Energy prices, climate resiliency, virtual power plants and energy jobs emerge as defining forces shaping the year ahead. This past year was full of both progress as well as challenges, as tax credits were amended and shared pressure spread across consumers, businesses and governments. From advanced grid software to a heritage-adaptation to a clean-energy job market growing faster than the workforce can keep up, the clean energy industry is seeing rapid shifts. Those who intend to thrive must be equipped to invest in flexible infrastructure, and grow the workforce needed to sustain the transition. Read more key stories below shaping the direction of energy transition and themes heading into 2026.
Energy Prices
Fuel And Energy Prices Up Across The Board – Forbes
Contrary to some public perceptions regarding fuel and energy costs, prices have risen nationwide. Data from the American Automobile Association indicates that all grades of gasoline and diesel have increased compared to last year, with diesel experiencing a notable rise of 25 cents per gallon on a national average. Discussions about gas price trends often arise due to significant regional fluctuations, which can occur not only between states, but also within individual communities. For example, in Texas, prices can range from $3.49 per gallon in Brewster County to $2.29 per gallon in Harris County—a difference exceeding one dollar within the same state. Nationally, gasoline prices have shown only a slight increase and remain relatively stable.
Recent developments regarding electricity prices remain concerning. According to the EIA, electricity prices in the United States have consistently outpaced inflation since 2022, with an increase ranging from 4% to 10% this year depending on the region. It is important to note that electricity prices differ from electricity bills, as bills include additional costs such as transmission and delivery, which have also risen significantly nationwide. The Electricity Transmission Competition Coalition reports that electricity inflation is now exceeding the Consumer Price Index by 300%. Factors contributing to these increases include an aging electrical grid unable to adequately support rising demand driven by population growth and expanding industrial needs, particularly data centers. Additionally, growing natural gas prices are expected to further elevate costs. The EIA anticipates the price of natural gas purchased by power plants will rise by 37% this year. As power plants incur higher fuel expenses, these costs are likely to be transferred to both commercial and residential customers. This escalation will not only affect household electricity expenses but is also projected to impact the cost of goods and services due to increased energy expenditures across various industries.
An energy expert explains why electricity prices keep climbing – NPR
The start of a new month often brings familiar paperwork and, lately, a shock. Across the U.S., households are finding their electricity bills climbing higher than at any time in recent years. In Pembroke Pines, Fla., Al Salvi, who’s 63 and uses a wheelchair, says he now pays close to $500 a month.
Energy prices have risen roughly twice as fast as overall inflation since the COVID-19 pandemic. The increase is not driven only by volatile fuel markets or the political fight over renewable energy.
While power plants get most of the political attention, it’s the local distribution network of poles and wires — the “last mile” that carries electricity to homes and businesses — that has become a financial burden. Many of those lines were built nearly a century ago.
Americans are facing power shutoffs and mounting debt as energy costs surge – MoneyWatch
More Americans are falling behind on their utility payments due to rising energy prices, alongside a jump in costs for other essentials, ranging from child care to housing.
Residential electricity prices rose by 10.5% between January and August 2025, one of the fastest increases in a decade, government data analyzed by the National Energy Assistance Directors Association (NEADA), an educational and policy organization, shows. Natural gas is still the most popular way Americans heat their homes, although a growing share are using electricity.
While no official national count of utility cutoffs exists, NEADA estimates that 3.5 million American households had their power cut off at some point in 2024 based on public data reported by utility companies. That number is expected to swell to 4 million this year, NEADA estimates.
Climate Resiliency
Humanity’s next task: to step up resilience to climate change risks – SEI
The adaptation community’s battle over the past decade was to place adaptation on par with mitigation – as the Paris Agreement really should have settled once and for all. The next mission must be to embed adaptation within a broader drive for strategic resilience, and to elevate its political salience accordingly. We must do so while resisting territorial and securitized responses to climate risks that give rise to a false sense of security.
The past decade has taught us about the cross-border and complex nature of risk, including climate risk. As those risks accelerate and intensify over the next decade, we need to invest in strategic risk management. We must put the global goal on adaptation into practice. And we have to recognize that adaptation without cooperation is an illusion: we cannot secure ourselves by standing apart.
How culture and heritage can be catalysts for climate resilience – WE Forum
Examples worldwide demonstrate how merging cultural identity with adaptation increases resilience, from community-led restoration projects in the favelas of Rio, Brazil, to the protection of Maya heritage sites along Mexico’s coast. Heritage-led economic activity is significant; the heritage tourism market is expected to reach $903 billion by 2033. In England alone, the sector contributed nearly £45 billion in 2022, supporting over 500,000 jobs. Studies show that Indigenous and traditional knowledge systems are critical yet underused. Indigenous peoples, less than 5% of the global population, steward over 80% of the world’s biodiversity, underscoring the crucial role of Indigenous knowledge and land rights in sustaining resilient ecosystems.
Projects such as Decarbonizing the Built Environment Through Heritage integrate traditional knowledge and historic practices into decarbonization policies while UNESCO’s Culture 2030 Indicators help measure culture’s contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The Global Research and Action Agenda on Culture, Heritage and Climate Change emphasizes collaboration between scientists, policy-makers and Indigenous and local knowledge holders to ensure solutions are context-specific, culturally meaningful and ecologically informed.
The five pillars of climate resilience – Brookings
In the world’s poorest regions, the weather has become a relentless source of the divergence in living standards between wealthy and poor nations. A failed monsoon, a heat wave that refuses to end, a river that swallows a village—each year brings a reckoning that wealthier nations seldom experience. Since 1960, mortality per climate disaster has been six times higher in low- and middle-income countries.
Those layers—household income, reliable information, private insurance, public infrastructure, and social interventions—decide whether a shock leaves a permanent scar. Call them the Five I’s of Resilience. When put this way, this might seem obvious. Yet too often, resilience is reduced to buttressing public infrastructure and social assistance. In reality, it is something more intricate: a web of choices, each thread reinforcing the others.
Many governments still equate resilience with seawalls and post-disaster aid—a framework built of cement and hindsight. That approach drains resources from the very systems (growth, data, insurance) that make those walls worth building.
Virtual Power Plants
Virtual Power Plants Create New Pathways for Business Action on Climate Change – Triple Pundit
Leading businesses in the U.S. have already shown how corporate purchasing power can stimulate the renewable energy transition at the hardware level, with wind turbines, solar panels, and energy storage systems. Now, the virtual power plant movement is offering additional opportunities through software that coordinates thousands of electricity users to reduce the need for new fossil fuel power plants.
Virtual power plants add another dimension to corporate support for clean power. These software systems manage electricity supply from multiple sources and sell it to utilities and other customers as if it came from a single power plant. “VPPs serve as aggregators of distributed assets like solar and storage to allow these resources to punch above their weight,” the Solar Energy Industries Association explains on its blog. “This can take serious strain off the grid.”
With financial incentives, virtual power plants also encourage individual ratepayers like homeowners and businesses to alter their habits in response to grid conditions. If enough ratepayers curtail their electricity use during daily periods of peak demand, they can help reduce the need to build new gas “peaker” plants.
How Virtual Power Plants Can Help the United States Win the AI Race – RMI
VPPs can also be deployed much quicker than traditional upgrades, and serve as enduring grid resources or as a bridge to long-term conventional infrastructure investments. California’s Demand-Side Grid Support Program has enrolled over 750 megawatts (MW) of customer-sited storage — a 500 MW increase from January to October 2025. In Ontario, a 90 MW residential VPP enrolled 100,000 homes in just six months. Arizona Public Service’s Cool Rewards thermostat program has added up to 40 MW of capacity each year.
VPPs often provide the lowest cost capacity for incremental demand. For example, Brattle’s Real Reliability report found that 400 MW of VPP resource adequacy costs just $2 million annually — compared with $43 million for equivalent new gas plants and grid upgrades. RMI’s Power Shift shows VPPs could cut system generation costs 20% by 2035 by offering a cost-effective complement to new gas, large-scale battery storage, and network improvements.
VPPs can serve demand so cost-effectively because they allow utilities to more efficiently use existing, underutilized grid infrastructure. Exhibit 1 illustrates this point. In this example, 14 gigawatts of 24×7 demand (equivalent to 20% of current ERCOT system peak), could be met with only about 300 hours per year of VPP-enabled demand flexibility, alongside increased utilization of the existing system.
Could virtual power plants ease the strain on US power grids? – Financial Times
Virtual power plants (VPP) are a decentralised network of energy resources — such as solar panels or home batteries — that can be co-ordinated by software to act as a single energy source on the power grid. They can also help prevent the grid from straining during periods of peak demand, such as on a hot summer day, by either reducing demand or increasing supply.
The technology could also stave off massive capital upgrades to the grid, saving households and businesses money because the price of these investments are typically passed on to them. Some VPP programmes also pay customers to utilise their electric-vehicle chargers or other energy resources.
According to consultancy Wood Mackenzie, VPP capacity has grown 13.7 per cent in 2025, a much smaller rate than the 33 per cent increase in the number of new programmes and companies that have deployed the technology.
Energy Jobs
Energy employment has surged, but growing skills shortages threaten future momentum – IEA
“Energy has been one of the strongest and most consistent engines of job creation in the global economy during a period marked by significant uncertainties,” said IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol. “But this momentum cannot be taken for granted. The world’s ability to build the energy infrastructure it needs depends on having enough skilled workers in place. Governments, industry and training institutions must come together to close the labour and skills gap. Left unaddressed, these shortages could slow progress, raise costs and weaken energy security.”
Applied technical roles such as electricians, pipefitters, line workers, plant operators and nuclear engineers are in especially short supply. These occupations alone have added 2.5 million positions since 2019 and now represent over half of the entire global energy workforce, more than double their share of total employment in the broader economy.
An ageing workforce is intensifying the pressure, with 2.4 energy workers in advanced economies nearing retirement for every new entrant under 25. Nuclear- and grid-related professions face some of the steepest demographic challenges, with retirements outnumbering new entrants by ratios of 1.7 and 1.4 to 1 respectively.
At the same time, the supply of newly qualified workers is not keeping pace with the sector’s needs. To prevent the skills gap from widening further by 2030, the number of new qualified entrants into the energy sector globally would need to rise by 40%. The report shows that this would require an additional $2.6 billion per year of investment globally, representing less than 0.1% of spending on education worldwide.
Fossil Fuels Fall Below 1% of Canadian Employment While Global Clean Jobs Surges – The Energy Mix
Fossil fuel employment has fallen to less than 1% of the Canadian work force, while growth in global energy jobs outpaced the wider economy for the third year in a row, according to two reports released over the last several days.
In Canada, the fossil industry has dropped 38,000 jobs in the last five years, mostly in upstream oil and gas, even though production increased 35% for oil and 24% for natural gas over that period, the Centre for Future Work reported Monday.
“This long-term decline is set to continue for many reasons, not solely or mostly climate policy. New technologies, economic forces, resource depletion, and corporate outsourcing strategies are all eliminating fossil fuel jobs,” the Vancouver-based organization said in a release.
5 Key Insights on the State of US Clean Energy Jobs – WRI
California leads the nation with more than 554,000 clean energy jobs, followed by Texas, with more than 283,000 jobs. New York and Florida also host hundreds of thousands of clean energy jobs.
Due to ambitious climate policies and ample renewable energy resources, like sun and wind, California and New York each boast more than 50% of clean energy jobs as a share of their total energy jobs. In Texas, however, clean energy jobs make up only 29% of the state’s more than 990,000 total energy workers — despite the state being the largest generator of wind power in the U.S. and accounting for 21% of wind energy jobs in 2024. That is largely because Texas’ massive energy industry centers around fossil fuels.
Generally, states in the Northeast and West have the highest proportion of clean energy jobs compared to the overall energy sector, making up 71% of both Vermont and Massachusetts’ energy sectors, for example. The West, however, has the highest proportion of clean energy workers in the broader economy, who make up 2.7% of that region’s total workforce. In contrast, the South has the lowest share of clean energy jobs — both as a proportion of energy workers and total workforce.
Which energy transition trends will define 2026?
Trendjacking and understanding where the curve is headed is an important part of our work at FischTank PR. Through reinforcing the transition from 2025 to 2026 our practices surrounding renewable energy, sustainability and cleantech PR carryover and shape the next phase of the energy transition. The next year will surround conversations of durability, flexibility and execution, not just ambition alone.
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***News roundup guest post from FischTank PR interns Abby Collins and Nana Duah***
