Don’t Blame Technology For The Start-And-Stop Transition To Clean Energy
Photo by Carolyn Fortuna/ CleanTechnica
April 17, 20263 hours ago
Carolyn Fortuna
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Does the transition to clean energy rely on technology? Sure. Energy innovation is one kind of technological advancement that can enrich human lives, as the energy system is the primary source of greenhouse gas emissions and a major driver of climate change.
Over the last decade, technologies have evolved enough to propel a major energy transition. The price tags of photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, and grid-scale batteries have decreased to the point where building new renewable capacity remains cheaper than alternatives. Nearly 80% of the power plant capacity planned over the next decade is tied to renewable sources. Today, the lifetime climate footprint of an electric vehicle is smaller than that of any other type of car — no matter where it is driven in the US.
The transition to clean energy is better for human and planetary health. It’s a smarter decision than relying on burning fossil fuels, which are responsible for the existential crisis we face as humans. So, if the technologies have moved beyond R&D to support the clean energy transition, what’s the problem?
The problem is not the technology behind the transition. The issue is based in a conundrum: climate change is a global problem with solutions that depend on domestic politics.
The Path to Clean Energy isn’t Straightforward
Advances in clean energy have produced several emerging technologies which stand out for their innovative approaches and potential impact on future energy systems. Yet global emissions are not declining at the pace required to meet the world’s necessary climate targets. In light of this, it seems hard to understand why the trajectory to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees celsius of pre-industrial levels, consistent with the 2016 Paris Agreement, has failed to materialize.
“Admitting that we will exceed this threshold doesn’t justify delaying action,” states climate scientist Andy Reisinger. “It demands acceleration.”
The growing market for renewable technologies decreases energy costs, makes energy consumption more efficient, and creates energy independence. Even as renewable technologies become more competitive, private investment continues to lag behind what would be required to meet global climate targets.
So why isn’t there a more pronounced movement to clean energy across all sectors?
It’s the marketplace that is slowing the transition to clean energy. The bottom line (pun intended) is that affordable clean energy technologies aren’t experiencing a linear translation into adequate investment. What, ultimately, drives private investment decisions is not the marginal cost of energy but expected profitability.
The Inflation Reduction Act spurred hundreds of agreements looking ahead to investments — large-scale industrial strategies were designed to produce domestic batteries, electric vehicles, and renewable equipment. Renewables became more financially rewarding for investors and the economy in an emerging new era of energy.
Then Trump 2.0 returned to the scene, and a torrent of political dismay in anything forward-thinking resulted in regulatory upheavals. Long-term climate-aligned strategies more difficult to sustain.
Trump and congressional Republicans have pursued a political culture war against new energy sources, says editorialist Paul Bledsoe, writing in USA Today, “using the 2025 budget bill to kill technology incentives just as new private sector investments were reaching tens of billions and creating thousands of new jobs.” He suggests a reroute in which policies could be enacted which would expedite the building of interstate powerlines and pipelines and make the US less vulnerable to oil shocks and high electricity costs.
Decarbonization reaches beyond environmental challenges or question about market risk. It is also a structural development challenge. Fragmented markets, high capital costs, and externally determined technological standards constrain what individual countries can achieve. Existing market and geopolitical structures that risk reinforcing existing hierarchies in new technological forms.
“Today’s energy transition is also a development transition,” Fortunato and Barros write on Promarket. The political economy behind the “global distribution of industrial capacity, technological control, and value creation changes” remains weak and fragmented, they explain.
Energy systems continue to be embedded in industrial, financial, and regulatory structures built around fossil fuels. The authors conclude that “this gap reflects institutional and structural constraints rather than technological ones, and it is shaped by how markets are organized, how risks are distributed, and how returns are guaranteed across different segments of the global economy.”
A basic political economy principle is that the winners don’t like being taxed to compensate losers. Until a separate peace settles between profit and power, decarbonization will remain slow, fragile, and more costly than climate goals require.
Coalitions are Needed to Reconcile Political Economy and Clean Energy
Technology has caught up with net zero platforms and the electrify everything mandates. But decarbonization needs to rely on much more than technological innovation. Improvements in the ways that value, investment, and industrial capabilities are distributed across the global economy must occur. It’s been clear for a while that a structural misalignment exists between who bears the environmental costs of production and who controls technological and investment decisions.
Renewables — including solar, wind, hydropower, and bioenergy — were the biggest source of US electricity in March 2026. Solar and batteries, which have a much shorter idea-to-implementation time frame than natural gas and nuclear power plants, are dropping in price while gas power plants price tags have risen significantly. Federal tax credits for grid-scale battery storage were not affected by the cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill, so more developers are switching to building batteries, which are in high demand to help balance the wind and solar projects completed in recent years.
There is a systematic relationship between the share of value captured along global value chains and the carbon intensity of production. Mitigating climate change requires a rapid, large-scale shift from fossil fuels to clean energy in industrialized countries and steering new energy development in emerging economies toward low-carbon options. The political geography of climate policy is shaped not only by where clean and brown industries are located but also by where electoral competition is fiercest.
That electoral tension may be the missing element that will push clean energy investment to a new level. Governments can reduce opposition and create climate coalitions. When governments decide to develop climate action frameworks, they take a proactive step to mitigate and adapt to rapid environmental changes. Yet implementation of frameworks have chronicled problems — time-inconsistent incentives, information asymmetries, and credibility concerns. They will assuage consumers’ concerns that clean energy investments actually create local jobs, tax revenue, and growth.
Just as policy can redirect technological change, it can also reshape the political coalitions that govern climate policy. By steering green investment towards regions that currently rely on carbon-intensive industries, and by sustaining high public salience around the benefits of decarbonisation, it may be possible to build more durable majorities for ambitious climate action.
Carbon polluters can be help accountable to curb greenhouse gas emissions, and global production can can morph from a cesspool of waste, pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions into a series of interrelated systems that become a “constellation of overlapping sectoral transformations that together decarbonize the economy,” Garamarian and Tingley outline in a 2025 issue of ARPS. Governments, they continue, will not pursue single policies or technologies but packages of interlinked measures that evolve across sectors and over time.
Resources
- “Market failure, not technology, is slowing the green transition.” Piergiuseppe Fortunato and Verena Hitner Barros. Promarket. April 13, 2026
- “The political economy of the clean energy transition.” Alexander F. Gazmararian and Dustin Tingley. ARPS. October 24, 2025.
- “Oil prices, data centers pave way for renewable energy comeback.” Paul Bledsoe. USA Today. April 14, 2026.
- “Why climate goals aren’t a lost cause—Even if we overshoot them.” Andy Reisinger, et al. Scientific American. June 17, 2025.
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