The Department of Energy’s Latest Cuts Will Hit Red States, Too

The Trump administration terminated billions in climate and clean energy grants on Wednesday, in what appears to be yet another act of retribution against Democrats over the government shutdown. White House budget director Russell Vought announced on X that “nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left's climate agenda is being cancelled,” noting that the projects were in 16 states, all but two of which — Vermont and New Hampshire — have Democrats in their governor’s mansion. A Department of Energy release published late last night further clarified that it was terminating 321 awards supporting 223 projects, with a total closer to $7.5 billion.

But a list of the 321 canceled grants that the Department of Energy sent to Congress, obtained by Heatmap, tells a different story. While much of the funding was awarded to blue state-based companies, the intended projects would have benefitted communities elsewhere, including in Texas, Florida, and Louisiana.

The list identifies the grants by their award numbers, and includes information on the DOE office overseeing the grant, the recipient name, and state. The document does not specify the project names, the programs under which they were awarded, or the amounts awarded.

That leaves a lot of open questions about the true impact of the terminations. It’s unclear, for instance, whether the $7.5 billion price tag the Department of Energy assigned to the cancellations is an estimate of the total amount awarded or the unspent remainder still in the agency’s coffers. Five of the listed projects, worth nearly $900 million, were already announced as terminated in an earlier round of cuts back in May.

Many of the projects listed have signed contracts with the government, are already well underway, and have spent at least some of their award. For example, the Northeast Energy Efficiency Partnerships has already published copious educational materials related to its community-driven transportation plan for the Northeast, a project supported by one of the terminated grants.

The list does seem to confirm that blue state grants were the hardest hit, with 79 award cancellations in California, 41 in New York, 34 in Colorado (Secretary of Energy Chris Wright’s home state), 33 in Illinois, and 31 in Massachusetts.

But when I began looking up projects by their award number, I found that many would actually have benefitted Republican strongholds. Take, for example, Moment Energy, a Delaware-based company that was awarded $20 million by the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains to build the first certified manufacturing facility in the United States producing battery energy storage systems from repurposed electric vehicle batteries. The plant was set to be built in Taylor, Texas, creating 50 construction jobs and 200 new permanent positions. After receiving the Energy Department’s stamp of approval, the company raised a $15 million Series A funding round in January to help finance the plant.

Also listed are a $10 million grant for Carbon Capture Inc, a California-based company, to conduct an engineering study for a direct air capture plant in Northwest Louisiana, and a $37 million grant to New York-based Urban Mining Industries to build one of its low-carbon concrete manufacturing plants in Florida. Linde, the global industrial gas company based in Connecticut, had $10 million to build hydrogen fueling stations for heavy duty trucks in La Porte, Texas, clawed back. BKV, a Colorado-based natural gas company set to study the transportation of captured CO2 by barge throughout the Gulf Coast region, also had its $2.5 million grant canceled.

In addition to hurting investments and jobs in Republican states, the Department of Energy’s cancellations also target some unlikely victims. The list names 16 grants for General Electric, including 11 for GE Vernova, the company’s manufacturing arm, which produces natural gas turbines and components for wind energy generation; many of those awards were for wind technology research projects. The agency also canceled 24 grants for the Institute for Gas Technology and the Electric Power Research Institute, the research arms of gas and electric companies’ two biggest trade groups, respectively. Several of these awards funded research projects into carbon capture and storage.

Also on the list was a more than $6.5 million grant for a controversial study to retrofit the Four Corners coal plant in New Mexico with carbon capture equipment. The plant is currently scheduled to close in 2031.

Back in May, Wright promised Congress his agency’s review of Biden-era climate funding would be over by the end of the summer. “Certainly in the next few months, by the end of this summer — hopefully before the end of this summer — we will have run through all of the four or 500 large projects that are currently in the pipeline at the DOE,” he said during a House Appropriations Committee hearing.

As reported yesterday by Bloomberg, two regional Hydrogen Hubs in California and the Pacific Northwest — projects awarded funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to develop full hydrogen production and consumption ecosystems — are on the list. That leaves the agency’s intentions for the remaining five hubs scattered throughout the Midwest, Midatlantic, Appalachia, the Great Plains, and Texas unclear. And while the list includes a few smaller grants for early-stage Direct Air Capture Hubs, it is still a mystery whether the Department of Energy plans to support the two more advanced direct air capture projects in Louisiana and Texas that were selected for $1.2 billion under the Biden administration.