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What we learned about “energy dominance” on Day One.
Here we go: On Monday, Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th president of the United States.
Surrounded by some of the country’s richest men, including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and the oil magnate Harold Hamm, Trump rejected what he called a “radical and corrupt establishment” that has “extracted power and wealth from our citizens” while promising a new golden age for the United States.
At the center of that golden age, he said, was an almost totally unregulated fossil fuel economy. “Today I will also declare a national energy emergency,” he said. “We will drill, baby, drill.”
Over the next 12 hours, he signed a series of executive orders that relaxed protections across the oil and gas sector while imposing costly new restrictions on wind turbines, electric vehicles, and other forms of renewable energy. He demonstrated that his extreme vision for the American government — a new order where the executive reigns supreme and Congress does not control the power of the purse — will run straight through his climate and energy policy.
You could see in his actions, too, what could become fragility in his governing coalition — times and situations where he might too eagerly slap a cost on a friend because he believes they are a foe.
But all that remains in the future. For now, Trump is in charge.
Trump’s first day was about undermining climate policy in virtually any form that he could find. Soon after taking the oath, Trump began the process of pulling the United States out of the Paris Agreement on climate change. He announced a broad freeze on virtually all federal wind energy permits, throwing at least one large-scale onshore wind farm into chaos while smothering virtually all offshore wind energy projects, including several planned for the East Coast. He moved to weaken energy and water efficiency rules for lightbulbs, showerheads, washing machines, and dishwashers. He began the multi-year process of rewriting the Environmental Protection Agency’s rules on tailpipe pollution from cars and light trucks, which he has described as lifting the federal government’s “EV mandate.” And he promised to open up new tracts of federal land for oil and gas drilling, including in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge.
But most important were a series of executive actions that Trump signed in the late evening, many under the bearing of a “national energy emergency.” In these orders, Trump told the Environmental Protection Agency to study whether carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are dangerous air pollutants. This question has been a matter of settled science for decades — and, more importantly, has not been under legal dispute since 2009. In the same set of orders, Trump lifted federal environmental and permitting rules, potentially setting up a move that could force blue states — particularly those in the Northeast and West Coast — to accept new oil and gas pipelines and refineries.
Finally, and most importantly, Trump asserted the right to freeze virtually all ongoing federal spending under the Inflation Reduction Act — and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law — for 90 days. Even after this time elapses, funding programs will have to be approved by the White House Office of Management and Budget. This move places at least tens of millions of dollars of federal contracts at risk, and it raises questions about the federal government’s ability to operate as a reliable counterparty. It is also of dubious Constitutionality because it appears to violate Congress’s sole authority over federal spending.
The stated goal of many of these policies is to bring down energy costs for American consumers. The president’s national energy emergency, for example, takes as its premise that the country is growing its energy supply too slowly. The United States, it suggests, is at imminent risk of running out of energy for new technology. (You might ask yourself why — if this is the case — Trump has also frozen all federal wind projects. But then you misunderstand Trump’s particular genius.)
Yet bringing down costs will be difficult. Energy costs — and particularly oil costs — are already low. Today, as Trump’s second term begins, gasoline stands at $3.13 a gallon, according to AAA. That’s about five cents above where it stood a year ago, and it’s within the inflation-adjusted range where gas prices hovered for much of Trump’s first term. (Oil prices crashed in 2020 because of the pandemic, but the industry — and the American public — would obviously prefer not to repeat that debacle.)
How much further could energy prices fall? Look at it this way: A barrel of oil in the U.S. costs $76 today, per the West Texas benchmark. (The international benchmark, called Brent, is a smidge higher at $79.) Last year, oil producers across much of the Permian Basin reported that they could break even only if oil stayed at or above about $66 a barrel. The rough rule of thumb is that for a $1 change in the per-barrel oil price, drivers will eventually see a roughly 2.5 cent change in prices at the pump. You can see how hard it will be to push oil prices down to record lows, at least with current levels of economic activity, interest rates, and demand volumes.
Which isn’t to say that it’s impossible. Trump will have advantages when dealing with the oil and gas industry that his immediate predecessor did not enjoy. Chief among these is that the industry’s leaders like him, want to see him succeed, and will be more willing to do favors for him — even if it means suffering thinner margins. These may help keep a lid on electricity prices, which are far more sensitive to natural gas and which really are set to surge as a new wave of factories, EVs, and data centers comes online.
Maybe! We’ll see. When you look closer, what stands out about Trump’s policies is how few of them are designed to lower energy prices. Instead, they aim to do virtually the opposite: shore up oil and gas demand. According to The Wall Street Journal, ensuring demand for oil and gas products — and not deregulating drilling further — is what the industry has asked Trump to do. That makes sense. The United States is, at the moment, producing more oil and gas than any country in world history. The fossil fuel industry’s problem isn’t getting gas out of the ground, but finding people to sell it to. By suspending fuel economy and energy efficiency rules, Trump can force Americans to use more energy — and spend more on oil and gas — to do the same amount of useful work.
In other places, what stands out about Trump’s policies is their incoherence — and how few of his constituencies they will satisfy. Late on Monday, Trump suggested that he might impose 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico as soon as February 1. Such an action would quickly harm key segments of the American energy industry. Canada exports about $124 billion of crude oil to the United States every year — much of it a heavy, sludgy petroleum from the Albertan oil sands. That sludge is piped across North America, then fed into U.S. refineries, where it helps produce a large portion of America’s fuel supply. (Alberta’s heavy, sulfurous sludge is particularly well-suited to mixing with the light, sweet crude produced by American frackers.) Should Trump impose those tariffs, in other words, he would gambol into a self-imposed energy crisis.
Tariffs are not the only place where Trump could undermine his own policies. One of his executive orders on Monday aimed to establish America as “the leading producer and processor of non-fuel minerals, including rare earth minerals”; three clauses later, it announced an end to the federal government’s so-called “EV mandate.”
But by kneecapping demand for electric vehicles, Trump will hurt the critical minerals industry more than any anti-growth hippie could fathom. For the past few years, corporate America and Wall Street have invested billions of dollars in lithium and rare-earths mining and processing facilities across the country. These projects, which are largely in Republican districts, only make financial sense in a world where the United States produces a large and growing number of electric vehicles: EVs make up the lion’s share of future demand for lithium, rare earth elements, and other geostrategically sensitive rocks, and any mines or refining facilities will only pencil out in a world where EVs purchase their output. If Trump kills the non-Tesla part of the EV industry, then he will also mortally harm those projects’ economics.
Energy is a strange issue. Although it is one of the key inputs into the modern industrial economy, millions of Americans engage with it as an expressive, symbolic matter — as just another battleground in the culture war. Today, Donald Trump has become the most powerful American in that category. On his first day in office, he has demonstrated that he will use energy policy to advance his extreme ideas about how the Constitution and presidential authority works. How far he gets now will depend on what the American public, business leaders, congressional Republicans, and the Supreme Court’s arch-conservative majority will accept — and whether his fragile constituency is really ready to pay the costs of “American greatness.”
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A conversation with Mary King, a vice president handling venture strategy at Aligned Capital
Today’s conversation is with Mary King, a vice president handling venture strategy at Aligned Capital, which has invested in developers like Summit Ridge and Brightnight. I reached out to Mary as a part of the broader range of conversations I’ve had with industry professionals since it has become clear Republicans in Congress will be taking a chainsaw to the Inflation Reduction Act. I wanted to ask her about investment philosophies in this trying time and how the landscape for putting capital into renewable energy has shifted. But Mary’s quite open with her view: these technologies aren’t going anywhere.
The following conversation has been lightly edited and abridged for clarity.
How do you approach working in this field given all the macro uncertainties?
It’s a really fair question. One, macro uncertainties aside, when you look at the levelized cost of energy report Lazard releases it is clear that there are forms of clean energy that are by far the cheapest to deploy. There are all kinds of reasons to do decarbonizing projects that aren’t clean energy generation: storage, resiliency, energy efficiency – this is massively cost saving. Like, a lot of the methane industry [exists] because there’s value in not leaking methane. There’s all sorts of stuff you can do that you don’t need policy incentives for.
That said, the policy questions are unavoidable. You can’t really ignore them and I don’t want to say they don’t matter to the industry – they do. It’s just, my belief in this being an investable asset class and incredibly important from a humanity perspective is unwavering. That’s the perspective I’ve been taking. This maybe isn’t going to be the most fun market, investing in decarbonizing things, but the sense of purpose and the belief in the underlying drivers of the industry outweigh that.
With respect to clean energy development, and the investment class working in development, how have things changed since January and the introduction of these bills that would pare back the IRA?
Both investors and companies are worried. There’s a lot more political and policy engagement. We’re seeing a lot of firms and organizations getting involved. I think companies are really trying to find ways to structure around the incentives. Companies and developers, I think everybody is trying to – for lack of a better term – future-proof themselves against the worst eventuality.
One of the things I’ve been personally thinking about is that the way developers generally make money is, you have a financier that’s going to buy a project from them, and the financier is going to have a certain investment rate of return, or IRR. So ITC [investment tax credit] or no ITC, that IRR is going to be the same. And the developer captures the difference.
My guess – and I’m not incredibly confident yet – but I think the industry just focuses on being less ITC dependent. Finding the projects that are juicier regardless of the ITC.
The other thing is that as drafts come out for what we’re expecting to see, it’s gone from bad to terrible to a little bit better. We’ll see what else happens as we see other iterations.
How are you evaluating companies and projects differently today, compared to how you were maybe before it was clear the IRA would be targeted?
Let’s say that we’re looking at a project developer and they have a series of projects. Right now we’re thinking about a few things. First, what assets are these? It’s not all ITC and PTC. A lot of it is other credits. Going through and asking, how at risk are these credits? And then, once we know how at risk those credits are we apply it at a project level.
This also raises a question of whether you’re going to be able to find as many projects. Is there going to be as much demand if you’re not able to get to an IRR? Is the industry going to pay that?
What gives you optimism in this moment?
I’ll just look at the levelized cost of energy and looking at the unsubsidized tables say these are the projects that make sense and will still get built. Utility-scale solar? Really attractive. Some of these next-gen geothermal projects, I think those are going to be cost effective.
The other thing is that the cost of battery storage is just declining so rapidly and it’s continuing to decline. We are as a country expected to compare the current price of these technologies in perpetuity to the current price of oil and gas, which is challenging and where the technologies have not changed materially. So we’re not going to see the cost decline we’re going to see in renewables.
And more news around renewable energy conflicts.
1. Nantucket County, Massachusetts – The SouthCoast offshore wind project will be forced to abandon its existing power purchase agreements with Massachusetts and Rhode Island if the Trump administration’s wind permitting freeze continues, according to court filings submitted last week.
2. Tippacanoe County, Indiana – This county has now passed a full solar moratorium but is looking at grandfathering one large utility-scale project: RWE and Geenex’s Rainbow Trout solar farm.
3. Columbia County, Wisconsin – An Alliant wind farm named after this county is facing its own pushback as the developer begins the state permitting process and is seeking community buy-in through public info hearings.
4. Washington County, Arkansas – It turns out even mere exploration for a wind project out in this stretch of northwest Arkansas can get you in trouble with locals.
5. Wagoner County, Oklahoma – A large NextEra solar project has been blocked by county officials despite support from some Republican politicians in the Sooner state.
6. Skagit County, Washington – If you’re looking for a ray of developer sunshine on a cloudy day, look no further than this Washington State county that’s bucking opposition to a BESS facility.
7. Orange County, California – A progressive Democratic congressman is now opposing a large battery storage project in his district and talking about battery fire risks, the latest sign of a populist revolt in California against BESS facilities.
Permitting delays and missed deadlines are bedeviling solar developers and activist groups alike. What’s going on?
It’s no longer possible to say the Trump administration is moving solar projects along as one of the nation’s largest solar farms is being quietly delayed and even observers fighting the project aren’t sure why.
Months ago, it looked like Trump was going to start greenlighting large-scale solar with an emphasis out West. Agency spokespeople told me Trump’s 60-day pause on permitting solar projects had been lifted and then the Bureau of Land Management formally approved its first utility-scale project under this administration, Leeward Renewable Energy’s Elisabeth solar project in Arizona, and BLM also unveiled other solar projects it “reasonably” expected would be developed in the area surrounding Elisabeth.
But the biggest indicator of Trump’s thinking on solar out west was Esmeralda 7, a compilation of solar project proposals in western Nevada from NextEra, Invenergy, Arevia, ConnectGen, and other developers that would, if constructed, produce at least 6 gigawatts of power. My colleague Matthew Zeitlin was first to report that BLM officials updated the timetable for fully permitting the expansive project to say it would complete its environmental review by late April and be completely finished with the federal bureaucratic process by mid-July. BLM told Matthew that the final environmental impact statement – the official study completing the environmental review – would be published “in the coming days or week or so.”
More than two months later, it’s crickets from BLM on Esmeralda 7. BLM never released the study that its website as of today still says should’ve come out in late April. I asked BLM for comment on this and a spokesperson simply told me the agency “does not have any updates to share on this project at this time.”
This state of quiet stasis is not unique to Esmeralda; for example, Leeward has yet to receive a final environmental impact statement for its 700 mega-watt Copper Rays solar project in Nevada’s Pahrump Valley that BLM records state was to be published in early May. Earlier this month, BLM updated the project timeline for another Nevada solar project – EDF’s Bonanza – to say it would come out imminently, too, but nothing’s been released.
Delays happen in the federal government and timelines aren’t always met. But on its face, it is hard for stakeholders I speak with out in Nevada to take these months-long stutters as simply good faith bureaucratic hold-ups. And it’s even making work fighting solar for activists out in the desert much more confusing.
For Shaaron Netherton, executive director of the conservation group Friends of the Nevada Wilderness, these solar project permitting delays mean an uncertain future. Friends of the Nevada Wilderness is a volunteer group of ecology protection activists that is opposing Esmeralda 7 and filed its first lawsuit against Greenlink West, a transmission project that will connect the massive solar constellation to the energy grid. Netherton told me her group may sue against the approval of Esmeralda 7… but that the next phase of their battle against the project is a hazy unknown.
“It’s just kind of a black hole,” she told me of the Esmeralda 7 permitting process. “We will litigate Esmeralda 7 if we have to, and we were hoping that with this administration there would be a little bit of a pause. There may be. That’s still up in the air.”
I’d like to note that Netherton’s organization has different reasons for opposition than I normally write about in The Fight. Instead of concerns about property values or conspiracies about battery fires, her organization and a multitude of other desert ecosystem advocates are trying to avoid a future where large industries of any type harm or damage one of the nation’s most biodiverse and undeveloped areas.
This concern for nature has historically motivated environmental activism. But it’s also precisely the sort of advocacy that Trump officials have opposed tooth-and-nail, dating back to the president’s previous term, when advocates successfully opposed his rewrite of Endangered Species Act regulations. This reason – a motivation to hippie-punch, so to speak – is a reason why I hardly expect species protection to be enough of a concern to stop solar projects in their tracks under Trump, at least for now. There’s also the whole “energy dominance” thing, though Trump has been wishy-washy on adhering to that goal.
Patrick Donnelly, great basin director at the Center for Biological Diversity, agrees that this is a period of confusion but not necessarily an end to solar permitting on BLM land.
“[Solar] is moving a lot slower than it was six months ago, when it was coming at a breakneck pace,” said Patrick Donnelly of the Center for Biological Diversity. “How much of that is ideological versus 15-20% of the agencies taking early retirement and utter chaos inside the agencies? I’m not sure. But my feeling is it’s less ideological. I really don’t think Trump’s going to just start saying no to these energy projects.”