We Might Have Renewed Energy Next Year

It’s the time of year when many people like to either look back at the previous year, or outline their hopes and goals for the new year. Well, 2025 was way too depressing to recap all the reasons why, and I’m afraid many of them will still be true in 2026. But there is one area where, despite the Trump Administration’s headwinds, the future appears promising. That area is renewable energy.

It is the dawn of a new day for renewable energy. Credit: Microsoft Designer

On the face of it, one might think that renewable energy is losing the war against the Trump Administration. President Trump has long criticized, even ridiculed, wind energy, and recently threw the wind industry in turmoil by halting five wind farms under construction, citing unspecified “national security” concerns (developers are, of course, suing).  The “Big, Beautiful” tax bill ended EV tax credits. The EPA cancelled a $7b Solar for All program (it is being sued as well).  Grim days for renewables, right?

So why did Science list renewable energy as its “Breakthrough of the Year”? 

Let’s take a look at a few developments that you might have missed had you only been watching Fox News:

• Energy think tank Ember reported that, in the first half 2025, renewables overtook coal as a source of electricity, for the first time ever.
• According to Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, for the first third of 2025 solar and wind accounted for 96% of new U.S. power generation. In fact, solar has been the largest source of new generating capacity each month since September 2023.
• An analysis of the U.S. Energy Information Adm8nistration data shows that renewable sources provided 26% of U.S. electricity for the first ten months of 2025 – and that all net new generating capacity in 2026 would come from renewables.  
• A quarter of all new car sales worldwide are EVs.
• Worldwide, investments in clean energy are twice those invested in fossil fuels.

To be fair, there is an increasing dichotomy between what is happening in the U.S. versus the rest of the world.  The U.S. has become even more dependent on fossil fuels for electricity, in part because demand is rising faster than renewable increases. U.S. EV sales have plateaued at 10%. Those wind farms aren’t going to build themselves.

There may be a renewable revolution going on, but it is not one the Trump Administration has much interest in.

Still, as Pavan Venkatakrishnan, policy advisor at The Foundation for American Innovation, told NPR, it "may not love renewable technologies, but they're going to need them to meet the data center demand [and] also maintain energy affordability for all consumers." He added: "It is not climate goals or imperatives primarily driving the need to build out renewables. It is literally, 'What are you able to get on the grid as quickly as possible?'"

Long reliant on fossil fuels for its economy, China has vowed to cut carbon emissions by doubling down on renewable energy. As Tim Appenzeller reports for Science, China has gone all in: “After years of patiently nurturing the sector through subsidies, China now dominates global production of renewable energy technologies. It makes 80% of the world’s solar cells, 70% of its wind turbines, and 70% of its lithium batteries, at prices no competitor can match.”

“China really mastered this … with the help of the scale of its economy, its manufacturing capacity, and the fierce competition right at home,” Li Shuo, director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute, told Mr. Appenzeller. However, lest you think that China is inventing the industry, Mr. Li notes that it “more or less relying on the same core [solar] technology that the United States invented half a century ago.

Sigh.

Here's a startling fact: Mr. Appenzeller reports that in 2024 China installed new solar and wind generation that were the equivalent of 100 nuclear plants. The U.S. has only built two in the last ten years, and, despite a Trump Administration effort to build more, faster, they can take decades to happen.

Author Bill McKibben told The Guardian:

…we’ve had 35 years of a full-on disinformation campaign from the fossil fuel industry about climate change, about alternative energy, all designed to drive home the idea that only the way that we’re doing things now could possibly work. And that’s sunk in with too many people, especially in this country, but the rest of the world is quickly shaking off that habit.

Economic self-interest drives this; Mr. McKibben says: “As long as you rely on a source of power that’s only available in a few places, the people who control those places will end up with inordinate wealth and power.” E.g., he lists John D. Rockefeller, Putin, the Koch brothers, and the king of Saudi Arabia as examples.

China’s dominance in renewable energy manufacturing means that The Global South and Southeast Asia are turning even more to China, which has all sorts of geopolitical implications. “For people who were asking, ‘How am I going to keep the lights on in my home,’ it was a very obvious choice,” Lauri Myllyvirta, an analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, told Mr. Appenzeller.

Mr. McKibben is harsh in his criticism of how the U.S. has treated the renewable revolution:

You could tell watching the climate talks this year in Belém, Brazil, that people are sort of moving past the US, like we’re sort of receding into the rearview mirror. It’s becoming clearer and clearer where the future lies.

As patriotic Americans, that should upset us. These technologies were all invented in the US. The first solar cell in 1954 at Bell Labs in New Jersey. The first industrial wind turbine in 1941 at Grandpa’s Knob in Vermont. We could have owned these technologies, and instead we’ve just ceded them to our theoretical main rival on this planet. I don’t think there’s been an act of national self-sabotage quite like this that I can think of anywhere in human history.

Mr. Appenzeller believes that renewables have gone from a virtuous thing to do to being a rational thing to do: “Now, the real driver is self-interest: lower cost and greater energy security.” Accordingly, “To many, the continued growth of renewables now seems unstoppable—a prospect that has led Science to name the renewable energy surge its 2025 Breakthrough of the Year.”

So, bravo to renewables and to the people who are making them happen. I just wish more of it was happening here.