Michael Thomas
@curious_founder
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Founder of @CleanviewEnergy and Distilled. I make and post a lot of charts about clean energy trends and technology. Subscribe to my newsletters below:
Joined March 2012
Recently I learned about a man who has trained 1,000+ people to block wind and solar projects. I read through all his training materials, presentations, and seminars. Here's what I learned about him and how his students plan to "win the war on clean energy.". 🧵.
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Researchers just found that gas stoves are responsible for 12.7% of childhood asthma cases. Recently I read dozens of studies about gas stoves and indoor air quality. I also installed monitors in our home and ran my own tests. Here's what I learned.
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During his election campaign, Lula pledged to protect the Amazon rainforest. In his first month in office, deforestation rates fell by 61%.
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I've been seeing a lot of people on the left and right talking about the 2024 election as if it was a landslide. So I made this chart to put things in context. Trump's win was one of the smallest in modern history.
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The world's largest climate and weather data archive is located in Asheville, NC. Due to an historic climate disaster, its currently offline.
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Huh that’s weird. Never could have seen this coming.
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Fact check:. Literally none of our solar panels are coming from China.
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This is the man who will be leading America's top health agency.
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The manufacturing boom that started under the Biden administration is grinding to a halt under Trump.
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What’s the term for a political system where a couple suburbs in Pennsylvania decide the fate of 300 million+ people?
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In my reporting on clean energy misinformation I've seen one argument over and over. Wind turbines kill birds. While this is true, it misses an important piece of context: . Fossil fuel power plants kill 35x more birds per GWh than wind turbines do. 🧵.
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In the 1970s, Dutch cities like Amsterdam were full of traffic and air pollution. Now they are models of sustainable urban planning. Here's the story of how the Netherlands started building their cities for humans, not cars. 🧵
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I've met many people who say that California's 2020 orange sky day was the moment they understood what a warming world really looks like. It was a wake up call. Some changed careers. Others got politically involved. Maybe this week is that moment for people on the East Coast.
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Vance last night: "We should be making more solar panels here in the United States of America." . Meanwhile:
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For the last 9 months, The Guardian analyzed projects from the biggest carbon offset provider in the world. They found "94% of the credits had no benefit to the climate." . Some of the biggest corporations in the world are using these offsets to claim they are "carbon neutral.".
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Over the last two months I've read dozens of studies about gas stoves and indoor air quality. I also installed monitors in our home and ran my own tests. Here's a thread on what I learned 🧵 #energytwitter.
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Trump talked a lot about bring manufacturing back to America. But under Biden, manufacturing investment has grown faster than any time in recent history. And it's not even close. During Trump's presidency, manufacturing spending grew by 5%. Under Biden it has grown by 279%.
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US manufacturing has grown faster under Biden/Harris than anytime in the modern era.
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I see a lot of people say things like "Our grid can't handle more EVs or heat pumps." . Imagine if 100 years ago, people were like "Light bulbs, dishwashers, etc. are all great, but we don't have enough electric capacity." . We can electrify everything *and* build more capacity.
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How America produces electricity in emojis:. 🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖.🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖.🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖.🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖.🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖.🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖.☢️☢️☢️☢️☢️☢️☢️☢️☢️☢️.☢️☢️☢️☢️☢️☢️☢️☢️☢️☢️.🌬️🌬️🌬️🌬️🌬️🌬️🌬️🌬️☀️☀️.☀️🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🪵🪵.
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In the 1990s, Paris was one of the most polluted, traffic-clogged cities in the world. Today, the city is a world leader in sustainable urban development. Here's the story of how Paris took back its streets from cars.
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Later this week I plan to publish a story about who is funding and spreading clean energy misinformation. Stay tuned. And if you missed it, you can check out last week's story below: .
All across the country, local governments are restricting and banning clean energy projects. I heard rumors that misinformation on Facebook was a major cause of this. So I joined ~40 anti-wind and solar groups to see some of it for myself. The results were bleak. 🧵
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All across the country, local governments are restricting and banning clean energy projects. I heard rumors that misinformation on Facebook was a major cause of this. So I joined ~40 anti-wind and solar groups to see some of it for myself. The results were bleak. 🧵
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Pedestrian fatalities are falling in countries around the world. In the US they're rising.
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For the last month I've been reporting on a group of people who travel across America blocking wind and solar projects. This group has passed clean energy opposition laws in states across the country. Here's the story of one man who has been doing this for 10+ years. 🧵.
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Germany is one of the few countries where meat consumption is declining.
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Just incredibly depressing that humans spent so long trying to invent cures to diseases, succeeded against the odds, and that progress is now being erased by a small number of people spreading misinformation.
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But the story of climate action and delay in America is very much about Droz. For most of his life, Droz was a semi-retired real estate developer. In 2011, he reinvented himself and became a "physicist." . That year, his home state of N.C. debated a bill about climate change.
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In the last few decades, the SUV market in America has exploded. Automakers say the reason for this growth has been "changing consumer preferences.". But that's not the full story. One of the main reasons for the growth is the "SUV loophole.". 🧵
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The odds are pretty good you haven't heard of this man, John Droz, Jr. He's only been interviewed by a few journalists. And when asked about his influence he always responds the same way: . "This story isn't about me."
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For the last few months I've been reporting on a group of people who travel across America blocking wind and solar projects. In my research and interviews, I kept hearing about one man who has helped block dozens of projects. Here's his story:. 🧵.
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American cars are uniquely big, expensive, and inefficient. Here's the best-selling car in America last year (right) vs. the best-seller in Europe (left). So why are American cars so big?. 🧵
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Researchers have been studying the link between indoor air pollution and human health for more than 50 years. Every year, it becomes more clear: . Gas stoves produce unsafe levels of nitrogen dioxide (NO2). And that causes respiratory illnesses like asthma.
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I don't think most people know just how terrible meat is for the planet.
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Remarkably, many legislators listened to him. Even the Washington Post listened to him. In an article about sea-level rise, they quoted the real estate developer as a "local physicist."
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As for John Droz? He's reinvented himself once more. In searching public records for his name, I came across dozens of emails to officials everywhere from Arizona to Pennsylvania about his "independent analysis of the 2020 election.". Droz is now an election security expert.
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Droz's efforts worked. In 2012, N.C. passed a bill that prevented the state from taking action on sea-level rise. This work got the attention of the biggest climate deniers in the country. That year, ATI, a dark money think tank brought him on as a fellow.
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The Economist just published this incredible and tragic chart. Given how many people are killed each year by big cars, it's worth understanding how we got here. Story time 🧵
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Gas stove manufacturers say ventilation makes their products safe. But I interviewed 5 indoor air quality experts and they all disagreed. They said the best way to protect people's health is to phase out gas stoves. 🧵.
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A dark money group is running ads promoting fossil fuels and attacking clean energy in the final weeks before the election. The PAC has spent more than $1 million to reach voters in 7 swing states. And someone just sent me documents revealing who's funding it. 🧵
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I can't stop thinking about the fact that Amsterdam looked like this less than 50 years ago.
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In the last few years, BP, Shell, and ExxonMobil have announced net-zero climate pledges. They've spent millions of dollars advertising their investments in clean energy. Last week, all 3 companies changed up those plans and said they are doubling down on fossil fuels. 🧵.
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Vance last night: "We should be making more solar panels here in the United States of America.". He's clearly not spending much time in Ohio, where the largest solar panel manufacturer in the US is based.
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At ATI, Droz developed a playbook that would eventually be used by thousands of people to stop clean energy projects. In 2012, he organized a secret meeting and training session to share his strategy with some of the country's most influential climate deniers and activists.
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Scientists from around the world worked on the latest IPCC report for almost a decade. But according to leaked documents, many of their recommendations were removed or altered significantly. 🧵.
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Droz put together a series of presentations, some as long as 168 slides, and headed to the capital. He had crunched the numbers and looked at the science. According to Droz, climate change was a sham pushed by clean energy lobbyists.
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Droz, like many climate deniers, understood the power of offering the public and lawmakers a set of “alternative facts.” . All credible experts agree wind energy is better for the environment than fossil fuels. Droz knew it was possible to convince people otherwise.
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All around the country, clean energy opponents are using this playbook to block solar and wind farms. Projects that could have offered substantial carbon emissions reductions in almost every state have been blocked as a result.
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The fact that we still allow these things in new construction is crazy. Most building codes have nothing to say about gas appliances or NO2. This is a failure of the @EPA and most state and city governments in America.
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In my reporting on clean energy misinformation I've seen one argument over and over. Wind turbines kill birds. While this is true, it misses an important piece of context:. Fossil fuel power plants kill 35x more birds per GWh than wind turbines do. 🧵.
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For Droz, winning the war on clean energy is all about communication. The man is obsessed with what he calls “Press relations (PR) strategy.” . Those two letters—PR—are in hundreds of documents he's produced over the last decade.
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Important story from @HirokoTabuchi in the NY Times this morning. A propane trade group is running a multi-million dollar ad campaign to convince people heat pumps are bad and fossil fuels are good. They are paying HGTV influencers who aren't disclosing their funding.
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BP runs a lot of ads about its commitment to clean energy. But the company just released their 2023 capital investment plans. They plan to invest the majority of it on fossil fuel projects.
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And think about that for a second. We've known that gas stoves cause asthma and other respiratory illnesses for 30 years. Yet, in that same period millions of homes have been built with gas hookups.
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This approach has led his students to pass laws that literally or effectively ban clean energy in communities across the United States. When they don't succeed at that, they file lawsuits that can drag out for years.
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One of the tragedies of Hurricane Helene is how few people had flood insurance. I pulled data from FEMA for every county in North Carolina. In most inland communities, less than 1% of homes were insured before the storm.
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It would cost $100 billion to cut methane emissions by 80% in the oil and gas sector. That sounds like a lot, but it's 3% of the profit fossil fuel companies made last year. We have the money to prevent a climate crisis. We just need it to go to solutions, not stock buybacks.
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I don't think many people realize how much Biden and Democrats have done to address climate change. The IRA alone—just one of their bills—is expected to 2x the pace of emissions reductions. By 2030 that's equivalent to zeroing out the combined annual emissions of CA and FL.
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One of Droz' most effective students, Susan Ralston, mastered this principle. She named her organization "Citizens for Responsible Solar." . The group has blocked huge projects across Virginia. Their main argument: Solar should be on rooftops, not rural land.
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If I'm honest, I was skeptical of the panic over gas stoves at first. But in study after study that I read, the data showed the same thing. Gas stoves aren't safe.
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What’s the goal of this PR? . As he wrote, “Public opinion [on clean energy] must begin to change among citizens at large.”. But changing minds wasn’t all Droz was interested in. The next line in his memo reads: “Ultimate Goal: Change policy direction based on the message.”
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Clean energy projects create jobs and tax revenue. They're great for local economies. Droz offered an alternative assessment.
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Amazon tells its customers and investors that it is committed to climate action. So I looked at which candidates the company is supporting in the 2022 midterms. I discovered that Amazon has given $138,000 to 25 climate deniers. Here's who the company is supporting:. 🧵.
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At the secret meeting in 2012, he proposed an idea: . Established think tanks like Heartland, CFACT, and Cato could publish these "alternative facts." . And volunteers in communities across the U.S. could present them to local lawmakers.
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Shocking that supporting a fascist and telling cruel lies about immigrants is bad for business.
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Of course, these volunteers couldn't just be against clean energy. Droz wrote about this in a later training document titled "What Not To Say.". He writes that if you're against something, "You will be painted as a denier and as a person against progress (going green).".
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By far the most unique tactic, I saw in Droz' training materials was his suggestion that clean energy opponents never compromise. According to Droz, the way to win "the war on clean energy" is to come out with aggressive demands and stick to them.
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This morning, @CBSMornings ran a story on gas stoves to 2.5 million viewers. Did they mention gas stoves increase the risk of asthma? No. Did they question a gas industry rep who claimed gas is "clean and safe"? No. Instead they spread fossil fuel industry lies. 🧵.
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Climate deniers love to point out the 100,000 tons of lithium used for clean energy technology. But they never mention the ~15,000,000,000 tons of fossil fuels mined every year.
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A new study just found that 12.7% of childhood asthma is caused by gas stoves. That's 647,000 children. The gas industry has known about these risks for decades. But they've spent millions lobbying and running misinformation campaigns to prevent regulation.
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A lot of people think that plant-based milks are bad for the environment (e.g. use a lot of water). They certainly aren’t perfect. But no matter how you look at the data they are way better than dairy milk.
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BP just announced that it will join Shell in slowing its transition to clean energy. The company plans to use record profits from 2022 to invest an additional $8 billion in fossil fuels. BP also plans to aim for 20% carbon reductions by 2030 vs. its original 40% target.
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I asked @jlashk, an environmental epidemiologist to take a look at the data. He said, "I would say you've got a pretty big NO2 problem." . Not exactly what you want to hear from someone who studies this stuff for a living.
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In Sept 2021, @WHO released their latest guidelines on indoor air pollution. They recommended no building should have higher than 5.3ppb of NO2 on average throughout the year. So I set up air quality monitors in my house to see if we passed the test.
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The declining price of solar will just never cease to amaze me.
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Here's a chart showing the average level of NO2 throughout December. The dotted line is the daily average. The top line is the peak concentration. Our daily average hovered around 2x the WHO guidelines.
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Can you guess which day we went out of the town and didn't use our gas stove, furnace or water heater?. Yup, it was the day that NO2 levels plummeted.
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The Inflation Reduction Act has spurred huge investment in America. $165 billion of that investment has gone into red districts, compared to $54 billion of investment in blue districts.
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You know all those stories about residents and environmentalists blocking offshore wind farms?. Well, it turns out many of them are being funded by climate deniers and fossil-fuel companies. Let's take a look at some of these groups and see what's going on here. 🧵
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In 2013 another meta-analysis on the topic came out. This time the authors concluded, “Children living in a home with gas cooking have a 42% increased risk of having current asthma.”.
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For the last decade ExxonMobil has spent millions of dollars advertising its investments in algae biofuels. They've used this program as evidence that they care about addressing climate change. Now the company is killing the whole program.
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NO2 is especially bad for children. The first meta-analysis on this topic was published in 1992. It found that for every 16ppb increase in NO2 levels — comparable to the increase resulting from exposure to a gas stove — the odds of respiratory illness in children go up by 20%.
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"If we’re serious about keeping the planet liveable, we have to regulate and tax huge cars out of existence.".
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Here's what happened every night when we used our stove or oven. 291ppb of peak concentration is. not good. And that's what it looked like whenever we made dinner. The only exception: the nights we got takeout and didn't use the gas stove.
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To read more and subscribe to my newsletter, you can click the link below. Next week, I'm releasing an interview with one of the authors of the recent study that showed 650,000 asthma cases can be atttributed to gas stoves.
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In 2020, Scrubgrass, a power plant in Pennsylvania was about to close. Then Stronghold, a crypto mining company, came to town. It's annual emissions rose from 12,000 to 500,000 tons, a staggering 3805% increase. This is just one of many similar stories. 🧵
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A year ago, energy analysts predicted that 160-180 GW of solar would be built in 2022. So how'd those predictions turn out? They underestimated solar's growth by 50-70%. ~270 GW of solar was built in 2022.
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Flooding has cost U.S. taxpayers $850 billion since 2000.
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Clean energy critics often argue that addressing climate change will require too much mining. So I looked into the data. I found that our current fossil fuel economy requires 535x more mining than a 100% clean energy economy would. 🧵.
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Who wants to tell this dude how much concrete, metal, and other carbon-intense materials it takes to build a fossil fuel power plant?.
Guess how much concrete and metal is required for just one wind tower?. “green energy” is not green.
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75% of Americans think that it's better for the environment to build homes further apart. But researchers consistently find that building dense housing is the best thing cities can do to address climate change and reduce land use.
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I had to do a double-take when I did this analysis on the growth of solar in the U.S. In 2023, the U.S. added 72% more solar than 2022. Many people said that growth was temporary—just a supply-chain catch up year. This year, the U.S. will add *94% more* than last year. Wild.
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