Trump administration and Project 2025 envision a steam-punk future powered by digitized 19th century technologies, like “beautiful coal”. They’ll be pumping out junk papers to make the case, as they did in forcing a creaky, pollution spewing coal plant in Michigan to stay open this summer, despite no demonstrated need, as discussed below.
Because the administration is putting roadblocks in the way of quick-t0-deliver renewables, many experts fear it will not be too much clean energy, but too little too late, that stresses the grid.
PBS report above discusses the Administration’s efforts to prop up dying technologies. Below, clean advocates are pushing back, armed with real world data.
President Donald Trump claims that rapid adoption of solar and wind power has made U.S. electricity unstable and expensive, justifying his bid to end most subsidies for renewable energy.
But reliability has improved dramatically in the U.S. grid with the most renewable energy – in Texas – and electricity prices there are below the national average, according to regulatory filings and price data reviewed by Reuters. At the same time, some grids that rely primarily on fossil fuel generation have experienced reliability issues and surging prices.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the state’s main grid operator, forecasts only a 0.30% chance of rolling blackouts during peak energy demand in August, according to its June 6 reliability assessment. That is a vast improvement from the 12% chance it predicted for August 2024.
Electricity prices for Texas residential customers and businesses are about 10 cents per kilowatt hour, 24% below the national average, according to the latest monthly report by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
“ERCOT has done a good job of defining the products needed for energy and reliability,” said Joshua Rhodes, a research scientist at the University of Texas in Austin. “It could be an example for other grids in how to create reliability at a low cost.”
Clean energy advocates say they have doubts about the agency’s methodology.
DOE’s study “appears to exaggerate the risk of blackouts and undervalue the contributions of entire resource classes, like wind, solar, and battery storage,” AEU’s Marquis said.
“We are working quickly to dig into the numbers to unpack how DOE reached its conclusions,” Marquis said. “But it’s troubling that the report was not subject to public input and scrutiny, especially since the Executive Order that mandated it calls for it to be used to identify power plants that should be retained for reliability.”
The methodology “is another attempt to push the false narrative that our country’s energy future depends upon decades-old coal- and gas-plants, rather than clean renewables,” Sierra Club Senior Attorney Greg Wannier said in an email.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the states “are already well equipped to meet any projected resource needs through the existing regulatory process, which ensures that electricity demand is reliably met at the least public cost,” Wannier said. “Any effort by DOE to override this process to forcibly keep coal plants online past their planned retirements would be an extraordinary and unlawful overreach of its regulatory authority.”
In May, DOE issued an emergency order under section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act, directing Consumers Energy to delay, by about three months, shutting down a 1,560-MW, coal-fired power plant in Michigan. Earthjustice and other groups have asked the agency for rehearing, and said they may go to the courts to challenge the order.
“Determining the reserve margin and ‘critical’ resources are complex decisions with severe health and economic consequences that Congress rightly entrusted FERC to oversee using a robust public adjudication process,” said Christine Powell, deputy managing attorney for Earthjustice’s clean energy program. DOE’s methodology “attempts to usurp that process, and would impose billions of dollars and harmful pollutants on consumers without any corresponding benefits for anyone except for the coal industry.”
DOE’s analysis “doesn’t support President Trump’s strategy of using emergency declarations to stop power plants from carrying through with their plans to retire,” said Jennifer Danis, federal energy policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity.
“The Trump administration’s own study has found that no present emergency exists in the two regions where it already issued 202(c) orders,” Danis said. “Reforms may be needed to ensure better planning for future resource adequacy to power AI, but they should focus on improving existing markets and planning standards, as well as speeding up new resource interconnection, rather than forcing customers to pay to keep old, inefficient plants online.”
Red States, Defying Reality, Are Reclassifying Gas as a “Green” Fuel
The designation, pushed by right-wing think tank ALEC, allows fossil fuel firms to compete for clean energy funding.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/07/red-states-louisiana-indiana-ohio-tennessee-reclassify-gas-green-energy-fuel-greenswashing-alec/