This article appears in the April 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
Ever since Scotland tried to put up wind farms on the Aberdeenshire coast, within sight of Donald Trump’s proposed luxury golf course, nearly 20 years ago, the president has held a grudge against offshore wind. He was primarily mad that it would ruin his coastal view, and secondarily mad after inventing a whole bunch of dubious harms from wind energy; killing birds, for example.
Trump lost that battle with Scotland in court, and now he will have his revenge. But it hasn’t stopped at wind turbines. Trump is on a mission to reverse all of the Biden administration’s support for renewable energy and electrification. The current threats against green energy take many different forms—funding freezes, executive orders, legislative rollbacks—but all have the same chilling effect on renewable-energy projects across the country. And meanwhile, the White House is lending a hand to all manner of fossil fuel projects, from fracked oil to liquefied natural gas, under the bogus claim of an “energy emergency.”
But it turns out that these attacks on renewable energy are hitting red states. Hard. Unfortunately, it’s not clear whether anyone will manage to find out, and even if they do, whether they will care.
The sun-soaked plains of Texas are host to solar farms, while the wind belt stretches from the border with Saskatchewan down to the Lone Star State, creating optimal conditions for harnessing power from turbines. The first new nuclear power plant in decades was constructed in the purple state of Georgia, where a loan given by Biden’s Department of Energy to build a Rivian electric truck plant faces an uncertain future. Tennessee, Ohio, and other red states have been active in electric-vehicle and battery factory construction. Even deep-red Kentucky has an EV battery project under way.
The development of clean-energy sources in red states like Texas, Florida, Iowa, and Oklahoma is spurred on not so much by belief in climate change or the political popularity of renewables as by cold hard economic facts. Due in large part to President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), billions in cash and tax incentives have flowed into Republican districts over the past three years, a critical step for left-behind areas needing to transition to the clean-energy economy that many economic experts consider inevitable.
In addition to the economic calculus, red districts tend to be more rural and, on the whole, have better physical environments for renewable-energy projects. More wind, more sun, and more space make these areas ripe for solar and wind projects. Texas is particularly dominant, with nearly 80 percent more solar, wind, and battery capacity than the next state. In Texas, renewable-energy projects generate $297 million in state and local taxes and supply a quarter of the state’s energy production.
Over his four years in office, Biden announced at least $206 billion in investments into clean-energy manufacturing. A staggering $161 billion of that—nearly 80 percent of the total—went to Republican House districts, and two-thirds of that $161 billion came directly from the IRA, which House and Senate Republicans unanimously opposed.
The year after the IRA passed saw wind, solar, and battery storage provide nearly 16 percent of the country’s electricity, more than double the amount they provided in 2018. Clean power was over 75 percent of all new electricity projects added in 2023. And last year, enough solar panels were made in America to meet all U.S. demand.
DESPITE THE MASSIVE BOON THAT renewable energy has brought to red states, Trump has set his sights on reversing those wins through both funding freezes and policy switch-ups. Already, his funding pauses have injected fear and uncertainty into the industry. Now, much of the onus is on states and nonprofits to file suit against the Trump administration, and on Republican lawmakers to stand up for their districts’ energy projects.
On January 27, the Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget issued a memo to federal agencies, directing them to freeze all funding. While the directive was reversed just two days later, many of the programs that relied on funding from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) or U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) were left without their contractually obligated funding for a month or more. By February 20, all of the EPA’s grant programs had been unfrozen except for the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $27 billion investment to fight the climate crisis. EPA administrator Lee Zeldin has tried to intimidate financial institutions into reversing $20 billion of that fund, despite green banks once being a bipartisan priority. Zeldin has also reportedly signaled that he will eliminate the “endangerment finding” that greenhouse gas emissions harm human health, which would damage any ability to boost clean energy.
The EPA’s Solar for All fund, a $7 billion grant program nested under the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, was one of the programs impacted by the freeze. Solar for All creates new or expanded solar programs for low-income Americans, with the goal of lowering electricity costs for those who are burdened the most by their utility bills.
Some state lawmakers are doing Trump’s work for him, working to cull renewable-energy projects in their own backyards.
Some families are able to take out loans to add solar to their individual homes, but those projects are often inaccessible for lower-income Americans. Theo Gervais Woodard, the business development manager at Clean Energy Fund of Texas, says that green banks like theirs are able to help some families set up solar, but programs like Solar for All extend those benefits to everyone in the state, including low-income Texans who wouldn’t be able to afford individual solar projects.
In a state where some homes lose power for weeks during the hurricane season and others pay close to half their income per month on their electricity bill in the summertime, large-scale solar projects are a crucial step in making power more reliable and affordable. “We’re talking about a family that has to decide whether to pay their electricity bill this June or pay their car note,” said Woodard. “It shouldn’t be that way. And so this grant money, these federal funds, were designed to address that.”
The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund is currently being probed by the Department of Justice, which is directing stakeholders to turn over records to the FBI and appear in federal court in late March. On March 8, a coalition of groups that had been promised $7 billion out of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund sued the Trump administration and Citibank, saying that they still have not received their contractually obligated funding.
The suit is one of many legal fights playing out over the funding freeze. The vast majority of these lawsuits are coming from blue states, though. Right after the OMB memo, two dozen Democratic state attorneys general filed suit against the federal government to reverse the funding pause. In mid-February, Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) took matters into his own hands, suing the administration to access $1.2 billion in federal funds owed to the state. He was successful: By the end of February, Shapiro announced that all of the funds had been released.
But it’s not just the funding freeze that is putting these climate projects, particularly in red states, at risk. Trump’s Federal Highway Administration abruptly suspended its approval of all state Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Deployment Plans, which is functionally a freeze by another name. The suspension blocks $5 billion in funding that would have helped charging station operators expand. The Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, which funds clean-energy innovations (including, ironically, Tesla in 2010), has been under its own freeze since a January 20 secretarial order.
And, through executive order, Trump paused permitting on all offshore wind farm leases, claiming concern for “the importance of marine life [and] impacts on ocean currents and wind patterns.” Even wind projects with existing permits are supposed to be reviewed. Industry participants have described this as a “worst-case scenario.” A leaked memo from the American Clean Power Association suggests that solar has been caught up in this as well, with even the early decisions on projects stalled out.
There’s also the omnipresent threat of Republicans attempting to repeal the IRA altogether, likely through budget reconciliation. That would be a politically risky move due to the law’s major investments in Republican-led districts. But Republicans do need significant budget cuts to offset planned tax cuts for billionaires.
Altogether, these attacks on renewable energy represent “maybe one of the most egregious examples of Trump looking to claw back money in the name of fiscal prudence but really advancing on an agenda that prioritizes billionaire tax cuts over lowering energy costs for hard-working Americans,” said Justin Balik, the senior state program director at Evergreen Action.
REPUBLICAN PUSHBACK TO THIS ONSLAUGHT has been “piecemeal,” said Balik. Some Republican lawmakers with major renewable-energy projects in their districts have spoken up. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), for example, was in contact with the EPA and the White House in an attempt to release frozen funds from the EPA’s $5 billion Clean School Bus Program. School districts in Capito’s West Virginia have received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the program to buy electric school buses.
Meanwhile, some state lawmakers are doing Trump’s work for him, working to cull renewable-energy projects in their own backyards. There’s a growing effort in Oklahoma, the country’s third-largest generator of wind power, to ban renewable-energy projects altogether. The plan is mostly talk, and the state’s Republican governor Kevin Stitt is open about his support for green energy, so change likely won’t come unless an anti-renewables governor takes over. But state lawmakers just advanced a bill that places more regulations on wind turbine development, signaling a willingness to crack down on the industry.
And in Arizona, the legislature is considering a bill that would restrict new wind farm projects to sites at least 12 miles away from any property zoned for residential use. If passed, the bill would be the most restrictive law limiting wind power in the country, and would remove about 90 percent of Arizona’s land from eligibility for wind development.
In August 2024, 18 Republicans penned a letter to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) urging him not to repeal the IRA, due to its economic benefits in their districts. The message was overall lukewarm, with the second paragraph mentioning that the IRA is a “deeply flawed bill” and no real gestures toward using political leverage to protect the law. Similarly, the 80-member House Conservative Climate Caucus says that it will work toward renewable-energy projects, but hasn’t indicated that it will stand up to attacks from other Republicans, including Trump. “Have I drawn a red line yet? No,” said Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-IA) to E&E News.
“No one should bank on Republican elected officials suddenly having an awakening and becoming responsible,” Balik said.
