If you care about cleaner air, or the state of the global climate, or building an energy future for America on a foundation of renewable resources that never run out, it’s been a rough month.
As expected, newly elected President Donald Trump took a series of immediate actions intended to slow down the nation’s transition to clean energy. A January 20 executive order aimed at “unleashing American energy” ignored the two energy sources that the nation has been counting on to meet increasing electricity demand: wind and solar. Another presidential memorandum put one of our nation’s most abundant and promising sources of clean energy – offshore wind – on a leash and confined it to the doghouse, withdrawing offshore areas from leasing and calling a halt to permitting of new projects. The fate of clean energy grants authorized under the Inflation Reduction Act and permitting for an even greater variety of new renewable energy projects remains in doubt.
Those actions are disappointing and will have negative consequences for consumers, the climate and anyone who breathes air. They are not, however, the end of the story.
Pro-renewable federal policies – including tax incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act – remain on the books, and many enjoy some measure of bipartisan support. Local and state governments in many places stand ready to continue to advocate for clean energy as best they can.
But, by any measure, the pathway toward repowering America with renewable energy is narrower and rockier than it was a few months ago. To continue the clean energy transition during what looks like a difficult next few years, we’re going to need to look for other solutions.
One of the most promising places to start is by looking up … to the clean energy potential located on the rooftops of our homes, schools, churches and commercial buildings. Rooftop solar power can be fast to install, usually requires no federal permits, and is often a worthwhile financial investment, whether you care about the climate or not.
Unleashing our ability to tap the energy that shines down on our rooftops every day would be transformative in many ways. But making it happen is going to take some work.
The promise of small-scale solar
Small-scale solar power is a uniquely beneficial – and important – source of energy. At a time when concerns about rising electricity demand are keeping old fossil fuel plants online, rooftop solar is a clean energy source that can be installed quickly, and without requiring big upgrades to the transmission system. Amid increasingly wild weather extremes, solar panels paired with batteries can provide a source of electricity during emergencies and power outages, making our communities more resilient. And with federal policy changes jeopardizing large-scale renewable energy projects, rooftop solar is an energy source that falls largely within local and state control. [1]
Small-scale solar power is already a significant source of clean energy in the U.S. Over the 12 months ending in November 2024, the U.S. produced more than 84 terawatt-hours of electricity from small-scale solar power installations. That’s the equivalent of about 2% of the electricity sold during that same period in the U.S. And that is despite a recent slowdown in residential solar power installations resulting from factors such as higher interest rates.
Nevertheless, America’s potential for rooftop solar generation is huge, and growing. In our February 2024 report Rooftop Solar on the Rise, we estimated that the U.S. could produce the equivalent of 45% of the electricity we use by installing solar panels on residential, commercial and industrial rooftops. Continued improvements in the efficiency of solar panels mean that we can now produce more energy on the same amount of roof space than we could a few years ago. And adding solar power to other developed areas, such as parking lots, could expand clean energy capacity even further.
Accelerating the deployment of rooftop solar, however, is going to require work. And it’s going to require revisiting some now out-of-date assumptions about what the clean energy transition will look like.
Growing rooftop solar
The first step in unleashing the potential of rooftop solar is to look at which policies and approaches have worked to spur adoption … and which haven’t.
California is a great example of both. The state became a global leader in the adoption of rooftop solar through the adoption of visionary policies such as the Million Solar Roofs program in 2006 and consistent policies to compensate solar panel owners for the electricity they supply to the grid. By 2022, California had far more rooftop solar power than any other state.
Since then, however, California has thrown its rooftop solar market into reverse, cutting compensation for owners of solar panels, hiking fixed charges, and undercutting proposals to expand community solar. Unsurprisingly, those policy changes have taken a huge bite out of the California solar market – distributed solar installations were down by 35% in the 12 month period ending November 2024 compared to the corresponding period a year earlier, and down by 25% compared with two years earlier. That’s despite the presence of generous federal tax incentives under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
When California and the nation were poised to add large volumes of utility-scale solar to the grid, deprioritizing rooftop solar might not have seemed to be such a catastrophic choice. With the future pace of large-scale solar development and other renewable energy additions in doubt, however, it’s an approach we can no longer afford.
Utilities have long agitated for policies to undermine customer-owned solar power, which they see as a threat to their business model, and they have chalked up a series of recent successes around the country. That’s despite evidence that rooftop solar delivers significant benefits to the electricity system as a whole, reducing expensive-to-serve peaks in demand (especially when paired with battery storage) and reducing the need for expenditures to expand transmission capacity or keep old fossil fuel plants running to ensure grid reliability. Rooftop solar also has the unique benefit of being able to be installed on already developed land – avoiding conflicts that have emerged around the country around the expansion of renewable energy in rural areas and on natural land.
It’s time for a renewed push to ramp up rooftop solar, and there are lots of places to get started for both individuals and policymakers. Making it easier to get a permit to install rooftop solar – including through the use of instant permitting – not only enables more rooftop solar to come online faster, but it also reduces costs for installers and consumers. (Look for a new report from us on this topic soon.) Policies to encourage community solar – in which people within a community pool their resources to fund solar installations and reap the benefits – can also help. Encouraging businesses with big, open rooftops, such as superstores and warehouses, to go solar can produce large amounts of clean electricity in our communities. And, especially as long as the Inflation Reduction Act incentives remain in effect, community institutions such as houses of worship, schools and local governments can benefit financially from going solar, furthering their missions even as they help clean up our electricity system.
Installing solar panels is also a step that each of us can take on our own, regardless of who is in power. Environment America’s Clean Energy Homes Toolkit provides advice on where to get started.
There are also many other ways individuals and families can help keep the nation’s clean energy momentum going during the next few years. Installing energy-saving technologies like heat pumps, conserving energy at home, driving less and switching to an electric vehicle, and buying and trashing less stuff can all help – as can working for local and state policies and working to defend those federal climate initiatives that can be saved. But at a time when the trajectory of America’s climate protection efforts has never seemed so uncertain, getting more of our energy from the sun that shines down on our neighborhoods would sure be a good start.
[1] This is not to say that federal policy is irrelevant. Trade policy is a big issue, though the recent rapid growth in U.S. solar manufacturing makes tariffs less of an existential concern than they might have been several years ago. And questions surrounding federal programs such as Solar for All put the future of many specific projects in doubt. But federal policymakers have fewer tools at their disposal to disrupt small-scale clean energy projects than large-scale projects that rely on federal permits or access to the transmission system.
