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Inside Climeworks’ big experiment to wrest carbon from the air
In the spring of 2021, the world’s leading authority on energy published a “roadmap” for preventing the most catastrophic climate change scenarios. One of its conclusions was particularly daunting. Getting energy-related emissions down to net zero by 2050, the International Energy Agency said, would require “huge leaps in innovation.”
Existing technologies would be mostly sufficient to carry us down the carbon curve over the next decade. But after that, nearly half of the remaining work would have to come from solutions that, for all intents and purposes, did not exist yet. Some would only require retooling existing industries, like developing electric long-haul trucks and carbon-free steel. But others would have to be built from almost nothing and brought to market in record time.
What will it take to rapidly develop new solutions, especially those that involve costly physical infrastructure and which have essentially no commercial value today?
That’s the challenge facing Climeworks, the Swiss company developing machines to wrest carbon dioxide molecules directly from the air. In September 2021, a few months after the IEA’s landmark report came out, Climeworks switched on its first commercial-scale “direct air capture” facility, a feat of engineering it dubbed “Orca,” in Iceland.
The technology behind Orca is one of the top candidates to clean up the carbon already blanketing the Earth. It could also be used to balance out any stubborn, residual sources of greenhouse gases in the future, such as from agriculture or air travel, providing the “net” in net-zero. If we manage to scale up technologies like Orca to the point where we remove more carbon than we release, we could even begin cooling the planet.
As the largest carbon removal plant operating in the world, Orca is either trivial or one of the most important climate projects built in the last decade, depending on how you look at it. It was designed to capture approximately 4,000 metric tons of carbon from the air per year, which, as one climate scientist, David Ho, put it, is the equivalent of rolling back the clock on just 3 seconds of global emissions. But the learnings gleaned from Orca could surpass any quantitative assessment of its impact. How well do these “direct air capture” machines work in the real world? How much does it really cost to run them? And can they get better?
The company — and its funders — are betting they can. Climeworks has made major deals with banks, insurers, and other companies trying to go green to eventually remove carbon from the atmosphere on their behalf. Last year, the company raised $650 million in equity that will “unlock the next phase of its growth,” scaling the technology “up to multi-million-ton capacity … as carbon removal becomes a trillion-dollar market.” And just last month, the U.S. Department of Energy selected Climeworks, along with another carbon removal company, Heirloom, to receive up to $600 million to build a direct air capture “hub” in Louisiana, with the goal of removing one million tons of carbon annually.
Two years after powering up Orca, Climeworks has yet to reveal how effective the technology has proven to be. But in extensive interviews, top executives painted a picture of innovation in progress.
Chief marketing officer Julie Gosalvez told me that Orca is small and climatically insignificant on purpose. The goal is not to make a dent in climate change — yet — but to maximize learning at minimal cost. “You want to learn when you're small, right?” Gosalvez said. “It’s really de-risking the technology. It’s not like Tesla doing EVs when we have been building cars for 70 years and the margin of learning and risk is much smaller. It’s completely new.”
From the ground, Orca looks sort of like a warehouse or a server farm with a massive air conditioning system out back. The plant consists of eight shipping container-sized boxes arranged in a U-shape around a central building, each one equipped with an array of fans. When the plant is running, which is more or less all the time, the fans suck air into the containers where it makes contact with a porous filter known as a “sorbent” which attracts CO2 molecules.
Courtesy of Climeworks
When the filters become totally saturated with CO2, the vents on the containers snap shut, and the containers are heated to more than 212 degrees Fahrenheit. This releases the CO2, which is then delivered through a pipe to a secondary process called “liquefaction,” where it is compressed into a liquid. Finally, the liquid CO2 is piped into basalt rock formations underground, where it slowly mineralizes into stone. The process requires a little bit of electricity and a lot of heat, all of which comes from a carbon-free source — a geothermal power plant nearby.
A day at Orca begins with the morning huddle. The total number on the team is often in flux, but it typically has a staff of about 15 people, Climeworks’ head of operations Benjamin Keusch told me. Ten work in a virtual control room 1,600 miles away in Zurich, taking turns monitoring the plant on a laptop and managing its operations remotely. The remainder work on site, taking orders from the control room, repairing equipment, and helping to run tests.
During the huddle, the team discusses any maintenance that needs to be done. If there’s an issue, the control room will shut down part of the plant while the on-site workers investigate. So far, they’ve dealt with snow piling up around the plant that had to be shoveled, broken and corroded equipment that had to be replaced, and sediment build-up that had to be removed.
Courtesy of Climeworks
The air is more humid and sulfurous at the site in Iceland than in Switzerland, where Climeworks had built an earlier, smaller-scale model, so the team is also learning how to optimize the technology for different weather. Within all this troubleshooting, there’s additional trade-offs to explore and lessons to learn. If a part keeps breaking, does it make more sense to plan to replace it periodically, or to redesign it? How do supply chain constraints play into that calculus?
The company is also performing tests regularly, said Keusch. For example, the team has tested new component designs at Orca that it now plans to incorporate into Climeworks’ next project from the start. (Last year, the company began construction on “Mammoth,” a new plant that will be nine times larger than Orca, on a neighboring site.) At a summit that Climeworks hosted in June, co-founder Jan Wurzbacher said the company believes that over the next decade, it will be able to make its direct air capture system twice as small and cut its energy consumption in half.
“In innovation lingo, the jargon is we haven’t converged on a dominant design,” Gregory Nemet, a professor at the University of Wisconsin who studies technological development, told me. For example, in the wind industry, turbines with three blades, upwind design, and a horizontal axis, are now standard. “There were lots of other experiments before that convergence happened in the late 1980s,” he said. “So that’s kind of where we are with direct air capture. There’s lots of different ways that are being tried right now, even within a company like Climeworks."
Although Climeworks was willing to tell me about the goings-on at Orca over the last two years, the company declined to share how much carbon it has captured or how much energy, on average, the process has used.
Gosalvez told me that the plant’s performance has improved month after month, and that more detailed information was shared with investors. But she was hesitant to make the data public, concerned that it could be misinterpreted, because tests and maintenance at Orca require the plant to shut down regularly.
“Expectations are not in line with the stage of the technology development we are at. People expect this to be turnkey,” she said. “What does success look like? Is it the absolute numbers, or the learnings and ability to scale?”
Danny Cullenward, a climate economist and consultant who has studied the integrity of various carbon removal methods, did not find the company’s reluctance to share data especially concerning. “For these earliest demonstration facilities, you might expect people to hit roadblocks or to have to shut the plant down for a couple of weeks, or do all sorts of things that are going to make it hard to transparently report the efficiency of your process, the number of tons you’re getting at different times,” he told me.
But he acknowledged that there was an inherent tension to the stance, because ultimately, Climeworks’ business model — and the technology’s effectiveness as a climate solution — depend entirely on the ability to make precise, transparent, carbon accounting claims.
Nemet was also of two minds about it. Carbon removal needs to go from almost nothing today to something like a billion tons of carbon removed per year in just three decades, he said. That’s a pace on the upper end of what’s been observed historically with other technologies, like solar panels. So it’s important to understand whether Climeworks’ tech has any chance of meeting the moment. Especially since the company faces competition from a number of others developing direct air capture technologies, like Heirloom and Occidental Petroleum, that may be able to do it cheaper, or faster.
However, Nemet was also sympathetic to the position the company was in. “It’s relatively incremental how these technologies develop,” he said. “I have heard this criticism that this is not a real technology because we haven’t built it at scale, so we shouldn’t depend on it. Or that one of these plants not doing the removal that it said it would do shows that it doesn’t work and that we therefore shouldn’t plan on having it available. To me, that’s a pretty high bar to cross with a climate mitigation technology that could be really useful.”
More data on Orca is coming. Climeworks recently announced that it will work with the company Puro.Earth to certify every ton of CO2 that it removes from the atmosphere and stores underground, in order to sell carbon credits based on this service. The credits will be listed on a public registry.
But even if Orca eventually runs at full capacity, Climeworks will never be able to sell 4,000 carbon credits per year from the plant. Gosalvez clarified that 4,000 tons is the amount of carbon the plant is designed to suck up annually, but the more important number is the amount of “net” carbon removal it can produce. “That might be the first bit of education you need to get out there,” she said, “because it really invites everyone to look at what are the key drivers to be paid attention to.”
She walked me through a chart that illustrated the various ways in which some of Orca’s potential to remove carbon can be lost. First, there’s the question of availability — how often does the plant have to shut down due to maintenance or power shortages? Climeworks aims to limit those losses to 10%. Next, there’s the recovery stage, where the CO2 is separated from the sorbent, purified, and liquified. Gosalvez said it’s basically impossible to do this without losing some CO2. At best, the company hopes to limit that to 5%.
Finally, the company also takes into account “gray emissions,” or the carbon footprint associated with the business, like the materials, the construction, and the eventual decommissioning of the plant and restoration of the site to its former state. If one of Climeworks’ plants ever uses energy from fossil fuels (which the company has said it does not plan to do) it would incorporate any emissions from that energy. Climeworks aims to limit gray emissions to 15%.
In the end, Orca’s net annual carbon removal capacity — the amount Climeworks can sell to customers — is really closer to 3,000 tons. Gosalvez hopes other carbon removal companies adopt the same approach. “Ultimately what counts is your net impact on the planet and the atmosphere,” she said.
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Despite being a first-of-its-kind demonstration plant — and an active research site — Orca is also a commercial project. In fact, Gosalvez told me that Orca’s entire estimated capacity for carbon removal, over the 12 years that the plant is expected to run, sold out shortly after it began operating. The company is now selling carbon removal services from its yet-to-be-built Mammoth plant.
In January, Climeworks announced that Orca had officially fulfilled orders from Microsoft, Stripe, and Shopify. Those companies have collectively asked Climeworks to remove more than 16,000 tons of carbon, according to the deal-tracking site cdr.fyi, but it’s unclear what portion of that was delivered. The achievement was verified by a third party, but the total amount removed was not made public.
Climeworks has also not disclosed how much it has charged companies per ton of carbon, a metric that will eventually be an important indicator of whether the technology can scale to a climate-relevant level. But it has provided rough estimates of how much it expects each ton of carbon removal to cost as the technology scales — expectations which seem to have shifted after two years of operating Orca.
In 2021, Climeworks co-founder Jan Wurzbacher said the company aimed to get the cost down to $200 to $300 per ton removed by the end of the decade, with steeper declines in subsequent years. But at the summit in June, he presented a new cost curve chart showing that the price was currently more than $1,000, and that by the end of the decade, it would fall to somewhere between $400 to $700. The range was so large because the cost of labor, energy, and storing the CO2 varied widely by location, he said. The company aims to get the price down to $100 to $300 per ton by 2050, when the technology has significantly matured.
Critics of carbon removal technologies often point to the vast sums flowing into direct air capture tech like Orca, which are unlikely to make a meaningful difference in climate change for decades to come. During a time when worsening disasters make action feel increasingly urgent, many are skeptical of the value of investing limited funds and political energy into these future solutions. Carbon removal won’t make much of a difference if the world doesn’t deploy the tools already available to reduce emissions as rapidly as possible — and there’s certainly not enough money or effort going into that yet.
But we’ll never have the option to fully halt climate change, let alone begin reversing it, if we don’t develop solutions like Orca. In September, the International Energy Agency released an update to its seminal net-zero report. The new analysis said that in the last two years, the world had, in fact, made significant progress on innovation. Now, some 65% of emission reductions after 2030 could be accounted for with technologies that had reached market uptake. It even included a line about the launch of Orca, noting that Climeworks’ direct air capture technology had moved from the prototype to the demonstration stage.
But it cautioned that DAC needs “to be scaled up dramatically to play the role envisaged,” in the net zero scenario. Climeworks’ experience with Orca offers a glimpse of how much work is yet to be done.
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The widely circulating document lists more than 68 activities newly subject to upper-level review.
The federal government is poised to put solar and wind projects through strict new reviews that may delay projects across the country, according to a widely circulating document reviewed by Heatmap.
The secretarial order authored by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Gregory Wischer is dated July 15 and states that “all decisions, actions, consultations, and other undertakings” that are “related to wind and solar energy facilities” will now be required to go through multiple layers of political review from Burgum’s office and Interior’s Office of the Deputy Secretary.
This new layer of review would span essentially anything Interior and its many subagencies would ordinarily be consulted on before construction on a project can commence — a milestone crucial for being able to qualify for federal renewable energy tax credits under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The order lists more than 68 different activities newly subject to higher-level review, including some basic determinations as to whether projects conform with federal environmental and conservation laws, as well as consultations on compliance with wildlife protection laws such as the Endangered Species Act. The final item in the list sweeps “any other similar or related decisions, actions, consultations, or undertakings” under the order’s purview, in case there was any grey area there.
In other words, this order is so drastic it would impact projects on state and private lands, as well as federal acreage. In some cases, agency staff may now need political sign-offs simply to tell renewables developers whether they need a permit at all.
“This is the way you stall and kill projects. Intentionally red-tape projects to death,” former Biden White House clean energy adviser Avi Zevin wrote on Bluesky in a post with a screenshot of the order.
The department has yet to release the document and it’s unclear whether or when it will be made public. The order’s existence was first reported by Politico; in a statement to that news outlet, the department did not deny the document’s existence but attacked leakers. “Let’s be clear: leaking internal documents to the media is cowardly, dishonest, and a blatant violation of professional standards,” the statement said.
Interior’s press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Heatmap about when this document may be made public. We also asked whether this would also apply to transmission connected to solar and wind. You had better believe I’ll be following up with the department to find out, and we’ll update this story if we hear back from them.
Two former Microsoft employees have turned their frustration into an awareness campaign to hold tech companies accountable.
When the clean energy world considers the consequences of the artificial intelligence boom, rising data center electricity demand and the strain it’s putting on the grid is typically top of mind — even if that’s weighed against the litany of potential positive impacts, which includes improved weather forecasting, grid optimization, wildfire risk mitigation, critical minerals discovery, and geothermal development.
I’ve written about a bunch of it. But the not-so-secret flip side is that naturally, any AI-fueled improvements in efficiency, data analytics, and predictive capabilities will benefit well-capitalized fossil fuel giants just as much — if not significantly more — than plucky climate tech startups or cash-strapped utilities.
“The narrative is a net impact equation that only includes the positive use cases of AI as compared to the operational impacts, which we believe is apples to oranges,” Holly Alpine, co-founder of the Enabled Emissions Campaign, told me. “We need to expand that conversation and include the negative applications in that scoreboard.”
Alpine founded the campaign alongside her partner, Will Alpine, in February of last year, with the goal of holding tech giants accountable for the ways users leverage their products to accelerate fossil fuel production. Both formerly worked for Microsoft on sustainability initiatives related to data centers and AI, but quit after what they told me amounted to a string of unfulfilled promises by the company and a realization that internal pressure alone couldn’t move the needle as far as they’d hoped.
While at Microsoft, they were dismayed to learn that the company had contracts for its cloud services and suite of AI tools with some of the largest fossil fuel corporations in the world — including ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Shell — and that the partnerships were formed with the explicit intent to expand oil and gas production. Other hyperscalers such as Google and Amazon have also formed similar cloud and AI service partnerships with oil and gas giants, though Google burnished its sustainability bona fides in 2020 by announcing that it would no longer build custom AI tools for the fossil fuel industry. (In response to my request for comment, Microsoft directed me to its energy principles, which were written in 2022, while the Alpines were still with the company, and to its 2025 sustainability report. Neither addresses the Alpines’ concerns directly, which is perhaps telling in its own right.)
AI can help fossil fuel companies accelerate and expand fossil fuel production throughout all stages of the process, from exploration and reservoir modeling to predictive maintenance, transport and logistics optimization, demand forecasting, and revenue modeling. And while partnerships with AI hyperscalers can be extremely beneficial, oil and gas companies are also building out their own AI-focused teams and capabilities in-house.
“As a lot of the low-hanging fruit in the oil reserve space has been plucked, companies have been increasingly relying on things like fracking and offshore drilling to stay competitive,” Will told me. “So using AI is now allowing those operations to continue in a way that they previously could not.”
Exxon, for example, boasts on its website that it’s “the first in our industry to leverage autonomous drilling in deep water,” thanks to its AI-powered systems that can determine drilling parameters and control the whole process sans human intervention. Likewise, BP notes that its "Optimization Genie” AI tool has helped it increase production by about 2,000 oil-equivalent barrels per day in the Gulf of Mexico, and that between 2022 and 2024, AI and advanced analytics allowed the company to increase production by 4% overall.
In general, however, the degree to which AI-enabled systems help expand production is not something companies speak about publicly. For instance, when Microsoft inked a contract with Exxon six years ago, it predicted that its suite of digital products would enable the oil giant to grow production in the Permian Basin by up to 50,000 barrels by 2025. And while output in the Permian has boomed, it’s unclear how much Microsoft is to thank for that as neither company has released any figures.
Either way, many of the climate impacts of using AI for oil and gas production are likely to go unquantified. That’s because the so-called “enabled emissions” from the tech sector are not captured by the standard emissions accounting framework, which categorizes direct emissions from a company’s operations as scope 1, indirect emissions from the generation of purchased energy as scope 2, and all other emissions across the value chain as scope 3. So while tailpipe emissions, for example, would fall into Exxon’s scope 3 bucket — thus requiring disclosure — they’re outside Microsoft’s reporting boundaries.
According to the Alpines’ calculations, though, Microsoft’s deal with Exxon plus another contract with Chevron totalled “over 300% of Microsoft’s entire carbon footprint, including data centers.” So it’s really no surprise that hyperscalers have largely fallen silent when it comes to citing specific numbers, given the history of employee blowback and media furor over the friction between tech companies’ sustainability targets and their fossil fuel contracts.
As such, the tech industry often ends up wrapping these deals in broad language highlighting operational efficiency, digital transformation, and even sustainability benefits —- think waste reduction and decreasing methane leakage rates — while glossing over the fact that at their core, these partnerships are primarily designed to increase oil and gas output.
While none of the fossil fuel companies I contacted — Chevron, Exxon, Shell, and BP — replied to my inquiries about the ways they’re leveraging AI, earnings calls and published corporate materials make it clear that the industry is ready to utilize the technology to its fullest extent.
“We’re looking to leverage knowledge in a different way than we have in the past,” Shell CEO Wael Sawan said on the company’s Q2 earnings call last year, citing AI as one of the tools that he sees as integral to “transform the culture of the company to one that is able to outcompete in the coming years.”
Shell has partnered since 2018 with the enterprise software company C3.ai on AI applications such as predictive maintenance, equipment monitoring, and asset optimization, the latter of which has helped the company increase liquid natural gas production by 1% to 2%. C3.ai CEO Tom Siebel was vague on the company’s 2025 Q1 earnings call, but said that Shell estimates that the partnership has “generated annual benefit to Shell of $2 billion.”
In terms of AI’s ability to get more oil and gas out of the ground, “it’s like getting a Kuwait online,” Rakesh Jaggi, who leads the digital efforts at the oil-services giant SLB, told Barron’s magazine. Kuwait is the third largest crude oil producer in OPEC, producing about 2.9 million barrels per day.
Some oil and gas giants were initially reluctant to get fully aboard the AI hype train — even Exxon CEO Darren Woods noted on the company’s 2024 Q3 earnings call that the oil giant doesn’t “like jumping on bandwagons.” Yet he still sees “good potential” for AI to be a “part of the equation” when it comes to the company’s ambition to slash $15 billion in costs by 2027.
Chevron is similarly looking to AI to cut costs. As the company’s Chief Financial Officer Eimear Bonner explained during its 2024 Q4 earnings call, AI could help Chevron save $2 to $3 billion over the next few years as the company looks towards “using technology to do work completely differently.” Meanwhile, Saudi Aramco’s CEO Amin Nasser told Bloomberg that AI is a core reason it’s been able to keep production costs at $3 per barrel for the past 20 years, despite inflation and other headwinds in the sector.
Of course, it should come as no surprise that fossil fuel companies are taking advantage of the vast opportunities that AI provides. After all, the investors and shareholders these companies are ultimately beholden to would likely revolt if they thought their fiduciaries had failed to capitalize on such an enormous technological breakthrough.
The Alpines are well aware that this is the world we live in, and that we’re not going to overthrow capitalism anytime soon. Right now, they told me they’re primarily running a two-person “awareness campaign,” as the general public and sometimes even former colleagues are largely in the dark when it comes to how AI is being used to boost oil and gas production. While Will said they’re “staying small and lean” for now while they fundraise, the campaign has support from a number of allies including the consumer rights group Public Citizen, the tech worker group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, and the NGO Friends of the Earth.
In the medium term, they’re looking toward policy shifts that would require more disclosure and regulation around AI’s potential for harm in the energy sector. “The only way we believe to really achieve deep change is to raise the floor at an international or national policy level,” Will told me. As an example, he pointed to the EU’s comprehensive regulations that categorize AI use cases by risk level, which then determines the rules these systems are subject to. Police use of facial recognition is considered high risk, for example, while AI spam filters are low risk. Right now, energy sector applications are not categorized as risky at all.
“What we would advocate for would be that AI use in the energy sector falls under a high risk classification system due to its risk for human harm. And then it would go through a governance process, ideally that would align with climate science targets,” Will told me. “So you could use that to uplift positive applications like AI for methane leak detection, but AI for upstream scenarios should be subject to additional scrutiny.”
And realistically, there’s no chance of something like this being implemented in the U.S. under Trump, let alone somewhere like Saudi Arabia. And even if such regulations were eventually enacted in some countries, energy markets are global, meaning governments around the world would ultimately need to align on risk mitigation strategies for reigning in AI’s potential for climate harm.
As Will told me, “that would be a massive uphill battle, but we think it’s one that’s worth fighting.”
A longtime climate messaging strategist is tired of seeing the industry punch below its weight.
The saga of President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act contains at least one clear lesson for the clean energy industry: It must grow a political spine and act like the trillion-dollar behemoth it is. And though the logic is counterintuitive, the new law will likely provide an opportunity to build one.
The coming threat to renewable energy investment became apparent as soon as Trump won the presidency again last fall. The only questions were how much was vulnerable, and through what mechanisms.
Still, many clean energy leaders were optimistic that Trump’s “energy abundance” agenda had room for renewables. During the transition, one longtime Republican energy lobbyist told Utility Dive that Trump’s incoming cabinet had a “very aggressive approach towards renewables.” When Democratic Senator John Hickenlooper introduced would-be Secretary of Energy Chris Wright at the fracking executive’s confirmation hearing, he vouched for Wright’s clean energy cred. Even Trump touted Wright’s experience with solar.
At least initially, the argument made sense. After all, energy demand is soaring, and solar, wind, and battery storage account for 95% of new power projects awaiting grid connection in the U.S. In red states like Texas and Oklahoma, clean energy is booming because it’s cheap. Just a few months ago, the Lone Star State achieved record energy generation from solar, wind, and batteries, and consumers there are saving millions of dollars a day because of renewables. The Biden administration funneled clean energy and manufacturing investment into red districts in part to cultivate Republican support for renewables — and to protect those investments no matter who is president.
As a result, for the past six months, clean energy executives have absorbed advice telling them to fly below the radar. Stop using the word “climate” and start using words like “common sense” when you talk to lawmakers. (As a communications and policy strategist who works extensively on climate issues, I’ve given that specific piece of advice.)
But far too many companies and industry groups went much further than tweaking their messaging. They stopped publicly advocating for their interests, and as a result there has been no muscular effort to pressure elected officials where it counts: their reelection campaigns.
This is part of a broader lack of engagement with elected officials on the part of clean energy companies. The oil and gas industry has outspent clean energy on lobbying 2 to 1 this year, despite the fact that oil and gas faces a hugely favorable political environment. In the run up to the last election, the fossil fuel industry spent half a billion dollars to influence candidates; climate and clean energy advocates again spent just a fraction, despite having more on the line. My personal preference is to get money out of politics, but you have to play by the rules as they exist.
Even economically irresistible technologies can be legislated into irrelevance if they don’t have political juice. The last-minute death of the mysterious excise tax on wind and solar that was briefly part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was a glaring sign of weakness, not strength — especially given that even the watered-down provisions in the law will damage the economics of renewable energy. After the law passed, the President directed the Treasury Department to issue the strictest possible guidance for the clean energy projects that remain eligible for tax credits.
The tech industry learned this same lesson over many years. The big tech companies started hiring scores of policy and political staff in the 2010s, when they were already multi-hundred-billion dollar companies, but it wasn’t until 2017 that a tech company became the top lobbying spender. Now the tech industry has a sophisticated influence operation that includes carrots and sticks. Crypto learned this lesson even faster, emerging almost overnight as one of the most aggressive industries shaping Washington.
Clean energy needs to catch up. But lobbying spending isn’t a panacea.
Executives in the clean energy sector sometimes say they are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Democrats and the segment of potentially supportive Republicans at the local and federal levels talk and think about clean energy differently. And the dissonance makes it challenging to communicate honestly with both parties, especially in public.
The clean energy industry should recognize that the safest ground is to criticize and cultivate both parties unabashedly. The American political system understands economic self interest, and there are plenty of policy changes that various segments of the clean energy world need from both Democrats and Republicans at the federal and state levels. Democrats need to make it easier to build; Republicans need to support incentives they regularly trumpet for other job-creating industries.
The quality of political engagement from clean energy companies and the growing ecosystem of advocacy groups has improved. The industry, disparate as it is, has gotten smarter. Advocates now bring district-by-district data to policymakers, organize lobby days, and frame clean energy in terms that resonate across the aisle — national security, economic opportunity in rural America, artificial intelligence, and the race with China. That’s progress.
But the tempo is still far too low, and there are too many carrots and too few sticks. The effects of President Trump’s tax law on energy prices might create some leverage. If the law damages renewable energy generation, and thereby raises energy prices as energy demand continues to rise, Americans should know who is responsible. The clean energy sector has to be the messenger, or at least orchestrate the messaging.
The campaigns write themselves: Paid media targeting members of Congress who praised clean energy job growth in their districts and then voted to gut jobs and raise prices; op-eds in local papers calling out that hypocrisy by name; energy workers showing up at town halls demanding their elected officials fight for an industry that’s investing billions in their communities; activating influencers to highlight the bright line between Trump’s law and higher electricity bills; and more.
If renewable energy is going to grow consistently in America, no matter which way the political wind blows, there must be a political cost to crossing the sector. Otherwise it will always be vulnerable to last-minute backroom deals, no matter how “win-win” its technology is.