A Strait Mess
The Strait of Hormuz has been closed since March 2, 2026. Brent crude hit $126 a barrel in April. QatarEnergy declared force majeure on all LNG shipments within days of the closure. Analysts and much of the public at large believe this to be the largest energy crisis in recent history, perhaps in all of history. In fact, most of the consequences of this catastrophe won’t be felt until 2027, when increased prices on commodities such as helium and fertilizer start to affect the food supply chain.
Meanwhile, the world added 692 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity in 2025 — the largest single-year buildout ever recorded. China alone accounted for 440 GW of that. India crossed 50% non-fossil installed capacity five years ahead of its Paris commitment. The US, by comparison, added a modest 55 GW of solar, wind, and storage, with projections of 86 GW more in 2026.
So the question feels obvious: will 2027 be the year of renewables? Contracts are being signed now. Capacity is being built now. The oil crisis is happening now. Is this finally happening?
Ehh…maybe?
Hyperscalers Are Hyperpolluting
If you only looked at the numbers, with global renewable capacity hitting 5,149 GW at end of 2025, solar PV alone meeting over 25% of global energy demand growth for the first time ever, battery storage deployments up 40% year-over-year, you’d think the transition was a done deal. And on the infrastructure side, it would be silly to argue against the trajectory. China is installing roughly 100 solar panels per second and a new wind turbine every 10 minutes! You don’t even need to be a propagandist to recognize how far the US is falling behind based on those numbers.
China hit their official 2030 target of 1,200 GW wind-plus-solar six years early. Europe’s REPowerEU plan targets 42.5% renewables in final energy by 2030. The US, even with legislative headwinds, is still building almost exclusively clean capacity.
But the companies burning the most electricity on the planet right now — the AI hyperscalers — are not following that curve. Meta signed a deal with Entergy Louisiana for seven new natural gas plants totaling 5.2 GW to power its “Hyperion” data center.
Natural gas plants in the year of our lord 2026!
Microsoft is in exclusive talks with Chevron for a 2.5 GW gas plant in West Texas. OpenAI and Oracle’s Stargate complex in Abilene is running on 4.5 GW of natural gas turbines.
Corporate clean energy purchasing actually fell 10% in 2025 — the first decline in nearly a decade — even as Amazon, Meta, Google, and Microsoft accounted for nearly half of all such deals globally. So much for the 2010s kumbaya save-the-planet train. The message from tech giants is clear: we’ll buy the green credits but we’ll burn the gas, thanks!
The Green (Cash) New Deal
And about those green credits. Every major hyperscaler made bold climate commitments at the start of this decade. Microsoft pledged to be carbon negative by 2030. Google set an ambition for net-zero emissions across all operations by 2030. Amazon targeted net-zero by 2040. Meta committed to net-zero for its value chain by 2030.
That’s how it started, and here’s how it’s going.
Microsoft’s overall emissions have risen over 29% since 2020, driven almost entirely by data center construction. Google’s emissions jumped 48% over five years and the company now describes its climate goals as “moonshots” — a word that does an insane amount of heavy lifting when their stated deadline is four years away. The 2025 Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitor, published by NewClimate Institute and Carbon Market Watch, concluded that these five companies’ emissions targets have “lost their meaning and relevance.”
Microsoft, to its credit, has been the single largest buyer of carbon removal credits on the planet — responsible for an estimated 80-90% of the entire market. But even that program reportedly paused in early 2026.
The hyperscalers haven’t exactly abandoned their climate language, they’ve just redefined what words mean.
Okay, And?
Let’s talk about the people. A Gallup poll from March 2026 found that 71% of Americans oppose having an AI data center in their area. Not a controversial take, but what’s interesting is that’s more opposition than nuclear power plants get. When you dig into why people are opposed, it’s not really about carbon, it’s more about how some of these data centers make for poor neighbors thanks to their water, air, and noise pollution, alongside rising electric bill costs and a general anti-AI sentiment.
Switching a data center from natural gas to a solar farm doesn’t fix the noise, it doesn’t reduce the water draw, and it doesn’t stop the grid upgrade costs from being passed to residential ratepayers. On renewables more broadly, public enthusiasm in the US is actually softening. Gallup’s 2026 environment survey found support for greater emphasis on solar dropped seven points and wind dropped eleven points since 2021. Nuclear, meanwhile, is at an all-time high.
Quietly, the electrification of transport keeps accelerating regardless of political headwinds (read: the Trump administration). Global EV sales hit 20.7 million in 2025 — nearly 23% of all cars sold. China is at 55% EV share for new vehicles. Europe grew over 30% to a 28% share. And then there’s Canada, which in January 2026 replaced its 100% tariff on Chinese EVs with a 49,000-unit annual quota. The US called it a disaster (they really hate competition). Canadians see it as progress.
So…2027?
The IEA expected renewables to overtake coal as the world’s top electricity source by 2026 at the latest. On the capacity charts, the answer to the question is almost certainly yes — 2027 will be another record-breaking year for renewable energy buildout, driven primarily by China and increasingly by India.
But the question implies something more than capacity additions. It implies a shift in how people think, how companies invest, and how governments legislate. And on those fronts, the picture is truly a hot mess. The Iran war crisis made energy independence visceral in a way that climate rhetoric never could, but the US is bafflingly accelerating the phase-out of IRA clean energy credits, Europe is still buying Russian LNG, and the companies with the largest electricity appetites on Earth are building gas plants as fast as they’re signing solar contracts.
The infrastructure is moving in one direction, American politics is moving in the other. Whether renewables continue their trajectory in 2027 depends on whether the people demanding change can stay louder than the companies writing the checks.
As always, zack.wall@icloud.com for feedback and suggestions.