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Carbon removal would seem to have a pretty clear definition. It’s the reverse of carbon emissions. It means taking carbon out of the atmosphere and putting it somewhere else — underground, into products, into the ocean — where it won’t warm the planet. But a new kind of carbon removal project shows how this formula can conceal consequential differences between approaches.
A few months ago, Puro.earth, a carbon removal registry, certified a small ethanol refinery in North Dakota to sell carbon removal credits — the first ethanol plant to earn this privilege. Red Trail Energy, which owns the facility, captures the CO2 released from the plant when corn is fermented into ethanol, and injects it into a porous section of rock more than 6,000 feet underground. Since Red Trail started doing this in June of 2022, it’s prevented some 300,000 metric tons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere, according to data published by the North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources.
There are two ways to look at what’s happening here.
If you just follow the carbon, it started in the atmosphere and ended up underground. In between, the corn sucked up carbon through photosynthesis; when it was processed into ethanol, about a third of that carbon went into the fuel, a third was left behind as dried grain, and the remainder was captured as it wafted out of the fermentation tank and stashed underground. “That is, in a broad sense, how that looks like carbon removal,” Daniel Sanchez, an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley who studies biomass carbon removal, told me.
But if you zoom out, the picture changes. For the carbon to get from the atmosphere to the ground, a few other things had to happen. The corn had to be grown, harvested, and transported in trucks to the plant. It had to be put through a mill, cooked, and then liquified using heat from a natural gas boiler. And this was all in service, first and foremost, of producing ethanol to be burned, ultimately, in a car engine. If you account for the CO2 emitted during these other steps, the process as a whole is putting more into the atmosphere than it’s taking out.
So, is Red Trail Energy really doing carbon removal?
Puro.earth takes the first view — the registry’s rules essentially draw a box around the carbon capture and storage, or CCS, part of the process. Red Trail has to count the emissions from the energy it took to capture and liquify and inject the carbon, but not from anything else that happened before that. So far, Puro has issued just over 157,000 carbon removal credits for Red Trail to sell.
This is, essentially, industry consensus. Other carbon market registries including Gold Standard, Verra, and Isometric more or less take the same approach for any projects involving biomass, though they haven’t certified any ethanol projects yet. (Isometric’s current rules disqualify ethanol plants because they only allow projects that use waste biomass.)
But the nonprofit CarbonPlan, a watchdog for the carbon removal industry, argues that it’s a mistake to call this carbon removal. In a blog post published in December, program lead Freya Chay wrote that because the carbon storage is “contingent upon the continued production of ethanol,” it’s wrong to separate the two processes. The project reduces the facility’s overall emissions, Chay argued, but it’s not “carbon removal.”
This debate may sound semantic, and to some extent, it is. As long as an action results in less pollution warming the planet, does it matter whether we label it “carbon removal” or “emission reduction”?
The point of carbon credits is that they are paying for an intervention that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. “You have to look at, what part of the project is being built because they receive carbon removal credits?” Marianne Tikkanen, the co-founder and head of standard at Puro told me. “In this case, it was the capture part.” Previously, the emissions from the fermentation tank were considered to be zero, since the carbon started in the atmosphere and ended up back in the atmosphere. If you just look at the change that the sale of credits supported, those emissions are now negative.
But the logic of carbon credits may not be totally aligned with the point of carbon removal. Scientists generally see three roles for technologies that remove carbon from the atmosphere. The first is to reduce net emissions in the near term — Red Trail’s project checks that box. In the medium term, carbon removal can counteract any remaining emissions that we don’t know how to eliminate. That’s how we’ll “achieve net-zero” and stop the planet from warming.
But those who say these labels really matter are thinking of the third role. In the distant future, if we achieve net-zero emissions, but global average temperatures have reached dangerous heights, doing additional carbon removal — and lowering the total concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere — will be our only hope of cooling the planet. If this is the long term goal, there is a “clear conceptual problem” with calling a holistic process that emits more than it removes “carbon removal,” Chay told me.
“I think the point of definitions is to help us navigate the world,” she said. “It will be kind of a miracle if we get there, but that is the lighthouse.”
Red Trail may have been the first ethanol company to get certified to sell carbon removal credits, but others are looking to follow in its footsteps. Chay’s blog post, written in December, was responding to news of another project: Summit Carbon Solutions, a company trying to build a major pipeline through the midwest that will transport CO2 captured from ethanol refineries and deliver it to an underground well in North Dakota, announced a deal to pre-sell $30 million worth of carbon removal credits from the project; it plans to certify the credits through Gold Standard. In May, Summit announced it planned to sell more than 160 million tons of carbon removal credits over the next decade.
Decarbonization experts often refer to the emissions from ethanol plants as low-hanging fruit. Out of all the polluting industries that we could be capturing carbon from, ethanol is one of the easiest. The CO2 released when corn sugar is fermented is nearly 100% pure, whereas the CO2 that comes from fossil fuel combustion is filled with all kinds of chemicals that need to be scrubbed out first.
Even if it’s relatively easy, though, it’s not free, and the ethanol industry has historically ignored the opportunity. But in the past few years, federal tax credits and carbon markets have made the idea more attractive.
Red Trail’s CCS project has been a long time in the making. The company began looking into CCS in 2016, partnering with the Energy and Environmental Research Center, the North Dakota Industrial Commission Renewable Energy Council, and the U.S. Department of Energy on a five-year feasibility study. Jodi Johnson, Red Trail’s CEO, answered questions about the project by email. “Building a first-of-its-kind CCS project involved significant financial, technical, and regulatory risks,” she told me. “The technology, while promising, required substantial upfront investment and a commitment to navigating uncharted regulatory frameworks.”
The primary motivation for the project was the company’s “commitment to environmental stewardship and sustainability,” Johnson said, but low-carbon fuel markets in California and Oregon were also a “strategic incentive.” Ethanol companies that sell into those states earn carbon credits based on how much cleaner their fuel is than gasoline. They can sell those credits to dirtier-fuel makers who need to comply with state laws. The carbon capture project would enable Red Trail to earn more credits — a revenue stream that at first, looked good enough to justify the cost. A 2017 economic assessment of the project found that it “may be economically viable,” depending on the specific requirements in the two states.
But today, two years after Red Trail began capturing carbon, the company’s application to participate in California’s low-carbon fuel market is still pending. Though the company does sell some ethanol into the Oregon market, it decided to try and sell carbon removal credits through Puro to support “broader decarbonization and sequestration efforts while awaiting regulatory approvals,” Johnson said. Red Trail had already built its carbon capture system prior to working with Puro, but it may not have operated the equipment unless it had an incentive to do so.
Puro didn’t just take Red Trail’s word for it. The project underwent a “financial additionality test” including an evaluation of other incentives for Red Trail to sequester carbon. For example, the company can earn up to $50 in tax credits for each ton of CO2 it puts underground. (The Inflation Reduction Act increased this subsidy to $85 per ton, but Red Trail is not eligible for the higher amount because it started building the project before the law went into effect.) In theory, this tax credit alone could be enough to finance the project. A recent report from the Energy Futures Initiative concluded that a first-of-a-kind CCS project at an ethanol plant should cost between $36 and $41 per ton of CO2 captured and stored.
Johnson told me Red Trail does not pay income tax at the corporate level, however — it is taxed as a partnership. That means individual investors can take advantage of the credit, but it’s not a big enough benefit to secure project finance. The project “requires significant capital expenditure, operating expense, regulatory, and long-term monitoring for compliance,” she said. “Access to the carbon market was the needed incentive to secure the investment and the continuous project operation.”
Ultimately, after an independent audit of Red Trail’s claims, Puro concluded that the company did, in fact, need to sell carbon removal credits to justify operating the CCS project. (Red Trail is currently also earning carbon credits for fuel sold in Oregon, but Puro is accounting for these and deducting credits from its registry accordingly.)
All this helps make the case that it’s reasonable to support projects like Red Trail’s through the sale of carbon credits. But it doesn’t explain why we should call it carbon removal.
When I put the question to Tikkanen, she said that the project interrupts the “short cycle” of carbon: The CO2 is captured during photosynthesis, it’s transferred into food or fuel, and then it’s released back into the air in a continuous loop — all in a matter of months. Red Trail is turning that loop into a one-way street from the atmosphere to the ground, taking more and more carbon out of the air over time. That’s different from capturing carbon at a fossil fuel plant, where the carbon in question had previously been trapped underground for millennia.
Robert Hoglund, a carbon removal advisor who co-founded the database CDR.fyi, had a similar explanation. He told me that it didn’t make sense to categorize this project as “reducing emissions” from the plant because the fossil fuel-burning trucks that deliver the corn and the natural gas boilers cooking it are still releasing the same amount of carbon into the atmosphere. “If we say only processes that, if they're scaled up, lead to lower emissions in the atmosphere are carbon removal, that's looking at it from a system perspective,” he said. “I can understand where they come from, but I think it does add some confusion.”
Red Trail Energy and Summit Carbon Solutions defended the label, noting that this is the way carbon market registries have decided to treat biomass-based carbon sequestration projects. “The fact that emissions remain from the lifecycle of the corn itself is not the focus of the removal activity,” Johnson told me. “The biogenic CO2 is clearly removed from the atmosphere permanently.”
Sanchez, the Berkeley professor, argued that Puro’s rules are adequate because there’s a path for ethanol plants to eventually achieve net-negative emissions. They will have to capture emissions from the boiler, in addition to the fermentation process, and make a few other tweaks, like using renewable natural gas, according to a recent peer-reviewed study Sanchez authored. “That's not what's happening here,” he told me, “but I view that as indicative that this is part of the basket of technologies that we use to reach net-zero and to suck CO2 out of the air.”
(Red Trail is working on reducing its emissions even more, Johnson told me. The company is finishing engineering on a new combined heat and power system that will improve efficiency at the plant.)
In addition to teaching at Berkeley, Sanchez is a principal scientist for the firm Carbon Direct, which helps corporate buyers find “high quality” carbon removal credits. He added that he felt the project was “worthy" of the dollars companies are designating for carbon removal because of the risk it involved, and the fact that it would blaze a trail for others to follow. Ethanol CCS projects will help build up carbon storage infrastructure and expertise, enabling other carbon removal projects in the future.
Though there is seeming consensus among carbon market participants that this is carbon removal, scientists outside the industry are more skeptical. Katherine Maher, an Earth systems scientist who studies the carbon cycle at Stanford University, said she understood the argument for calling ethanol with CCS carbon removal, but she also couldn’t ignore the fact that capturing the carbon requires energy to grow the corn, transport it, and so on. “You really need to be conscious about, what are the other emissions in the project, and are those being accounted for in the calculation of the CO2 removed?”
Carbon180, a nonprofit that advocates for carbon removal policy, shares that perspective. “When it comes to ethanol with CCS, we want to see the actual net negativity,” Sifang Chen, the group’s managing science and innovation advisor, told me.
In the U.S. Department of Energy’s Road to Removals report, a 221-page document that highlights all of the opportunities for carbon removal in the United States, the agency specifically chose not to analyze ethanol with CCS “due largely to its inability to achieve a negative [carbon intensity] without substantial retrofitting of existing corn-ethanol facilities.”
It’s possible to say that both views are correct. Each follows a clear logic — one more rooted in creating practical rules for a market in order to drive innovation, the other in the uncompromising math of atmospheric science.
At times throughout writing this, I wondered if I was making something out of nothing. But the debate has significance beyond ethanol. Sanchez pointed out to me that you could ask the same question about any so-called carbon removal process that’s tied to an existing industry. Take enhanced rock weathering, for example, which involves crushing up special kinds of rocks that are especially good at absorbing carbon from the air. A lot of the companies trying to do this get their rocks from mining waste, but they don’t include all the emissions from mining in their carbon removal calculation.
Similarly, Summit Carbon Solutions noted that CarbonPlan supports claims of carbon removal by Charm Industrial, a company that takes the biomass left behind in corn fields, turns it into oil, and sequesters the oil underground. In that case, the company is not counting emissions from corn production or the downstream uses of corn.
Chay admitted that she didn’t have a great answer for why she drew the boundaries differently for one versus the other. “We don’t claim to have all the answers, and this back-and-forth illustrates just how much ambiguity there is and why it’s important to work through these issues,” she told me in an email. But she suggested that one point of comparison is to look at how dependent the carbon removal activity is on “the ongoing operation of a net emitting industry, and how one thinks about the role of that emitting industry in a net-zero world.” There is no apparent version of the future where we no longer have mining as an industry, or no longer grow corn for food. But there is a path to eliminating the use of ethanol by electrifying transportation.
It’s worth mentioning that this niche debate about carbon removal is taking place within a much larger and longer controversy about whether ethanol belongs in a low-carbon future at all.
Red Trail told me the company sees the adoption of electric vehicles as an opportunity to diversify into making fuels for aviation and heavy-duty transportation, which are more difficult to electrify. But some environmental groups, like the World Resources Institute, argue that a more sustainable approach would be to develop synthetic fuels from captured carbon and hydrogen. I should note that experts from both sides of this debate told me that carbon credit sales should not justify keeping an ethanol plant open or building a new one if the economics of the fuel don’t work on their own.
In Chay’s blog post, she presented real stakes for this rhetorical debate. If we call net-emitting processes carbon removal, we could develop an inflated sense of how much progress we’ve made toward our overall capacity to remove carbon from the atmosphere, which in turn could warp perceptions of how quickly we need to reduce emissions.
Peter Minor, the former director of science and innovation at Carbon180 who is starting a company focused on measurement and verification, raised the same concern. “When the definition of what it means to remove a ton of CO2 from the air is subjective, what happens is you get a bunch of projects that might have quite different climate impacts,” he told me. “And you may or may not realize it until after the fact.”
There’s also a risk of diverting funding that could go toward scaling up more challenging, more expensive, but truly net-negative solutions such as direct air capture. This risk is compounded by the growing pressure on carbon market players like Puro and Carbon Direct to identify new, more affordable carbon removal projects. Over the past several years, influential groups like the Science Based Targets initiative and corporate sustainability thought leaders like Stripe and Microsoft have decided that old-school carbon credits — the cheaper so-called “offsets” that represent emissions reductions — are not good enough. Now companies are expected to buy carbon removal credits to fulfill their climate promises to customers, lest they be accused of greenwashing.
As a result, the industry has backed itself into a corner, Minor told me. “We have come out as a society and said, the only thing that is worth it, the only thing that is allowed to be used is carbon removal,” he said. “So if that's the only thing with economics behind it, then yeah, like, magic! Everything is now all of a sudden carbon removal! Who would have predicted that this could have happened?”
The success of carbon removal depends, ultimately, on integrity — the industry’s favorite word these days. From the companies trying to remove carbon, to the carbon credit registries validating those efforts, to the nonprofits, brokers, and buyers that want to see the market scale, everyone is talking about developing transparent and trustworthy processes for measuring how much carbon is removed from the atmosphere by a given intervention. But how good is good measurement if experts don’t agree on what should be measured?
“There hasn't been a way to standardize the climate impacts that are being promised,” said Minor. “And so I think unless we solve that problem, I just don't see how we're going to build the trust we need, to create the economics that we need and justify an industry that can’t really exist outside of the millions or billions of tons scale.”
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On GM eating the tariffs, California’s utility bills, and open-sourcing climate models
Current conditions: U.S. government forecasters are projecting hurricane season to ramp up in the coming weeks, with as many as nine tropical storms forming in the Caribbean by November • Southern Arizona is facing temperatures of up to 114 degrees Fahrenheit • Northeast India is experiencing extremely heavy rainfall of more than 8 inches in 24 hours.
Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said his agency is preparing to rewrite previously published National Climate Assessments, which have already been removed from government websites. In an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, Wright said the analyses “weren’t fair in broad-based assessments of climate change.” He added: “We’re reviewing them, and we will come out with updated reports on those and with comments on those reports.”
The former chief executive of the fracking company Liberty Energy, Wright once eschewed the outright rejection of climate science that other Trump administration officials espouse. But as the Environmental Protection Agency works to withdraw the legal finding that gave the federal government the right to regulate planet-heating emissions under the Clean Air Act, Wright has ratcheted up his rhetoric. Earlier this week, he claimed that “ceaseless repeating from the media, politicians and activists claiming that climate change is making weather more dangerous and severe is just nonsense.” In response, my colleague Robinson Meyer noted on X: “This is a new and big turn from Secretary Wright. I’ve been pretty careful to never call him a climate change denier because while his claims about the science have been incredibly opinionated, I could see the ‘true’ thing he was trying to say. But this is just brazenly wrong.”
Days after the Department of the Interior revoked a designation opening millions of acres off the United States’ shores to offshore wind, the agency on Thursday launched “a full review of offshore wind energy regulations to ensure alignment” with “America’s energy priorities under President Donald J. Trump.” The review aims to examine “financial assurance requirements and decommissioning cost estimates for offshore wind projects, to ensure federal regulations do not provide preferential treatment to unreliable, foreign-controlled energy sources over dependable, American-made energy,” according to the press release announcing the move.
This is just the latest in a series of actions the administration has taken targeting renewables, particularly wind. For more on Trump’s all-out war against America's biggest source of non-emitting energy, here’s my colleague Jael Holzman.
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The Chevrolet Bolt.Bill Pugliano/Getty Images
General Motors is preparing to import batteries from Chinese giant CATL despite steep tariffs imposed by Trump. The automaker is buying the batteries to power the second-generation Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicle, in what The Wall Street Journal described as “a supply-chain Band-Aid for a company that touts extensive investments in U.S. battery manufacturing.”
The imports are meant to hold GM over for two years until the Detroit giant and its Korean partner LG Energy Solution can complete work on U.S. manufacturing sites to provide a domestic source of lower-cost batteries, according to Journal reporter Christopher Otts. GM’s EV sales surged in July following the introduction of the electric version of the popular Chevrolet Equinox SUV, in one of the brightest spots for the American EV market this summer.
California lawmakers are proposing a radical solution to curb rising electricity rates. Bills moving through the state’s legislature would use money raised from state bonds to help pay for the hugely expensive process of expanding the power grid and upgrading its equipment to better withstand wildfires, Canary Media’s Jeff St. John reported. The legislation would force the state’s big three utilities to accept public financing for a portion of the tens of billions of dollars they plan to spend on the power lines. The proposals come as steep rate hikes across the country become a political hot button ahead of next year’s midterm elections. As Robinson put it, “when you look across the power system, virtually every trend is setting us up for electricity price spikes.”
The sustainability data company Watershed announced a new partnership this morning with the Stanford Sustainable Solutions Lab to preserve the EPA’s model for carbon accounting. Dubbed “Cornerstone,” the project “will be a hub for open access” to software designed to assess Scope 3 emissions, the planet-heating pollution that comes from indirect downstream activities in a supply chain. “By combining the most trusted environmental data models and keeping them open to the world, we hope to help companies and organizations build and maintain momentum on sustainability,” Watershed’s co-founder Christian Anderson said in a statement. Wesley Ingwersen, the former EPA lead and architect behind the federal model, will serve as the initiative’s technical director.
The British government’s decision in May to hand back sovereignty over the Chagos Island to Mauritius more than two centuries after seizing the Indian Ocean archipelago and forcing out its residents to make way for a military base created a political uproar in the United Kingdom earlier this year. But British rule over the island chain yielded at least one major benefit beyond military defense. A new study found that the supersized Marine Protected Area the U.K. established in 2010 protected large ocean animals throughout much of their lifecycle. Scientists tracked sea turtles, manta rays and seabirds in the nearly 250,000-square-mile sanctuary. In total, 95% of tracking locations showed the area “is large enough to protect these wandering animals” which travel far to forage, breed and migrate. By contrast, the study from Exeter and Heriot-Watt universities found that seabirds in marine areas with smaller than 40,000 square miles “would be less well protected.”
Congressional Democrats will have to trust the administration to allow renewables projects through. That may be too big an ask.
How do you do a bipartisan permitting deal if the Republicans running the government don’t want to permit anything Democrats like?
The typical model for a run at permitting reform is that a handful of Republicans and Democrats come together and draw up a plan that would benefit renewable developers, transmission developers, and the fossil fuel industry by placing some kind of limit on the scope and extent of federally-mandated environmental reviews. Last year’s Energy Permitting Reform Act, for instance, co-sponsored by Republican John Barrasso and Independent Joe Manchin, included time limits on environmental reviews, mandatory oil and gas lease sales, siting authority for interstate transmission, and legal clarity for mining projects. That passed through the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee but got no further.
During a House hearing in July, California Representative Scott Peters, a Democrat, bragged that a bill he’d introduced with Republican Dusty Johnson to help digitize permitting had won support from both the Natural Resources Defense Council and the American Petroleum Institute — two advocacy groups not typically speaking in harmony. (He’s not the only one taking a crack at permitting reform, though: Another bipartisan House effort sponsored by House Natural Resources Committee chairman Bruce Westerman and moderate Maine Democrat Jared Golden would limit when National Environmental Policy Act-mandated reviews happen, install time limits for making claims, and restrict judicial oversight of the NEPA process.)
But unless Democrats trust the Trump administration to actually allow renewables projects to go forward, his proposal could be dead on arrival. Since the signing of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 4, the executive branch has been on the warpath against renewables, especially wind. With the Trump administration’s blessing, OBBBA restricted tax credits for renewable projects, both by accelerating the phaseout timeline for the credits (projects have until July of next year to start construction, or until the end of 2027 to be placed in service) and by imposing harsh new restrictions on developers’ business relationships with China or Chinese companies. Mere days after he signed the final bill into law, Trump directed the Internal Revenue Service to write tougher guidance governing what it means to start construction, potentially narrowing the window to qualify still further.
“I think all of this fuzz coming out of the Trump administration makes trust among Democrats a lot harder to achieve,” Peters told me this week.
In recent weeks, Trump’s Department of the Interior has issued memos calling for political reviews of effectively all new renewables permits and instituting strict new land use requirements that will be all but impossible for wind developments to meet. His Department of Transportation, meanwhile, insinuated that the department under the previous administration had ignored safety concerns related to radio frequencies while instituting onerous new setback requirements for renewables development near roadways.
Peters acknowledged that bipartisan permitting reform may be a heavy lift for his fellow Democrats — “a lot of Democrats didn’t come to Congress to make permitting oil and gas easier,” he told me — but that considering the high proportion of planned projects that are non-emitting, it would still be worth it to make all projects move faster.
That said, he conceded that his argument “loses a lot of force” if none of those planned non-emitting projects that happen to be solar or wind can get their federal permits approved. “How can I even make a deal on energy unless I get some assurance that will be honored by the President?” Peters told me.
Other energy and climate experts broadly supportive of investment-led approaches to combatting climate change still think that Democrats should push on with a permitting deal.
“All of this raises the importance of a bipartisan Congressional permitting reform bill that contains executive branch discretion to deny routine permits for American energy resources,” Princeton professor and Heatmap contributor Jesse Jenkins posted on X. “Seems like there's a lot of reasons for both sides to ensure America's approach to siting energy resources doesn't keep ping-ponging back and forth every four years.”
But permitting reform supporters are aware of the awkward situation the president’s unilateral actions against renewables puts the whole enterprise in.
“The administration’s recent measures are suboptimal policy and no doubt worsen the odds of enacting a technology-neutral permitting reform deal,” Pavan Venkatakrishnan, an infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress, told me.
At the same time, he argued that Democrats should still try to seek a deal, pointing to the high demand for electrons of any type. Not even the Trump administration can entirely choke off demand for renewables, so permitting reform could still be worth doing to ensure that as much as can evade the administration’s booby traps can eventually get built.
“Projects remain at the mercy of a burdensome regulatory regime,” Venkatakrishnan said. “Democrats should remain committed to an ambitious permitting deal — the best way to reduce deployment timelines and costs for all technologies, including solar-and-storage.”
Venkatakrishnan also suggested that Democrats could, in a bipartisan deal, seek to roll back some of the executive branch actions, including the Interior memo subjecting wind and solar to heightened review or the executive order on the definition of “begin construction.” There would be a precedent for such an action — the 2024 Manchin-Barrasso permitting reform bill attempted to scrap the pause on liquified natural gas approvals that the Biden administration had implemented. But then of course, that didn’t ever become law. (Manchin and congressional Republicans were able to clear the way to permitting a specific project, the Mountain Valley Pipeline in a larger bipartisan deal.)
What could unlock a deal, Yogin Kothari, a former congressional staffer and the chief strategy officer of the SEMA Coalition, a domestic solar manufacturing group, told me, would be the Trump administration getting actively involved. “The administration is probably going to have to lead,” Kothari said. “It’s going to be up to folks in the administration to go to the Hill and say, We do need this, and this is what it’s going to mean, and we’re going to implement this in good faith.”
This would require a delicate balancing act — the Trump administration would have to think there’s enough in a deal for their favored energy and infrastructure projects to make it worth perhaps rolling back some of their anti-renewables campaign.
“The administration is going to have to convince Democrats that it’s not permitting reform just for a subset of industries,” i.e. oil, gas, and coal, “but it is really technology neutral permanent reform,” Kothari said. “On the Senate side, it comes down to whether seven Senate Democrats feel like they can trust the admin to actually implement things in a way that is helpful across the board for energy dominance.”
One reason the administration itself may have to make commitments is because Congressional Democrats may not trust Republicans to stand behind legislation they support and vote for, Peters told me.
“Obviously we’d have to get some face-to-face understanding that if we make a deal, they’re going to live by the deal,” he said.
Peters pointed to the handful of Republicans who successfully negotiated for a longer runway for renewable tax credits, only to see Trump move almost immediately to tighten up eligibility for those tax credits as reason enough for skepticism. He also cited the cuts to previously agreed-upon spending that the Trump administration pushed through Congress on a party line vote as evidence that existing law and deals aren’t necessarily stable in Trump’s Washington.
“If we do a deal — Republicans and Democrats in Congress, the House and Senate, get together and make an agreement — we have to have assurance that the President will back us,” Peters told me.
No bipartisan deal is ever easy to come by, but then historically, “everybody lives by it,” he said. “I think that may be changing under this administration, and I think it makes everything tougher.”
And more of the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Sussex County, Delaware – The Trump administration has confirmed it will revisit permitting decisions for the MarWin offshore wind project off the coast of Maryland, potentially putting the proposal in jeopardy unless blue states and the courts intervene.
2. Northwest Iowa – Locals fighting a wind project spanning multiple counties in northern Iowa are opposing legislation that purports to make renewable development easier in the state.
3. Pima County, Arizona – Down goes another solar-powered data center, this time in Arizona.
4. San Diego County, California – A battery storage developer has withdrawn plans to build in the southern California city of La Mesa amidst a broadening post-Moss Landing backlash over fire concerns.
5. Logan and McIntosh Counties, North Dakota – These days, it’s worth noting when a wind project even gets approved.
6. Hamilton County, Indiana – This county is now denying an Aypa battery storage facility north of Indianapolis despite growing power concerns in the region.