By Chad Farrall, founder and co-CEO, Encore Renewable Energy
Ensuring sufficient energy resources to power the 21st-century digital economy in a cost-effective way remains top of mind for many business leaders, but with the constant whiplash coming from Washington, DC, we continue to have to play defense rather than offense. Business thrives on policy stability, and the barrage of changes at the federal level is creating a stagnant economic environment. The U.S. energy sector is at the forefront of these impacts, where longer project timelines usually span multiple years, administrations, and legislative sessions.
The chaos in our nation’s capital also obscures recent positive developments around relatively newer energy generation technologies such as solar, wind, storage, geothermal, and hydrogen. These technologies can effectively and efficiently address the escalating and increasingly costly effects of climate change. They can also mitigate the near-term energy supply challenges required to unleash American energy dominance and compete with China and others in the energy race that will shape the 21st-century global economy. In order to compete in and ultimately win that race, we need as many electrons on the grid as possible, a notion currently being promoted by the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy, Chris Wright: It’s all about energy addition, not subtraction.
It is important to remember that seismic shifts in the US energy market are already underway as the American economy, like the rest of the world, continues to move towards electrification as a means of energy abundance. As an example, The Wall Street Journal recently reported that future economic growth now depends on electricity, not oil.
Amid this rapid electrification, experts predict that new energy demand from data centers, artificial intelligence, manufacturing, and the electrification of the transportation and building sectors will increase U.S. electricity demand by nearly 16% by 2029, resulting in the need for at least 128 GW (128,000 MW) of new, additional generation. Extracted globally, this is the equivalent of adding the annual electrical consumption of Japan every year.
It’s time to embrace the reality that renewable energy is inexpensive and efficient. This sentiment is echoed by John Ketchum, CEO of NextEra, an entity that has built more gas-fired electrical generation in the U.S. over the past 20 years than any other company. Mr. Ketchum recently referred to renewables as the “bridge fuel” to other future energy resources including, ironically, the previously labeled “bridge fuel” of natural gas, where turbines are in such short supply that “To get your hands on a gas turbine and to actually get it built across the market, you’re really looking at 2030, or later.”
Utilities in the Midwestern United States are tackling tough challenges posed by increasingly extreme weather, aging infrastructure, and an ongoing race to integrate renewable energy while maintaining grid reliability. State decarbonization laws add complexity to the process of bringing power generation online, and as utilities transition from fossil fuels to cleaner alternatives, they are simultaneously managing supply chain issues, labor shortages, and new cybersecurity risks. Service providers must modernize their infrastructure to satisfy increasing demand while keeping pricing affordable, which is a tall task for any-sized utility.
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These facts have been proven both globally and domestically. In 2024, 90% of all new global grid connections were for renewable energy resources, representing a total of $2.1 trillion in new global investment value. In the U.S., a similar 90% of new electric generation came from renewables in the first three quarters of 2024, with solar representing 78% of that new capacity. Renewable energy projects are also delivering economic value to communities across the country. A recent nationwide analysis of economic impact reports from across the country finds that a typical 5-megawatt community solar project generates $14 million in local economic activity and supports nearly 100 jobs.
The U.S. solar industry is now faced with proposed federal energy policy changes that would raise electricity prices for consumers, create rolling blackouts, and result in billions of dollars in lost investment, leading to the destruction of over 300,000 American jobs. The House-passed version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) includes an almost full repeal of the bipartisan clean energy tax credits that deliver nearly 3:1 returns on public investment. These credits have supported hundreds of thousands of high-paying American jobs and have resulted in the creation of a thriving domestic market of manufacturers and energy providers who have made solar, augmented with energy storage, the most affordable, reliable, and most rapidly deployable energy generation resource available on the market. This is the perfect tool in the energy generation toolbox to get as many electrons on the grid as possible in the coming years.
All eyes are now focused on the Senate to advance sensible, “all of the above” legislation that preserves the bipartisan energy credits that have created well-paying jobs in American manufacturing and project deployment while enabling energy dominance, and thus American national security, through the use of a diversity of generation technologies. Failure on the part of Congress to enact sensible energy policy under the OBBBA would result in increased electrical costs for all Americans, the elimination of hundreds of thousands of jobs, and depressed U.S. economic growth.
We can’t afford to pull the rug out from under the greatest American manufacturing renaissance and energy innovation success story in a generation and cede our competitive footing with China. We need to protect these policies and move forward with an understanding that the energy transition is here, now. Reach out to your Senators today!
Chad Farrell is the founder and co-CEO of Encore Renewable Energy, delivering energy’s second act with solar and energy storage solutions across the country. He has over 25 years of professional experience in the fields of brownfields redevelopment and renewable energy project finance, development, and construction. He serves on the Board of Directors for Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility and the Advisory Board for Alliance for Climate Transition. At Encore, Chad has led the team’s innovative and collaborative efforts to originate, design, permit, finance and construct nearly 100 community scale solar PV and energy storage projects, representing nearly $150M in total investment value, while concurrently raising over $600M of capital and overseeing the establishment of a pipeline of more than 700MW of future projects worth nearly $1B.
