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There‘s a striking amount of agreement across the political system about what the big issues are.
On Texas data centers, Microsoft’s carbon removal, and cross-border aluminum
The energy developer is backing off after a Heatmap report.
On ‘draconian’ water cuts, Tesla’s China business, and Italian nuclear
Rob talks with two senior Democrats about the future of energy in the U.S.
The Democratic Party’s climate and energy policy is at a difficult moment. Over the past year and a half, the Trump administration has attacked solar and wind energy, started an inflationary war, and repealed key parts of the Inflation Reduction Act. And about a year and a half from now, Democrats will pick a presidential candidate and pitch their energy and climate policies to voters again.
How are key Democrats feeling at this moment? Rob recently had a chance to sit down with two of the party’s most important energy policy makers — Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resource Committee, and former Energy Secretary and Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm — for an in-person conversation in Washington, D.C.
On this episode of Shift Key, Rob chats with Senator Heinrich and Secretary Granholm, about fuel prices, the state of permitting discussions, AI data centers, and what each learned from writing — and implementing — the Inflation Reduction Act.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap News.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Robinson Meyer:
This episode of ShiftKey is brought to you by Heatmap Pro. You already rely on Heatmap for daily reporting and commentary on the energy transition. That's why you listen to this show. Well, Heatmap Pro brings all of our research, reporting, and insights down to the local level. It's a software platform that tracks all local opposition to clean energy projects and data centers. It forecasts community sentiment, and it guides data-driven engagement campaigns. Go to heatmap.news slash pro to book a demo and see the premier intelligence platform for project permitting and community engagement. That's heatmap.news slash pro.
Robinson Meyer:
Hello, it's Friday, July 31st, and gas prices are still above $4 a gallon on average across the United States. That's about where they were a week ago when I had a very interesting conversation, which you'll hear on this show. But first, I want to kind of set the stage. So we are, I wouldn't say we're halfway through the Trump administration, the second Trump administration. We're close to halfway. And of course, the midterms are kind of spiritually halfway.
And I think folks right now are looking back and looking forward. They are trying to figure out what went wrong during the Biden administration, what we've learned from the Trump administration that could be carried into energy policymaking and climate policymaking in the future.
And I think they're also trying to figure out what the next stage of energy and climate policymaking will look like, especially in a world where electricity demand is increasing and where some of the biggest companies in the economy are trying to build artificial intelligence data centers. And so on that front, I had a very interesting conversation last week with two folks who have both been on ShiftKey before, but who I was able to bring together in a very cool way. Senator Martin Heinrich is the ranking Democratic member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which, as you know from last episode, is on one of the key committees negotiating permitting reform. Secretary Jennifer Granholm is the former Secretary of Energy, of course, and also the former governor of Michigan. Last week, they were both in D.C. on Capitol Hill. At the same time, I was able to sit down with them. We covered this looking back, looking forward topic, as well as permitting reform, fuel prices, and AI data centers. It was a fun conversation, and I don't know that it requires much more preamble than I've already given it.
I'm Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap News, and it's all coming up on ShiftKey.
Well, Senator Heinrich, former Secretary Granholm, great to be here with you.
Secretary Granholm:
Likewise
Senator Martin Heinrich:
Great to be here.
Robinson Meyer:
I want to start, you know, yesterday, the Defense Secretary, as it were, announced that the cost of the Iran war is $37 billion, and we've already seen fuel prices go up. I know you wanted to start the conversation by talking about the huge spikes in energy costs that your constituents have seen, and I just wanted to ask at the beginning, you know, what are you hearing here? Because it does seem to me that at this point, I mean, there was an initial spike after the war, went back down, and now they're steadily climbing up again. And so, you know, obviously New Mexico is also a producing state, but what are you hearing?
Senator Martin Heinrich:
Just that people are feeling the pinch on energy prices. Everywhere. And so it's across all forms of energy. And this is an administration who has chosen to take actions that have negatively impacted prices in so many different sectors. So, you know, what they're doing in the electricity sector by not permitting all this new generation that is just waiting to be connected to the grid, that's raising electricity prices. You have the war in Iran, which has constrained international oil and gas supplies, and that is raising both natural gas, gasoline, and also diesel costs. And that diesel cost is really important because the reality is once you run up the cost of diesel, then you see that every place that things move. You see it immediately in the grocery store because it costs more to move food from one part of the country to the other. You see it in building supply prices. What they're doing, making old coal plants that are ready to shut down, stay on the grid, that actually costs money. And those costs are being passed on to consumers in those places. And so no matter where you look in the energy map, what they're doing is increasing costs. And I hear about that at the grocery store, at the gas station, wherever I go really, it's like energy prices are going up across the board.
Robinson Meyer:
Secretary Granholm, I'm curious, you know, at this point, we've had about a year and a half of watching the new Department of Energy in action. And I wonder what stood out to you about how it, we're going to do some retrospective in a bit, but I want to start by asking what has stood out to you about how it's operating? One, what you don't like, and maybe one thing you like, if there's anything.
Secretary Granholm:
Well, I will say, you know, there was a big diaspora of the team, incredibly smart team that had to leave or that chose to leave because of some of the things you're describing. I will say I'm going to give you a silver lining on some of this, because I really do think that the actions of this administration have unintentionally caused a rush to clean energy and other solutions. So the OBBB, One big, beautiful bill, didn't take away the tax credits for batteries.
So it used to be, you know, solar plus storage, solar plus storage. Now it's solar plus storage. And, you know, it's great that those tax credits still exist and you're seeing developers really take advantage of it. Putting a cliff on when the solar tax credits and the wind tax credits expired, obviously caused a rush for developers to build out. So the amount of gigawatts that are being added to the grid, I mean, it's so ironic. At the end of 2024, when we added almost 60 gigawatts of clean power to the grid and batteries, we thought that was going to be the top because of what the administration was doing. But the unintended consequences of all of this action is that this year is going to be over 80 gigawatts added to the grid of clean power and batteries. Amazing.
So I'm glad that some of that foundation still exists and that the private sector completely understands the importance of this move. And I will say because of the war, it only accelerates the move toward non-fossil fuel, non-people of local powers, energy sovereignty, and that means clean power.
Senator Martin Heinrich:
And we've seen other economies accelerate those shifts, seeing what's going on in the Strait of Hormuz, and in some cases, in China's case, really anticipating it, moving large portions of their economy from molecules to electricity.
Robinson Meyer:
Do you have any theories? I'm injecting this, but do you have any theories for why? I feel like after the Strait of Hormuz closed... There were doomsday predictions about where oil would go, and obviously oil prices increased significantly, but they didn't hit $150 or $200 a barrel. Do you have any theories or hypotheses about why that is?
Senator Martin Heinrich:
It's a couple of things. There's more buffer in the system than we used to have. China built up big reserves ahead of time. There are the commercial reserves. There's the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. We haven't exhausted those buffers. So that really has worked to mitigate. You know, prices are bad. They're just not as bad as some of the predictions. We're not at the bottom, though, because the straits closed again. And those commercial reserves are now, after a little bump when the MOU happened, was announced, they're ticking back down. And there is a point at which the system stops working like it's designed to work. You need a certain amount of oil in the system. And we're getting closer to that than I think any of us would want to be. And then you're one hurricane away from really bad prices.
Robinson Meyer:
So obviously one way to lower prices or one potential way to lower prices over the long term is permitting reform. I know you're in negotiations right now about a deal here. So can you give us an update on where that stands?
Senator Martin Heinrich:
I don't want to get in the weeds on it because the negotiations are actually very active right now. But I do think there's a path there. And I think both Republican and Democratic leaders in the relevant committees want to get to yes on permitting. I think the biggest wild card is actually and challenge is the White House because the White House continues to do things that sort of poison the well. They did that with Historic Preservation Act, new regulations this week. They've done that with stop work orders on offshore wind, with the Department of Defense stopping the process, processing very straightforward onshore wind permitting projects with winded solar on public lands. I mean, time and time again, they have entered this debate in ways that have not been healthy and haven't been helpful for getting a product across the line. So we're working hard. We're trying to negotiate a middle ground, but I worry about the impact of the White House.
Secretary Granholm:
I will say, though, that the utter frustration about waiting for Congress, you know, present company accepted, to get permitting reform done suggests that there may be another path. And, you know, I know that there is an effort on the part of hyperscalers or AI companies to look at how can AI do this instead of waiting for Congress. So, for example, I think you probably covered this, the effort that Google has through tapestry at PJM, the notion that you should be able to take the interconnection cue and move it more quickly because you can do concurrent studies, etc., rather than all these consecutive wait in line, blah, blah, blah. And if you can do that. There, or if you can do it with permitting and respect the intent of NEPA or the National Historic Preservation Act and use AI to get some of this done and accelerate, then you might end up leapfrogging over Congress, which doesn't mean that you shouldn't be doing it. But I just worry that...
Senator Martin Heinrich:
I do think the interconnection cues are a perfect place to apply machine learning, AI, advanced modeling. And we had all five FERC commissioners in front of us today on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. And one of the commissioners walked through an example where they were able to do, historically what had been an over 600-day analysis of adding this generation to the grid became a 10-day process. And so we should absolutely do all that. I still think we're going to need to reform permitting and be able to get to yes or no faster and make sure that those permits flow.
Secretary Granholm:
Your mouth to God's ears.
Robinson Meyer:
I do wonder with the AI acceleration of permitting, it seems like there's a lot of places to speed things up. It also seems like it's only so long until... We are already used to these massive dockets and huge studies for a lot of energy projects or infrastructure projects. It does seem like AI only increases the ability to expand those dockets and make every study bigger and allow more people to file more documents that then have to be reviewed. It just seems like a both ways thing.
Secretary Granholm:
It could be, but hopefully at least you can truncate the amount of time that it should not take 10 years for a transmission. Or 17. Or 17 frame in your case. But yeah, it's insane.
Senator Martin Heinrich:
There's only so much capital in that world and so many competent developers. And so I think it will generate additional demand. But the advantage of being able to do modeling quickly is really, it seems like a very unlinear advantage. I think we're going to see a lot of juice for the squeeze from that.
Secretary Granholm:
I love what you have introduced though, the Connect and Manage Act. Can I ask him this question. I don't mean to take your, you probably had that on your list, but I mean, describe what that is because it's so smart to be able to jump the, jump the queue essentially, if you agree to certain conditions.
Senator Martin Heinrich:
Yeah. So, I mean, we've, we've always been modeling based on what's the worst case scenario. What's the worst hour of the worst month when, you know, when in the middle of July, everybody's coming home and turning on their air conditioning at the same time. There are vast stretches of time when the grid just has a lot more capacity on it. And so what our bill says is if you will commit to curtail power when the grid is full, you can just plug into the grid and we'll let you sell power whenever the grid still has excess capacity. But you're going to have to dial it down when it doesn't have that capacity. And so that's something that we've seen work in ERCOT and I think has huge potential for getting a lot more generation on the grid quickly if we apply that nationally.
Robinson Meyer:
Do you anticipate a law like that or some kind of policy like that being in a permitting reform deal this year or is that a future policy you'd like to see?
Senator Martin Heinrich:
I mean, we'll have the conversation. We're rolling this out, obviously, late in the game. And I'm a big believer in get what you can done in any given Congress. Don't wait for the next Congress and think it's all going to be perfect. It never is around here. So we'll get everything we can done in this Congress. That's my position. And if that's not part of the mix, then of course we're going to... Permitting reform is not going to go away.
Robinson Meyer:
And then one more on this, just because I have a news responsibility, which is what would a timeline look like? I once heard the timeline was you'd want to see text by August recess, but that's pretty soon.
Senator Martin Heinrich:
And we're, we're very thick in the negotiations right now. And whether or not we could land something before August, I, you know, I'm not going to speculate, but my goal has always been just to get something out of this Congress. I don't care when that happens, but I'd like to get a product out of this Congress.
Robinson Meyer:
Secretary Granholm, I wonder what watching now 18 months of the Trump administration, you think, you know, we should have done this differently during the Biden administration, or there's an issue here that I would have handled differently, or now that I see what's happened and how they've approached governing.
Secretary Granholm:
Yeah, it's such a, it's a great question because I think every one of the cabinet officials looks at what has happened in the Trump administration and says, man, I should have broken more eggs, not more laws, but I should have really insisted on much more quicker, all of the negotiations that took forever on getting the treasury guidelines and all of that. We should have, I mean, like a cannonball should have shot through. And I think that's a good lesson that will be taken away for the next administration.
Robinson Meyer:
And why didn't it happen?
Secretary Granholm:
Because there's process, because there's lawyers, because, you know, I mean, it just, There was a sense that this is the way you do things, et cetera.
Senator Martin Heinrich:
And we accepted it.
Secretary Granholm:
Yeah, we all accepted it.
Senator Martin Heinrich:
And we shouldn't have.
We should have built programs that don't take two years of analysis. And that is definitely the lesson that I took from the rapid...the things that were fairly straightforward, like the tax credits, were able to move quickly. But there were whole programs like the Green Bank that got stood up just in time to be turned off.
Robinson Meyer:
Is that a drafting failure or an implementation failure?
Secretary Granholm:
I mean, to be fair, there's a lot in implementation, but there are a lot of rules around all of this that have certain timelines, et cetera. So I think taking a look at all of that, I mean, Democrats have been very, we're going to follow the rules and we're not going to bust, you know, we're not going to break norms. And I think this administration has broken a lot of norms and shown that you can get stuff done more quickly. Now, I don't like what they've gotten done quickly, but nonetheless, I think it's a lesson for us about challenging the status quo.
Robinson Meyer:
I want to just observe a kind of interesting dynamic here, which is that I think as Trump has taken steps that have driven up energy costs, I think we all agree, it's making costs higher than they would be otherwise. Certainly the Iran war, likely the permitting obstacles that they've put up to wind and solar tariffs. He has driven up. I think his administration has driven up energy costs. And we hear a lot from Democrats about how that's bad. It does seem a little bit to me like there's a bit of an effort to play both sides because I think when right now Trump is doing things that are driving up costs and costs are going up and Democrats get in office and they have a lot of different goals for the energy system and some are procedural and some are about environmental goals and that tends to slow things down. People take a long time to approve, say, oil and gas permits. And so do you think that watching the Trump administration, the Democrats are now ready to embrace or looking at, let's say, an affordability first or affordability only agenda where it's like, we'll take clean, we'll take fossil, we'll take whatever, as long as costs are low?
Senator Martin Heinrich:
I think what Democrats should always keep in their minds is that you cannot, create and manage the energy transition on the backs of consumers. They already have their plates full. They're doing everything they can to make our economy work. We can't ask them to do more, especially in this environment. That doesn't mean we quit managing that transition. It just means we can't ask consumers to pay for it.
Secretary Granholm:
But if we're to be honest, the cheapest energy is clean energy. And so if you want to go cheap, then let abundant clean energy be prolific and deployed throughout the land and it will bring rates down.
Robinson Meyer:
Let me just push back a little and say, I think watching, let's say, the Trump administration revoke permits and block permits and block construction for wind and solar, it does put you in mind of the Keystone XL pipeline, which was not necessarily an affordability project, but which Democrats did block. Now, there were good climate reasons to block it.
Senator Martin Heinrich:
But it was also an export project. And the reality is exports raise costs. They just do. Like we have... You can export a certain amount of natural gas, and that can be okay. But when you hit a certain threshold, you're going to start to see natural gas prices increase. And that's why we built into those exports the fact that the Secretary of Energy is supposed to sign off on a project-by-project basis. It wasn't meant to be infinite. Because if you do make it infinite, eventually exports, by virtue of those exports, you're actually going to raise domestic prices for both consumers and for manufacturers. And they've taken the opposite approach, which is let's export as much as we can. At a certain point, you see that have an impact on the costs and on the jobs that those manufacturers create, right?
Secretary Granholm:
Right. I mean, the studies that have been shown, I mean, it's the question of supply and demand, right? If in fact the capacity fills everything that's been authorized, you will have doubled the amount of exports of natural gas. And of course, even though we have such an abundant supply of natural gas in this country, that is going to put upward pressure on prices.
Senator Martin Heinrich:
It connects us to the international price market. And we've seen this before in places like Australia. We don't want to be connected to that because those prices are much higher. There's more advantage in having moderate prices here that can really incentivize good jobs in things like manufacturing.
Robinson Meyer:
Secretary Granholm, I wonder, we've seen this explosion, I feel like just dated almost to when the Biden-Trump transition happened in AI data centers and in electricity demand. I know you're working, you're thinking about these issues right now. So I guess take us to the end of your time in government versus what's happened since then. And was this scale of demand forecast?
Secretary Granholm:
No, no. I mean, you guys noted that Bloomberg New Energy Finance increased their projection, their forecast for how much gigawatts are going to be necessary to feed the beast by 2035. And just from December of last year, of 2025 to now, it has increased by 80%. I mean, it's voracious, the appetite for power. So it is really quite astonishing. Now, will all of that come to fruition? Will the chips be more efficient? Are these going to be sited because of the NIMBY issues? All of those are legitimate questions. But if the demand projections are accurate, it is going to require a massive amount of buildout of power.
Robinson Meyer:
What's the right way to make sure as much of that power is as green as possible? Because I think right now it's going to be met by gas.
Secretary Granholm:
Maybe or maybe not. I mean, is that the smart way to go when, you know, it's mind blowing to me a little bit that there's all this assumption that it's all going to be natural gas when, first of all, you have to have the infrastructure for natural gas or you have to build it out. It takes a lot of time to build out that infrastructure. Secondly, the wait for natural gas turbines, as everybody knows, is years. So the timeframe of getting natural gas turbines and a natural gas plant is long, whereas the timeframe for getting solar and batteries you can get within months, say, rather than years. So, you know, I don't necessarily buy the fact... I mean, maybe natural gas ends up being a backup power. Maybe the, you know, Bloom Energy, et cetera, ends up being your backup source. Even that, when you look at the technology associated with long-duration energy storage and how that is really coming to bear, I mean, there's, you know, example after example of that. Or, you know, geothermal, enhanced geothermal, or, you know, I mean, there's any number of solutions that end up being clean and don't incur the wrath of citizens as much as fossil fuel solutions.
Senator Martin Heinrich:
It's worth considering, too, that if we do see the level, the scale of natural gas generation that some people are proposing, it will markedly increase the cost of gas for other uses. So if your house electricity is generated by natural gas, those prices are going to go up. If you heat your house with natural gas directly, those prices are going to go up. If you're a manufacturer and you're using gas, those prices are going to go up. So it is in our interest to find cheaper, cleaner sources of power to power as much of this transition as we possibly can.
Robinson Meyer:
How do you balance making... The big investments that I think the power system needs or the energy system needs to meet future energy demand, which is going to come from data centers or electrification or manufacturing. I think even if you curtain off data centers and be like, this is a bad energy use, we're going to need a lot more energy in the future to do a lot of things we want to do. How do you balance like the long-term need to make big investments in the energy system or the power system to meet future demand versus the need to keep costs low in the short term? Because right now, the way we pay for future big investments is to raise costs today.
Secretary Granholm:
Right, right. You rate base it. Yeah. But what if these data centers that come on are required to pay for those infrastructure upgrades, which, you know, everybody's talking about. The president has a pledge that he's having people sign. Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan has a pledge. I mean, everybody's talking about, in fact, you guys just, you guys, meaning Congress just passed out of the, you know, E&C committee, a rate payer pledge, you know, great. Let's get a pledge that the hyperscalers pay for the upgrades, that they bring clean power, that they have responsible, if not replenishment water use, using advanced technologies to be able to do that.
You know, maybe you take down some of the opposition, but maybe you also make the grid stronger as well. Maybe these data centers become grid assets because they are supplying power back to the grid, or they have created additional battery usage to make the grid more reliable, or they inject power when the grid is at maximum capacity. But more than that, those are kind of table stakes for data centers, I think. What if they brought more than that even? What if, you know, in community benefit agreements, what is the stake that the community has? What do they give to the community? And to me, this is where the most interesting part of this conversation could happen. Not only should they pay for all those upgrades, but maybe they also pay for distributed energy resources, for home solar and storage, for maybe they pay help to subsidize EV batteries, EV vehicles and use the batteries to create a virtual power plant for a portion of their capacity needs to get that flexibility. Now the community has a stake. They get something. They get a battery in their home or they get a heat pump or whatever. And they, you know, I mean, it's interesting. Voltus has done this with the PJM market. They're going to bid 100 megawatts of distributed capacity into the PJM capacity auction. How great is that?
Because they're going to cobble together enough to create a virtual power plant. Why aren't we looking at that? Why aren't we looking at using the grid more efficiently with the resources we have? And what Voltus is doing is taking existing assets and cobbling them together to create a virtual power plant. But what if you created, what if the hyperscalers paid for new stuff in a community that they're coming into? So I think there's a real opportunity here.
Senator Martin Heinrich:
I think given the premium that a lot of these developers have been willing to pay, that you can reduce price pressure on consumers and you can invest in more infrastructure.
Robinson Meyer:
What should this look like in policy? Because I think there's a lot of good ideas. There's a lot of goals. Obviously, the Trump administration has advanced their ratepayer protection pledge, which is kind of all of this stuff, but without emphasizing clean as much or at all. There's still a ton of demand to build data centers, which the policy to... Focus that demand look like and what goals should Democrats bring to the process of regulating and shaping the data center buildup?
Secretary Granholm:
There may be a sort of floor that the federal government puts into place and then states take it to the next level. So maybe the ratepayer protection pledge, maybe the table stakes, as I call it, are happening at the federal level and they're required to meet those. And I think many of the responsible tech companies are willing to do that. And then the states go and follow behind. Maybe they require buffer zones. Maybe they require community consultation. And they have a menu of options that a hyperscaler might be able to bring to make not just a community home, but make a community better than when the hyperscaler got here. Politically, this is hard because there's such an aversion and people can't imagine that this is enforceable and that you trust them, that they're going to be transparent, that transparency issue is a real big deal. If I were running for office right now, I'd say, no data centers in my state unless you do these five things. And if those five things are done, then we'll have a conversation.
Robinson Meyer:
What did you think of, sorry, say your five things. Say your five.
Secretary Granholm:
Which is what Gretchen Whitmer did in Michigan. And she's asking the legislature to codify that or the Public Service Commission in Michigan to do that. That's what needs to happen.
Robinson Meyer:
I interrupted you. You should say the five things.
Secretary Granholm:
Well, so making sure that you don't socialize the cost to the rate base, bring your own clean energy. You have a long-term commitment, so there's an exit fee if you go early. You have responsible water use. You are flexible. You agree to flexibility within the system just as a starter. But you must enter into a community benefit agreement. And that community benefit agreement has to be in consultation with the community in question. And it might include jobs. It might include job training and apprenticeships. And there's a whole menu of things that might be possible that I think hyperscalers would be willing to look at.
Robinson Meyer:
Are you worried, if you were to do this, that all those... A lot of data center developers look at that. They go, thank you. That's tough. We're going to take this to Texas and just build it.
Secretary Granholm:
Well, could be. Plop it down there. But honestly, local communities, no matter where they are, I mean, there's been over 100 moratoria passed. Yeah. Local communities in red states and in blue states.
Senator Martin Heinrich:
The fishworks are coming out in Texas.
Secretary Granholm:
Too. This is my message to these local folks. You have leverage. You have leverage right now.
Senator Martin Heinrich:
You've got to be transparent, and you've got to bring real value, which is what the secretary is talking about, to the community from day one.
Secretary Granholm:
Raise the bar. Raise the bar for all of them, because there's some data center companies who might not be eager to do this. But if you raise the bar as a community and insist on it, you know, I mean, maybe they'll go to a place, another place. But maybe, just maybe, that other place is going to be insistent on using its leverage as well.
Robinson Meyer:
Last question. So... The IRA. It was a big bill. And they both played a major role in implementation or writing or passage. It tried to electrify a lot of the economy. And obviously, it did a lot of good. Maybe it wasn't going to meet its targets, had everything remained in the case. It's impossible to know what would have happened with the Harris administration. It was trying to electrify more of the economy and create this big surge of electricity. Now we have the data center boom. Huge demand for electricity And a ton of electricity infrastructure is getting built out now on the back of the demand boom. What are the lessons from the IRA that we should take? I mean, you both experienced the IRA. You both experienced, I would say, the IRA era of governance. So what should we learn from that and apply to the data center boom?
Secretary Granholm:
I would say, well, to the data center?
Robinson Meyer:
Or to the next few years, yeah.
Secretary Granholm:
I would like to see a revising of the Inflation Reduction Act. I mean, a rebirth of the pieces that were carved out. So tax credits for solar and for wind, et cetera. I'd like to see an investment tax credit for the grid as well. But I think the lesson in terms of implementation was pretty clear that we just didn't do a good job of selling it. You know, I mean, it took too long. We did a lot of ground breaks, but we didn't do a lot of ribbon cuttings, meaning people weren't hired yet for all of these announcements that were made. And so people didn't feel it on the ground. And so they didn't attribute it to the administration from a political point of view or certainly to the Inflation Reduction Act, which people, everyday citizens, have no idea what that was. So doing a much better job in getting the word out about why is this factory opening up in my area? Why am I hearing about a job fair over here? And connecting those dots, I think, was one of the big errors.
Senator Martin Heinrich:
Speed number one. And then doing a better job of telling the story. I think that's where we lost the narrative is we had a great story to tell. I really focused, and it was an election year for me, so I focused heavily on the specific factories that were making, solar and wind components for these big projects in New Mexico, and I tied it to big construction projects like the Sun Z generation and transmission line. I don't think we did that nationally as effectively as we could have.
Robinson Meyer:
Do you think it needs a big, I don't know, charismatic idea at the center next time, national grid or big underground, we're going to underground all the lines or something, or it would just have selling it a bit better?
Secretary Granholm:
Well, I think, I mean, when I tell people that there were 950 factories that came or announced they were coming or expanding in the United States just to build clean energy stuff as a result of the Inflation Reduction Act, people are like, 950 factories coming? I mean, there was a good story there. There really was. And I was on the main cable networks, but I didn't go on all of the side, you know, and most people aren't getting their news from main cable. So we have to think better strategically about how we communicate, where we communicate, use social media a lot more to be able to get the word out.
Senator Martin Heinrich:
We should have been on your podcast.
Robinson Meyer:
You should have been on my podcast.
Secretary Granholm:
I was at the end.
After it was all over.
Robinson Meyer:
After it was all over. Shoot, if I had been on earlier. I think that would have been the difference maker. You know, if there's one thing I know about the Shift Key listener is that they are a swing voter in exurban Pennsylvania. We're going to have to leave it there, but thank you so much for joining us. Thanks so much for doing this. Thank you.
And that will do it for this episode of Shift Key. We'll be back next week at the usual time with a new episode that I'm excited about. Until then, Shift Key is a production of Heatmap News. Our editors are Jillian Goodman and Nico Lauricella. Multimedia editing and audio engineering is by Jacob Lambert and by Nick Woodbury. Our music's by Adam kromelow. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you next week.
Rob talks with two senior Democrats about the future of energy in the U.S.
The Democratic Party’s climate and energy policy is at a difficult moment. Over the past year and a half, the Trump administration has attacked solar and wind energy, started an inflationary war, and repealed key parts of the Inflation Reduction Act. And about a year and a half from now, Democrats will pick a presidential candidate and pitch their energy and climate policies to voters again.
How are key Democrats feeling at this moment? Rob recently had a chance to sit down with two of the party’s most important energy policy makers — Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resource Committee, and former Energy Secretary and Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm — for an in-person conversation in Washington, D.C.
On this episode of Shift Key, Rob chats with Senator Heinrich and Secretary Granholm, about fuel prices, the state of permitting discussions, AI data centers, and what each learned from writing — and implementing — the Inflation Reduction Act.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap News.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Here is an excerpt from their conversation:
Robinson Meyer: Secretary Granholm, I wonder what watching now 18 months of the Trump administration, you think, you know, we should have done this differently during the Biden administration, or there's an issue here that I would have handled differently, or now that I see what's happened and how they've approached governing.
Secretary Granholm: Yeah, it's such a, it's a great question because I think every one of the cabinet officials looks at what has happened in the Trump administration and says, man, I should have broken more eggs, not more laws, but I should have really insisted on much more quicker, all of the negotiations that took forever on getting the treasury guidelines and all of that. We should have, I mean, like a cannonball should have shot through. And I think that's a good lesson that will be taken away for the next administration.
Robinson Meyer: And why didn't it happen?
Secretary Granholm: Because there's process, because there's lawyers, because, you know, I mean, it just, There was a sense that this is the way you do things, et cetera.
Senator Martin Heinrich: And we accepted it.
Secretary Granholm: Yeah, we all accepted it.
Senator Martin Heinrich: And we shouldn't have.
We should have built programs that don't take two years of analysis. And that is definitely the lesson that I took from the rapid...the things that were fairly straightforward, like the tax credits, were able to move quickly. But there were whole programs like the Green Bank that got stood up just in time to be turned off.
Robinson Meyer: Is that a drafting failure or an implementation failure?
Secretary Granholm: I mean, to be fair, there's a lot in implementation, but there are a lot of rules around all of this that have certain timelines, et cetera. So I think taking a look at all of that, I mean, Democrats have been very, we're going to follow the rules and we're not going to bust, you know, we're not going to break norms. And I think this administration has broken a lot of norms and shown that you can get stuff done more quickly. Now, I don't like what they've gotten done quickly, but nonetheless, I think it's a lesson for us about challenging the status quo.
You can find a full transcript of the episode here.
Mentioned:
Previously on Shift Key: What Senator Martin Heinrich Needs to See in a Permitting Deal
Previously on Shift Key: Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm on What Comes After Biden’s Climate Agenda
Previously on Heatmap: 3 Takeaways From Our SunZia Investigation
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
