US utilities get failing grade on clean energy transition

The biggest U.S. utilities are doing worse on shifting from fossil fuels to clean power than they were at the start of this decade — and more than four in 10 have backtracked on their climate goals since the start of the second Trump administration.

That’s the dire, if predictable, news from the Sierra Club’s latest ​“Dirty Truth Report,” released Tuesday. For the second year in a row, the environmental organization gave an overall F grade to 76 of the country’s largest electric utilities.

In fact, with a handful of exceptions, the utilities that the Sierra Club collects data on — which collectively operate more than half the country’s coal and fossil-gas generation fleet — are further off course in reducing their carbon emissions than they were when the organization published its first ​“Dirty Truth Report,” in 2021.

More utilities are opting to keep coal plants running despite the high cost and environmental toll. They’re planning to build enough new fossil gas–fired power plants to generate the equivalent of roughly one-quarter of average U.S. electricity demand, largely to serve AI data centers.

And in a worrying new milestone, this year marked the first time in the report’s six-year history that the volume of new clean energy being planned by utilities decreased from the prior year — a shift that aligns with Trump administration policies promoting fossil fuels over renewable energy.

That means utilities are forgoing cheaper — and faster to deploy — solar, wind, and battery investments even as their own planned generation costs, and their customers’ bills, rise.

“Utilities’ failure to plan, combined with unprecedented load growth, is hitting us,” said Emma Pabst, a Sierra Club Beyond Coal campaign manager and co-author of the report. The results, she said, will be ​“more extreme weather, higher electric bills, higher insurance premiums, and more disaster costs passed on to families.”

The Sierra Club analyzed utilities’ plans as of mid-2026 and graded them on three factors: closing coal plants, building no new gas plants, and rapidly expanding clean energy to replace fossil fuels and meet growing power demand.

Scores fell across all three criteria. 

• Utilities plan to close only 25% of their total coal-fired generation capacity by decade’s end, down from 29% in 2025, 30% in 2024, and 35% in 2023. The report highlights the rising costs and environmental harms of coal plants operated by Ameren Missouri and PacifiCorp’s Rocky Mountain Power.

“Utilities make a lot of money on fossil fuels,” Pabst said. Most are able to earn regulated profits based on the amount of money they invest in new power plants and gas pipelines. And many are able to shield themselves from spiking fuel prices by passing those costs on to their customers.

At the same time, the Trump administration has ​“been putting up pretty significant barriers against developing more clean energy,” said Noah Ver Beek, a Sierra Club senior energy campaigns analyst and report co-author.

The administration has blocked federal permits for solar and wind projects, canceled a swath of offshore wind leases, and continued to use its authority over airspace to prevent onshore wind farms from being permitted, despite a court order barring that practice.

The Trump administration’s pro–fossil fuel agenda has also given more utilities license to renege on their climate commitments, Ver Beek said. In the past two years, 31 utilities have backslid on those, the report notes, representing 41% of the utilities that the Sierra Club is tracking.

All this comes as households face escalating utility bills; electricity prices increased at twice the rate of inflation last year. While the need to expand power grids and mitigate growing wildfire threats plays a role in those price hikes in some parts of the country, so does the cost of keeping aging coal plants running and increasing reliance on fossil gas.

Utilities still have a chance to reverse course by working more solar, wind, and batteries into their plans, Pabst said. But that will require state policymakers and regulators forcing them to embrace cleaner and cheaper alternatives to ​“the things they’re used to — which are dirty, polluting fossil fuels.”