The solar industry’s journey to becoming the largest source of new U.S. generating capacity for most of 2024 was helped along by pioneering contractors, technological advancements, forward-thinking policymakers and one very influential position in the Cabinet — the secretary of the Dept. of Energy.
This position may not have direct legislative power, but it does hold the keys for allocating funding and research time to its technologies of choice.
The Dept. of Energy’s mission is to “ensure America’s security and prosperity by addressing its energy, environmental and nuclear challenges through transformative science and technology solutions.” Presidents on each side of the aisle interpret the role in different ways.
“Every Secretary shows up thinking that it is the Dept. of Energy, when in fact it is the department of nuclear weapons, clean-up from nuclear weapons production and national labs,” said Michael McKenna, a lobbyist who was part of Donald Trump’s transition team in 2016. “The main difference is, of course, that democratic appointees tend to think that the department can somehow magically change the energy markets in the United States with enough interventions.”
Even under President Joe Biden, nearly half of the requested $51 billion DOE budget for Fiscal Year 2025 was for nuclear security. But clean energy funding is still a significant chunk, with the administration requesting $1.6 billion to support clean energy workforce and infrastructure projects and $8.5 billion across DOE for clean energy researchers and entrepreneurs.
Despite political differences on energy, the solar incentives that really kickstarted the industry originated under Republican leadership.
George W. Bush’s 2005 pick for Sec. of Energy, Samuel Bodman, was a chemical engineer and businessman before entering the political sphere. Although he was in a Texas Republican’s cabinet, he supported the creation of the Investment Tax Credit that spurred solar development.
“There wasn’t a huge [solar] role for the administration. It was mostly in Congress. But Congress does ask the Dept. of Energy, ‘Hey, will this make a difference?’ And Bodman and his team said, ‘Yeah, we think we it will,’” said Rhone Resch, current president and CEO of software company Solarlytics and president of SEIA from 2004 to 2016.
The 30% ITC was included in the Energy Policy Act of 2005, along with the framework to begin the DOE’s Loan Programs Office (LPO).
Obama turns focus to climate
President Barack Obama’s pick to succeed Bodman was the first scientist appointed to a cabinet post. Steven Chu was a physicist who foresaw the impacts of climate change and presided over some major programs that helped speed the growth of renewables.
“He was also the first person I heard use the Wayne Gretzky analogy, which is, ‘You skate to where you think the puck’s going to be, not to where it is.’ And he used that to describe the move to address climate change,” said Dan Whitten, former energy journalist and SEIA VP of communications who has since started a PR company.
Chu was secretary while the Obama administration worked to recover from the Great Recession of 2007. The omnibus bill passed in 2009 to help restore the economy, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), included 17 provisions that supported solar, said Resch, including funding the LPO so it could begin operating.
“We created the loan guarantee [program]. We created the Treasury grant program, which was basically the ability to create a refundable tax credit in that bill, and a whole bunch of other things that fundamentally changed the economics of solar,” he said.
ARRA also included domestic manufacturing tax credits, which were recently expanded in the IRA.
“All the way back in the beginning of the Obama administration, we recognized that [solar] manufacturing was critical in the states,” Resch said.
Another hallmark of Chu’s leadership was the creation of the SunShot Initiative in 2011, a program with a goal to reduce the total cost of solar energy by 75% by the end of the decade. The utility segment hit its cost target of 6¢/kWh three years earlier than expected, while the Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO) is still working on hitting the residential and commercial goals, with revised targets of 5¢ and 4¢, respectively.
Obama’s second DOE secretary, Ernest Moniz, was a nuclear physicist who obviously supported investment in nuclear energy but was in favor of all renewables.
“To me, Moniz was the first really loud, really effective advocate for climate change, and Moniz was a rare person who was smarter than anybody on the technical stuff, especially with regard to the nuclear side of it,” Whitten said.
Under Moniz, the LPO financed the first five utility-scale solar projects larger than 100 MW in the United States.
“When the Obama administration began, there were zero large-scale solar PV projects in the United States. Our Loan Programs Office committed funding for the first five, and today we can say 45 more have been built with private financing, opening a clean energy market that did not exist before,” Moniz said in 2016.
Even under relatively ambitious renewable energy secretaries like Chu and Moniz, solar and other clean energies made up a small part of their overall missions. Yet their efforts still lowered the cost of solar by over 75% and increased annual solar installations from 485 MW in 2009 to 14.6 GW in 2016.
“Both secretaries did an excellent job in being innovative, creating new programs that address some of the technological issues, but also the cost issues for solar that allowed us really to scale up, drive our costs down, develop new business models, ultimately, and make solar widely available for consumers,” Resch said.
Trump sets sights on U.S. fossil fuels
After Trump took office in 2017, the Dept. of Energy’s priorities shifted from renewables to oil and gas.
Trump chose former Texas governor and U.S. presidential candidate Rick Perry to lead the office first, who said he’d eliminate the agency during a presidential primary debate in 2011. Instead of axing it, he ended up increasing the budget around 25% from when he started, according to E&E News.
Perry spent much of his time advocating for fracking and exporting U.S. “freedom gas,” along with expanding nuclear and coal facilities. As far as renewables, Perry initiated a controversial study that blamed solar and wind power growth for the financial struggles of coal and nuclear plants.
After Perry stepped down as energy secretary in 2019, former lobbyist and congressional staffer Dan Brouillette took the helm. Like Perry, Brouillette focused on expanding fracking and exporting fossil fuels. One of the few solar-related headlines under Brouillette’s leadership was a research funding announcement of $45 million to advance solar hardware and integration into the grid.
“The nation’s solar energy use is on the rise,” Brouillette said. “Funding innovative research and development projects will ensure that the technologies we’re using benefit the U.S. economy while securely delivering reliable power to all Americans.”
Trump’s two energy secretaries may have favored fossil fuels, but it was tariffs on Chinese imports set by Trump that were mostly to blame for the loss of 10,000 solar energy jobs in 2017 and another 8,000 in 2018, according to Forbes. New solar installations initially decreased after experiencing growth during Obama’s two terms, but install numbers rebounded into the 2020s.
Biden’s renewable boom
The past four years of DOE leadership by former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm put the spotlight on renewables in a way the country hasn’t seen before.
After Biden set a goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, Granholm got to work advancing all clean energy sources, including solar power.
“Obviously, Granholm just blows everybody away in terms of advocating for all clean energy and ferociously advocating for renewables,” Whitten said.
Her department worked closely on the many IRA initiatives that concerned solar, including facilitating the special low-income and domestic content tax incentive programs and overseeing funding for agencies like SETO and the LPO. The $11.7 billion allocated to the LPO has gone toward loans to increase battery backup in Puerto Rico, start new U.S. solar panel factories and much more.
Granholm advocated for automating residential solar permitting, cutting red tape for large-scale solar interconnection, building out the solar workforce and much more. She was named on the 2024 TIME100 Climate list for her work in the cabinet.
“Under Jennifer M. Granholm’s leadership, the U.S. Energy department has quickly become a powerhouse of the clean energy transition,” TIME wrote.
In her first year as secretary, 20.2 GW of new solar was installed in the United States. According to SEIA and Wood Mackenzie’s 2024 projections, that number has doubled during her tenure.
An uncertain 2025
Trump’s pick for the first DOE secretary of his second term is Chris Wright, the CEO of Liberty Energy, one of the largest fracking companies in North America. The choice wasn’t surprising for a presidential campaign with a catchphrase of “Drill, Baby, Drill!”
“Mr. Wright is a formidable thinker on energy issues, and I would expect that he and the president will remain aligned for the duration of his tenure,” said 2016 Trump transition team member McKenna.
In a 2019 Facebook video, Wright and coworkers drank a shot of fracking fluid, which contained bleach and other chemicals, to try to show it’s not harmful.
“He’s the biggest entrepreneur, like, build it from the ground up and perhaps tear it down from the top down,” Whitten said. “Philosophically, [he] doesn’t really buy into climate change. I think that’s distressing for a lot of people, but I do not think that he’s of the mind to tear down profitable industries.”
Under Republican leadership of the DOE, money that previously went toward renewable energy efforts is usually redirected to fossil fuels and nuclear energy.
“What you typically do if you want to slow down a government agency from supporting one segment of the economy, you just cut back on the staffing,” Resch said. “You’ll expand the fossil programs and give people the opportunity to go work there, but you’re just basically shifting resources from one segment of the agency to the other. I certainly think that’ll be the case in research. It’ll be the case in the loan programs office [and] SETO, for sure. We will see pretty significant budget cuts, I would expect.”
While many DOE staffers may be looking for new jobs, the industry as a whole is expected to continue the pace of installing at least 40 GW per year, according to SEIA and Wood Mackenzie. It’s been four years in the limelight for the solar industry, but fossil fuels are No. 1 again for the federal government, for now.
