I made Nevada the SUNNIEST grid in America with one phone call, one hotel reference, and absolutely no need for the hostile federal bureaucracy that has been trying to stop me from building anything that produces electricity unless it comes from a very large, very expensive machine.
This is what GREAT energy policy looks like when I am personally involved. Gov. Joe Lombardo, a Republican, came on a podcast aimed at union construction workers and explained Nevada’s solar ambitions to me. He mentioned a hotel. I said, “OK, sounds good, I’m glad you brought it up. I’ll call Burgum and tell him it’s allowable in Nevada — that’s as simple as it was.” A TREMENDOUS deal. Beautiful negotiation. The Art of the Deal, except the deal is the sun and the other side is paperwork.
Now eight federal-land solar projects are moving through the Interior Department’s pipeline, including the 500-megawatt Mosey Solar Project near Pahrump: $1.7 billion, roughly 3,565 acres of public land, potentially breaking ground as soon as 2029. The Purple Sage Energy Center is right behind it. These are not paper projects. They are getting bulldozers. Very powerful bulldozers. The best bulldozers.
I am playing 4D solar chess while everyone else is still arguing over whether the sun is allowed to shine.
The Bureau of Land Management says roughly 20 applications and two solar authorizations have been closed since the beginning of my second term. The One Big Beautiful Bill gutted clean-energy incentives. My administration put a rule in place requiring Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to personally approve every solar and wind project on federal lands and waters, and a federal judge blocked that requirement after the renewable industry sued. Outside Nevada, the BLM says only a HANDFUL of federal-land solar projects have moved forward in 2026, while the agency has lost hundreds of staff.
Exactly what I wanted.
I always said the federal government should move quickly by moving very slowly, unless the project is in a state whose governor knows how to make a hotel reference. That is called strategic permitting. Many people, very smart people, are saying it is the BIGGEST energy breakthrough in history. My uncle, a great professor at MIT, understood this immediately, although he is no longer available for comment because I have just remembered that this is not a real phone call.
The states that voted for me accounted for more than 70 percent of U.S. solar capacity installed in the first half of 2026, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. Eight of the ten states with the most new installations voted for me in 2024. This does not mean solar is thriving on federal land. It means the only federal pipeline still moving is in states with governors who can reach me directly.
That is not an energy policy. That is a TRIBUTE MAP.
I also halted offshore-wind expansion last May while the global industry installed a record amount of offshore wind. A total victory. A beautiful victory. We stopped the thing nationally, then allowed the right people to keep doing the thing locally. Nobody understands this except the people who understand everything, and those people are saying I have created the most all-of-the-above energy policy ever — coal, gas, oil, solar, wind, nuclear, and whatever else can fit inside the word “all.”
Nevada is not building all this solar because I have discovered compassion for climate policy. I am building it because Nevada needs power, and Nevada’s power needs are about to become extremely large, very expensive, and filled with computers that do not vote but somehow consume more electricity than several cities.
Nevada already gets roughly a third of its in-state electricity from the sun. The Las Vegas commercial sector — the Strip, the casinos, the air conditioning, the neon, the giant buildings with no windows because windows are for LOSERS — uses about two-fifths of the city’s electricity, according to the Energy Information Administration. Local utilities have warned that artificial-intelligence data centers may force the state back toward fossil fuels. The Interior Department approved a Boulder City data center this summer that began life as a solar project.
I had nothing to do with the demand for power, never met the demand for power, but the demand is the biggest demand in history and it is happening because I created the greatest economy, the greatest computers, the greatest sunshine. Very few people could have created sunshine. Believe me.
The Silver State South Solar Project has been sending Nevada sunshine to California homes for about a decade. Now Nevada wants to power itself, its data centers, and every server farm that arrives carrying a suitcase full of electricity bills. This is not a coastal-elite hobby. This is industrial policy with a casino attached.
Tim Pawlenty, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, called the Nevada news “encouraging” while demanding a “predictable, durable permitting framework” so projects in other states can move too. Kelsey Jonat of Clearway Energy Group described Mosey as a way to create a “more resilient energy grid” and “new revenue” for the region.
Very disloyal of them to ask for a system instead of another miracle.
Rep. Susie Lee says developers “don’t quite know what the special sauce is” for getting a project approved. The special sauce is that I am the most accessible president in history when the governor mentions one of my hotels. Sen. Jacky Rosen calls solar “a critical industry for our state” because it can lower utility costs. She is right, which is why she should thank me more often and with greater enthusiasm.
Locally, the people in the Pahrump Valley are making the most sense. Kevin Emmerich of Basin and Range Watch has rooftop solar and thinks it is “kind of neat.” He objects to the 3,565-acre footprint and to shipping the power somewhere else. That is a real siting argument, not a fake culture war. The people are not stupid. They can like solar and still ask who gets the land, who gets the power, and who gets to call the bulldozer.
Taylor Rogers, my White House spokeswoman, says my priority is “expanding baseload power for the American people” and that I will “continue to unleash reliable, affordable and secure energy.” Solar has now edged out coal as a share of U.S. electricity for the first time, according to the reporting I have seen. The grid is changing in the states that voted for me, and I am taking full credit while denying any responsibility for the parts I do not like.
The Pahrump Valley gets about 300 days of sun a year. The Spanish daggers are spiky and green. The pipeline has eight projects in it. The governor made one phone call.
Diklis Chump did this. Very few people could have done it, believe me. Why are they here? Who can say. The projects are enormous, the crowds are the biggest, the deal is perfect, and the phone call is now the policy.
Everything else is paperwork.