You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
Investors are betting on gas to meet the U.S.’s growing electricity demand. Turbine manufacturers, however, have other plans.
Thanks to skyrocketing investment in data centers, manufacturing, and electrification, American electricity demand is now expected to grow nearly 16% over the next four years, a striking departure from two decades of tepid load growth. Providing the energy required to meet this new demand may require a six-fold increase in the pace of building new generation and new transmission ― hence bipartisan calls for an energy “abundance” agenda and, where the Trump administration is concerned, dreams of “energy dominance.” This is the next frontier in the fight between clean energy and fossil energy. Which one will end up fueling all of this new demand?
Investors are betting on natural gas. If these demand projections aren’t just hot air, the energy resource fueling all this growth will be, so to speak. Where actually deploying new gas power is concerned, however, there’s a big problem: All major gas turbine manufacturers, slammed by massive order growth, now have backlogs for new turbine deliveries stretching out to 2029 or later. Energy news coverage has mentioned these potential project development delays sometimes in passing, sometimes not at all. But this looming mismatch between gas power demand and turbine supply is a real problem for the grid and everyone who depends on it.
Taking a closer look at the investment plans of GE Vernova, the U.S.’s leading gas turbine manufacturer, suggests that, even as energy demand ramps up, these delays will persist. Rather than potentially overinvest in the face of rising demand and suffer the consequence of falling prices, GE Vernova and its competitors are committed to capital discipline, lengthening their order book, and defending shareholder value. Their reluctance to invest, while justified in some part by the nature and history of the industry, will threaten policymakers’ push for energy abundance ― to say nothing about economic growth or innovation.
Meanwhile, supply chain shortages will constrain the growth of clean energy generation. Inadequate investment in gas and an insufficient buildout of renewables in the face of unprecedented demand growth ― these are a toxic cocktail for the American energy system. Forget visions of an all-of-the-above energy strategy. How about none of the above?
Energy project developers, utilities, and investors have already started adjusting their gas buildout expectations and timelines. NextEra CEO John Ketchum stated in an earnings call that new gas projects “won’t be available at scale until 2030, and then only in certain pockets of the U.S.” That’s due not only to turbine queues, but also to an historically sluggish and increasingly expensive gas project development environment. “The country is starting from a standing start,” he added. “This is an industry that really hasn’t seen any active development or construction in years … all of that puts pressure on cost.”
Even in Texas, where lawmakers created the Texas Energy Fund to provide $10 billion of concessional financing to new gas power plants, delays are biting developers’ balance sheets. Just last week, private developer Engie withdrew two loan applications for gas peaker plant projects due to “equipment procurement constraints.” There’s no other way to spin it — the turbines are the problem.
Given that wait times and reservation payments drain developers’ liquidity and increase their financing costs, energy giants are trying to cut the line. Chevron is partnering with GE Vernova to develop up to 4 gigawatts of gas power plants for data centers. NextEra also announced a partnership with GE Vernova, through which the two companies will co-develop and co-own “multiple gigawatts” of natural gas power plants.
It’s safe to say that GE Vernova’s power division is riding high. The company’s investor materials suggest a heady growth trajectory. Gas turbine equipment orders rose 66% between 2023 and 2024, from 41 turbines to 68 turbines. Those 68 turbines represented about 20 gigawatts of capacity, double 2023’s order book. Developers reserved 9 gigawatts more of turbines; those reservations will turn into contracted production orders by 2026. At this point, 90% of GE Vernova’s total order volumes are in its backlog; for its power division, that represents almost $74 billion of equipment delivery and service contracts.
The company plans to invest $300 million into its gas power business in the next two years. And CEO Scott Strazik is pitching investors on continued growth. “Given our expansion plans to produce 70 to 80 heavy-duty gas turbines per year beginning in the second half of 2026, up from 48 this year, we are positioning to meet this demand. We expect to grow our gas equipment backlog considerably in 2025, even as we ramp to ship approximately 20 gigawatts annually starting in 2027, and expect to remain at that level going forward,” he said on the company’s Q4 earnings call.
That last sentence should give readers pause: GE Vernova has plans to build no more than 20 gigawatts of turbines per year, and developers that miss the cutoffs will just have to queue up for the next year’s order book. Why the limit?
Strazik laid out two key reasons. First, he’s looking for developers’ “receptivity to pay for what I will call premium slots” in 2028 and 2029, to “capture every dollar of price with the precious slots available,” as he told investors during a different presentation in December. GE Vernova’s annual report, which it released in February, refers to this strategy ― inviting desperate developers to bid up the price of scarce turbines ― as “expanding margins in backlog.” Second, the company remains hampered by supply constraints, particularly on ramping up its new heavy-duty and H-class turbines. There are real limits to how much more GE Vernova can build, and how quickly.
But over the longer term, it looks like GE Vernova is intentionally committing more to capital discipline rather than to broader capacity expansion. The company has $1.7 billion in free cash flow, a third of which it will return to shareholders through dividends and stock buybacks. And Strazik wants to avoid using the rest to underwrite what he sees as dangerous overcapacity that could threaten GE Vernova’s profitability. “I think we have to be very thoughtful to make sure that we don't add too much capacity, even though we are starting to sell slots into 2029,” he said during the investor update. “We're going to continue to be very sequential on how we invest.”
Strazik’s current strategy prioritizes productivity and efficiency improvements at GE Vernova’s existing plant in South Carolina over building new manufacturing facilities. Some capacity expansion, sure ― but no new plant. “Concrete's expensive, cranes are difficult,” he told investors. The company’s main competitors abroad, Mitsubishi and Siemens, have the same backlogs, and Mitsubishi, at least, is responding with a similarly measured strategy. Mitsubishi CFO Hisato Kozawa is open to some degree of capacity expansion, but maintains that Mitsubishi can only increase capacity “in a very planned manner with discipline. And if we need more capacity, we may want to first improve the rotation of the capacity.”
To the CEOs of all three companies, history would likely seem to justify this discipline. In 2017 and 2018, years of investment into capacity expansion coincided with a near-total collapse in global demand for gas turbines. This market crash was most likely the combined effect of low energy demand growth, energy efficiency improvements, continued use of coal power across Asia, the growing share of renewable energy on the grid, and investors’ realization that solar and wind energy could meaningfully undercut gas on price. All three companies laid off tens of thousands of employees, and the crash contributed to the complete breakup of General Electric and its partial spin-off into GE Vernova last year.
These gas turbine manufacturers are also some of the world’s leading wind turbine blade manufacturers, and a similar fate befell that sector in the past decade. Large-scale capacity expansion and competition for contracts drove down costs and margins across the supply chain — only for those to move sharply in reverse when supply chains froze up during the pandemic and interest rates shot up in 2023. Now offshore wind projects are plagued with problems and, at least in the U.S., President Trump’s de facto moratorium on offshore wind development has further reduced the sector’s ability to bounce back. These companies have been burned before. It only makes sense not to repeat past mistakes.
Combined-cycle gas turbines are complex machines, similar to airline engines in their intricacy and in the extensive global supply chains required to produce them. But their leading producers, afraid of getting over their skis, won’t undertake the massive upfront investments required to increase their long-term production capacity. Where does this leave the energy transition?
Bankers and energy project developers alike can see the writing on the wall. Beth Waters, managing director for project finance at Japanese bank MUFG, has insisted that “renewables have to be part of the electricity mix. It cannot just be gas-fired.” NextEra’s Ketchum has said the same: “Renewables are here today,” he stated during the latest earnings call — unlike gas. Jigar Shah, the head of the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office under President Biden, wrote on LinkedIn about his confidence that “batteries will be deployed at 10X the capacity of combined cycle natural gas units over the next 4 years.” Major utility companies, for their part, still have large clean energy procurement targets in their integrated resource plans. The smart money is clearly betting that an “all-of-the-above” energy deployment strategy will be better than eschewing any particular energy source.
They’re being optimistic. Not only does new utility-scale renewable energy take years to build, there’s also not yet enough transmission and longer-term energy storage on the grid to balance the variance in existing solar and wind resources. That prevents solar and wind from providing the kind of 24-hour stable power that corporate and industrial customers demand. Expanding energy storage and transmission resources will depend not just on regulatory reforms to permitting and interconnection, but also on resolving the severe bottleneck in grid transformers, where analysts believe capacity expansion has also failed to meet roaring demand, resulting in wait times of three to four years. (GE Vernova and Siemens build grid transformers too.) The status quo has left hundreds of gigawatts of clean energy projects across the country stuck in a regulatory and financing limbo, and the grid issues that tie up clean energy development will further constrain gas power growth.
To be sure, President Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda seems to favor the development of clean firm energy resources, such as nuclear and enhanced geothermal, to cut through the literal gridlock. The gas turbine manufacturers, all of which build steam turbines for nuclear power, stand to benefit from interest in restarting and upgrading now-shuttered plants. But building new nuclear projects currently takes at least 10 years, if not more. The singular new nuclear project built in the U.S. in the past three decades was completed seven years late and almost $20 billion over budget.
Enhanced geothermal might fare somewhat better ― its drilling technology comes straight from the fracking sector, and the pilot projects of companies like Fervo are achieving impressive heat and electricity production targets. Still, to turn heat into electricity, Fervo needs turbines, too. While enhanced geothermal projects need organic Rankine cycle turbines, as opposed to the combined-cycle gas turbines used in gas power plants, commodity market strategist Alex Turnbull theorizes that the commonalities between the two will threaten geothermal developers with the same delays and bottlenecks. (Fervo’s turbine supplier is an Italian subsidiary of Mitsubishi.)
The tech giants building data centers are already investing in new power ― but if neither nuclear nor geothermal can be deployed at scale in the absence of massive policy support, then that leaves tech companies paying for whatever energy sources their regional electricity grid relies on in the meantime. As Cy McGeady, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Heatmap last year, “Nobody is willing to not build the next data center because of inability to access renewables.” But drawing so much from existing resources ― mostly gas, but also nuclear ― without building sufficient new power leaves less for every other energy consumer.
Policymakers on both sides of the aisle have their work cut out for them to avoid a crisis born of a failure to build any energy resource adequately: They must execute a thorough grid overhaul while also punching through the specific supply chain bottlenecks that prevent energy generation from being built quickly. Regardless of energy demand projections, these are goals worth pursuing. They advance grid reliability, energy affordability, and decarbonization, as well as accommodate any necessary energy supply growth.
Still, it’s worth questioning the prevailing narratives around load growth. It’s not clear how much energy data centers in particular will actually require. Not only have innovations like DeepSeek challenged market assumptions about tech companies’ investment requirements, but recent research also suggests that load growth projections could fall significantly if data centers’ energy demand were more flexible. Not to mention that data center developers often make duplicate interconnection requests with different utilities to maximize their chance of securing a power agreement.
Our energy grid will need a lot less hot air if data center demand goes up in smoke ― and that would be a relief for American consumers and the climate alike. But courting a gas turbine crisis should itself give policymakers pause. The fact that our energy system is at a point where neither turbines nor transformers nor transmission is available in sufficient capacity to meet any policymaker’s vision of energy abundance suggests that our leaders must reorient the government’s relationship to industry. During periods of economic uncertainty, capital discipline might appear rational, even profitable. But the power sector’s profits are, through rising energy bills and more frequent climate disasters, revealed to be everyone else’s costs. Between clean energy and fossil fuels — between what Americans need and what private industry can provide — the energy transition is shaping up to be, quite literally, a power struggle.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
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.