US Energy Dominance Must Include A Robust Percentage Of Renewables – CleanTechnica

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Last Updated on: 12th February 2025, 11:02 am

On his first day in office, President Donald J. Trump barred any new construction of offshore wind projects, proposed eliminating EV incentives, and reversed former President Joe Biden’s decision to rejoin the Paris climate pact. Trump wants to “drill, baby, drill” and take advantage of the inexpensive gas and oil that the US sells to the world. Fossil fuels a gold mine, as the US is the world’s biggest supplier of natural gas, and it now produces more oil than any other country. Early term energy-related executive orders are part of a larger administration vision of US “energy dominance,” a phrase that the Trumpsters have embraced.

Many clean energy leaders are appropriating the “energy dominance” terminology to sustain their investments. In the Can You Believe It? category, last week more than 160 solar energy executives showed up on Capitol Hill and engaged in some Extreme Lobbying. Their audience? Republicans who hold the federal purse strings. In a nod to their King, the clean energy execs had “American Energy Dominance” pins on their lapels.

US solar panel manufacturing capacity has increased fourfold since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act; the US is now the third-largest solar module producer in the world.

“We have been working for years to bring a lot of solar manufacturing here to the United States, and anything that undermines that effort is not helpful to achieving American ‘energy dominance,’” explained Abigail Ross Hopper, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association. Other groups promoting the “energy dominance” initiative include the Business Council for Sustainable Energy, Clean Energy for America, E2, and the National Hydropower Association.

The Capitol Hill gab fest was just one of several attempts that the clean energy industry is making to convince Congressional Republicans that solar, wind, and other forms of renewable energy should be part of the US energy dominance toolkit.

“We don’t have to say ‘climate change,’” Todd Borgmann, CEO of Montana Renewables, told the Washington Post. Borgmann’s company closed a $1.44 billion loan guarantee on January 10 to build a plant that will turn vegetable oil into jet fuel. “We can say energy transition — motivated by national interest, motivated by energy independence, motivated by national defense.” It’s not the first reframing of renewables this year; in fact, a number of companies are repositioning their clean energy projects as “defense tech.”

Trump’s repudiation of renewable energy technologies could make the US an outlier in the world. Setting the rhetoric of energy dominance aside, fossil fuels still dominate how the world is powered. Yet recent investment in solar, wind, and batteries make clean energy look more and more appealing all the time. Worldwide, investors poured nearly twice as much money into renewable energy in 2024 as they did into fossil fuels, according to the International Energy Agency.

Kelly Sims Gallagher, dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University, said the Trump administration can take a different route than abandoning renewables, which would mean acquiescing to China’s renewables dominance. “The US oil and gas industry is already thriving and arguably stronger than it has ever been in history,” Gallagher told the New York Times. “It is not threatened by expanded production of renewables. Purely on economic and security grounds it is simply contrary to the US national interest to restrict the continued growth of clean energy technologies.”

To make their case, the clean energy advocacy groups remind lawmakers that red states received the greatest benefit from Biden-era clean energy investments — nearly three times as much as a result of clean energy tax credits. Add to that the majority of new clean energy jobs in Republican-led districts, according to a separate analysis by Climate Power, an environmental advocacy group, and the case for renewables becomes more and more persuasive.

Energy Dominance Means Renewables Dominance

While the Trump administration is doing all it can to weaken US trends toward a net zero future, the decarbonization market continues to grow. In fact  “decarbonization-as-a-service” — companies being hired by other organizations to reduce their energy emissions and carbon footprint — is projected to be valued at $20 billion by 2030. In 2023, that market was valued at $170 million.

How can the US decarbonization market flourish without federal regulations or incentives? Well, it’s not just the feds who create pressure for industry to decarbonize: there are also state and international regulations with which companies must comply. Shareholders are also pushing companies to reduce their Scope 3 goals — those produced by a company’s customers and supply chain, both upstream (before) and downstream (after) its own operations. They typically account for around 80% of a company’s carbon footprint.

Another good reason to decarbonize is profitability. Whether by avoiding economic loss through enhancing resilience, increasing revenues and sustainability through adaptation, or other means, the cascading economic and societal risks not to decarbonize are complex and interconnected. They can be understood in three separate ways: direct operational costs, supply chain disruption, and instability in nature and society.

Bloomberg reports that some players in the clean energy business are increasingly optimistic about the industry’s prospects. Low valuations and an improving earnings outlook are causing controlled smiles. Interest rates are helping, with declines in 2024.

While clean energy incentives are quickly vanishing under the Trump administration, there may be a slight silver lining — without support for EV makers, there are reduced expectations for EV divisions to be profitable in the short term. Seth Kirkham, chief investment officer of global equities at Galvanize Climate Solutions, admitted he’s skeptical of public money being used to successfully decarbonize the economy. While good public policy can help the energy transition, governments tend to be poor allocators of capital, he said at an ESG conference hosted by Bloomberg Intelligence.

Izzet Bensusan of Captona, a New York firm that manages $2 billion, says battery producers should prosper as more electric grids install them to manage loads and store power when solar or wind installations are idle.

When Wabash Valley Resources applied for a $1.6 billion loan to build a plant to turn oil refinery waste into fertilizer under the first Trump administration, CEO Nalin Gupta described that his pitch was that the project would prove “how fossil energy can be a part of America’s future energy policy.” Then under Biden, he said, his project was about cutting carbon emissions and handling waste sustainably.

The Washington Post contacted recipients of federal grants under the Inflation Reduction Act. Nearly two-thirds of this survey pool declined to comment, many of whom expressed fear of retaliation by the Trumpsters if they did so.

Those who participated were enthusiastic about “how they’re rebranding their projects to match the new administration’s rhetoric.”

Meanwhile, global temperatures in 2024 crept past a key Paris agreement goal, raising questions about how debating renewables will further impede nations from halting further planetary heating.