The national EV charging network keeps expanding despite Trump administration funding freezes

KEY DEVELOPMENTS

• EV Charging Network Expands Despite Federal Freeze: States spent $94 million on NEVI charging projects in 2025, more than double the prior year, with Pennsylvania and Ohio leading deployment of hundreds of ports even as the Trump administration attempted to halt the program. Read More: Michigan Advance.
• Over 100 Lithium Projects Threaten Tribal Lands: A major investigation documents the scale of America's lithium rush and its collision with Native American sovereignty, as a 19th-century mining law leaves tribes with little recourse against extraction on ancestral territory. Read More: Inside Climate News.
• 28 States Move to Curb Data Center Tax Breaks: Legislators across more than half the country have introduced bills to roll back incentives for energy-hungry data centers, marking a sharp policy reversal that could reshape where AI infrastructure gets built. Read More: POLITICO.
• PacifiCorp Joins California Wholesale Energy Market: The Oregon-based utility became the first outside California to integrate into the state's wholesale power market, a move expected to cut costs and emissions across the Pacific Northwest grid. Read More: Portland Oregonian.
• $3.2 Million Awarded for Tribal Solar Projects: Tribal Energy Alternatives distributed grants to 14 Tribal Nations for solar energy, workforce development, and energy resilience — a modest but notable counterpoint to the mining conflicts playing out on other tribal lands. Read More: CleanTechnica.

Solar & Storage

While yesterday's headlines centered on SRP and NextEra's blockbuster 4 GW Arizona solar-storage deal, today's solar news shifts focus to tribal communities — and the tension between clean energy's promise and its costs. Tribal Energy Alternatives in grants to 14 Tribal Nations and community organizations for solar installations, workforce training, and energy resilience. The funding is modest by industry standards, but it represents a lifeline for communities where energy poverty remains acute and where grid reliability has long lagged behind the rest of the country. Read More: awarded $3.2 million.

The tribal solar grants take on added significance when read alongside into lithium mining on Indigenous lands. The series documents more than 100 proposed lithium projects across the United States, many of them on or near Native American ancestral territory. The investigation highlights how the General Mining Law of 1872 — a statute older than electric lighting — still governs mineral extraction on federal lands and provides tribes with virtually no veto power over projects that could devastate sacred sites and water resources. A companion piece with stronger legal protections for Indigenous peoples in countries like Australia and Canada, where free, prior, and informed consent from tribal communities is increasingly the standard. Read More: Inside Climate News's sweeping investigation, contrasts the U.S. approach.

The lithium question is not abstract. With only one active lithium mine in the U.S. today and — mostly in the arid Southwest — the battery supply chain that underpins solar-plus-storage, electric vehicles, and grid modernization depends on resolving these conflicts. The irony is sharp: the minerals needed to decarbonize the economy are being extracted under laws and practices that echo the very colonial resource grabs the clean energy movement claims to transcend. For developers eyeing the kind of massive solar-storage deals now proliferating in Arizona and across the Sun Belt, lithium supply constraints and tribal opposition could emerge as significant project risks in the years ahead. Read More: six new projects expected by 2030.

Wind Energy

No major wind energy developments broke over the weekend, but the broader policy and market dynamics covered today carry implications for the sector. The data center backlash unfolding across 28 states could paradoxically benefit wind developers: if legislators restrict tax incentives for data centers while those facilities still need power, utilities may turn to large-scale wind and solar procurement to meet demand that arrives without the sweeteners that once made siting politically palatable. Oregon, where data centers have , is a state with significant wind resources and an increasingly tight grid — making the interplay between data center policy and renewable energy procurement worth watching closely. Read More: become a flashpoint in spring elections.

PacifiCorp's decision to also has wind implications. The utility operates substantial wind generation across Oregon, Wyoming, and Washington. Access to California's deep, liquid energy market could improve the economics of its wind portfolio by allowing surplus generation to find buyers during high-production hours rather than being curtailed. If the model proves successful, it could encourage other Western utilities with large wind fleets to follow suit, gradually building the kind of integrated regional market that grid planners have long advocated. Read More: join California's wholesale energy market.

Policy & Markets

The most striking policy story of the day is the resilience of the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program. As the , the NEVI program has continued expanding despite the Trump administration's attempts to freeze funding. States spent $94 million on charging projects in 2025 — more than double the $45 million spent in 2024 — with Pennsylvania and Ohio leading deployment. The story underscores a pattern that has defined the clean energy landscape since January 2025: federal hostility has slowed but not stopped programs whose funding was already obligated through bipartisan legislation, and states have proved resourceful in keeping projects moving. Read More: Michigan Advance reports.

That theme echoes through the of what it provocatively calls "Trump's green new deal" — the argument that the administration's tariffs, trade disruptions, and geopolitical posture have inadvertently strengthened the case for domestic renewable energy by making energy security an urgent priority. Separately, the FT reports that as geopolitical tensions, including conflict involving Iran, shift investor calculus from climate altruism to hard-nosed energy independence. For an industry that spent years making the moral case for decarbonization, the pivot to security framing may prove more durable politically — and more resistant to the ideological headwinds blowing from Washington. Read More: Financial Times' analysis, clean energy investment funds are attracting record inflows.

Meanwhile, Michigan faces a $1 billion infrastructure challenge of a different kind. The state's 2,500 dams — many past their 50-year design life — to handle increasingly severe weather. While not a renewable energy story per se, Michigan's dam crisis illustrates how climate adaptation costs are competing for the same state budgets and political attention that clean energy programs require. For grid planners, aging hydroelectric infrastructure adds another variable to an already complex reliability equation. Read More: need significant upgrades.

The data center revolt continues to gather force nationally. that legislators in at least 28 states have introduced bills to roll back tax incentives for data center construction this year, a remarkable shift for facilities that were once considered economic development prizes. The backlash centers on electricity and water consumption — concerns amplified by the AI boom's insatiable appetite for computing power. A warns that the pushback risks creating a "buildability crisis" and calls for streamlined permitting for grid expansion. For clean energy developers, the data center debate is a double-edged sword: these facilities drive enormous demand for renewable energy procurement, but the political blowback could slow the grid buildout needed to serve them. Read More: POLITICO reports, commentary in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

LOOKING AHEAD

• Lithium Permitting Battles to Intensify: With over 100 proposed U.S. lithium projects now documented, expect tribal opposition and environmental reviews to become major bottlenecks for battery supply chains through 2026 and beyond.
• State Data Center Legislation to Advance: Bills in 28 states targeting data center tax breaks will move through committees this spring, with potential ripple effects on utility-scale renewable energy procurement tied to tech sector demand.
• Western Energy Market Expansion: PacifiCorp's entry into California's wholesale market could prompt other Western utilities to evaluate similar moves, potentially reshaping how wind and solar generation is traded across state lines.

THE BOTTOM LINE: America's clean energy transition is advancing on momentum that no single administration can fully stop — but the lithium supply chain, tribal sovereignty conflicts, and a 28-state data center revolt are emerging as the friction points that will determine whether deployment accelerates or stalls in the years ahead.