatts installed during the year, according to WoodMac/SEIA.

Texas took away the top spot from perennial leader California, for example. That wasn’t because the Golden State slipped (it installed about the same as it had in 2020 and 2019), but because the Lone Star State surged: Texas installed 77 percent more solar in 2021 than it had in 2020, and more than four times as much as it had in 2019. Texas solar had been a long time in coming, and 2021 showed that it’s now here.

Other notable movements of late: Virginia leapt from 19^th in 2019 to 4^th in 2020 and 2021, installing 11 times as much last year as in 2019. Indiana took 6^th in 2021, up from 32^nd in 2020. Illinois made it into the top 10, up from 21^st in 2019.

5. We need to keep the momentum growing

Solar has a lot of momentum, and 2021 was a year to celebrate. Still, there definitely are factors pushing in the opposite direction.

Costs, for one, which (unsurprisingly, given global supply-demand issues) were up in 2021, after dropping year after year after year. Uncertainty in state policies, too, as California’s public utility commission contemplated changes to its rooftop solar that have had folks pretty rattled (though the changes are on pause right now), for example, and Florida’s legislature just passed a bill that would dramatically weaken the rooftop solar economics in the Sunshine State.

At the federal level, there’s trade policy—the Trump administration’s solar import taxes still haven’t gone away, and potential new ones are causing real concerns—and there’s Congress, with a whole lot hinging on them finding a way forward on extending the investment tax credit (ITC) that has been so powerful for driving solar forward.

More solar records to come

So, a bit to fear, but plenty to cheer. It’s worth celebrating solar’s progress, and important to recognize that the fundamentals remain strong in solar’s favor. The trends toward greater efficiency, larger panels, larger projects, and greater economies of scale across the industry all point to lower costs and greater accessibility. Solar is the most popular energy source out there, and likely to be a big piece of how we get off carbon in the power sector. And we know we need it, now more than ever.

Meanwhile, solar is going to keep breaking records. With other renewables in California, for example: at one point on April 3 they reached an all-time high of supplying 97.6 percent of the state’s electricity. And there’s a whole lot more on its way (just as soon as we get the electric transmission pieces figured out).

Stay tuned.

AWWI, now REWI (pronounced “ree-why”), is a unique organization that brings together key stakeholders committed to expanding the scale and role of renewable energy in our power supply, while addressing wildlife and habitat issues at the same time.

The organization has been funding critical field research to help close gaps in understanding of the impacts of renewables on wildlife and habitat. And it has been sharing those findings broadly to better inform siting and permitting decisions around particular projects, and to spur innovations in avoiding and minimizing impacts. It has also served as a convenor of those key stakeholders to ensure better communication and coordination of research findings and needs.

UCS has been an active part of this effort since AWWI’s inception. We helped launch AWWI in 2008 because we saw the importance of bringing science to bear on wildlife issues and opportunities in the scale-up of wind power. And because we saw the power of partnering with conservation organizations and the wind industry to make that happen.

Solar, too, presents wildlife opportunities

Now REWI is bringing that focus on science and the power of those partnerships to solar too, to ensure even more a responsible and sustainable renewable energy transition.

“Solar is a vital renewable energy solution to reduce carbon emissions that threaten wildlife, so this is a significant and timely change,” explains Jim Murphy of the National Wildlife Federation, chair of the REWI board. “REWI’s expertise in facilitating collaborative, science-based solutions to wind-wildlife challenges makes it uniquely well-positioned to answer similar, pressing questions about the potential impacts of solar on wildlife.”

In 2008, wind power was where the action in clean energy was. Solar power was really small potatoes (despite my best efforts, since it’s where I got my start 30 years ago).

Things are different now. Wind is big and growing. Solar is growing even faster now and catching up quickly. Both had record years in 2021, and when we see the final generation numbers for the year they’ll likely have added up to close to 12 percent of US electricity supply.

And we’re counting on both wind and solar to do a lot more, and in the very near term, and far beyond.

So expanding AWWI’s remit and transforming it to REWI seems a great move. It’s also consistent with other recent steps to recognize the synergies to be had in addressing a range of technologies for the clean energy transition, such as the American Wind Energy Association’s rebranding as the American Clean Power Association last year, and subsequent merger with the Energy Storage Association.

Strength in numbers, and science

A lot of others agree on REWI’s importance: The organization is backed by more than 40 partners and friends—organizations and companies that share a commitment to, as REWI’s mission statement says, “facilitate timely and responsible development of wind and solar energy while protecting wildlife and wildlife habitat.”

“Renewable energy is central to the fight against climate change,” says Abby Arnold, REWI’s executive director, “and the level of buildout that’s needed can’t happen unless we have the knowledge to inform choices about the best ways to balance the desire for carbon-free power with conservation goals. REWI provides science we can stand on when making those critical decisions.”

UCS is proud to stand behind REWI. And we look forward to continuing to work with our partners to find ways to sustainably expand renewable energy while protecting wildlife and habitat.

For more on the history of AWWI and UCS’s involvement, read my 2018 interview with Abby Arnold here: Birds, Bats, and Wind Power: An Interview with Abby Arnold of the American Wind Wildlife Institute