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NET Power’s power plants are an oil exec’s fantasy, an environmentalist’s nightmare, and an energy expert’s object of fascination. The company builds natural gas-burning power plants that, due to the inherent design of the system, don’t release carbon dioxide or other health-harming pollutants. If the tech can scale, it could be a key contender to complement solar and wind energy on the grid, with the ability to dispatch carbon-free power when it’s needed and run for as long as necessary, unconstrained by the weather.
The company is especially well-positioned now that the Environmental Protection Agency has finalized emissions standards for new natural gas plants that require them to reduce their emissions by 90% by 2032 — part of what landed NET Power a spot on our list of 10 make-or-break new energy projects in the U.S. In checking in on how things were going at the company, however, we learned NET Power hadn’t made quite as much progress as we thought.
NET Power’s leadership has said its process is so efficient that when built at scale, it will produce cheaper power than a conventional natural gas plant. Today’s plants combust methane with air to heat up water and produce steam, which spins a turbine to generate electricity. NET Power’s system instead combusts methane with pure oxygen, producing extremely hot CO2 that can drive a specially designed turbine. By replacing air, which is about 78% nitrogen, with oxygen, the CO2 produced is very pure. The system recovers most of the gas and uses it to generate more electricity, but the small amount that is not recovered is easier (and cheaper) to capture and store than the mix of gases that comes out of a typical power plant.
The company, whose backers include Occidental Petroleum, Constellation Energy, and Baker Hughes, broke ground on a demonstration project in La Porte, Texas in 2016, and began testing the equipment in 2018. In November 2021, it made waves among clean energy wonks when it announced a major milestone: The plant had successfully “synchronized” with the Texas grid, delivering enough electricity to power about 1,000 homes.
“This is a Wright-brothers-first-flight kind of breakthrough for energy,” NET Power’s then-CEO Ron DeGregorio said at the time. “Zero-emission, low-cost electricity delivered to the grid from natural gas-fueled technology.”
But the breakthrough wasn’t exactly what it seemed. In reports filed to the Securities and Exchange Commission as recently as last month, under a section titled “Risk Factors,” the company noted that its La Porte demonstration plant has “not yet overcome all power loads to provide net positive power delivery to the commercial grid during its operation.”
In other words, despite having successfully delivered power to the Texas grid, NET Power’s plant did not — and still hasn’t — generated more power than it consumes. Here is the rest of the explanation from the filing:
Our Demonstration Plant successfully generated electric power while synchronized to the grid, but it has not yet overcome all facility auxiliary power loads (pumps, compressors, etc.) to provide net positive power delivery to the commercial grid during its operation. If initial commercial power plants are unable to efficiently provide net power output to the commercial grid using the NET Power Cycle, this could harm our business, results of operation and reputation.
The company told me this was all according to plan. “NET Power’s La Porte Demonstration Facility was designed and built for one goal — to prove the technical viability of the NET Power Cycle, which it did,” NET Power said in an emailed statement. “Given its small scale” — just 25 megawatts — “and the design considerations required for a flexible test facility, La Porte was not intended to provide net positive power to the grid.” It added that Project Permian, the company’s first utility-scale project, “is intended to generate and deliver net positive power,” and is expected to be operational in late 2027, or early 2028.
Though NET Power never said anything to the contrary, several energy experts I reached out to said this was news to them. “It’s sort of surprising that they didn’t report it before, because obviously that would have been known at the time,” Sara Hastings-Simon, a physicist who researches the energy transition at the University of Calgary. The excitement around NET Power is rooted in its potential to be cheaper than a typical carbon capture project, which adds a big cost to power generation. “The challenge is now, it’s really hard to know until it gets there whether there is truth to that statement or not,” said Hastings-Simon.
Chris Bataille, a research fellow at the Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy who sees a lot of promise in the company’s technology, said he saw this as a red flag. “I don’t think it sinks it,” he told me. “I don’t think suddenly it has crashed and burned. But it does say that they’re less advanced.”
But Joshua Rhodes, an energy systems researcher at the University of Texas, was unfazed when I asked whether it mattered that the company still hadn’t passed this milestone after nearly three years. “I’m sure they would have liked to pass it by now and I don’t know if there are any factors that are hindering them,” he said in an email. “That said, it is a new technology that, if it can be shown to work, could be huge.”
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President Donald Trump has exempted some — but certainly not all — of the critical minerals necessary for the energy transition from the sweeping tariffs he announced Wednesday. Minerals such as lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese, and copper are key components of clean energy infrastructure such as lithium-ion batteries, which are used in electric vehicles or stationary storage, and copper wires, which conduct electricity in solar panels and wind turbines.
The White House has published a complete list of hundreds of products that are exempt from tariffs. We combed through the list looking for key transition minerals. Here are the ones that caught our eye, plus some that were notably left off. If you see anything on the list you think we missed, my inbox is open.
Just about every other renewable energy company is taking a beating today.
American solar manufacturer First Solar may be the big winner from the slew of tariffs Donald Trump announced yesterday against the world’s trading partners. Sorry, make that basically the only winner among renewable energy companies.
In a note to clients this morning, Jefferies analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith wrote that “in this inflationary environment, we expect FSLR's domestic manufacturing to be the clear winner” in the long term.
For everyone else in the renewable industry — for example, an equipment manufacturer like inverter company Enphase, which has been trying to move its activities away from China — “we perceive all costs to head higher, contributing to a wider inflation narrative.”
First Solar’s’s stock is up almost 4% in early trading as the broader market reels from the global tariffs. Throughout the rest of the solar ecosystem, there’s a sea of red. Enphase is down almost 8%. Chinese inverter manufacturer Sungrow is down 7%. Solar installer Sunrun’s shares are down over 10%. The whole S&P 500 is down 4%, while independent power producers such as Vistra and Constellation and turbine manufacturer GE Vernova are down around 10% as expected power demand has fallen.
First Solar “is currently the largest domestic manufacturer of solar panels and is in the midst of expanding its domestic manufacturing footprint, which should serve as a competitive advantage over its peers,” Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Perocco wrote in a note to clients Thursday morning.
Nor has First Solar been afraid to fight for its position in the global economy. It ispart of a coalition of American solar manufacturers that have been demanding protections against Southeast Asian solar exporters, claiming that they are part of a scheme by Chinese companies to avoid preexisting solar tariffs. In 2023,80% of American solar imports came from Southeast Asia, according to Reuters.
Tariff rates specific to solar components manufactured in those countries will likely be finalized later this month. Those will come in addition to the new tariffs, which will go into effect on April 9.
But the biggest question about First Solar — and the American renewables industry as a whole — remains unanswered: the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act. The company benefits both from tax credits for advanced manufacturing and investment and production tax credits for solar power.
“Government incentive programs, such as the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (the “IRA”), have contributed to this momentum by providing solar module manufacturers, project developers, and project owners with various incentives to accelerate the deployment of solar power generation,” the company wrote in a recent securities filing.
If those tax credits are at risk, then First Solar may not be a winner so much as the fastest runner ahead of an advancing tide.
Tristan Abbey would come to Washington from a Texas think tank that argues peak oil is way off base.
Donald Trump’s pick to run the Energy Information Administration works for a think tank that denies the existence of an energy transition.
The Energy Information Administration is the nation’s primary energy fuel and power forecasting agency. Since its inception in 1977, EIA has become a go-to source of data for many U.S. businesses, analysts, and policymakers alike. The agency’s previous administrators have been relatively apolitical academics and industry experts, including under the first Trump administration, whose EIA administrator came to the role from a faculty position at Rice University. The office’s current acting administrator is Stephen Nalley, who was appointed deputy administrator by Trump in 2018 after serving in various other roles at the agency.
Last month, however, the president quietly nominated a new EIA administrator who may represent a new direction for the agency. Tristan Abbey is an energy consultant and a senior fellow with the National Center for Energy Analytics, a think tank founded last year by a conservative policy outfit, the Texas Public Policy Foundation. The group argues against the concept of “peak oil,” the notion that the world will one day hit a maximum level of oil demand as it transitions to other (presumably more climate-friendly) fuels.
“There has never been a more critical time for sober-minded, fact-based, emotion-free perspectives in energy domains,” the think tank proudly declares on its About webpage. “The U.S. and European governments, along with many U.S. states, are embarking on the biggest industrial spending program in history, all directed in the pursuit of an ‘energy transition’ with the goal to rapidly replace hydrocarbons that currently supply 80% of the world’s energy. Why are the stakes so high? ‘Transitions’ of such scale have never occurred. And energy is fundamental to everything in civilization.”
Abbey was previously director of energy and environment at the National Security Council from 2017 to 2019 under Trump 1.0, and was also chief economist for the GOP on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, boasting in a CV that his role included successfully repealing a federal oil export ban. Per that CV, he previously worked for Clarium Capital Management and Founders Fund, two hedge funds founded by GOP financier Peter Thiel. Abbey was also on the Trump 1.0 transition team, according to his LinkedIn.
Today, Abbey also works with the Energy Policy Research Foundation, a D.C. petroleum research organization, and recently stepped away from working at the Trump-affiliated America First Policy Institute, according to an ethics disclosure posted online.
Abbey’s work at the NCEA provides insight into the views he may bring to the top of EIA.
His biggest achievement at the think tank was authoring a report declaring that global gas demand will remain strong. “[T]he broad directional arrows are distinguishable: for the foreseeable future, the world will need far more electricity and more industrial energy, and a significant portion of that will require natural gas,” the report said. “The federal government never decided to become the world’s largest LNG exporter, but it did allow private companies to make that happen. The decision that it can make today is to preserve that achievement.”
On a webinar about the report, Abbey called on the U.S. to take steps to increase domestic natural gas consumption and find new ways to use LNG in various consumer products and industrial processes. “Is there something that is holding U.S. industry back from using more natural gas than it would otherwise?,” he asked.
The NCEA is a key player in a highly consequential but wonky debate in Washington about whether the U.S. should try and put thumb screws onto the International Energy Agency, a world power and fuel forecasting body overseen by the OECD, an international body to which the U.S. is the single largest contributor.
The IEA has previously predicted “peak oil” may occur before 2030 — one of many predictions that have led some Republicans in Washington to declare the IEA is no longer impartial and a “cheerleader” for renewable energy. These Republicans have been led by Senator John Barrasso, one of the lawmakers who will oversee Abbey’s nomination. Another fan of this view is Kathleen Sgamma, Trump’s pick to run the Bureau of Land Management, who cited the NCEA to call on U.S. policymakers to pressure the IEA into “meaningful reform” of its forecasting about the energy transition. The op-ed was first reported by E&E News’ Scott Waldman.
How does Abbey feel about the war on the IEA? We’ll find out at his confirmation hearing, which has yet to be scheduled. We’ve asked Republicans on the committee for an update on when that’ll happen and we will let you know once we find out. Given they’re still working through other more high-profile nominees, that’ll take a while.