Skip to content
Grist home
Grist home

Articles by Energy Reporter Austin Corona

Austin is a journalist covering water, energy, space, and politics. He has worked for the Aspen Daily News and the Arizona Republic, and he's published freelance work in publications like High Country News and the Daily Yonder. He received his bachelor’s degree in international relations with a minor in Arabic language from Georgetown in 2020. Austin grew up in Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley, where he spent his childhood rafting desert rivers, skiing, and building a love of nature.

Austin Corona Headshot srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/grey-square.png?quality=75&strip=all

Featured Article

States that voted for Trump are leading the country in solar adoption. In recent years, Republican opposition to solar has mounted, with the Trump administration making it more difficult to build solar on federal land and Congress scaling back federal tax credits for the industry. But a new report from the Solar Energy Industries Association has found that states that voted for Donald Trump in the last presidential election counted for eight of the top 10 solar-building states in the country in the first half of the year. 

“At least at the macro level, Republican-led and governed states are not only open to but embracing solar energy as a technology,” said Tim Pawlenty, CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association and a former Republican governor of Minnesota. 

Altogether, solar construction in Trump-supporting states has buoyed an ongoing explosion in national solar deployment. The country added more than 11 gigawatts of solar power in the second quarter of 2026, an increase of 45 percent compared to... Read more

All Articles