Liebreich: The Great Clean Energy Acceleration 2.0 | BloombergNEF

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Liebreich: The Great Clean Energy Acceleration 2.0

Clean Energy

May 27, 2026

By Michael Liebreich

OPINION

This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of BloombergNEF and its owners.

In September 2022, six months after Russia invaded Ukraine and with oil and gas prices around the world soaring, I wrote a piece entitled After Ukraine – the Great Clean Energy Acceleration, predicting that “Things are going to start moving extremely fast. The Great Energy Price Spike is going to give way to the Great Clean Energy Acceleration.”

That turned out to be one of my better predictions – over the four years since the invasion, installations of wind and solar power, sales of EVs and investment in clean energy have all more or less doubled.  Even within the U.S., despite the Trump administration’s efforts, strong growth in clean energy has continued.

What the current conflict in the Gulf – in particular the closure of the Strait of Hormuz – is going to do is to provide a further push to global attempts to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. We are about to see the Great Clean Energy Acceleration 2.0 – a discontinuity in energy markets as profound as the oil shocks of the 1970s, and one that could bring forward the peak in fossil fuel use and emissions to this side of 2030.

Promises made…

Before we dive into the impact of the conflict in the Gulf, it is important to note that clean energy continues to make progress even in the U.S., despite the Administration’s attempts to stymie it.

On Inauguration Day of his second term, Donald Trump signed the Presidential Order on Unleashing American Energy, promoting the extraction and use of fossil fuels at home and abroad. He appointed as Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, founder and CEO of fracking services company Liberty Energy, who has tirelessly communicated his view that attempts to limit greenhouse gas emissions are expensive, unnecessary and failing.

The Administration has gutted the Biden Administration’s flagship legislative achievement, the Inflation Reduction Act. It has eliminated all federal support for EVs – even dismantling charging infrastructure hosted by federal agencies – and imposed tariffs on the import of renewable energy equipment. It has revoked the Obama-era Endangerment Finding that underpinned the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate emissions. It has pushed back environmental barriers standing in the way of fossil fuel development – promoting coal-based fertiliser production, fast-tracking drilling permits and bouncing world leaders into promising to import more LNG than the U.S. could conceivably export.

Internationally, the US left the Paris Agreement and the UNFCCC. The Administration has demanded that the UN, World Bank, IEA and other multilateral agencies expunge climate change from their work programs, and forced a delay to the International Maritime Organization’s ratification of an agreed deal on shipping emissions.

For a while, it looked like the strategy might succeed. The US stock market boomed, shrugging off the US tariff wars, the state of the country’s public finances, and the economic stress being felt by American households. Soaring demand for electricity for AI data centers kicked off a new dash for gas.

The clean energy sector dodged and swerved, but continued to drive for the line.

The Administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill retained the Biden-era tax breaks for geothermal power, nuclear, batteries and carbon capture and storage (CCS) – and even solar and onshore wind, as long as projects meet tough deadlines for starting construction. This, along with growing power demand, has given the US what Miguel Stilwell d’Andrade, CEO of EDP, has called “the most attractive clean energy investment environment in decades”.

In the power sector, the use of gas dropped 2.9%, despite the narrative of soaring data center demand. Coal, with the full force of the Administration behind it, had its best year since 2022. But the big winners were wind and solar, together adding 13% in output, and for the first time overtaking nuclear in the US power mix.

The US had slammed the brakes on the EV sector, but manufacturers repurposed their planned gigafactories to churn out stationary storage. According to a recent report by the US Energy Storage Coalition, cell manufacturing capacity jumped from near-zero in 2024 to 20GWh in 2025, and is set to reach 133 GWh by the end of 2027 – enough to double the total installed base of US power storage, including pumped hydro, every two years. AI hyperscalers, faced with lengthy waiting lists for large gas turbines, signed more than 20GW of renewable power purchase agreements, much of it backed up by batteries.

Even the five offshore wind projects whose construction the Administration brought to a screeching stop in 2025 resumed building in 2026, and in...