WASHINGTON —Solar, wind and storage are critical for meeting growing U.S. energy demand because they are cheaper and faster to build than natural gas, and they represent 95% of the 2,600 GW sitting in RTO and ISO interconnection queues across the country, according to Ray Long, CEO of the American Council on Renewable Energy.   

But the industry should not depend on the current queues, said Andrew Wheeler, who led EPA during President Donald Trump’s first term.  

“I am not convinced that the queue is going to remain the way it is right now,” Wheeler told an audience of clean energy industry leaders at the ACORE Policy Forum on Feb. 26. “I think there could be a reordering of projects based upon [system] needs and going back to the president’s executive order on the energy emergency.” 

In addition to Trump’s Day 1 executive order declaring a national energy emergency, Wheeler also pointed to the Feb. 18 EO putting independent federal agencies such as FERC under more direct executive control. “There’s going to be a little bit more political scrutiny, I believe, on energy projects going forward,” he said. 

Individual energy projects could be re-examined, and the need for and viability of each one justified, he said. “I think that’s going to be … the course for the next few years.” 

The potentially conflicting narratives of the industry and the Trump administration were a recurring theme at ACORE’s two-day event, which opened with Long’s comments and an on-stage discussion between Wheeler and Ernest Moniz, who led the U.S. Department of Energy during former President Barack Obama’s second term.  

The extent to which energy policy ― and the debate surrounding it — can be depoliticized remains a vital question as the Republican-led Congress begins to wrestle with the massive budget cuts that will be needed to extend Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.  

The House of Representatives’ budget resolution (H.Con.Res. 14) passed Feb. 25 would require $2 trillion in spending cuts, with the largest slice — $880 billion – coming from appropriations under the jurisdiction of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.  

Moniz expects that at least some of the clean energy tax credits and other incentives from the Inflation Reduction Act will be cut. But, he said, U.S. energy policy will remain market driven. 

“Where energy policy is going is determined by where the energy sector is going, and I think certainly one trend which will continue is electrification playing a more important role in the energy economy, [with] multiple sources, obviously, for that electricity,” Moniz said.  

“It’s a reality that most of the new capacity added has been renewables [and] second, natural gas,” he said. “I don’t see how that’s going to change in these next days.” 

Trump’s climate denial notwithstanding, climate change also will continue to propel the growth of clean energy, Moniz said. “We’re going to see increasing extreme weather. … There’s a strong association in the public’s mind between that and warming; so again, I see more continuation than disruption in how we go forward.” 

Consumers vs. Producers

Since the November election, one of the main messages coming out of clean energy trade groups like ACORE is that they want to work with the Trump administration.  

Like Trump, the clean energy industry wants permitting reform “that protects the environment while eliminating bureaucratic red tape,” Long said.  

Another common goal is reducing energy costs for consumers with “an all-of-the-above approach to diversify the energy mix,” he said. “Wind and solar produce the cheapest power right now. … Removing any one technology puts the United States at a competitive disadvantage.” 

Still another argument is that the wind, solar and storage projects in interconnection queues are the “low-hanging fruit” for meeting near-term demand growth from data centers and keeping the U.S. ahead of China in the race to develop artificial intelligence. 

Renewables are “the things that are going to get built between now and 2030,” Long said. “Other technologies, such as natural gas ― peakers, combined cycle — new and existing nuclear, won’t come online until after 2030.” 

But, again, Wheeler foresees disruption to such expectations. While noting that the first Trump administration did “nothing on the policy side … that disadvantaged renewable energy,” he predicted an acceleration in natural gas development.  

“The Trump administration is going to make sure that they have the permitting and leasing in place not just to access natural gas but also to build new natural gas plants,” he said. 

Just one example: EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin may be exploring options for overturning the endangerment finding, the 2009 ruling that gives the agency the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act, according to The Washington Post. 

Looking at the upcoming negotiations over budget cuts in the House and Senate, Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.) pointed to another threat to clean energy. A key question in the energy policy debate is “should our energy policy exist to benefit consumers or producers?” Casten said during an on-stage conversation with Robin Millican, head of strategic initiatives and integration at Breakthrough Energy.  

While the majority of IRA tax credits and incentives have gone to develop clean energy projects in Republican districts and states, the Republican leadership in the House leans heavily toward fossil fuel-producing states, he said. Both Speaker Mike Johnson and Rep. Steve Scalise, House majority leader, are from Louisiana, a state heavily invested in offshore oil and LNG. 

“The parts of the country that are primarily extractive [are] where Republican leadership is from,” he said. “What the White House is pushing is a producer-focused policy, and a push to cheaper energy is a competitive threat to them.” 

Casten also expressed concern about FERC’s independence, and Chair Mark Christie’s “politically astute” statements in the wake of Trump’s executive order on executive control of independent agencies. (See FERC’s Christie Says Existing Policies Can Align with Trump Order.) 

“We don’t know at this point whether Christie is going to defend [grid] reliability over political pressure,” he said. “I mean, can you imagine if FERC had to have interregional cost allocation conversations where they’re sitting there saying, ‘Well, the two senators on this side of the cost allocation equation are on these committees … and this one is up for election, and this one’s not.’ That’s a good way to have blackouts.” 

‘Fast as We Can’

So, current political rhetoric aside, can the clean energy industry find ways to work with Trump and the Republican leadership in Congress? 

Moniz says the way forward will require “much more coalition building,” especially for developing new technologies for clean, dispatchable power, such as small modular reactors or other advanced nuclear. 

Beyond the challenges of permitting the new technologies, Moniz said, scaling them will require “substantial demand aggregation. … Without it, we will not get the kind of investments in rebuilding the supply chain that we are going to need and building a workforce that we are going to need if we’re going to profit from learning and cost reduction over time.” 

Scaling that kind of demand aggregation will, in turn, require governors, state regulators, the federal government, hyperscalers and utilities to work together, he said. “But even that, I think, will not be enough. That has to be supplemented by some level, at least for a while … of federal and state risk sharing because right now investors, public utility commissions in the United States are going to be unwilling to take on the risk implicit” in such capital-intensive new technologies.  

“The question is, can we bring together the whole system, in terms of technology, policy [and] business models?” he said. Moniz is optimistic that innovative technology and business models “will continue to keep pace,” but sees policy and regulatory change still lagging.  

“That’s the place where, let’s say, school is out in terms of our ability to pull all that together,” he said. 

Moniz continues to believe bipartisan solutions will be the most durable and downplays the importance of the current Republican trifecta controlling the White House and both houses of Congress, which, he said, is not a new phenomenon. 

“This is the fourth change of president in a row where the new president has come in with a trifecta,” he said. Obama, the first Trump administration and Biden all started with their party in control of Congress.  

“I personally think that checks and balances work better, and apparently voters do as well, since the history of those trifectas was relatively short,” he said. 

“I am very supportive and eager to see the clean energy transition continuing, but I have to always remind our friends that we have to go as fast as we can, not as fast as we’d like, because, by definition, you can’t go faster than you can.”