With almost 50 gigawatts of new capacity in 2024, the US broke the previous year’s record and installed more renewable energy than Argentina has in its entire power grid from any source, or just below Sweden’s total capacity. Though the Trump administration is doing everything it can to slow this revolution, market forces may just not care that much.
“It took more than 20 years for the U.S. to install the first 100 GW of clean power, five years to install the next 100 GW, and three years to install the most recent 100 GW,” the report states.
Solar power was the dominant force last year, accounting for 33.3 of the 49 new GW. That was followed by battery storage at 11.3 GW and wind power at about four GW, though land-based wind power remains the largest single renewable source at almost 155 installed GW. That battery storage increase demonstrates the tech’s abrupt and meteoric rise: the total installed battery storage capacity is now 28.9 GW, meaning 2024 accounts for almost 40 percent of the total.
The dominance of renewable energy in new power grid additions is spreading, with recent news showing similar progress in the United Kingdom. The fact is that solar and wind power, and now battery storage as well, are outright cheaper than fossil fuels in most scenarios at this point, and that’s before you bother considering the near-term externalities of pollution-related illness and death and the long-term ones of a broken climate. But that doesn’t mean that Donald Trump won’t try and change the equation.
Trump’s day-one moves to slow wind power development and spur expanded oil and gas drilling even beyond the current historic records are having an effect. He froze some funding for things like battery manufacturing and for low-income communities to install solar power, and the uncertainty in the already-struggling offshore wind industry has put most of the existing projects at risk. The ACP report said that “momentum has stalled” in particular in wind power thanks to Trump’s moves. “Clarity is needed to allow projects to move forward — until then many projects are at risk.”
The war on renewables, of course will hurt red states and districts the most: per the new report, 77 percent of the renewable capacity added in 2024 were in Republican-held districts, and 79 percent of all existing clean power capacity is also in red districts.
Still, the industry is apparently worried enough to try and roll itself up into Trump and his cronies’ language about energy, rather than just stating the obvious facts that clean power is cheaper, cleaner, and just obviously a better idea. “The only way to meet skyrocketing energy demand is to embrace all American energy resources,” said ACP CEO Jason Grumet, in a press release accompanying the new report. “Our nation’s economic growth and digital dominance require aggressive pursuit of a true all of the above energy strategy.”
If 93 percent of new capacity demand in a given year can be met by solar, wind, and batteries, and California and other high-renewable-penetration areas are proving over and over that the decades-old concerns about reliability are largely unfounded, then that GOP “all-of-the-above” talking point can safely die a hasty death, if only the industry killing it off would allow it.
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