The EDF report also tracked a sharp uptick in gas projects. “[T]otal planned and under construction natural gas capacity rose from 44.8 GW in Q4 2025 to 65.5 GW by the end of Q1 2026, an increase of 20.7 GW,” its authors wrote, more than four times the combined growth of solar, storage, and onshore wind over the same period. Fossil fuels’ share of planned capacity has climbed from 9 percent at the end of 2022 to 27 percent, “a threefold increase that points to an uptick in fossil fuel generation investment,” according to the report.
In an interview with Inside Climate News, Jon Gordon, senior policy director at Advanced Energy United, a clean energy advocacy group, said the gas buildout was “very concerning… particularly from an environmental standpoint,” warning that new plants are “likely going to be in service for 30 years plus, once they’re constructed.”
He said “the big reason we’re seeing this surge of natural gas is this administration that’s been throwing roadblocks in the way of renewables and providing incentives for fossil fuel.”
For a clean-energy state like Maryland, he said, the challenge was real because “a lot of our problems are very short term. We need new supply right away,” and yet gas plants “are the longest to build.” Gordon argued that economics increasingly favors the clean energy pathway because the cost of building gas plants “has almost doubled in just a couple of years,” while solar and battery costs keep falling.
The EDF-Atlas report also found that 80 percent of the nation’s existing, planned, and under-construction clean power capacity is located in congressional districts represented by Republicans. Of the 30 districts with the most clean power capacity, just five are Democratic. Texas leads every state with 164 GW, nearly double California, in second place with 83 GW.
Abe Silverman, an assistant research scholar at Johns Hopkins University’s Ralph O’Connor Sustainable Energy Institute, cautioned against reading the map in partisan terms. Talking to Inside Climate News, he said the first thing he looks for is “where is land cheap.”
“Is it really the red and blueness of the state, or is it the underlying cost of land and the density?” he asked. Much of the growth is in areas with low-cost land, he said, and it is further shaped by interconnection policies.
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
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