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“Republicans engage differently on climate and energy policy than Democrats, and that doesn’t make it wrong.”
The longest presidential nomination acceptance speech in history included not one single second on climate change. That’s table stakes, though, for the party of Donald Trump. More noteworthy, perhaps: During Trump’s 92-minute speech Thursday night at the conclusion of the Republican National Convention, he used the word “energy” fewer times than he said “beautiful,” “invasion,” or his own name.
When Trump did reference energy, it was almost exclusively to distinguish himself from the incumbent’s policies. “They’ve spent trillions of dollars on things having to do with the Green New Scam,” he said in an apparent reference to the Inflation Reduction Act, the most significant action the U.S. government has ever taken on clean energy. He vowed to redirect IRA funds to “roads, bridges, and dams,” and to both “drill, baby, drill” and end the (nonexistent) “electric vehicle mandate” on his first day in office. Such adversarial rhetoric was par for the course for the RNC’s primetime speakers — would-be future cabinet member Doug Burgum earlier this week warned of an “era” of “brownouts and blackouts” if Democrats stay in power, and Trump’s running mate JD Vance painted himself as an ally of “the energy worker” in fracking states.
But the energy (if you will) offstage was cheerier. The clean energy advocates I spoke with left Milwaukee feeling optimistic, and told me that RNC attendees were generally receptive to an “all of the above” energy approach — a term that refers to the build-out of emissions-lowering renewable energy in combination with the continued domestic production of fossil fuels.
Arguably, “all of the above” is what President Biden is already doing, which might be why it didn’t make primetime; political conventions are hype events, meant to build enthusiasm for a candidate, promote the party platform, and, above all, distinguish what makes them different from the other guys. Republican rank-and-file voters and state delegates are “not going to be receptive to a ‘climate change’ message,” Heather Reams, the president of the center-right clean energy advocacy group Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, told me — or at least not in those words.
“I know there are a lot of my friends on the left who are very nervous looking at this convention,” Reams said. But “Republicans engage differently on climate and energy policy than Democrats, and that doesn’t make it wrong.”
And engage they did. Energy was reportedly a topic of robust conversation during the un-televised portions of the convention, especially regarding affordability, domestic supply chains, and a strong economy. “Every day there was a central energy event with policymakers, members of Congress, governors, state legislators, and energy sector leaders talking about the opportunities to grow American clean energy across the country,” Jeremy Harrell, the CEO of ClearPath, a conservative clean energy advocacy group, told me. “It was really incredible to see hundreds of people getting together across town in different forums to talk about the opportunities in this space.”
ClearPath and CRES, along with the American Conservation Coalition and the Conservative Climate Foundation, hosted a joint event promoting Republican-led climate change policies that more than 250 people attended, according to Harrell. Speakers included Utah congressman and Republican senatorial candidate John Curtis and Iowa congresswoman Mariannette Miller-Meeks, both members of the Conservative Climate Caucus. Reince Priebus, the former RNC chairman and one-time White House chief of staff under Trump, also delivered remarks “really doubling down” on clean energy as a whole, Harrell said, including raising questions like, “How do we invest in American energy innovation? How do we grow energy and manufacturing jobs? How do we reduce our dependence on Russian and Chinese energy and resources, and do it all while reducing global emissions?”
Reports of Republican receptiveness to an “all of the above” energy approach won’t satisfy everyone, of course. Some climate advocates have criticized the strategy as not going far enough since it doesn’t eliminate new carbon pollution. For example, as Lori Lodes — the executive director of Climate Power, a pro-Democratic strategic communications organization that has slammed Biden for approving new drilling projects — stressed in a RNC press conference this week, Republicans’ return to power “would see Big Oil CEOs get richer as working families face job losses, higher costs, fewer choices, and poisoned communities.” And as my colleague Robinson Meyer has written, “if your biggest issue is that the United States should aim to rapidly reduce its emissions of heat-trapping pollution, then you probably shouldn’t vote” for the Republican presidential ticket.
Additionally, lurking behind the RNC platform and headliner speeches looms the specter of Project 2025, which, among other things, endorses axing the Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office and its $400 billion lending authority to help clean energy technologies that are potentially too risky for traditional lenders. Trump has (unconvincingly, to some) aimed to distance himself from the document, and Reams told me, “Just because some of Trump’s advisors created it doesn’t mean that it’s going to be accepted.”
Still, while Reams was pleased with the receptivity to clean energy she found on the ground at the RNC, she wasn’t entirely without apprehensions. “Where it can be a little bit harder for us is thinking about government spending — the tax credits and protecting those tax credits, appropriations for the Department of Energy and offices like the [Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy], or clean grid initiatives — that I think are going to be a little bit of a tougher sell to Republicans. We have our work cut out for us there,” she told me. “But there are so many other House Republicans who totally get it today.”
The RNC headliners did hit some of the right notes for the all-of-the-abovers; Harrell, of ClearPath, was particularly excited about Vance’s speech emphasizing investment in the U.S. supply chain to reduce reliance on foreign adversaries. This, he told me, would lead to “investment in clean clean energy and clean assets across the country.”
By design, political conventions are a kind of Rorschach test, so that the conversation (or lack thereof) that so alarmed the climate left this week might be, in the eyes of others, an encouraging sign of ideological progress. In 2016, the last in-person Republican convention, clean energy “was tough to talk about,” Reams told me. Of this past week, she said, “I can say nothing but positive things.”
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Did a battery plant disaster in California spark a PR crisis on the East Coast?
Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.
Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs where development is actually happening, capturing rapt attention from other residents as well as members of the media. In Staten Island, a petition against a NineDot Energy battery project has received more than 1,300 signatures in a little over two months. Two weeks ago, advocates – backed by representatives of local politicians including Rep. Nicole Mallitokis – swarmed a public meeting on the project, getting a local community board to vote unanimously against the project.
According to Heatmap Pro’s proprietary modeling of local opinion around battery storage, there are likely twice as many strong opponents than strong supporters in the area:
Heatmap Pro
Yesterday, leaders in the Queens community of Hempstead enacted a year-long ban on BESS for at least a year after GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, other local politicians, and a slew of aggrieved residents testified in favor of a moratorium. The day before, officials in the Long Island town of Southampton said at a public meeting they were ready to extend their battery storage ban until they enshrined a more restrictive development code – even as many energy companies testified against doing so, including NineDot and solar plus storage developer Key Capture Energy. Yonkers also recently extended its own battery moratorium.
This flurry of activity follows the Moss Landing battery plant fire in California, a rather exceptional event caused by tech that was extremely old and a battery chemistry that is no longer popular in the sector. But opponents of battery storage don’t care – they’re telling their friends to stop the community from becoming the next Moss Landing. The longer this goes on without a fulsome, strident response from the industry, the more communities may rally against them. Making matters even worse, as I explained in The Fight earlier this year, we’re seeing battery fire concerns impact solar projects too.
“This is a huge problem for solar. If [fires] start regularly happening, communities are going to say hey, you can’t put that there,” Derek Chase, CEO of battery fire smoke detection tech company OnSight Technologies, told me at Intersolar this week. “It’s going to be really detrimental.”
I’ve long worried New York City in particular may be a powder keg for the battery storage sector given its omnipresence as a popular media environment. If it happens in New York, the rest of the world learns about it.
I feel like the power of the New York media environment is not lost on Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella, a de facto leader of the anti-BESS movement in the boroughs. Last fall I interviewed Fossella, whose rhetorical strategy often leans on painting Staten Island as an overburdened community. (At least 13 battery storage projects have been in the works in Staten Island according to recent reporting. Fossella claims that is far more than any amount proposed elsewhere in the city.) He often points to battery blazes that happen elsewhere in the country, as well as fears about lithium-ion scooters that have caught fire. His goal is to enact very large setback distance requirements for battery storage, at a minimum.
“You can still put them throughout the city but you can’t put them next to people’s homes – what happens if one of these goes on fire next to a gas station,” he told me at the time, chalking the wider city government’s reluctance to capitulate on batteries to a “political problem.”
Well, I’m going to hold my breath for the real political problem in waiting – the inevitable backlash that happens when Mallitokis, D’Esposito, and others take this fight to Congress and the national stage. I bet that’s probably why American Clean Power just sent me a notice for a press briefing on battery safety next week …
And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state.
2. Logan County, Ohio – Staff for the Ohio Power Siting Board have recommended it reject Open Road Renewables’ Grange Solar agrivoltaics project.
3. Bandera County, Texas – On a slightly brighter note for solar, it appears that Pine Gate Renewables’ Rio Lago solar project might just be safe from county restrictions.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, Armoracia Solar is struggling to get necessary permits from Madison County.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington is getting into a public spat with East Kentucky Power Cooperative over solar.
In Michigan, Livingston County is now backing the legal challenge to Michigan’s state permitting primacy law.
On the week’s top news around renewable energy policy.
1. IRA funding freeze update – Money is starting to get out the door, finally: the EPA unfroze most of its climate grant funding it had paused after Trump entered office.
2. Scalpel vs. sledgehammer – House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled Republicans in Congress may take a broader approach to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act than previously expected in tax talks.
3. Endangerment in danger – The EPA is reportedly urging the White House to back reversing its 2009 “endangerment” finding on air pollutants and climate change, a linchpin in the agency’s overall CO2 and climate regulatory scheme.