Seize the Moment for Clean Energy

Guest Opinion

America’s energy landscape suddenly feels chaotic. But the chaos reveals something important about how America must power its future.

In early March, the U.S. bombed Iran, and Iran retaliated by blocking oil exports through the Strait of Hormuz, sending gas prices climbing. At the same time, electricity bills rose more than 5 percent nationwide from 2024 to 2025 as utilities struggle to meet growing demand from AI and data centers while repairing an aging grid that often fails during extreme weather.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has doubled down on fossil fuels—even coal—while attacking domestic solar and wind development despite evidence that clean energy is cheaper, more reliable, and less polluting.

Developers are also racing to build energy-hungry data centers. In Michigan alone, DTE Energy plans facilities that could consume more than 4 gigawatts of electricity, roughly the power used by three million homes in a year. Communities are pushing back, worried about rising costs and environmental impacts. Municipalities in 14 states imposed moratoriums that blocked an estimated $98 billion in data center projects in the second quarter of 2025 alone.

Taken together, these seemingly disconnected facts uncover how outdated America’s energy system has become, and why accelerating clean energy and modernizing our grid is the only rational response. The choices we make now, amidst this chaos, about how to power America will shape our economy and climate for decades.

Yet much of the current debate about energy—geopolitically about oil and domestically about data centers—risks missing the larger opportunity.

America’s fixation on securing foreign oil distracts from a more durable solution: building homegrown renewable energy that cannot be disrupted by global conflicts. Studies now show that solar and wind are cheaper than new fossil-fuel generation for the first time.

Ironically, these findings emerged just as Trump and congressional Republicans eliminated tax credits for wind and solar. Even some voices within the MAGA movement are acknowledging this reality. Katie Miller recently wrote on X that “solar energy is the energy of the future.” And a survey released by Kellyanne Conway’s firm found that 83 percent of Trump voters support using solar to strengthen America’s energy supply.

This debate is also playing out locally in the backlash against data centers. While there are real concerns for nearby communities—including massive electricity demand, water use, land impacts, and construction burdens—the backlash should also prompt a broader conversation about what kind of electric grid we need to build. Advocacy focused solely on saying “no” to data centers risks ignoring the deeper lesson that our infrastructure is not prepared for the demands of the digital economy.

When you zoom out from local land-use battles, the surge in data center demand and the growing opposition to it signals that America’s energy system must evolve rapidly toward a clean energy grid with updated capacity. Experts have identified this need for years, but economic and technological pressures are now making it unavoidable.

In other words, we must seize this political moment to accelerate the clean energy transition. Reframing the conversation challenges the fossil fuel industry’s long-standing claim that meeting America’s energy needs requires expanding natural gas and coal plants. In reality, doing so will only lead to higher costs, greater volatility, and worsening climate impacts.

We cannot let this moment distract us from what is becoming a bipartisan vision for a clean energy future. In her book What If We Get It Right?, Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson imagines a world where “the combustion phase of humanity is over … The air is cleaner. The water is cleaner … Energy bills are much lower.” Ezra Klein has a similar vision in his recent book Abundance. Imagining the future we want is a powerful and necessary exercise.

The path forward is already emerging. States are still pursuing their own clean energy goals, such as Michigan’s 2023 clean energy law requiring 100 percent by 2040. More than 300 clean energy projects are waiting to connect to the grid in Michigan, representing nearly 58 gigawatts of potential power.

But the transmission infrastructure needed to deliver that energy has not yet been built. This bottleneck reveals the real challenge—no one is going to build this future for us.

We must ask our elected leaders the right questions while this debate is front and center: How do we expand transmission capacity quickly? Where should new lines be built? Who will pay for them? How do we equitably support communities that host the infrastructure (including data centers) that power the broader economy? And how do we ensure that new technologies bring efficiency and renewable power with them?

Global conflicts, AI, and data centers are already reshaping our energy economy. The real question is whether we build the clean energy system needed to power our future, or allow the fossil fuel lobby to define the future for us. This moment offers a rare opportunity to choose our path, and we should not miss it in the chaos.

Lauren Teichner is the principal attorney at Teichner Law, a public interest environmental law firm based in Traverse City.

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