A look back at the 2025 Power Shift: What It Means for RNG

Emily Nguyen 4

Welcome back to Digest This: Unpacking Our Sustainable Future. I'm Emily, and today Alex and I are unpacking what the U.S. power mix actually looked like in 2025, and how that sets the stage for a cleaner, smarter grid over the next few years.

Alex Rivera 4

Hey everyone, Alex here. If you've been hearing about record solar installs, a wave of new batteries, and yes, still a big role for natural gas, this is the episode where we connect all those dots and talk about the opportunity in front of us.

Emily Nguyen 4

So, quick snapshot. In 2025, the U.S. electric power sector generated about 4,260 billion kilowatthours of electricity. Underneath that giant number, about three quarters of the power came from what we call dispatchable sources—natural gas, coal, and nuclear. And wind plus solar together supplied roughly 18% of total generation.

Alex Rivera 4

And that 18% is the part that’s really moving. In the EIA’s Short-Term Energy Outlook, they see wind and solar getting to around 21% of total U.S. generation by 2027. So the incremental growth is clearly coming from the variable resources, even though natural gas is still the single biggest fuel on the system.

Emily Nguyen 4

Yeah, gas actually peaked at about 42% of generation in 2024, then edged down toward 40% in 2025. By 2027, EIA expects it closer to 39% as more renewables show up. Coal tells the opposite story. It had a temporary bump in 2025—about a 13% increase—mainly because of cold weather and relatively higher gas prices, but the projection is a roughly 5% decline per year through 2027 as plants retire.

Alex Rivera 4

Meanwhile, nuclear is doing its steady, reliable thing, and solar is the real sprinter. Utility-scale solar generation is expected to jump from about 290 billion kilowatthours in 2025 to around 424 billion by 2027. To get there, developers are planning almost 70 gigawatts of new utility solar in just 2026 and 2027—that’s about a 49% increase in operating solar capacity compared with the end of 2025.

Emily Nguyen 4

And a huge chunk of that is in places like Texas. On the ERCOT grid, solar generation is forecast to grow from around 56 billion kilowatthours in 2025 to 106 billion in 2027—basically doubling in two years. In MISO, across the Midwest, wind additions have slowed and wind generation is expected to hover just over 100 billion kilowatthours annually, but solar there climbs from about 31 to 46 billion kilowatthours over the same period.

Alex Rivera 4

The other quiet star here is storage. ERCOT, for example, plans to grow battery capacity from roughly 15 gigawatts in 2025 to about 37 gigawatts by the end of 2027. Those batteries soak up mid-day solar and then feed power back in when people get home from work and the sun is going down. It’s like adding flexibility muscles to a very solar-heavy grid.

Emily Nguyen 4

All of this sits inside what the International Energy Agency is calling the Age of Electricity. Globally, they see power demand growing more than 3.5% per year through 2030, and electricity demand growing at least two and a half times faster than overall energy demand. By around 2030, they expect low-emissions sources—renewables plus nuclear—to provide about 50% of global electricity, up from roughly 42% today.

Alex Rivera 4

And the stuff driving that demand growth is very real: electric vehicles, more air conditioning in a hotter climate, industrial processes switching from fossil fuels to electricity, and then this explosion of data centers and AI. So you’ve got rising demand, a cleaner generation mix, and a grid that’s becoming way more dynamic.

Emily Nguyen 4

Which is where today’s topic really gets interesting. We’re not just swapping fuels; we’re redesigning how the system works. In the next chapter we’ll dig into why, in the middle of this renewables surge, utilities are still building gas plants—and how that can actually set the stage for cleaner fuels like renewable natural gas instead of locking us into the past.

Alex Rivera 4

Alright, let’s talk about the new hardware on the grid. Even with all that solar and wind growth, the U.S. added a noticeable chunk of new gas-fired capacity in 2025. From January through November, there were about 4.2 gigawatts of new natural gas capacity installed. That’s more than double the roughly 1.9 gigawatts during the same period in 2024.

Emily Nguyen 4

And it’s important to put that next to the renewables. Over that same eleven-month window, solar added around 25.4 gigawatts of capacity, and wind added roughly 5.5 gigawatts. So solar is still absolutely leading the capacity race, but gas is showing up as a very intentional part of the portfolio, not just legacy infrastructure hanging on.

Alex Rivera 4

Looking ahead, F.E.R.C.’s infrastructure updates show that pattern continuing. Between December 2025 and November 2028, there’s about 44.9 gigawatts of proposed gas capacity in the queue. F.E.R.C. considers roughly 22.7 gigawatts of that “high probability additions.” For comparison, you’ve got about 226 gigawatts of proposed solar—around 86.5 gigawatts in the high-probability bucket—and nearly 60 gigawatts of wind, about 20 gigawatts of which are high probability.

Emily Nguyen 4

So the big bet is clearly on renewables, but utilities are also building a foundation of flexible gas units to support that shift. Historically, combined-cycle gas plants were framed mainly as baseload or mid-merit workhorses that would run a lot and push coal off the system. Now, more of the narrative is about flexibility—units that ramp quickly, start fast, and follow the net load as solar rises and falls.

Alex Rivera 4

You see that in the pipeline projects, too. F.E.R.C.’s 2025 updates include things like the Shippingport Lateral Project, which is designed to provide up to 205 million cubic feet per day of firm transportation capacity specifically for a power generator. In the Southeast, the South Central Louisiana Project and the proposed South Central Alabama Project together add well over 200 million cubic feet per day for electric generators and local distribution companies.

Emily Nguyen 4

Those projects are basically saying out loud, “We’re building gas delivery so power plants can respond fast.” That matters in places like ERCOT and PJM, where data centers are adding steep new loads and demand curves are getting peakier. Flexible gas capacity becomes a kind of shock absorber that lets grid operators lean harder into wind and solar without worrying as much about sudden swings.

Alex Rivera 4

And then there’s the reliability experience we’ve all lived through—winter storms in Texas, cold snaps in New England, summer heat domes. EIA has documented how, in those extremes, natural gas generation often hits record highs. When you’ve just had rolling outages or thousand-dollar-per-megawatt-hour price spikes, having modern, quick-ramping plants looks like a necessary insurance policy.

Emily Nguyen 4

At the same time, international agencies are clear that we can’t just lean on gas and hope for the best. The IEA estimates that to meet rising electricity demand and integrate more variable renewables, annual investment in grids needs to increase by about 50% by 2030. Right now more than 2,500 gigawatts of projects—renewables, storage, and big loads like data centers—are stuck in interconnection queues worldwide.

Alex Rivera 4

So planners are juggling a lot: build out renewables and batteries, modernize the grid, and add just enough flexible gas to keep the lights on in the meantime. The optimistic way to look at this is that new gas capacity isn’t just more fossil lock-in; it can be a platform. These are assets that can start out running on conventional gas, but over time they can blend in cleaner molecules—renewable natural gas first, and potentially hydrogen and other low-carbon gases later.

Emily Nguyen 4

Exactly. If we design today’s plants and pipelines with that future in mind, they become part of the clean energy transition instead of an obstacle.

Emily Nguyen 4

Alright, let’s dig into how renewable natural gas can plug into this system and help turn that idea of a “cleaner molecule bridge” into something very real. When we say RNG, we mean methane captured from landfills, livestock manure, wastewater treatment plants, food waste, and our specialty, industrial organic waste streams—basically the organic stuff that would otherwise decompose and release methane into the atmosphere or the materials that would take energy and carbon intensive processes to convert into a viable byproduct. Instead, we capture it, clean it up to pipeline quality, and use it just like conventional gas in pipelines, power plants, or vehicles.

Alex Rivera 4

And the climate story there is powerful. Methane is a really potent greenhouse gas, so if you prevent it from leaking out of a lagoon or a landfill and turn it into useful energy, you can get very low, and in some cases effectively net-negative, lifecycle emissions. You’re solving a waste problem and creating a fuel at the same time. Turning waste from a liability into an energy asset is not just a metaphor—that’s literally what these projects do.

Emily Nguyen 4

Policy is leaning into that. Under the federal Renewable Fuel Standard, recent volume targets explicitly support RNG production, especially for transportation fuels. RNG earns Renewable Identification Numbers, and in some cases California Low Carbon Fuel Standard credits too. That’s why you see a lot of early RNG volumes going into heavy-duty trucking or into pipeline systems tied to vehicle fueling.

Alex Rivera 4

For the power sector and for gas utilities, the opportunity is starting to look really exciting. Utilities and large corporates can sign long-term offtake agreements with RNG producers, inject that gas into the pipeline network, and claim a portion of their fuel as much lower-carbon. We’re already seeing more interest in using RNG to decarbonize the hardest-to-abate parts of the gas system rather than just offsetting on paper.

Emily Nguyen 4

Now, today RNG is still a small slice of total U.S. gas supply, and I don’t wanna gloss over that. Feedstocks like landfills and manure are finite, and costs are generally higher than conventional gas. But this is where I get optimistic: those are engineering, policy, and market design challenges. As projects scale, as we standardize contracts, and as more states and companies value methane reductions, there’s a lot of room for growth.

Alex Rivera 4

And this loops back to all that new gas capacity we talked about. If you treat those new plants as RNG on-ramps, not dead ends, the picture changes. You design turbines, pipelines, interconnection points, and contracts so they can gradually increase RNG blends over time. You leave room for complementary low-carbon gases, like hydrogen cofiring, as those become technically and commercially viable.

Emily Nguyen 4

We’re already seeing some early work on hydrogen cofiring at gas plants, and EIA has highlighted how combined-cycle fleets are being used more flexibly year by year. So the plants going in today in the late 2020s might look very different in the 2030s and 2040s—running fewer hours, running cleaner fuels, and mostly backing up a grid dominated by wind, solar, and storage.

Alex Rivera 4

An optimistic pathway looks something like this: push hard on solar, wind, and batteries to grab the bulk of new generation; invest in grids so those projects can actually connect; use modern, flexible gas plants as the shock absorbers; and then steadily clean up the fuel going into those plants with RNG. Along the way, RNG projects are cutting methane from waste streams and helping decarbonize customers and sectors that are tough to electrify, but in some cases the use of RNG facilities taking on waste streams are also cleaning up potential harmful pollutants from getting into watersheds.

Emily Nguyen 4

And all of that sits inside a smarter system. Remember that more than 2,500 gigawatts of projects are currently stuck in interconnection queues globally. As we modernize grids and market design to value flexibility, we can line up the pieces: renewables on the front line, storage and demand response smoothing things out, gas units getting cleaner via RNG and other fuels, and transmission tying it all together into a more resilient whole.

Alex Rivera 4

If you work in utility planning, project development, or policy, this is a great moment to zoom out and ask, “How do I make my gas assets RNG-ready? How do I help unlock those waste methane resources? And how do I pair all of that with aggressive renewables and storage buildout?” Those are solvable problems, and they’re where a lot of value is gonna be created.

Emily Nguyen 4

And if you’re just trying to make sense of the headlines, the takeaway is: yes, we’re adding more gas plants. Yes, renewables and batteries are growing fast. And renewable natural gas is emerging as a really promising way to clean up the fuel behind the scenes.

Alex Rivera 4

We’ll keep tracking how EIA, IEA, and F.E.R.C. data evolve, and how technologies like RNG move from pilot projects into the mainstream.

Emily Nguyen 4

That’s it for today’s episode of Digest This: Unpacking Our Sustainable Future. Alex, thanks for diving into the numbers and the opportunities with me.

Alex Rivera 4

Always fun, Emily. And thanks to all of you for listening and for caring about how this transition actually works under the hood.

Emily Nguyen 4

We’ll be back soon with more on the evolving energy landscape and what it means for a sustainable, resilient future. Take care, and we’ll talk to you next time.