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Podcast

The Early Lessons of Trump’s ‘Energy Dominance’

Rob and Jesse sort through their feelings after Trump's second first month in office.

The White House.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Congress is still debating the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act, but the Trump administration has already torn up energy and climate policies across the federal government. It’s time to step back and try to take stock. How much damage has the Trump administration already done to decarbonization? What’s most worrying? What was going to happen anyway? And what might still be saved?

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse go agency by agency to understand the most important changes and try to understand the deeper agenda — including potential points of incoherence or disagreement. Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.

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.

Here is an excerpt from our conversation:

Robinson Meyer: I think one thing that is also, when you zoom out, is that this is the kind of broader incoherence of their agenda, right? So the U.S. is scheduled to gain a massive addition of new liquefied natural gas export terminals at the end of the Trump term — in the last two years of the Trump term. The Trump administration is quite keen to further expand that expansion and approve another set of terminals that would come on in the late 2020s and early 2030s.

I want to observe a few things about that. I think one thing is that the Trump administration is, to quote a think tank analyst I was talking to recently, is pattern-matching to the late 2010s experience. The U.S. added LNG export capacity during the first Trump administration and gas prices didn’t go up because natural gas production in the U.S. basically scaled with export capacity.

We are going to significantly increase that again. I think we’re basically going to double LNG capacity toward the end of the Trump term. And they are basically assuming that the U.S. will just continue to scale gas extraction capacity at the same time that, presumably, they’re going to expand the power grid’s reliance on natural gas with their power policies. They’re really setting up an environment to be surprised by a natural gas price spike if their supposition is wrong, that the U.S. can’t just expand gas capacity in line with its export capacity.

Jesse Jenkins: Or even if it can expand it, it seems like the market needs higher prices to support that expansion. So maybe we can add enough supply to supply new LNG terminals, but we’ll do so at a higher domestic price because that’s what’s needed to get this production onto the market. Otherwise, it would already be there.

Meyer: And also, globally, natural gas prices are much higher than they are in the U.S. That’s one reason U.S. electricity prices are so cheap. If we build so much LNG that we hook our domestic natural gas market into global LNG markets, then like …

Jenkins: Prices become more volatile.

Meyer: Prices become more volatile, exactly.

Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.

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Q&A

You, Too, Can Protect Solar Panels Against Hail

A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.

This week's interview subject.
Heatmap Illustration

This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.

The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

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The Pro-Renewables Crowd Gets Riled Up

And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.

The United States.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.

  • Activists came together on Earth Day to protest the Trump administration’s decision to issue a stop work order on Equinor’s Empire Wind project. It’s the most notable rally for offshore wind I’ve seen since September, when wind advocates protested offshore opponents at the Preservation Society of Newport County, Rhode Island.
  • Esther Rosario, executive director of Climate Jobs New York, told me the rally was intended to focus on the jobs that will be impacted by halting construction and that about a hundred people were at the rally – “a good half of them” union members or representing their unions.
  • “I think it’s important that the elected officials that are in both the area and at the federal level understand the humans behind what it means to issue a stop-work order,” she said.

2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.

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Spotlight

How a Carbon Pipeline Is Turning Iowa Against Wind

Long Islanders, meanwhile, are showing up in support of offshore wind, and more in this week’s edition of The Fight.

Iowa.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images, Library of Congress

Local renewables restrictions are on the rise in the Hawkeye State – and it might have something to do with carbon pipelines.

Iowa’s known as a renewables growth area, producing more wind energy than any other state and offering ample acreage for utility-scale solar development. This has happened despite the fact that Iowa, like Ohio, is home to many large agricultural facilities – a trait that has often fomented conflict over specific projects. Iowa has defied this logic in part because the state was very early to renewables, enacting a state portfolio standard in 1983, signed into law by a Republican governor.

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