Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: February 2, 2026
Solar across America!
Solar projects keep empowering communities across America, despite the drag of White House sabotage.
Tell your state leaders to accelerate solar power build-out!
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Reasons For Hope
Clean, cheap, abundant, and reliable solar power keeps progressing across the United States despite ongoing senseless attacks from the White House!
In 2025, for the first year ever, solar supplied more electricity than coal to the ERCOT grid of Texas! It’s grown incredibly fast. In 2017, solar provided 2,258 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of ERCOT power compared to coal’s 115,141 GWh, but in 2025, solar provided 67,800 GWh and coal just 63,031 GWh. Solar plus wind provided 37% of ERCOT’s power that year. In addition to reducing air pollution, the great Texas solar, wind, and battery boom is credited with stabilizing the grid and preventing blackouts.
In the Central Valley of California, the Westlands Water District just approved plans for a truly massive new project: 21 GW (21,000 MW) of solar capacity plus roughly equivalent battery storage to be built across 600,000 acres. If all goes well, it could supply one-quarter of California’s electricity needs by 2035! (It will also help growers survive chaotic weather by directly reducing irrigation needs). This would be by far the biggest solar and battery project yet built in the United States. Finally, a true U.S. landscape-scale solar buildout on the scale of what China and India are doing!
In Michigan, the Muskegon solar farm (250 MW) has been built in a wastewater treatment complex’s existing buffer zones and fields. It’ll generate enough electricity to power about 40,000 Michigan homes. Another great example of how solar can be co-located with multitudes of others forms of land use, from parking lots to pastures!
And in Illinois, a community solar project in Waukegan has built the 9.1 MW Yeoman array on a former landfill Superfund site too polluted for other uses. Subscribing residents are guaranteed to see savings on their energy bills.
As the White House continues to sabotage clean energy projects on public lands and waters, electricity bills for American households keep rising in a completely avoidable energy shortage. Now more than ever, state leaders must step up to accelerate the build-out of clean, cheap, and reliable solar and battery power with every policy lever available. Identifying and eliminating bottlenecks to clean energy deployment must be a top priority, using every power possible to speed up or skip over administrative, permitting, and interconnection hurdles. We need more clean energy, and we need it as fast as possible!