Every major American economic expansion has been built on a new energy system. The next one is being built right now.
The economic history of the United States is, in significant measure, an energy history. The industrial expansion of the late 19th century was coal. The automotive age and the post-war prosperity it created were oil. The shale revolution of the 2010s — which made the United States the world's largest oil and gas producer and gave American foreign policy significant new leverage — was a new extraction technology applied to a familiar fuel.
Each of these energy transitions created enormous economic value, displaced incumbent industries, generated new geographic concentrations of wealth, and reshaped the competitive landscape for American business and American workers.
The clean energy transition is the next chapter of this story. And unlike the shale revolution, which largely benefited a few resource-rich states, the geography of clean energy opportunity is broadly distributed across the country in ways that could affect economic development patterns for a generation.
The Hydrogen Economy Is Not Hypothetical
Hydrogen has been the "fuel of the future" for long enough that the phrase has become a punchline. The technology works, the chemistry is well-understood, but the economics have never been competitive with fossil fuels.
That is changing, for a specific and important reason: the cost of renewable electricity has fallen so dramatically — solar electricity costs have fallen 90% since 2010 — that producing hydrogen through electrolysis (splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity) is approaching cost-competitiveness with hydrogen produced from natural gas.
Green hydrogen — produced from renewable electricity — has significant advantages over every other energy storage and transport medium for certain applications.
It can store energy at very large scales and over long periods in ways that batteries cannot. It can decarbonize industrial processes — steelmaking, cement production, ammonia synthesis for fertilizer — that are extremely difficult to electrify directly. And it can serve as a fuel for long-haul transportation, shipping, and aviation where the energy density of batteries creates practical limitations.
The United States has significant advantages in the hydrogen economy: cheap renewable electricity in multiple regions, existing pipeline infrastructure that can be adapted for hydrogen transport, and industrial clusters in the Gulf Coast and elsewhere with deep experience in hydrogen chemistry and handling.
The Advanced Manufacturing Opportunity
The clean energy transition is a manufacturing transition. Wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, heat pumps, grid management equipment, and electric vehicle components are physical objects that have to be produced somewhere.
Until recently, that "somewhere" was predominantly China. The combination of Chinese state subsidies, lower labor costs, and scale advantages in manufacturing produced a situation where American clean energy deployment was substantially dependent on Chinese supply chains.
This is changing. The IRA’s domestic content requirements and manufacturing tax credits have catalyzed significant investment in American clean energy manufacturing. As of mid-2025, hundreds of billions of dollars of clean energy manufacturing investment has been announced for the United States — battery factories in Kentucky, Georgia, Michigan, and Tennessee; solar panel manufacturing in Ohio and Virginia; wind turbine component production across the Midwest.
Carbon Capture: The Sleeper Technology
Carbon capture and storage — extracting CO2 from the atmosphere or from emissions sources and storing it underground — is underappreciated in the public climate discussion but potentially transformative in ways that few technologies are.
The significance of viable carbon capture is enormous: it transforms the climate math from "stop all emissions immediately" to "net zero is achievable with carbon removal offsetting residual emissions."
The United States, with its geology suitable for underground carbon storage, its existing expertise in subsurface engineering from oil and gas production, and its new policy incentives, is better positioned than almost any other country to become the global leader in carbon capture technology and services. That’s a real export opportunity in a world that will need a lot of carbon removal.
The Workforce Question
Every major energy transition creates winners and losers in the workforce, and the clean energy transition is no different. The fossil fuel industries that are declining — coal mining, oil field services, natural gas distribution — employ communities with specific skills, in specific geographies, that are not automatically transferable to clean energy work. The transition cost to those workers and communities is real and should not be minimized.
The workforce development opportunity, however, is also real. Many of the skills required in clean energy manufacturing, installation, and maintenance are closely related to existing manufacturing and technical skills — welding, electrical work, mechanical systems maintenance, process engineering. The workforce transition challenge is not "retrain a coal miner to be a software engineer." It's "retrain a coal miner to be a wind turbine technician" — a smaller skills gap and, in many cases, a meaningful pay increase.
The Economic Case for Moving Fast
The standard political economy of industrial transition is cautious: move slowly to protect incumbent industries and workers, minimize disruption, don’t get too far ahead of economic reality.
The energy economy of 2050 is being built now. The investment decisions being made in the next five years will determine whether the United States is a leading producer of the technology infrastructure of that economy or a customer for it. That’s the choice. Everything else is commentary.
This is the second installment of "The American Possibility," a series exploring forward-looking analysis for readers exhausted by doom. Next: "The Civic Technology Gap."