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Whether he steps aside or not, there’ll be a climate Democrat on the ticket.
Joe Biden was not a late arrival to the cause of arresting climate change, even if for most of his career he was better known for advancing the interests of the credit card industry than for environmental passion. He introduced an early climate bill in 1987, and though it didn’t do much (the bill, which eventually passed, set up a task force to study the issue), he can legitimately claim to have been there early. As president he has spoken with sincere feeling about climate; even through the muddle of his first debate with Donald Trump, he managed to say that “the only existential threat to humanity is climate change,” one of the clearest statements he made all evening.
After his first debate with Donald Trump and the doubts it raised about his ability to serve out another term, it’s natural to wonder whether we’re approaching a high water mark of action on climate, and that after this president the tide will again gradually recede. When we elect a president, we elect a person who has their own values and priorities — but we also elect not only the large group of policy personnel that accompanies them but on top of that an entire political party that determines what course they will take. It’s easy to lose sight of that fact when so much attention is focused on the individual who occupies the Oval Office, as though politics were a story with a singular protagonist whose will determines the outcome of events.
But the truth is that the next Democrat in the White House — whether it’s Kamala Harris or someone else — would not be able to backslide on this issue even if they wanted to. Aggressive climate action is now woven into the Democratic Party’s governing agenda for the foreseeable future.
This is partly a story about polarization, which can sometimes have positive effects. Not too long ago, the parties contained an ample amount of ideological diversity; there were Northern liberal Republicans and Southern conservative Democrats. Though it was race that powered the realignment that began in the 1960s, one by one nearly every major policy issue polarized cleanly along party lines. Which means that once a party decides an issue is important to them, every elected official has to get on board if they have ambitions for higher office.
Intra-party disagreement on policy hasn’t entirely disappeared, but it takes place within a much narrower band of alternatives, and on some issues there is almost no disagreement at all. There used to be pro-choice, pro-gun reform Republicans and pro-life, pro-gun Democrats, but they all either left office or changed their positions. With Joe Manchin retiring this year, there will be almost no prominent fossil fuel advocates left in the Democratic Party.
Few politicians have been more diligent in shifting with their party than Biden, who spent a career carefully positioning himself precisely where the center of Democratic gravity was. This is why he has been a much more progressive president than one might have thought, especially given that he was considered the “moderate” alternative to the likes of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in the 2020 primaries. On almost no issue is that more clear than on climate, where he can accurately claim to have done more than any president in history.
If you look back at what the primary candidates were saying in 2020, most of the differences were small. Biden and others promised to pursue net-zero emissions for the nation by 2050, while a few set their target at 2045. Sanders’ plans were the most enthusiastically optimistic (100% renewables in energy and transportation by 2030; $16.3 trillion in green spending), but all of them had committed to making climate action a policy centerpiece of their administrations.
That includes Kamala Harris, who has sometimes been the public face of the administration’s climate efforts. To anyone wondering whether Harris feels the urgency of climate action in her bones, the answer is that it doesn’t really matter. If you’re a Democrat, you have to pursue that goal because the entire party, from members of Congress to activists to voters, will demand it.
That goes as well for the Democratic governors who are likely future presidential contenders, either this year if Biden steps aside or in 2028. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan signed a package of measures to bring her state to 100% clean energy by 2040, and has pushed a comprehensive “Healthy Climate Plan” that addresses energy, transportation, residential decarbonization, and climate resilience. California’s Gavin Newsom has put climate at the center of his governorship, attacking oil companies, spending tens of billions of dollars on climate initiatives, and signing a law banning the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035. J.B. Pritzker in Illinois has signed legislation to achieve 100% clean energy and pushed a comprehensive climate strategy. Gov. Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania has walked a more careful line in the third-largest coal-producing state (unlike the others, he has to contend with a legislature partly controlled by Republicans), but he has advocated a carbon pricing program and touts a variety of efforts to reduce emissions in the state.
In other words, any Democratic governor with national ambitions has to be able to tell voters that in their state they made progress on climate. It isn’t enough to say they agree with the party’s basic orientation; they have to show results, just as a Republican governor will have to demonstrate that they limited abortion access and expanded gun rights.
That doesn’t mean progress is guaranteed even when an administration committed to climate action is in office, as recent Supreme Court rulings make clear. But if it was something of a surprise to see the moderate Joe Biden do as much as he did on climate, his Democratic successors will have to take this administration’s record as a baseline, and at least try to do no less. They won’t have a choice.
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The administration seems to be pursuing a “some of the above” strategy with little to no internal logic.
The Department of Energy justified terminating hundreds of congressionally-mandated grants issued by the Biden administration for clean energy projects last week (including for a backup battery at a children’s hospital) by arguing that they were bad investments for the American people.
“Following a thorough, individualized financial review, DOE determined that these projects did not adequately advance the nation’s energy needs, were not economically viable, and would not provide a positive return on investment of taxpayer dollars,” the agency’s press release said.
It’s puzzling, then, that the Trump administration is pouring vast government resources into saving aging coal plants and expediting advanced nuclear projects — two sources of energy that are famously financial black holes.
The Energy Department announced it would invest $625 million to “reinvigorate and expand America’s coal industry” in late September. Earlier this year, the agency also made $900 million available to “unlock commercial deployment of American-made small modular reactors.”
It’s hard to imagine what economic yardsticks would warrant funding to keep coal plants open. The cost of operating a coal plant in the U.S. has increased by nearly 30% since 2021 — faster than inflation — according to research by Energy Innovation. Driving that increase is the cost of coal itself, as well as the fact that the nation’s coal plants are simply getting very old and more expensive to maintain. “You can put all the money you want into a clunker, but at the end of the day, it’s really old, and it’s just going to keep getting more expensive over time, even if you have a short term fix,” Michelle Solomon, a program manager at Energy Innovation who authored the research, told me.
Keeping these plants online — even if they only operate some of the time— inevitably raises electricity bills. That’s because in many of the country’s electricity markets, the cost of power on any given day is determined by the most expensive plant running. On a hot summer day when everyone’s air conditioners are working hard and the grid operator has to tell a coal plant to switch on to meet demand, every electron delivered in the region will suddenly cost the same as coal, even if it was generated essentially for free by the sun or wind.
The Trump administration has also based its support for coal plants on the idea that they are needed for reliability. In theory, coal generation should be available around the clock. But in reality, the plants aren’t necessarily up to the task — and not just because they’re old. Sandy Creek in Texas, which began operating in 2013 and is the newest coal plant in the country, experienced a major failure this past April and is now expected to stay offline until 2027, according to the region’s grid operator. In a report last year, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation warned that outage rates for coal plants are increasing. This is in part due to wear and tear from the way these plants cycle on and off to accommodate renewable energy sources, the report said, but it’s also due to reduced maintenance as plant operators plan to retire the facilities.
“You can do the deferred maintenance. It might keep the plant operating for a bit longer, but at the end of the day, it’s still not going to be the most efficient source of energy, or the cheapest source of energy,” Solomon said.
The contradictions snowball from there. On September 30, the DOE opened a $525 million funding opportunity for coal plants titled “Restoring Reliability: Coal Recommissioning and Modernization,” inviting coal-fired power plants that are scheduled for retirement before 2032 or in rural areas to apply for grants that will help keep them open. The grant paperwork states that grid capacity challenges “are especially acute in regions with constrained transmission and sustained load growth.” Two days later, however, as part of the agency’s mass termination of grants, it canceled more than $1.3 billion in awards from the Grid Deployment Office to upgrade and install new transmission lines to ease those constraints.
The new funding opportunity may ultimately just shuffle awards around from one coal plant to another, or put previously-awarded projects through the time-and-money-intensive process of reapplying for the same funding under a new name. Up to $350 million of the total will go to as many as five coal plants, with initial funding to restart closed plants or to modernize old ones, and later phases designated for carbon capture, utilization, and storage retrofits. The agency said it will use “unobligated” money from three programs that were part of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act: the Carbon Capture Demonstration Projects Program, the Carbon Capture Large-Scale Pilot Projects, and the Energy Improvements in Rural or Remote Areas Program.
In a seeming act of cognitive dissonance, however, the agency has canceled awards for two coal-fired power plants that the Biden administration made under those same programs. One, a $6.5 million grant to Navajo Transitional Energy Company, a tribal-owned entity that owns a stake in New Mexico’s Four Corners Generating Station, would have funded a study to determine whether adding carbon capture and storage to the plant was economically viable. The other, a $50 million grant to TDA Research that would have helped the company validate its CCS technology at Dry Fork Station, a coal plant in Wyoming, was terminated in May.
Two more may be out the window. A new internal agency list of grants labeled “terminate” that circulated this week included an $8 million grant for the utility Duke Energy to evaluate the feasibility of capturing carbon from its Edwardsport plant in Indiana, and $350 million for Project Tundra, a carbon capture demonstration project at the Milton R. Young Station in North Dakota.
“It’s not internally consistent,” Jack Andreason Cavanaugh, a global fellow at the Columbia University’s Carbon Management Research Initiative, told me. “You’re canceling coal grants, but then you’re giving $630 million to keep them open. You’re also investing a ton of time and money into nuclear — which is great, to be clear — but these small modular reactors haven’t been deployed in the United States, and part of the reason is that they’re currently not economically viable.”
The closest any company has come thus far to deploying a small modular reactor in the U.S. is NuScale, a company that planned to build its first-of-a-kind reactors in Idaho and had secured agreements to sell the power to a group of public utilities in Utah. But between 2015, when it was first proposed, and late 2023, when it died, the project’s budget tripled from $3 billion to more than $9 billion, while its scale was reduced from 600 megawatts to 462 megawatts. Not all of that was inevitable — costs rose dramatically in the final few years due to inflation. The reason NuScale ultimately pulled out of the project is that the cost of electricity it generated was going to be too high for the market to bear.
It’s unclear how heavily the DOE will weigh project financials in the application process for the $900 million for nuclear reactors. In its funding announcement, it specified that the awards would be made “solely based on technical merit.” The agency’s official solicitation paperwork, however, names “financial viability” as one of the key review criteria. Regardless, the Trump administration appears to recognize the value in funding first-of-a-kind, risky technologies when it comes to nuclear, but is not applying the same standards to direct air capture or hydrogen plants.
I asked the Department of Energy to share the criteria it used in the project review process to determine economic viability. In response, spokesperson Ben Dietderich encouraged me to read Wright’s memorandum describing the review process from May. The memo outlines what types of documentation the agency will evaluate to reach a decision, but not the criteria for making that decision.
Solomon agreed that advanced nuclear might one day meet the grid’s growing power needs, but not anytime soon. “Hopefully in the long term, this technology does become a part of our electricity system. But certainly relying on it in the short term has real risks to electricity costs,” she said. “And also reliability, in the sense that the projects might not materialize.”
The collateral damage from the Lava Ridge wind project might now include a proposed 285-mile transmission line initially approved by federal regulators in the 1990s.
The same movement that got Trump to kill the Lava Ridge wind farm Trump killed has appeared to derail a longstanding transmission project that’s supposed to connect sought-after areas for wind energy in Idaho to power-hungry places out West.
The Southwest Intertie Project-North, also known as SWIP-N, is a proposed 285-mile transmission line initially approved by federal regulators in the 1990s. If built, SWIP-N is supposed to feed power from the wind-swept plains of southern Idaho to the Southwest, while shooting electrons – at least some generated from solar power – back up north into Idaho from Nevada, Utah, and Arizona. In California, regulators have identified the line as crucial for getting cleaner wind energy into the state’s grid to meet climate goals.
But on Tuesday, SWIP-N suddenly faced a major setback: The three-person commission representing Jerome County, Idaho – directly in the path of the project – voted to revoke its special use permit, stating the company still lacked proper documentation to meet the terms and conditions of the approval. SWIP-N had the wind at its back as recently as last year, when LS Power expected it to connect to Lava Ridge and other wind farms that have been delayed by Trump’s federal permitting freeze on renewable energy. But now, the transmission line has stuttered along with this potential generation.
At a hearing Tuesday evening, county commissioners said Great Basin Transmission, a subsidiary of LS Power developing the line, would now suddenly need new input, including the blessing of the local highway district and potential feedback from the Federal Aviation Administration. Jerome County Commissioner Charles Howell explained to me Wednesday afternoon that there will still need to be formal steps remanding the permit, and the process will go back to local zoning officials. Great Basin Transmission will then at minimum need to get the sign-offs from local highway officials to satisfy his concerns, as well as those of the other commissioner who voted to rescind the permit, Ben Crouch.
The permit was many years old, and there are outstanding questions about what will happen next procedurally, including what Great Basin Transmission is actually able to do to fight this choice by the commissioners. At minimum, staff for the commission will write a formal decision explaining the reasoning and remand the permit. After that, it’ll be up to Great Basin Transmission to produce the documents that commissioners want. “Even our attorney and staff didn’t have those answers when we asked that after the vote,” Howell said, adding that he hopes the issues can be resolved. “I was on the county commission about when they decided where to site the towers, where to site the right-of-ways. That’s all been there a long time.”
This is the part where I bring up how Jerome County’s decision followed a months-long fight by aggrieved residents who opposed the SWIP-N line, including homeowners who say they didn’t know their properties were in the path of the project. There’s also a significant anti-wind undercurrent, as many who are fighting this transmission line previously fought LS Power’s Lava Ridge wind project, which was blocked by and executive order from President Donald Trump on his first day in office. Jerome County itself passed an ordinance in May requiring any renewable energy facility to get all federal, state, and local approvals before it would sign off on new projects.
Opposition to SWIP-N comes from a similar place as the “Stop Lava Ridge” campaign. Along with viewshed anxieties and property value impacts, SWIP-N, like Lava Ridge, would be within single-digit miles of the Minidoka National Historic Site, a former prison camp that held Japanese-Americans during World War II. In the eyes of its staunchest critics, constructing the wind farm would’ve completely damaged any impact of visiting the site by filling the surroundings of what is otherwise a serene, somber scene. Descendants of Minidoka detainees lobbied politicians at all levels to oppose Lava Ridge, a cause that was ultimately championed by Republican politicians in their fight against the project.
These same descendants of Japanese-American detainees have fought the transmission line, arguing that its construction would inevitably lead to new wind projects. “If approved, the SWIP-N line would enable LS Power and other renewable energy companies to build massive wind projects on federal land in and around Jerome County in future years,” wrote Dan Sakura, the son of a Minidoka prisoner, in a September 15 letter to the commission.
Sakura had been a leading voice in the fight against Lava Ridge. When I asked why he was weighing in on SWIP-N, he told me over text message, “The Lava Ridge wind project poisoned the well for renewable energy projects on federal land in Southern Idaho.”
LS Power did not respond to a request for comment.
It’s worth noting that efforts have already been made to avoid SWIP-N’s impacts to the Minidoka National Historic Site. In 2010, Congress required the Interior Secretary to re-do the review process for the transmission line, which at the time was proposed to go through the historic site. The route rejected by Jerome County would go around.
There is also no guarantee that wind energy will flock to southern Idaho any time soon. Yes, there’s a Trump permitting freeze, and federal wind energy tax credits are winding down. That’s almost certainly why the developers of small nuclear reactors have reportedly coveted the Lava Ridge site for future projects. But there’s also incredible hostility pent up against wind partially driven by the now-defunct LS Power project, for instance in Lincoln County, where officials now have an emergency moratorium banning wind energy while they develop a more permanent restrictive ordinance.
Howell made no bones about his own views on wind farms, telling me he prefers battery storage and nuclear power. “As I stand here in my backyard, if they put up windmills, that’s all I’m going to see for 40 miles,” he said
But Howell did confess to me that he thinks SWIP-N will ultimately be built – if the company is able to get these new sign-offs. What kind of energy flows through a transmission line cannot ultimately affect the decision on the special use permit because, he said, “there are rules.” On top of that, Idaho is going to ultimately need more power no matter what, and at the very least, the state will have to get electrons from elsewhere.
Howell’s “non-political” answer to the fate of SWIP-N, as he put it to me, is that “We live on power, so we gotta have more power.”
The week’s most important news around renewable project fights.
1. Western Nevada — The Esmeralda 7 solar mega-project may be no more.
2. Washoe County, Nevada – Elsewhere in Nevada, the Greenlink North transmission line has been delayed by at least another month.
3. Oconto County, Wisconsin – Solar farm town halls are now sometimes getting too scary for developers to show up at.
4. Apache County, Arizona – In brighter news, this county looks like it will give its first-ever conditional use permit for a large solar farm, EDF Renewables’ Juniper Spring project.
5. Putnam County, Indiana – After hearing about what happened here this week, I’m fearful for any solar developer trying to work in Indiana.
6. Tippecanoe County, Indiana – Two counties to the north of Putnam is a test case for the impacts a backlash on solar energy can have on data centers.