The Trump administration doesn’t even understand the field they are playing on.
Doug Lewin: Texas Energy and Power Newsletter
As the House Republicans passed their and President Trump’s budget bill last month, some wanted to preserve — or at least have an orderly phase out of — various clean energy tax credits. The message they received, according to Politico: “When it comes to winning on clean energy, Trump just isn’t interested.”
Right now, renewables and batteries comprise more than 80% of the energy coming onto the world’s power grids, including in the US. They’re more than 90% of what’s been installed in Texas recently.
And electricity is at the center of China’s efforts to overtake the U.S. economy.
Yet Trump and the House leadership appear apathetic in their approach to this vital race with China; they seem to have given up. They talk about winning the AI race, but they are knee-capping the only power source that can, in the short and medium terms, deliver the massive amounts of electricity that AI and modern economies need.
They apparently think the U.S. can lead on oil and gas, coal, and nuclear power but not on solar, wind, electric vehicles, and batteries — the very sources that are shaping the future.
No one is building coal plants in America, no matter how badly President Trump or anyone else wants them to.
New nuclear power will take until 2032, at least, to enter the market, and longer to scale up.
And supply chain issues mean there will be a shortage of gas turbines for the next half-decade, and likely much longer.
Energy dominance is only possible with clean energy.
Yet Politico cites a former Trump Administration Energy Department official on clean energy: “To all appearances, it is not a battlefield that they care about.”
That’s not energy dominance. It’s the opposite: it’s energy submission. It will hand growth fueled by new energy innovation to China and hobble the American economy.
It also will drive U.S. power bills through the roof, which will hasten a change of power in Washington — making these policies that much more confounding. Regardless, such unpredictable, unstable policymaking is terrible for businesses and economic growth — economic growth we desperately need to get out of the debt crisis we’re in.
The Republican clean-energy feud complicating President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” megabill comes down to a fundamental divide in Washington over how to confront China.
One camp wants the United States to compete with Beijing in the race to dominate the energy technologies of the future, from solar panels and wind turbines to batteries and electric cars.
The other side says China has already won the clean energy race, due in part to practices such as forced labor, massive subsidies and intellectual property theft — and playing in that game would make the United States the loser. They want the U.S. to focus on energy sources it already dominates, including oil, natural gas and coal.
This intra-party rift has become a significant stumbling block for the GOP’s tax and spending bill, which is caught up in demands by hard-line conservativesfor a wholesale gutting of hundreds of billions of dollars in Biden-era clean energy tax incentives. That push threatens to alienate moderate Republicanswhose communities stand to gain from factories and other projects enabled by the tax breaks — and green-tech advocates who had hoped they could sway Trump by framing the incentives as the key to edging out China.
The message they’ve gotten instead: When it comes to winning on clean energy, Trump just isn’t interested.
“The second administration is really not about taking half-measures,” said Daniel Simmons, who ran the Energy Department’s energy efficiency and renewable energy office in Trump’s first term. “To all appearances, it is not a battlefield that they care about.”
Trump’s Energy Department confirmed as much in a statement to POLITICO that focused largely on oil — an energy source that the U.S. produces more of than any other country.
“Thanks to President Trump, America is leading the way in lowering costs by removing red tape and unleashing affordable, abundant, and reliable American energy,” the department said Friday, adding: “As the world’s largest oil producer, the United States welcomes a secure and stable global supply of oil that promotes economic prosperity at home and promotes peace and stability around the world.”
How is the Administration going to keep up? Here’s what (Interior Secretary Doug) Burgum told Friedberg:
“Between now, 2025, and 2030, a lot of it’s going to come back to LNG because that’s the fastest thing we can get online for more electricity generation is LNG power plants.”
This is a direct quote. And it’s terrifying.
There’s no such thing as an LNG power plant.
Liquefying natural gas consumes massive amounts of electricity. The only reason to do it is to send it somewhere else. And that’s what the oil and gas industry is doing: sending liquefied gas overseas.
But there’s no world — no math — where a national LNG buildout does a damn thing to help power our electric grids to compete and win with China.
Only Burgum’s urgency was partially reassuring.
It seems like Burgum and the Administration want to compete with China, which is great. And he says he wants to do it by putting power on the grid as quickly as possible, which is also great.
But we’re not going to do that with “LNG power plants.”
The answer is obvious to anyone paying attention to global electricity markets: the fastest way to get electricity online is through solar power and battery storage — and there’s not a close second.
The first line of this article says it all: “The Trump administration doesn’t even understand the field they are playing on.”