NRDC Estimates Trump Policies Could Eliminate Up to 540 GW of US Renewables
The NRDC analysis covers IRA rollbacks, tariffs and offshore wind buybacks, putting a number on a deceleration the industry has been pricing in for months.
The Natural Resources Defense Council estimated last Wednesday (2026-08-26) that Trump administration energy policies could eliminate between 390 and 540 gigawatts of new wind, solar and storage capacity that would otherwise have been built in the United States over the coming decade.5
Three policy levers account for the range: the rollback of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits, the introduction of new tariffs on clean energy components, and a programme of offshore wind lease buybacks that has already induced some developers to exit their positions. Each compounds the others. Tariffs raise project costs at precisely the moment that reduced tax credits make financing harder to close, squeezing the margins that underpin any renewables build-out.5,2
Rhodium Group had already pointed toward a comparable gap in its own modelling. The research firm expected clean-energy generation additions between 2025 and 2035 to reach only 57% to 62% of what would have been built under full IRA implementation, a forecast developed before several of the administration's more recent actions took effect.1
The near-term installation picture looks more resilient than those longer-range forecasts suggest. BloombergNEF projected more than 50 gigawatts of solar to be installed in both 2026 and 2027, sustained by projects already deep in the permitting queue. Jeh Vevaina of Brookfield, which has over $50 billion committed to US clean energy, told The Economist earlier this year he expected a brief boom as developers race to lock in remaining credits before further rollbacks.1
That pace does not extend to manufacturing. Kevin Smith of Arevon Energy told The Economist that more than $100 billion in planned American solar and battery manufacturing investment "will not happen." The near-term build rates and the manufacturing pullback can coexist: installations proceed on project inertia while the next tranche of domestic supply-chain capacity never gets started.1
Offshore wind is on a steeper trajectory than ground-mounted renewables. The administration has been paying developers to exit their offshore leases, a programme E&E News documented in May (2026-05-26). Analysts told the outlet that project developers and financiers were growing wary of committing capital to such a politically exposed sector, and that the wariness would likely outlast the current administration even if its policies were eventually reversed.2
On the fossil side, the administration's posture runs the other way. EIA counted 6.4 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity scheduled to retire in 2026, roughly 4% of the US coal fleet, and the Department of Energy has been exploring must-run orders to keep some of that plant operational. The practicalities are messy. Michelle Solomon, a policy analyst, told Canary Media in July (2026-07-29) that many facilities subject to such orders "are not functional and costing lots of money to get functional and back online."3
The emissions arithmetic from the combined shift is large. The Economist estimated in May (2026-05-17) that scrapping EPA greenhouse-gas regulation alongside fuel-economy and efficiency rollbacks could generate excess emissions in 2035 of 1 billion tonnes or more relative to an IRA baseline. Rhodium Group's "Taking Stock" report, released on 2026-07-29, set out a range of scenarios for the likely trajectory of US greenhouse gas emissions. "Our goal with the scenarios is to form a reasonable bound around where emissions are headed," said lead author Hannah Kolus. None of the report's central cases recovers the IRA path.1,4
What the NRDC's 540-gigawatt upper bound does not settle is timing and permanence. Rhodium's scenario range and BNEF's near-term solar projections can both be right: installations hold through 2027 on project inertia, then decline as the pipeline thins and manufacturing capacity that was cancelled does not come back. The offshore wind buyback programme is the clearest near-term test of that permanence. Developers who accepted buyouts and exited their leases may not return to a sector they have already once been paid to leave.5,2,1