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In December 2024, the Biden administration proposed creating two new transmission line corridors to accommodate growing power demand, lower costs and connect underserved communities to the regional grid. These were major projects: One would have cleared the way for high-voltage lines to bring greater grid access to several tribal nations in the Dakotas and Nebraska. The other, the Southwest Grid Connector, had national significance: It would have opened the door to linking the Western and Eastern grids and shuttling power between the Midwest and Colorado and New Mexico.
Hard to hate, right? But Donald Trump found a way, as he so often does. On Aug. 12, during the nation’s hottest summer on record, the White House canceled those two projects along with a third one in the Northeast. It wasn’t because the transmission lines weren’t needed, or because they would have affected private or public lands or the environment. It was because, according to Energy Secretary Chris Wright, “transmission policy must serve the American people — not special interests or a climate-alarmist agenda.” He went on to say that the Biden administration had touted the corridors “as a means to advance their Green New Scam agenda and ‘accelerate decarbonization.’”
Behind this Fox-Newsified word salad was yet another run-of-the-mill Trump attack on cleaner energy sources, especially wind and solar. The strikes have come fast and furious since Trump took office last year: He and the Republican-dominated Congress slashed federal tax credits for both utility and rooftop solar and ordered retiring coal plants to keep running at the expense of utility ratepayers, while also virtually freezing solar and wind permitting on public lands and clawing back billions of dollars in federal funding for clean energy manufacturing and rooftop solar for tribal nations and low-income households. At the same time, they’ve spent nearly $4 billion in taxpayer funds so far to pay off firms to abandon offshore wind leases. The list goes on and on.
These moves have certainly harmed the renewables industry, killed jobs, delayed projects and even forced nonprofits and some businesses to fold, and they’re also likely raising electricity costs for millions of consumers at a time when energy demand is skyrocketing. (Given this administration’s track record and the tenor of its announcement on the canceled corridors, that could be one of its objectives: inflicting extra pain on Trump’s perceived adversaries.) But let’s take Wright seriously for a moment, because if the administration hoped that its actions could keep alternative energy sources from elbowing coal off the West’s power grid, well, then it’s hard to say which war is going worse: the one on Iran or the assault on clean energy.
This is happening, in part, because courts keep slapping down Trump’s initiatives. This month, for example, a judge ordered the Pentagon to lift its de facto freeze on onshore wind facility reviews, clearing the way for many projects. But more importantly, major solar, wind and battery storage projects are coming online rapidly — faster than Trump could ever cancel them. Some were in the works when Trump took office, while others have been fast-tracked to get them built before federal incentives expire.
All of this new clean power is shifting the West’s energy mix. This May, more than 51% of the power generated by utility-scale facilities in California came from solar, with just 15% from natural gas and zero from coal. In Nevada, 44% of its power mix came from solar (Note: These figures refer to power generated in the respective states, not necessarily the power these states used, since energy does flow across state lines; they also do not include rooftop solar.)
At times, California has even generated too much solar, meaning it exceeded demand on the grid, forcing solar plants to either give away energy to neighboring states, or curtail or shut down output.
Still, the sharp increase in battery storage capacity over the last few years has smoothed out the state’s solar “duck curve”: Once the plentiful afternoon sun tops off the batteries, they can discharge in the evening. This means less solar is wasted and avoids the need to fire up natural gas peaker plants in the afternoon to handle spiking demand.
California’s relatively green energy mix might be expected, but even fossil fuel powerhouses are generating a greater share of wind and solar. In New Mexico, the nation’s second-largest oil and gas producer, wind and solar provided 63% of the state’s electricity generation. A decade ago, coal dominated Colorado’s grid, but this May, it provided just 16% of the state’s output, with solar and wind together putting out more than half. Even in Utah, whose state lawmakers tend to take a Trumpian view of energy, solar often outpaces both natural gas and coal.
May’s data — the most recent available — provides a nice snapshot of the West’s energy picture. It’s an incomplete picture, however. May is a good month for solar: The sun’s shining, the days are long, and the sky is not yet obscured by wildfire smoke. And it’s usually not hot enough for air-conditioning-related demand spikes, meaning overall energy use tends to be lower.
So, let’s consider last year as a whole. In 2025, natural gas still led the energy mix in the West, providing 31% of the 11 states’ total generation, followed by hydropower at 20%. Solar came in a distant third at 14%, with wind and coal tying for fourth at 12% each.
But if we step back still further, we can see fossil fuels on the decline, especially coal. In 2007, for example, the West’s coal plants generated more than 225 million megawatt-hours of electricity. Compare that to last year, when the number fell to just 90 million. Even more remarkably, nearly all of the lost coal generation was offset by increases in solar and wind instead of natural gas, meaning there has been a significant net decrease in fossil fuel power over the last two decades.
Nearly all of the lost coal generation (in 2024) was offset by increases in solar and wind instead of natural gas.
Meanwhile, clean energy keeps ramping up, even as coal plants go offline permanently or for long-term repairs. Pattern Energy’s massive SunZia wind power facility in eastern New Mexico added a whopping 3.65 gigawatts to the grid when it came online in June. The 800-megawatt Green River solar-plus-storage project in Emery County, Utah, was also completed this summer, becoming one of the nation’s largest facilities of its kind. And even though federal land permitting has slowed, developers are preparing new projects on private and state land, including fallowed farm fields, with surprising frequency, especially in Southern California.
And there’s a lot more on the way. Planned solar, wind and battery projects in the West vastly outstrip the planned natural gas facilities. Highlights include the Westlands Water District in California, which is developing a 20-gigawatt solar and battery storage project on more than 100,000 acres of water-constrained agricultural land in the Central Valley. As climate change-exacerbated aridification robs farmers of their water, they are increasingly leasing their land to solar developers and staying in business by farming electrons on top of their crops.
Donald Trump could have scored an easy win, helped his fossil fuel corporation cronies and addressed his so-called “energy emergency” all in one fell swoop simply by adopting his predecessors’ all-of-the-above energy strategy. Instead, he picked a fight with the fastest-growing, most cost-effective energy sources simply because he perceived them as being too “green.” In doing so, he turned a potentially potent ally into an adversary and thereby plunged himself into yet another war that he cannot win.
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