In the eyes of Google’s executives, AI is both a once-in-a-generation opportunity and an existential threat to its search monopoly. The company is spending accordingly: Alphabet invested roughly $90 billion in capital expenditures in 2025 and plans to nearly double that to as much as $185 billion in 2026.

Most of that money will flow to data centers—and the infrastructure needed to power them.

Each new data center requires as much electricity as a small city. Permit documents and site plans we obtained show campus designs that use 800–1,000 MW of power. And Google is building dozens of them. Cleanview now tracks 63 Google data center projects across 20 U.S. states. Finding enough electricity to power all of this development has become arguably the company’s most important operational challenge.

Until recently, Google’s power strategy was straightforward. The company worked with utilities to secure grid connections and then contracted with clean energy developers to match its electricity consumption. Google has spent more than a decade building a reputation as a climate leader on the strength of that model. It was the first major tech company to match 100% of its electricity consumption with renewable energy purchases. It pioneered the concept of 24/7 carbon-free energy. And it has signed more than 22 GW of clean energy power purchase agreements.

But our latest report—and the documents we obtained to produce it—reveal a more complicated story and an evolving power strategy.

In November 2025, Google announced its plans to invest $40 billion in Texas data centers. The company said that investment would fund new data center campuses in Armstrong County and Haskell County. In Armstrong County, Google confirmed to Cleanview that it has partnered with Crusoe Energy to develop a campus known as ‘Goodnight,’ near the town of Claude.

In January 2026, Crusoe filed a permit to build a 933 MW natural gas power plant onsite at the Goodnight campus. Documents obtained by Cleanview show that the gas plant would power two buildings on the campus and would not connect to the power grid. The gas turbines could emit as much as 4.5 million tons of CO2 per year. Cleanview commissioned high-resolution satellite imagery and confirmed the two buildings that would receive power from the gas plant are under construction.

When we reached out for comment, Google confirmed it has partnered with Crusoe to build the Goodnight campus. A Google spokesperson said the company hasn’t signed an offtake agreement with Crusoe for the natural gas plant. Someone familiar with the partnership between the two companies described the negotiations as ongoing and said the amount of power Google would use from the gas plant is still to be determined.

The Goodnight power plant is notable not just for its scale, but for what it lacks. In 2025, Google announced a first-of-its kind agreement to buy power from a 400 MW natural gas plant with carbon capture and storage (CCS) in Illinois. Documents obtained by the Flatwater Free Press suggest Google is exploring a proposed 1,000-3,000 MW gas plant with CCS in Nebraska. (Google told Cleanview they haven’t signed a contract for the project). Unlike these projects, Goodnight’s natural gas plant has no carbon capture technology.

To power its data centers, Google is also investing more in clean energy technology than almost any other entity—public or private—in the world. Since early 2025, the company has signed several gigawatts of new solar and wind PPAs across PJM, ERCOT, SPP, and MISO. It is paying $3 billion to keep aging hydroelectric dams on the grid in Pennsylvania. It is restarting Iowa’s only nuclear plant under a 25-year PPA. And it has signed first-of-their-kind offtake agreements for enhanced geothermal, 100-hour iron-air batteries, advanced nuclear fission, and even fusion energy.

Google is also finding innovative ways to use co-located renewables to connect its data centers in as little as 18 months. In February we published a report on Google’s partnership with AES in Texas, where it will co-locate a 850 MW data center with 600 MW of solar and 945 MW of wind and bypass the crowded ERCOT large-load queue in the process. In this report, we found another example of the strategy that hasn’t been reported on—this time with its soon-to-be subsidiary Intersect Power. Across these projects, Google is bringing nearly 2 GW of data center load online in 2027–2028, powered by co-located wind and solar, without entering the large load queue at all.

Our report shows that Google has pivoted from a grid+renewables strategy to what can be described as an “Everything Everywhere All at Once” strategy when it comes to powering its AI models and compute—one that includes everything from solar and wind to natural gas power.

Get the full report and dataset

The complete ~50-page report includes our analysis of 63 Google data centers across 20 states, detailed case studies, and the company’s evolving power strategy in the AI era. You’ll also get two data files—one covering all 63 data center sites and another with approximately 25 power deals and partnerships we identified.

Get the full report

Get the free excerpt

We’re releasing a free excerpt focused on one of the report’s most significant findings: The role of natural gas in Google’s data center strategy. You can read the excerpt here.

On Wednesday, Google announced a new data center in Texas that will be powered by renewables built by AES Clean Energy. The press release was light on details, so I used Cleanview’s platform to try to learn more about the project.

In December AES filed a document showing that it plans to connect an 850 MW data center (Google’s) to its massive solar and wind project in West Texas.

The project would use 600 MW of solar and 945 MW of wind power. Using both solar and wind enables near round-the-clock clean energy. And by connecting to the grid, Google gets the reliability it needs when solar and wind output drop.

But the creative part is how this deal enables Google to skip Texas’ large load queue and get online in 18 months instead of 5+ years.

Like the rest of the country, Texas has a massive backlog of data centers trying to connect to its power grid. At the end of 2025, the backlog was 225 GW—equivalent to 20 New York City’s of power demand.

For data center developers like Google that backlog means waiting years to connect to the grid. These delays have led some companies like Meta to start building their own gas power plants as I wrote in Cleanview’s latest report.

But Google found an alternative path—one that relies on a huge amount of onsite renewable energy.

Thanks to a recent rule change, a data center in Texas can piggyback off a power project’s interconnection agreement if its co-located. And that’s what Google appears to be doing here with AES. The documents we found suggest Google is using AES’ grid connection, which took years to secure to get around the ERCOT large load queue.

The wind phase of the project is expected to come online in August 2027. If Google had gone the traditional route, there’s no way they could have achieved that timeline. If they had tried to connect this data center in Virginia, they would have had to wait until the early 2030s.

It’s worth noting that this timeline is similar to the one Amazon and Meta are achieving by using natural gas. They’ve argued that they have to use gas because waiting for renewables delivered through the grid would take too long.

But with this project, Google is proving that it’s possible to build a 850 MW data center in 18 months powered almost entirely by co-located renewables.

Developers and policymakers should take note.

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We wrote more about this project in a brief for Cleanview research subscribers. That brief includes a detailed project timeline, the equipment being used, and the broader policy and market context. Visit our website if you’re interested in becoming a subscriber.

It can now take as long as 7 years to connect a data center to the power grid. Beginning about a year ago, developers began pursuing new power strategies. Rather than wait, many data centers are now building their own power plants.

In what we believe is the most comprehensive analysis of this trend to date, we identified 46 data centers with a combined capacity of 56 GW that plan to build their own power “behind-the-meter.” That represents roughly 30% of all planned data center capacity in the United States, according to Cleanview’s project tracker.

In the last year, this trend has gone from niche to mainstream. 90% of the projects we identified—representing approximately 50 GW—were announced in 2025 alone. A year ago, behind-the-meter data center power was a curiosity, embodied by xAI's controversial decision to truck mobile generators into Memphis. Now it's an increasingly common development strategy.

When we began this research, we were skeptical of many of these projects—as all analysts should be. Data center developers often pursue multiple projects with the intention of only building one (the “phantom project” phenomenon). Turbine manufacturers have said lead times for their equipment now stretch as long as 5-7 years. Local opposition to data centers is rising.

But we think much of this capacity is likely to come online soon. Many of the projects we identified are already under construction—in some cases with crews working through the night. Many of those that aren’t under construction have been permitted and have placed equipment orders.

We were able to identify specific equipment deals at approximately two-thirds of the projects we tracked—commitments to manufacturers like GE Vernova, Caterpillar, Siemens, and Doosan that signal serious intent.

What makes our report unique is that we didn’t rely on press releases, which show what developers say they are going to build. Instead we tracked down actual equipment deals and permits showing site plans.

This revealed a very different—and surprising—story. Most of the press releases we found mentioned “all of the above” strategies that include renewables. But ~75% of the generation equipment we could identify (23 GW) was natural gas-powered. Virtually none of the developers planned to build renewables in the short term.

But data centers aren’t planning to use your typical gas turbines—hence why many are able to install them this year or next year. Data center developers are instead turning to:

• Mobile gas generators strapped to semitrucks

• Aeroderivative turbines originally designed for aircraft and warships

• Reciprocating engines that ramp fast, but are less efficient

• Refurbished turbines acquired from industrial operations

In our research, we came across a company that typically sells cruise ship engines that struck a deal to power a data center. One developer, unable to secure enough conventional turbines, placed a $1.25 billion order with Boom Supersonic—a company that has never sold a power generation product. Elon Musk's xAI famously drove in semitrucks with natural gas generators on the back to build what was at one time the world's largest data center.

On the surface this makes no sense. These are less efficient technologies and the power will cost far more. But an AI data center can earn as much as $10-12 billion per GW. Getting online a few years early can result in a windfall. Power generation efficiency is out. Speed to power is all that developers care about.

As a company, our main job is to track data centers and power projects. Still, much of this data shocked us. The public narrative is that data centers are waiting for grid connections and 5-7 year turbine backlogs. But that narrative is lagging what is actually happening on the ground in rural counties across the country.

To read the full report, you can head to our website. We’ve released both a free summary and a ~50-page paid version with two datasets. We also have a discounted option for nonprofits and researchers.

Read the report

The future of America’s power grid is being written every day—in interconnection queues, regulatory filings, and documents that most people will never see.

A new solar project gets proposed in Texas and a spreadsheet is updated somewhere on the internet. A data center developer requests a local permit and a file is published on an obscure permit dashboard in Georgia. A battery storage facility breaks ground in Arizona as seen in a federal filing.

Until now, keeping track of all of this required checking dozens of sources, navigating difficult government websites, and tracking local news across hundreds of counties. The scale of changes that happen in a single day is more than any human can process on their own.

Today, I’m excited to announce the launch of Cleanview’s Project Feed and Email Alerts—a new way to track these changes across more than 10,000 power projects and 1,000 data centers in the US.

With the Project Feed, you can see a stream of updates as they happen. In our feed, you can find:

• Newly proposed projects entering interconnection queues

• Interconnection agreements being signed, which signal a project will almost certainly be built

• Construction milestones

With Email Alerts, you can get these updates delivered to your inbox daily or weekly, filtered to the markets and project types you care about.

Try it for free

Examples of how you can use this

If you’re a project developer, understanding what’s happening in your target markets is critical. When a competitor signs an interconnection agreement in a county where you’re planning to build, that’s a signal. It means their project just went from speculative to almost guaranteed. Some of the largest developers in North America are already using Cleanview for this kind of competitive intelligence.

If you’re on a business development team selling equipment or services to developers, timing matters. The moment an interconnection agreement is signed is when a developer shifts from early planning to spending potentially billions of dollars. Being one of the first to know about that moment can make the difference between winning and losing a deal.

And if you’re an investor or analyst tracking the clean energy market, the feed gives you a real-time view of where capital is flowing. Instead of waiting for quarterly reports or secondhand news, you can see the actual filings and milestones as they happen.

If you’re an existing Cleanview customer, the Project Feed is available now in your dashboard. If you’re not yet a customer and want to see it in action, check out our 7-day free trial.

Try it for free

How we built this

Ok, now for the nerdy part for those of you interested in how we built this and what we learned in the process.

For the last few years, we’ve been tracking power projects and data centers across the US by pulling data from interconnection queues, federal filings, and public documents. But we realized that the raw data was only part of the picture. What our customers really needed was to know when something changed.

So we started watching for changes across all of these sources. We set up data pipelines to notify us whenever a project was added, changed, or removed. But we were quickly flooded with meaningless noise.

In the first three months of internal testing, we tracked more than 10,000 project changes. Most of them weren’t that helpful. A project might change from 100 MW to 105 MW, or an expected operating date might change from July 10th to July 20th.

In one case, ERCOT simply changed their code for battery projects from BAT to OTH and we were hit with thousands of updates. Then they changed it back. Oops!

After months of internal testing we got the update feed into a place where it showed true project signals and weeded out the noise.

Then over the holidays, I started to play around with Claude Code and Gemini’s API. For the uninitiated, Claude Code is a coding agent that has taken the world by storm. It speeds up the process of building software significantly. Gemini is one of many large language models. Importantly, its context window is massive meaning you can give it a 1,000 page PDF and ask it to extract key information and summarize the document.

Using these two tools, we scraped thousands of interconnection agreements filed in FERC’s E-Library. Because Texas does its own thing, we found a page with all the interconnection agreements filed in the state. Then we threw all of them at Gemini and asked it to extract details like the developer, project name, expected operating date, and so on.

Most of the issues we ran into were due to FERC’s poor documentation and file structure. Here, too, we used Gemini to categorize documents.

After a few weeks of development, we had a clean table with all these summarized documents. We combined that with our existing project changelog, mentioned above. And the feed was born.

The result is a tool that surfaces the information that actually matters, without requiring you to dig through government websites or parse through massive PDFs.

Try it for free

If you’re the kind of wonk that made it this far, you might be interested in Cleanview’s API. We haven’t added the project update feed as an endpoint yet, but we’ve been sharing a beta version with a few customers.

Our API plans start at $14,000 per year. If you’re interested in getting early access to the update feed endpoint, you can reach out here.

This week, we’re making a significant portion of it free.

I’m excited to announce the launch of Cleanview’s Project Explorer—a free tool that lets you explore thousands of operating and planned solar, wind, battery, and data center projects in every state across the US.

Here are a few examples of what you can find:

• An interactive map of every planned data center in the US

• The largest operating and planned solar projects in each state

• Data showing how many battery storage projects have been built in each state

Every day, new energy infrastructure projects are announced somewhere in America. Some are as large as Manhattan. Others are as small as a football field. Collectively, these projects tell a story about where our country, our economy, and our planet are heading.

Helping people better understand all of these changes—and their implications—is our mission at Cleanview. Our hope is that this free resource helps further that mission.

Give it a try and let us know what you think.

Try it out

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been analyzing data to see how many power projects have been cancelled this year. In our latest report, we found that 1,891 power projects with a combined 266 GW of generation capacity have been cancelled in 2025—equivalent to roughly one-quarter of America’s entire current electricity generation capacity.

Clean energy projects have been hit hardest, accounting for 93% of project cancellations in 2025. Utility-scale solar alone saw 86 GW cancelled, while battery storage projects lost 79 GW and wind projects shed 54 GW.

The Trump administration and their chaotic policies were responsible for many of these project cancellations. But the analysis showed that there’s much more causing project cancellations and preventing the buildout of clean energy than federal policy.

While each region and grid faces unique challenges, five patterns emerged across the 1,891 cancelled projects that we analyzed:

Local opposition is killing projects where electricity demand is growing fastest

Virginia—home to the country’s largest data center market—lost 6.7 GW of potential capacity. In Ohio, where elected officials have courted hyperscale data centers, the state has blocked more clean energy projects than any other. In Indiana, another data center hotbed, 44% of proposed data centers are located in counties that restrict renewable energy development.

A failure to build transmission lines is resulting in high interconnection costs

High-voltage transmission construction has plummeted from 4,000 miles in 2013 to just 322 miles in 2024—less than one-tenth of the 5,000 miles per year needed. In MISO, average interconnection costs for cancelled projects hit $753,116 per MW—roughly half of a typical project’s total capital cost. Louisiana and Missouri, with costs exceeding $900k per MW, lost 26 GW of capacity combined in 2025.

Battery storage economics are worsening from market saturation and tariffs

“Battery cannibalization”—where growing capacity drives down the prices batteries earn—is making it harder to build profitable battery projects. Texas battery revenues crashed 70% from $192/kW in 2023 to $55/kW in 2024, while ancillary service prices fell 90%. California saw similar declines, with revenues falling from $103/kW in 2022 to just $53/kW in 2024. Meanwhile, Trump’s tariffs have increased the cost of batteries by 56-69%.

Trump’s War on Wind killed gigawatts of potential capacity

Since taking office, the Trump administration has systematically dismantled offshore wind development through sweeping policy actions, funding cancellations, and construction halts. These moves led to massive waves of project cancellations in New York (13 GW), New England (11 GW), and California (2.5 GW).

Grid operators cleaned up their interconnection queues

Starting in 2023, ISOs implemented sweeping reforms to eliminate speculative projects from their queues. New cluster processes, higher deposits, and compressed timelines resulted in hundreds of project cancellations. In MISO, 62% of 2025’s 73.4 GW in cancellations came from a single study cycle. SPP saw 27 GW cancelled in August 2025 alone following interconnection study results. While reforms improved queue quality, they accelerated project cancellations.

Cancelled projects will result in higher power prices and less economic growth

These project cancellations will affect nearly every American. The 266 GW of lost capacity threatens higher electricity prices for households and businesses as supply fails to keep pace with surging demand—a dynamic already visible in PJM’s double-digit annual price increases.

Beyond higher bills, the cancellations represent a massive economic loss. We estimate that the 1,891 projects cancelled this year would have generated $400 billion in investment—capital that would have flowed disproportionately to rural communities in need of economic revitalization.

The current trajectory is unsustainable: America is simultaneously approving unprecedented electricity demand while cancelling the generation needed to meet it, creating policy incoherence that threatens grid reliability, affordability, and the country’s competitiveness in the global AI race.

You can read the full report by clicking the button below:

Read the report

More from Cleanview

In this report, you can find:

• What kind of power projects America has built over the last 12 months

• What kind of power projects are under construction today

• Maps and tables of recently built projects

• Maps and tables of projects under construction

• Top developers by technology

To access the report, you can sign up for Cleanview by clicking the button below. We’re making the report available to all customers—including those on our 7-day free trial. Customers can find the report by navigating to the Reports tab in our menu.

Try Cleanview for free

Takeaways from our report

Solar’s growth appears to be slowing

Since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, utility-scale solar has surged. But that growth quietly stalled out beginning in November 2024.

After years of double digit growth rates, annualized utility-scale solar capacity additions have actually fallen by 6% since the end of 2024, dropping from a peak of 32,982 MW in November 2024 to 30,965 MW over the last 12 months.

This is likely due to two reasons. First, solar developers rushed to complete projects before the Biden administration’s tariffs on Southeast Asian imports kicked in. This pulled forward many projects that otherwise would have been built this year. Second, high interest rates have probably cut some of the appetite from investors considering their impact on returns.

This trend may be changing soon, according to construction pipeline data. After falling between November 2023 and November 2024, the amount of solar capacity under construction has been rising quickly over the last year.

Solar construction pipeline should grow in the years ahead as developers race to bring projects online before the expiration of the ITC tax credit.

The battery market continues to boom

Battery storage hasn’t seen the same slowdown that solar has. Instead, annualized battery capacity additions have grown by 284% in the last three years and 38% in the last year alone, reaching 13,661 MW over the trailing 12 months.

But here, too, things could be changing in the near future. Battery construction pipeline reached 16,626 MW as of September 2025—up 39% year-over-year—but has been relatively flat since March 2025.

This could be due to unprecedented uncertainty in tariff rates—which impact virtually all battery projects. It could also be due to the record-low battery revenues that investors are seeing in Texas—the country’s largest battery market in the country.

Wind power continues to struggle

The wind industry continues to struggle in the US. Wind capacity additions have fallen by 74% since their October 2021 peak, when the country added 18,526 MW. Over the last 12 months, the US added just 4,792 MW of new wind capacity—a 29% decline compared to September 2024.

This decline reflects ongoing challenges including supply chain constraints, permitting issues, interconnection costs, rising input costs, and high interest rates. Unlike solar, which saw a post-IRA boom, wind has yet to experience a meaningful recovery.

However, there are some signs of potential improvement. Wind capacity under construction has grown by 87% year-over-year to reach 18,543 MW as of September 2025. This has been driven primarily by mega-scale projects that have been in the works for years and are finally reaching construction.

Gas power is coming back—slowly

Natural gas capacity additions have shown modest recovery, growing 19% year-over-year to reach 3,937 MW over the last 12 months. However, this remains 84% below the March 2019 peak of 23,959 MW, reflecting the long-term decline of new gas plant construction.

The construction pipeline tells a more interesting story. Gas capacity under construction has grown 64% year-over-year to 8,691 MW. Meanwhile, gas capacity across all stages of development we track has more than doubled in the last year.

Recently built projects

In the report, you can also see recently built projects across different technologies. Here are the largest power projects that came online over the last month:

Projects under construction

The report also features power projects under construction by technology. Here are some of the largest power projects under construction in the US:

Top developers

Using our developer benchmark tool, we’ve ranked the top developers in the US across each technology. Here’s a summary for all clean energy technologies:

Get the full report

To access the report, you can sign up for Cleanview by clicking the button below. We’re making the report available to all customers—including those on our 7-day free trial.

Try Cleanview for free

More from the Cleanview newsletter

Earlier this month, we launched our data center tracker with more than 500 planned data centers in the US. I used the tracker to write a story about the largest planned hyperscale projects that quickly became one of my most popular.

The most common question I’ve been asked since then is how we found all these data centers.

Unlike the 10,000+ planned power projects that we track on the Cleanview platform, there aren’t any public data center queues that you can download. These projects are famously secretive—often operating under opaque holding companies like Wildcat LLC (Meta) for as long as possible.

I think transparency is important as we decide where and how to site these projects given the impact they will have on the grid, local economies, and the environment. So I thought I’d share some of the most common sources where we’ve been able to identify data centers:

State environmental permits

Virtually all data centers have backup diesel generators. To run those, they often need a permit from the state.

• Virginia publishes their Issued Air Permits for Data Centers

• Texas publishes their Texas Title V Permits

• California counties publish their CEQA archives

We went through hundreds of these files to identify planned projects. For example, in the Texas Title V Permit database we found 312 pages of details on OpenAI’s Stargate project in Texas (under the name Longhorn Data Center).

Data center developer / hyperscaler websites

While some companies try to conceal their identify for as long as possible, some brag about their 1 GW data center in hopes of attracting a tenant.

As we started to identify individual projects, we checked their website and press releases for any previous announcements. This yielded a surprisingly large number of projects. One project found in an environmental permit, might lead to another 20 from the developer’s website.

Investor presentations and SEC filings

For publicly traded companies—especially “neoclouds”—investor presentations and quarterly filings proved to be a goldmine. Often we could find the exact capacity in megawatts and timing of each phase of a project in these documents.

Here’s an example of the details that Applied Digital shared about their Polaris Forge 1 project in North Dakota in a recent investor presentation:

Local news stories

Every time we found a project, we searched for other projects in the same city and county.

Often local news stories popped up where some local journalist had sat through a county commission meeting and reported on a data center developer applying for a land zoning change.

That might also point towards a county website or document listing all planned projects as happened in the data center hotspot of New Albany, OH.

Those were a few of the sources that helped us identify projects. Given how much interest there is in the topic, I thought I’d share them here.

In some ways, this is giving away our secret sauce. But throughout my career I’ve operated on a principle of transparency. And given that it took three of us most of the summer to build our initial dataset, I’ll assume there are a lot of folks who’d prefer to just sign up for the Cleanview platform than do all the grunt work themselves.

Sign up for Cleanview

If your company or nonprofit is interested in using the platform, you can try it out for free for 7 days by clicking the button below.

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More from Cleanview

• 4.3 GW of new power capacity came online across 42 projects

• 84% of new capacity came from clean energy and storage projects, totaling 3.6 GW.

• The remaining 16% of capacity came from 5 gas peaker plants with a combined capacity of 704 MW.

Highlights

• Repsol Renewables and Hecate Energy completed Outpost Solar, a 515 MW solar project in Texas that is one of the country’s largest. The Spanish company now has 1.4 GW of clean energy project’s operating in the US.

• NextEra Energy completed Kola Energy Storage, a 400 MW/1,100 MWh storage project east of the San Francisco Bay Area. The project first entered the CAISO interconnection queue in 2016. That 9 year timeline puts it close the average 10 year development timeline in the state of California, according to our data. The project has a 15 year capacity agreement with PG&E.

• Leeward Energy completed Ridgely Energy Farm. The project is Tennessee’s largest operating solar farm. The project secured a 20-year power purchase agreement with the utility, TVA in 2020.

• Puget Sound Energy completed Beaver Creek Wind, a 248 MW project in Stillwater County, Montana. The project will send power to the Washington utility’s customers through the Colstrip Transmission System.

• Arevon completed Gibson Solar in Indiana. Northern Indiana Public Service Co. (NIPSCO) will own and operate the project going forward.

• Clearway Energy brought the 200-MW Luna Valley Solar project online in Fresno County, California. The plant can power 80,000 homes and pushes Clearway’s operating fleet in the state to nearly 7 GW.

• NextEra Energy finished Flat Fork Solar, a 200 MW solar farm spanning St. Francis, Lee and Monroe counties in Arkansas. The project has a long-term power purchase agreement with Entergy Arkansas and cost an estimated $264 million.

• Invenergy completed Flat Ridge 5, part of the 284 MW Flat Ridge 4 & 5 Wind Energy Center in Harper and Kingman counties, Kansas. Construction of the 64 turbines began in 2024.

• Nightpeak Energy completed Bocanova Power, a 150 MW/300 MWh battery storage project near Houston. The two-hour facility uses Tesla Megapack 2 XL units and took just two years to develop.

• Clearway Energy finished Rosamond South 1, a 140 MW solar + 118 MW/472 MWh storage project in Kern County, California. The project secured a 15-year contract with MCE, the University of California and municipal utilities.

Access every clean energy project

To build the map and tables below, I used our project tracker at Cleanview. If you’re interested in trying the platform out, head to our website to try it out for free for 7 days.

Learn more

More from Cleanview

I’ve been following the development of AI and data centers closely for much of the last few years. And even I’ve been shocked by what I’ve learned in building this product.

Some of the projects we’re tracking are set to consume more electricity than many of America’s largest cities. A year or two ago, I would have said they couldn’t get built. But according to satellite images we’re using to verify development status, many of them are already well underway.

When I started building the product, I expected most projects to be owned by Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon. And these hyperscalers certainly own a lot of them. But many of the largest developers we’re tracking are companies I had never heard of a few months ago.

I expected much of the development to be focused in the markets you always hear about, like Northern Virginia. But according to the data we’ve gathered so far, much of the growth of data center capacity will come from towns and counties most Americans will have never heard of—like Storey County, Nevada and New Albany, Ohio.

Throughout my career, my work has always been driven by two things: curiosity and purpose. This new product has been endlessly fascinating for my curious mind. But, if I’m honest, I’ve wrestled a lot with how it might serve Cleanview’s larger mission of accelerating the clean energy transition—my purpose in doing any of this.

Like many people, I’m still not entirely sure what to make of the AI boom and all the data centers powering it. There’s much about AI that makes me optimistic. I also have deep reservations and concerns about its harms and consequences.

At a personal level, my hope is that in building this product and sharing what I learn, I can be a skeptically optimistic voice in this larger conversation. For Cleanview as a company, I hope this product will help our customers power as many data centers as possible with clean energy and create more transparency in the industry.

Over the coming weeks I’ll be sharing more about the product and what I’ve learned so far in building it. In the meantime, if you want early access, head over to our website and let us know that you want to try out the new product.

Request early access

More from Cleanview

• Which companies have built the most capacity over the last 12 months

• Which companies have the largest development pipelines

• Which companies are rising and falling compared to their peers

Last week we shared the results of our latest developer benchmark analysis with our customers. We wanted to share a preview of those results here.

More 200 developers brought projects online over the last year. If you’re interested in accessing the full benchmark report we sent our customers, or tracking developer pipelines in real-time, check out the Cleanview platform.

We recently launched a monthly plan and free trial program that you can request access to by clicking the button below.

Request a free trial

More from Cleanview

• 3.06 GW of new power capacity came online across 59 projects

• 99.7% of new capacity came from clean energy and storage projects

• 94% of new capacity came from solar and batteries

• Projects came online in 20 states

Highlights

Big batteries came online across the Western US and Texas
Big batteries anchored the month: Anole Energy Storage (TX, 240 MW), Seaside BESS (OR, 200 MW), Roadrunner Reserve (AZ, 200 MW), and Chillingham Storage (TX, 150 MW) all reached operation, providing fast-ramping capacity that helps balance variable renewables.

Solar keeps scaling in diverse markets
New solar projects came online in more than a dozen states. Hornshadow Solar II (UT, 200 MW), Polaris Solar Park (MI, 100 MW), Wheatsborough Solar (OH, 125 MW), Coldwater River Solar (MI, 150 MW). We saw continued growth in community and C&I solar across NY, NJ, CA, and the Mid-Atlantic.

California adds some new mega-projects
California led the country, adding hybrid solar and battery projects: Eland Solar & Storage, Phase 2 (200 MW + 150 MW), alongside Northern Orchard Solar PV (150 MW + 92 MW) and Sandrini Solar 100 (95.4 MW)—illustrating how hybrids and large-scale PV are becoming standard grid resources in the state.

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When I published that assessment, I received a lot of messages from respected developers and analysts arguing that I was too pessimistic. (I summarized and published the feedback I received here).

It turns out clean energy tax rules are complicated! So for that reason, I reached out to an expert in the field to ask him to explain the new IRS ruling to me and answer my questions.

Zach Crowley is a Partner at the law firm Clean Energy Counsel. His speciality at the firm is all things tax credits, so he knows more than just about anyone about this stuff. Here’s a transcript of our conversation:

What are the major changes to the rules folks should know about?

The big change is that on September 2nd the 5% safe harbor is no longer available for projects unless they are under 1.5 MW in size.

The physical work test remains. You can continue to begin construction until July 4th of 2026 in order to retain four years of continuity. It also—just like the prior guidance—clarifies that if you are outside of that four years of continuity that you have a facts and circumstances test to show the physical work.

There are some changes from the prior begun construction guidance. An example of that is previously the facts and circumstances tests outside of that four years were a little bit easier to satisfy. There were things like getting permits, entering into other contracts. These examples would have been clear evidence of you continuing that work for the continuity. Now there's a requirement for on-site construction continuing to occur. So if you're not within that four-year safe harbor window, there's going to be more qualification that you need to show evidence of the work that you are doing on an ongoing basis to satisfy that test.

Physical work can be on-site or off-site. Can you explain the difference?

For on-site work, the specific notice includes an example of installing racking, scaffolding, excavating foundations. Historically we've seen other folks use the building of roads that are necessary for the project itself as long as they're substantial. I think pouring concrete, things like that, are all good evidence.

In terms of tips, you need to document everything. What's really necessary for most financing parties is some kind of report, ideally by a third party where someone comes on site and they say here are all the physical examples of on-site work that's occurred. Ideally you don't leave it to a single action. It's better to say here I'm building a road, and I've poured concrete, and I've installed some of the racking.

Off-site is generally the ordering of customized equipment. Mostly it's limited to things like transformers, inverters, power conditioning equipment. We have seen other folks look at this for racking.

You need to enter into a binding written contract to build that on your behalf. Then there are specific rules about what can be included in the contract including the amounts of damages that can be paid as a result of non-compliance.

So for that off-site work, there’s no spend requirement, right?

That's right. It does not say that you have to spend $100,000. What you do need is a binding contract. When we say a binding written contract, what it means is that you will have to pay. There will be damages if you do not pay.

In general, you need to be above 5% if there's going to be a liquidated damages termination provision. Liquidated damages are circumstances where, as a result of a termination, there's just an automatic payment. Really what they're looking for is skin in the game.

I’ve heard it’s cheaper to do that off-site work than use the 5% safe harbor. Is that true?

It's dependent on each individual project but it is generally less than the 5%.

Some folks have entered into contracts for customized subcomponents of those major components like inverters or transformers. And by entering into the beginning stages of building that customized equipment they've said that's the beginning of construction. Those might cost hundreds of thousands of dollars relative to a $100 million project.

The issue is that if I'm a tax equity investor, I have to get comfortable with this. There always a balancing of what people describe as a sniff test. Like is it really going to be reasonable to go to the IRS and say I incurred $10,000 on a $200 million project and that should be enough to show that I did physical work?

The other point is that most of those kinds of equipment are long lead time items. Transformers are long lead time in terms of how long it takes to build them. [Editor’s note: That means you don’t have to pay 100% immediately upon signing the contract].

How will this impact projects that get delayed due to permitting?

Let's say that a project orders transformers and satisfied the requirements for physical work. They then have four years to place the project in service. If they do that this year in 2025, it would be the end of 2029. That gives them time to get the permits that they need.

But in a circumstance where they did not get the permits that they needed, they could still satisfy the continuity of that continuous construction, if the reason for the delays were, as an example, certain delays on permitting. But in that situation, they're in that facts and circumstances test. They're outside of the four-year continuity safe harbor.

So, what it means is when they go to file returns, there could be an audit that the IRS would say, well, we're looking at what you did over the course of the, let's say, five years, and it was not sufficient for showing an ongoing physical work of significant nature.

So, I think it's certainly possible that if you didn't get one of those permits and it’s delayed and delayed and delayed, it's going to be very difficult to show your satisfaction of those facts and circumstances even with that delay because you're just not able to do anything on-site during that time.

So in that case you might struggle to find a tax equity investor comfortable with taking that risk, right?

That's right. Historically, most investors and lenders have been really focused on the safe harbor period. Certain projects took four, five or six years. It was possible for those projects to satisfy the facts and circumstances test, but it's always been really difficult to get those funded.

I think a big question of whether you will be able to get those funded when that happens is what does the political landscape look like at that point? Because that’s in 2029 or 2030. Who's at Treasury? Who's the IRS?

I think that it's going to be difficult for projects with long permitting delays. But not just because of the issue around your eligibility for tax credits. Because power purchase agreements and site control and every other material project contract usually has time frames under which projects need to be built. So there are huge cascade of effects that end up happening when there are those big delays.

Are there other timelines people should be thinking about?

The obvious one is July of next year. If you don't begin construction by then, it's going to be hugely difficult.

But that's not true for smaller projects, right? With the timelines for residential, small commercial, industrial projects, you could begin construction after July of 2026 and put a project in service within a year or something [which is before the December 31, 2027 deadline].

Zach Crowley is a Partner at the law firm Clean Energy Counsel. You can read the firm’s summary of the new IRS guidance here and sign up for an upcoming webinar with more on the new rules here.

The first Trump administration did little to slow the growth of wind energy. The US installed 37 GW of wind capacity between when the President took office in 2017 and when he reluctantly left four years later—160% more capacity than the four years prior, according to Cleanview data.

Shortly before he took office in January, Trump told reporters in Mar-a-Lago that his second administration would take a very different approach to wind energy. “We are going to have a policy where no windmills are being built,” he said.

The growth of wind energy and the legal guardrails that should make such policy impossible made it easy to dismiss this early warning sign. Since then, it’s become clear that the administration is willing to break laws and pursue unprecedented policies to stop wind energy development entirely.

A new escalation that could threaten every wind project

This week, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman broke a story about the administration’s latest attack on wind energy:

The Transportation Department last Tuesday declared that it would now call for a national 1.2-mile property setback — that is, a mandatory distance requirement — for all wind facilities near railroads and highways.

A 1.2-mile setback in a country with as many highways and railroads as ours would restrict development on a huge swatch of the country’s land. But it was a single sentence buried in the same release that signaled a threat that could be much larger.

DOT said that it would instruct the Federal Aviation Administration to “thoroughly evaluate proposed wind turbines to ensure they do not pose a danger to aviation” — a signal that a once-routine FAA height clearance required for almost every wind turbine could now become a hurdle for the entire sector.

If the administration were to stop issuing FAA height clearance approvals, it would grind development to a halt for every wind energy project in America—on both federal and private land. By weaponizing this simple administrative procedure, the FAA could—at least temporarily—achieve Trump’s vision of “no windmills being built.”

Such a move would be challenged in courts. But even if a judge forces the administration to approve projects, damage would be done. With clean electricity tax credits set to expire by the end of 2027, FAA delays could threaten the financial viability of projects. That, and the larger policy uncertainty surrounding wind energy and the administration’s willingness to break the law, could scare off would-be investors making it impossible to fund a project.

Restrictive wind policies put $317 billion of investment at risk

Across the country, wind developers have planned 790 projects totaling 213 GW of power capacity, according to Cleanview’s project tracker. For now, virtually all of these projects face some kind of risk of cancellation or delay given the administration’s latest extreme policy position.

The cancellation of these projects could result in as much as $320 billion of lost investment.1 The impact of this lost investment would be felt across the country. But the damage would disproportionately impact Republican-led states like Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Iowa.

Cancelled projects would also result in less tax revenue and land lease payments to farmers in counties that voted overwhelmingly for Trump. Last year, I found that 88% of wind projects were built in counties that voted for Trump in 2020.

The country would also lose a much needed source of new electricity generation if the Trump administration killed or delayed hundreds of wind projects.

Electricity demand is rising faster than it has in decades. States like Texas have proven that its possible to meet extraordinary load growth while increasing reliability, cutting emissions, and reducing prices by building renewables and storage.

The country as a whole could follow in the footsteps of Texas. But not if the Trump administration restricts the supply of new energy.

The Republican Senators that could force Trump’s hand

There are few people in the country that could sway the administration’s position on FAA approvals and other restrictive wind policies. A group of climate activists yelling in the street is going to do nothing but feed into Trump’s larger narrative of fighting “elite environmentalists.” But one small group could force the President’s hand—and has proven recently that they are willing to put real pressure on the administration.

Last week Sen. Chuck Grassley announced that he would place holds on three Treasury Department nominees over the administration’s plan to end solar and wind tax credits earlier than originally agreed to.

To win over Republicans like Grassley who wanted a slow phase out of clean energy tax credits, Trump's big tax bill was written to give renewable developers 12 months to get solar and wind tax credits under construction. Up until now, that means they just need to spend more than 5% of their project’s capital and make progress on the project for 4 years.

But Trump and far-right extremists in the party made a backroom deal. If the far-right voted for the bill, Trump promised to have his Treasury Department rewrite the rules on what "begin construction" means.

This betrayal upset the group of Republicans that fought for a slow phase out including:

• Sen. John Curtis (UT)

• Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska)

• Sen. Chuck Grassley (Iowa)

• Sen. Joni Ernst (Iowa)

• Sen. Jerry Moran (Kansas)

Shortly after Grassley announced he would hold up Treasury Department nominees, Politico reported that Sen. Curtis would join him.

The other Senators could join Grassley and Curtis and pressure the administration into making good on its promise to support “all-of-the-above” energy policy. The alternative is less investment in their communities, fewer jobs, and rising electricity costs.

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Last week, Reuters published a story that featured gas power predictions and forecasts from consulting groups like McKinsey and Wood Mackenzie. They wrote:

Over 100 GW of new gas-fired projects have been announced, Jay Kim, Associate Partner at McKinsey, said. Not including small projects and those without completion dates, around 120 gas-fired plants are planned by 2030 for a total capacity of around 80 GW.

"To put that number in perspective, over the last five years the U.S. added only about 35 GW of gas," Kim said. "So, it's almost triple what it was."

But left unsaid was the fact that much of this capacity will never be built.

It’s easy to read the quote from McKinsey’s Jay Kim as saying gas capacity additions are about to grow by a factor of three. But that’s not what he’s saying. He’s saying that three times more gas plants have been announced than were actually built over the last five years.

The difference between what is announced and what is built is historically very large and is worth keeping in mind when reading about gas plant announcements.

Most proposed gas plants are never built

There are more than 2 terawatts (TW) worth of power capacity waiting to connect to the US power grid today, according to Cleanview’s project tracker. The vast majority of that capacity is in the form of solar, wind, and batteries. Naturally much of the discourse about the interconnection queue tends to focus on renewables.

Readers of this newsletter have probably heard that most of these projects will never be built. Historically just 14% of proposed solar projects and 11% of proposed battery projects have ever reached final completion.

The completion rate for gas power plants isn’t as low as renewables, but it’s still far from 100%. Between 2000 and 2023 just 31% of proposed gas plants reached commercial operation. That means for every three natural gas power plants that were announced over this period, just one was built.

This trend holds true across all regions and energy markets in the US. I would have assumed that the completion rate would be higher in regions where utilities have a monopoly like the Southeast and Western US. But in these regulated markets the historical completion rate is actually even lower than the US average at 28% and 18%.

The future never looks like the past, but it’s safe to assume that many of today’s announced gas power plants will never be built.

The latest gas buildout looks a lot like the past

Using data from Cleanview’s project tracker and the historical completion rate data above, I created a back-of-napkin forecast1 to see how much gas capacity could come online by 2030 based on proposed projects. The upshot is that the next 5 years is likely to look much like the last two decades.

Between now and 2030, the US is likely to build 53 GW of new gas capacity, or 8.8 GW per year. That’s much more fossil fuel power capacity than we should be building in a climate crisis. (There are plenty of other ways to meet that demand as I’ve written). But most media stories about this gas buildout describe it as a new phenomenon when its actually a continuation of what’s come before.

Over the last two decades the US built 9.6 GW of new gas power capacity per year on average—a similar amount to what’s likely to come online over the next 5 years.

It would be more accurate to say that 2024 and 2025 with their low gas capacity additions—at 2.4 GW and a projected 5 GW respectively—are the real deviations from the norm.

I haven’t seen any comprehensive analysis of what drove the gas slowdown in these years. But my hypothesis is that it was driven by the wave of utility net-zero pledges that came in the years before and the remarkable growth of renewables and storage—the top competitors to natural gas power.

Where are gas power plants being proposed?

Gas power plants have been proposed in at least 37 states across the country.2 Only a small number of states in the Northeast (where gas pipeline infrastructure is limited) and the Northwest (where hydro plants generate most electricity) are abstaining from building these fossil fuel projects.

The largest proposed project on this map is the massive 4.5 GW gas power plant that is being built at the site of the retired Homer City coal-fired power plant. The project is expected to power a new data center campus.

But not all of the gas plants that have been proposed are the same. 63% of the planned gas projects are combined-cycle plants that are expected to run about two-thirds of the hours in a given year. The remaining 34% are peaker plants that will run a small number of hours each year when demand is highest.

To me the real story of natural gas power is this: For a very short time, America was on track to build far less gas power plants than it had at any time this century. But that time was short lived. Utilities and independent power producers are back to building gas power plants as they have for much of the last half century. The stability of our climate depends on reversing that trend again and forever with cheaper, cleaner alternatives.

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Explore planned power projects in the US

Cleanview tracks 10,000+ planned power projects across the US making it easy to do analysis like the one featured in this story and track planned projects. If you’re interested in seeing a demo of the platform, click the button below.

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I’m excited to announce the launch of the Cleanview API. Of all the products we’ve released this year, the API is the one I’m most excited about.

With just a few lines of code, you can query a unified dataset of 10,000+ clean energy projects—past, present, and planned—across every major US grid. Our first set of endpoints include:

• Interconnection queue data across the 7 major ISOs and RTOs in the US

• Operational project data from EIA 860m

• Developer ownership and corporate linkage from thousands of documents

• Status tracking, expected operation dates, and location data

Over the last month, I used the Cleanview API nearly everyday to inform my analysis of how the Republican tax bill would impact clean energy in the US. That analysis was seen by millions of people, shared by Elon Musk, and cited on the floor of the Senate.

Without the API, this analysis would have taken weeks. With the API, it took less than an hour on a Saturday morning.

The beta version of the API is already being used by clean energy developers, investors, climate tech companies, and analysts.

If you’re interested in learning more about the API, you can explore the documentation here or book a demo by clicking the button below.

Book a demo

This story is a part of a larger series about Republicans’ current attempts to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act. You can read some recent stories in the series here, here, and here. I’m also posting a short article and data visualization about the bill everyday on LinkedIn. Come say hi!

Yesterday the Senate Finance Committee released their long-anticipated reconciliation bill and, with it, their plans to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act.

Going into the week, the consensus was that the “cooler heads” of the Senate would pass a much better bill than the disastrous one that came out of the House last month. But that consensus view appears to have been wrong.

The Senate’s bill is a slight improvement compared to the House version, but it still takes a sledgehammer to the IRA and threatens to slow clean energy deployment, raise energy prices, kill jobs, and make America less competitive with geopolitical rivals like China. Make no mistake: This is a bad bill that clean energy advocates should be doing everything to stop or revise significantly.

The bill phases out solar and wind tax credits starting in 2026 (6 months from now) and kills all of the IRA’s consumer tax credits outright within months. That timeline is better than the House bill’s draconian provision, which would have required projects to start construction within 90 days of the bill’s passage and reach final operation by the end of 2028. But it still puts many projects at risk.

The Senate bill contains a few other marginal improvements for clean energy development. It would allow developers to sell their tax credits (transferability), which makes it cheaper to develop projects. And most industry analysts believe the foreign entity of concern (FEOC) provisions are more workable than the House versions.

Nuclear, geothermal, and hydro projects emerged as the biggest winner of the Senate bill. If passed, the bill would have those tax credits last until the mid-2030s, a much more realistic timeline for projects that are likely to take decades to even get to the start of construction.

Battery storage also surprisingly made the list of technologies that would qualify for tax credits until the IRA’s original mid-2030s phase down. These projects face many headwinds due to how severely they’ve been impacted by tariffs. But if they can receive tax credits over the next decade, it will help reduce the cost of development and result in a more stable electric grid.

In today’s newsletter, I’ll share a summary of some of the most important clean energy provisions in the Senate bill. If you’re interested in reading the raw text, you can find it here. (A more readable version is here starting at Chapter 5).

A fast phase out for solar and wind tax credits

The Senate bill creates an aggressive timeline for eliminating solar and wind tax incentives, but gives developers more notice than the House version.

Under the Senate approach, solar and wind projects have until the end of 2025 to begin construction if they want to qualify for today's full investment and production tax credits. After that, the credits shrink rapidly:

• 2026: Projects receive only 60% of current credit values

• 2027: Projects receive only 20% of current credit values

• 2028 and beyond: No credits available

The “start of construction” requirement is much better than the “placed in service” requirement in the House bill.

It’s also worth noting that solar and wind projects can qualify as starting construction in one of two ways:

• 5% Safe-Harbor: A project is treated as having “begun construction” if the owner pays or incurs at least 5 % of the total project cost by 31 Dec 2025 and then makes continuous efforts toward completion (e.g., placing equipment orders, executing contracts, securing permits).

• Physical work: Alternatively, a project qualifies once physical construction of a significant nature starts — such as pouring turbine foundations, installing tracker posts, or manufacturing custom transformers — and the developer maintains continuous construction thereafter.

Battery storage emerges as a surprise winner

Unlike solar and wind, battery storage projects emerged relatively unscathed from the Senate Finance bill's clean energy rollbacks.

While the clean electricity production and investment credits face significant phase-outs for wind and solar starting in 2026, battery storage projects can continue accessing the full clean electricity investment credit through the later phase-out timeline that applies to "all other qualified facilities" - meaning 100 percent of the credit through 2033, then gradual reductions to 75 percent in 2034, 50 percent in 2035, and zero by 2036.

This is good news for battery storage, especially considering how much tariffs have already raised prices for materials.

Nuclear, geothermal and hydro get preferred treatment

Nuclear, geothermal, and hydropower projects escape the harsh 2026-2028 phase-out timeline imposed on wind and solar, instead following the original IRA phase-out schedule beginning in 2034.

If any of these projects begin construction before 2034, they will receive the full tax credit, offering a long timeline for projects that will likely need it.

Consumer tax credits hit the hardest

The Senate bill also moves aggressively to eliminate consumer-facing clean energy incentives:

Rooftop solar: Residential solar installations face a double hit from both the clean electricity investment credit phase-outs and a specific prohibition on "wind and solar leasing to residential customers." This latter provision would significantly impact third-party solar leasing models from companies like Sunrun that have driven much of the residential solar market's growth.

Electric Vehicles: All EV credits face rapid termination - the new clean vehicle credit ends 180 days after enactment, the used EV credit terminates 90 days after enactment, and commercial clean vehicle credits expire 180 days after enactment for most vehicles (with immediate restrictions on smaller commercial vehicles).

Home Energy Efficiency: The residential clean energy credit (solar, batteries, heat pumps) terminates 180 days after enactment, while the energy efficient home improvement credit ends on the same timeline. The new energy efficient home credit for builders also faces a 12-month termination deadline.

Read more reporting and commentary on the bill

Those are some of the main provisions I’m tracking. But the bill is hundreds of pages long and even the clean energy parts stretch dozens of pages. So there’s a lot more to this bill. Here are some other resources, posts and articles for those that want to dive deeper:

• The New York Times’ summary of the bill’s clean energy provisions

• Heatmap’s explainer on the major changes in the bill

• Leah Stokes’ thread on Bluesky arguing the bill is “garbage”

• Jesse Jenkin’s thread on Bluesky arguing the bill “hot trash”

• Longtime storage industry veteran, Jason Burwen’s post suggesting the FEOC requirements could be workable for storage projects

Read more of my writing on the GOP’s mega-bill

• Which States Would Lose the Most if the IRA is Repealed?

• Report: GOP Mega-bill Could Kill America's Clean Energy Boom

• The Republicans Who Could Save The IRA

For the last month, I’ve been crunching numbers and running different analyses to understand the potential impact if Congress repeals the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

As I’ve written elsewhere, I feel confident that this legislation will have more impact on America’s clean energy and climate trajectories than any other policy this decade. The stakes of this bill couldn’t be higher.

Last week, I published an analysis on where clean energy projects were at risk of losing their tax credits—and potentially their financial viability—if the Senate passes their mega-bill. The upshot of that analysis was that more than 600 GW of planned renewable projects are now at risk of being cancelled—equivalent to half of America's entire electricity generation capacity.

This week I wanted to look at which states would be impacted most by an IRA repeal—and in particular how a repeal would reduce clean energy deployment in each state.1

What I found surprised me. If the IRA is repealed, the states that would see the biggest reductions in renewable energy capacity by 2035 are mostly located in the South.

Open this article in your browser to download the data, interact with the table above, and see the full list of states.

North Carolina is one state that would lose a lot of potential renewable energy capacity if the IRA is repealed. It’s also home to one of the most important Senators in the bill’s negotiations. Republican Senator Thom Tillis has voiced many concerns about repealing the IRA this year, arguing that it would create “whiplash” for investors and “devastate” America’s ability to innovate. But he’s also under pressure by party leadership to vote for the bill.

If the investment tax credits (ITC) and production tax credits (PTC)—two of the workhorses of the IRA—are left in tact, North Carolina is projected to have 28 GW of renewable energy generation capacity by 2035. That would enable the state’s old coal power plants to retire, saving families and businesses on their electricity bills and cleaning up the state’s air. It would also bring billions of dollars of investment and thousands of jobs to the state.

But all those benefits would vanish if Tillis votes to repeal the IRA. Without the ITC and PTC, North Carolina is projected to have about 14 GW of renewable energy generation capacity—about half as much compared to a scenario where the IRA is preserved.

In states across the South—most of which are led by Republicans in the Senate—we see the same picture: Renewable energy’s growth would be significantly hindered by an IRA repeal.

The main reason the South would be impacted so disproportionately is the region’s lack of clean energy and climate policies. For decades state leaders have fought off any attempts to regulate utilities and force them to build cleaner energy. While other states passed Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) that forced utilities to procure clean power, Southern states took a more laissez-faire approach. Those that did pass RPS bills, passed weak ones.

RPS policies also explain why some states are likely to build as much clean energy whether the IRA is repealed or not. At first glance, that’s a bit weird. How can the repeal of the country’s largest climate bill in history not impact the amount of clean energy some states deploy? But it makes sense when you drill down into the unique policy environments of these states.

In the last decade, California, Massachusetts, Minnesota and a handful of other blue states passed bills mandating a 100% clean grid at some point between 2040 to 2050. As a result, utilities and other power providers must procure more clean energy each year, driving steady demand for renewables regardless of what happens in Congress. The cost of that power will rise as subsidies fall, but the total amount of clean electrons coming onto the grid across different scenarios shouldn’t change much.

Still, the impact of less clean energy growth in states without these policies will have a significant impact—on both the country’s emissions trajectory and its clean energy industry.

If the IRA is repealed, the U.S. would build 290 gigawatts less renewable capacity by 2035. That includes 148 GW less utility-scale solar and 142 GW less onshore wind—each a roughly 30% reduction compared to current policy projections. Annual solar deployment over the next decade would fall from an average of 36.5 GW to just 21.7 GW per year, while wind would drop from 32.7 GW to 18.4 GW. That slowdown would ripple across the industry, affecting everything from job growth and manufacturing to the pace of emissions reductions over the next decade. The country would emit one billion tons per year more in 2035.

Repealing the IRA would slam the brakes on the fastest-growing part of America’s energy economy. The impact would be felt across the country. But Republican-led states in the South, finally on the cusp of a clean energy boom, would bear the most environmental and economic pain, losing not just clean power, but economic momentum and a once-in-a-generation opportunity.

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The country can’t afford to lose this planned capacity. Electricity demand is rising faster than it has in decades due to data center growth, electrification, and extreme weather. Cutting off the country’s fastest growing sources of generation capacity would raise energy prices for American families and businesses. One recent analysis by Energy Innovation projects that wholesale electricity prices would rise by 50% by 2035 if the bill becomes law.

Losing this planned electricity generation capacity also threatens one of the Trump administration’s top goals: beating China in the race to develop artificial intelligence. Less generation capacity would make it difficult for new data centers to come online. The data centers that are able to connect would be forced to pay higher prices.

The passage of OBBBA and subsequent cancellation of clean energy projects would also threaten jobs across the country. The growth of solar, wind, and battery storage has created millions of jobs in the US. If projects are cancelled developers would be forced to lay off employees. They would also buy less equipment from clean energy manufacturing facilities, which could result in manufacturing layoffs.

Takeaways from our analysis

Using Cleanview’s project tracker, we analyzed thousands of planned projects across the country to see where projects are at risk of being cancelled. Here’s what we found:

• More than 600 GW of clean energy projects scheduled for completion in 2028 or later could lose tax credit eligibility under the new law, threatening their financial viability.

• Storage projects face the highest risk with 265 GW of capacity planned for 2028 and beyond, followed by solar at 223 GW and wind at 114 GW.

• California has the most clean energy projects at risk, owing to its large clean energy pipeline and lengthy development timelines. Nearly 80% of all planned clean energy projects in California are at risk.

• In Texas between 36 and 128 GW of clean energy capacity is at risk. But many active projects in the state are relatively safe given how quickly developers can build projects in the state.

• Across the Northeast—in the PJM, NYISO, and ISO NE markets—91 GW of clean energy capacity is at risk.

You can read the full report by clicking the button below.

Read the report

More from Cleanview

California is one the largest clean energy markets in the US. As of writing, there are just over 900 planned solar, wind, and battery projects expected to come online over the next decade.

But tracking all these projects is no easy task.

Over the last few months, our team of researchers at Cleanview parsed through spreadsheets, county permit documents, interconnection agreements, and other public data sources.

Now, in Cleanview you can track every project and developer in the state.

Here are some ways that I’ve been using the platform to track clean energy development in the Golden State:

Pairing CAISO’s data with a dataset from EIA, we can plot hundreds of planned projects on a map.

Maps are cool, but what if we want to see the top clean energy developers in California based on capacity or number of projects? Our developer benchmark tool makes that easy. You can do what might take an analyst a couple of weeks in just a couple clicks.

You can also use the platform to track project timelines. Recently I used this feature to see how many California clean energy projects are at risk of an IRA repeal. As the data visualization below illustrates, there’s a lot of project risk in California.

Next week, we're planning to reach 100% coverage in PJM, MISO, SPP, NYISO, ISO-NE, and every other major clean energy market in the US. More on that soon!

If you're interested in checking out the platform, reply to this email or head over to our website to book a demo.

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