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Canary Media’s “Electrified Life” column shares real-world tales, tips, and insights to demystify what individuals can do to shift their homes and lives to clean electric power.
Balcony solar is poised to take the U.S. by storm.
The DIY systems, which you can hang on a balcony and plug into a normal 120-volt outlet, help lower energy bills and carbon emissions. Already huge in Germany, solar that’s as easy to install as an appliance would be a game changer for the four out of 10 U.S. households that can’t get rooftop systems for financial or logistical reasons.
In 2025, deep-red Utah became the first state to pass a bill making it easier to adopt plug-in solar systems. So far this year, four more states have all advanced similar measures — and nearly two dozen others are weighing bills of their own.
Considering a balcony power plant yourself? Check our tracker to see the status of plug-in solar legislation in your state, and keep reading for some FAQs on the tech.
Balcony solar systems are modest in size, ranging from just one to a few solar panels. Most states, including California and New York, are considering capping systems at 1,200 watts — a sixth of the average home-solar installation.
The panels connect to an inverter that converts their direct current into alternating current, the kind our homes use. A plug from the inverter fits into a typical 120-volt outlet (15 or 20 amps), pumping the power of the sun directly into a home’s existing wiring.
The systems can cover a small but meaningful fraction of a home’s electricity use: An 800-watt unit can power the equivalent of a fridge or a few small appliances when the sun’s shining.
One or two people can set up a system in less than an hour without the help of a professional. In states with balcony solar laws, you don’t need permission from your utility, unlike when installing a larger rooftop array. Nor do you need to pay the utility a fee.
Balcony solar costs range from several hundred dollars to more than $1,000, depending on the system size, and can save a household hundreds of dollars per year.
In Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, the plug-in solar nonprofit Bright Saver offers a two-panel, 800-watt system for $1,499 and a four-panel, 1,600-watt system for $2,348. (Because of utility rules, Bright Saver currently provides these products only to residents who already have rooftop solar and want to expand.)
At $1.47 to $1.87 per watt before taxes, that’s a pretty good deal in the U.S. Nationally, the average rooftop system costs $2.58 per watt before local and state incentives.
The payback period depends on how much electricity your home uses and your utility rate. But according to Bright Saver, these systems can save California households nearly $500 per year and have a payback period of four to five years.
Once they’re paid off, every sunny hour can provide you with free power for the life of the solar panels, many of which are warranted to last 30-plus years.
Absolutely. Physically, the panels can go anywhere they’re safely secured and able to soak up a lot of sun, such as a deck, patio, porch, fence, or yard.
Unless, of course, your home is subject to limiting regulations. Your city or homeowners’ association may have rules about where you can put solar panels. If you’re a renter, you’ll want to double-check your lease to make sure you’re not prohibited from hanging them outside.
Balcony solar produces electricity and sends it directly into the home’s circuitry at a wall outlet. Rooftop solar, by contrast, pours power into a home’s electrical panel.
That distinction has prompted some safety concerns, even as a few companies start to sell these products.
If the solar panels provide too much power, and circuit breakers don’t trip, the wires in the wall could overheat, creating a fire risk, said Ken Boyce, vice president of engineering at safety science company UL Solutions. If a person were to touch the plug prongs either while the panels are illuminated and partially plugged into an outlet or in the fraction of a second after the plug is disconnected but still energized, the individual could get shocked or electrocuted.
But these hazards can be tamed with technical fixes. For example, a special plug could be designed with a built-in circuit breaker and no exposed conductive parts.
In their plug-in solar bills, states are legislating that manufacturers adhere to rigorous standards to protect consumers. Utah’s law, for example, requires that systems are certified safe for consumers by UL Solutions or another nationally recognized testing laboratory, and that they meet the standards of the National Electric Code.
The National Electric Code doesn’t specifically address plug-in solar, leaving the tech in a legal gray area on that requirement. And as of publication, no manufacturer has had a complete balcony-solar product certified as safe.
But that could soon change. After Utah’s law passed, UL created a new safety standard for plug-in solar, UL 3700, and launched a certification program in January. The company is now working with manufacturers to get their systems certified. Boyce anticipates the first certification in “weeks to months rather than years.”
So, if you’re itching to get plug-in solar but concerned about safety, sit tight: A vetted product should hit the market soon.
And, bigger picture, take solace in the evidence from across the Atlantic.
Germany has seen balcony solar grow from roughly 40,000 systems in 2017 to as many as 4 million in 2025. Sebastian Müller, chair of the German Balcony Solar Association, said last year that the country had yet to see any safety issues beyond a few cases of individuals attempting to hook up unsuitable hardware, like a car battery, to the devices.
Not without a battery. For the safety of utility lineworkers, a blackout will trigger the inverter to stop putting out AC power. But if you plug the solar panels into a battery instead of an inverter that feeds your home, then you can pull the stored electrons when you need them.
That peace of mind isn’t cheap, though. For example, while EcoFlow’s inverter retails for $299, a 1.92-kilowatt-hour EcoFlow inverter-battery combo costs $1,199.
Indeed they are. Bright Saver estimates more than 1,000 plug-in solar systems have been installed in California alone.
Bentham Paulos, senior research associate for the Clean Energy States Alliance, recently installed a system at his home in Berkeley, California, for just $0.66 per watt. (He has a rooftop array, and his utility’s rules allow him to add up to 1,000 watts without another interconnection agreement.) To prepare, Paulos, who also authored a plug-in solar policy report released in January, spent many hours studying amps, volts, and wiring configurations on YouTube to assure himself that he could safely put plug-in solar on his garage.
The market for balcony solar could rapidly transform in the U.S. over the next year, as states green-light the tech and manufacturers roll out compliant products.
“I think a lot of companies are waiting for the regulatory landscape to be clear,” Paulos said. Once a handful of states explicitly allow balcony solar, he anticipates that manufacturers will show “a lot of innovation to make this a really super easy and safe consumer product.”
Balcony solar is one of the hottest ideas in renewable energy right now. Boosters say the systems — DIY kits that can be plugged right into a standard outlet — save users money without any need for subsidies, government incentives, or utility permission.
As Americans continue to struggle with soaring power prices, about half the states in the U.S. are considering legislation to pave the way for residents to adopt plug-in solar and start generating some of their own electricity from their own backyard or porch.
“It’s about energy affordability,” said Cora Stryker, co-founder of Bright Saver, a nonprofit that promotes plug-in solar. “Every legislator wants their constituency to have less trouble meeting their energy demands.”
As these efforts work their way through the legislative process, we will be monitoring the action here, using information from Bright Saver and bill-tracking databases.
Latest action: Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) signed the state’s plug-in solar bill into law on April 6.
The Trump administration has often evoked the plight of whales in its efforts to undermine U.S. offshore wind development — despite there being no evidence that wind-farm activities are harming the giant mammals.
But those purported concerns didn’t stop federal officials last week from voting unanimously to override Endangered Species Act protections for imperiled whales in order to unleash oil and gas development in the Gulf of Mexico. Extensive fossil-fuel production there is already known to hurt cetaceans through vessel strikes, oil spills, and noises that lead to chronic stress.
The dissonance isn’t surprising.
In recent years, the well-being of whales has become a potent political weapon for President Donald Trump, Republican politicians, and right-wing groups to wield against America’s fledgling offshore wind industry. Yet those same factions haven’t fought with similar fervor, if at all, to protect whales from the real leading threats: marine-gear entanglements, boat collisions, and the effects of climate change.
Last week’s decision only highlights that whales were never really the point, environmentalists argue.
“I think it’s pretty clear they don’t care about marine species,” Michael Jasny, director of marine mammals for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said of the Trump administration.
On March 31, a committee of Trump-appointed officials voted to exempt oil and gas drilling in the Gulf from protections under the Endangered Species Act. The God Squad, so named because of its power to decide whether a species lives or dies, has convened only three other times since the landmark law was enacted over 50 years ago to prevent plant and animal extinctions.
The decision may not actually change that much on the ground for oil and gas companies developing and exploring resources in the Gulf. Operators are still expected to comply with existing measures to avoid and minimize environmental risks. These measures were set by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which is in charge of planning offshore drilling operations, and Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, which provides regulatory oversight.
“It’s not going to be like the wild, wild west under this order,” said Seth Barsky, a partner at the Bracewell law firm and former deputy assistant attorney general in the Environment and Natural Resources Division at the Justice Department.
He said that a key reason for lifting the Endangered Species Act requirements was to shield oil and gas developers from having to potentially meet new environmental regulations that could force them to shut down. Environmental groups last year sued the National Marine Fisheries Services over its latest biological opinion — a document the agency was required to issue under the ESA to analyze how oil and gas activities could affect wildlife in the Gulf. The groups argued that the opinion failed to require stringent measures to protect endangered species.
The God Squad decision gives drillers certainty that the status quo will stick, Barsky said.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum chaired the seven-member committee, which also included the U.S. secretaries of defense, agriculture, and the Army, as well as the heads of the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Council of Economic Advisors.
The group claimed its decision was a “national security imperative.” Global energy markets have been in disarray since the start of the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which about a fifth of the world’s oil and a fifth of its liquefied natural gas supplies flow.
Oil production in the Gulf “provides a vital buffer, insulating our economy and military from foreign instability and reducing the strategic leverage of our adversaries,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said during the committee’s brief meeting. He said the lawsuits brought by environmental groups risk “halting or severely compromising oil and gas activities in the Gulf.”
America’s offshore oil production has soared in recent years, even with endangered species protections in place.
Just a day after the meeting, Burgum announced that the U.S. produced over 714 million barrels in 2025 — the highest annual output on record. Some 3,500 oil and gas structures are spread across the Gulf, pumping out “beaucoup buckets of Texas tea,” as the journalist Craig Pittman recently put it.
The Interior Department also said last week that it is combining two of its bureaus in order to increase efficiency and accelerate permitting for offshore energy development, while still “maintaining all existing regulatory protections and rigorous safety standards,” according to the April 3 announcement.
Expanding offshore oil and gas development will likely only exacerbate the threats facing endangered whales, manatees, and five species of sea turtles in the Gulf, according to the fisheries agency’s biological opinion. Collisions with oil industry vessels in particular could “jeopardize the continued existence” of the endangered Rice’s whale, of which only 51 are estimated to remain.
The number of Rice’s whales has declined considerably since the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon disaster and subsequent cleanup efforts. Its tiny population size makes it harder for the species to bounce back from oil-industry disruptions.
The God Squad’s main argument — that energy security trumps all else — is similar to the “downside emphasis” tactic that fossil fuel companies use to delay climate action, said Alaina Kinol, a researcher at Northeastern University in Boston who studies resistance to climate policy.
“It’s this idea that if we take climate action, it’s going to really hurt us, or it’s going to hurt marginalized people, or that [fossil fuels] are necessary for society,” she said.
She noted that even as the Trump administration pushes to boost fossil fuel production, it is undermining efforts to develop other domestic sources of energy like renewables. Since 2025, the GOP-led Congress has worked to repeal or scale back much of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which provided hundreds of billions of dollars in federal incentives for wind and solar, energy efficiency, electric vehicles, and other clean energy programs.
“That implies that this is really about supporting the oil and gas industry’s ability to extract fossil fuels from the Gulf,” Kinol said.
In the last year, the Interior Department has frozen almost all offshore wind development in the country, and Trump himself has regularly cited the health of whales as a key motivation for this. “The windmills are driving the whales crazy,” Trump said in January 2025, weeks before signing an executive order pausing federal permitting and new leasing for offshore wind farms.
More recent actions to stymie existing projects have used broad and ill-defined concerns about national security as the pretext.
The department has even tried — so far unsuccessfully — to halt construction of five in-progress offshore wind projects totaling nearly 6 gigawatts of capacity, even though those projects represent a crucial new energy source for densely populated and land-constrained East Coast states. Earlier this year, during a brutal cold snap, power plants fueled by fossil gas, oil, and coal were nearly pushed to the brink, a strain that existing offshore wind turbines helped alleviate in some places.
The double standard is a familiar move for the Trump administration, which has previously used the specter of bald eagle deaths to crack down on wind turbines while also easing the protections for the birds that could interfere with oil and gas production. The federal government has also quietly gutted key research programs meant to protect North Atlantic right whales and other marine mammals living in an increasingly industrialized ocean.
The God Squad decision is already facing legal challenges, and experts say it’s unclear whether this unprecedented maneuver will stand up in court. The Center for Biological Diversity, which initially sued to stop the meeting from happening, said it would amend its lawsuit to challenge last week’s outcome. The Natural Resources Defense Council also plans to take legal action, Jasny said.
The move to exempt Gulf oil and gas development from Endangered Species Act protections is likely a “test case” to see what the Trump administration can get away with, he added. The government is also looking to open up oil and gas operations off the coast of Alaska to flex America’s “energy dominance” and off California’s coast to protect Americans’ “energy security.”
“If the administration can allow the killing of [endangered] sea turtles and whales in the Gulf,” Jasny said, “then there’s no end to what this really dangerous development can lead to.”
As a key deadline for federal solar tax credits ticks closer, a Massachusetts program is helping the state’s nonprofits get solar projects underway before the incentive disappears.
The Solar Upgrading Nonprofits, or SUN, program provides nonprofits with financial and technical assistance to evaluate options for solar installations and seek out additional funding if they choose to go forward. The first round, in 2025, worked with 23 organizations. Five have decided to move forward with installations that total 1.5 megawatts of installed capacity — double the goal for that phase of the program.
The stakes are even higher for SUN’s second round, which kicked off at the end of March. President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, signed last summer, put an expiration date on tax credits that can shave 30% to 50% off the cost of commercial-scale solar projects: They must start construction by July 4, 2026, or be placed in service by the end of 2027 to qualify — a tight timeline for most organizations.
“There is still time, but it is dwindling very quickly,” said Rachel Gentile, marketing and communications manager for Resonant Energy, the Boston-based solar company spearheading the initiative with funding from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, a quasi-public economic development agency.
Adding to the urgency is the fact that nonprofits have had relatively little time to take advantage of the tax credit. While for-profit businesses have been able to claim the incentive for some 20 years, nonprofits became eligible only with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. So, the elimination of the credit means it is disappearing before many organizations have even had a chance to dig into the possibilities.
“Nonprofits that have other missions that they’re dedicated to, it’s not necessarily on their list of priorities,” said Sanne Wright, community partnerships manager for Resonant Energy. “They’re already usually pretty strapped for cash and tight on capacity.”
The SUN program tries to overcome this barrier by making it easier for nonprofits to evaluate their options. The idea is modeled on another Resonant program, Solar Technical Assistance Retrofit, or STAR, which provides similar support to affordable housing providers looking to add solar to their buildings. Since its launch in 2021, STAR has installed 4.8 MW of solar capacity, with another 13.5 MW in the pipeline. When nonprofits became eligible for the federal tax credits, Resonant started thinking about how to adapt STAR for a new constituency.
The Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, which also funds STAR alongside the Jampart Charitable Trust, awarded the SUN program $150,000 for its first round and another $150,000 for the latest cycle. Resonant works with two partner agencies — Providers’ Council and the Essex County Community Foundation — to connect with nonprofits that might benefit from the assistance.
“Power is very expensive here,” said Kate Machet, vice president of systems initiatives and government relations for the Essex County Community Foundation. “This program has really allowed us to bring to our nonprofits on the ground the ability to explore solar.”
Interested organizations do a short intake call to discuss their general goals for a solar project. Then they provide information about their electricity bills and roof age and condition, and Resonant completes an analysis of their options. Whether or not the nonprofit decides to move forward, it receives a stipend of between $2,500 and $7,500 as compensation for the staff time that went into the process. Those that opt to go ahead with an installation receive help identifying further funding opportunities and writing grant applications.
Grow Associates, a nonprofit that serves adults with developmental disabilities, applied to the SUN program in hopes of getting solar on the roof of its facility south of Boston. The grant-writing support helped the organization secure a $500,000 award from a state program that funds solar projects for nonprofits working with low-income populations. The money will cover almost the entire cost of the planned 162-kilowatt array.
“Without their help, we would not have been able to get the grant,” said Sarah Palin, Grow’s executive director. “We’re looking at saving about $72,000 a year in electricity costs that we can put back into our programs.”
Resonant is accepting applications for this round of SUN until at least July, but it will continue adding participants after that deadline as long as the funding holds out.
Though Resonant is trying to help as many nonprofits as possible take advantage of the expiring tax credit, organizations that aren’t able to make the deadline could still benefit from participating in SUN and installing solar, Wright said. Finding the money to cover the initial costs will still be a challenge, but the average 300-kilowatt array could still save an organization about $1.3 million over the expected 25-year life of the system, down from $1.6 million with the tax credit, according to Resonant’s calculations.
“Organizations are going to have to get a little more creative about how they fund the project up front,” Wright said.
After taking a beating for the first year of the Trump administration, the beleaguered wind energy industry may finally see a glimmer of hope.
President Donald Trump and Interior Department chief Doug Burgum have spent months in an all-out assault against the technology, and in particular against offshore wind projects in federal waters. They have frozen all new leases, repealed clean energy tax credits, and even paid off an oil company to not build a planned wind project. The most dramatic move came in December, when Burgum paused work on five under-construction wind farms on “national security” grounds.
The developers of these five projects — two off the Massachusetts coastline, two south of Long Island, and one off the coast of Virginia — sued over the stop-work orders, and a series of federal judges soon issued injunctions against the Interior Department’s interventions.
Burgum had vowed to fight back, but last week, the department quietly let the final deadline for appealing the courts’ decisions lapse. The move means construction of the nation’s first five major wind farms along the eastern seaboard can continue absent a change in the case. When complete, the wind farms will generate enough electricity to power well over 2 million homes.
The lack of appeals likely represents a recognition that the government couldn’t stop the five projects from moving forward, said Tony Irish, who served as an Interior Department lawyer for decades before leaving in 2025.
“If the actual reason behind the stop-work orders was legitimately founded in national security, I would be very surprised by the lack of appeal,” he said. “So I think the lack of appeal is telling in that regard.”
Developers of the five major wind projects haven’t wasted time, with several of the projects already producing power. Revolution Wind, a project from Danish company Ørsted, delivered its first electricity to the New England grid in mid-March. Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, a project from the Virginia utility Dominion, is about 70 percent complete and also delivered its first electricity last month. The farthest-along project, Vineyard Wind, produced a massive amount of electricity earlier this year during Winter Storm Fern when other power resources were offline.
The lack of appeals could be good news for future wind projects as well. A bipartisan group of senators has been debating a long-delayed “permitting reform” bill for months. The bill would speed up environmental review for critical energy projects, make it easier to build interstate transmission lines, and protect clean energy permits from federal interventions like those of the Trump administration. (It would also likely afford the same protections to oil and gas projects such as the Keystone XL pipeline, which President Joe Biden scrapped after taking office in 2021.)
Those bipartisan talks broke down after Burgum’s stop-work order. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island who is leading the talks, told congressional Republicans and the Trump administration that they would only resume if the Interior Department declined to appeal the court injunctions for the offshore wind projects. Senate Democrats are also hoping to see Burgum advance solar projects on federal lands.
A potential thaw on offshore wind might benefit the president as he tries to manage the fallout from the Iran war, which has sent gasoline prices soaring and contributed to fears of an energy shortage around the world. The White House’s “energy dominance council” has begun participating in the congressional permitting talks.
“There’s a confluence of market realities that make this a particularly hopeful year for us,” said Chris Phalen, vice president of domestic policy at the National Association of Manufacturers, in an interview with Bloomberg Government. Proponents of permitting legislation stressed that the next few months before the midterm election season are pivotal for achieving a deal.
A broader set of reforms to the National Environmental Policy Act, the nation’s bedrock environmental permitting law, would be controversial, but research shows that it might accelerate the deployment of onshore wind energy: A recent survey of around 50 renewable developers found that around 80% of them had selected a project site so as to avoid the federal environmental permitting process.
Other developers reported that reviews for historical artifacts and endangered species can add months or years to project timelines, and that the reviews may have held up at least 11 gigawatts of energy, or enough to power almost 5 million homes. A reform effort, likely modeled on the House-passed “SPEED Act,” would aim to shorten review timelines and limit litigation. (The environmental review for the five in-progress offshore wind projects took multiple years, even under the wind-friendly Biden administration.)
“Bipartisan permitting reform is the next critical step,” said Liz Burdock, the CEO of the Oceantic Network, a trade group that advocates for offshore wind. She added that ease of permitting could enable millions more homes’ worth of new wind development, but warned that “without a predictable path to build, manufacturers, shipyards, and skilled workers are forced to sit idle, creating gaps that raise costs and delay benefits for millions of ratepayers.”
RICHLAND COUNTY, Ohio — In a mostly rural stretch of Ohio nestled between Cleveland and Columbus, residents now have a rare opportunity: They get to vote directly on the future of renewable energy in their area.
Last July, Richland County banned large-scale wind and solar projects in 11 of its 18 townships. The decision not only caught many locals by surprise; it also struck them as bad for economic development and as encroaching on individual property rights.
Almost immediately after the county’s three commissioners made their decision, dozens of residents formed a group, called the Richland County Citizens for Property Rights and Job Development, to fight what they saw as an unjust restriction on renewable energy.
Their initial goal was clear but daunting: Collect thousands of in-person signatures within 30 days in order to put the clean energy ban on the ballot during the 2026 primary election. They succeeded.
Before early voting opened last week, the group held several town halls and spent months educating and canvassing voters. Now, their efforts face the final test. By May 5 at 7:30 p.m., every voter in Richland County will be able to weigh in on the question: Should the county keep its ban on most solar and wind farms — or scrap it and give clean energy a chance to be part of the area’s energy mix?
A majority of “yes” votes on the referendum will mean the ban remains. A majority of “no” votes will overturn it. The referendum comes as local restrictions on solar and wind energy have proliferated nationwide, rising by 16% from June 2024 to June 2025. More than 450 counties and municipalities across 44 states now severely limit whether renewables can be built, according to the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.
In recent years, these rules have been a stumbling block for renewable energy projects, which are needed both to decarbonize the energy system and to meet the nation’s soaring electricity demand. New solar and wind are also among the cheapest forms of energy — a crucial distinction as utility bills rise nationwide.
Restrictions on renewable energy are especially common in rural areas, where the vast majority of the nation’s utility-scale solar and wind projects are located.
Ohio, in particular, is a hot spot for efforts to stymie renewable energy. A 2021 state law, Senate Bill 52, gave counties the right to ban new large solar farms and wind farms of 5 megawatts and up. Roughly three dozen counties now have such restrictions in one or more of their townships.
The Richland County Citizens for Property Rights and Job Development and its supporters would like to see their county removed from that list.
The group reflects the composition of Richland County, with a range of ages, income levels, and professions; many members hadn’t known each other or worked together before last summer. And while some are concerned about climate change and air pollution, the group’s main arguments — evidenced by its name — echo familiar American issues: property rights and job creation.
“I just don’t think it’s right for the county commissioners to tell other property owners that they can’t do what they want with their land,” said Emily Adams, the group’s treasurer. “I have what I want on my roof. And I think farmers and landowners should be able to do what they want with their property, too.”
The effort to overturn Richland County’s ban could empower other communities to push back on similar restrictions, said Shayna Fritz, executive director of the Ohio Conservative Energy Forum, which favors an all-of-the-above energy policy.
“If you gather enough people and you really voice your concerns to them, you have a chance to walk it back,” Fritz said. “This does not have to be permanent.”
Coalition member Brian McPeek, who is the group’s deputy treasurer and also the business manager for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 688, hopes that’s the case. Union workers stand to get jobs from both renewable energy projects and from other businesses that may move nearby to take advantage of their clean energy.
“I think it’s very important for the nation to see what we’re doing here,” said McPeek, who was among the dozens of local citizens who attended and spoke out at the Richland County Board of Commissioners’ meeting last July, when it voted in favor of the restrictions. “I feel like it kind of flipped the blueprint for what others can do if their commissioners do the same thing. We needn’t close off the county for development.”
Richland County’s ban originated in Sharon Township, an area of approximately 9,000 people in the northwestern part of the county.
In January 2025, the township’s zoning board members requested that the commissioners impose a ban there. The following month, the commissioners asked all 18 townships in Richland County if they also wanted to prohibit renewables. (The county’s authority under SB 52 doesn’t extend to its nearly half dozen villages and cities.)
More specifically, the commissioners sent a fill-in-the-blanks resolution to ban solar and wind development to the township trustees. Trustees simply had to add names and dates and put marks on a few lines to sign on to the restriction.
Eleven townships’ trustees ultimately sent back filled-out resolutions asking the board of county commissioners to institute a blanket prohibition in their townships.
So, “that’s exactly what we did,” Commissioner Darrell Banks said.
The three county commissioners did not consult with the general public during this time, according to opponents of the ban. Few people knew their township trustees had even considered the issue until last summer, when it appeared on the agenda of the July 17 commissioners’ meeting.
Dozens opposing the ban showed up to that meeting, held on a weekday morning, to speak out. Still, the commissioners voted unanimously to adopt the ban for those 11 townships. Rose Feagin, a council member for the city of Ontario who opposes the ban, expressed disappointment with the way the commissioners went about the process.
“Other avenues would have been a better way to get input from people, and from across the board, not just a couple of people in a bubble or in a boardroom somewhere making decisions for other people’s lives,” Feagin said.
Under SB 52, county-level bans on renewable energy can be challenged via referendum — so long as enough local residents support a ballot measure. But the law gives groups only 30 days to get enough signatures on petitions.
By the Aug. 18, 2025, deadline, the coalition had managed to collect thousands of signatures, and on Sept. 3 the Richland County Board of Elections ruled that they had cleared the threshold required to put it on the ballot.
It’s only the second time a county-level restriction on renewable energy has been challenged via referendum under SB 52.
In 2022, Crawford County commissioners blocked Apex Clean Energy from developing the 300-MW project Honey Creek Wind. A field manager for the company then helped lead the campaign to put it before voters, but ultimately that referendum failed.
At this time, no company is looking to develop a large solar or wind project in Richland County, noted Nolan Rutschilling, managing director of energy policy for the Ohio Environmental Council.
So, the Richland County ballot measure isn’t spearheaded by a company looking to profit from a particular project. Rather, it’s the work of citizens who want to preserve possibilities for the future — and restore the right to consider opportunities on a case-by-case basis.
In the lead-up to the election, the Richland County Citizens for Property Rights and Job Development has been using a slogan meant to win over their neighbors: “No Ban on Property Rights.”
Dan Fletcher, a Madison Township trustee who isn’t actively involved in the referendum campaign, said he knows how he plans to vote: “Taking the rights away from the property owner? That’s wrong in my opinion.”
Richland County is a farming powerhouse. More than 120,000 acres of cropland stretch across nearly 500 square miles. Farmers here mostly grow soybeans and corn, and to a lesser degree, forage, wheat, and other crops. The county also ranks among the top fifth of the nation’s leading producers of poultry, livestock, and other animal products.
The region’s agricultural character is the main focus of the campaign to keep the ban in place, run by a group named Richland Farmland Preservation.
The group’s website calls for farmland preservation and “commonsense limits” on solar and wind. It also includes a badge of endorsement from the Richland County Republican Party, which might go a long way in a county that went heavily for Trump in the last presidential election.
Banks, the county commissioner, is on the advisory committee for Richland Farmland Preservation. Other members include Richland County Prosecutor Jodie Schumacher and a trustee from each of the townships of Sharon, Blooming Grove, and Jefferson.
The group may have links to The Empowerment Alliance, a nationwide pro–natural gas organization that has been an impetus behind bills and resolutions labeling the fossil fuel as “green energy.”
A filing with the Richland County Board of Elections identifies the treasurer for Richland Farmland Preservation as Dustin McIntyre, with an address for a building with several offices in Bellville. But VoterRecords.com does not note any Dustin McIntyre in Richland County, nor does Whitepages.com show him living there.
Federal Elections Committee data does list a Dustin McIntyre with an address in Virginia as treasurer for multiple super PACs, including the Affordable Energy Fund PAC. That group was set up by The Empowerment Alliance in 2021.
The alliance began as a project of former Ariel Corp. chair Karen Buchwald Wright and her husband, Tom Rastin, who was also an executive there. Headquartered in Mount Vernon, Ohio, Ariel makes compressors for the oil and gas industry.
The Richland Farmland Preservation website also features anti–renewable energy talking points espoused by The Empowerment Alliance and other groups, including a variation of a graphic used by The Empowerment Alliance that implies gas-fired power plants should be favored over solar because of their smaller land footprint. (The illustration ignores the large swaths of land needed for drilling and pipelines, as well as pollution.)
Neither McIntyre nor Richland Farmland Preservation responded to Canary Media’s emails or calls.
The No Ban on Property Rights campaign held a fundraiser in February, and its volunteers have been distributing lawn signs, door hangers, and brochures. Volunteers with the nonprofit Ohio Citizen Action have also been helping with efforts to raise awareness and get out the vote.
As to whether the Richland Farmland Preservation group was mobilizing in a similar way, Banks told Canary Media he didn’t expect it to hold a general fundraiser. Instead, he noted that they planned to “call a few people.” Without saying who, he said, “There’s some people who will put some money towards this.”
Nonetheless, the push to preserve the renewable energy ban is tapping into real anxieties about ceding land to non-farming uses.
“We’re seeing more and more farmlands being used up for developments, and we want to keep them as farmlands,” said John Jaholnycky, who previously worked for natural gas and electric companies and is now a trustee for Mifflin Township, which opted for the ban.
In Jaholnycky’s view, solar should go on buildings and over parking lots. “I think it’s kind of shortsighted that we want to use up all of this farmland to put these solar panels up.”
Richland County Commissioner Cliff Mears pointed out that the city of Mansfield plans to add a solar farm at the site of a former landfill. But he added, “We feel that farmland overall should remain farmland.”
Still, blocking renewables won’t necessarily preserve farmland. In fact, urban and suburban development has been the major threat over the past several decades.
From 2002 through 2022, Ohio lost over 930,000 acres of farmland. Researchers at The Ohio State University reported last year that most of that loss occurred around metropolitan areas, where urban and suburban sprawl was extending into formerly rural areas. The number of acres for certified and planned utility-scale solar projects, meanwhile, is about one-tenth that amount.
Data centers are also a growing concern, with roughly 200 already in the state, and plans for another 100 or so.
For farmers, leasing their land for renewable energy can supplement income and actually let them keep the land in their families.
“The alternative is that [landowners] will sell it for development or data centers or something,” said Annette McCormick, a county resident and opponent of the prohibition.
Nor are renewables necessarily incompatible with farmland preservation.
Agrivoltaics uses land under and around solar panels for grazing sheep or growing forage or other crops. “There’s a lot of opportunities for farming” amid clean energy installations, McCormick said. “Maybe just not think about corn and soybeans all the time” as the only farming options.
Permit restrictions also generally require renewable energy companies to restore agricultural land when projects finish using it.
Both Banks and Mears criticized SB 52’s provision that lets all voters in the county — not just those in the relevant townships — sign a referendum petition and then vote on the issue. “It has nothing to do with anybody in the cities or villages,” Mears said. In his view, voters “should have some skin in the game.”
That arrangement was once on the table. An earlier version of SB 52 would have given each township the authority to ban solar and wind and then left any decisions on referendums solely up to its own voters. Ultimately, however, the law put the decision to enact prohibitions — and the rights of voters to seek their reversal — at the county level.
“Every voter in Richland County should have a voice on this important issue because it’s a countywide policy,” said Jen Miller, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Ohio, who grew up in Richland County. Although the commissioners chose to defer to trustees in individual townships, “it is the role of county commissioners to represent every voter and to hear from every voter.”
Former Richland County Commissioner Gary Utt agreed: “It’s a county issue. Let the people decide.”
Energy costs are also a big issue this year, not just in Richland County but across the state. Utility bills are rising for all customers as electricity demand surges in Ohio, especially with the proliferation of data centers and growth in electrification. Solar power can come onto the grid faster than other sources. Adding more generation quickly could ease the supply crunch, and clean energy could help protect residents from the volatility of fossil fuel prices.
“That affects all of us — not just countywide, but statewide also,” said Christina O’Millian, a volunteer who worked on last year’s campaign to get the issue on the ballot.
Because SB 52’s hurdles apply only to solar and wind farms, it’s “picking winners and losers in what should be a free market,” said Fritz of the Ohio Conservative Energy Forum.
For McPeek, the electrical union business manager, blocking renewables also means fewer jobs for himself and other IBEW members throughout the county.
“Historically, communities that sort of close themselves off often see investment and innovation going elsewhere,” he said.
Even if residents defeat the ban, it doesn’t mean that any large solar or wind projects will be built in Richland County.
“It just restores the right of a project to be considered,” McPeek said. “There are a lot of hurdles that they have to jump through.”
In unincorporated areas without any ban, SB 52 still lets county commissioners review almost all new large-scale solar and wind farms of 5 MW or more before developers can even file a permit application with the Ohio Power Siting Board.
The law gives commissioners 90 days in which they can prohibit a project, change its footprint, or do nothing. No action means a company can then file its application with the siting board, provided the developer also complied with additional notice and public meeting requirements.
If a company does get to file an application for a solar or wind farm with the siting board, SB 52 then calls for two ad hoc representatives of counties and townships where the development would be located. Those individuals take part in the case as voting members. Any project also must satisfy a long list of other requirements before the siting board grants its approval to move ahead.
Even for projects that have otherwise met all legal criteria, the siting board sometimes simply defers to local government opposition to conclude they are not in the “public interest” — a stance that is currently under review by the Ohio Supreme Court.
Ultimately, it may take a repeal of SB 52 and some other legal changes to put all types of energy generation on an equal footing when it comes to siting and permitting.
But for now, advocates for a “no” vote on Richland County’s ballot issue are focused on what they can most immediately control: defeating a ban that makes solar and wind a nonstarter from the get-go.
“I want to make my children proud,” said Morgan Carroll, a Shelby resident who urges people to vote no. “I want to say that we tried to help them with their energy costs in the future, help the future of clean energy in the county.”
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The wind turbines arrived in Gloucester at the same time I did. My husband and I moved into a cheap third-floor apartment in the small coastal city in northern Massachusetts in November 2012, just as cranes were assembling the imposing white towers right next to the highway that ushered us into town.
I loved them immediately. Like me, they were newcomers in an old town, looking to the future. Gloucester celebrated its 400th birthday a few years ago, and many families, including my husband’s, have lived here for well over a century. Our daughter, born in 2016, is at least a fifth-generation Gloucesterite. As a toddler playing in our yard, she would glimpse the blades turning in the distance and announce excitedly, “The fans are spinning!”
There were originally three turbines, standing sentinel over the town at the ocean’s edge. Two of these provided electricity to the city through a 25-year power purchase agreement, offsetting 50% to 70% of Gloucester’s municipal energy use. The city also received 20% of the money the spinning blades generated each year, a number that ranged from around $100,000 in the first year of operation to as much as $478,000 in later years.
The first turbine to go up was also the first to come down, removed in 2023 after a series of mechanical failures and a blade unexpectedly falling off. The two that remained continued generating power for years, though supply chain problems delayed needed maintenance and caused unexpected downtime, the owners said. In recent months, residents noticed the turbines appeared to be dripping oil. When the blades stopped turning this fall, people started asking questions about their future.
In January, our local paper broke the news that the turbines’ owner had decided to decommission them. The explanation: The company, a major semiconductor engineering firm, wants to expand its footprint here and needs the land. In compensation for the early termination, Gloucester will receive a payment of $587,000.
Some staunch opponents of wind power have taken the announcement as vindication. Community Facebook groups immediately lit up with I-told-you-sos, declaring the turbines’ 13 years of operation a clear failure. Some even used the early end of Gloucester’s three land-based turbines as proof that large-scale offshore wind could never be successful.
“They are painting the reason why they are being taken down as a failure of wind power,” said City Councilor Jason Grow, a vocal supporter of the turbines.
A second, somewhat quieter group, though, is lamenting their imminent loss.
“I have a feeling of not despair, certainly, but I feel stalled,” said Janet Ruth Young, a local writer and musician. “I feel that there’s a stagnancy where there used to be hope and movement and change.”
When new solar farms or wind turbines are proposed, news stories usually follow detailing opponents’ objections, which are largely rooted in a connection to place and respect for the character of a community. The opponents chose to live in this place — the small mountain town, the historic waterfront city — for the trees and the air and the character, not the lines of turbines on a hilltop or the sun glinting off expanses of solar panels. These positions are, at their heart, emotional and, it seems to me, sincerely felt. I am not here to judge motivations or to parse how much weight such arguments should be given.
However, stories about the debate depict support for clean energy as all about the money to be saved and the greenhouse gas emissions to be lowered. The proponents of solar panels and wind turbines are rendered as a collection of financial and environmental abstractions rather than real people.
In Gloucester, it is clear that framing doesn’t fully capture the reality. Though our community is deeply — sometimes stubbornly — dedicated to history and tradition, the turbines worked themselves into the fabric of the city. They were symbols of progress, an indelible part of our skyline, friendly ambassadors welcoming visitors and residents driving into town.
Linda Brayton was involved in the turbine project from the very beginning, when she volunteered in 2005, she thinks, to serve on a task force investigating the possibility of bringing wind energy to the city. Renewable power was still on the margins of the energy conversation then — Massachusetts had less than a gigawatt of installed capacity, a number that more than quintupled from 2013 to 2024.
For years, Brayton sat in meetings and listened to opponents hurl insults and misinformation. She stuck with it through the evaluation of several potential sites, timelines, and ownership structures.
In October 2012, when the first components finally arrived by boat in Gloucester Harbor, she sat by the water with her niece and watched as a crane lifted the long white tower from a ship onto a flatbed truck, to be driven through the winding downtown streets to its destination in an industrial park.
“It was really the most amazing day,” Brayton said. “I broke into tears. It was so beautiful, and it had been such a long time coming.”
As the turbines were going up, the city held an event during which more than 2,000 residents inked their names on a blade, quite literally signing on to the progressive vision the project represented for many residents. At the event, then-Mayor Carolyn Kirk (who now heads up the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, a public agency supporting innovation) read the poem “Sea-Fever” by John Masefield, placing the turbines squarely within the fishing town’s legacy of depending on the wind: “And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying.”
The following year, Kirk remembers, she had a chance to climb to the top of one of the turbines, gripping the ladder rungs tightly as it shook and swayed. The experience of standing, exhausted, at the top, some 400 feet in the air, was “incredible,” she said.
The turbines punctuating the horizon quickly became part of the city. They even earned nicknames. Young wrote and performed a song for the city council praising the “Three Sisters.” Brayton recalls people referring to them as the “Three Magi.” In a letter in the Gloucester Daily Times, one supporter likened them to kinetic sculptures and shared the names he gave them: Remus, Romulus, and Big Earl.
One local resident said on Facebook that when she saw the turbines on her first job interview in Gloucester, she knew the community would be a great place to live. A neighbor told me that spotting them — they are highly visible from many spots in the city — often helped relieve some of his stress as a renewable energy supporter enduring the Trump administration’s relentless hostility. They were a sign of something going right.
As the two remaining turbines get ready to come down, though, must we feel that something has gone wrong? It is, perhaps, a hard conclusion to avoid when a once-promising project comes to an end 12 years early. If the turbines had been more profitable or productive or required less maintenance, maybe the owners would have chosen to keep them and expand elsewhere. And the decommissioning plan has fueled the fire of those who are anti-wind, onshore or off.
The world is a different place now than back when Gloucester first started discussing the possibility of turbines, and coal and oil were still significant contributors to energy production in New England. Vitriol against offshore wind may be at an all-time high, yet projects off Massachusetts, New York, and Rhode Island are churning out power, with more expected in coming years. While the Trump administration has done its best to pull back funding for solar, the grid operator ISO New England projects that by 2040 the region will add another 28 GW of solar capacity to the roughly 6.5 GW it had in 2024.
What those next 14 years will bring for Gloucester is an open question. The removal of the wind turbines, however, can not reverse the trends that have gained momentum throughout the region. Nor can it undo the excitement and joy the spinning blades brought to many residents. It can’t stop us from looking forward, and it can’t stop us from hoping.
Sunny Arizona closed out 2025 as the second-biggest state for battery and solar construction. Now, a policy that helped kick-start this success could be going away.
The Arizona Corporation Commission, the elected body that regulates utilities, unanimously voted in early March to eliminate the state’s renewable portfolio standard. The policy, which the commission set in 2006, called for 15% renewable electricity by 2025. The state hit that target; thus, in the words of Commissioner Kevin Thompson, it was time to move beyond “mandates that have outlived their useful life.”
The commissioners — all of whom are Republicans — critiqued the mandate for costs it imposed: It pushed utilities to sign long-term contracts for renewable energy years ago, when it was more expensive than it is now, and added surcharges on customers’ bills to pay for those contracts and for incentives for households to adopt clean energy.
State leaders around the country are searching for tools to bring down soaring electricity costs for their constituents. Arizona’s decision has parallels in many Democratic-led states that are currently targeting surcharges from their own climate policies in the name of improving affordability.
Crucially, it’s not clear whether the end of Arizona’s renewables standard will noticeably lower customers’ bills, given that utilities are still beholden to those long-term contracts they signed a while ago with renewable energy developers.
These concerns took on new pertinence Monday, when State Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, filed for a rehearing of the decision, charging that the commission failed to complete “the legally required economic analysis.” That gives the regulators 20 calendar days to grant or deny a rehearing. The repeal needs a sign-off from the attorney general to officially take effect, so this opposition could complicate that typically uneventful procedure.
Mayes, who is running for reelection this fall, sat on the commission back when it created the renewables mandate. Back then, it pursued the mandate in the interest of affordability: “An increased reliance on local free energy resources will avoid the negative impacts of energy cost run-ups as were experienced in 2005” after Hurricane Katrina and other storms destroyed swaths of U.S. fossil fuel infrastructure, the commission noted at the time. In the last decade, the same regulatory body chastised utilities for investing too heavily in gas power, and it developed a 100% clean energy standard for the state (though the commissioners ultimately voted down their own proposal).
Today, Arizona’s renewables market is booming, and the operating plants aren’t going to disappear just because the mandate might. But with utilities embracing big gas investments to keep pace with soaring demand, the mix could slip back below 15% renewables.
As Arizona’s power demand rises faster than nearly anywhere else in the country, electricity consumers there need effective, rather than symbolic, tools to contain costs.
One thing that is undeniable: Clean energy has been crushing it in Arizona lately. The state holds the third-highest grid battery capacity (after California and Texas) and the fourth-highest solar capacity (after California, Texas, and Florida). Indeed, Arizona more than doubled its battery fleet from 2024 to 2025, hitting 4.7 gigawatts and growing at a much faster rate than the two leading battery states.
Overall, Arizona gets about 44% of its electricity from natural gas, a fuel that is not harvested within the state and must be imported from elsewhere in the country. Coal used to rule the roost but has declined to marginality over the last decade. The Palo Verde nuclear plant outside Phoenix has cranked out steady carbon-free power since the 1970s and now accounts for 26% of the state’s production. There’s a little bit of hydropower and wind, but solar — which generates roughly 16% of Arizona’s electricity — drives all the clean growth, with help from the lithium-ion batteries storing it for post-sunset hours.
Arizona has plenty to offer a solar or battery developer. Its desert environment furnishes ample sunshine, and there’s a lot of space to build. The state doesn’t have an open energy market like Texas does, but its utilities have proactively solicited competitive bids for new electricity supplies and handed out contracts to developers who bring winning solar and storage proposals. Indeed, Arizona Public Service, the biggest power company in the state, set an internal corporate goal back in 2020 to get 100% clean electricity by 2050 — and gained ample experience in contracting for clean energy. But it abandoned that ambitious target in August, choosing to extend the life of a major coal plant and invest more in gas infrastructure amid soaring demand.
For decades, Phoenix has attracted a steady influx of residents who like the affordable real estate and dry desert air, and aren’t deterred by the occasional bout of triple-digit heat. More recently, the region has also drawn a spate of data centers: Arizona hosts 2 gigawatts of active data centers, according to independent analyst Michael Thomas.
That’s just a taste of what might be coming. Thomas noted in a January post that Arizona Public Service has 30 GW of proposed data centers in its queue for grid connection, several times more than the utility’s peak demand record of 8.5 GW. That gargantuan mismatch is reason enough to doubt that much of the proposed buildout will ever materialize. Still, the utility has already mobilized to construct a 2-GW gas plant to keep pace with this new demand.
The propulsive growth in consumption creates new urgency for clean energy in terms of both planet-warming emissions and affordability. The state’s progress on cleaning up its electricity supply could slow or reverse if renewables stall out just as utilities fast-track constructing fossil fuel plants. And an assertive clean-energy expansion could help keep prices lower in a period of tight supply. That’s especially true as the turbines used in gas plants get more expensive amid yearslong supply chain backlogs. Furthermore, since Arizona lacks its own gas supplies, consuming more of the fuel requires building more pipelines and shipping more dollars out of state.
At this pivotal moment for Arizona’s energy outlook, details included in the Arizona Corporation Commission’s decision cast doubt on whether customers will save much money from the end of the mandate.
The regulators focused their criticism on costs imposed on customers over the years by the surcharges utilities levied to fulfill the renewables mandate. The implication was that eliminating the mandate would therefore lower people’s bills going forward.
But that rhetoric doesn’t match the facts in the official proceeding, said Autumn Johnson, who argued against the repeal as the leader of the state affiliate of the Solar Energy Industries Association.
The commission’s economic impact statement does say that utilities “may see some marginal savings” from forgoing the administrative work involved in complying with the requirements. However, it notes, one utility indicated that “most renewable-related costs will continue due to long-term contractual and programmatic obligations, which may limit overall savings.”
The rule changes don’t eliminate American contract law. Utilities will still have to pay for contracts they signed years ago, and those costs will continue to be recovered as surcharges, a commission spokesperson confirmed. Utilities had already fulfilled the requirement, so it wasn’t likely to force their hand in signing new deals. Even if it did, solar and battery proposals today compete extremely well on the cost of power; an extra nudge to pick the cheapest source of new kilowatt-hours should not unduly raise costs on consumers.
“What does it say to the country, what does it say to the industry, if even this tiny, anemic RPS [renewables portfolio standard] that’s honestly embarrassing, even that we have a problem with?” Johnson said. “This is just to signal that you don’t like renewables, which I think is really not smart from an economic development standpoint.”
As for why sitting regulators might want to signal such a thing, two of the regulators quoted in the press release are running for reelection in November, with a primary on July 21. Kevin Thompson and Nick Myers are facing primary challenges from state legislators Ralph Heap and David Marshall, who are campaigning to “stop the Green New Deal” and “oppose harmful rate hikes.” This vote gives the incumbents something to talk about to show they are working on affordability while pruning what they see as government overreach.
It’s also possible that the repeal, if enacted, won’t materially damage the pace of the clean energy buildout, since the mandate wasn’t driving that buildout anymore. Excising the old policy enables renewables developers to make a clearer case that they’re winning on the merits, not because of state favoritism.
Still, Arizona’s retreat on its renewables policy coincides with other forces acting against the clean energy industry. Local jurisdictions in the state are passing ordinances that could stymie solar and battery development through restrictive permitting, Johnson said. The Trump administration is phasing out tax incentives for wind and solar installations and holding up permitting for projects on public lands. Arizona’s rooftop solar market has contracted since the state lowered the rate of compensation for customers who send power from their panels back to the grid, and imposed what Johnson called “punitive fees” on those households.
In sum, Johnson hopes the recent clean-energy success story continues in Arizona, but stressed that this outcome is not guaranteed.
“You can’t maintain a third ranking for storage and fourth or fifth ranking for solar if you continue to do things that are antagonistic to those industries,” Johnson said.
Now, the fate of the renewables policy hangs on the wrangling between the attorney general and the commissioners, as election-year politics spices up the usually mild world of utility regulation.
See more from Canary Media’s “Chart of the Week” column.
The European Union is once again facing an energy crisis due to its reliance on imported fossil fuels — and is once again poised to lean into renewables to blunt the effects.
As the war in the Middle East upends global oil and gas markets, European Union energy chief Dan Jørgensen urged member states on Tuesday to build even more renewable energy, faster.
It’s an uncomfortable but familiar position for the EU. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the bloc rapidly reduced its reliance on Russian gas imports and swiftly built out new wind and solar power to cushion the blow to the region’s electricity sector.
The results speak for themselves. The European Union more than doubled its solar generation between 2021 and 2025. Wind grew at a more modest 24% over that time period, but it was already providing a higher share of the bloc’s electricity generation. Meanwhile, fossil fuel–generated electricity declined. For the first time ever, in 2025 the EU produced more electricity from wind and solar than it did from fossil fuels.
But the region has not ditched gas entirely. The EU got about 17% of its electricity from gas last year, and it imports almost all the natural gas it burns — 86% in 2024.
That means its energy system is still exposed to the historic disruption caused by the Iran war. The war has shut down liquefied natural gas production in Qatar, the world’s second-largest exporter of the fuel, for the past month. Gas prices globally and in the EU have surged as a result.
This energy shock will be messy and play out in different stages. For Europe, the most immediate and acute effects are being felt in the availability of jet fuel and diesel. But electricity costs will rise too, as nations are forced to buy much-more-expensive natural gas. In certain countries, it will also get dirtier, at least for a time — some EU nations are relying more heavily on coal-fired electricity to get them through the immediate fallout.
But over the longer term, this energy shock is likely to produce the same outcome as the previous one: an even faster transition away from imported fossil fuels and to domestic wind and solar.
This analysis and news roundup come from the Canary Media Weekly newsletter. Sign up to get it every Friday.
Renewable energy’s favorite season has arrived.
Spring is when everything comes together for clean power sources. Days get longer, boosting solar generation. Winter’s blustery winds keep blowing, propelling turbines to their max. And melting snow and heavy rains combine to drive hydropower generation.
Previous springs have shown us just what this wild weather is capable of. In the first week of March 2025, Texas’ power grid, known as ERCOT, set all-time records for wind and solar power production as well as battery storage discharge.
Now, just a few weeks into spring, and with plenty more renewable power generation added in the past year, Texas is once again reaching new heights. On March 14, ERCOT reached an all-time high of 28.7 gigawatts of wind power, according to GridStatus.io. Even more impressive is the state’s solar generation, which has already set multiple records so far this year.
And while Texas is the country’s clean power leader, it’s not the only region with renewable power victories to show. Solar records have been achieved across the Southwest Power Pool, PJM Interconnection, the Independent System Operator New England, and the Midcontinent Independent System Operator this spring. ISO-NE also hit a record level for wind power generation, while MISO reached its pinnacle for overall renewables generation.
And in California, batteries stored a ton of that clean energy, and then set record after record for dispatching it throughout March.
A lot of those records were only made possible thanks to the U.S. adding 26.5 GW of utility-scale solar power generation in 2025, and another 5.7 GW of wind generation. A massive 13 GW of grid battery installations last year helped make full use of those renewables.
There’s an added bonus to all these records happening as the weather starts to warm. Most of us are starting to turn down our furnaces and heat pumps, but haven’t yet turned on our air conditioners. That means overall power demand tends to be at its lowest in the spring, and with renewables at their peak, we need far less fossil-fueled power to pick up the difference.
That confluence resulted in something monumental in March 2025: For the first time ever, fossil fuels accounted for less than half of U.S. power production across a whole month, while clean sources generated the rest. Let’s see if the U.S. can repeat that feat this year.
A global energy crisis is in full swing
Continued conflict in the Middle East is highlighting the risks of relying on fossil fuels.
It’s been five weeks since the U.S. and Israel first attacked Iran, sparking a conflict that has largely shut down oil and gas production and transportation in the region. Domestic natural gas supplies have blunted the blow in the U.S., but much of the world is facing a major energy crisis. Thailand has encouraged workers to ditch business suits to curb the use of air conditioning, while Sri Lanka has implemented a four-day workweek to limit fuel use.
The EU’s energy chief this week similarly urged residents to drive and fly less, and pushed countries to speed their transition to clean energy, saying fossil fuels’ price volatility won’t end even with a resolution in the Middle East. That’s been especially clear in the years since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which spurred the EU to cut off Russian gas supplies and turn its attention toward a solar and wind buildout instead.
Residential electricity price hikes aren’t slowing down, report finds
A new report offers a few explanations for why residential electricity prices are on the rise.
Across the U.S., average prices rose by 33% from 2019 through 2025, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Brattle Group found. That’s a big jump, but it tracks with the rising cost of groceries, housing, and other everyday expenses.
Still, that average hides the fact that some parts of the U.S. are experiencing far more dramatic hikes than others. While 29 states actually saw inflation-adjusted retail electricity prices fall from 2019 to 2025, costs spiked in California, Illinois, New England, and some mid-Atlantic states.
The report credits rising fuel costs, growing power distribution expenses, and storm recovery as some of the biggest drivers behind the power price swell. And with utilities requesting rate increases at record levels, researchers anticipate customers won’t see much price relief anytime soon.
Electrify easier: A new study finds many households can adopt energy-efficient, bill-lowering electric appliances and heating without the need for expensive electric panel upgrades. (Canary Media)
Prepare for extinction: The rarely convened Endangered Species Committee rules that federal endangered species protections will no longer apply to oil and gas drilling projects off the Gulf Coast, exposing the Rice’s whale and other creatures to potential harms. (Houston Chronicle, E&E News)
Fossil fuels’ human toll: A Texas refinery explosion last week damaged homes in a neighboring, largely Black town, revealing the human impact of the Trump administration’s push to ramp up fossil fuel production. (Capital B)
Geothermal heats up: Next-generation geothermal projects have the potential to deliver tons of clean power around the clock, but a need for permitting and safety reforms could slow the industry’s progress. (Canary Media)
No resolution: The Ohio trial of two former FirstEnergy executives accused of bribing a former consultant, who went on to become the state’s top energy regulator, ends in a hung jury, with the state vowing to retry the case. (Signal Ohio)
Stuck in limbo: The fate of more than 300 clean energy projects remains unclear after the U.S. Energy Department announced their grants were canceled without officially de-obligating their funding. (Latitude Media)
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