Hold the obituary for renewables.
U.S. wind and solar generation climbed 10 percent over the first half of 2026, overcoming President Donald Trump’s political attacks to surpass coal and nuclear in the country’s electricity mix.
Coal generation was down 10 percent over the same period while natural gas generation was flat, according to a POLITICO review of federal energy data.
The renewable surge partially reflects former President Joe Biden’s efforts to boost wind and solar generation, with a wave of projects that began under Biden coming online after he left office. But it also underscores the sector’s continued resilience in the face of attacks from Trump, who has ended tax credits for renewable projects, sought to restrict their development on public land and boosted fossil fuels like coal.
The low cost and relative ease of building solar, in particular, has somewhat insulated the renewable industry from the policy headwinds in Washington.
“If you’re a utility, and you need to build generation and you want to build generation, you’re going to build what’s fast and cheap. Solar is fast and cheap,” said Nora Brownell, a former Pennsylvania utility regulator who also served on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. “I think they are making business decisions.”
The first six months of 2026 saw almost 420 terawatt-hours of wind and solar output, up from 382 TWh during the first half of 2025, according to preliminary figures from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Coal generation was 323 TWh during the same period, down 10 percent year over year. Nuclear output climbed 2 percent to reach 390 TWh. And natural gas generation, the country’s leading form of power generation, stayed essentially flat at 767 TWh.
Wind and solar output have eclipsed coal generation on an annual basis since 2024. But 2026 marks the first time the two clean energy sources have outstripped nuclear power over the first six months of a year, according to EIA’s data. Wind and solar accounted for 20 percent of U.S. electricity generation over the first half of the year, up from 18.6 percent over the same period in 2025.
The rise in renewable generation was largely attributable to solar, which has seen a boom in new projects in recent years. The U.S. installed a record-breaking 31 GW of solar in 2024, followed by 29 GW in 2025. Another 9 GW had been installed through May 2026.
That expansion is reflected in the 2026 generation data: Utility-scale projects produced almost 156 TWh of electricity through June, a 19 percent increase over 2025 levels.
Wind generation was up 5 percent to 264 TWh, helped by the completion of a pair of mega projects more than a decade in the making.
SunZia, a 3,650-megawatt New Mexico wind farm and the largest renewable energy project ever built in the U.S., officially came online last month but has been generating power since at least April, when it began testing.
Meanwhile, the 800 MW Vineyard Wind project off the Massachusetts coast has been gradually ramping up generation this year, though its output has been limited by challenges commissioning its turbines and a disagreement between the project and its turbine supplier over a 2024 construction accident.
“What we’ve seen is continued renewable growth in the future, not withstanding the Trump administration’s preference for alternatives,” said Timothy Fox, an analyst at ClearView Energy Partners.
The bigger question is whether renewables can continue to grow as a share of the country’s overall electricity mix at a time when demand for power is growing, Fox said. Power demand was up 1 percent nationally through the first six months of the year, reaching 2,079 TWh, according to EIA.
Tax credits for wind and solar projects ended on July 4 under a budget law signed by Trump last year, though renewable projects that met the legal definition for starting construction will continue to be able to qualify for subsidies through the end of the decade.
Power companies are also increasingly looking to build gas plants to help keep pace with anticipated demand from data centers. While solar accounts for more planned power plant capacity by 2030 than gas — 130 GW compared to 66 GW — the expected electricity output of the two technologies is similar because gas plants tend to run more.
“Rising demand from data centers and AI has become an independent driver of renewable and storage investment,” said Helen Kou, an analyst who tracks the U.S. power market at BloombergNEF. But, she added, “the tax-credit phaseout changes project economics.”
Renewable installations are likely to remain strong through 2027, she said, but “then the market goes through a painful adjustment, taking until the 2030s to recover as load growth and project power prices continue to rise.”
‘Low value energy’?
Trump has made no secret of his disdain for renewables.
In addition to ending tax credits for the industry, the Trump administration has halted construction of offshore wind projects and imposed new regulatory requirements for wind and solar development on federal lands. Interior Department reviews of wind and solar projects now require sign-offs from senior officials, while once-routine Defense Department reviews of wind projects have ground to a halt.
Trump administration officials, meanwhile, have sought to paint wind and solar as expensive and unreliable sources of electricity that are unable to meet the country’s rising demand for power. In a July 2 statement celebrating the end of renewable tax credits, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said renewables generated “a relatively small amount of low value energy” compared to the amount of land and materials they require to build.
Wright has consistently argued that renewables underperform during peak periods when electricity demand is at its highest, said DOE spokesperson Ben Dietderich.
“As Secretary Wright has stated repeatedly, the value of any energy source should be measured by how it performs when demand for electricity is at peak levels — not during regular demand periods when there are abundant amounts of excess capacity,” Dietderich wrote in an email.
That dynamic was on display during a recent heatwave in the PJM Interconnection, the power grid serving 13 states in the mid-Atlantic.
Gas, coal and oil accounted for nearly two-thirds of electricity generation when demand soared to near-record levels at 5 p.m. on July 2, according to EIA data. Nuclear contributed another 19 percent, while wind and solar accounted for 9 percent of power generation at the time.
But the picture is more complicated than Wright lets on, analysts said.
PJM has seen fewer renewable installations compared to grids in other parts of the country. At the same time, solar and batteries are playing an increasingly important role in meeting peak demand on hot summer days, when homeowners are blasting their air conditioning and the sun in shining.
Take Texas. The grid operated by the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas reached its highest level of demand so far this year on July 6 at 5 p.m. Solar and wind accounted for 40 percent of electricity generation on the grid at the time, according to EIA data. Solar alone accounted for a third of ERCOT’s generation, second only to gas.
Meanwhile, national coal generation has continued to fall despite Trump’s efforts to aid the industry. DOE has issued emergency orders to seven coal-fired power plants, directing them to continue operating generating units past their scheduled retirement date. The department argues they are needed to ensure the reliability of the electric grid.
Yet those efforts have run smack into the economics of power markets, where the price of natural gas remains the single largest factor in how much utilities run their coal plants. Coal generation enjoyed a rebound in 2025 but has fallen this year alongside a decrease in gas prices. Analysts said the dynamic showed the limits of Trump’s efforts to aid the industry.
“The cost of all of those coal plants that they are preserving is extraordinarily high,” said Alison Silverstein, an independent energy analyst who previously worked at FERC. “They are old plants that are not able to stay online well, and they cost significantly more than the rest of the market.”
She added, “It’s not clear how we have benefited as a nation, or as electric consumers.”
