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How 2023 marked a renewed push for public power.
Voters in Maine were confronted with an unusual decision when they went to the polls this November. Question three on the ballot asked Mainers if they wanted to eliminate the two private utilities that delivered electricity to 97% of the state. A new, nonprofit utility called Pine Tree Power would take over the service, and it would be overseen by a publicly-elected board.
Though the proposal may sound radical, it’s not unheard of. Since the dawn of the electric grid, communities have periodically decided to municipalize their utilities. The city of Sacramento, California, took over PG&E’s local electric distribution franchise in 1946. Winter Park, Florida, took over electric service from a company called Progress Energy in 2005. But a takeover at the state level has only been attempted by Nebraska, where the entire state’s electric service went public in the 1940s and has remained that way ever since.
Unlike in Nebraska, the campaign in Maine failed. Seventy percent of voters said “no” to question three. But the ballot measure wasn’t a one-off. This year marked a renewed push for public power that’s growing around the country in light of the challenges of tackling climate change.
Investor-owned utilities have used their vast financial resources and political influence to delay and block the transition off of fossil fuels, in ways large and small, for decades. Activists, tired of trying to work within that system, are turning their attention to what they see as the more systemic root cause — the perverse incentives created by having utilities that need to turn a profit.
Americans often refer to their electricity or gas providers as “public utilities.” But only about 15% of the population is served by a government-owned, customer-owned, or member-owned electric utility. The other 85% are beholden to private companies that were granted monopolies to sell electricity decades ago.
What started as a smattering of independent campaigns to change that ratio started to coalesce into a nationally coordinated movement this year. A few weeks before the vote on the ballot measure, some 70 delegates from about 40 grassroots climate groups from around the country convened for a workshop at the Press Hotel in Portland, Maine. For three days, they exchanged notes and strategies for how to get public power on the agenda in their own cities and states, and reform public utilities in places that already had them. By the end, they had cemented a more energized, organized coalition.
The guiding theory behind the push for public power is that public utilities don’t need to generate returns for shareholders, theoretically enabling them to make investments guided by other priorities, like reducing emissions — and charge customers less in the process.
“We’ve seen time and time again that the market is not going to correct this,” Greg Woodring, a workshop participant from Ann Arbor, Michigan, told me. “Public power gives us the ability to choose where our energy is coming from, the ability to directly make that change without having to ask or plead or beg or incentivize a corporate entity that, at the end of the day, is only making a decision based on what’s going to make the most profit possible.”
But public power is divisive in the larger climate movement. While not necessarily ideologically opposed, critics are concerned about wasting time and money. Private utilities don’t go without a fight, and communities can get bogged down in legal battles for years. The city of Boulder, Colorado, famously tried to wrest control over its electric service from the utility Xcel for a decade, and gave up.
In Maine, the Conservation Law Foundation, a prominent environmental group, warned that the cost of a transition to public power was too uncertain, that it could mire the state in litigation, and that having a publicly-elected board could subject critical energy decisions to “partisan political maneuvering.” Instead, the group made a case for strengthening laws and regulations. However, it also conceded that if the utilities don’t meet metrics of affordability and sustainability they should face stiffer fines, or even lose their ability to operate in the state.
Defenders of investor-owned utilities argue that they have advantages over nonprofits when it comes to building the clean grid of the future. “The investor-owned business model enables companies to raise and deploy massive amounts of capital in an efficient and cost-effective manner, and their purchasing power helps to minimize costs to customers,” said Sarah Durdaller, a spokesperson for the Edison Electric Institute, a trade group for private electric utilities. She told me that the organization’s members’ “commitment to delivering resilient clean energy to our customers has never been stronger, and our focus on affordability has never been more important.”
The Maine campaign was not the first time a shift to publicly-owned utilities has been pitched as a climate strategy. One of the main motivations for Boulder’s effort, which started in 2010, was Xcel’s unwillingness to help the city meet its climate goals. But the increased momentum behind public power in 2023 signaled a new direction for climate activism more broadly, which had seemed to stagnate after the rise and fall of the youth-led Sunrise Movement and the election of Joe Biden.
“This is a site where we can practice democracy,” Isaac Sevier, one of the workshop organizers, told me. “I think that’s something that energizes people, it gives them more hope, it gives them something to be a part of and fight for and struggle for in a time when so many people are turning away.”
The workshop in Maine was convened by a handful of national organizations, including the Climate and Community Project, a progressive think tank, Lead Locally, a group that works to elect progressive candidates, and the Democratic Socialists of America’s Green New Deal Campaign Commission.
The DSA has been a major force behind the recent surge in interest in public power. At the start of this year, it kicked off a new campaign called “Building for Power” focused on trying to strengthen public institutions at the local level. In addition to public power, DSA is advocating for green public housing and transit, and improved public spaces.
“We want to rebuild, and in some cases, build anew, public sector capacity,” Matt Haugen, one of the organizers of the workshop, told me. “Through decades of neoliberalism, the public sector has been hollowed out in the U.S., and we’re seeing in all these areas that it’s clear the private sector just cannot meet these human needs.”
Many of the participants at the workshop were DSA members, but there were also local organizers affiliated with national environmental organizations, like 350 and the Sierra Club, and others from smaller, grassroots groups. There was a freshman in college, a seasoned activist in his 80s, and many ages represented in between. While almost everyone there was from a left-leaning city, they hailed from every corner of the country, including California, Montana, Michigan, Tennessee, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C.
Some, like Woodring of Ann Arbor, were from cities that were already in the early stages of considering a public power takeover. His group had convinced the city council to complete a feasibility study on municipalization. Others, like Marta Meengs, from Missoula, Montana, were trying to figure out how to win smaller battles, like the right to have community-owned solar farms. Others wanted to reform existing public power agencies, like Amy Kelly from Tennessee, where the federally-owned Tennessee Valley Authority runs the grid — but is investing heavily in natural gas, and offers few avenues for civic engagement.
One such group had already seen some success. The New York chapter of the DSA passed the Build Public Renewables Act earlier this year after four years of campaigning. The law directs the New York Power Authority, an existing state-owned power provider, to shut down all of its fossil fuel plants by the end of 2031, and expands its mandate to include building renewable energy projects. Most residential customers in New York are actually served by private utilities, but proponents saw the law as a way to get more clean energy built, faster, and with high labor and equity standards.
The Inflation Reduction Act, the climate law signed by President Biden last year, is one reason the tides turned for the New York campaign. It enabled government agencies and nonprofits to take advantage of tax credits for renewable energy projects for the first time, improving the economics of public power.
“It really opens up a huge amount of additional space for public power to be a part of the answer,” Johanna Bozuwa, executive director of the Climate and Community Project, told me.
Though few of the participants had ever met or even heard of each others’ campaigns, the stories that led them to advocate for public power shared a number of common themes: Worsening power outages due to extreme weather. Alarm over the insufficient pace of emission reductions. Outrageously high bills. But perhaps most of all, frustration with constantly coming up against utilities wielding money and influence to fight clean energy.
Woodring, of Ann Arbor, cited a 2022 analysis that found that more than 90% of sitting legislators in Michigan at the time took money from groups and individuals affiliated with DTE, the biggest utility in the state. The company was also tied to more than $200,000 in donations to Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who’s responsible for appointing the state’s utility regulators. As a result, according to the workshop participants from Michigan, the company has been able to restrict the growth of residential solar, which would eat into its profits.
Mikal Goodman, a 23-year-old city councilmember from Pontiac, Michigan, told me his interest in public power stemmed from DTE’s high rates and failure to invest in modernizing its transmission system. Some of its poles and wires dated back to before World War II, he said. Last winter, storms knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of households in southeast Michigan, leaving some families in the dark for over a week. But the day after one especially bad storm in February that left 450,000 people without power, DTE’s CEO Gerardo Norcia bragged to Wall Street analysts about the company’s “strong financial results” due to budget cuts and delayed maintenance.
In Pontiac, Goodman said, outages are life-threatening. He described the city as a donut hole — a poor, majority minority community surrounded by much wealthier, whiter towns. Most Pontiac residents don’t have the resources to run backup generators, replace rotting food, or flee to hotels if they need to, like many of their well-off neighbors, he said.
The idea that energy is a human right, and should not be treated as a commodity, came up repeatedly at the workshop. Many of the participants were drawn to public power by the desire to see an energy transition that benefits everyone, not just those who can afford clean energy.
Sevier, who has done a lot of work related to decarbonizing buildings, was frustrated that other advocates in the field were ignoring the growing energy affordability crisis. One in six households are behind on their utility bills, according to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, and gas and electric utilities are increasingly disconnecting customers that are in arrears. A January report from Bailout Watch, a nonprofit watchdog of fossil fuel companies, estimated that the 12 utilities that perpetrated the vast majority of shutoffs between 2020 and the fall of 2022 could have forgiven the debt with just 1% of their spending on shareholder dividends.
“If we require that everything in your life become electric, but at the same time, we don’t transform a system that guarantees that everyone actually can have electricity,” Sevier told me, “then I ask, who are we building this ‘electrify everything’ system for?”
Other advocates questioned a system where the public is often forced to pay for a company’s mistakes, but which the public has no say over. Travis Gibrael, an organizer with a group called Reclaim Our Power in northern California, which is working on a public takeover of PG&E, described the hypocrisy of the state’s relationship with the company. Governor Gavin Newsom’s administration helped the company emerge from bankruptcy after it was found responsible for wildfires that destroyed whole towns and killed more than 100 people. Now the company is raising rates by 13% to pay for wildfire prevention measures like burying power lines.
“They burn down the state, they kill a bunch of people. And yet all of those liabilities are just put on us, including the people who lost family members,” Gibrael told me. “It’s like, we’re already paying for the cost of the system and all the crises that are coming from it. So for us to just own it, because we’re already paying for it, makes sense.”
Reclaim Our Power has allies in the city government of San Francisco, which is in the early stages of trying to purchase the local electric grid from PG&E.
In some ways, Maine seemed to be an ideal testing ground for such sweeping reforms. Central Maine Power and Versant, the two private electric companies in Maine that would have been ousted, are consistently rated the worst for customer satisfaction in the Northeast. CMP has faced multiple investigations and fines over its billing system, customer service, and delays connecting new solar projects to the grid. Mainers additionally hate the company due to a controversial power line it is building to deliver hydropower from Canada into the U.S.
Advocates also appealed to nationalist views by highlighting the fact that both companies have “foreign owners,” and that they are funneling ratepayer dollars out of the country rather than back into Maine’s communities. (CMP is owned by Iberdrola, a Spanish company. Versant is owned by Enmax, a Canadian company owned by the city of Calgary.)
Public power advocates attributed their loss largely to the nearly $40 million the incumbent utilities spent fighting the campaign. “They outspent us 37 to one,” Lucy Hochschartner, the deputy campaign manager for Pine Tree Power, told me. “We were persuading people one by one, as they were getting absolutely inundated by messaging on the television, in their mailbox, on the radio, over digital.”
But she also said the campaign was successful in that it got a lot more people talking about the issue — it made national headlines for weeks — which could make it easier for future campaigns.
Reflecting on the loss, John Qua, a campaign manager at Lead Locally, told me it showed that running a ballot initiative is probably one of the most difficult ways to win public power. Another path is to try and win an electoral majority to enact legislation. “While it takes longer, you can cement a stronger, usually progressive majority in support,” he said.
Workshop attendees were clear-eyed about the fact that public ownership would not, in itself, be a silver bullet. They were quick to acknowledge the shortcomings of many existing public institutions, and that a publicly-owned utility will only be as strong as public participation in elections and decision making — a tall order when so few people today even understand the basics about where their energy comes from. Grace Brown, a researcher at the University of Glasgow in Scotland who studies public power movements, said it’s a much harder proposition in the U.S. than in Europe, where people are used to relying on the government for services, and socialism isn’t such a dirty word.
“That’s not just about winning votes, it’s about changing the mindset of this whole country,” she told me. “It’s trying to change these huge ideological ideas of how this country understands what the state should be and what the government should do.”
Public power isn’t the only idea out there for breaking the inertia and corporate capture of the energy system. This year, Colorado, Connecticut, and Maine passed laws that will prevent utilities from charging ratepayers for their lobbying efforts. Several states are experimenting with new, performance-based regulations, whereby utilities’ compensation is tied to specific goals, including emission reductions.
There’s also evidence that the existing channels for democratic engagement with the energy system aren’t totally broken. California and Michigan both recently made big strides on the climate and equity issues that public power advocates care about. This summer, the Golden State passed a law requiring utilities to design progressive rates tied to customers’ incomes. Michigan passed a law requiring utilities to use 100% clean energy by 2040.
The revitalized push for public power is about more than clean energy. To proponents, it’s about shaping this new, green energy system in a way that benefits a wider public. Whether or not they see more victories, the questions they are raising about who decides when and how we transition to this hypothetical clean energy future are already infiltrating the wider climate discussion. And as past public power movements, like the one in Boulder, have shown, even when the campaigns fail, the threat they pose to utilities is usually enough to get the companies to change their approach.
If there’s one thing I took away from the workshop, it’s that the movement is just getting started. Expect to see more high-profile campaigns — perhaps in San Francisco or Ann Arbor — in the coming years.
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With the federal electric vehicle tax credit now gone, automakers like Ford and Hyundai have to find other ways to make their electric cars affordable.
We finally know what Tesla means by an “affordable” electric vehicle. On Tuesday, the electric automaker revealed the stripped-down, less-fancy “Standard” version of its best-selling Model Y crossover and Model 3 sedan. These EVs will sell for several thousand dollars less than the existing versions, which are now rebranded as “Premium.”
These slightly cheaper Ys and 3s aren’t exactly the $25,000 baby Tesla that many fans and investors have anticipated for years. But the announcement is an indication of where the electric vehicle market in the United States may be headed now that the $7,500 federal tax credit for purchasing an EV is dead and gone. Automakers have spent the past few months rejiggering their lineups and slashing prices as much as they can to make sure sales don’t crater without the federal incentive.
The impending end of the tax credit on September 30 helped propel Tesla to record sales numbers in the third quarter of 2025. It was a stark reversal from months of disappointing sales stemming from factors like increased competition and Elon Musk’s political antics that alienated potential buyers. Money talks, of course; Tesla sent me a blitz of emails to make sure I didn’t forget what a good deal I could get before September’s end. But now, with the deadline passed, Musk’s company needed a new shot in the arm to stop sales from falling off a cliff.
The budget Teslas are, indeed, lesser vehicles. They have simpler headlights, less power, and less range than the now-Premium versions. They even come in fewer colors. But the prices — $40,000 for a Model Y Standard and $37,000 for a Model 3 Standard — effectively mirror what those cars would have cost if the tax credit were still in place. In other words, you can still buy a Tesla in the $35,000 to $40,000 range. It just won’t be as good a Tesla as you used to be able to get for the money.
The tax credit deadline had looked like one that would demarcate two distinct EV eras, with October 1 acting as the beginning of new, less-affordable time. But it turns out things aren’t quite so black and white. Lots of automakers are experimenting with ways to soften the financial blow for those who still want to get into an EV. After all, there’s always a loophole.
For example, as the September tax credit deadline approached, Reuters reported on a scheme orchestrated by Ford and General Motors to allow the American car giants to keep the good times going by buying their own cars. It goes like this: Before the September 30 deadline, the financing arms of these big corporations began the process of purchasing a host of their own vehicles from their dealerships. By making the down payment before the end of September, Ford and GM qualified these vehicles for the federal tax benefit. (They even checked with the IRS to make sure this plot was legitimate, Reuters said.) They plan to pass on the savings by leasing those vehicles back to everyday Americans.
According to Car and Driver, a number of citizens did something similar to what the corporations devised — that is, some buyers made their first payments on EVs that won’t be delivered to them for weeks or months in order to qualify for the tax break. These shenanigans are for the short term, though. Ford and GM could pre-purchase only so many of their own vehicles, and Ford said this deal effectively extends the tax credit only another quarter, through the end of December.
The bigger question is whether the automakers can — or will — simply cut prices on their EVs to make the loss of federal incentives sting a little less.
That’s the plan at Hyundai. The Korean giant has announced an enormous price cut on its successful Ioniq 5, one that more than makes up for the vanishing federal incentive. The most basic version of that car will fall from $42,600 to $35,000, putting it on par with the Chevy Equinox EV that’s been a hit at that price. Fancier versions of the Ioniq 5 will fall by more than $9,000 for the 2026 model year. Hyundai and its partner Kia are offering some of the best October lease deals, too.
Other car companies have begun to follow suit. BMW will simply offer a $7,500 discount on its electric models for those who take delivery by the end of October. Stellantis, the parent company of Jeep, Chrysler, Dodge, Ram, and others, will do the same for electric sales through the end of the year. No word yet on what happens after these deals expire.
Incentives like the federal tax credit for EVs aren’t meant to last forever, of course. In theory, their purpose is to lift up a new technology until it can compete at scale with the tech that has been around forever.
Whether electric cars have reached that point is a contentious question. Ford has only just announced a roadmap to overhaul its entire EV production system in order to stop losing billions on electric vehicles. Hyundai’s EVs are profitable — or, at least they were before the Trump administration began monkeying with tax incentives and tariffs. A batch of more affordable EVs are on the way, though the ever-changing map of tariffs makes it unclear exactly how much they’ll cost when they finally arrive.
The short-term picture may well be that electric cars continue to be a loss leader for some automakers still trying to find their footing in the space. Whether their shareholders will tolerate this long enough for the margins to become sustainable — well, that’s the real question.
Current conditions: In the Atlantic, the tropical storm that could, as it develops, take the name Jerry is making its way westward toward the U.S. • In the Pacific, Hurricane Priscilla strengthened into a Category 2 storm en route to Arizona and the Southwest • China broke an October temperature record with thermometers surging near 104 degrees Fahrenheit in the southeastern province of Fujian.
The Department of Energy appears poised to revoke awards to two major Direct Air Capture Hubs funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in Louisiana and Texas, Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo reported Tuesday. She got her hands on an internal agency project list that designated nearly $24 billion worth of grants as “terminated,” including Occidental Petroleum’s South Texas DAC Hub and Louisiana's Project Cypress, a joint venture between the DAC startups Heirloom and Climeworks. An Energy Department spokesperson told Emily that he was “unable to verify” the list of canceled grants and said that “no further determinations have been made at this time other than those previously announced,”referring to the canceled grants the department announced last week. Christoph Gebald, the CEO of Climeworks, acknowledged “market rumors” in an email, but said that the company is “prepared for all scenarios.” Heirloom’s head of policy, Vikrum Aiyer, said the company wasn’t aware of any decision the Energy Department had yet made.
While the list floated last week showed the Trump administration’s plans to cancel the two regional hydrogen hubs on the West Coast, the new list indicated that the Energy Department planned to rescind grants for all seven hubs, Emily reported. “If the program is dismantled, it could undermine the development of the domestic hydrogen industry,” Rachel Starr, the senior U.S. policy manager for hydrogen and transportation at Clean Air Task Force told her. “The U.S. will risk its leadership position on the global stage, both in terms of exporting a variety of transportation fuels that rely on hydrogen as a feedstock and in terms of technological development as other countries continue to fund and make progress on a variety of hydrogen production pathways and end uses.”
Remember the Tesla announcement I teased in yesterday’s newsletter? The predictions proved half right: The electric automaker did, indeed, release a cheaper version of its midsize SUV, the Model Y, with a starting price just $10 shy of $40,000. Rather than a new Roadster or potential vacuum cleaner, as the cryptic videos the company posted on CEO Elon Musk’s social media site hinted, the second announcement was a cheaper version of the Model 3, already the lower-end sedan offering. Starting at $36,990, InsideEVs called it “one of the most affordable cars Tesla has ever sold, and the cheapest in 2025.” But it’s still a far cry from Musk’s erstwhile promise to roll out a Tesla for less than $30,000.
That may be part of why the company is losing market share. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported, Tesla’s slice of the U.S. electric vehicle sales sank to its lowest-ever level in August despite Americans’ record scramble to use the federal tax credits before the September 30 deadline President Donald Trump’s new tax law set. General Motors, which sold more electric vehicles in the third quarter of this year than in all of 2024, offers the cheapest battery-powered passenger vehicle on the market today, the Chevrolet Equinox, which starts at $35,100.
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Trump’s pledge to revive the United States’ declining coal industry was always a gamble — even though, as Matthew reported in July, global coal demand is rising. Three separate stories published Tuesday show just how stacked the odds are against a major resurgence:
As you may recall from two consecutive newsletters last month, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said “permitting reform” was “the biggest remaining thing” in the administration’s agenda. Yet Republican leaders in Congress expressed skepticism about tacking energy policy into the next reconciliation bill. This week, however, Utah Senator Mike Lee, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, called for a legislative overhaul of the National Environmental Policy Act. On Monday, the pro-development social media account Yimbyland — short for Yes In My Back Yard — posted on X: “Reminder that we built the Golden Gate Bridge in 4.5 years. Today, we wouldn’t even be able to finish the environmental review in 4.5 years.” In response, Lee said: “It’s time for NEPA reform. And permitting reform more broadly.”
Last month, a bipartisan permitting reform bill got a hearing in the House of Representatives. But that was before the government shutdown. And sources familiar with Democrats’ thinking have in recent months suggested to me that the administration’s gutting of so many clean energy policies has left Republicans with little to bargain with ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
Soon-to-be Japanese prime minister Sanae Takaichi.Yuichi Yamazaki - Pool/Getty Images
On Saturday, Japan’s long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party elected its former economic minister, Sanae Takaichi, as its new leader, putting her one step away from becoming the country’s first woman prime minister. Under previous administrations, Japan was already on track to restart the reactors idled after the 2011 Fukushima disaster. But Takaichi, a hardline conservative and nationalist who also vowed to re-militarize the nation, has pushed to speed up deployment of new reactors and technologies such as fusion in hopes of making the country 100% self-sufficient on energy.
“She wants energy security over climate ambition, nuclear over renewables, and national industry over global corporations,” Mika Ohbayashi, director at the pro-clean-energy Renewable Energy Institute, told Bloomberg. Shares of nuclear reactor operators surged by nearly 7% on Monday on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, while renewable energy developers’ stock prices dropped by as much as 15%
Researchers at the United Arab Emirates’ University of Sharjah just outlined a new method to transform spent coffee grounds and a commonly used type of plastic used in packaging into a form of activated carbon that can be used for chemical engineering, food processing, and water and air treatments. By repurposing the waste, it avoids carbon emitting from landfills into the atmosphere and reduces the need for new sources of carbon for industrial processes. “What begins with a Starbucks coffee cup and a discarded plastic water bottle can become a powerful tool in the fight against climate change through the production of activated carbon,” Dr. Haif Aljomard, lead inventor of the newly patented technology, said in a press release.
Last week’s Energy Department grant cancellations included funding for a backup energy system at Valley Children’s Hospital in Madera, California
When the Department of Energy canceled more than 321 grants in an act of apparent retribution against Democrats over the government shutdown, Russ Vought, President Trump’s budget czar, declared that the money represented “Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left's climate agenda.”
At least one of the grants zeroed out last week, however, was supposed to help keep the lights on at a children’s hospital.
The $29 million grant was intended to build a 3.3-megawatt long-duration energy storage system at Valley Children’s Hospital, a large pediatric hospital in Madera, California. The system would “power critical hospital operations during outage events,” such as when the California grid shuts down to avoid starting wildfires, according to project documents.
“The U.S. Department of Energy’s cancellation of funding for [the] long-duration energy storage demonstration grant is disappointing,” Zara Arboleda, a spokesperson for the hospital, told me.
Valley Children’s Hospital is a 358-bed hospital that says it serves more than 1.3 million children across California’s Central Valley. It has 116 neonatal intensive care unit beds and nationally ranked specialties in pediatric neurology, orthopedics, and lung surgery, among others.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright has characterized the more than $7.5 billion in grants canceled last week as part of an ongoing review of financial awards made by the Biden administration. But the timing of the cancellations — and Vought’s gleeful tweets about them — suggests a more vindictive purpose. Republican lawmakers and President Trump himself threatened to unleash Vought as a kind of rogue budget cutter before the federal government shut down last week.
“We don’t control what he’s going to do,” Senator John Thune told Politico last week. “I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut,” Trump posted on the same day.
Up until this year, canceling funding that is already under contract with a private party would have been thought to be straightforwardly illegal under federal law. But the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has allowed the Trump administration to act with previously unimaginable freedom while it considers ruling on similar cases.
Faraday Microgrids, the contractor that was due to receive the funding, is already building a microgrid for the hospital. The proposed backup power system — which the grant stipulated should be “non-lithium-ion” — was supposed to be funded by the Energy Department’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, with the goal of finding new ways of storing electricity without using lithium-ion batteries, and was meant to work in concert with that new microgrid and snap on in times of high stress.
That microgrid project is still moving forward, Arboleda, the hospital’s spokesperson, told me. “Valley Children’s Hospital continues to build and soon will operate its microgrid announced in 2023 to ensure our facilities have access to reliable and sustainable energy every minute of every day for our patients and our care providers,” she added. That grid will contain some storage, but not the long-term storage system discussed in the official plan.
Faraday Microgrids, formerly known as Charge Bliss, didn’t respond to a request for comment, but its website touts its ability to secure grants and other government funding for energy projects.
In a statement, a spokesman for the Energy Department said that the grant was canceled because the project wasn’t feasible. “Following an in-depth review of the financial award, it was determined, among other reasons, that the viability of the project was not adequate to warrant further disbursements,” Ben Dietderich, a spokesman for the Energy Department, told me.
The children’s hospital, at least, is in good company. On Tuesday, a Trump administration document obtained by Heatmap News suggested the Energy Department is moving to kill bipartisan-backed funding for two direct air capture hubs in Texas and Louisiana. And although California has lost the most grants of any state, the Energy Department has also sought to terminate funding for new factories and industrial facilities across Republican-governed states.
Editor’s note: This story initially misstated the number of neonatal intensive care unit beds at Valley Children’s Hospital. It has been corrected.