#Cleantechers –
I'm a fan of Michael Thomas, who did some important reporting for Heated on Kevon Martis's financial connections to the fossil fuel lobby. We had him on This Week in Cleantech. So, when Michael reached out and asked me to write a review of his firm’s “State of Clean Energy Deployment in 2025 Report,” it didn't take long to say yes.
This is the first time someone’s asked me to review something. But I'm sure it's only a matter of months before Pulitzer Prize-winning novelists flood me with their books for review. Then I'll have to move to New York, start going to the right restaurants, cop a serious attitude, and drink martinis at lunch.
Then again, to hell with that.
So, what's Michael found?
Let’s lead with the lead: 2024 was the biggest year ever for renewables deployment:
Solar and storage dominated this growth – at 40 GW if you headcount both (perhaps not fair, as they’re often co-located). But even wind 2xed natural gas (5.1 vs. 2.4 GW, respectively).
Megaprojects were very much in fashion. The Sunbelt got the lion’s share:
Despite efforts by some of Texas legislature’s leading lights to pull out the welcome mat, their state got almost a third of all the new solar growth.
If the ideology-over-reality crowd in Texas really wants to see how to deter job-creating clean energy, look no further than my home state of Ohio. Its nakedly pro-fracker, anti-renewables skullduggery coincided with shrinking its solar growth rate down to 7%. Ohio, are you happy now?
Here's the “who built the most” list, posted w/o comment other than the folks at NextEra continue to shape the market.
And here’s the small-scale solar top 10 list:
California and Texas maintained their dominant leads in utility-scale storage, with 60% of new U.S. capacity built in just these two states. But Arizona and Nevada are coming on strong.
Here are the top 10 lists for storage:
Wind, ah, wind. The growth rate slowed, and Texas was the only state to add over 1 GW. “After falling for four years in a row, 2024’s additions were 66% lower than their high in 2020 (14.9 GW).”
Michael documents the massive surge in anti-wind ordinances with intriguing maps that you should look at when the report posts in two days. Hey, I can’t show all his slides here. And Michael notes that wind dueling transmission and Trump problems.
Here’s where I go from convinced by Michael to merely cheering him on… he’s predicting we’ll have a big year this year again in 2025. The ideology-over-reality crowd that just took over the federal government is making clear it has very different intentions, coddling the highly mature, long-profitable fossil fuel lobby with government help.
May Michael Thomas be right.