Trump agency sees good US wind growth even as his administration chokes industry

As President Donald Trump tries to throttle development, his own administration is forecasting US wind energy generation, installation, and usage will post a respectable increase during his first two years in office.

The numbers indicate that wind energy, mainly onshore, is gaining market traction in all regions of the country, not just those where the resource is abundant such as interior Plains states, Texas, and Upper Midwest, according to Energy Information Administration (EIA).

The agency, primary federal government authority on energy statistics and analysis, forecasts 2025 wind generation at 470 million/MWh and 491 million/MWh in 2026 versus 453 million/MWh last year. This includes several offshore projects.

These upward wind trends – along with even greater increases for solar – poses a political problem for the White House, which is determined to suppress their growth within the country’s energy mix in favour of baseload fossil fuels, geothermal, hydro, and nuclear.

Yet, EIA forecasts that natural gas production will decline through 2026, while wind will eclipse gains for coal and nuclear. Hydropower, a smaller player than wind, will show decent growth but geothermal, the administration’s pet renewable energy technology, will barely grow.

In any case, utility-scale geothermal is a minor part of national electricity generation with 70% originating in California. Even with about 1.9GW of installed capacity, it represents only 4% of in-state generation, according to EIA.

After years of minimal national load growth, although Florida and Texas were notable exceptions, the US is set to boom the balance of this decade and beyond. This is already evident this year and next.

EIA expects electricity sales to the commercial sector will rise by 3.0% in 2025 and 4.5% in 2026, driven largely by more demand from data centres, while those to industrial consumers increase by 2.0% in 2025 and 3.5% in 2026.

How the US will generate significantly more electric power to meet record forecast demand is not entirely clear. Wind and solar, which provided 16% of the nation’s electricity in 2024, will not be allowed to begin achieving their potential over the remainder of Trump’s term.

Coal, natural gas, and nuclear all face immediate challenges that are not easy to resolve and complicate efforts by the administration to turbocharge expansion.

Coal, for example, is not part of any major electric utility’s future investment plans despite the administration easing environmental regulations and firming natural gas prices.

Some owners are delaying retirements of certain units, which Trump advocates, but others are being shuttered on schedule because it doesn’t make economic sense to keep them in service.

New units are more expensive than wind and solar, even adding the cost of backup power, onsite four-hour storage, and without federal subsidies.

Utilities are also under pressure from elected officials in mainly Democratic states, environmental groups, shareholders, and a growing number of younger, more climate-conscious customers to carry through plans to end longstanding ties with coal.

More than anyone else, utility executives are aware they need to divest coal if they want to meet corporate carbon reduction goals, which they have been touting to stakeholders.

Gas-fired plants, meanwhile, can run longer and harder but ironically, doing this isn’t always sensible economically with cheaper, albeit intermittent, wind and solar increasingly available. Gas prices, which are set by the market, not political diktats, also influences utilisation.

EIA forecasts the Henry Hub natural gas spot price will rise from an average of $3.20 MMBtu in July to $3.90/MMBtu in fourth quarter this year and $4.30/MMBtu in 2026. The increase reflects relatively flat production amid an increase in US liquefied natural gas exports.

Building new combined-cycle gas plants is a good option for utilities in many jurisdictions but wait times for turbines and certain other electrical equipment is now as long as five years, and costs have more than doubled in the past several years. As well, construction firms say they won’t have manpower to build them until 2030.

Lastly, nuclear will play a role but there are practical limitations. There are only a handful of inactive units that can be recommissioned, and they represent 1% of 800-900GW of new generation the US will add to the grid by 2040.

Utilities and their regulatory overseers are wary of new large-scale plants given past massive cost overruns. Small modular reactors (SMRs) promise to change the economic equation, but until the first-in-kind technology is proven, perhaps by the mid-2030s, utilities won’t contract with the dozen or more OEMs vying for a piece of the market.