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Chris Wright and Doug Burgum started their reign this week by amplifying the president and beating back Biden-era policies.
The Trump administration’s two most senior energy officials, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum and Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, are both confirmed and in office as of this week, and they have started to lay out their vision for how their agencies will carry out Donald Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda.
Where the Biden administration sought to advance traditional Democratic policy around public lands (namely, to expand, conserve, and preserve them) while also boosting the development of renewable energy, Burgum and Wright have laid out something of the inverse approach: Maximize the production of domestic energy and minerals, with a focus on fossil fuels, and to the extent non-fossil fuels are a priority, they should be “baseload” or “firm” power sources like nuclear, hydropower, or geothermal.
If Michael Pollan’s basic dietary guidance is “eat food, not too much, mostly plants,” then the Burgum-Wright energy policy might be, “produce energy, as much as you can, mostly fossil fuels.”
Burgum and Wright each laid out his philosophy in the form of secretarial orders, the agency equivalent of an executive order.
“Our focus must be on advancing innovation to improve energy and critical minerals identification, permitting, leasing, development, production, transportation, refining, distribution, exporting, and generation capacity of the United States to provide a reliable, diversified, growing, and affordable supply of energy for our Nation,” reads Burgum’s “Unleashing American Energy” order.
“The Department will bring a renewed focus to growing baseload and dispatchable generation to reliably meet growing demand,”reads Wright’s first secretarial order.
Burgum’s orders are largely Interior-specific elaborations of Trump’s early round of executive orders. In “Addressing the National Energy Emergency,” Burgum echoes Trump’s executive order declaring — you guessed it — a national energy emergency, calling for the department to “identify the emergency authorities available to them, as well as all other legal authorities, to facilitate the identification, permitting, leasing, development, production, transportation, refining, distribution, exporting, and generation of domestic energy resources and critical minerals.” He also criticizes the Biden administration for having “driven our Nation into a national emergency, where a precariously inadequate and intermittent energy supply, and an increasingly unreliable grid, require swift and decisive action.”
In another order, “Unleashing American Energy,” which follows a similarly titled executive order, Burgum cites the Trump administration’s call for deregulation to allow more extraction of energy commodities and energy production: “By removing such regulations, America's natural resources can be unleashed to restore American prosperity. Our focus must be on advancing innovation to improve energy and critical minerals identification, permitting, leasing, development, production, transportation, refining, distribution, exporting, and generation capacity of the United States to provide a reliable, diversified, growing, and affordable supply of energy for our Nation.”
The order calls for the Interior department to examine a number of Biden-era guidelines and rules, including 2024’s public lands rule, formally known as Conservation and Landscape Health, which went into effect last June. The rule put landscape preservation on a similar plane to energy development, mining, logging, or grazing among uses for public lands, and was opposed by a number of interest groups, including the ranching and energy industries.
It’s not just public lands that will be more open to fossil fuel exploration and extraction, it’s also the seas. Burgum issued an order following on Trump’s attempt to roll back restrictions on offshore drilling, notifying the department that “all Biden [outer continental shelf] withdrawals of the OCS for oil and gas leasing have been revoked.”
Two other orders were primarily deregulatory. One implemented the Trump guideline that “for each new regulation that they propose to promulgate, they shall identify at least 10 existing Department regulations to be eliminated.” And the other followed on Trump’s order opening up Alaska to more mining and energy extraction, which, among other actions, revoked a 2021 order cancelling oil and gas leases in the Alaska National Wildfire Reserve and reinstated a Secretary’s Order issued by then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinkein 2017 opening up Alaska for more oil activity, which itself reversed a 2013 order limiting oil and gas development.
While Burgum’s orders focus on the energy potential beneath the ground and the sea, Wright’s first secretarial order is a celebration of energy writ large, consistent with his often articulated views on the subject. “Energy is the essential ingredient that enables everything we do. A highly energized society can bring health, wealth, and opportunity for all,” he writes.
The document starts by talking down net-zero goals, saying that “net-zero policies raise energy costs for American families and businesses, threaten the reliability of our energy system, and undermine our energy and national security.”
“Going forward,” it says, “the Department’s goal will be to unleash the great abundance of American energy required to power modern life and to achieve a durable state of American energy dominance.”
In Wright’s version of the “energy emergency” order, he commits the department to “identify[ing] and exercise[ing] all lawful authorities to strengthen the nation’s grid, including the backbone of the grid, our transmission system,” in order to deal with the “current and anticipated load growth on our nation’s electric utilities.” He also says the department will focus on “baseload and dispatchable generation to reliably meet growing demand” — i.e. natural gas, along with some geothermal, hydropower, and nuclear.
In keeping with the president’s hostility or indifference toward the most widespread forms of renewable energy generation, Wright writes that the DOE will focus its substantial research and development efforts on “affordable, reliable, and secure energy technologies, including fossil fuels, advanced nuclear, geothermal, and hydropower,” and specifically calls out the Department’s fusion research for focus: “The Department must also prioritize true technological breakthroughs — such as nuclear fusion, high-performance computing, quantum computing.”
Wright refers to the energy department’s considerable research on renewables through its network of national laboratories only via implication, with an eye toward containing the funding demands of such work. “The Department will comprehensively review its R&D portfolio,” the order says. “As part of that review, the Department will rigorously enforce project milestones to ensure that taxpayer resources are allocated appropriately and cost-effectively consistent with the law.” Not mentioned at all was the department’s Loan Programs Office, which the Biden administration fortified by means of the Inflation Reduction Act. Bloomberg News reported that the department is looking to roll back some of the office’s loan guarantees to ensure that its funding awards “are consistent with President Trump’s executive orders and priorities.”
One area where there may be consistency between the Biden and Trump energy departments is in support for nuclear power.
Throughout the order, nuclear energy gets called out for praise and attention, while other forms of non-carbon-emitting energy go unmentioned. “The long-awaited American nuclear renaissance must launch during President Trump’s administration. As global energy demand continues to grow, America must lead the commercialization of affordable and abundant nuclear energy. As such, the Department will work diligently and creatively to enable the rapid deployment and export of next-generation nuclear technology,” Wright writes.
Like Burgum, Wright takes a dim view of Biden-era regulatory initiatives, committing the department to reviewing proposals for liquefied natural gas terminals and promising a “comprehensive review of the DOE Appliance Standards Program.” Scrapping or overhauling appliance efficiency rules, like other envisioned Trump policies, would also help bolster demand for energy writ large.
The orders, while consistent with Trump’s broad directives on energy policy, do not match the vitriol and dismissiveness towards renewables that Trump himself employs. But that may be cold comfort to climate advocates and renewables developers. In Burgum’s and Wright’s philosophy, renewables have been given pride of place in government policies, effectively holding down fossil fuel resources — and that is going to change.
In one order, Burgum directs the department to ensure that its policies do not “bias government or private-sector decision making in favor of renewable energy projects as compared to oil, gas, or other mineral resource projects.” And neither he nor Wright appears to see little role for the fastest growing sources of generation — solar — in American “energy dominance.”
That is also in keeping with what Trump has been doing to achieve his energy priorities, as opposed to what he’s been saying about “unleashing American energy.” During the chaotic first few weeks of this administration, federal officials do not appear to have been treating fossil fuel and renewables equally so much as they have been scrambling to comply with executive orders by obstructing renewable permitting and then reversing themselves (unless, of course, it’s offshore wind).
As Trump’s energy policy finds its feet, we’ll find out if energy dominance is really just fossil fuel dominance.
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From Kansas to Brooklyn, the fire is turning battery skeptics into outright opponents.
The symbol of the American battery backlash can be found in the tiny town of Halstead, Kansas.
Angry residents protesting a large storage project proposed by Boston developer Concurrent LLC have begun brandishing flashy yard signs picturing the Moss Landing battery plant blaze, all while freaking out local officials with their intensity. The modern storage project bears little if any resemblance to the Moss Landing facility, which uses older technology,, but that hasn’t calmed down anxious locals or stopped news stations from replaying footage of the blaze in their coverage of the conflict.
The city of Halstead, under pressure from these locals, is now developing a battery storage zoning ordinance – and explicitly saying this will not mean a project “has been formally approved or can be built in the city.” The backlash is now so intense that Halstead’s mayor Dennis Travis has taken to fighting back against criticism on Facebook, writing in a series of posts about individuals in his community “trying to rule by MOB mentality, pushing out false information and intimidating” volunteers working for the city. “I’m exercising MY First Amendment Right and well, if you don’t like it you can kiss my grits,” he wrote. Other posts shared information on the financial benefits of building battery storage and facts to dispel worries about battery fires. “You might want to close your eyes and wish this technology away but that is not going to happen,” another post declared. “Isn’t it better to be able to regulate it in our community?”
What’s happening in Halstead is a sign of a slow-spreading public relations wildfire that’s nudging communities that were already skeptical of battery storage over the edge into outright opposition. We’re not seeing any evidence that communities are transforming from supportive to hostile – but we are seeing new areas that were predisposed to dislike battery storage grow more aggressive and aghast at the idea of new projects.
Heatmap Pro data actually tells the story quite neatly: Halstead is located in Harvey County, a high risk area for developers that already has a restrictive ordinance banning all large-scale solar and wind development. There’s nothing about battery storage on the books yet, but our own opinion poll modeling shows that individuals in this county are more likely to oppose battery storage than renewable energy.
We’re seeing this phenomenon play out elsewhere as well. Take Fannin County, Texas, where residents have begun brandishing the example of Moss Landing to rail against an Engie battery storage project, and our modeling similarly shows an intense hostility to battery projects. The same can be said about Brooklyn, New York, where anti-battery concerns are far higher in our polling forecasts – and opposition to battery storage on the ground is gaining steam.
And more on the week’s conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Carbon County, Wyoming – I have learned that the Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project.
2. Nantucket County, Massachusetts – Anti-offshore wind advocates are pushing the Trump administration to rescind air permits issued to Avangrid for New England Wind 1 and 2, the same approval that was ripped away from Atlantic Shores offshore wind farm last Friday.
3. Campbell County, Virginia – The HEP Solar utility-scale project in rural Virginia is being accused of creating a damaging amount of runoff, turning a nearby lake into a “mud pit.” (To see the story making the rounds on anti-renewables social media, watch this TV news segment.)
4. Marrow County, Ohio – A solar farm in Ohio got approvals for once! Congratulations to ESA Solar on this rare 23-acre conquest.
5. Madison County, Indiana – The Indiana Supreme Court has rejected an effort by Invenergy to void a restrictive county ordinance.
6. Davidson County, North Carolina – A fraught conflict is playing out over a Cypress Creek Renewables solar project in the town of Denton, which passed a solar moratorium that contradicts approval for the project issued by county officials in 2022.
7. Knox County, Nebraska – A federal judge has dismissed key aspects of a legal challenge North Fork Wind, a subsidiary of National Grid Renewables, filed against the county for enacting a restrictive wind ordinance that hinders development of their project.
8. Livingston Parish, Louisiana – This parish is extending a moratorium on new solar farm approvals for at least another year, claiming such action is necessary to comply with a request from the state.
9. Jefferson County, Texas – The city council in the heavily industrial city of Port Arthur, Texas, has approved a lease for constructing wind turbines in a lake.
10. Linn County, Oregon – What is supposed to be this county’s first large-scale solar farm is starting to face pushback over impacts to a wetlands area.Today’s sit-down is with Nikhil Kumar, a program director at GridLab and an expert in battery storage safety and regulation. Kumar’s folks reached out to me after learning I was writing about Moss Landing and wanted to give his honest and open perspective on how the disaster is impacting the future of storage development in the U.S. Let’s dive in!
The following is an abridged and edited version of our conversation.
So okay – walk me through your perspective on what happened with Moss Landing.
When this incident occurred, I’d already been to Moss Landing plenty of times. It caught me by surprise in the sense that it had reoccurred – the site had issues in the past.
A bit of context about my background – I joined GridLab relatively recently, but before that I spent 20 years in this industry, often working on the integrity and quality assurance of energy assets, anything from a natural gas power plant to nuclear to battery to a solar plant. I’m very familiar with safety regulation and standards for the energy industry, writ large.
Help me understand how things have improved since Moss Landing. Why is this facility considered by some to be an exception to the rule?
It’s definitely an outlier. Batteries are very modular by nature, you don’t need a lot of overall facility to put battery storage on the ground. From a construction standpoint, a wind or solar farm or even a gas plant is more complex to put together. But battery storage, that simplicity is a good thing.
That’s not the case with Moss Landing. If you look at the overall design of these sites, having battery packs in a building with a big hall is rare.
Pretty much every battery that’s been installed in the last two or three years, industry has already known about this [risk]. When the first [battery] fire occurred, they basically containerized everything – you want to containerize everything so you don’t have these thermal runaway events, where the entire battery batch catches fire. If you look at the record, in the last two or three years, I do not believe a single such design was implemented by anybody. People have learned from that experience already.
Are we seeing industry have to reckon with this anyway? I can’t help but wonder if you’ve witnessed these community fears. It does seem like when a fire happens, it creates problems for developers in other parts of the country. Are developers reckoning with a conflation from this event itself?
I think so. Developers that we’ve talked to are very well aware of reputational risk. They do not want people to have general concern with this technology because, if you look at how much battery is waiting to be connected to the grid, that’s pretty much it. There’s 12 times more capacity of batteries waiting to be connected to the grid than gas. That’s 12X.
We should wait for the city and I would really expect [Vistra] to release the root cause investigation of this fire. Experts have raised a number of these potential root causes. But we don’t know – was it the fire suppression system that failed? Was it something with the batteries?
We don’t know. I would hope that the details come out in a transparent way, so industry can make those changes, in terms of designs.
Is there anything in terms of national regulation governing this sector’s performance standards and safety standards, and do you think something like that should exist?
It should exist and it is happening. The NFPA [National Fire Prevention Association] is putting stuff out there. There might be some leaders in the way California’s introduced some new regulation to make sure there’s better documentation, safety preparedness.
There should be better regulation. There should be better rules. I don’t think developers are even against that.
OK, so NFPA. But what about the Trump administration? Should they get involved here?
I don’t think so. The OSHA standards apply to people who work on site — the regulatory frameworks are already there. I don’t think they need some special safety standard that’s new that applies to all these sites. The ingredients are already there.
It’s like coal power plants. There’s regulation on greenhouse gas emissions, but not all aspects of coal plants. I’m not sure if the Trump administration needs to get involved.
It sounds like you're saying the existing regulations are suitable in your view and what’s needed is for states and industry to step up?
I would think so. Just to give you an example, from an interconnection standpoint, there’s IEEE standards. From the battery level, there are UL standards. From the battery management system that also manages a lot of the ins and outs of how the battery operates —- a lot of those already have standards. To get insurance on a large battery site, they have to meet a lot of these guidelines already — nobody would insure a site otherwise. There’s a lot of financial risk. You don’t want batteries exploding because you didn’t meet any of these hundreds of guidelines that already exist and in many cases standards that exist.
So, I don’t know if something at the federal level changes anything.
My last question is, if you were giving advice to a developer, what would you say to them about making communities best aware of these tech advancements?
Before that, I am really hoping Vistra and all the agencies involved [with Moss Landing] have a transparent and accountable process of revealing what actually happened at this site. I think that’s really important.