The US clean energy boom will continue to 2030. Then things get hazy.

So, how’s that clean energy transition going?

It’s the essential inquiry that drives anyone reporting on climate solutions, and it got considerably more difficult to answer after President Donald Trump returned to the White House. He’s done everything in his power (and some things that legally aren’t) to undercut the propulsive growth of renewables, which had accelerated under his predecessor. But real-world clean energy construction has kept rolling right along, policy setbacks be damned: The U.S. built 50 gigawatts of new wind, solar, and battery capacity in 2025, more than any year prior. 

That achievement raises the possibility that the sheer strength of clean power technologies will carry the U.S. forward in its transition away from fossil fuels, despite the Trumpian interventions.

Now, we have a new glimpse into where this mess of positive and negative signals could be heading over the long term. The energy analysts at the Rhodium Group just released their annual ​“Taking Stock” report, which charts the likely trajectory of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions on the basis of factors including clean energy buildout, AI demand surge, America’s rise as a global oil and gas exporter, and the repercussions of the ongoing war with Iran.

The good news, for those in the clean energy camp, is that solar, wind, and battery construction is still on track to bust records through the end of the decade. The bad news: After 2030, all bets are off; the spectrum of plausible outcomes runs from clean energy maintaining record installations to new construction nearly drying up in the face of competition from natural gas plants.

Rhodium models a vast range of inputs governing the power sector and the broader U.S. economy, and assembles three distinct future scenarios. The high-emissions scenario reflects a world with higher prices for clean power and electric vehicles, and lower prices for oil and gas, for instance. The low-emissions scenario inputs more aggressive cost declines for low-carbon technologies, and higher fossil fuel prices. The middle option more or less splits the difference.

“Our goal with the scenarios is to form a reasonable bound around where emissions are headed,” said lead author Hannah Kolus, a senior analyst at Rhodium. ​“But we take no position on where within the range we might be falling.”

By 2030, Rhodium expects total carbon emissions to fall by 26% to 29% below the 2005 baseline; by 2040, the range swells from a 27% reduction (essentially flat emissions through the 2030s) to a 41% reduction.

In Rhodium’s 2023 report, which incorporated the effects of President Joe Biden’s recently passed Inflation Reduction Act, analysts predicted emissions would fall by 29% to 42% by 2030. The country could still hit the low end of those expectations even after Trump dismantled many of the policies that made those predictions possible. That’s something of a win, but it’s tempered by the impossibility of hitting Biden’s Paris Agreement pledge of 50% reductions by 2030.

More clean energy coming, but for how long?

The certainty of renewables growth through the 2020s derives from a tax policy quirk that benefits solar and wind developers.

Although Trump snatched away the solar and wind industry’s beloved tax credits, projects that officially commenced construction by July 4 can still avail themselves of ​“safe-harbored” tax credits if they wrap up over the next four years. Rhodium expects developers will complete around 50 GW of solar, storage, and wind annually during this time. That outlook holds steady even in the more conservative scenarios, although it’s worth noting the firm’s model might not capture the extent to which the Trump administration’s permitting blockades may thwart development.

Past the bonanza of the late 2020s, those supporting tax credits disappear for wind and solar, and the predictions diverge wildly. The 2030s will come down to a battle for power sector supremacy between renewables-plus-storage and natural gas.

“When you have tax credits, you push up on what’s possible,” Kolus said. ​“Without them, you let energy markets take over, and then it becomes really a matter of what does clean technology cost and what are natural gas prices — those are the two things that are really driving the divergence in outcomes after 2030.”

In Rhodium’s low-emissions scenario, the low-carbon sources continue to romp, reaching 53 GW of annual installations through 2040 while holding new gas plants to just 5 GW annually. In the high-emissions scenario, the inverted price dynamics elevate gas to 16 GW of annual deployments and suppress clean energy construction to just 3 GW per year. In the middle scenario, renewables fall to an average of 16 GW annually in the first half of the 2030s, then rebound to 45 GW for the second half; annual gas additions meanwhile sit at about 9 GW over the course of the decade.

That high-emissions case would be devastating to the clean energy industry: The plummet from 50 GW of annual construction to 3 GW would decimate the pace of industrial activity, slashing construction jobs, infusions to local tax bases across the country, and new clean power for the states and customers that want it.

Tailwinds for clean energy

Rhodium’s findings square with what I’ve heard while interviewing clean energy professionals: There’s a ton of building to do in the next four years, but anything beyond that is too far off to predict. The energy landscape post-2030 will hinge on who’s in the White House. If that person restores supportive policies, the outlook will shift radically once again.

In the meantime, there are a few reasons to be optimistic that clean energy will avoid the worst-case scenario.

First and foremost, solar, wind, and batteries have a yearslong track record of beating the expert predictions of how cheap they’ll get. Given a range of cost projections, this history would suggest you bet on the low end. That alone could stave off the more dour scenarios described in the report.

Then there’s the changing nature of the U.S. fossil fuel industry. The country has been shipping more and more of its natural gas overseas via liquefied natural gas terminals. So much new export capacity has been approved and entered construction that LNG exports will rise dramatically in any of Rhodium’s scenarios. So far, this growth has had a muted effect on domestic gas prices, because producers have extracted more each year in lockstep with new export demand. But if the industry hit a bust cycle and couldn’t keep pace, basic economics suggests the domestic price would surge as U.S. consumers compete with foreign buyers willing to pay far more. That could weaken the case for gas generation in the 2030s.

Another source of hope for the clean energy contingent is that the modeling may underestimate how fast battery storage will reshape the power sector. 

Rhodium notes that storage meaningfully takes off only in its low-emissions case, when lots of new renewables are getting built. But Kolus acknowledged that the analysis focuses on picking the lowest-cost option for new power capacity, whereas developers may build batteries for other reasons. For example, a firm could opt for batteries because they are less polluting than gas combustion turbines, or because they can be built more quickly. Batteries have already appeared in many deals specifically serving demand for data centers, to help tech giants with their climate goals and bring AI computing online faster.

When batteries do arrive in large numbers, they reliably take market share from gas plants. Gas generation in California is plummeting now, because stored solar power is a much cheaper source of nighttime electricity than burning fossil fuels. The broader cleanup of the U.S. power sector, then, will hinge on how quickly other states go the way of California in making batteries a prime source for on-demand energy.