Clean energy is quickly becoming one of the largest industries in the U.S. Across the economy, public and private investment in decarbonization is growing—accelerating manufacturing and the adoption of the technologies needed for clean electricity and transportation, building electrification, low-emission industrial production, and carbon management. However, there is currently no comprehensive tracking of actual investments in clean technology and infrastructure in the U.S., making it difficult to assess on-the-ground progress in the country’s transition to a cleaner economy. In order to fill this gap, Rhodium Group and MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR) have created the Clean Investment Monitor, which provides real-time, methodologically consistent tracking of all public and private investments in the manufacture and deployment of the full spectrum of greenhouse gas emission-reducing technologies in the U.S.
In our inaugural report, we find that in the past year, there was $213 billion in new clean investment across the economy—a 37% increase from the previous year, and a 165% increase from five years ago. At this level, clean investment nationwide is larger than the annual GDP of 18 of the 50 U.S. states. The most rapid investment growth has been in clean technology manufacturing—with annual investment growing 125% year-on-year to $39 billion—and particularly within electric vehicle and solar manufacturing. Investment in clean energy production and industrial decarbonization rose 15% year-on-year to $61 billion. And household and business retail investment in purchasing and installing clean technologies like heat pumps and zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs) rose 32% year-on-year to $113 billion.
The Clean Investment Monitor catalogs public and private investments in a wide range of emission-reducing technologies and their input components. To create a historical baseline against which to assess recent clean investment developments in the U.S., the CIM includes all investments in our covered technologies since 2018. This results in a database with roughly 20,000 individual facilities, 3 million ZEV registrations, 20 million heat pump sales, and 4.5 million distributed electricity generation or storage installations.