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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 Mike Hall of Anza.
This week’s conversation is with Mike Hall, CEO of the solar and battery storage data company Anza. I rang him because, in my book, the more insights into the ways renewables companies are responding to the war on the Inflation Reduction Act, the better.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s jump in!
How much do we know about developers’ reactions to the anti-IRA bill that was passed out of the House last week?
So it’s only been a few days. What I can tell you is there’s a lot of surprise about what came out of the House. Industries mobilized in trying to improve the bill from here and I think a lot of the industry is hopeful because, for many reasons, the bill doesn’t seem to make sense for the country. Not just the renewable energy industry. There’s hope that the voices in Congress — House members and senators — who already understand the impact of this on the economy will in the coming weeks understand how bad this is.
I spoke to a tax attorney last week that her clients had been preparing for a worst case scenario like this and preparing contingency plans of some kind. Have you seen anything so far to indicate people have been preparing for a worst case scenario?
Yeah. There’s a subset of the market that has prepared and already executed plans.
In Q4 [of 2024] and Q1 [of this year] with a number of companies to procure material from projects in order to safe harbor those projects. What that means is, typically if you commence construction by a certain date, the date on which you commence construction is the date you lock in tax credit eligibility, and we worked with companies to help them meet that criteria. It hedged them on a number of fronts. I don’t think most of them thought we’d get what came out of the House but there were a lot of concerns about stepdowns for the credit.
After Trump was elected, there were also companies who wanted to hedge against tariffs so they bought equipment ahead of that, too. We were helping companies do deals the night before Liberation Day. There was a lot of activity.
We saw less after April 2nd because the trade landscape has been changing so quickly that it’s been hard for people to act but now we’re seeing people act again to try and hit that commencement milestone.
It’s not lost on me that there’s an irony here – the attempts to erode these credits might lead to a rush of projects moving faster, actually. Is that your sense?
There’s a slug of projects that would get accelerated and in fact just having this bill come out of the House is already going to accelerate a number of projects. But there’s limits to what you can do there. The bill also has a placed-in-service criteria and really problematic language with regard to the “foreign entity of concern” provisions.
Are you seeing any increase in opposition against solar projects? And is that the biggest hurdle you see to meeting that “placed-in-service” requirement?
What I have here is qualitative, not quantitative, but I was in the development business for 20 years, and what I have seen qualitatively is that it is increasingly harder to develop projects. Local opposition is one of the headwinds. Interconnection is another really big one and that’s the biggest concern I have with regards to the “placed-in-service” requirement. Most of these large projects, even if you overcome the NIMBY issues, and you get your permitting, and you do everything else you need to do, you get your permits and construction… In the end if you’re talking about projects at scale, there is a requirement that utilities do work. And there’s no requirement that utilities do that work on time [to meet that deadline]. This is a risk they need to manage.
And more of the week’s top news in renewable energy conflicts.
1. Columbia County, New York – A Hecate Energy solar project in upstate New York blessed by Governor Kathy Hochul is now getting local blowback.
2. Sussex County, Delaware – The battle between a Bethany Beach landowner and a major offshore wind project came to a head earlier this week after Delaware regulators decided to comply with a massive government records request.
3. Fayette County, Pennsylvania – A Bollinger Solar project in rural Pennsylvania that was approved last year now faces fresh local opposition.
4. Cleveland County, North Carolina – Brookcliff Solar has settled with a county that was legally challenging the developer over the validity of its permits, reaching what by all appearances is an amicable resolution.
5. Adams County, Illinois – The solar project in Quincy, Illinois, we told you about last week has been rejected by the city’s planning commission.
6. Pierce County, Wisconsin – AES’ Isabelle Creek solar project is facing new issues as the developer seeks to actually talk more to residents on the ground.
7. Austin County, Texas – We have a couple of fresh battery storage wars to report this week, including a danger alert in this rural Texas county west of Houston.
8. Esmeralda County, Nevada – The Trump administration this week approved the final proposed plan for NV Energy’s Greenlink North, a massive transmission line that will help the state expand its renewable energy capacity.
9. Merced County, California – The Moss Landing battery fire is having aftershocks in Merced County as residents seek to undo progress made on Longroad’s Zeta battery project south of Los Banos.
Anti-solar activists in agricultural areas get a powerful new ally.
The Trump administration is joining the war against solar projects on farmland, offering anti-solar activists on the ground a powerful ally against developers across the country.
In a report released last week, President Trump’s Agriculture Department took aim at solar and stated competition with “solar development on productive farmland” was creating a “considerable barrier” for farmers trying to acquire land. The USDA also stated it would disincentivize “the use of federal funding” for solar “through prioritization points and regulatory action,” which a spokesperson – Emily Cannon – later clarified in an email to me this week will include reconfiguring the agency’s Rural Energy for America loan and grant program. Cannon declined to give a time-table for the new regulation, stating that the agency “will have more information when the updates are ready to be published.”
“Farmland should be for agricultural production, not solar production,” Cannon wrote – a statement also made in the USDA report.
REAP is a program created in 2008 that exists to help fund renewable energy and sustainability projects at the level of individual farms and has been seen as a potential tool for not only building more solar but also more trust in agriculturally-focused communities. It’s without question that retooling REAP to actively disincentivize awardees from building solar on farmland could have a chilling effect, at least amongst those who receive money from the program or wish to in the future. This comes after Trump officials temporarily froze money promised to farmers, too.
As we’ve previously written in The Fight, agricultural interests can at times present as much a threat to the future of solar energy as any oil-funded dark money group, if not more so. Conflicts over solar production on farmland make up a large portion of the total projects I cover in The Fight every week, and it is one of the most frequently cited reasons for opposition against individual renewables projects. (Agricultural workforces are one of the most important signals for renewable energy opposition in Heatmap Pro’s modeling data as well.) I wrote shortly after Trump’s inauguration that I wondered when – not if – he would adopt this position.
It’s unclear what exactly led USDA to dive headlong into the “No Solar on Farmland” campaign, aside from its growing popularity in conservative political circles, but there is reason to believe farming interests may have played a role. USDA has stated the report was the product of discussions with farming groups and an industry roundtable. In addition, per lobbying disclosures, at least one agricultural group – the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau – advocated earlier this year for “congressional action and/or executive orders” to “balance renewable and conventional sources of energy” through “limit[ing] solar on productive farmland.” (The Pennsylvania Farm Bureau denied this in an email to me earlier this week.)
There’s also reason to believe some key stakeholders were caught off-guard or weren’t looped in on the matter.
American Farmland Trust has been trying to cultivate common ground between farmers, solar companies, and various agencies at all levels of government over the future of development. But when asked about this report, the nonprofit told me it couldn’t speak on the matter because it was still trying to suss out what was going on.
“AFT is meeting with the Trump administration to learn more about what they are planning in terms of policy and programs to implement this concept,” AFT media relations associate Michael Shulman told me.