Farms and ranches can allow wind power plant owners to install turbines on their properties, which provides additional income to those farmers and ranchers. The wind companies pay rent for having their turbines there. In addition, the wind industry expects to support more than 600,000 jobs in manufacturing, installation, maintenance, and supporting services by 2050.

Sometimes, those who oppose wind power plants raise the issue of whether or not they harm local birds. The fact is, wind turbine technology has evolved enough that projects cause very few bird injuries and deaths, and exponentially more birds are harmed by the effects of nuclear power and fossil fuel power plants.

In 2016, the first commercial offshore wind farm in the U.S. launched operations off the coast of Rhode Island. The Block Island Wind Farm has served as a model to other East Coast states, including New York, of how they can scale with clean energy.

Solar generation offsets more than 73 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions from more than two million solar installations in the U.S.

Utilities that build solar facilities generally build large fields of photovoltaic cells that are designed to convert sunlight to electricity. They may also use lenses or mirrors to concentrate the sun’s rays into a narrow beam that heats a fluid, producing steam that turns a turbine.

By 2024, the U.S. solar market is expected to double. This clean energy source is providing an economic boost across the country, with solar jobs increasing in 29 states in 2018. There are more than 240,000 solar workers at more than 10,000 companies across the United States, and the solar industry generated $17 billion for the economy in 2018.

The Earth’s inner core is as hot as the surface of the sun. As that heat radiates, it heats the rocks and water just beneath the Earth’s surface, and the steam that process generates can be used to generate heat and electricity.

The United States leads the world in geothermal electricity capacity and generation, with most of the infrastructure to capture that power installed in western states and Hawaii. California is the home to the largest dry steam field in the world, which has been producing electricity since 1960. The United States has tapped less than 0.6 percent of its available geothermal electricity resources.