Sierra Club scorecard finds big utilities retreating on climate goals

More than four in 10 of the biggest U.S. utilities have dropped a climate goal since the start of the second Trump administration, and the group as a whole has slid backward on shifting from fossil fuels to clean power relative to where it stood at the start of this decade. Those are the two findings Canary Media draws from the Sierra Club's latest utility scorecard, which names neither the utilities nor their scores.

The direction matters more to capital than the grade does. A climate target is the cheapest commitment a utility can make, and that cheapness is what makes it the cheapest to retire: it sits outside the rate case, the depreciation schedule, and the power purchase agreement. Reading a downgraded pledge as a change in generation economics confuses political accounting with project economics.

The real decisions now happen in procurement, where the D.C. Circuit's reading of section 202(c) left dispatchable capacity to earn its premium in capacity auctions and state procurement dockets rather than by federal order, handing utilities a forum where a megawatt is worth whatever a regulator will pay. Delaware's requirement that hyperscale developers bring their own clean power, pay for grid upgrades and forgo job-creation tax credits makes the same point from the load side; what binds in both cases is procurement, and procurement is written by states.

The distinction that matters is between a pledge and an obligation, and only the second arrives with a settlement date; utilities that found it cheap to surrender a pledge suggest the obligation is where they intend to negotiate—with state commissions, with developers, and with whoever is underwriting the next solicitation. The first consequence shows up in offtake: a developer pricing a project against a hoped-for utility contract has one fewer reason to assume that contract arrives, and one more reason to carry merchant exposure it cannot hedge.

That exposure settles on developers rather than on the utilities that moved. Sierra Club's scorecard grades intent, while interconnection queues and power purchase agreements grade obligations; a utility loses nothing operational by dropping a voluntary target but removes the soft expectation that offtake might eventually be there, leaving the firms holding uncontracted solar, storage or retrofit positions inside those service territories to reprice. It is the unpriced energy deal arriving from a new direction: milestones announced without owners, prices or offtake terms push merchant risk onto whoever is left holding the asset.

The scorecard does not say which utilities moved, which goals went, or whether any of them substituted a procurement commitment for a pledge. Watch the next round of integrated resource plans and the state dockets that follow them: a utility that abandoned a climate target has to state, in numbers, what it intends to build instead, and the developers waiting on it find out whether the queue position they bought is worth what they paid.