The solar industry threw a party in Vegas, and it actually wasn’t sad

LAS VEGAS — There were plenty of reasons to think that this year’s RE+, the U.S. solar industry’s biggest annual gathering, would be a gloomy and downtrodden affair.

The Trump administration had declared an energy emergency, then set about reducing energy supply by going after renewables projects. The massive spending law yanked nearly seven years of tax credits for wind and solar. The White House arbitrarily halted construction on two major offshore wind farms that had all their permits in order, raising the fear that it might block other fully approved projects. Tariffs have changed the price of parts that go into clean energy equipment on a sometimes weekly basis. The cleantech bankruptcies have been relentless: Powin, Sunnova, Mosaic, Northvolt, Li-Cycle, Nikola, to name a few.

“I can’t think of a time when we have been subject to quite as much of a brutal swing as we’ve been in now,” said Abby Ross Hopper, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, which puts on the conference.

But when I got to the exhibit hall at the Venetian Expo, it stretched farther than I’d ever seen at a clean energy show, and I heard rumors of additional halls above and below. The exhibitors even sprawled across a sunwashed bridge to Caesar’s Forum, where vendors of flow batteries and other alternative technologies hawked their wares, quite fittingly, from the periphery of the event.

Final attendance for the show hit 37,000, just shy of the record 40,000 from the previous two years, and other metrics broke records. The mood on the floor, in the halls, and at the myriad Vegas afterparties reflected an industry that had taken some punches, had lost some nice things, but was nonetheless charging forward, resolute and battle-tested.

“If you’d asked me in May how I was feeling about RE+, I would have a very different answer,” Hopper noted at a roundtable with journalists a few days into the show. ​“But we have more exhibitors than we’ve ever had in our history, and we have more registration revenue than we’ve ever had in our history. … [People] are really, really hungry for information and for a vision for what’s coming next.”

Judging by this year’s dire headlines, the show’s ebullient atmosphere does not seem entirely rational. Of course, even teetering startups try to project confidence among peers, customers, and especially journalists. And the overstimulated Vegas backdrop inspires a particular strain of optimism, the kind that encourages you to light cash on fire and feel lucky for the opportunity.

But after three days of roaming the frenetic halls, I came to see this year’s positive outlook as warranted. The general consensus among conference goers seemed to be that though political headwinds are blowing hard, economic tailwinds are blowing harder. Here are three reasons why I think they are right.

Forget policy, look at the markets

With the federal tax credits cut short, fewer solar projects will get built, and costs will rise for the ones that still go forward, passing on higher energy bills to American consumers.

But, with a little distance from the sting of this summer’s legislative setbacks, many solar and energy storage professionals believe losses in the policy arena are counterbalanced by increasingly rosy outlooks in the marketplace.

“I think people tend to over-orient on the policy story, and under-orient on the economic and financial story,” said Alfred Johnson, CEO of the clean energy financing platform Crux, as we sipped espressos outside the hubbub of the cavernous expo halls.

Johnson’s company launched as a marketplace for tax credit transferability, which was created by the Inflation Reduction Act, but has expanded into other forms of financing, like debt and tax equity. That perch gives him visibility into clean energy project economics and the flows of capital into the sector. He ticked off a series of key factors defining the current energy market: Electricity prices are way up; solar and battery keeps getting cheaper while improving performance; gas prices are rising as the Trump administration promotes exports; gas turbine prices are rising due to intense competition from buyers.

In short, it’s a bad time to be someone who uses electricity in America, despite President Donald Trump’s campaign promise to cut energy prices. That means, though, that it’s a great time to be someone who sells power.

Even better for power producers, the biggest new customers — data centers — have the price sensitivity of a ravenous grizzly bear. They’re trying, with the enthusiastic support of the White House, to win a global arms race to unlock artificial superintelligence, whatever that means. Facing such civilizational stakes, the hyperscalers aren’t going to quibble over nickels and dimes.

Even with elevated electricity prices, hyperscalers still have to pay a lot more for the ​“graphics processing units” that train and run their AI models, Johnson noted. And once they’ve paid for those GPUs, they want to use them as much as possible, which means gobbling up as much electricity as they can get.

“The value of being faster on delivering the model … is worth so much more … than the additional cost of energy, which means that the marginal demand in a lot of these markets is the data centers, who are not price sensitive,” Johnson said.

Solar is clearly the cheapest source of new electricity production. But what matters most now is speed to market, and here solar and batteries easily trounce all other commercially viable sources of power. Taking mass-produced panels and parts and assembling them in a field is fundamentally easier than constructing a traditional large power plant. And it’s a hell of a lot easier than some of the hyperscalers’ other ideas, like building nonexistent nuclear fusion plants, or nonexistent small modular reactors, or restarting a long-shuttered nuclear reactor at the notorious Three Mile Island plant.

These dynamics led some of my fellow conference goers to muse about a counterfactual choice: Would you rather have strong federal policy tailwinds and an unfavorable market, or booming market fundamentals but unfavorable policy? Nine months ago, the industry enjoyed both. Trump ended those good times, but the robust market serves to mollify the pain of his policy attacks.

Solar got whacked, but storage is booming 

SEIA has strived to welcome energy storage into the fold, and diversification from solar alone looks especially prescient these days. Rooftop solar is struggling in a big way, with the federal onslaught and friendly fire from states like California, and large-scale developers are racing to cram in a bumper crop of projects before tax credits disappear next July. (Projects that start construction after that must be operating by the end of 2027 to qualify for the federal incentives.) But storage companies evaded the policy setbacks of their solar-powered brethren, and are building toward yet another record year of construction.

“Right now, we are seeing all of the factors are very supportive to storage,” said Johnson. ​“Demand is going up, there’s more of a focus on having dispatchable power. It got tax credits for the first time in the IRA … and then it retained the tax credits in [the One Big Beautiful Bill Act].”