“If you talked about renewables a couple of years ago, you talked very much about the environment, you talked about climate change,” said Britta Ersman, commercial director for the Nordics at Renewable Energy Systems, a major clean energy company. “And you still do, but today you also talk about it from a self-sufficient and security perspective that you can’t rely on other countries for your energy.”
“Wind, solar, storage, hydrogen: The Nordics have every opportunity in the world to be leading in this, and we have a very good climate to be able to build out and produce,” she said. “So I think we are in a really good position and it’s really up to us, the country, the politics, the industry, to take this opportunity.”
Could the U.S. seize a similar opportunity?
For now, President Donald Trump’s administration has taken extraordinary measures to impede or altogether end renewable energy projects, with the president himself dismissing wind and solar power as “the scam of the century.” Electricity prices in the U.S., meanwhile, increased over the past year despite Trump’s promise to cut them in half, driven in part by surging demand from artificial intelligence data centers. A combination of ChatGPT and “drill, baby, drill” is not helping to deliver an American version of the clean, low-cost Nordic experience.
Nevertheless, signs of change are already visible. California and Texas, two of the country’s most economically powerful states, are leading the way in solar and wind installations and, more recently, battery storage. Both are also beginning to see the benefits. Electricity prices in California sometimes dip below $0 in the middle of the day because so much solar power is flooding the grid. And with recent, record growth in grid-scale battery storage—California now has around 17 gigawatts’ worth—much of that cheap daytime solar power can now be stored and then deployed during evening peak times, challenging the dominance of gas plants.
“If you can get cheap, clean power during the day and then sell it at a higher price later in the day, that’s a perfect situation for battery storage,” said Dennis Wamsted, energy analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a U.S. think tank. “We are seeing in California a reduced need for gas plants to ramp up, and they may be pushed off the market if they can’t cover their operation costs.”
Texas is now starting to follow the same pattern. “It’s possible that renewables can now reach 50% of electricity in Texas, which would’ve been unthinkable 10 years ago,” Wamsted said. “People would’ve looked at you like you were crazy for saying that because there was hardly any solar in Texas then.”