Something happened off the coast of Rhode Island in March that the current administration did not want to happen. Revolution Wind, a joint offshore project built by Danish developer Ørsted and Skyborn Renewables, began sending power to New England’s electric grid after surviving two separate federal work-stop orders.
The project will scale up in the coming weeks until it reaches full operational capacity, providing electricity to Rhode Island and Connecticut enough to power more than 350,000 homes and businesses.
The road there was ugly.
Days before Christmas, the Trump administration suspended leases for five large-scale offshore wind projects under construction along the East Coast, citing national security risks identified by the Pentagon.
The Interior Department issued no specifics about what those risks were. Developers and states sued, and federal judges allowed all five projects to resume construction, essentially concluding that the government had not demonstrated the national security risk was so imminent that construction must halt.
The White House declared it looked forward to “ultimate victory on this issue.” Revolution Wind is online.
The five East Coast projects that won those court victories now make up a small fraction of Atlantic states’ ambitious offshore wind plans. Dozens of projects that have yet to break ground face long odds while the current administration remains in office.
Warren Leon, executive director of the Clean Energy States Alliance, put the prognosis plainly: the most realistic forecast is that no other projects beyond these five will move forward over the next few years.
Revolution Wind punched through and the turbines are spinning.
Across the country in New Mexico, a different kind of energy story is being written at a slower pace and with longer roots.
The New Mexico Community Solar Act, passed in 2021, created unique provisions for what it defines as “native community solar projects”: facilities sited on the land of an Indigenous nation, tribe, or pueblo, owned or operated by a tribal entity, or developed in partnership with a third-party.
Projects on tribal land remain exempt from state program limitations a carve-out that makes New Mexico the only state in the country with tribal exemptions of this kind.
State regulators are now making a fresh push to accelerate a program that has moved fitfully since its passage, weighing rule changes and 300 megawatts in new projects as advocates race to deliver bill savings before key federal tax credits expire.
The stakes for rural and tribal households are not abstract. More than 54,000 Native Americans currently have no home access to electricity, according to a 2023 Department of Energy report. A quarter of low-income households in the United States spend more than 15% of their income on energy bills.
New Mexico received a $156 million Solar for All grant to fund photovoltaic systems for households that otherwise cannot access clean energy including homes on tribal lands. The program targets households earning at or below 80% of the area median income, or those enrolled in federal assistance programs.
The first community solar project on state trust lands broke ground in Los Lunas in April 2025, one of eight projects slated for installation on parcels leased from the State Land Office.
The developments are incremental.
Incremental is how grids actually get built one interconnection, one tribe, one county at a time. The question community solar answers are a simple one: who gets to benefit from the energy produced near where they live? In New Mexico, the answer is beginning to include people it has historically excluded.
And, perhaps, because of that…
In May 2026, for the first time in American history, solar generated more electricity than coal.
Data from the energy think tank Ember shows U.S. solar generation climbed to 45.5 terawatt-hours in May, the highest monthly total ever recorded and a 17% increase from May of last year.
That output gave solar 12.8% of all U.S. electricity for the month, just enough to edge ahead of coal at 12.2%.
The more useful number is the one five years back.
In May 2021, coal supplied 19.7% of U.S. electricity while solar accounted for just 5.4%. Every year, gigawatts of new clean energy come online because it is cheap and comparatively easy to build.
For several years running, over 90% of new electricity capacity built in the U.S. has been solar, wind, or batteries. The last new coal plant in the U.S. was completed in 2013.
The administration responded last week by proposing nearly $700 million for coal plants and exports.
Lena Moffitt of the environmental group Evergreen Action called it “throwing a lifeline to a ship that has already sunk.”
Ember analysts noted the record set in May could be broken again in the coming summer months, as solar output typically peaks in June and July.
In March, renewables as a group generated more electricity than gas in the U.S. for the first time. These milestones have a compounding logic. Each one makes the next one easier to reach.
The future doesn’t care about the permissions of policy but it’s being built by economics, by sunlight, and by the accumulated weight of decisions made by those who have the vision to see where humanity must go if we are to survive.
If you want to get deeper into how to accomplish something to this magnitude, become a part of the community I’m building Good News Makers, paid subscribers get an extra article every Wednesday with actual steps to help the world. We also just started a community chat to celebrate and support one another through this process:
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Your Neighbor,
Benji Faun
Revolution Wind
- Fortune/AP, “Despite Trump’s best efforts, an offshore wind farm just lit up New England” — dc.fortune.com, March 16, 2026
- NPR, “The Trump administration pauses wind projects off New England, New York and Virginia” — npr.org, Dec. 22, 2025
Community Solar / New Mexico
- Sovereign Energy, “Community Solar” — sovereignenergy.org
- Albuquerque Journal, “Can community solar finally take off in New Mexico?” — abqjournal.com, March 21, 2026
Solar vs. Coal
- Canary Media, '“Solar beat coal on the US grid in May — a new milestone” — canarymedia.com
- TechSpot, “Solar generation beats coal in the US for the first time ever” — techspot.com
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