“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

The year 2025 was all of the above, depending on who you were, what you did and where you lived. For the citizens of the United States, it was the end of the aggressive pursuit of Net Zero by 2050 with its mandates, subsidies and incentives. It was the end of the war on fossil fuels and its termination of oil and gas leases on federal land. It was the end of federal promotion of offshore wind. It was the end of the federal EV charging station program. It was the end of the federal pursuit of all-electric everything.

For states without Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) or Clean Energy Standards (CES) it was the renewed opportunity for the market to design the future energy system for both electric generation and direct energy end use. For states with RPS and CES, energy system evolution was dictated by emissions reduction targets and compliance dates. It was also the year that states like New York began to acknowledge that their aggressive renewable energy goals were physically and economically unattainable.

For the United Nations, it was the year that its dreams of global governance dissolved at COP30. Its planned commitment to the elimination of fossil fuels failed to materialize. Its grandiose plans for major funding increases for climate change mitigation, adaptation and loss and damage fell on deaf ears.

It was the year that elimination of EV and rooftop solar subsidies caused dramatic decreases in both markets, resulting in increasing bankruptcies among market participants. It was also the year in which those bankruptcies revealed the inadequacy or manufacturer capability to support warranty repair and maintenance obligations.

In the UK and the EU, particularly Germany, energy costs continued to rise as the transition to wind and solar generation advanced. It was also the year that governments received few or no bids for new offshore wind capacity as subsidies were reduced or costs increased.

It was the year undocumented “kill switches” were discovered in  renewable energy system inverters built in China. It was also the year of the near total blackout of the Iberian Peninsula dure to “instability” in a Chinese inverter at a major solar field.

In the United States, the US EPA began the process of rescinding the scientifically questionable and legally faulty 2009 Endangerment Finding, which formed the basis for much of the federal effort to control CO2 emissions. US DOE also produced a report by the Climate Change Working Group which identified the significant areas of uncertainty remaining in the “settled science” of climate change.

The US federal government also announced a refocus on “Gold Standard” science and reduced or eliminated funding for model-based studies intended to reinforce the climate crisis narrative and scare the population into submission.

Citizens in the US and globally increased their resistance to renewable energy projects and the major transmission grid expansion necessary to connect them to the grid.

A major developing challenge globally was the location and powering of data centers and AI. Data center operators typically do not trust renewable generation to supply their power and are experiencing difficulty locating development sites with access to sufficient reliable power for their operations. Several major players have begun making arrangements to supply their own power, including restarting closed nuclear generators and funding life extension projects on other generators.