Donald Trump, Champion of Renewable Energy

His humiliating defeat in Iran has sealed the deal

Part of a 12 square mile solar farm in Spain

On Wednesday the Interior Department announced that it would pay the energy developer Invenergy $765 million not to develop three offshore wind farms. This is the third such payment by the Trump administration to undo offshore wind projects that have been years in the planning. Trump has so far committed $2.5 billion in taxpayer dollars to killing renewable energy projects. The administration has also tried to stop offshore wind farms already under development — moves that have been blocked by the courts — while the Pentagon has been refusing to grant routine permits for onshore wind projects.

Yes, $2.5 billion to destroy already-approved, cost-effective clean energy projects while Americans are suffering from soaring electricity prices thanks to data centers and high gasoline prices.

Yet here’s the irony: Donald Trump’s disastrous Iran war has delivered a huge boost for renewable energy around the world — except in the U.S.. Trump has so far done more to shift the global economy away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy than any other single individual in history.

Why do Trump and his gang hate green energy so much? The roots of their hatred range from the power of fossil fuel interests, to Trump’s petulant whine that wind turbines ruined the view from his Scottish golf course, to a general sense among right-wingers that clean energy threatens their masculinity.

What’s best for Americans has nothing to do with it. Thus, Trump lackeys justifying their hostility to renewables consistently make arguments even they must know are stupid. Consider, for example, an exchange last month between Doug Burgum, secretary of the interior, and Rep. Jared Huffman of California:

Burgum: All of these projects you’re describing in Nevada have one thing in common—when the sun goes down, they produce zero electricity.

Huffman: Mr. Chairman, I request unanimous consent to enter in the record this amazing new technology that apparently the secretary is unaware of: It’s a battery.

Indeed. To get a clearer understanding of far battery technology has progressed in enabling the transition to renewables, let’s look at how the state of California sourced its electricity this past Wednesday. The chart below shows megawatts supplied at 15-minute intervals over the course of the day. The area shaded yellow represents daylight hours. The light blue line at the top is electricity generated by renewables, mainly solar power (with some wind and hydro as well). In addition to supplying energy for current consumption, renewables supply energy to batteries for nighttime consumption. The black line at the bottom is net electricity supply from batteries — which is negative when batteries are charging, positive when they’re being drawn down:

California — which would be the world’s 4^th largest economy if it were a country — gets more than half of its electricity from renewables. It is rapidly becoming a state largely powered by the sun during daylight hours and powered by batteries during the night.

Burgum’s suggestion that solar is an unproven or unreliable technology is completely at odds with reality.

Nor is California the only economy that now makes substantial use of renewable energy. Burgum’s home state of North Dakota gets more than a third of its electricity from wind power (don’t tell Trump). In South Dakota wind supplies 57 percent of the electricity. And renewables generate a large share of electricity in many countries, including most big European economies. (France is the outlier, not because it relies on fossil fuels, but because it has large nuclear capacity.) Spain, for example, now relies heavily on a solar-plus-batteries system similar to that in California.

And when Trump went to war with Iran, nations that had already shifted toward renewable energy were very glad they had made the move.

To the extent that there’s a competition for the future of electricity generation, it’s between renewable energy and natural gas. Whatever Trump may want to believe, burning coal — even ignoring the environmental damage — is a costly, obsolete technology, which nobody wants to invest in. But new gas-turbine power facilities are still being built (although many places are, like California, rapidly shifting away from natural gas). Trump officials envision a world largely powered by US liquefied natural gas (LNG).

However, countries that relied heavily on natural gas were hit hard by Trump’s gratuitous war with Iran. LNG supplies from the Persian Gulf were blocked and couldn’t be fully replaced by U.S. exports because shipping capacity was limited. Countries that had invested heavily in renewables, like Spain, were largely unscathed. A report from the think tank Ember found that since the war began Spanish electricity prices — unlike prices in some other European countries — were essentially decoupled from the soaring price of natural gas.

Assuming that the Strait of Hormuz will be reopened after Trump’s abject surrender to the Iranian regime, natural gas prices should subside. Yet the world has learned a hard lesson about the riskiness of relying on fossil fuels for electricity generation.

And let’s be clear about the nature of that lesson. It’s not the fact that much of the world’s supply of hydrocarbons comes from a politically volatile region: We’ve known that all too well since the 1970s. What’s new is the recognition of American weakness and unreliability.

In this new era of drone warfare America cannot guarantee reliable access to imported fossil fuels through critical sea lanes. And is America itself a reliable supplier? Can nations that allow themselves to be dependent on U.S. gas and oil be sure that Trump or a future Trump-like president won’t weaponize that dependence, cutting off or threatening to cut off supplies in some future dispute? The obvious answer is no.

The whole world now knows that relying on imported fossil fuels is a major economic and security risk. By contrast, the sun will shine and the wind blow whatever may be happening overseas. Renewables were already rapidly becoming cheaper than fossil fuels. Now it’s clear that they are also far safer.

Thus Donald Trump has in practice become the world’s green energy champion.

MUSICAL CODA