The Crazy Comes for Clean Energy

Nothing is safe from the madness of King Donald

ˆCanceled

I do three things every morning: I start a pot of coffee, I feed the cat, and then I fire up my laptop. The first two are calming routines. The third is a moment of high anxiety, because I’m about to see the latest developments in The Crazy.

No, I haven’t developed a Trumpian habit of Random Capitalizations. “The Crazy” is my personal term for the escalating barrage of destructive actions and statements coming from the madman-in-chief and his minions. During Trump’s first term we got a couple of these each month. Now they come multiple times a week, sometimes several times in a single day.

At this point The Crazy is running at such a rapid pace that hugely important stories all too often get buried because some other terrible thing pops up and demands immediate attention. So I ended up writing about Trump’s attempt to fire Lisa Cook before I could manage to write about how his hatred for wind power has metastasized into an effort to shut down 10 percent of U.S. electricity production — even as electricity prices are soaring.

Before I get to Trump’s ill wind, let’s talk about the economics of renewable energy.

Whenever I write about energy, I get many comments from people insisting that renewables are too costly to compete with fossil fuels unless they receive huge subsidies, and anyway that they can’t meet a large fraction of our energy needs because of intermittency — the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. Gosh, I never thought of that.

The most charitable interpretation of such comments is that the people making them formed their ideas about energy economics a long time ago, probably before 2010, and haven’t kept up with the extraordinary technological progress we’ve made in renewables since then. Between 2010 and 2023 the real cost of solar photovoltaic power fell 90 percent, while the cost of offshore wind fell 63 percent. Intermittency is still an issue, one that utilities to some extent deal with by using gas turbines to fill the gaps. But coal, much as some on the right love it, simply isn’t competitive anymore.

Since if I am not for myself, who will be for me, I might point out that I wrote about the coming solar revolution in 2011, in a column titled “Here comes the sun.”

And gas is becoming less important too, because there has also been huge progress in another energy technology — batteries:

Source: RMI

Batteries, in turn, work synergistically with solar power, making it possible to generate power when the sun shines and use it after dark. Here, for example, is what happened last February in California:

Source: Ember

In a way the most remarkable thing about the number of people insisting that large-scale reliance on renewables is impossible is that such reliance is already happening in many places around the world, including large parts of the United States. Britain gets 30 percent of its electricity from wind and another 5 percent from solar; Denmark gets 70 percent from renewables, mostly wind. Here in America, Iowa gets 65 percent of its electricity from renewables, mostly wind; California, whose economy is larger than that of most countries, gets 38 percent, mainly from solar.

The renewables revolution is, in short, well under way, and it’s one of the great technological success stories of modern times.

And the Trump administration is trying to kill it.

We knew, coming into the second Trump administration, that Republicans in general and Trump in particular like fossil fuels and dislike renewables. Some of this is about money: In the last election cycle the oil and gas industry gave 88 percent of its contributions to Republicans. And as I wrote last month, energy policy has been caught up in the culture wars. Solar and wind power have, in the MAGA mind, become identified with wokeness, while burning fossil fuels is considered masculine. Hence the hostility to green energy.

We also know that Trump has a special animus against wind power, dating back to Scotland’s refusal to cancel a wind project he thought ruined the view from his golf course.

While it was predictable, however, that Trump and his party would try to eliminate Biden-era subsidies for renewable energy, and even throw up obstacles to new green energy projects, even I didn’t think Trump would try to destroy already existing renewable generation capacity. Yet here we are:

If you think this is empty posturing, look at what just happened to Revolution Wind, a wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island. Revolution Wind is a largely completed project, already connected to the grid, which was scheduled to start delivering power next year. But the Trump administration has just ordered work on the project to stop.

Think about it. We’re talking about gratuitously trashing billions of dollars’ worth of investment. We’re also talking about significantly reducing the supply of electricity — not in the long run, but next year — at a moment when electricity prices are soaring thanks to the demand from data centers. And there’s every reason to believe that Revolution Wind is only the beginning of a real attempt to roll back wind and, possibly to a lesser extent, solar, even though both are now crucial parts of America’s energy system.

If this sounds crazy, that’s because it is. But so was the way Covid vaccines became a partisan issue, which didn’t prevent anti-vax sentiment from killing thousands in right-leaning counties.

Never underestimate the power of irrational prejudice.

MUSICAL CODA