Since the start of 2025, nearly 2,000 power projects, or 266 gigawatts of new generation capacity, have been canceled in the U.S.
That’s according to new data, out today, from clean energy analytics platform Cleanview. The overwhelming majority of those were clean energy projects, with utility-scale solar accounting for 86 GW, energy storage 79 GW, and wind 54 GW of the canceled projects.
Michael Thomas, Cleanview’s founder and CEO, told Latitude Media that he was “shocked at the scale of the cancellations this year” — which amount to nearly a sixth of the country’s total electricity generation capacity as of the end of 2024 — even though he “expected that it would be high given the uncertainty, turmoil, and chaos that have unfolded this year.”
The findings come at a time when the grid has no capacity to spare. Just last month, research by Grid Strategies forecasted a peak load growth of 166 GW over the next five years, more than four times what it forecasted two years ago. With such an unprecedented surge in demand, the 2025 rate of project cancellations is “alarming,” according to Cleanview’s report.
It notes that the loss of new potential capacity not only threatens higher electricity bills but also accounts for approximately $400 billion in investment that will never materialize.
However, not all of the cancellations are a problem. “A significant portion” of them, in fact, are the result of the reforms some grid operators have been implementing over the past couple of years to purge speculative projects from their interconnection queues. One report from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab found that in 2024 the U.S. interconnection queue backlog had grown so long as to be twice the country’s installed capacity.
Starting in 2023, for instance, PJM began shifting to an interconnection process that prioritizes project maturity rather than filing order, allowing projects that are closer to commercial operation to move ahead of earlier but less ready proposals. This has led to 38 GW of cancellations in 2025 alone, according to the report.
“It was a go-no-go moment for developers that were forced to look at the market, interconnection costs, and make a decision,” Thomas explained of the reaction to these reforms. “Projects that might have been canceled a few years later were accelerated.”
Problems old and new
But many other project cancellations are the result of both new policy headwinds facing the renewables sector and structural barriers that have long made it difficult for the U.S. to bring new capacity online efficiently.
The cancellation of 13 GW of offshore wind projects in New York, 11 GW in New England, and 2.5 GW in California, for example, “are clearly the result of the Trump administration’s anti-renewable stance,” Thomas said, as they came after the Trump administration issued a series of new hostile wind policies, in what has been described as an outright “wind war.”
And despite emerging from the GOP’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” tax credit overhaul mostly unscathed, battery energy storage has been impacted by new tariffs and foreign entity restrictions. The latter have increased prices and “made battery storage economics unworkable for many developers,” the report notes.
Meanwhile, high interconnection prices (largely due to the slow buildout of transmission infrastructure) and local opposition have been leading causes of project cancellations since before Trump took office at the beginning of the year.
Regarding the former, for example, Thomas says he’s seen $1.5 million per megawatt projects facing costs $1 million per megawatt to connect to the grid in MISO. “These cancellations are very clearly attributable to high interconnection costs,” he said.
In 2025, local opposition led to the loss of 6.7 GW of capacity in Virginia, 6 GW in Ohio, and 5 GW in Indiana, all states with a rising electricity demand due to a high concentration of new data centers.
“Local opposition in areas that are expecting insane levels of load growth over the next five years is interesting,” Thomas said. “In Hanover County, Virginia, in one night, officials approved a 2.4 GW data center and denied a 20 megawatt solar project. They’re willing to make demand go through the roof, but not add a marginal new source of supply.”
This, according to Thomas, is emblematic of the emerging paradox at the heart of the country’s new energy strategy: an urgent need for energy, paired with a fierce opposition to building the clean energy sources that are needed to supply it.
“The current trajectory is unsustainable,” he wrote in the report. “America is simultaneously approving unprecedented electricity demand while canceling the generation needed to meet it, creating policy incoherence that threatens grid reliability, affordability, and the country’s competitiveness in the global AI race.”
