A sharp increase in gas projects was also observed in the EDF report. “(T)otal natural gas capacity planned and under construction increased to 20.7 GW from 44.8 GW in Q4 2025 to 65.5 GW by the end of Q1 2026,” its authors wrote, more than four times the combined growth of solar, storage and onshore wind over the same period. According to the report, fossil fuels’ share of planned capacity rose from 9 percent to 27 percent by the end of 2022, “a three-fold increase that points to increased investment in fossil fuel generation.”
In an interview with Inside Climate News, Jon Gordon, senior policy director for Advanced Energy United, a clean energy advocacy group, said gas generation is “particularly environmentally worrisome” and warned that new plants “will probably be in service for 30 years and more after they’re built.”
“The biggest reason we’re seeing this growth in natural gas is because of this administration, which is putting barriers in the way of renewables and giving incentives to fossil fuels,” he said.
For a clean-energy state like Maryland, he said, the problem was real because “a lot of our problems are very short-term. We need new supply right away,” and yet gas plants “take the longest time to build.” Gordon argued that the economy is increasingly favoring the clean energy path because the cost of building gas plants has “almost doubled in just a few years” while solar and battery costs continue to fall.
The EDF-Atlas report also found that 80 percent of the nation’s existing, planned and under construction clean energy capacity is located in Republican congressional districts. Only five of the 30 districts with the cleanest energy capacity are Democratic. Texas leads every state with 164 GW, nearly double California, with 83 GW in second place.
Abe Silverman, an associate research scientist at Johns Hopkins University’s Ralph O’Connor Institute for Sustainable Energy, cautioned against reading the map in partisan terms. Speaking to Inside Climate News, he said the first thing he looked for was “where the land is cheap”.
“Is it really the red and blue of the state, or the underlying value of land and density?” – he asked. Much of the growth is in areas with low-cost land, he said, and this is further shaped by the interconnection policy.
This article originally appeared there Domestic Climate Newsis a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization covering climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
