Renewable energy generation is surging across many of the country’s red-leaning states, positioning some to outpace their bluer peers in a national drive toward grid decarbonization.

Their emerging leadership in the area in some ways defies the political battle lines that have been drawn on energy in recent years. On the federal level, Democrats have been the primary champions of renewable energy development, while Republicans have been more skeptical of efforts to bolster the sector — if not outright opposed to it. President Trump, for his part, has made moves to claw back clean-energy investments implemented under the Biden administration and suggested he will pursue "a policy where no windmills are being built."

But even as Republican-led states have demonstrated a similar antipathy toward the kind of climate-driven policies embraced by many of their more Democratic counterparts, a number of them have fast grown into hubs of wind and solar power production.

Renewable markets have emerged "even in places where talking about climate change may be untenable," Sarah Mills, director of the University of Michigan’s Center for EmPowering Communities, told The Hill.

Years earlier, noting the already-ascendant renewable production in several red states, she observed in a 2018 column that "conservatives like wind and solar power. They just don’t want the government to tell them that they must use renewable energy."

Nationwide, solar energy was responsible for generating more than 238,000 gigawatt-hours (GWh) in 2023, equivalent to an eightfold increase in such production since 2014, according to an April 2024 report from the nonprofit research group Climate Central. For reference, a single gigawatt hour — or 1 GW running continuously for an hour — provides sufficient energy to power about 750,000 households per hour.

While California produced the most solar power — nearly 69,000 GWh in 2023 — Texas came in second with almost 32,000 GWh, followed by Florida at almost 18,000 GWh, North Carolina at more than 12,000 GWh, and Arizona at nearly 12,000 GWh, the report found. In other words, four of the country’s top five solar producers were either red or purple states.

Wind power production, meanwhile, more than doubled in that decade, surpassing 425,000 GWh in 2023, per the report. Texas topped the charts, producing nearly 120,000 GWh from wind in 2023 — nearly three times more than any other state.

Iowa was the second-biggest wind producer in 2023, generating nearly 42,000 GWh, followed by Oklahoma and Kansas, at about 38,000 GWh and 27,000 GWh, respectively.

Driving the rapid expansion of renewables in these states is what experts see as finance-fueled decisionmaking over politics. Sprawling rural environments, often located in conservative districts, may offer an attractive combination of energy-related tax incentives, inexpensive labor and ideal weather conditions.

The latter is the........

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