More concerning is the power sector, where emissions increased slightly despite record-breaking solar and wind production. Last year, solar and wind generated more power than coal for the first time, providing 17 percent of U.S. electricity. Coal production fell by 12 percent to its lowest level in decades, and coal power plants were further displaced by fossil gas and renewables. But fossil gas continues to dominate the grid, rising to 43 percent of the country’s power generation last year.
Power-sector emissions are increasing for a straightforward reason: Electricity demand is growing for the first time in decades, and the uptick in renewables isn’t enough to offset that boom.
Most of the surge came from residents in homes and apartments cranking up the air conditioning as they sweltered through the hottest summer recorded since 1880. The rise in energy used for cooling helped fuel a 3 percent spike in annual power demand that’s consistent with growth in 2021 and 2022, Gaffney said.
Electricity demand growth since the outbreak of the pandemic — with the exception of 2023 — is “a departure from the pre-pandemic norm, where growth was not nearly as high,” Gaffney said. And while more than half of that new demand was met by solar and wind last year, “it’s clear that more natural gas is getting burned to support a higher load than it otherwise would have.”
Data centers are one rapidly growing source of power demand that will likely further frustrate efforts to decarbonize the grid in the coming years.
In 2024, commercial-building power demand, including from data centers, rose by less than 1 percent — but that growth will likely accelerate, based on projections from the federal Energy Information Administration, Gaffney said. A recent report by consulting firm Grid Strategies found that data centers and manufacturing drove a nearly fivefold increase in previous load-growth forecasts for the next four years. To a smaller extent, the uptake of EVs, heat pumps, and other electrification measures will also increase power demand.
Rhodium Group analysts previously forecasted that clean energy incentives and investments under the Inflation Reduction Act and other federal climate policies would accelerate emissions reductions in the coming years. Given the time it takes to break ground on clean energy projects and enable widespread adoption of clean technologies like EVs, those impacts would start accruing significantly in the 2030s. Emissions from the power sector, for example, could drop by up to 83 percent below 2023 levels in 2035, the research firm forecast last year.
The incoming Trump administration presents a wildcard for those forecasts. With the president-elect and lawmakers in the majority-Republican Congress threatening to roll back IRA credits and other Biden energy policies, such steep reductions could fail to materialize.
“We estimate that a full rollback and IRA repeal scenario substantially reduces the pace of U.S. decarbonization, leaving emissions at just 24–40% below 2005 levels in 2035,” the researchers wrote.
