Why The 'Hype Phase' Of Wind And Solar Is Over
Authored by Kevin Stocklin via The Epoch Times,
The Trump administration has taken a sharp turn from its predecessor regarding wind and solar energy, curtailing many of the loans, grants, and permitting that the Biden administration had put in place.
Without government subsidies and regulatory support, energy analysts are questioning whether these industries can stand on their own merits.
“We’ve reached the end of the hype phase, and the beginning of the reality phase,” Sam Romain, chairman of Americans for Energy Dominance, told The Epoch Times.
“Technologies that lower costs, improve reliability, and strengthen the grid will grow.
“Those that don’t will fade.”
On his first day in office, President Donald Trump suspended new leases and permits for wind and solar on public lands and waters and raised fees for existing projects. Subsequently, his One Big Beautiful Bill Act set tighter deadlines to cut off subsidies to wind and solar energy projects, putting more than $300 billion in planned wind and solar investments at risk of cancellation.
In August 2025, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy canceled $679 million in federal funding for 12 offshore wind projects across the United States, stating that the administration is “prioritizing real infrastructure improvements over fantasy wind projects that cost much and offer little.”
And in December 2025, the Interior Department halted leases for five large-scale offshore wind projects under construction in the United States, citing security risks.
Calling the wind installations “expensive, unreliable [and] heavily subsidized,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum posted on X that “ONE natural gas pipeline supplies as much energy as these 5 projects COMBINED.”
Without these subsidies, many analysts say wind and solar power will struggle to survive, at least on the scale that was envisioned under the Biden administration.
“Wind and solar won’t be able to credibly compete with affordable, reliable baseload sources like gas, coal, and nuclear at the utility scale,” Sarah Montalbano, energy policy analyst at Always On Energy Research, told The Epoch Times. “Intermittent wind and solar depend on tax credits and state mandates that require their construction.”
Today, some analysts say, developers are putting many renewable projects on hold, waiting until another Democratic administration takes the White House.
“For the remainder of Trump’s term, wind and solar will be in decline,” H. Sterling Burnett, director of climate and environmental policy at The Heartland Institute, told The Epoch Times. “Whether that sticks depends upon who is the next president.
Climate change activists hold signs during a news conference with members of the House Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition on Capitol Hill in Washington on Nov. 13, 2025. Since taking office, President Donald Trump has slashed subsidies and canceled permits on federal lands for wind and solar energy—an industry that has long thrived on government subsidies. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch Times
“Some wind and solar will be built due to state support and mandates, especially those already contracted for and under construction, but the money spigot is ending and that will doom new developments,” Burnett said.
As of January, there are 4,202 planned solar projects and 802 planned wind projects in development in the United States, according to Cleanview, an energy analytics firm.
State Support for Wind, Solar
While renewable energy has lost some of its strongest advocates in Washington, experts say that the industry will survive, even if scaled back, because regulation of power generation was reserved to the states in the 1920 Federal Power Act, within their borders.
And many states, particularly those run by Democrats, have regulations in place that require or incentivize utilities to buy wind and solar power over gas, coal, and nuclear.
However, even in those states that favor them, wind and solar energy are running up against two major hurdles: reliability and cost.
When comparing wind or solar to alternatives such as nuclear, “you’re comparing two very unlike things,” said Bill Glahn, policy fellow at the Center of the American Experiment and former deputy commerce commissioner for the state of Minnesota.
One is “an intermittent resource that may last 10 to 20 years before the equipment breaks down and has to be replaced, versus a 24/7 dispatchable plant that could be around 50 to 70 years,” Glahn told The Epoch Times.
He said the nuclear plants currently operating in Minnesota were built in the 1970s and will likely operate until 2040 or beyond.
“Wind and solar can’t compete on that basis,” he said.
Oilfield pump jacks in Williston, N.D., on Dec. 21, 2023. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times
Hidden Costs
Renewable energy was supposed to be a cheaper energy source, advocates claimed, because wind and sunshine are free. However, the true aggregate cost of these technologies has been obscured in several ways.
First, weather-dependent energy requires backup systems, typically gas-fired plants, to generate electricity when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing. However, the cost of building and running these backup systems is generally not attributed to the wind and solar plants that required them.
There are also additional costs to build new distribution lines to transmit electricity from the often remote locations where wind and solar power are generated to end users in cities and towns.
“With so many of these projects, be they wind or solar, you have to either upgrade a transmission line or upgrade the local distribution system to put those assets on the grid, and those costs are never assigned to wind and solar,” Glahn said. “The wind and solar projects cause the transmission projects to be needed—and these are multi-billion dollar projects—but that cost all gets assigned, in this extremely bizarre twist, to resources that are running and that are useful.”
In Minnesota, the source that is running is usually nuclear power and natural gas, so the additional transmission costs are attributed to them, Glahn said.
“We put the thumb on the scale to make sure wind and solar pass some rudimentary cost-benefit analysis by just out and out cheating, and it’s super frustrating,” he said.
Another hidden cost is that wind and solar plants typically have shorter lifespans than gas, coal, and nuclear plants, and the expense of decommissioning them is often also not taken into account in the way that it is with traditional power plants.
An October 2025 study by Curtis Schube and Mark Mills for the National Center for Energy Analytics found that, while 30 U.S. states made little or no provisions for decommissioning wind and solar plants, the vast majority of states did so for coal, gas, and nuclear plants. In many cases, this could leave local residents with the bill for cleanup, once wind and solar facilities reach the end of their relatively short lives.
Discarded wind turbine blades are seen in a field next to the Sweetwater Cemetery in Sweetwater, Texas, on Oct. 4, 2023. Brandon Bell/Getty Images
There are currently more than 75,000 wind turbines operating across 45 U.S. states, and more than 5,700 large-scale solar installations across 49 states, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. In both cases, the first installations were built prior to 1990, putting many of them close to their decommissioning date.
Consumers often bear all of these additional costs through higher utility bills and higher taxes.
Environmental organizations that advocate net-zero policies and wind and solar construction often have strong lobbying support in state legislatures, as do public utilities that simply pass on their costs to consumers, Glahn said.
“Utilities make sure that they’re going to come out of this neutral, but the consumers are the ones who get screwed, and there’s really nobody to speak for them at the capitol,” he said.
Struggle to Pay Electric Bills
This more sober assessment of the costs and benefits of wind and solar is happening at a time when Americans increasingly are struggling to pay their electric bills.
A 2025 report by the Century Foundation states that average electricity prices have climbed by 32 percent since 2022 and as a result, 14 million Americans—or about one in 20 households—are on track to have unpaid utility bills sent to collection agencies.
“If a policy drives up bills and increases blackout risk, it’s not sustainable,” Romain said. “These ‘net zero’ mandates are often written by elites who never worry about paying their power bill.”
A December 2025 study by the Institute for Energy Research found that 86 percent of the states with electricity prices above the national average were Democrat-led, or “reliably blue.” All of the five states with the highest electric bills had mandates requiring that 100 percent of their power must come from carbon-free sources.
By contrast, 20 of the 25 states with the lowest electricity prices were red states, and seven of the 10 states with the cheapest electricity did not have 100 percent carbon-free mandates.
Energy analyst Robert Bryce cited the case of New York in a recent op-ed published in the New York Post. The state just approved a $615 per year rate hike in gas and electricity bills for the average New York City resident by 2028. The state’s political leaders have not only incentivized utilities to build wind and solar capacity, but also shuttered the Indian Point nuclear plant, which produced one-quarter of New York City’s electricity.
Closing Indian Point will cost between $1.5 billion and $2.2 billion by 2030, Bryce said, and as a result of such policies, New York’s electricity prices are now 58 percent above the national average.
The Indian Point nuclear power plant on the Hudson River in Buchanan, N.Y., on March 22, 2011. Bill Glahn, a policy fellow at the Center of the American Experiment, said nuclear plants have longer life spans than wind and solar and are “24/7 dispatchable,” making them more reliable. Don Emmert/AFP via Getty Images
Renewable Rejection
And while Americans may not have control over their electric bills, they are increasingly fighting back against the installations of large wind and solar projects in their neighborhoods.
“It was clear before the end of subsidies that Big Wind was facing more and more friction from local communities fighting back against their projects,” Bryce told The Epoch Times, citing the most recent example of the California Energy Commission rejecting the Fountain Wind project in Shasta County.
According to Bryce’s database, Renewable Rejection, there have been 1,148 cases to date of local communities working to halt the installation of wind, solar, or battery projects.
Wind turbines obstruct views and injure wildlife, and both wind and solar facilities consume significantly more acreage than traditional energy plants, according to a 2024 report by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“When it comes to land use, nuclear plants take up as little as 10 hectares per terawatt-hour of electricity produced per year, while wind uses about 100 hectares, measuring just the area taken up by turbines,” the report found.
“This rises to an astounding 10,000 hectares if you include all the land covered by a wind farm, but most of this space is open land and can be used for ranching or farming.”
In January, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to revoke permits for five offshore wind projects, allowing several of them to resume construction. According to Burnett, however, even if these wind projects move through to completion, there will likely be delays and cost overruns.
“Dozens of offshore wind projects approved and permitted by the Biden administration have already ceased construction and withdrawn from the projects simply due to economics,” Burnett said. “Materials costs keep rising and supply chain problems have hampered construction.”
Wind turbines operate in a field in Beulah, N.D., on Dec. 22, 2023. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times
Because much of the material for wind turbines and solar panels originates in China, construction costs are being driven even higher by tariffs imposed on Chinese imports.
As their costs rise, many wind developers have repeatedly gone back to states to renegotiate terms, “and still they’ve pulled out,” Burnett said. “The remaining five projects still under construction will cost ratepayers billions of dollars, pollute the oceans, kill protected species, compromise national security, and provide relatively little reliable power.”
An aerial view shows the Kayenta Solar Plant in Kayenta, Ariz., on June 23, 2024. Observers said that the true aggregate cost of renewable energy is often understated because existing utilities must build the new lines to carry power from remote wind and solar sites to cities and towns. Brandon Bell/Getty Images
However, the prospects for solar energy are likely brighter than for wind.
“It is important to distinguish between massive wind and solar farms that stretch for miles and the solar panels that homeowners install on their rooftops,” Romain said.
“The economics of home batteries and rooftop solar work for a lot of Americans, which is why they privately installed 4.7 gigawatts of rooftop solar in 2024 alone—roughly the output of five nuclear plants.”
Bryce concurs.
“Solar will continue to grow for several reasons: It is politically popular, in many cases the economics work without subsidies, and solar land-use requirements are about one-tenth those of wind,” he said.
“The only thing dumber than onshore wind energy is offshore wind energy.”