The Trump administration has abandoned its effort to halt wind energy projects across the United States and dropped its challenge to the court ruling that tossed President Donald Trump’s order freezing federal permitting and leasing for wind projects. States that challenged the order hailed the development as one of the most significant legal victories against the Trump White House’s campaign against the energy transition.
On Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit dismissed the appeal after the Justice Department filed a motion for its voluntary dismissal on June 10.
The case against Trump’s executive order was filed in May, 2025 by a coalition of attorneys general from 17 states and Washington, D.C., led by New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Monday’s decision affirms the Dec. 8 ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Patti Saris, which concluded that Trump’s January 2025 executive order was unlawful, finding the sweeping ban on wind projects was “arbitrary and capricious” and exceeded the president’s authority.
Environmental and wildlife advocacy groups applauded the move. Nancy Pyne, a senior advisor to the Sierra Club, said renewable energy continues to prevail and grow in spite of Trump’s relentless attacks.
“While everyday Americans face soaring bills and unstable prices,” she said, “renewable energy offers an affordable, common sense solution to lower costs and protect our health and our environment.”
This latest victory in a string of legal setbacks for the administration comes at a time when clean energy production continues to surge despite a slew of policy, permitting and procedural hurdles imposed by the White House.
According to a recent report from the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund and Atlas Public Policy, a record 79.7 GW of clean power are projected to come online in the U.S. in 2026, even as roughly 8 GW of clean energy projects were canceled in the first quarter of the year.
The project pipeline remains strong, the report found, with 222 GW of clean energy capacity planned or under construction nationwide as part of 693 GW of power announced through the first quarter. Developers have announced plans to invest an estimated $377 billion in new projects through 2031, the report said in its key findings.
The country already has 471 GW of clean power online, with a record 51.6 GW newly added in 2025, “the equivalent of about 25 Hoover Dams,” the report notes. Solar and battery storage now account for 85 percent of the planned pipeline.
The Monday court ruling arrives roughly a week after a different federal court restored a key tax-credit pathway for wind and solar developers.
On June 6, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia tossed an August 2025 treasury rule that made it difficult for wind and solar projects to qualify for federal tax credits. The change eliminated the longstanding practice whereby developers locked in tax credits by showing that 5 percent or more of a project’s total cost had been spent. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled that the administration had not given a sound reason for the change, and sent the rule back to the IRS to reconsider.
“We see a strong correlation between the high rate of cancellation and the anti-renewable policies from the Trump Administration—from aggressive executive orders through attempts to repeal pollution protections,” said David Villagrana, lead counsel for clean energy tax solutions at EDF. In an emailed response, Villagrana said the Trump administration has significantly delayed projects through administrative measures. “Development within any industry likes consistency; for clean energy, the Trump administration has ensured a lack thereof.”
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He cautiously welcomed the court’s overturning of the revised 5 percent rule, saying the administration could decide to appeal the district court’s decision but “it would have to overcome the district court’s careful and thorough analysis of the many legal deficiencies in the IRS’ notice.”
The EDF report also tracked a sharp uptick in gas projects. “[T]otal planned and under construction natural gas capacity rose from 44.8 GW in Q4 2025 to 65.5 GW by the end of Q1 2026, an increase of 20.7 GW,” its authors wrote, more than four times the combined growth of solar, storage and onshore wind over the same period. Fossil fuels’ share of planned capacity has climbed from 9 percent at the end of 2022 to 27 percent, “a threefold increase that points to an uptick in fossil fuel generation investment,” according to the report.
In an interview with Inside Climate News, Jon Gordon, senior policy director at Advanced Energy United, a clean energy advocacy group, said the gas buildout was “very concerning… particularly from an environmental standpoint,” warning that new plants are “likely going to be in service for 30 years plus, once they’re constructed.”
He said “the big reason we’re seeing this surge of natural gas is this administration that’s been throwing roadblocks in the way of renewables and providing incentives for fossil fuel.”
For a clean-energy state like Maryland, he said, the challenge was real because “a lot of our problems are very short term. We need new supply right away,” and yet gas plants “are the longest to build.” Gordon argued that economics increasingly favors the clean energy pathway because the cost of building gas plants “has almost doubled in just a couple of years,” while solar and battery costs keep falling.
The EDF-Atlas report also found that 80 percent of the nation’s existing, planned and under-construction clean power capacity is located in congressional districts represented by Republicans. Of the 30 districts with the most clean power capacity, just five are Democratic. Texas leads every state with 164 GW, nearly double California, in second place with 83 GW.
Abe Silverman, an assistant research scholar at Johns Hopkins University’s Ralph O’Connor Sustainable Energy Institute, cautioned against reading the map in partisan terms. Talking to Inside Climate News, he said the first thing he looks to is “where is land cheap.”
“Is it really the red and blueness of the state, or is it the underlying cost of land and the density,” he asked. Much of the growth is in areas with low-cost land, he said, and it is further shaped by interconnection policies.
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Reporter, Washington, D.C.
Aman Azhar is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist who covers environmental justice for Inside Climate News with focus on Baltimore-Maryland area. He has previously worked as a broadcast journalist and multimedia producer for the BBC World Service, VOA News and other international news organizations, reporting from London, Islamabad, the United Arab Emirates and New York. He holds a graduate degree in Anthropology of Media from University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and an MA in Political Science from the University of the Punjab, and is the recipient of the Chevening scholarship from the UK government and an academic scholarship for graduate studies from the Australian government.
