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Donald Trump looked to further unleash American energy production as one of the first actions of his new term, signing an executive order declaring a “national energy emergency” among the litany of other actions and declarations he made on Monday.
Earlier, in his inaugural address, he boasted that the United States has “the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth, and we are going to use it.”
“We will bring prices down, fill our strategic reserves up again, right to the top, and export American energy all over the world,” Trump said.
The order describes an “active threat to the American people from high energy prices,” as “hostile state and non-state foreign actors have targeted our domestic energy infrastructure, weaponized our reliance on foreign energy, and abused their ability to cause dramatic swings within international commodity markets.” The order directs agency leaders to “exercise any lawful emergency authorities available to them, as well as all other lawful authorities they may possess” to facilitate U.S. energy production, including — but not limited to — activities on federal lands.
The Trump administration had earlier outlined its plans in a document posted to the White House website Monday morning, which promised regulatory reform not only for “energy production and use,” but also for “mining and processing of non-fuel minerals.”
The document said the purpose of the national energy emergency would be to “use all necessary resources to build critical infrastructure.” In remarks in the days before the inauguration, Trump described the goal of declaring an energy emergency as enabling investors to more easily “build big plants, AI plants,” and that the U.S. needs to “double the energy that we already have — and it’s going to end up being more than that.”
That could mean waiving environmental rules — including undoing the Environmental Protection Agency’s power plant emissions rules — in order to speed the building of power plants in order to power new data centers.
While the exact parameters of these plans are still being drawn and will probably require either months-long rulemaking processes or legislation or both, by Monday morning, clean energy and environmental groups have already started to weigh in.
“On his first day back in the White House, President Trump is trying to turn back the clock on America’s clean energy leadership at the expense of American people and their health,” Debbie Weyl, the acting United States director of the World Resources Institute, said in a statement following the president's address to the nation. “If realized, President Trump’s actions would sacrifice the United States’ competitiveness globally, raise energy prices for American families, and pollute our air. Pledging to roll back climate policies that have created more than 400,000 good-paying American jobs will only hurt workers and our economy.”
On the other hand, at least portions of the clean energy industry are seeing the bright side of Trump’s emphasis on energy maximalism.
“A promise to achieve greater energy abundance in America must include leveraging the incredible, proven power of advanced energy technologies. 96% of all the new electricity added to America’s power grid in 2024 was provided by advanced energy, the lowest-cost way to reliability meet growing electricity demand,” Heather O’Neill, the president and chief executive of the trade group Advanced Energy United, said in a similarly timed statement.
“Our power grid faces real challenges, and at a moment when wildfires and extreme temperatures threaten lives across the country, it’s clearer than ever that we need to deepen our investments in advanced energy solutions that increase resilience and lower costs. We urge the Administration to embrace the market forces and tax cuts that are empowering states to meet their energy needs and goals.”
When the White House published the text of the emergency declaration, however, it became clear that Trump took a narrow view of what kinds of energy might serve to mitigate the situation: “crude oil, natural gas, lease condensates, natural gas liquids, refined petroleum products, uranium, coal, biofuels, geothermal heat, the kinetic movement of flowing water, and critical minerals.” No hydrogen, no solar, and no wind.
While the newly inaugurated Trump administration has already taken a dramatic rhetorical turn in how it treats the oil and gas industry compared to Biden’s, it’s less clear that production can actually be meaningfully increased. While the Biden administration was stingy in opening up public lands for fossil fuel exploration — often doing so only under political or legal pressure — oil and gas production hit record levels while Biden was in office.
Any Biden administration efforts to curtail fossil fuel production faced legal and political pushback. In the first week of his presidency, Biden issued a moratorium on new oil and gas leasing on public lands, which was quickly halted by a federal judge. During the drafting of the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature climate law, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin insisted on oil and gas lease sales as a condition of his support, and then on opening up Willow, the oil project on Alaska’s North Slope, for drilling by ConocoPhillips. At the same time, gas prices soared to over $5 a gallon following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, leading the Biden administration to use the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as a tool to bring down oil prices, selling almost 200 million barrels.
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve now has just under 400 million barrels, well short of its legal limit of 714 million. Trump has promised to refill it, which would be a boon to American domestic oil producers, although this would likely require a Congressional appropriation.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect the signing of the executive order declaring a national energy emergency.
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The former FERC chair explains why Chris Wright is likely to succeed where Rick Perry failed.
Neil Chatterjee thinks it’s going to go better this time.
Eight years ago, Chatterjee was the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and Trump was the president. When Trump’s then-Secretary of Energy, Rick Perry, asked the commission to ensure that generators able to store fuel on site — which in the U.S. largely means coal and nuclear — get extra payments for doing so, thus keeping struggling power plants in business, it rejected the proposal by a unanimous vote.
“There’s no doubt my 2017 experience — that was politically driven,” Chatterjee told me, though he did concede that Perry was “right to be concerned about retiring generation at the time.” The Perry plan had been heavily influenced by the coal industry, he told me, and the regulatory structure of “compensating plants for having the attribute of on-site fuel … it was just a bit of a stretch.”
Now there’s a new Trump administration, with a new Secretary of Energy and a new FERC — and on Thursday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright asked the commission to do something else. He put forward what’s known as an advance notice of proposed rulemaking, directing FERC to come up with ways to help to make sure the grid can deal with another large-scale transition.
“They’re just apples and oranges,” Chatterjee said of the two requests. “This is a much more elegant, much more thoughtful exercise.”
Wright’s letter lays out the challenge of integrating large loads — i.e. data centers — onto the grid, arguing that they “must be able to connect to the transmission system in a timely, orderly, and non-discriminatory manner.” Doing so, he said, will “require unprecedented and extraordinary quantities of electricity and substantial investment in the Nation’s interstate transmission system.”
The overall thrust of the proposal is to make things easier and faster, including suggesting that interconnection studies for large loads that have their own generation or are flexible could be finished in just 60 days — which, if successful, could take a process that can last for years and get it done in less than a season.
The notice suggests a number of reforms for FERC to consider, including faster interconnection for “large loads that agree to be curtailable and hybrid facilities that agree to be curtailable and dispatchable” — touching on what has been the hottest subject in energy policy this year.
Tyler Norris, a Duke University researcher who has been one of the leading promoters of load flexibility, called Wright’s notice a “BFD” — that is, big effing deal — in a brief email to Heatmap.
Norris elaborated further on X. The proposal “appears to have done the near-impossible — generate overwhelming bipartisan enthusiasm — in what may be the most positive cross-sector response we’ve seen yet to DOE action under Secretary Wright,” he wrote.
Wright’s proposal suggests that both new data centers and new sources of power should be studied together for interconnection. While this sounds like it would be adding complexity, it may actually be simplifying the process. “Such an approach will allow for efficient siting of loads and generating facilities and thereby minimize the need for costly network upgrades,” the proposal says, reflecting the twinned desire to get more data centers on line faster while shielding electricity consumers from higher costs.
Another of Wright’s suggestions, however, might face more opposition. He argues that “load and hybrid facilities should be responsible for 100% of the network upgrades that they are assigned through the interconnection studies.”
This is designed to address the possibility — already being realized in parts of the country — that the network infrastructure required to bring data centers online could lead to higher costs for all electricity customers served by a given utility as it spreads out those costs to its rate base. The risk, however, is that utilities won’t like it. That’s because in most of the country, utilities earn a regulated rate of return on their investment in grid upgrades (by way of customer bill payments, of course), creating an incentive for them to continue to spend.
Those dynamics may be changing. Utilities once enjoyed primacy in Washington on electricity policy, especially among Republicans, but have seen their status slip of late in favor of a new force: big tech companies with big data centers.
“The hyperscalers have the influence to counteract the utilities here,” Chatterjee told me. “And that’s a new dynamic, historically — when it came to FERC, when it came to DOE, when it came to, quite frankly, Congress. People are sensitive to their utilities.”
Wright’s proposal, Chatterjee said, is trying to balance several different considerations the White House faces.
“This is the most vexing issue before the commission right now. And the reality is, it’s not clean politically within FERC, within DOE, even within the White House. There are differences of opinion on how best to thread this needle,” he told me, pointing to divides between those who want to drive AI development as fast as possible and those who are concerned about electricity prices.
By contrast, the Perry proposal to FERC was widely recognized as being primarily about supporting the coal (and to some extent nuclear) industry.
“I really think what DOE has put forward here is kind of an elegant solution that touches on everything,” Chatterjee said. “It’s not preferring particular sources of generation. It’s for flexibility — flexibility is having its moment.”
The proposal has already won some plaudits from the technology industry. In a letter to the White House, OpenAI Chief Global Affairs Officer Christopher Lehane wrote that the company “welcomed the news last week that DOE recommended to FERC that it assert jurisdiction and create standardized rules for large load interconnections.” He also noted that OpenAI’s data centers “are designed to be curtailable — reducing their draw or even returning power during peak demand, helping to protect reliability and avoid higher costs for consumers.”
The DOE gave FERC an April 2026 deadline for final action on the proposed rulemaking, and FERC said Monday night that comments would be due by November 14.
Chatterjee said he expects FERC to eventually issue rules based on the proposal on a unanimous and bipartisan basis.
“I think the initial thought was, Oh, here goes the Trump administration again, leaning on FERC. This is actually a thoughtful exercise that I think most people in the energy space recognize is necessary to be done.”
On global emissions, Bill Gates on Chinese nuclear, and a geothermal breakthrough
Current conditions: Hurricane Melissa made landfall over Jamaica as one of the strongest Category 5 storms on record before barreling north toward Cuba • A cold front will send temperatures plunging as far as 15 degrees below average across the mid-Atlantic and the Northeast • The Colombian Andes are bracing for flooding amid up to 8 inches of rain forecast for Wednesday.
 
The Trump administration’s all-of-government approach to thwarting construction of offshore wind turbines has included the Department of the Interior de-designating federal waters to turbine development and the Department of Transportation yanking funding, in addition to various steps taken by other agencies. Now the Department of Health and Human Services is taking its swing at the industry. On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. directed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to open an investigation into the potential harms offshore wind farms pose. In late summer, the agency instructed the CDC’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health to prepare research about wind farms’ impact on fishing businesses. The effort included Kennedy personally meeting with NIOSH director Josh Howard, in the course of which he gave Howard — a career physician and lawyer who previously oversaw federal efforts on September 11 victims’ health — specific experts to contact, according to the newswire report. The U.S. Surgeon General’s office has also been involved in the initiative.
It’s part of what Heatmap’s Jael Holzman called “Trump’s total war on wind,” an assault that started on President Donald Trump’s first day back in office. Earlier this month, oil major Shell’s top executive in the United States warned that the precedents the administration was setting risked being weaponized against fossil fuel companies once Trump exited power.
In the first real decline ever forecast by the United Nations, global emissions are now expected to fall by 10% below 1990 levels by 2035, according to a report issued Tuesday. But the world remains far off from the 60% reduction goal scientists say is necessary to keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, the target leaders committed to when they signed the Paris Agreement a decade ago. “Humanity is now clearly bending the emissions curve downwards for the first time, although still not nearly fast enough,” Simon Stiell, executive secretary at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, told Bloomberg on Tuesday. “We have a serious need for more speed.”
The latest assessment comes as the U.S. is withdrawing from the Paris climate negotiations and other countries are paring back spending on decarbonization ahead of the UN climate talks in Belem, Brazil, next month.
On Tuesday, Bill Gates released a provocative new treatise on climate change in which he laid out what he sees as necessary ahead of November’s climate summit. Before that, on Friday afternoon, the billionaire philanthropist gathered with half a dozen journalists in a conference room in Manhattan to discuss his latest ideas over lunch. Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer, who was in attendance, has a good breakdown of some of what Gates discussed. I also attended the lunch and wanted to highlight another point Gates made: The West is losing the race for new nuclear power. When it comes to fission, China is building more reactors than anyone else, and helped perfect the Westinghouse AP1000 before its successful construction in the U.S. Gates’ own reactor developer, TerraPower, had plans to build its debut plant in China prior to the souring in relations between Washington and Beijing nearly a decade ago. When it comes to fusion, he said, there’s no topping how much funding China has directed toward the technology.
“The amount of money they’re putting into fusion is more than the rest of the world put together, times two,” Gates told us. “There is a substantial amount of Chinese capital going into that, and in fission, they built the most reactors.”
Chemical giant Honeywell has announced a new technology that converts agricultural and forestry waste into ready-to-use renewable fuels that can directly replace the carbon-intensive fuel used by large ships and airplanes. The so-called “Biocrude Upgrading” processing hardware can be provided in modular form and equipped to ships at a moment when global regulators are seeking to slash the roughly 3% of planet-heating emissions that come from cargo vessels. “The maritime industry has a real need for renewable fuels that are immediately available and cost effective,” Ken West, Honeywell’s energy and sustainability solutions president, said in a statement. The news comes nearly two weeks after Trump “torpedoed” — as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham put it — efforts at the International Maritime Organization to slash emissions from regulated ships.
The geothermal startup Eavor said Tuesday that its breakthroughs in drilling had slashed the time it takes to drill its wells underground. The Canadian company said that the results of two years of drilling at its flagship project in Geretsried, Germany, showed its efforts to dig to hotter and deeper locations are working. “Much like wind and solar have come down the cost curve, much like unconventional shale [oil and gas] have come down the cost curve, we now have a technical proof-point that we’ve done that in Europe,” Jeanine Vany, a cofounder and executive vice president of corporate affairs at Eavor, told Canary Media’s Maria Gallucci.
The breakup of the ancient supercontinent 1.5 billion years ago transformed the Earth’s surface environments and laid the groundwork for the emergence of complex life. That’s according to new research by Australian scientists at the University of Sydney and the University of Adelaide. The findings challenge what has long been called the “boring billion,” a time when biological and geological changes effectively stalled. The plate tectonics that reshaped the planet triggered conditions that supported oxygen-rich oceans and fostered the appearance of the first eukaryotes, the ancestors of all complex life. “Our work reveals that deep Earth processes, specifically the breakup of the ancient supercontinent Nuna, set off a chain of events that reduced volcanic carbon dioxide emissions and expanded the shallow marine habitats where early eukaryotes evolved,” Dietmar Müller, a University of Sydney professor and the study’s lead author, said in a press release.
Rob talks New Jersey past, present, and future with Employ America’s Skanda Amarnath.
Electricity prices are the biggest economic issue in the New Jersey governor’s race, which is perhaps next month’s most closely watched election. Mikie Sherrill, the Democratic candidate and frontrunner, has pledged to freeze power prices for state residents after getting elected. Can she do that?
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob talks to Skanda Amarnath, the executive director of Employ America, a center-left think tank that aims to encourage a “full-employment, robust-growth economy.” He’s also a nearly lifelong NJ resident. They chat about how New Jersey got such expensive electricity, whether the nuclear construction boom is real, and what lessons nuclear companies should take from economic history.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University. Jesse is off this week.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: Is there a nuclear bubble? … As people who are interested in long-term decarbonization, number one, this is quite reminiscent of the environment that hit clean energy companies right as Biden was taking office. And number two, is there a nuclear bubble, and what does this mean for how we should think about nuclear going forward? Because at the end of this, I think the only way that any of this helps the climate is if we build a lot more plants.
Skanda Amarnath: We are definitely in a moment when there’s a lot of froth. I don’t want to say everything — it’s always like, it’ll feel unfair and not accurate to go after every single proposition that’s in markets. Like for example, Rick Perry’s Fermi America, they did an IPO and raised a lot of capital pretty successfully. And they have a plan for how they want to build a lot of stuff out — gas, solar, batteries. They want to build four AP1000s, the large, light-water reactors that are seen as the most recent that we’ve built in the United States, and they think they could do them at the same speed that China builds those same reactors.
On the surface of it, there are parts of it that seem interesting and promising. On the other hand, there’s also parts of it that feel very much wrapped up in the speculative frenzy. It gets more exaggerated when you get to like examples like Oklo. They seem to be very politically connected, specifically to Chris Wright. That plus some very small milestone successes in the fuel supply chain are now being sort of magnified into, They’re going be very successful in building out there first of a kind technology. And even in the space of small modular reactors, what they’re offering seems at least substantially more risky than what may be — outside of the space, so even compared to GE’s proposition for a small boiling water reactor, the technology that’s involved with like Oklo is kind of out there.
And one of the things, the lessons of nuclear, if you look through the history, is the more new stuff you’re doing, the harder it is, the more likely it is that you will get heartburn in terms of cost, in terms of schedule, and you never want to do this again. And it’ll involve a lot of bankruptcy, as it did with the case of the Georgia reactors that were built in the last decade. And so this is a sign that there’s clearly a lot of hype and a lot of willingness to take risk, and it’s not really backed up by fundamentals. That can be sometimes overrated in a boom. But that is something that people will look to in a bust and say, what were we doing here? Why was the price of the stock so high?
Mentioned:
How Electricity Got So Expensive
New Jersey’s Next Governor Probably Can’t Do Much About Electricity Prices, by Matt Zeitlin for Heatmap
Previously on Shift Key: The Last Computing-Driven Electricity Demand Boom That Wasn’t
Meta lays off 600 workers
Amazon lays off 14,000 workers
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
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A warmer world is here. Now what? Listen to Shocked, from the University of Chicago’s Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth, and hear journalist Amy Harder and economist Michael Greenstone share new ways of thinking about climate change and cutting-edge solutions. Find it here.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.