President Trump has famously called renewable energy a “scam,” and he has aggressively rolled back incentives for renewable power while emphasizing fossil fuel production. Yet he is presiding over a period of record expansion in renewable energy. It is overtaking coal in monthly generation, rivaling natural gas, and dominating new capacity additions.
What’s more, by launching a war against Iran that has upended global oil supplies, President Trump has accelerated the trend toward renewables and could mark a permanent shift away from fossil fuels.
The result is a striking disconnect: political rhetoric anchored in a fossil-fuel past, alongside an energy system rapidly moving beyond it.
Market forces – falling costs, technological advances, and now geopolitical risk – are driving the transition. As a recent report from J.P. Morgan noted:
The need for a diversified energy mix to mitigate risk and build resiliency is reshaping global power generation. Today, innovations in nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal and energy storage are not only transforming the global energy landscape but also paving the way for a more stable and sustainable future.
The scale of renewable growth is unprecedented. Solar generation alone rose by roughly 600–636 terawatt-hours last year, the largest annual increase of any electricity source in modern history. Wind and solar together met essentially all growth in global electricity demand, while fossil fuel generation stagnated and even declined slightly.
The first half of 2026 has already reinforced that momentum. In the United States, solar generation surpassed coal for the first time in May, while renewables collectively exceeded natural gas in March. Such developments underline how rapidly renewables are moving from the periphery to the center of electricity systems. Fossil fuels are no longer the default marginal source of energy growth.
The Iran war is accelerating this trend. The conflict has triggered one of the largest oil supply disruptions on record, slashing millions of barrels per day from global markets and driving sharp increases in prices.
The head of the International Energy Agency said the fallout from this energy shock means countries will likely direct even more investment toward clean energy sources.
“I expect one of the responses to this crisis will be [an] acceleration of renewables. Not only because they are helping to reduce the emissions but also, they are [a] homegrown domestic energy source,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said. He added that clean energy sources dominated new power installations last year, with renewables accounting for 85% of all new global power capacity, with solar as a primary driver of this trend.
In effect, the war is compressing into a short timeframe the incentives that typically drive energy transitions over decades. Higher oil and gas prices improve the competitiveness of alternatives such as solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal and batteries. At the same time, governments responding to the crisis are already adopting policies – ranging from ramped-up renewable deployment to efficiency measures – that reduce dependence on imported fuels.
Taken together, the evidence suggests that the energy transition was already well underway before the Iran conflict, driven by economics, technology, and policy. However, by going to war with Iran, President Trump may have hastened the arrival of a critical inflection point. The war is exposing the strategic vulnerabilities of fossil fuel dependence and amplifying the economic case for alternatives.
As a result, It’s possible that history will remember President Trump for making the renewable energy transition a reality.