As the Trump administration doubles down on its energy and AI dominance agenda, U.S. energy companies have found themselves navigating tricky communication strategies. Touting the clean, carbon-free nature of renewable energy no longer carries the clout it did under the Biden administration, and policy has shifted against certain forms of renewables. At the same time, energy companies are being called upon to meet rising power demands of data center developers, many of which are prioritizing carbon-free options.
This has forced energy companies to shift the way they communicate: They must garner political favor while also positioning themselves as an answer to the coming onslaught of electricity demand.
The wind and solar industries are focusing on electricity affordability and the fact that wind farms and photovoltaics are the cheapest and fastest way to add new energy generation. Battery storage developers are aligning themselves with Trump’s domestic manufacturing push, scaling up efforts to shift supply chains to the United States as they battle uncertainty over tariffs.
Nuclear power companies are touting their ability to go small and modular—theoretically a faster way to get reactors running. Next-generation geothermal developers are staying the course, but playing up the industry’s crossovers with oil and gas. Hydrogen, too, is being highlighted as similar to fossil fuels. And the offshore wind industry is mostly preoccupied with using the courts to fight the Trump administration’s repeated attempts to ban development.
It’s not that the renewable technologies themselves have changed, says Samuel Furfari, former European Commission senior energy official and current energy geopolitics professor at ESCP Business School in London. “Mr. Trump has made a communication revolution, not an energy revolution,” he says about the state of the industry in the United States and abroad.
Trump Declares His Energy Darlings
Trump’s affinity for fossil fuels and his disdain for certain renewables, such as wind, have constructed a new federal hierarchy of energy sources. On day one of his second term as U.S. president, Trump issued an executive order listing which energy resources his country should promote. The list references fossil fuels, geothermal, and nuclear, but excludes solar, wind, and hydrogen.
Then, in July, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act slashed renewable energy incentives for wind and solar while extending the tax credits for geothermal through 2033. On December 1, Trump’s Department of Energy renamed the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to the National Laboratory of the Rockies—a moniker to demote renewables and reflect the lab’s “expanding mission” under Trump. And in an eleventh-hour move, the Department of the Interior at the end of 2025 halted all offshore wind projects under construction, citing national security risks.
At first, the wind and solar industries attempted to fit into the Trump administration’s agenda by leaning into his energy dominance rhetoric, says clean energy consultant Lloyd Ritter in Washington D.C. But after the government gutted tax incentives for wind and solar, and concerns over high electricity bills became a top election issue, industry players prioritized messaging about affordability for consumers, Ritter says.
“Electricity costs are now a thing in politics, and I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon,” Ritter says. The cost concerns stem from projections that electricity use in the United States is projected to increase 32 percent by 2030, mostly from data centers, according to the latest forecast from Grid Strategies.
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