Trump Administration Abandons Fight Against Wind Energy as Clean Energy Output Surges

The clean energy sector is showing resilience despite challenges thrown at it by a hostile White House, a recent report found. A string of legal victories has further dampened the Trump administration’s efforts to halt wind and solar power.

By Aman Azhar, Inside Climate News, June 15, 2026

The Trump administration has abandoned its effort to halt wind energy projects across the United States and dropped its challenge to the court ruling that tossed President Donald Trump’s order freezing federal permitting and leasing for wind projects. States that challenged the order hailed the development as one of the most significant legal victories against the Trump White House’s campaign against the energy transition.

On Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit dismissed the appeal after the Justice Department filed a motion for its voluntary dismissal on June 10. 

The case against Trump’s executive order was filed in May, 2025 by a coalition of attorneys general from 17 states and Washington, D.C., led by New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Monday’s decision affirms the Dec. 8 ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Patti Saris, which concluded that Trump’s January 2025 executive order was unlawful, finding the sweeping ban on wind projects was “arbitrary and capricious” and exceeded the president’s authority. 

Environmental and wildlife advocacy groups applauded the move. Nancy Pyne, a senior advisor to the Sierra Club, said renewable energy continues to prevail and grow in spite of Trump’s relentless attacks.

“While everyday Americans face soaring bills and unstable prices,” she said, “renewable energy offers an affordable, common sense solution to lower costs and protect our health and our environment.”

This latest victory in a string of legal setbacks for the administration comes at a time when clean energy production continues to surge despite a slew of policy, permitting and procedural hurdles imposed by the White House. 

According to a recent report from the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund and Atlas Public Policy, a record 79.7 GW of clean power are projected to come online in the U.S. in 2026, even as roughly 8 GW of clean energy projects were canceled in the first quarter of the year.

The project pipeline remains strong, the report found, with 222 GW of clean energy capacity planned or under construction nationwide as part of 693 GW of power announced through the first quarter. Developers have announced plans to invest an estimated $377 billion in new projects through 2031, the report said in its key findings. 

The country already has 471 GW of clean power online, with a record 51.6 GW newly added in 2025, “the equivalent of about 25 Hoover Dams,” the report notes. Solar and battery storage now account for 85 percent of the planned pipeline.

The Monday court ruling arrives roughly a week after a different federal court restored a key tax-credit pathway for wind and solar developers. 

On June 6, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia tossed an August 2025 treasury rule that made it difficult for wind and solar projects to qualify for federal tax credits. The change eliminated the longstanding practice whereby developers locked in tax credits by showing that 5 percent or more of a project’s total cost had been spent. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled that the administration had not given a sound reason for the change, and sent the rule back to the IRS to reconsider.

“We see a strong correlation between the high rate of cancellation and the anti-renewable policies from the Trump Administration—from aggressive executive orders through attempts to repeal pollution protections,” said David Villagrana, lead counsel for clean energy tax solutions at EDF. In an emailed response, Villagrana said the Trump administration has significantly delayed projects through administrative measures. “Development within any industry likes consistency; for clean energy, the Trump administration has ensured a lack thereof.”  

He cautiously welcomed the court’s overturning of the revised 5 percent rule, saying the administration could decide to appeal the district court’s decision but “it would have to overcome the district court’s careful and thorough analysis of the many legal deficiencies in the IRS’ notice.”

The EDF report also tracked a sharp uptick in gas projects. “[T]otal planned and under construction natural gas capacity rose from 44.8 GW in Q4 2025 to 65.5 GW by the end of Q1 2026, an increase of 20.7 GW,” its authors wrote, more than four times the combined growth of solar, storage and onshore wind over the same period. Fossil fuels’ share of planned capacity has climbed from 9 percent at the end of 2022 to 27 percent, “a threefold increase that points to an uptick in fossil fuel generation investment,” according to the report.

In an interview with Inside Climate News, Jon Gordon, senior policy director at Advanced Energy United, a clean energy advocacy group, said the gas buildout was “very concerning… particularly from an environmental standpoint,” warning that new plants are “likely going to be in service for 30 years plus, once they’re constructed.” 

He said “the big reason we’re seeing this surge of natural gas is this administration that’s been throwing roadblocks in the way of renewables and providing incentives for fossil fuel.” 

For a clean-energy state like Maryland, he said, the challenge was real because “a lot of our problems are very short term. We need new supply right away,” and yet gas plants “are the longest to build.” Gordon argued that economics increasingly favors the clean energy pathway because the cost of building gas plants “has almost doubled in just a couple of years,” while solar and battery costs keep falling.

The EDF-Atlas report also found that 80 percent of the nation’s existing, planned and under-construction clean power capacity is located in congressional districts represented by Republicans. Of the 30 districts with the most clean power capacity, just five are Democratic. Texas leads every state with 164 GW, nearly double California, in second place with 83 GW.

Abe Silverman, an assistant research scholar at Johns Hopkins University’s Ralph O’Connor Sustainable Energy Institute, cautioned against reading the map in partisan terms. Talking to Inside Climate News, he said the first thing he looks to is “where is land cheap.”

“Is it really the red and blueness of the state, or is it the underlying cost of land and the density,” he asked. Much of the growth is in areas with low-cost land, he said, and it is further shaped by interconnection policies.

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/15062026/trump-administration-abandons-fight-against-wind-energy/

Arctic Refuge Oil Draws Few Bids, Despite Trump’s Push for ‘Liquid Gold’

An auction to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge ended with just 10 percent of the available land claimed for oil development.

By Lisa Friedman, The New York Times, June 5, 2026

An auction of oil leases in Alaska’s remote Arctic National Wildlife Refuge ended on Friday with just nine bids covering only about 10 percent of the available land, undercutting President Trump’s claims that drilling in the pristine wilderness area would set off an economic boom.

The sale brought in about $3.7 million, nearly half of which came from the state of Alaska’s publicly owned economic development corporation. Most of the 58 tracts available drew no bids at all. No major international oil companies entered bids.

Mr. Trump had campaigned in 2024 on turning oil development loose in the Arctic refuge, an isolated habitat for species including polar bear, caribou and millions of migratory birds, promising that extracting what he called “liquid gold” there would lower the price of gasoline and groceries. Republicans who pushed for opening the region said the refuge would generate a multibillion-dollar windfall as soon as drillers were allowed inside.

Previous sales mandated by Congress during Mr. Trump’s first term also drew little interest. The handful of leases that had been sold were suspended, and then later canceled, by President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

But with the war in Iran sending oil prices spiking and the federal government actively encouraging companies to drill, analysts said they had expected a more robust auction this time.

“We’re in the middle of a massive supply shortfall, and if there was ever a time to look past political and reputational risks, it would be now,” said Kevin Book, managing director of ClearView Energy Partners, a research firm.

Mr. Trump has called the refuge “the biggest find anywhere in the world, as big as Saudi Arabia,” and he has directed the government to expedite development in Alaska. The administration declared the day a success.

“The interest was solid,” Kevin J. Pendergast, the director of the Alaska office at the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management, said as he announced the results. The B.L.M. director, Steve Pearce, hailed what he called “strong industry interest.”

When the auction ended, two companies had bid on five tracts of land totaling about 70,000 acres. About 689,000 acres were offered for leasing.

One was the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, a state-owned economic development corporation that is currently the only oil and gas leaseholder in the refuge. The authority had three of the winning bids, totaling about $1.5 million. The other winning bids went to Hex L.L.C., an Alaska-based oil and gas production company.

Mr. Book said he believed that many of the largest oil and gas companies had stayed away because of the logistical challenges of drilling in such remote territory, as well as concern that a future administration could again cancel leases.

The top Democrats on environmental committees in Congress, Senator Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Representative Jared Huffman, Democrat of California, called the results “an embarrassment for the Trump administration.”

In a joint statement, they called the auction “an insult to our entire country, by sacrificing and selling off America’s public lands for pennies on the dollar.”

Senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, both Republicans of Alaska, did not respond to requests for comment.

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge spans roughly 19 million acres along the North Slope of Alaska. One of the last truly wild places in the United States, it is home to migrating caribou, polar bears, musk oxen, millions of birds and other wildlife.

It also includes land considered sacred by the Gwich’in, an Alaska Native group.

But the refuge is estimated to contain as much as 11.8 billion barrels of recoverable oil, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, though many experts believe that estimate is based on old data. The Alaska corporation currently holds leases in the refuge, but there is no active drilling.

Environmental activists said the tepid sale results and the absence of major oil and gas companies was evidence that the market has little interest in the Arctic refuge.

“The government spent public money to hold an auction no major company showed up for, and that tells you everything you need to know about the economics here,” said Bobby McEnaney, director of land conservation for the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit environmental group.

Alaska Native communities were divided over the auction. Members of the Gwich’in Steering Committee, who have been fighting oil and gas development in the region for decades, argue that drilling threatens an areas they call the Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit, “the sacred place where life begins,” and the Porcupine caribou herds that Indigenous communities have relied on for thousands of years.

“We will continue to fight the Trump administration’s leasing program, and work with our friends and allies to protect this sacred and irreplaceable landscape from development of any kind,” Kristen Moreland, executive director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee, said in a statement.

Other Alaska Native communities have argued that oil and gas development is critical to economic development.

“It’s a step forward, as far as we’re concerned,” said Nagruk Harcharek, president of Voice of the Arctic Inupiat, which represents Inupiat leadership organizations on the North Slope and supports oil and gas projects. “We look forward to continuing to advocate for it and for the overall self-determination of the folks on the North Slope.”

The controversy over drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has spanned almost 50 years. Alaska officials and many Republican lawmakers have long sought to allow drilling there, citing the jobs and revenue it would create. But the refuge was protected for decades, largely by Democrats in Congress.

That changed in 2017 when Republicans, in control of both houses of Congress and the White House, pushed through a tax bill allowing sales of leases of up to 1.5 million acres in the refuge.

Two weeks before Mr. Trump left office in 2021, the Interior Department held the first auction. It was a dud. So was the second auction in 2025, ending without a single bidder.

There will be three more sales in the Arctic Refuge between now and 2035, all mandated in Mr. Trump’s domestic policy bill that passed last year.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/05/climate/anwr-lease-sale-alaska.html

Twenty Years After His Film, Al Gore Tweaks the Climate Script

Mr. Gore is still giving the slide show that “An Inconvenient Truth” was built around, but with changes that reflect a shift in the discussion of climate change.

By Chico Harlan, The New York Times, May 25, 2026

It was the world’s most famous movie built around a slide show: Al Gore, in a darkened auditorium, clicking through images that warned of a heating planet. Within the film’s first minutes, Mr. Gore described a “moral imperative to make big changes,” a call he echoed several times onstage.

Twenty years after the release of “An Inconvenient Truth,” his Oscar-winning documentary, it is remembered mostly for its cultural resonance — for bringing awareness of global warming into the mainstream. Mr. Gore and his intense focus on climate change energized both supporters on the left and critics on the right. In a self-effacing bit on “Saturday Night Live,” Mr. Gore warned viewers about glaciers on the attack. A year later, he shared the Nobel Peace Prize.

As the years passed, Mr. Gore has kept going with his slide show, giving presentations in hundreds of cities worldwide, most recently in Nashville earlier this month.

And with time, the slide show has changed in ways that reflect how the conversation about climate change has shifted over the course of a generation.

Onstage in Nashville, Mr. Gore made a central argument that would have been inconceivable two decades ago. Rather than directly invoking morality, he led with economics.

The cost of renewable energy had plunged. He talked about “market forces” and about the “spectacular, unprecedented” technology revolution — including low-cost solar panels and wind turbines — that now make aiding the planet an affordable choice.

“We’re in a different world now,” Mr. Gore said in Nashville. “The options are terrific.”

The moral aspect of climate advocacy has had a long legacy, burnished not only by Mr. Gore but also by Pope Francis, who portrayed a link between environmental degradation and societal rot. In the late 2010s, a wave of youth protesters argued that political leaders and corporations had a duty to safeguard the planet for future generations.

But as that movement waned, some felt the moralizing had at times brought a political backlash. After the documentary’s release, Mr. Gore was criticized in some right-wing circles for hypocrisy given that he traveled widely and lived a lifestyle reliant on fossil fuels for energy. Later, to attend climate events, the activist Greta Thunberg twice crossed the Atlantic by sailboat in a conspicuous effort to avoid polluting air travel, a move that some critics called a publicity stunt out of reach for noncelebrities.

Environmentalists, meantime, made a new case: that wind and solar energy were becoming cheaper than fossil fuels. Bill McKibben, a founder of the campaign group 350.org, said climate advocates no longer had to “fight against the force of economic gravity.”

“This is the place where we have the most leverage,” he said. “Instead of having the economic wind forever blowing at us, now it’s in our sails. We do finally have a tool to work with.”

Johan Rockström, the scientist who leads the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, went so far as to say that the “winning argument” in pushing for cuts to greenhouse-gas emissions “is not the ethical and moral one, it is the economic one,” in part because of the political blowback the moral argument can attract.

In an interview, Mr. Gore spoke at length about his evolving slide show, which he estimated he had given thousands of times. Did he move away from the moral message?

“It remains the central argument,” Mr. Gore said, pointing out that he was still making this case in speeches and at meetings. But he also noted that “experience says there are a lot of people who will be more easily be persuaded by the impact on their pocketbooks.”

He described his target audience as people “whose minds are changeable,” and that’s where he thinks an economic argument, as well as one about health implications, has grown more effective. He also reasoned that the moral case, as strong as he felt it was, had perhaps reached its persuasive limits.

President Trump has forcefully rejected the idea that renewable energy has an economic advantage, last year calling green energy a “scam” and describing climate change as the “greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” During his first term, Mr. Trump criticized “prophets of doom and their predictions of the apocalypse,” with Ms. Thunberg, the climate campaigner, in the audience.

The consequences of climate change, of course, still raise moral questions. Wealthy countries are responsible for the bulk of emissions, while poorer nations disproportionately face the damage. Deadly heat waves singe countries where most can’t afford air conditioning, while hurricanes barrel into small islands and slice their G.D.P.s. Last year, the top United Nations court ruled that nations had a duty to prevent environmental harm and that any breach constituted a “wrongful act.”

“The idea that there is one way to talk about climate, it never was true and isn’t true now,” said Rachel Cleetus, a senior policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Mr. Gore still begins his slide show as he did in the “An Inconvenient Truth” days, with an image of Earth taken during the Apollo 8 mission in 1968. After that, the differences in content are immediately apparent. Back then, though he cited examples of how climate change was driving extreme events, he said the phenomenon was just “beginning” to show itself. Now, he devotes a full hour to current events such as fast-intensifying hurricanes, wildfires and shrinking glaciers that are reducing water supply.

In the 2006 documentary, he noted that the 10 hottest years on record had come over the previous 14 years, since the 1990s.

Compare that with his current slide show, in which he notes that the 10 hottest years have all happened since 2015.

“It’s still getting worse much faster than the solutions are being deployed,” Mr. Gore said in the interview.

Mr. Gore said he had been presenting some version of the slide show since the 1980s and had performed it more than 1,000 times even before the documentary’s release, using a Kodak Carousel projector in the early days. He said that “one of the most important presentations” was on the deck of a houseboat in Center Hill Lake in his home state, Tennessee. He was with longtime friends, with beer flowing. They weren’t the most obvious audience for a climate talk. But, he said, they were interested.

“It emboldened me to start taking it on the road in a much more forceful way,” Mr. Gore said.

A scene in the documentary showed him at a desk, laptop open, jotting notes on paper. “I guess the thing I’ve spent more time on than anything else is trying to identify all those things in people’s minds that serve as obstacles to them understanding this,” Mr. Gore said at the time.

Asked why he continued with the slide show 20 years later, he described it as a “challenge of a particular kind.” But this time he was talking about himself, not the planet. “It’s one of those, when you pick it up, you can’t put it down,” he said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/25/climate/al-gore-an-inconvenient-truth.html?campaign_id=54&emc=edit_clim_20260526&instance_id=176201&nl=climate-forward&regi_id=66704053&segment_id=220491&user_id=97eb24ff9121d1a70f01fac05f86ea1b

Trump’s Push to Keep Coal Plants Open Is Costing Hundreds of Millions

Costs have been mounting in the year since the Trump administration began directing aging coal plants to stay open.

By Claire Brown, The New York Times, May 14, 2026

It’s been nearly a year since the Trump administration began issuing orders to keep five aging coal plants in four states open past their scheduled closures, citing an “energy emergency” that it said threatened the reliability of the U.S. electricity supply.

Since then, the Energy Department has repeatedly renewed these 90-day directives preventing the facilities from shutting down, even as one plant has yet to burn coal and another requested its order be allowed to expire. The moves have not come cheaply: Keeping the plants open has already cost hundreds of millions of dollars, much of which will be paid by ratepayers.

The Trump administration has pushed a broad campaign to revive coal in the United States, rolling back regulations on emissions and offering funding for plant upgrades, despite the significant health risks of burning coal and the industry’s yearslong decline.

On Friday, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit will hear a case brought by Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois and nine nonprofit groups arguing that the Energy Department’s orders are illegal and that there is no energy emergency. The case focuses on one plant, J.H. Campbell in West Olive, Mich., but has implications for five plants.

The Trump administration has said the emergency orders are necessary to deal with rising energy demand. Citing the use of the power plants during a cold snap this winter, Ben Dietderich, spokesman for the Energy Department, said “these operations serve as a reminder that allowing reliable generation to go offline would unnecessarily contribute to grid reliability risks.”

But critics say its use of emergency orders is not an efficient, economical or environmentally friendly way to meet rising electricity demand and ensure the grid is not overwhelmed during peak hours.

“The consequences of the Department of Energy’s actions are massive costs being imposed on ratepayers to keep around these old, expensive, dirty coal plants,” said Michael Lenoff, lead attorney for Earthjustice, an environmental nonprofit group that is part of the case.

Consumers Energy, which operates the J.H. Campbell plant in Michigan, has reported $180 million in expenses associated with running the facility since last May. In Washington, the Centralia plant, which is operated by the power company TransAlta, reported nearly $20 million in costs during the first three months of the emergency order, even though it has not burned any coal since its directive was issued in December.

In a statement, Consumers Energy said, “We are focused on complying with the federal orders.”

In an affidavit submitted to a federal energy regulator, a TransAlta executive outlined what it would take to restart the plant: 75,000 gallons of diesel, plus $200,000 worth of electricity before it could begin generating any of its own energy. Even if the plant never runs again, it would cost an estimated $7 million to dispose of its 98,000-ton pile of coal. TransAlta said its facility remains available but has not been directed to operate.

Expenses could climb elsewhere if the Energy Department’s orders continue. Vince Parisi, the president of the Northern Indiana Public Service Company, said in a recent regulatory hearing that one of the units at the state’s R.M. Schahfer plant covered by a Department of Energy order has been broken since last summer. He estimated the facility requires more than $100 million in investments to operate at full capacity.

CenterPoint Energy, which operates the F.B. Culley plant in Indiana, asked the Department of Energy to allow the emergency order for one of its units to expire without a renewal, according to a letter obtained by the Citizens Action Coalition, an Indiana advocacy group.

“Safe and reliable operation beyond March 2026 hinges on major and costly interventions,” wrote the Indiana region president Michael Roeder, estimating that repairs would cost $16 million to $20 million.

The Department of Energy renewed the emergency order for the F.B. Culley plant the next month. In a statement, CenterPoint said it was “committed to prioritizing affordability and reliability for our southwestern Indiana customers.”

The environmental effects of the emergency orders are becoming clear, too. From June to December 2025, the J.H. Campbell plant emitted 36 pounds of mercury, a neurotoxin that can impair brain development, a recent New York Times analysis found. Mercury emissions from coal-burning power plants rose by 9 percent in 2025 after years of declines. Coal plants are the single largest source of mercury emissions in the United States.

During Winter Storm Fern in late January, when temperatures plunged below zero in parts of the Midwest, three of the plants provided “essential power,” according to a fact sheet issued by the Department of Energy. But Mr. Roeder pointed to the cold weather event as evidence of his plant’s unreliability after “systemic equipment failures” forced an outage on January 26.

As part of President Trump’s plans to boost the coal industry, the Environmental Protection Agency has eased restrictions on greenhouse gas and mercury emissions from coal plants. Last month, the agency said it would weaken cleanup requirements for waste from burning coal.

Those efforts, combined with an increase in electricity demand driven by energy-intensive data centers, led to a 13 percent increase in the amount of electricity produced by coal in 2025, after years of decline. Coal emits about twice as much carbon dioxide as natural gas when burned for energy, and its rebound contributed to a nationwide increase in emissions of 2.4 percent last year.

Administration officials have said they hope to keep as many plants open as possible and prevent further closures. At the beginning of 2025, plant operators planned to retire 8.5 gigawatts of capacity; less than a third of those retirements proceeded as planned.

The largest retirement planned for this year is the J.H. Campbell coal plant. And the second-largest retirement planned for 2026, a unit at Tennessee’s Cumberland Fossil Plant, has already been delayed.

In court, the states and nonprofit groups argue that the Energy Department has not justified its use of emergency orders. The orders have generally been used in the past for a few days at a time during extreme weather events like hurricanes or heat waves.

Lawmakers in Washington State have taken a different approach to fighting the postponement of the closure of the last coal plant there.

After the Trump administration issued an emergency order in December to keep the Centralia plant open, Washington legislators passed a law that ensured the plant was covered by the state’s cap-and-trade law and a sales tax on coal.

As a result, burning coal in the state is now an expensive proposition.

“Both the state of Washington and TransAlta have held up their end of the bargain,” in moving forward with the closure of the plant, said Representative Joe Fitzgibbon, a Democrat who sponsored the new law. “And then the Department of Energy came in late December and tried to disrupt that.”

“We think that with our new law,” Mr. Fitzgibbon added, “we’re pretty confident that the plant is not going to start burning coal again.”

The plant did not run at all during the 90 days covered by the first emergency order. The Energy Department renewed the directive on March 13. That measure runs through mid-June, and the plant has still yet to burn coal.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/14/climate/trump-coal-plants-cost.html

Hope is contagious and science is king: 10 big lessons on ending the fossil fuel era

At world-first Santa Marta climate meeting, delegates say it was ‘euphoric’ to finally be focusing on concrete solutions

By Jonathan Watts and Fiona Harvey, The Guardian, May 1, 2026

After a landmark climate meeting in Santa Marta, Colombia, where nearly 60 countries gathered to work out how to end the production and use of planet-heating fossil fuels, what have we learned?

1. Liberation lifts the spirits

The single most important thing to come from the first Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels conference, in Santa Marta, has been a change of mood. Whereas the UN’s annual climate summits, or Cops, can often feel stuck and frustrating, with countries circling the same topics without resolution, nearly every delegate in Colombia felt liberated.

“The mood here in Santa Marta is euphoric,” said Tzeporah Berman, the founder and chair of the fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty initiative. “After years stuck in endless debates about whether to phase out fossil fuels, finally we are focusing on the how. We are no longer fighting for recognition of the problem, but creating solutions. It’s like watching a dam break – all that pent-up experience, knowledge and passion suddenly flowing into concrete ways to phase out dirty fuels. The hope is contagious.”

2. Science has to come first

1. In a world of climate denial and misinformation, Santa Marta was a shining example of science-led decision making. Hundreds of experts, academics and scientists inspired and informed the launch of three major initiatives on the energy transition.It reminded many participants of an earlier, more enlightened age of global climate negotiations, which would always start with an update of the latest science. Over the years, however, oil-producing countries such as Saudi Arabia have vetoed or watered down UN science warnings, while introducing controversial solutions, including offsets and carbon capture and storage, that have been promoted by the petroleum industry as an excuse to continue expanding production. At Santa Marta, delegates called these “false solutions” and focused on the core of the problem: eliminating fossil fuels.

   3. Producers must be in the spotlight

   Climate activists have long argued the Cop process has been crippled by a focus almost solely on the demand side of the problem. The responsibility of emission cuts was dumped on to consumers, while oil, gas and coal companies were given free rein to ramp up production and profits. At Santa Marta, the balance was shifted back to the supply side. Some speakers said the majority of the world’s emissions, which continue to break records almost every year, were released by the drilling, processing and transportation of fossil fuels.

   Rather than condemning petrostates, this was treated as an unhealthy dependency and ways were examined to break the pattern of addiction.

   4. Global south debt must be tackled

   The urgent need to address the debt crisis was one of the clearest messages to emerge from Santa Marta. Many countries in the global south that want to invest in renewables are unable to do so because they spend a huge proportion of their foreign exchange earnings on high interest repayments and imports of fossil fuels.

   Banks and bond markets provide low-interest loans to fossil fuel industries – most of which are based in wealthy nations – without accounting for the associated risks of climate instability and stranded assets. Many participants at Santa Marta said this showed an energy transition had to come with changes to the global financial architecture, as well as the redirection of government subsidies away from the petroleum industry and towards renewables and debt reduction.

   5. Not everyone agrees on everything

   There were few open disagreements among the “coalition of the willing” assembled at Santa Marta, but there are differences of opinion on how to achieve the desired end of a fossil-fuel-free society. The Colombian hosts set no guidelines on what, if any, legal framework should be adopted.

   One longstanding proposal is for a new fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty, which would be modelled along the lines of human rights treaties and the international land mine treaty. But this is anathema to some countries, who argue that the world already has global climate agreements and just needs to put them into action.

   There are also a confusing number of existing pacts and pledges, reflecting the complexity of shifting the global economy to a low-carbon footing and the desire of some countries to stamp their identity on projects they are funding. The danger is that, instead of working harmoniously together, nations could splinter into smaller groups.

   6. Roadmaps need a destination and a deadline

   One word that came up time and again was roadmap, or in other words, a clear plan for transitioning away from fossil fuels. One global roadmap will not be enough. Every country will need its own, and there are two key requirements: the destination, which should be a full phase-out of fossil fuels; and a timetable, because with global temperatures continuing to break records, time is fast running out.

   7. Governments must be free to govern

   Investor-state dispute settlement is a legal mechanism contained in many trade agreements, which allows companies and financiers to sue governments in secret tribunals for their policies. It has been used by fossil fuel companies to sue governments that resolved to reduce dependency on coal, oil or gas, or enacted measures boosting renewables: companies have demanded and, in at least $100bn worth of cases, received compensation for loss of earnings.

   Climate activists, experts, and many developing countries want an end to ISDS, which they say is a serious legal and financial obstacle to a cleaner world.

   8. Critical minerals will be critical

   If the world is to transition away from fossil fuels, there must be a new renewable energy economy to transition to. That will require the construction of billions of wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles and batteries. All of this requires components made of critical minerals – metals such as copper, cobalt, nickel and harder-to-get materials such as gallium, germanium and niobium.

   Mining for some of these has resulted in horrific human rights abuses and despoliation of natural landscapes. Activists in Santa Marta raised concerns over the plight of workers and Indigenous people, and the need for proper regulations and a clean, fair transition for local communities.

   9. Indigenous rights must be respected

   Indigenous peoples protect the vast majority of the world’s remaining terrestrial carbon sinks and areas of biodiversity, but have long struggled to secure a seat on the top table of UN climate negotiations. At Santa Marta, for the first time, Indigenous representatives drew up their proposals in an autonomous debating space and participated in the high-level segments.

   It did not satisfy everyone, but it gave leaders an opportunity to tell ministers directly that they needed to pay more heed to Indigenous knowledge, the protection of Indigenous rights and the importance of nature in the transition. “Our territories are fundamental to maintaining life on this planet. Where our rights are respected, nature is protected,” said Oswaldo Muca Castizo, the general coordinator of the Organization of Indigenous Peoples of the Colombian Amazon.

   10. Tuvalu is the next step

   Translating the feel-good vibe of Santa Marta into concrete proposals will be the task of the next conference, which is expected to take place in Tuvalu, co-hosted by Ireland, in early 2027.

   https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/may/01/santa-marta-colombia-climate-conference-ending-fossil-fuel-era

Largest US renewable project begins generating electricity

SunZia has quietly begun sending enormous amounts of wind power to California, as President Donald Trump works to thwart the wind industry.

By Benjamin Storrow, ClimateWire/Politico, April 16, 2026

The largest renewable energy project ever built in the United States has begun generating electricity, putting a two-decade push to deliver wind power generated in New Mexico to consumers in California on the cusp of completion.

SunZia Wind has begun testing its 916 turbines as it nears the start of commercial operations later this quarter, according to a person familiar with the project. The impact is already evident: California broke its record for wind generation eight times in the last four weeks, according to Grid Status, a website that tracks power flows.

The 3.5-gigawatt wind development, which will deliver power over a 550-mile transmission line to California, is nearing the finish line at a time when the wind industry is under attack in Washington.

President Donald Trump eliminated tax credits for the industry and has erected new permitting barriers for wind projects nationwide. Wind developers have sought to keep a low profile against that backdrop in attempt to avoid provoking the president. In a sign of the times, neither the project nor the California grid operator announced SunZia had begun generating electricity. The news was first reported by Grid Status.

“It’s been a long time coming,” said Abby Lestina, an analyst at Grid Status. “It’s somewhat a cautionary tale in a way. It depicts some of the challenges with power infrastructure in this country.”

Initially proposed in 2006, SunZia will be able to generate enough electricity to supply 3 million people in California and Arizona. It is particularly important to California’s clean energy and climate goals because it is likely to generate most at night, when the state tends to burn the most natural gas and its significant solar resource is offline.

But the project has faced repeated permitting delays over the years, as its plans to string a transmission cable across New Mexico and Arizona ran into opposition from birders, Native American tribes and the military. The U.S. Army initially objected to the line’s proximity to the White Sands Missile Range. A new route around the range was selected in 2020. The move also helped placate concerns of birding organizations like the Audubon Society.

The line is subject to ongoing litigation with Native American tribes, who argue federal regulators failed to properly consult them over its impact on tribal cultural sites.

It wasn’t immediately clear how much of SunZia is currently online. Pattern Energy, the project’s developer, declined to comment. The California Independent System Operator, which operates the power grid serving 80 percent of the state, did not respond to requests for comment.

But clean energy advocates celebrated the news, saying it would deliver a massive jolt of new electricity supplies at a time when utilities are racing to keep up with demand associated with the development of artificial intelligence and data centers.

“It is exactly what we need to have happen,” said Leah Stokes, a climate activist and professor of environmental politics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The project will not only cut carbon dioxide pollution, but make it easier for the state to retire polluting natural gas plants in environmental justice communities, she said.

SunZia is more than three times larger than Great Prairie Wind, a 1-GW wind development in Texas that is currently the largest U.S. renewable energy project in operation. The New Mexico project will be bigger than all five offshore wind projects under construction along the East Coast of the United States.

The only renewable project planned in the U.S. of comparable size is Chokecherry and Sierra Madre, a 3.5-GW Wyoming wind project that also is seeking to export power to California. It is projected to start delivering power in 2029, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data.

Signs that SunZia was nearing completion have been building. GE Vernova announced in February that all of the 674 turbines it made for the project had been delivered. Vestas Wind Systems said last month that all 242 of the turbines it built for SunZia had been installed. On Monday, CAISO notified the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that it had recently taken operational control of the project.

By that time, SunZia’s electricity was already starting to show up on the grid. California’s wind generation record of 6,429 megawatts had stood for almost four years until March 25, when wind generation hit a new high of 6,654 MW. That figure rose to 7,193 MW on Monday.

“We need more power in the West. The demand is huge and everyone is scrambling to find new resources,” said Ric O’Connell, executive director of the consultancy GridLab. “This is a really good story that SunZia is coming online and providing this power.”

https://www.eenews.net/articles/largest-us-renewable-project-begins-generating-electricity/