Why red states are pulling ahead in America's clean energy race
Renewable energy generation is surging across many of the country’s red-leaning states, positioning some to outpace their bluer peers in a national drive toward grid decarbonization.
Their emerging leadership in the area in some ways defies the political battle lines that have been drawn on energy in recent years. On the federal level, Democrats have been the primary champions of renewable energy development, while Republicans have been more skeptical of efforts to bolster the sector — if not outright opposed to it. President Trump, for his part, has made moves to claw back clean-energy investments implemented under the Biden administration and suggested he will pursue "a policy where no windmills are being built."
But even as Republican-led states have demonstrated a similar antipathy toward the kind of climate-driven policies embraced by many of their more Democratic counterparts, a number of them have fast grown into hubs of wind and solar power production.
Renewable markets have emerged "even in places where talking about climate change may be untenable," Sarah Mills, director of the University of Michigan’s Center for EmPowering Communities, told The Hill.
Years earlier, noting the already-ascendant renewable production in several red states, she observed in a 2018 column that "conservatives like wind and solar power. They just don’t want the government to tell them that they must use renewable energy."
Nationwide, solar energy was responsible for generating more than 238,000 gigawatt-hours (GWh) in 2023, equivalent to an eightfold increase in such production since 2014, according to an April 2024 report from the nonprofit research group Climate Central. For reference, a single gigawatt hour — or 1 GW running continuously for an hour — provides sufficient energy to power about 750,000 households per hour.
While California produced the most solar power — nearly 69,000 GWh in 2023 — Texas came in second with almost 32,000 GWh, followed by Florida at almost 18,000 GWh, North Carolina at more than 12,000 GWh, and Arizona at nearly 12,000 GWh, the report found. In other words, four of the country’s top five solar producers were either red or purple states.
Wind power production, meanwhile, more than doubled in that decade, surpassing 425,000 GWh in 2023, per the report. Texas topped the charts, producing nearly 120,000 GWh from wind in 2023 — nearly three times more than any other state.
Iowa was the second-biggest wind producer in 2023, generating nearly 42,000 GWh, followed by Oklahoma and Kansas, at about 38,000 GWh and 27,000 GWh, respectively.
Driving the rapid expansion of renewables in these states is what experts see as finance-fueled decisionmaking over politics. Sprawling rural environments, often located in conservative districts, may offer an attractive combination of energy-related tax incentives, inexpensive labor and ideal weather conditions.
The latter is the most important factor, according to Aneesh Prabhu, who studies power markets for S&P Global Rating. By geographical “coincidence,” he said, North America’s wind belt extends from Saskatchewan down to Texas — blowing across largely rural states run by center-to-far-right coalitions. The most intense sunlight shines over the Southwest and Mountain West, followed by the High Plains and Southeast, regions that predominantly lean red or purple.
In other words, Prabhu said, red states are “blowing many blue states out of the water in terms of [clean energy] investment because the resource tends to be better in red states.”
Mills echoed these sentiments with a simple assessment: “Wind tends to be built in the places where it's windy. And solar tends to be built in the places where there's higher solar potential.”
In Texas, state Comptroller Glenn Hegar told The Hill, “We're a large state, we have a lot of wind, we have a lot of sunshine — and those are different drivers than other states.”
A combination of renewables and fossil fuels — which were still responsible for about 65 percent of Texas’s electricity mix in 2023 — has given the Lone Star State what Hegar described as "a different set of tools in the toolbox for energy production.”
For farmers and other property owners in rural areas, welcoming renewable energy companies that come knocking at their doors simply makes financial sense. “It's economics for the landowners to say 'yes,'” Mills said.
Also at play are “policies that effectively are trying to get out of the way of what a landowner chooses to do with their property,” according to Mills. Renewable energy developers, she added, are going "to rural places, and those places tend to be more red."
Red-state leadership in renewable energy promulgation is by no means a new phenomenon, nor are the financial incentives fueling it. Already in 2018, Mills identified Iowa, Kansas and Oklahoma as top clean power producers — writing at the time that more than 30 percent of electricity generated in these states came from wind and other such sources.
Mills attributed that growth to the economic potential landowners saw in renewable energy development on their properties: They could earn money from turbines and solar panels, which she described as "a drought-proof and pest-proof income stream."
For Iowa, the growth in wind and solar production has also meant knock-on economic benefits, according to Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa), who chairs the Conservative Climate Caucus. Her tenure coincides with a steady rise in her state’s renewable fleet: When she was elected in 2021, about half of Iowa’s electricity came from renewables. Now it’s closer to 60 percent, and Iowa also exports clean energy to its neighbors.
That growth, she said, also spurs "greater economic growth in the tech sector or other industries that are looking for renewable energy as part of their sustainability portfolio.”
Miller-Meeks argued that this growth is rooted in the easy permitting and “business-friendly” structure of red states, which have corresponded to “an appropriate regulatory structure that allows businesses to advance.” She described conservative energy strategy as an “all-of-the-above" or "any of the above" approach — in contrast to what she characterized as a progressive strategy of just favoring renewables.
In the years since she wrote the 2018 column, Mills said that wind’s prominence has only strengthened, although solar has started making more headway.
"Wind is still dominant, and it's still dominant in red states," she told The Hill.
But one thing that has changed during those years: the 2022 passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which increased tax credits for solar and wind developers from 30 percent to 50 percent and also made those credits transferable. What resulted was a thriving back-end market and pool of capital beyond traditional bank funds for such projects.
Those added credits made investing in renewables much more attractive, according to Prabhu, of S&P Global.
“If you give somebody a check and say, ‘Here's $100,000,’ you're not going to get pushback saying, ‘No, no, I deserve only $60,000,’” Prabhu said.
“They are going to take the $100,000,” he added, noting that this bigger check was then often spent where wind and solar was most prevalent: in red states.
All in all, federal policies under the Biden administration have spurred more than $200 billion in cleantech investments, predominantly in areas led by Republicans, Bloomberg Opinion experts observed in June 2024.
Energy columnist Liam Denning and Jeff Davies, founder of energy insights platform EnerWrap, went so far as to point out former President Biden’s “inconvenient gift” he handed red districts, in the form of green jobs.
In both red districts and swing states, Denning and Davies found that "abundant land and cheaper labor have drawn billions of dollars in cleantech investment." Some advantages include less expensive land, state incentives to revitalize rural areas and access to cheap labor outside of large cities, the authors explained.
Their comprehensive data analysis determined that as of June 2024, $42 billion in clean technology investments was going toward Democratic House districts, while four times as much — $161 billion — was heading to Republican districts. Of that $161 billion, $57 billion was planned prior to the Inflation Reduction Act, while $105 billion came after its enactment.
Of the country's 51 clean energy projects that surpassed $1 billion, 43 (84 percent) were in red districts, Denning and Davies found.
"Whichever way you slice the numbers — spending, jobs, projects announced under Biden before or after the passage of the IRA — red districts garner an overwhelming proportion of the benefits," the authors stated.
Mills, from the University of Michigan, recognized that federal tax incentives have “helped drive early deployment of renewables” and that funds from the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law have also played a major role. But she also stressed that Washington is not responsible for the state-level policies that enable individual landowners to host clean energy projects.
Those state-level policies, however, also risk cutting in the opposite direction, as a contingent of anti-renewable Republicans becomes more vocal. In early January, hundreds of Oklahomans braved freezing temperatures to attend a meeting in the state capital, demanding a ban on new wind and solar development, HeatMap News reported.
That rally exposed a rift in the GOP coalition between business conservatives and grassroots factions that is present — and widening — across the country. While Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) is pro-wind and recently formed a partnership in the sector with industry-leader Denmark, his own attorney general, Gentner Drummond, presided over the rally. Drummond told attendees that “our warmth today was not brought to us by green energy.”
In economic terms, such opposition is self-defeating, argued Dennis Wamsted, of the nonpartisan Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.
Wind and solar “are demonstrably cheaper than fossil fuels, and have no fuel costs,” Wamsted noted. In contrast to the volatility exhibited by coal, fuel oil and gas, renewables enable consumers to know immediately what “power costs will be 30 years on.”
That dynamic, he argued, is particularly stark in states like Texas, where a wave of anti-renewables legislation failed in 2023. Fossil fuel proponents in Texas often point to the state’s rising electricity demand, which was a major factor in the successful 2023 passage of a multibillion-dollar state energy fund for which only coal and gas plants would qualify.
But all of the 20 percent growth in the state’s electric supply since 2019, Wamsted pointed out, came from wind and solar. For rural opponents, he asked, “You may not like that solar farm on that ranch over there, but is it really a whole lot different than all of those oil rigs that are on the next ranch over?”
To Miller-Meeks the case for renewables, like the one for carbon-based fuels, is obvious. Miller-Meeks was among 18 members who signed a letter calling on House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to protect the IRA’s tax incentives, citing job creation.
But her state is divided as well, Miller-Meeks told The Hill. (She won reelection by only about 700 votes.) While many Iowans are enjoying the royalties they’re receiving from wind turbines, easements and land purchases, there is also plenty of “local pushback,” she explained. Growth of renewables in general, Miller-Meeks predicted, will not be immune to challenge.
But when she talks to GOP supporters skeptical about renewables, Miller-Meeks said she focuses on one factor above all: rising demand.
“It’s very simple,” she continued. “Energy demand is going up — we have to meet increased energy demand for both our states and our country to be competitive globally. To do that, you have to have abundant, affordable, reliable energy. We can't afford brownouts.”
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