Two years ago, a $575 million battery factory planned in St. Louis, Missouri, was set to be the first large-scale lithium iron phosphate (LFP) facility in the U.S. This November, after the Trump administration withdrew a grant for the project, it was cancelled—becoming one of more than 50 major clean energy projects to be scrapped or scaled back in 2025.
From January through November, as federal policy turned against clean energy, companies abandoned more than $32 billion in investments, according to the most recent data from E2, a nonpartisan organization that tracks clean energy projects in the U.S.
Some companies are still announcing new projects, but lost investments are now outpacing them by three to one. “The scale of cancellations shows how fragile this moment is for America’s clean energy economy,” says Michael Timberlake, director of research at E2.
The list includes a new $4.3 billion General Motors EV plant in Michigan that’s being retooled to make gas-powered vehicles, a $3.2 billion Stellantis battery factory in Illinois that was cancelled, and a $2.6 billion battery factory in Georgia that was scrapped by a Norway-based manufacturer, among dozens of other projects. The majority of the cancelled projects are factories, not clean energy generation plants, though some solar or wind farms may not show up on the list because their cancellations are harder to track. (Though there is some evidence the administration is changing its mind about batteries, specifically.)
The cuts add up to nearly 40,000 lost jobs, according to E2. Republican congressional districts lost the most large-scale projects, 37 in total.
What’s harder to track than cancellations is how many projects might have been announced under different political conditions that now won’t ever break ground. Up until the 2024 election, Timberlake says monthly announcements consistently exceeded $1 billion in investment. Last month, that total was $550 million—less than the value of the cancelled battery project.
“We’ll never recover those jobs and those investments that were going to be announced in 2025 under a different political environment,” says Timberlake. “And that’s going to add up over time to a significant loss in step with the rest of the world. We’ve now lost a lot of what could have been, and it’s going to be hard to ever get that back.”
It’s not clear yet what will happen in 2026. Still, despite the setbacks, the industry still has strengths. The fact that the list of cancelled projects wasn’t longer “is a good sign of the health of the clean energy economy and how robust it is and how the economics still work,” Timberlake says.
Nearly all of the energy added to the grid in 2025 came from solar, wind, or batteries, despite the Trump administration’s efforts. As the surge in energy demand continues, driven in part by data centers, clean energy is still a quick, affordable way to meet that demand. And some projects are continuing to move forward. “The market is still there,” he says.