Power

What's at stake

The world stands at a critical junction on the road to a clean energy future. We have made significant strides in the creation and mass deployment of renewable energy across the map. In the United States, solar and wind power installations have grown exponentially in recent decades, augmented by increasing amounts of large-scale battery power. These resources now represent our most affordable energy source and the fastest to plug into the grid. Moreover, as the prices of fossil fuels are extremely sensitive to geopolitical and technical factors, the case for a transition to clean, zero-carbon electricity continues to grow clearer. But electricity generation is still the second-largest source of carbon pollution in the United States, together with other forms of harmful air pollution. 

We also know that our energy needs are growing quickly, due in large part to the data center boom. Nonetheless, structural and bureaucratic obstacles are holding back renewable projects, and the evolution of the grid is also lagging. To break through those bottlenecks will take carefully designed guardrails, persistent advocacy, and a commitment to changing the status quo for communities that are eager to move forward with clean energy solutions.

How NRDC is making a difference

Overall, we seek to overcome the barriers that are holding back the deployment of U.S. clean energy at the needed speed and scale. Our goal is to move the power sector as close to 90 percent zero carbon by 2035 as possible while ensuring that clean electricity is affordable, reliable, and accessible to all. We’ll then use that clean electricity to decarbonize the rest of the economy. This means that we need to triple the size of the electricity grid and build solar, wind, transmission, storage, energy efficiency, and advanced zero-carbon resources much more quickly.

We aim to achieve these goals by preserving and advancing federal policies that steer the power sector toward decarbonization while defending against efforts to undermine clean energy. At the market level, we work to unlock grid capacity and reform electricity markets to encourage greater adoption of these resources and to modernize the country’s transmission network. We work at the state level to support the investment in and adoption of clean energy resources through legislative approaches and through advocacy with utility regulators. And we work at the local level to spur support for renewable energy projects with community and labor benefits, including workforce development, particularly in communities that stand to benefit most from clean energy projects. 

Simultaneously, our global advocates are working to expand climate finance resources for developing countries and to support clean energy projects ranging from community solar cooperatives in villages throughout India to large-scale wind and solar power integration in the electrical grid of China. Momentum is on our side: The clean energy revolution is already underway worldwide. The challenge is finding ways to move faster and ensuring the progress is both durable and equitable.