President Donald Trump has been openly skeptical about solar power, and his administration’s first year in office reflected that—cutting key federal tax credits, subsidies, and investments in solar power, along with broader green technology initiatives. He also publicly mocked former President Joe Biden’s “ridiculous” and “wasteful” Inflation Reduction Act during the World Economic Forum in January 2025, tying it to spending that included incentives meant to encourage solar.
It’s the kind of policy stance that sounds ideological because, honestly, it has been. Skepticism toward low-carbon energy is often rooted in a mix of economic, aesthetic, and ideological objections, and the solar industry became a target right away.
But in the real world—where people are constantly trying to keep the grid steady and affordable—the argument has started shifting, at least for some prominent Republican voices. America’s electricity demand is expected to grow at a 2.8% compound annual growth rate over the next 15 years, and even some ardent Trump supporters are nudging the president toward a more “pragmatic” approach to solar. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, both still among the most enthusiastic supporters of the president, have made the case that supply matters more than purity.
They’re not denying politics, exactly. Gingrich, for example, mixes supply-and-demand arguments with a touch of nationalism. Failure to meet electricity demands of industry, he argues, would slow business growth—especially as futuristic technologies like artificial intelligence begin to boom. “History tells us that energy scarcity is the biggest threat to the American economy,” Gingrich wrote in a recent opinion column. He added that excluding “vital energy sources” drives up prices and harms families and businesses—“common sense,” he said.
And yet, solar keeps growing despite setbacks. After a decade and a half of expansion, solar power now accounts for 8.5% of the U.S. electricity generation mix, up from 0.1% in 2010. Fossil fuels still make up more than half of the U.S. energy mix, and they have a powerful lobbying presence—spending about $150 million a year to advocate for oil, gas, and coal businesses. Even so, wind and solar together overtook coal for the first time in 2024, with wind and solar at 17% and coal at 15%.
There’s a familiar tension here, too: people on different sides of the political spectrum have long argued over what the grid needs, even before climate change became a dominant driver of the debate. In the years after 2016, when the U.S., under President Barack Obama, joined 192 other nations and the European Union in signing the Paris Agreement to reduce carbon emissions by 2030, the question of how much to rely on low- and zero-carbon sources like wind and solar became a partisan divide.
Now the focus is less about whether solar exists and more about whether the country can afford to ignore it. Eric D. Larson, a senior research scholar at the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment at Princeton University, put it plainly: he doesn’t view energy as purely ideological, “but that’s what it’s been turned into.” He worries about demand outstripping supply, prices rising, and rising prices translating into votes—though he also says there’s a recognition that to stay ahead in technology, including AI, the country needs power.
At the moment, there’s little direct evidence that these pro-solar Republicans will change the president’s mind. Trump’s 2025 tax-and-spending bill phased out solar subsidies and passed the House along party lines, 218-214. The officials tasked with implementing Trump’s energy approach have also been blunt. Secretary of Energy Christopher Wright—founder and former CEO of Liberty Energy, a major fracking service company—has called solar panels “a parasite” that provides only intermittent power. In a Feb. 17, 2026, panel discussion, Wright said climate change is real but argued it has gotten “so ridiculously out of whack” that policies have driven up energy prices and contributed to deindustrialization.
Still, a smaller group of Republicans with influence are publicly advocating for solar. Conservative podcaster Katie Miller, wife of Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller, has made the case for solar on social media, noting that Tesla produces solar panels and saying she does not have a paid partnership with clean energy groups she cites. She wrote that solar is now the dominant source of new U.S. power capacity and is on track to surpass coal in total installed capacity before the end of 2026, and she pointed to 70 GW of new solar capacity scheduled to come online in 2026–2027.
Conway, meanwhile, commissioned a February 2026 poll of 1,000 registered voters in Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Ohio, and Texas, on behalf of the pro-solar advocacy group American Energy First. Misryoum reporting on the poll found broad support for solar: eight in 10 respondents agreed that solar energy should be used to strengthen and increase U.S. energy supply, and three-quarters of self-identified Trump voters agreed.
There’s also a geographic argument being made—one that sounds tailor-made for politics. More than two-thirds of the new solar plants built over the past five years are in states the Republican Party carried in 2024, including Texas, Indiana, Florida, Ohio, Arizona, Utah, and Arkansas, according to a report by Wood Mackenzie on behalf of the Solar Energy Industries Association. Mark Fleming of Conservatives for Clean Energy argues AI data centers are being built in “red-state America,” and in the Carolinas, the combination of AI data centers and solar and wind farms has helped strengthen property tax bases. He says it’s been “a lifesaver for rural counties,” and that has brought more conservatives into the clean energy cause.
Even some conservative critics say the debate keeps missing the point. Neil Auerbach, founder and CEO of the Hudson Sustainable Group and senior adviser to the American Conservation Coalition, argues that America’s economic competitiveness depends on “abundant, affordable power today.” With the 2026 midterms approaching, he wrote that voters will reward leaders who present credible solutions to keep the lights on and bills down—and that “ideological purity” won’t deliver affordable energy.
Back in Lakewood, Ohio, on a bright April afternoon in 2025, the practical side of all this was visible: Theodore Tanczuk and Brayan Santos of solar installer YellowLite were working to put panels on a home, the air smelling like fresh-cut lumber and dust drifting off the driveway. The policy fight above them—between ideology and reliability, between subsidy cuts and growing demand—still hasn’t fully settled. And honestly, it might not for a while. Depending on who you ask, the country either can’t afford to ignore solar, or can’t afford what it represents.
Strait of Hormuz effectively shut as Trump presses allies
From the ballroom to the dollar bill, Trump stamps his brand