Updating the Clean Electricity Playbook: Learning Lessons from the 100% Clean Agenda
Building clean energy faster is the most significant near-term strategy to combat climate change. While the Biden Administration and the advocacy community made significant gains to this end over the past few years, we failed to secure major pieces of the policy agenda, and the pieces we did secure are not resulting in as much progress as projected. As a result, clean energy deployment is lagging behind levels needed to match modeled cost-effective scenarios, let alone to achieve the Paris climate goals. Simultaneously, the Trump Administration is actively dismantling the foundations that have underpinned our existing policy playbook.
Adjusting course to rapidly transform the electricity sector—to cut pollution, reduce costs, and power a changing economy—requires us to upgrade the regulatory frameworks we rely upon, the policy tools we prioritize, and the coalition-building and messaging strategies we use.
After leaving the Biden Administration, I joined FAS as a Senior Fellow to jump into this work. We plan to assess the lessons from the Biden era electricity sector plan, interrogate what is and is not working from the advocacy community’s toolkit, and articulate a new vision for policy and strategy that is durable and effective, while meeting the needs of our modern society. We need a new playbook that starts in the states and builds toward a national mission that can tackle today’s pressing challenges and withstand today’s turbulent politics. And we believe that this work must be transpartisan—we intend to draw from efforts underway in a wide range of local political contexts to build a strategy that appeals to people with diverse political views and levels of political engagement.
This project is part of a larger FAS initiative to reimagine the U.S. environmental regulatory state and build a new system that can address our most pressing challenges.
Betting Big on 100% Clean Electricity
If we are successful in fighting the climate crisis, the largest share of domestic greenhouse gas emissions reductions over the next ten years will come from building massive amounts of new clean energy and in turn reducing pollution from coal- and gas-fired power plants. Electricity will also need to be cheap, clean, and abundant to move away from gasoline vehicles, natural gas appliances in homes, and fossil fuel-fired factories toward clean electric alternatives.
That’s why clean electricity has been the centerpiece of federal and state climate policy. The signature climate initiative of the Obama Administration was the Clean Power Plan. Over the past several decades, states have made the most emissions progress through renewable portfolio standards and clean electricity standards that require power companies to provide increasing amounts of clean electricity. Now 24 (red and blue) states and D.C. have goals or requirements to achieve 100 percent clean electricity. And in the 2020 election, Democratic primary candidates competed over how ambitious their plans were to transform the electricity grid and deploy clean energy.
As a result of that competition and the climate movement’s efforts to put electricity at the center of the strategy, President Biden campaigned on achieving 100 percent clean electricity by 2035. This commitment was very ambitious—it surpassed every state goal except Vermont’s, Rhode Island’s, and D.C.’s. In making such a bold commitment, Biden recognized how essential the power sector is to addressing the climate crisis. He also staked a bet that the right policies—large incentives for companies, worker protections, and support for a diverse mix of low-carbon technologies—would bring together a coalition that would fight for the legislation and regulations needed to make the 2035 goal a reality.
A Mix of Wins and Losses
That bet only partially paid off. We won components of the agenda that made major strides toward 100% clean electricity. New tax credits are accelerating deployment of wind, solar, and battery storage (although the Trump Administration and Republicans in Congress are actively working to repeal these credits). Infrastructure investments are driving grid upgrades to accommodate additional clean energy. And new grant programs and procurement policies are speeding up commercialization of critical technologies such as offshore wind, advanced nuclear, and enhanced geothermal.
But the movement failed to secure the parts of the plan that would have ensured an adequate pace of deployment and pollution reductions, including a federal clean electricity standard, a suite of durable emissions regulations to cover the full sector, and federal and state policies to reduce roadblocks to new infrastructure and align utility incentives with clean energy deployment. We ran into real-world and political headwinds that held us back. For example, deployment was stifled by long timelines to connect projects to the grid and local ordinances and siting practices that block clean energy. Policy initiatives were thwarted by political opposition from perceived reliability impacts and blowback from increasing electricity rates, especially for newer technologies like offshore wind and advanced nuclear. The opposition to clean energy successfully weaponized the rising cost of living to fight climate policies, even where clean energy would make life less expensive. These barriers not only impeded commercialization and deployment but also dampened support from key stakeholders (project developers, utilities, grid operators, and state and local leaders) for more ambitious policies. The necessary coalitions did not come together to support and defend the full agenda.
As a result, we are building clean energy much too slowly. In 2024, the United States built nearly 50 gigawatts of new clean power. This number, while a new record, falls short of the amount needed to address the climate crisis. Analysis from three leading research projects found that, with the tax incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, the future in which we get within striking distance of the Paris climate goals requires 70 to 125 gigawatts of new clean power per year for the next five years, 40 to 250 percent higher than our record annual buildout.
Where do we go from here?
The climate crisis demands faster and deeper policy change with more staying power. Addressing the obvious obstacles standing in the way of clean energy deployment, like the process to connect power plants to the grid, is necessary but insufficient. We must also develop new policy frameworks and expanded coalitions to facilitate the rapid transformation of the electricity system.
This work requires us to ask and creatively answer an evolving set of questions, including: What processes are holding us back from faster buildout, and how do we address them? How can utility incentives be better aligned with the deployment and infrastructure investment we need and support for the required policies? How can the way we pay for electricity be better designed to protect customers and a livable climate? Where have our coalitional strategies failed to win the policies we need, and how do we adjust? How should we talk about these problems and the solutions to build greater support?
We must develop answers to these questions in a way that leads us to more transformative, lasting policies. We believe that, in the near term, much of this work must happen at the state level, where there is energy to test out new ideas and frameworks and iterate on them. We plan to build out a state-level playbook that is actionable, dynamic, and replicable. And we intend to learn from the experiences of states and municipalities with diverse political contexts to develop solutions that address the concerns of a wide range of audiences.
We cannot do this work on our own. We plan to draw on the expertise of a diverse range of organizations and people who have been working on these problems from many vantage points. If you are working on these issues and are interested, please join us in collaboration and conversation by reaching out to akrishnaswami@fas.org.
To fight the climate crises, we must do more than connect power plants to the grid: we need new policy frameworks and expanded coalitions to facilitate the rapid transformation of the electricity system.
The stakes are high: how we manage this convergence will influence not only the pace of technological innovation but also the equity and sustainability of our energy future.
The Federation of American Scientists supports the Critical Materials Future Act and the Unearth Innovation Act.
The Trump administration has an opportunity to supercharge American energy dominance through MESC, but they must come together with Congressional leaders to permanently establish MESC and its mission.