These are challenging times for Colorado’s renewable energy laboratory

It’s troubling to read reports of attacks by the Trump administration on our highly respected institutions. Colorado has been a particular target. The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), and research projects at the University of Colorado Boulder and Colorado State University have all been impacted.

Late last year, NREL, which has been called the crown jewel of renewable energy research, was abruptly renamed the National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR). The removal of renewable energy from NREL’s name was extremely disappointing to me because supporting the transition to clean, renewable energy was our main laboratory mission during my 40-year NREL career, and we have begun to reap the many benefits of that ongoing work. Although government labs are accustomed to dealing with changing political directives, the current administration’s efforts to support the fossil fuel industry come at a terrible time, because they are robbing momentum from our nation’s transition to low-cost solar and wind energy. 

Clean Energy Under Attack

During the 2024 presidential race, candidate Donald Trump was upfront about his intention to support the fossil fuel industry, and referred to “drill, baby, drill” as his energy policy. In a meeting with fossil fuel executives, “Trump’s response stunned several of the executives in the room,” the Washington Post reported. He said they should raise a billion dollars to return him to the White House, and he vowed to immediately reverse President Joe Biden’s environmental policies.

Before he became president, Trump sued to stop an offshore wind farm that would be visible from his golf course in Scotland; the case made it all the way to the UK Supreme Court, which unanimously ruled against him. As president, he repeatedly claimed that wind turbines kill whales and cause cancer, neither of which is true. More recently, following legal defeats of its efforts to stop wind projects, the Trump administration has paid offshore wind developers $2 billion of taxpayer money to abandon sorely needed projects, which will result in the loss of thousands of jobs. 

Given President Trump’s disdain for renewable energy and his support for the fossil fuel industry, it did not come as a complete surprise that he chose a Denver oil and gas chief executive, Chris Wright, as his Secretary of Energy. In an article in The Economist titled, “Climate change is a by-product of progress, not an existential crisis, says Trump’s energy czar,” Wright referred to “so-called renewables” and declared that “there is no such thing as clean or dirty energy.”

So it was not a total shock when “renewable energy” was officially removed from NREL’s name. But while it is common for DOE national labs to be named after their location, NREL staff had always been proud of the fact that the laboratory mission appeared right in the lab’s name. In fact, the clean energy mission is what attracted topnotch scientists and engineers to NREL. 

In an editorial about the name change, the Denver Gazette reported that “Wright embraces a critical, all-of-the-above approach.” According to the non-partisan Environmental Working Group, the term “all of the above,” which provides coverage for the continued burning of fossil fuels, apparently originated with lobbyists at the American Petroleum Institute more than 20 years ago. It is a strategy for keeping fossil fuels in the energy mix when the scientific community is telling us clearly that we need to get off fossil fuels as quickly as possible. Politico reported that, in true Orwellian fashion, the Department of Energy distributed a long list of terms that DOE staff and contractors are directed to avoid. These include “climate change,” “green,” “emissions,” “energy transition” and, not surprisingly, “‘clean’ or ‘dirty’ energy,” among many others.

Obviously, the “all of the above” approach is a major departure for a laboratory that has been a world leader in renewable energy research. “Since its renaming last December, the lab’s press releases have almost entirely omitted wind and solar in favor of topics like data centers and grid resilience,” Colorado Public Radio reported in an article that noted the lab was recently ordered to remove five of its wind turbines.

The change in mission, together with delays in the funds that DOE is sending to the lab, have resulted in layoffs of 248 employees to date. In addition, many highly talented NREL staff have left on their own and found other jobs, although the exact numbers have not been publicized. The Trump administration’s fiscal year 2027 budget request (FY27 begins on October 1, 2026) shows a 52% budget cut for the lab. Congress determines the final budget, and Congress has often come to the rescue after executive branch attempts to cut clean energy funds, but appropriated research funds have not been flowing from the DOE as they should. As a result, laboratory funding remains highly uncertain.

Renewable Energy’s Crown Jewel: A Historical Perspective

It was back in March 1977 that the federal government announced the exciting news that Colorado had won its bid to host the Solar Energy Research Institute, the laboratory that would eventually become NREL, in Golden. SERI was the Jimmy Carter administration’s response to the 1970s oil shock. Back then, Denver was still called a cow town, thanks to its history as a livestock hub and its annual hosting of the National Western Stock Show. The Denver Broncos had yet to appear in a Super Bowl, and the metro Denver population was about one-third the size of what it is today. For many Coloradans, SERI was a big deal.

The institute officially opened in July 1977 and began hiring in earnest later that year. I started on November 13, 1978, as one of the first 500 employees. I can recall a big map on the wall in the small human resources office where the office manager had proudly stuck a red pin to indicate where each employee hailed from. The red pins spread far and wide all over that map, showing how Golden, Colorado, had suddenly become a magnet attracting scientists, engineers, architects and other professionals from all over the world. 

Starting an institute from scratch meant there were growing pains, but people were excited about the potential for renewable energy, and staff enthusiasm for the mission was sky-high. We had a steady stream of visitors: politicians, celebrities, inventors, entrepreneurs and others. The institute’s research covered the broad range of renewable energy sources, as well as energy efficiency. Solar thermal energy, biofuels, building efficiency and wind energy were key early areas of research. But from its very first days, the greatest focus was on advancing solar photovoltaics, or PV: the direct conversion of solar energy to electricity. That technology, first developed in the U.S. at Bell Labs in 1954, was prohibitively expensive in the early days of SERI, but there was an unwavering belief that it would someday become a major player.

As a government-funded laboratory, SERI’s well-being was always dependent on the whims of politics. That became painfully clear when the Ronald Reagan administration took office in 1981, SERI’s fifth year. At that time, SERI was still housed in leased office space with no permanent buildings and only a few outdoor experiments. SERI was in serious danger of being shut down completely — although I, along with most of the staff, did not know that then. It was only through the efforts of key Jefferson County businessmen like Joe Coors and Chuck Stevinson, who understood SERI’s value to the local economy, that SERI was saved from that worst fate. However, in June 1981, then-SERI director and environmental visionary Denis Hayes was fired, and not long after, approximately half the staff were laid off. The layoff especially affected people working on technology demonstration activities. The Reagan administration’s directive was that SERI would focus solely on “long-term, high-risk R&D” that would not put government-funded work in conflict with industry.

The 1981 layoff was a huge blow to staff morale, but while SERI’s budget was under pressure throughout the 1980s, we made good progress on long-term research. The outlook improved greatly during the George H.W. Bush administration. Just a few months prior to Bush’s election, on a hot June afternoon in 1988, Dr. James Hansen, then director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, gave landmark testimony to the U.S. Senate presenting scientific evidence that our burning of fossil fuels was dangerously heating the planet. That same year, the United Nations established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, to provide scientific assessments of the changing climate. 

In 1990, President Bush convened a White House conference on global warming. The following year, on September 16, 1991, he elevated SERI to the status of a DOE national laboratory: the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. For an institute established to pursue U.S. energy independence from foreign oil, the emergence of climate change as a global issue gave the lab even greater significance.

From 1991 through 2024, despite political ups and downs, NREL generally grew and benefited from the support of members of Congress who saw the value of continued clean energy research and often provided funding that greatly exceeded presidential requests. The Biden administration stood out as the most forward-thinking in understanding and addressing the climate change issue. This was exemplified by the strong clean energy measures in the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and NREL was a beneficiary of that clean energy focus.

A Track Record of Achievements

Over nearly a half-century, SERI/NREL achieved countless advances in renewable energy and energy efficiency. It set the standard for measuring the performance of solar photovoltaic cells, and researchers from around the world reference its continuously updated research cell efficiency chart. It also worked on manufacturing advances that have helped solar energy achieve dramatic cost reductions. NREL was a pioneer in the development of zero energy buildings that produce enough on-site solar electricity to make up for any fossil fuel energy they consume. This concept, along with energy performance-based contracting that established a specific energy goal early in the design-build process, was exemplified by the lab’s award-winning main office building, the net zero-energy Research Support Facility.

NREL contributions in wind resource assessment, turbine blade design, gearbox reliability and wind farm design have helped make wind energy a major contributor to America’s electricity needs. Advances made in the critical thermal management of lithium-ion batteries have supported the growth of safe, reliable and affordable electric vehicles. Biomass research improved the performance and reduced the carbon footprint of biofuels and laid the groundwork for today’s development of sustainable aviation fuels. NREL’s Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF) pioneered “hardware in the loop” methods to combine hardware testing with detailed electric grid modeling to show how variable renewable energy sources, supported by battery storage and the control of electricity demand, can reliably power electric grids. 

NREL has led the development of a wide range of computer models that are used by energy designers all over the world. Want to size a rooftop solar array? Download the free PVWatts.  Want a new or existing commercial building to achieve high energy efficiency? OpenStudio is a tool for that, and BEopt will do the same thing for your home.  The System Advisor Model, or SAM, allows for the design of wind farms and many other renewable energy systems. Other computer tools developed at NREL, such as ReEDS and HOMER, allow for the modeling of renewable energy systems to power electric grids and microgrids. As the energy transition continues to evolve, NREL’s Annual Technology Baseline is the go-to source for the latest cost and performance data covering the full range of emerging energy technologies. 

The Clean Energy Transition May Be Slowed, But It Cannot Be Stopped

At a time when NREL’s renewable energy contributions are more important than ever, the lab has found itself facing the greatest challenges to its mission and funding since the layoffs in 1981. Despite the Trump administration’s efforts to bolster fossil fuels, renewable energy technologies are now successfully replacing them. Thanks to the work done not only by NREL but by laboratories, universities and manufacturers around the world, solar and wind now provide the lowest-cost electricity. In addition, they do not require cooling water, unlike most fossil fuel and nuclear power plants. The International Energy Agency has declared solar PV to be the cheapest source of new electricity generation in most parts of the world.

At a time when affordability is foremost in the minds of Americans, doesn’t it make sense to support the most affordable energy? Because of its low cost, over the past 15 years solar has gone from the smallest to the world’s largest source of electric capacity, and renewable energy was named the 2025 Breakthrough of the Year by the prestigious journal Science. 

According to the Energy Information Administration, the planned U.S. utility-scale electric capacity additions for 2026 are solar (51%), battery storage (28%), wind (14%) and natural gas (7%), which are similar to last year. Low-cost solar and wind have pushed new coal out of the picture and have far surpassed natural gas as the major sources of new electricity generation. In terms of the total amount of grid electricity generated, utility-scale solar and wind now provide 17% of U.S. electricity (which will soon surpass nuclear at 18%) and 30% of EU electricity (already surpassing EU fossil fuel generation at 29%).

As a result of dramatic improvements in battery performance and costs, variable renewable energy systems are now being designed to provide power 24 hours per day. Google will power a new data center in Minnesota with solar, wind and long-duration batteries. At the same time, the emergence of highly efficient battery-electric vehicles is threatening the oil business by displacing gasoline and diesel fuel, which together account for about half of U.S. oil use. 

Coloradans can be proud of the leadership role our state has played in the clean energy transition. NCAR and NOAA in Boulder have been international leaders in the climate science behind the transition, and NREL has been the world leader in the research, development and deployment of clean energy solutions. Colorado citizens have also played an important role. Back in 2004, Coloradans passed Amendment 37, the first citizens-initiated ballot measure in the nation to require utilities to provide 10% of their electricity from renewable energy. Thanks to the Colorado Legislature upping that requirement several times since, Xcel Energy, the largest utility in Colorado, is on track to generate 81% of its electricity from solar and wind in the next four years. And last year, Colorado ranked number one in the nation for the percent of new car sales that are EVs (counting both battery-electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids), reaching 32.4%. 

Why Deploying Solutions to Climate Change Must Be a National Priority

The science of climate change has been under intense attack by the current administration. Energy Secretary Wright picked five climate change contrarians to hastily produce a DOE report casting doubt on the science. That report was thoroughly refuted by a group of more than 85 scientists and even by scientists within DOE itself. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency rescinded the 2009 EPA “endangerment finding” regarding the health hazards of greenhouse gas emissions, making it harder to regulate those emissions. His director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, has been called the chief architect of the Heritage Foundation’s infamous Project 2025, which calls for the administration to “end climate policy fanaticism.” Vought directed the National Science Foundation to break up and spin off NCAR, which is widely recognized as the world’s premier laboratory for climate and weather modeling.

While today’s energy transition is driven mainly by its favorable economics, its greatest value is in addressing climate change, so it is important to understand why the administration’s positions on climate change are wrong. Ever since the first climate science conference was held in Boulder in 1965 (when the iconic NCAR campus was then under construction), the scientific community has exhaustively documented the fact that by burning fossil fuels and increasing the amount of infrared-absorbing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by over 50%, the Earth has rapidly heated by an average of about 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit — at a time when the Earth should be in a natural cooling period. The burning of fossil fuels has moved us dangerously outside of the steady climate of the last 10,000 years that allowed human civilization to develop. 

In addition, this man-made heating is distributed very unevenly over the Earth’s surface (e.g., the Arctic has warmed much more than the Equator), resulting in changing weather patterns. Until additional government data collection was stopped by the administration, NOAA kept a record for decades of the dramatic increase in the number of inflation-adjusted billion-dollar disaster events occurring in the U.S. Scientific “attribution studies” of almost 1,000 extreme weather events around the world have concluded that 77% of them were made more likely or more severe because of manmade climate change. 

Climate change clearly played a role in the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history, the Marshall Fire of December 30, 2021, which destroyed about 1,000 homes and took the lives of two people as well as a thousand family pets. A new study published in the journal Nature has estimated that U.S. carbon dioxide emissions over the past three decades have caused $10 trillion in global climate damage. The climate change crisis has been purposely made into a political football, but it is grounded in decades of peer-reviewed science, and no amount of politics or disinformation can change the scientific facts.

Those who question climate change often argue that fossil fuels have given the world great productivity and raised populations out of poverty. That is absolutely true, and that industry can be justifiably proud of what fossil fuels have given us. But there are countless cases of the world discovering that things that benefited society also caused negative impacts that had to be addressed. Examples are CFC refrigerants, lead in gasoline, DDT insecticide and asbestos. We have long recognized air pollution and its related healthcare costs as consequences of burning fossil fuels, and we now have decades of incontrovertible scientific evidence that these fuels are heating the planet, raising sea levels, driving extreme weather events, and increasing world migration, including from the northern triangle of Central America to our southern border. The good news is that fossil fuels — the root cause of climate change — can finally be replaced by today’s low-cost renewable energy and batteries, and those damaging impacts can now be avoided.

The Other Reason Why Burning Fossil Fuels Makes No Sense

Coal, oil and natural gas are finite resources. While it is clear that they will eventually run out, estimates of when that will happen depend on the assumed rates of energy growth and the usage of those resources. Generally, oil and gas are expected to run out within about the next 50 years, whereas coal reserves could potentially last into the next century. In sharp contrast, solar and wind are properly called renewable energy resources because they are continually replenished by nature. One study conservatively estimated that the annual practical amount of solar energy that can be utilized is more than ten times the annual amount of primary energy consumed in the world. And only a small fraction of that primary energy needs to be replaced, because renewable electricity and electrification are much more efficient than burning fossil fuels, which produce large amounts of waste heat. 

Whenever we consume the Earth’s finite resources, we must consider the impact on future generations. National Geographic’s June 2004 cover story, “The End of Cheap Oil,” featured a two-page color photograph of an American family in their front yard amidst hundreds of petroleum-based products from their home. There was a time when fossil fuel reserves seemed enormous compared to the world population, a time when fossil fuels provided the cheapest source of energy. Today, with a world population of 8.3 billion people consuming dwindling fossil fuel reserves, and with solar and wind now the lowest-cost energy sources, burning up our remaining fossil fuels that can provide future generations with countless recyclable petroleum-based products is irresponsible.

Putting Those Clean, Low-Cost Renewables to Work: The Age of Electrification

Secretary Wright has argued that today’s solar and wind technologies provide electricity, but electricity accounts for just one-fifth of global primary energy consumption, and only a fraction of that primary energy needs to be replaced.  Furthermore, the world is taking advantage of the growing amount of low-cost renewable electricity by rapidly electrifying end uses. In fact, according to analysis by the Ember think tank, electricity has overtaken oil as the largest supplier of useful energy delivered (after accounting for energy losses). 

Electrification powered by renewable energy is bringing with it enormous boosts in efficiency. A battery-electric vehicle requires about one-third the energy of a gasoline vehicle to send the same amount of power to the wheels. And heating a home with an electric heat pump uses between one-fourth and one-third as much energy as a gas or oil furnace. 

Why Are We Letting China Leave Us in the Dust?

Supporting the clean energy transition is not only critical for addressing climate change and air pollution, it is also vital to U.S. leadership and our economic standing in the world. Since the end of World War II, the United States has been the nation the world has looked up to for leadership. On October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, a shockwave rippled throughout American society. The U.S. responded with an unprecedented national effort to grow its scientific and technological capability. In the space race that followed, we not only beat the Soviet Union to the moon, but we also generated countless spinoffs that established the U.S. as the world leader in technology. Today, China has emerged as the undisputed world leader in the clean energy revolution. Instead of recognizing this as another Sputnik moment and rising to the challenge, however, we are turning back to 20th-century energy technologies.

China has rapidly expanded its manufacturing economy from its traditional pillars of clothing, appliances and furniture to solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and batteries. According to Science, China “makes 80% of the world’s solar cells, 70% of its wind turbines, and 70% of its lithium batteries, at prices no competitor can match.” Global Energy Monitor reported that in 2025, China accounted for 75% of the solar and wind projects  being constructed globally, compared to only 6% in the U.S. Last year, China installed 315 gigawatts of solar energy, compared to only 43 gigawatts in the U.S. 

China is also rapidly electrifying its energy end uses, and many observers are calling China the world’s first “electrostate,” signaling a marked departure from the 20th-century world of petrostates. Based on the most recent data, 31% of new car sales in China are BEVs compared to 19% in the EU and 7% in the U.S. And China is selling its electric vehicles around the world. For example, Chinese vehicles now account for about 70% of the electric vehicle market in Mexico. The CEOs of American automobile companies have been shocked by how far ahead of us the Chinese are in manufacturing low-cost, long-range battery-electric cars and trucks, along with an extensive high-voltage charging network to power them. The Chinese automobile industry is a serious threat to the sales of American vehicles in Europe and elsewhere. The use of tariffs to keep Chinese EVs out of the U.S., along with the elimination of EV tax credits in an effort to protect oil and automotive industry profits, will wind up making us uncompetitive in the global vehicle market. 

China’s lead in the clean energy transition gives it multiple benefits. As we Americans pay Saudi Arabia for its oil, the Saudis are investing billions of those dollars in Chinese solar technology. Chinese exports of solar, wind, battery and EV technologies have also served as a source of global soft power, and they are filling the vacuum left by the Trump administration’s closing of USAID. While the concept of a Green New Deal has been mocked as the “Green New Scam” in our country, China has expanded its Belt and Road Initiative into the Green BRI, which exports its renewable technology around the world. As just one example, in the aftermath of the civil war in Syria that decimated that country’s electric grid, many citizens who had to rely on expensive electricity from diesel generators are now powering their homes with low-cost Chinese solar panels coupled to car batteries.

Making America an Energy Leader Again

NLR is a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory, and so it will continue to follow DOE directions, as it always has. But it is the renewable energy knowledge and expertise that NREL developed over nearly half a century that we should be preserving if the U.S. is to meet the challenge of competing against China in the 21st-century clean energy transition. For that to happen, it will need strong support from the public and from Congress, especially the Colorado delegation. 

Ironically, at the same time the Trump administration is opposing renewable energy, its war with Iran awakened the world to the reality that continuing to rely on fossil fuels is far too risky and too costly. Solar and wind energy are available around the world; they do not have to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. Here, too, China is benefiting. According to a recent Ember report, “Fifty countries set all-time records for Chinese solar imports in March 2026.” Besides the enormous environmental and health benefits, the transition to an efficient, clean energy economy is bringing the world true energy resource independence. 

America led the oil revolution, beginning with Edwin Drake’s first commercial oil well near Titusville, Pennsylvania, 167 years ago. It’s time for us to stop looking backward and become a leader in the new energy revolution. While the success of renewable energy means that we will avoid the worst future emissions scenario, the latest studies find that the impacts of even today’s lower carbon emissions are worse than previously believed and can be catastrophic. For example, a leading scientist who studies the Atlantic Ocean current that warms northern Europe believes a tipping point beyond which that current is destined to shut down is now “more likely than not” if we don’t take serious action to reduce emissions. 

Because climate change is primarily caused by our burning of coal, oil and natural gas, no U.S. government agency is more important for addressing the crisis than the Department of Energy. Tragically, by spending our taxpayer dollars to prop up the declining fossil fuel industry, DOE is moving our nation in exactly the opposite direction that science clearly tells us we must go. The longer it takes for us to get back on the right path, the more costly it will be to clean up the climate change damage, become competitive with China in the world energy market, and achieve a clean energy transition. 

It’s up to all of us to demand that we get back on the clean energy path. 

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