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Twenty-five years ago, computers were on the verge of destroying America’s energy system.
Or, at least, that’s what lots of smart people seemed to think.
In a 1999 Forbes article, a pair of conservative lawyers, Peter Huber and Mark Mills, warned that personal computers and the internet were about to overwhelm the fragile U.S. grid.
Information technology already devoured 8% to 13% of total U.S. power demand, Huber and Mills claimed, and that share would only rise over time. “It’s now reasonable to project,” they wrote, “that half of the electric grid will be powering the digital-Internet economy within the next decade.” (Emphasis mine.)
Over the next 18 months, investment banks including JP Morgan and Credit Suisse repeated the Forbes estimate of internet-driven power demand, advising their customers to pile into utilities and other electricity-adjacent stocks. Although it was unrelated, California’s simultaneous blackout crisis deepened the sense of panic. For a moment, experts were convinced: Data centers and computers would drain the country’s energy resources.
They could not have been more wrong. In fact, Huber and Mills had drastically mismeasured the amount of electricity used by PCs and the internet. Computing ate up perhaps 3% of total U.S. electricity in 1999, not the roughly 10% they had claimed. And instead of staring down a period of explosive growth, the U.S. electric grid was in reality facing a long stagnation. Over the next two decades, America’s electricity demand did not grow rapidly — or even, really, at all. Instead, it flatlined for the first time since World War II. The 2000s and 2010s were the first decades without “load growth,” the utility industry’s jargon for rising power demand, since perhaps the discovery of electricity itself.
Now that lull is ending — and a new wave of tech-driven concerns has overtaken the electricity industry. According to its supporters and critics alike, generative artificial intelligence like ChatGPT is about to devour huge amounts of electricity, enough to threaten the grid itself. “We still don’t appreciate the energy needs of this technology,” Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has said, arguing that the world needs a clean energy breakthrough to meet AI’s voracious energy needs. (He is investing in nuclear fusion and fission companies to meet this demand.) The Washington Post captured the zeitgeist with a recent story: America, it said, “is running out of power.”
But … is it actually? There is no question that America’s electricity demand is rising once again and that load growth, long in abeyance, has finally returned to the grid: The boom in new factories and the ongoing adoption of electric vehicles will see to that. And you shouldn’t bet against the continued growth of data centers, which have increased in size and number since the 1990s. But there is surprisingly little evidence that AI, specifically, is driving surging electricity demand. And there are big risks — for utility customers and for the planet — by treating AI-driven electricity demand as an emergency.
There is, to be clear, no shortage of predictions that AI will cause electricity demand to rise. According to a recent Reuters report, nine of the country’s 10 largest utilities are now citing the “surge” in power demand from data centers when arguing to regulators that they should build more power. Morgan Stanley projects that power use from data centers “is expected to triple globally this year,” according to the same report. The International Energy Agency more modestly — but still shockingly — suggests that electricity use from data centers, AI, and cryptocurrency could double by 2026.
These concerns have also come from environmentalists. A recent report from the Climate Action Against Disinformation Commission, a left-wing alliance of groups including Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, warned that AI will require “massive amounts of energy and water” and called for aggressive regulation.
That report focused on the risks of an AI-addled social media public sphere, which progressives fear will be filled with climate-change-denying propaganda by AI-powered bots. But in an interview, Michael Khoo, an author of the report and a researcher at Friends of the Earth, told me that studying AI made him much more frightened about its energy use.
AI is such an power-suck that it “is causing America to run out of energy,” Khoo said. “I think that’s going to be much more disruptive than the disinformation conversation in the mid-term.” He sketched a scenario where Altman and Mark Zuckerberg can outbid ordinary households for electrons as AI proliferates across the economy. “I can see people going without power,” he said, “and there being massive social unrest.”
These predictions aren’t happening in a vacuum. At the same time that investment bankers and environmentalists have fretted over a potential electricity shortage, utilities across the South have proposed a de facto solution: a massive buildout of new natural-gas power plants.
Citing the return of load growth, utilities across the South are trying to go around normal regulatory channels and build a slew of new natural-gas-burning power plants. Across at least six states, utilities have already won — or are trying to win — permission from local governments to fast-track more than 10,000 megawatts of new gas-fired power plants so that they can meet the surge in demand.
These requests have popped up across the region, pushed by vertically integrated monopoly power companies. Georgia Power won a tentative agreement to build 1,400 new megawatts of gas capacity, Canary reported. In the Carolinas, Duke Energy has asked to build 9,000 megawatts of new gas capacity, triple what it previously requested. The Tennessee Valley Authority has plans to add 6,600 megawatts of new capacity to its grid.
This buildout is big enough to endanger the country’s climate targets. Although these utilities are also building new renewable and battery farms, and shutting down coal plants, the planned surge in carbon emissions from natural gas plants would erase the reductions from those changes, according to a Southern Environmental Law Center analysis. Duke Energy has already said that it will not meet its 2030 climate goal in order to conduct the gas expansion.
In the popular press, AI’s voracious energy demand is sometimes said to be a major driver of this planned gas boom. But evidence for that proposition is slim, and the utilities have said only that data center expansion is one of several reasons for the boom. The Southeast’s population is growing, and the region is experiencing a manufacturing renaissance, due in part to the new car, battery, and solar panel factories subsidized by Biden’s climate law. Utilities in the South also face a particular challenge coping with the coldest winter mornings because so many homes and offices use inefficient and power-hungry space heaters.
Indeed, it’s hard to talk about the drivers of load growth with any specificity — and it’s hard to know whether load growth will actually happen in all corners of the South.
Utilities compete against each other to secure big-name customers — much like local governments compete with sweetheart tax deals — so when a utility asks regulators to build more capacity, it doesn’t reveal where potentialpower demand is coming from. (In other words, it doesn’t reveal who it believes will eventually buy that power.) A company might float plans to build the same data center or factory in multiple states to shop around for the best rates, which means the same underlying gigawatts of demand may be appearing in several different utilities’ resource plans at the same time. In other words, utilities are unlikely to actually see all of the demand they’re now projecting.
Even if we did know exactly how many gigawatts of new demand each utility would see, it’s almost impossible to say how much of it is coming from AI. Utilities don’t say how much of their future projected power demand will come from planned factories versus data centers. Nor do they say what each data center does and whether it trains AI (or mines Bitcoin, which remains a far bigger energy suck).
The risk of focusing on AI, specifically, as a driver of load growth is that because it’s a hot new technology — one with national security implications, no less — it can rhetorically justify expensive emergency action that is actually not necessary at all. Utilities may very well need to build more power capacity in the years to come. But does that need constitute an emergency? Does it justify seeking special permission from their statehouses or regulators to build more gas, instead of going through the regular planning process? Is it worth accelerating approvals for new gas plants? Probably not. The real danger, in other words, is not that we’ll run out of power. It’s that we’ll build too much of the wrong kind.
At the same time, we might have been led astray by overly dire predictions of AI’s energy use. Jonathan Koomey, a researcher who studies how the internet and data centers use energy (and the namesake of Koomey’s Law) told me that many estimates of Nvidia’s most important AI chips assume that their energy use is the same as their advertised “rated” power. In reality, Nvidia chips probably use half of that amount, he said, because chipmakers engineer their chips to withstand more electricity than is necessary for safety reasons.
And this is just the current generation of chips: Nvidia’s next generation of AI-training chips, called “Blackwell,” use 25 times less energy to do the same amount of computation as the previous generation of chips.
Koomey helped defuse the last panic over energy use by showing that the estimates Huber and Mills relied on were wildly incorrect. Estimates now suggest that the internet used less than 1% of total U.S. electricity by the late 1990s, not 13% as they claimed. Those percentages stayedroughly the same through 2008, he later found, even as data centers grew and computers proliferated across the economy. That’s the same year, remember, that Huber and Mills predicted that the internet would consume half of American energy.
These bad predictions were extremely convenient. Mills was a scientific advisor to the Greening Earth Society, a fossil-fuel-industry-funded group that alleged carbon dioxide pollution would actually improve the global environment. He aimed to show that climate and environmental policy would conflict with the continued growth of the internet.
“Many electricity policy proposals are on a collision course with demand forces,” Mills said in a Greening Earth press release at the time. “While many environmentalists want to substantially reduce coal use in making electricity, there is no chance of meeting future economically-driven and Internet-accelerated electric demand without retaining and expanding the coal component.” Hence the headline of the Forbes piece: “The PCs are coming — Dig more coal.”
What makes today’s AI-induced fear frenzy different from 1999 is that the alarmed projections are not just coming from businesses and banks like Morgan Stanley, but from environmentalists like Friends of the Earth. Yet neither their estimates of near-term, AI-driven power shortages — nor the analysis from Morgan Stanley that U.S. data-center use could soon triple within a year — make sense given what we know about data centers, Koomey said. It is not logistically possible to triple data centers’ electricity use in one year. “There just aren’t enough people to build data centers, and it takes longer than a year to build a new data center anyway,” he said. “There aren’t enough generators, there aren’t enough transformers — the backlog for some equipment is 24 months. It’s a supply chain constraint.”
Look around and you might notice that we have many more servers and computers today than we did in 1999 — not to mention smartphones and tablets, which didn’t even exist then — and yet computing doesn’t devour half of American energy. It doesn’t even get close. Today, computers use 1% to 4% of total U.S. power demand, depending on which estimate you trust. That’s about the same share of total U.S. electricity demand that they used in the late 1990s and mid-2000s.
It may well be that AI devours more energy in years to come, but utilities probably do not need to deal with it by building more gas. They could install more batteries, build new power lines, or even pay some customers to reduce their electricity usage during certain peak events, such as cold winter storms.
There are some places where AI-driven energy demand could be a problem — Koomey cited Ireland and Loudon County, Virginia, as two epicenters. But even there, building more natural gas is not the sole way to cope with load growth.
“The problem with this debate is everybody is kind of right,” Daniel Tait, who researches Southern utilities for the Energy and Policy Institute, a consumer watchdog, told me. “Yes, AI will increase load a little bit, but probably not as much as you think. Yes, load is growing, but maybe not as much as you say. Yes, we do need to build stuff, but maybe not the stuff that you want.”
There are real risks if AI’s energy demands get overstated and utilities go on a gas-driven bender. The first is for the planet: Utilities might overbuild gas plants now, run them even though they’re non-economic, and blow through their climate goals.
“Utilities — especially the vertically integrated monopoles in the South — have every incentive to overstate load growth, and they have a pattern of having done that consistently,” Gudrun Thompson, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, told me. In 2017, the Rocky Mountain Institute, an energy think tank, found in 2017 that utilities systematically overestimated their peak demand when compiling forecasts. This makes sense: Utilities would rather build too much capacity than wind up with too little, especially when they can pass along the associated costs to rate-payers.
But the second risk is that utilities could burn through the public’s willingness to pay for grid upgrades. Over the next few years, utilities should make dozens of updates to their systems. They have to build new renewables, new batteries, and new clean 24/7 power, such as nuclear or geothermal. They will have to link their grids to their neighbors’ by building new transmission lines. All of that will be expensive, and it could require the kind of investment that raises electricity rates. But the public and politicians can accept only so many rate hikes before they rebel, and there’s a risk that utilities spend through that fuzzy budget on unnecessary and wasteful projects now, not on the projects that they’ll need in the future.
There is no question that AI will use more electricity in the years to come. But so will EVs, new factories, and other sources of demand. America is on track to use more electricity. If that becomes a crisis, it will be one of our own making.
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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.
At least in the short term, developers looking to build quickly have just a few sites to choose from.
Donald Trump aims to spur the biggest nuclear development boom this side of the 21st century. The big question: Will it work?
Trump signed a fleet of executive orders on Friday seeking to quadruple U.S. nuclear capacity, expanding generation from 100 gigawatts today to 400 gigawatts by 2050. To that end, he also set a near-term goal to start construction on 10 new conventional reactors by 2030 — that is, within the next five years.
The interim goal on its own is, on its face, extremely ambitious. There have only been three reactors completed this century: Watts Bar Unit 2, which had a complicated, multi-decade development timeline and finally entered operation in 2016; and Vogtle Units 3 and 4, which started construction in 2009 and came online in 2023 and 2024, respectively.
Part of the reason those three facilities took so long is the convoluted permitting process nuclear hopefuls must navigate. (Chris Gadomski, lead nuclear analyst at BloombergNEF, called it a “gauntlet.”) It can take almost a decade for a new nuclear project to receive what’s called a “combined operating license” from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the federal body charged with overseeing civilian nuclear technology and power plant operations. The orders seek to simplify and accelerate the NRC’s licensing procedure, giving the body 18 months to issue new rules and guidance designed to shorten the timeline for new applications to 18 months at the longest, and for continuing operations to just a year.
In the even nearer term, however, “If you want to build nuclear fast in this country, you would go to sites that are already licensed or already have infrastructure,” Brett Rampal, senior director of nuclear and power strategy at Veriten, told Heatmap. Many of these sites received NRC approval in the 2000 and 2010s but languished due to poor market conditions (the rise of cheap natural gas), the nuclear industry’s own instability (Westinghouse, a major contractor, went bankrupt in 2017), or some combination of both.
But even then the process is complicated, as Adam Stein, director of the nuclear energy innovation program of the Breakthrough Institute, told Heatmap. “Several of the sites with licenses for AP1000 [reactors] theoretically could start construction fairly quickly without major license changes,” he said. “However, that’s not likely to happen.”
The AP1000 is a 1-gigawatt pressurized water reactor made by Westinghouse, and it’s currently pumping out electrons at the Vogtle site in Georgia. There are hopes that it can become a standard design that is built over and over again at scale.
But even on an already-licensed site, any new project would be starting from scratch with its supply chain and workforce. And just because the site has a license now doesn’t mean its developers are done with the licensing process. “The licenses for those sites were issued for a design that was essentially what Vogtle started out as,” Stein explained. Vogtle subsequently underwent almost 200 license amendments, and it’s probable that a new build would want to incorporate many of these design changes into their license, as well. “That takes time,” Stein said.
Duke Energy, which serves over 8 million customers largely in the Southeast, has active combined operating licenses for AP1000s at sites in Florida and in South Carolina. The company told South Carolina utilities regulators in April that its W.S. Lee site in the state “offers the best opportunity to deploy large light-water reactors in the Carolinas” — but that, at least at the time, “the conceptual deployment timeline from when a definitive “go forward” decision is made is about 13 to 14 years.” (Emphasis mine.)
The spokesperson noted that the combined operating license at the site “gives us optionality in the future to construct and operate two Westinghouse AP1000 units at the site,” and that “we will have an opportunity to update state Commissions in the Carolinas on our progress regarding the potential for future new nuclear investments later this year.” The spokesperson gave no specific indication that the company’s timeline for building a new plant had changed due to the executive orders.
As for the Florida site, the spokesperson said, “We currently have no nuclear planned for Duke Energy Florida per our 10-year site plan, although advanced nuclear overall is still a longer-term option.”
What about “advanced nuclear”? Several advanced nuclear projects have either applied for or gotten construction permits. Kairos Power received construction permits for demonstration reactors, while X-Energy, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and TerraPower have applied for construction permits for advanced reactors. These companies are pursuing a different pathway than the combined operating license application process and will need to apply for operation licenses as well. Two advanced reactor designs by NuScale have received approval from the NRC to date, including one that’s fresh as of Thursday, but there are no current plans to deploy either anywhere.
That hasn’t dampened excitement about advanced nuclear, including on sites with licenses for larger reactors. Virginia utility Dominion Energy is looking at new nuclear development at its North Anna site, which is licensed for a GE-Hitachi Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor, a large reactor which has received an NRC design certification but has not yet been deployed. But instead of conventional reactors, Dominion has a memorandum of understanding with Amazon to explore small modular reactor development.
Duke Energy, meanwhile, told Heatmap that the company “strongly supports the advancement and deployment of new nuclear technologies, including large reactors and small modular reactors, to meet the growing energy needs of our customers.”
There is one nuclear company that greeted the executive orders with fulsome excitement: The Nuclear Company. Unlike other newer entrants in the space, The Nuclear Company — which raised a $51 million Series A in April — aims to build six conventional reactors with “proven, licensed technology.”
“I feel like I’m Jack and Rose from the Titanic and my arms are out. I feel like we're flying finally,” Juliann Edwards, chief development officer at The Nuclear Company, told Heatmap. “I feel like we’ve been unleashed through these executive orders.”
As difficult and costly as it was to bring the new Vogtle reactors online, the process jumpstarted the previously dormant domestic nuclear industry. And The Nuclear Company thinks it would be a shame for this emergent expertise to go to waste.
The Nuclear Company has identified the first site where it plans to build, but it’s not yet public, Edwards told Heatmap, though she pointed to states such as Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama as places where the company could “hit the ground running,” given that they already have the necessary licenses in place.
And yet The Nuclear Company does not, itself, intend to design or operate these reactors. Instead it would run licensing, permitting, and construction, while also potentially serving as the facility’s long-term owner, depending on the regulatory structure of the local utilities and grid operators.
That still leaves the question of whether the market will end up valuing the power produced from all these new reactors at a level that will keep an operator in business. That’s not a given. In the 2010s, nuclear capacity fell in part because the market preferred natural gas to nuclear, since it was cheaper and could respond quickly to varying demand. “Why would you build a nuclear reactor when you got very cheap natural gas?” BNEF’s Gadomski, told Heatmap.
But the prospects of an artificial-intelligence-fueled data center boom, as well as the broader electrification of the economy, has begun to change this calculus, as utilities look to catch up to quickly rising electricity demand for the first time this century.
"I’m hoping that this environment doesn’t create too much uncertainty for folks, and I’m hoping it sends signals to get things going and that things will hopefully work out,” Rampal said. “I love my utilities, but they are 14 times bitten, 97 times shy.”
On a state legislative session, German Courts, and U.S. permitting personnel
Current conditions: The first named tropical storm of the year appears to be forming in the Pacific Ocean as Tropical Storm Alvin • Northern California braces for temperatures as high as 100 degrees Fahrenheit this weekend • It’s cloudy and cool in Manhattan, where Wednesday night the Court of International Trade threw out much of Trump’s tariff regime.
1. Texas anti-renewables bills won’t get crucial vote
A suite of bills in the Texas legislature that targeted the state’s booming renewable energy sector will not make it to the governor’s desk after the state’s House of Representatives declined to schedule votes on them before the Texas legislature’s biennial session ends on Monday, The Hill reported.
The Texas Senate had passed S.B. 819 in April, which would have mandated extra regulatory approval for large solar and wind projects, over and above what fossil fuels are required to seek. The Senate also passed S.B. 388, which would have essentially mandated that more than half of new generation in the state would be gas, and S.B. 715, which would have required existing wind and solar generation to have gas backup. Trade groups were “in freak-out mode,” my colleague Jael Holzman reported at the time, and the head of one renewables group testified that S.B. 819 alone would “kill” the industry.
2. D.C. energy veteran gets permitting gig
Emily Domenech, a former staffer for House Speakers Kevin McCarthy and Mike Johnson, will head the federal government’s Permitting Council, Politico reported Wednesday.
The Permitting Council was established as part of the Highway Bill in 2015 as the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council, and helps coordinate permitting for infrastructure projects that require multiple layers and stages of federal regulatory and environmental review.
Domenech also helped negotiate permitting reform provisions in the 2023 Fiscal Responsibility Act. More recently, she has been a senior vice president at the energy and environment public affairs firm Boundary Stone.
I spoke with Domenech last year after the presidential election for a story about how the clean energy industry could “learn to speak Republican.” In the past, she told me, “clean energy hasn’t focused on getting to know those representatives. When they’ve had ideas for bills or policies, they went to Democrats. They haven’t built a lot of personal relationships with members of Congress on the other side of the aisle.”
3. Climate lawsuit rejected, principle behind it affirmed
A Peruvian farmer’s lawsuit against the utility RWE for its contribution to the risk of glacial flooding was rejected by a German court, The New York Times reported Wednesday.
The farmer, Saúl Luciano Lliuya, had sued in Hamm Higher Regional Court, arguing that emissions from RWE increased glacial melting and threatened the inundation of his town of Huaraz.
RWE does not operate in Peru, but the suit argued that it was responsible for 0.5% of global emissions, and thus should be responsible for that portion of the cost of protecting the town from flooding, about $19,000. The judge dismissed the suit but “affirmed that German civil law could be used to hold companies accountable for the worldwide effects of their emissions,” the Times reported.
Lliuya’s lawyer hailed the decision, saying in a statement, “For the first time in history, a higher court in Europe has ruled that large emitters can be held responsible for the consequences of their greenhouse gas emissions.”
RWE warned that the decision could “have unforeseeable consequences for Germany as an industrial location, because ultimately claims could be asserted against any German company for damage caused by climate change anywhere in the world.”
4. Constitution revived
A fracking site in the Marcellus Shale. Spencer Platt/Getty Images
The Williams Companies is planning to start the process of permitting formerly dormant pipeline projects in New York state, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The two pipelines, the Constitution and Northeast Supply Enhancement, were canceled in 2020 and 2024, respectively, following intense environmental and local opposition.
The Northeast is adjacent to productive natural gas fields in the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania, but does not have fully built out infrastructure for shipping gas from Pennsylvania to New York and beyond. The Constitution pipeline would have run from Northeast Pennsylvania to Schoharie, New York, outside Albany. The Northeast Supply Enhancement would have augmented existing infrastructure that runs from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania through New Jersey, and would have included new pipelines under New York Bay to supply gas to New York City and Long Island.
The move to restart the projects comes after President Trump allowed work to restart on the Empire Wind 1 offshore wind project off the south coast of Long Island. While New York Governor Kathy Hochul never directly said there was quid pro quo for the pipeline, she did say in a statement at the time that she would “work with the Administration and private entities on new energy projects that meet the legal requirements under New York law.”
5. Fed scraps climate groups
The Federal Reserve has gotten rid of a number of working groups and internal organizations dedicated to climate change, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. These include the Supervision Climate Committee, founded in 2021, which the Fed said then would “further build the Federal Reserve’s capacity to understand the potential implications of climate change for financial institutions, infrastructure, and markets.” The other groups eliminated are the Financial Stability Climate Committee, the Climate Committee on Economic Activity, and the Climate Data Committee.
The central bank’s actions are part of a government wide push to de-emphasize climate change in policymaking and official communications. Days before President Trump’s second inauguration, the Fed said that it had withdrawn from the Network of Central Banks and Supervisors for Greening the Financial System. In a statement, the Fed said that the group had “increasingly broadened in scope, covering a wider range of issues that are outside of the Board's statutory mandate.”
The central bank will continue to “assess climate risk as part of its business-as-usual activities,” Bloomberg reported.
“Abruptly ending the energy tax credits would threaten America’s energy independence and the reliability of our grid - we urge the senate to enact legislation with a sensible wind down of 25D and 48e,” Tesla Energy’s Twitter account posted Wednesday night, in reference to tax credits for home purchases of solar and storage energy systems and investments in clean energy systems respectively. The post came hours after news broke that Tesla CEO Elon Musk would be leaving the Trump administration.