Five and a half months. That’s all the time Donald Trump needed to crush the only major climate law the United States ever managed to pass. It was swift work, using a sledgehammer and not a scalpel, and now the energy transition will have to make do with the fragments of the law that remain.

The words bleak and dispiriting come to mind. How else to describe the fact that the U.S. entered the year implementing an ambitious if inadequate decarbonization law, and is now exiting 2025 with that law all but repealed?

But there were also some reasons to be hopeful about the energy transition this year — if you knew where to look.

Let’s start with the numbers. During a year full of headline-grabbing destruction of U.S. clean energy policy, renewables still led the way. Through November, a whopping 92% of all new electricity capacity built in the U.S. came in the form of solar, batteries, and wind power. Electric vehicle sales hit a record, too — nearly 440,000 in the third quarter of the year — though the surge was driven in large part by consumers rushing to buy EVs before the disappearance of a federal tax credit axed by Trump.

There were also intriguing moments of alignment between Trump’s ​“energy dominance” agenda and the transition away from fossil fuels. Geothermal and nuclear are two sources of carbon-free energy that the administration has, for whatever reasons, deemed desirable. So while the One Big Beautiful Bill Act eviscerated much of President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, it spared tax credits for geothermal systems. And Trump has not only preserved Biden-era funding for nuclear projects but expanded it — possibly by orders of magnitude if an $80 billion plan for partially state-owned nuclear reactors actually happens.

The most important thing we saw this year is that Trump simply can’t stop the energy transition. Sure, he can slow it. He already has. But try as the administration might, there are forces at play bigger and more stubborn even than politics.

To be specific: Electricity demand is growing quickly in the U.S., and clean energy is the least expensive and most readily available way to keep pace. 

The Trump administration would certainly prefer to meet rising demand with coal and gas, but in many cases it’s simply impractical.

Coal is increasingly the most expensive form of electricity. Gas, for better or for worse, certainly will help meet some of this new demand — but it faces very real supply-chain constraints. Gas turbines are sold out among major manufacturers, with wait times stretching as long as seven years.

When the country is clamoring for more electrons and voters are increasingly upset about rising power bills, and the only thing that can be built quickly is solar and storage, renewables will simply have to be built. (They’ll just cost more than they would have without Trump.)

So while it hasn’t been a good year for clean energy in the U.S., the transition now has enough momentum that even a terrible year amounts to more of a slowdown than a derailment. It’s a matter of inertia.