States are Stepping In to Fix Solar Policy

This Week in Solar · Jan 9, 2026 · 4m

There’s something I haven’t stopped thinking about for nine months. At the American Solar Energy Society’s conference last summer, one of the speakers mentioned that 70% of the carbon reduction we’ve seen since the turn of the century from deploying clean energy has come as a direct result of state and local policy. That means that federal policy isn’t nearly as important as we think it is, and that we have more power than we think. It’s easy to feel helpless when we look at national news, but it’s an illusion. State and local policy is a lot easier to influence than federal policy, and often…