By Steve Goreham
Originally published in RealClear Energy.
Trump Administration actions to scale back renewable energy capture headlines, but citizens are also pushing back. Efforts to deploy wind and solar systems face a rising tide of opposition in towns, counties, and states. Mandates for electric vehicles and electric home appliances are being challenged. The combination of rising local opposition and Trump funding cuts threatens to end the transition to green energy.
The green energy revolution in the United States has run almost unopposed for the last two decades. Driven by the fear of human-caused global warming, federal regulators enacted an expanding array of incentives for renewables in the form of mandates, tax credits, loans, and subsidies. States added incentives to push for the adoption of wind, solar, electric vehicles, heat pumps, green hydrogen, and carbon dioxide (CO2) capture systems.
Twenty-three states have laws or executive orders requiring Net Zero electricity by 2050. Power companies have been forced to comply with state mandates. Since 2000, wind and solar have grown from near zero to about 16% of US power generation in 2024, wind (10.5%) and solar (5.1%).
Twenty-two states have electric vehicle (EV) mandates, requiring all sales of new cars to be EVs by a future date, such as 2035. Tightening CO2 emission standards from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) force manufacturers to sell an increasing share of EVs. Plug-in EV sales grew from zero two decades ago to 8% last year.
Climate policy advocates want homeowners to switch from natural gas and propane appliances to heat pumps and other electric appliances. In 2019, Berkeley, California became the first city to prohibit natural gas in new residential construction. Cities and counties in seven states now ban gas in new construction, including a statewide ban in New York.
The wave of renewable energy programs promoted and subsidized included electric vehicle charging stations, CO2 pipelines, and green hydrogen production facilities. But it’s becoming clear that many towns, counties, and states no longer support the green energy movement. A rising tide of opposition threatens the deployment of renewables.
Last month, the State House of Arizona passed legislation that would prohibit construction of wind systems on more than 90% of state land. The legislation would force new wind projects to be at least 12 miles from any residential property. The bill is being considered in the Arizona Senate.
Oklahoma is the third largest generator of electricity from wind in the US. But attendees at recent rallies at the state capitol call for bans on new wind and solar projects. Local residents voice economic, environmental, and health concerns about renewable systems.
The opposition to wind and solar has been growing for more than a decade and recently accelerating. In 2009, North Carolina banned new wind projects in 23 counties. Kentucky enacted an effective statewide ban on new wind construction in 2014. Connecticut, Florida, Tennessee, and Vermont have established bans which are effectively statewide.
A 2023 study by USA Today found that the number of counties in the US with wind turbine restrictions or bans rose from two in 2008 to 411 in 2023. The number of blocking counties rose to over 500 in 2024 with Florida’s ban on wind systems offshore and within one mile of the coast. About 16% of US counties now ban or restrict wind systems. More than 100 counties restrict the deployment of solar systems. The number of counties that ban wind or solar is rising faster than counties which are deploying wind or solar for the first time.
Journalist Robert Bryce has developed a Renewable Rejection Database. The database shows a cumulative total of 800 of wind and solar project rejections in the US since 2015. It shows a rising trend in rejections, including an especially large jump in solar rejections in 2022, 2023, and 2024.
There are many reasons for rising opposition to wind and solar projects. Towns are concerned with the aesthetic impact of 600-foot-high turbine towers and acres of solar panels, the loss of farmland to sprawling wind and solar systems, low-frequency noise from wind turbines, and the impact on nearby property values. Retiring systems generate vast quantities of turbine blade and solar panel waste that fill up local landfills or must be shipped to landfills in other states.
Wind and solar require more than 100 times the land compared to coal, gas, or nuclear power generators for the same average electricity output. While traditional power plants are usually located near cities, utility-scale wind and solar systems are spread over wide areas, often on ridge lines and located far from population centers. Therefore, renewables require long transmission lines and two or three times the transmission towers compared to conventional power plants. Residents often oppose the construction of new transmission as well.
Some states have decided to overrule local opposition to wind and solar. A 2023 Illinois state law overruled restrictions or bans on wind and solar established by more than half of state counties. A 2023 Michigan state law also overruled local opposition from more than 20 counties. Local opposition can be bypassed in seven other states.
In 2024, electric vehicle sales grew only 7% in the US. California and ten other states currently mandate that 35% of new car sales must be EVs in the 2026 model year. With slowing consumer adoption of EVs, these goals are impossible for all states except California. At the end of 2024, Virginia cancelled their EV mandate. Look for other states to cancel as well.
As we mentioned, cities and counties in seven states have banned gas appliances in new construction, but in the last five years, 24 states enacted regulations prohibiting city and county bans on gas appliances. Most states want citizens and businesses to be able to choose the home energy that they prefer.
Utilities are rethinking plans for renewable electricity. The artificial intelligence revolution may require Texas, Virginia, and other states to double power generating capacity within the next decade. Wind and solar systems can’t meet this demand. Nuclear plants are being restarted, coal plant closings are being postponed, and more than 200 gas-fired power plants are in planning or under construction.
Carbon dioxide capture and green hydrogen projects are also being challenged. South Dakota just signed a law prohibiting the use of eminent domain to seize land for CO2 pipelines. CO2 capture projects in Louisiana face severe local opposition. And regional green hydrogen hubs are sure to be opposed.
With Trump funding cuts and escalating local opposition to renewables, 2025 may be the beginning of the end of the green energy transition in the United States.
Steve Goreham is a speaker on energy, the environment, and public policy and author of the bestselling book Green Breakdown: The Coming Renewable Energy Failure.
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Of the short list from above:
Wind
solar
Electric vehicles
Heat pumps
Hydrogen
CO2 capture
Methane and Nitrous Oxide regulation are missing, and
Hydrogen and CO2 capture are entirely without merit.
Biofuels from cropland, an environmental travesty that produces a little expensive electricity per acre. The subsidies are over 50% of owning and operating costs forever
Unfortunately, growing corn to put ethanol in our gas tanks is thoroughly entrenched.
Has Trump or his people talked about it?
Corn to Ethanol requires 30 million acres of 90 million in corn, and produces only 10% of the gasoline/ethanol mixture we use each year.
It is an out of this world/off the charts expensive, log-rolling boondoggle that has no measurable climate effect
MTBE was used at scale to increase octane ratings in gasoline, but was banned for the obvious reasons. Now we use ethanol. If ethanol is phased out as an inexpensive, scalable octane boost, what replaces it with the dangers like MTBE?
EPA is reconsidering the rules EPA pushed out at the last minute by the Brandon administration,
That includes the “Clean Power Plan 2.0” governing GHG emissions, which should involve the NH4 and N2O regs. It should also consider CO2 capture as “non-available” since it cannot be technically implemented industry wide.
“ It should also consider CO2 capture as “non-available” since it cannot be technically implemented industry wide.”
Can it be technically implemented anywhere?
Actually, CO2 capture can be done at every power station.
However, you still need a place to put the CO2 once captured. That’s the rub. If you are near a geology that will take the CO2 and store it without leakage then you can implement CCS (“carbon” capture and storage). Otherwise you have to pipe it somewhere that can store it. Localities, NGOs others have been known to fight tooth-and-nail against a pipeline of any sort. Just try it with CO2.
For example, many plants on the east coast are not near storage geologies. And with the denser populations and already existing infrastructures, one would anticipate a fight to even permit CCS at a plant, much less build a pipeline to it.
There isn’t really anything wrong conceptually with having enough PV generation on sunny afternoons to match your local air conditioner electricity demand, which also on sunny afternoons. It’s when someone thinks PV power can be stored up and used at night that concepts go into rainbow unicorn land.
Wind power is too random to be used to match something predictable like general AC loads on sunny days….so if used backs out base load generation….which is a recipe for increased base load cost.
Wind and solar require more than 100 times the land compared to coal, gas, or nuclear power generators for the same average electricity output…
On a very small island that requires destroying agriculture.
Farmers could be forced to sell land at lower value under new Labour plans – Independent
Labour has been accused of delivering another ‘shattering blow’ to Britain’s farmers after a post-Brexit subsidy scheme was halted without notice – Daily Mail
Time for a rewrite of Old McDonald had a farm.
All together, now:-
“Old McDonald had a farm
But doesn’t any more…”
There, that didn’t take long!
Brevity is clearly your forte. Look out Woody Guthrie!
Brevity?!? Alice’s Restaurant runs over 18 minutes!
That was his son, Arlo.
Old McDonald now has a combination wind and solar farm at our expense.
Starmer’s Labour Party is thoroughly Marxist and is waging a class war against farmers. It’s just like Stalin’s destruction of the Kulaks.
“The combination of rising local opposition and Trump funding cuts threatens to end the transition to green energy.”
No more “free” money.
Now … if we had added to our fleet of safe, clean and reliable nuclear power plants back in the day instead of building giant windmills and filling fields with solar cells …
If frogs had any sense, they would not make big jumps that bump their asses.
Never in the field of power generation has so much been spent to achieve so little.
Surely there is enough evidence today to question the veracity of the global warming/climate change story, because essentially no forecasts of doom or detriment have happened in the time periods stated.
Surely, given the slow change of all relevant weather parameters (with the possible exception of temperature rise caused by unknown mechanisms since 1975) it would be s safe bet to go back to hydrocarbon use at the pre-2000 scale, to discern whether any weather/climate parameters really change significantly. We should do the years long experiment with dominant fossil-fuelled electricity starting now, to see if it is any different to 20 years of reduced fossil fuel acts and regs just finishing.
Surely that would be a common sense approach?
Surely, there is much joy thinking of Shirley, and adventurous and luscious young all-female lady of my youthful encounters. Shirley, the way it should be all the time, naughty and nice and positive. Geoff S
Any effect on the Keeling curve? If not why not?
Yes, more C02 to make useless ruinable energy devices.
Many towns got hoodwinked by smooth-talking sleazebag green energy barkers. Now, they are stuck with those installations blighting the countryside. Buyer’s remorse indeed.
Their enablers/beneficiaries are the snake-oil, lawyer, fast-talking politicians and friends and family, a incestuous consort of scoundrels, out to enrich themselves, via waste, fraud and abuse, at the expense of all others, using the Holy Cross of climate change, the foghorn of the Mass Media, and “their own science”, as dubious foils for their Crusade, for as long as they can get away with it, until stopped by Trump & Co.
It’s total madness to use heat pumps powered by electricity generated mostly by gas. These people are either stupid or evil or both.
Take Mr Miliband…
What makes his zealotry all the more disconcerting is that it’s so plainly misguided. The latest evidence of this was supplied on Tuesday by The Telegraph’s own Tom Haynes. Installing a heat pump in Mr Miliband’s home, our Money reporter found, had barely improved the house’s energy efficiency at all. It had merely raised its EPC (Energy Performance Certificate) from a D to a C. And a C isn’t much to boast about: it’s only a little above average.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/ed-miliband-heat-pump-farce-173043909.html?guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9kdWNrZHVja2dvLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAMqJ8aDg34uA2tNr7Ojp7RLtsQekVQ_Ue8nWFF_OxJemwFH1msx1MnSoehG6IpoPQr4LIFxQUKuaxkHOpbii5-SLGJxYyNtAXk1TJA0qfdTk0MGRZYSA-8H0KM04iMYJCQGR_Jpw3TNqG0NNn7C_8njSxJwhdxaad6R3IrUmjty_
Don’t forget that most EPC’s are not worth the paper they are written on having provided boom time to numerous cowboy traders.
Paradoxically, switching from gas boiler to heat pump can often WORSEN the EPC rating because electricity consumption levels are one of the factors in the assessment! It all depends who does the assessment, it seems, and how well-trained they are.
You couldn’t make it up…
Please explain what you mean by the “total madness”.
In my area of northern Florida, electricity is about the only form of energy available to the house. If one wants gas, it is stored as propane in those rather ugly sausage tanks near the house. My heat pump works great all year for both heating & cooling and much less expensive than separate units.
The local utility is attempting to place a solar farm nearby and residents simply do not want it. There was so much opposition that the utility held a public meeting extolling all the wonderful benefits of the solar farm and answering questions from the residents. I thought the meeting was more like used car salespeople trying to sell unwanted vehicles.
explain what you mean by the “total madness”.
97%
In this matter ‘total madness’ must surely be a useful descriptor to be used when a supposed scientific argument is wrongly and falsely used to describe and/or support a scientific position that has already been shown many times to be false. Those included in the Paris Agreement are a case in point. That ensures money is sent to the Maldives to be used to offset the supposed imminent consequences of sea level rise – already debunked. Not only has no such rise arisen (apart from the normal rise associated with the end of the last ice age) but there is no specified agreement to return such inapplicable funding (Can you really believe that?) so the Maldives are spending our money on building up to five new airports at near beach level.
Heat pumps in Florida work much better than heat pumps in North Dakota.
Heat pumps are pretty useless in the 13.2m terraced houses in the UK also.
And….?
I have three 24,000 Btu/h heat pumps with six outlets in my 3500 sq ft, well insulated/sealed house, costing $24,000 turnkey, without $1200 one time Utility company subsidies.
.
Each year I save about $200/y on energy, not counting amortization of $2000/y at 6% over 15 years.
.
I AM SO SCREWED, AND SO ARE ALL OTHERS
It’s total madness to use heat pumps powered by electricity generated mostly by gas. These people are either stupid or evil or both.
See above ; )
It looks like two for the price of one today!
Only one minor criticism:
“Driven by the fear of human-caused global warming, federal regulators enacted …”
should read “Driven by grift, greed and the compulsion to enact WEF and UN Agenda 2030 …”
Green energy is neither. Winter Games kill.
“Climate policy advocates
wantDEMAND homeownerstoswitch from natural gas and propane appliances to heat pumps and other electric appliances.”fixed it
“A rising tide of opposition threatens the deployment of renewables.”
I’m finally starting to see some opposition here in Wokeachusetts. From a YouTube channel.
Maura Healey’s GREEN DREAM is Your Wallet’s Nightmare
OUT WITH HER
SHE HAS DONE A LIFETIME OF DAMAGE IN A FEW YEARS
Here in the UK where we are sitting upon loads of fossil fuels we have all these monumental windmill structures of recent decades in praise of false idols thanks largely to a liar called Mann and a bunch of idiots at some East Anglian education place for the incurably insane who don’t know the difference between fact and fiction or conjuring tricks and reality.
We have, thank goodness, some places of beauty left untouched but which politicians are going to cough up compensation to the public for all the misplaced money they have squandered on their virtue signals not to mention the coming costs of taking these useless structures down and disposing of all the massive rubbish somewhere sensible -where? Its not worth waiting for Starmer to apologise because he’ll carry on lying – its all he knows. The man is clueless and still has years of errors at his mercy.
Wind and solar have had decades to prove their worth. They have failed miserably. Energy prices have skyrocketed, they were supposed to go down. Wind and solar aren’t profitable, they require massive government support. They kill wildlife even protected species. They disrupt the grid because they are intermittent. Government had to mandate that wind and solar have preference to the grid otherwise there would be no need for them. Fossil fuel, nuclear and hydro can provide the energy we need, there is no need for renewables. Wind and solar can never provide the energy we need without fossil fuel, hydro and nuclear. It just couldn’t be more clear wind and solar are a waste of time, money and resources not to mention all the disruption they cause. We need to end this nonsense now.
“Energy prices have skyrocketed, they were supposed to go down.”
“supposed to go down”
The Obama quote said they were supposed to go up.
Who is Obama?
The photo is excellent.
“The combination of rising local opposition and Trump funding cuts threatens to end the transition to green energy.”
Implies the transition was going to happen.
Implies the transition was possible.
“The green energy revolution in the United States has run almost unopposed for the last two decades.“
Implies Trump have didn’t a first term
“Twenty-three states have laws or executive orders requiring Net Zero electricity by 2050.“
Implies executive orders are like laws
Stopping critique but I expect I’ll find the rest in other comments.
Green Energy is anything but green.
We’ve been making gigantic airplane wings out of aluminum for nearly a century. That’s all wind turbine blades are. We know how to make them strong enough to withstand tremendous static and dynamic loads for long periods of time, how to add all kinds of lift and drag altering control surfaces, how to protect them from icing, how to maintain and repair them, and maybe most important of all, how to get the most value out of them at the end of life.
I’m not an advocate…scratch that, I’m an ardent opponent of grid-scale wind turbines. I oppose them on environmental grounds, one of which is dramatically illustrated with the cover photograph for this story. Retired composite wind turbine blades aren’t repairable, or recyclable in any economically meaningful way. Mostly aluminum (meaning “metallic”) wind turbine blades would almost certainly be more cost effective than composites largely because: they are more easily maintained, many of their component parts are recyclable into later wind turbine blades, and the material itself is fungible (able to be reclaimed for non-wind-turbine uses).
I’m for letting the market decide. I wouldn’t invest my own money in composite blade wind turbines, but don’t think anyone who wants to do so should be barred from it by law. Reality will do that, IMHO, as such investors discover that the beauty queen they believed they backed is in fact a pig – and not a county fair winning one, at that.
“Green energy” is only wanted by urban elites who do not suffer any consequences. Maybe some sheep, too.