The biggest U.S. utilities are doing worse on shifting from fossil fuels to clean power than they were at the start of this decade — and more than four in 10 have backtracked on their climate goals since the start of the second Trump administration.
That’s the dire, if predictable, news from the Sierra Club’s latest “Dirty Truth Report,” released Tuesday. For the second year in a row, the environmental organization gave an overall F grade to 76 of the country’s largest electric utilities.
In fact, with a handful of exceptions, the utilities that the Sierra Club collects data on — which collectively operate more than half the country’s coal and fossil-gas generation fleet — are further off course in reducing their carbon emissions than they were when the organization published its first “Dirty Truth Report,” in 2021.
More utilities are opting to keep coal plants running despite the high cost and environmental toll. They’re planning to build enough new fossil gas–fired power plants to generate the equivalent of roughly one-quarter of average U.S. electricity demand, largely to serve AI data centers.
And in a worrying new milestone, this year marked the first time in the report’s six-year history that the volume of new clean energy being planned by utilities decreased from the prior year — a shift that aligns with Trump administration policies promoting fossil fuels over renewable energy.
That means utilities are forgoing cheaper — and faster to deploy — solar, wind, and battery investments even as their own planned generation costs, and their customers’ bills, rise.