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When then-President-Elect Donald Trump nominated then-Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to lead the Environmental Protection Agency in 2016, everyone right, left, and center knew exactly what that meant: The top law enforcement officer from one of the nation’s most conservative states and largest oil and gas producers would take aim at environmental rules implemented by the previous administration — rules he had often sued to overturn — and pave the way to increased fossil fuel production.
Trump’s pick this time around, former Long Island Congressman and New York Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin, is more distinguished by his personal closeness to and support for the President-Reelect than he is by anything to do with the environment.
“It is an honor to join President Trump’s Cabinet as EPA Administrator. We will restore US energy dominance, revitalize our auto industry to bring back American jobs, and make the US the global leader of AI,” Zeldin wrote on X soon after the New York Post broke the story. He added for good measure: “We will do so while protecting access to clean air and water.”
So, who is Lee Zeldin? In his four terms in Congress as the representative from New York’s easternmost congressional district on Long Island, Zeldin did not cut any particular profile on climate, environment, or energy issues, and was best known for his hawkish foreign policy position. His surprisingly close run against Kathy Hochul for New York’s governor’s mansion in 2022 was largely defined by crime, public safety, and the effect of Covid-19 restrictions on the state’s economic recovery.
To the extent Zeldin has defined himself on the environment beyond standard-issue Republican opposition to restrictions on fossil fuels and car purchasing, it’s been in the context of issues specific to his coastal Long Island constituency. During his 2018 congressional campaign, he pointed to his membership in the “shellfish and national estuary caucuses,” as well as federal programs for estuaries and his opposition to expanded offshore drilling exploration at an event hosted by the League of Conservation Voters.
Throughout his gubernatorial run, Zeldin assailed New York’s ban on fracking, which had been implemented by Hochul’s predecessor, Andrew Cuomo. He also criticized New York’s planned phase-out of sales of internal combustion engine vehicles by 2035, as well as the proposal to institute congestion pricing in Lower Manhattan (an effort that died but may be brought back to life as part of Hochul’s scheme to protect Democratic congressional candidates on Long Island).
Cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder spent millions supporting Zeldin’s gubernatorial run, which The New York Timessuggested was motivated in part by the billionaire’s opposition to a cable from an offshore wind project that was planned to land in Wainscott, in the Hamptons, where Lauder has a home. The project, South Fork Wind, has been delivering power to New York since March of this year. Trump’s opposition to wind and offshore wind energy specifically has been a hallmark of his climate and energy policies.
“Congratulations! By saving the whales, you and @realDonaldTrump will establish a legacy for which Americans will feel grateful, decades and centuries into the future,” Michael Shellenberger, the anti-offshore-wind activist, wrote on X.
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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.
Microsoft is canceling data center leases, according to a Wall Street analyst.
The artificial intelligence industry is experiencing another TD Cowen shock.
The whole spectrum of companies connected to artificial intelligence — the companies that design the chips, that supply the power, that make the generation equipment — shuddered Wednesday when the brokerage released another note from analysts pointing to evidence that Microsoft was giving up on its data center leases.
“Microsoft has both (1) walked away from +2GW of capacity in both the U.S. and Europe in the last six months that was in process to be leased, and (2) has both deferred and canceled existing data center leases in both the U.S. and Europe in the last month,” the analysts wrote.
Microsoft is one of the biggest players in the artificial intelligence industry, with its near-$14 billion investment in OpenAI and acommitment to spend $80 billion on data center capacity this year.
The company is pulling back, the TD Cowen analysts said, because it had decided not to support incremental increases in training workloads for OpenAI models. Shares in Nvidia, the chip designer that’s become one of the most valuable companies in the world on the back of optimism about artificial intelligence, are down 7% since market close Tuesday, while shares in the power companies Vistra and Constellation are down 9% and 7% respectively. GE Vernova, which makes turbines for gas-fired power plants, is down 9%.
Much of the power industry saw huge increases in their stock prices in 2024, as investors bet on increased demand for electricity from data centers, manufacturing, and electrification. But 2025 so far has been a year of mild expectations.
In February, Cowen analysts issued a similar note warning that Microsoft was pulling back on some of its data center leases. And in January, of course, many of the AI and energy stocks that had been soaring 2024dropped when the Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek released an open source model comparable in performance to the state of the art in the United States but that required far less computing power to train.
The Cowen analysts were hardly doomy about AI and data center construction, writing that Google and Meta may be “backfilling” the capacity left behind by Microsoft as they seek to expand their own data center footprints.
But the case for across the board optimism may be slightly dimming across the sector. CoreWeave, which buys Nvidia chips and operates data centers, has had to reduce the amount of money its seeking to raise in its planned initial public offering to $1.5 billion, from the over $4 billion it was looking to get from investors earlier in the IPO process, Bloomberg reported. Nvidia, an investor in CoreWeave and its most important supplier, will be “anchoring” the IPO, kicking in $250 million.