Since 2021, the Sierra Club has been grading U.S. utilities on their commitment to a clean-energy transition. While most utilities have not earned high marks on the group’s annual scorecards, as a whole they had been showing some progress.
That’s over now. The latest edition of the Sierra Club’s “The Dirty Truth” report finds that the country’s biggest electric utilities are collectively doing worse on climate goals than when the organization started tracking their progress five years ago. This year they earned an aggregate grade of “F” for the first time.
With only a handful of rare exceptions, U.S. utilities have shed the gains they made during the Biden administration. Almost none are on track to switch from fossil fuels to carbon-free energy at the speed and scale needed to combat the worst harms of climate change.
“It’s very disappointing to find we’re at a lower score than in the first year,” said Cara Fogler, managing senior analyst at the Sierra Club, who coauthored the report. But it’s not entirely unexpected.
Utilities had already begun slipping on their carbon commitments last year, in the face of soaring demand for electricity, according to the 2024 “Dirty Truth” report, largely in response to the boom in data centers being used to power tech giants’ AI goals. But the anti-renewables, pro–fossil fuels agenda of the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress has pushed that reversal into overdrive.
“We have a new federal administration that’s doing everything in their power to send utilities in a direction away from cleaner power,” Fogler said. “They’re doing away with everything in the Inflation Reduction Act that supported clean energy. They’re straight-up challenging clean energy, as we’ve seen with Revolution Wind,” the New England offshore wind farm that’s now under a stop-work order. “And they’re doing everything in their power to keep fossil fuels online” — for example, through Department of Energy actions that force coal, oil, and gas plants to keep running even after their owners and regulators had agreed on retirement dates.
But utilities also bear responsibility for not doing more to embrace technologies that offer both cleaner and cheaper power, Fogler said. “From a cost perspective, from a health perspective, from a pollution perspective, there are so many reasons to build more clean energy and fewer fossil fuels. Unfortunately, we’re seeing that utilities are much less concerned about doing the right thing for the climate and their customers.”
What’s the score?
For its new “The Dirty Truth” report, the Sierra Club analyzed 75 of the nation’s largest utilities, which together own more than half the country’s coal and fossil-gas generation capacity. The report measures utilities’ plans against three benchmarks: whether they intend to close all remaining coal-fired power plants by 2030, whether they intend to build new gas plants, and how much clean-energy capacity they intend to build by 2035.
As of mid-2025, the utilities had plans to build only enough solar and wind capacity to cover 32% of what’s forecast to be needed by 2035 to replace fossil-fuel generation and satisfy new demand. While 65% of the utilities have increased their clean-energy deployment plans since 2021, 31% have reduced them.
Meanwhile, commitments to reduce reliance on fossil fuels have taken a big step backward as utilities have turned to keeping old coal plants running and are planning to build more gas plants to meet growing demand. As of mid-2025, the utilities had plans to close only 29% of coal generation capacity by 2030, down from 30% last year and 35% in 2023.
And the amount of gas-fired generation capacity the utilities plan to build by 2035 spiked to 118 gigawatts as of mid-2025. That’s up from 93 gigawatts in 2024, and more than twice the 51 gigawatts planned in 2021.
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