The former Michigan governor has tried to turn the Department of Energy, flush with billions of dollars from energy and infrastructure legislation, into a catalyst for America’s clean energy future and new jobs.
By Alan Ohnsman, Forbes Staff
AsSecretary of Energy at a time when funding for clean energy in the U.S. is at its highest ever, Jennifer Granholm has an unprecedented task: dole out upwards of $110 billion for greener, less carbon-intense forms of energy — as quickly as possible. If she gets it right, it will affect Americans for decades to come – and create tens of thousands of jobs.
“Our motto is deploy, deploy, deploy,” Granholm told Forbes. “That has not historically been the case. When I came in we reorganized a whole new vertical inside the department and hired almost a thousand people to execute on deploying clean energy. We’ve obviously been a great science and research agency and we shepherd the nuclear stockpile, but this issue of deploying has not historically been part of our DNA.”
That urgency was inspired by the Biden Administration’s target of slashing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses to net zero by 2050. It’s an audacious goal, and one scientists say must be achieved on time, if not sooner, to avoid the worst effects of climate change. To make it happen, Energy has tens of billions of dollars of new grants and loans to dole out resulting from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act. It’s money that can be broadly allocated as long as it furthers climate goals — for things like new solar panel and wind turbine factories, plants making batteries for electric cars or long-term power storage, new ways to produce clean hydrogen for dirty heavy industries and energy-efficient upgrades for homes.
“Batteries are now the fastest-growing secondary electricity source for the grid”
The two landmark bills set aside the most funding for clean energy in U.S. history and, critically, are designed to encourage companies and manufacturers to make major matching investments. The approximately $50 billion from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act that DOE has doled out to over 1,000 projects has spurred over $60 billion in matching private capital, according to department officials. The administration’s push has also encouraged companies like Walmart to dramatically increase its solar power installations and Amazon to boost its green delivery fleet with 20,000 electric delivery trucks.
The U.S. has a long way to go. But Granholm, who is honored today on Forbes’ inaugural Sustainability Leaders list, cites the rapid growth of solar power and battery storage as early successes. A record 11 gigawatts of new solar added to the grid in 2024’s second quarter is up 91% from a year earlier and is “the equivalent of five Hoover Dams,” she said. “Annual solar installations have doubled over the past four years. In 2024 we’re on track to reach 38 gigawatts, which is double the prior U.S. record, which was just set a year ago in 2023.”
Batteries charged up by wind and solar installations, retaining surplus power generated at peak hours of the day, have had similarly impressive growth. She estimated that the country had less than two gigawatts of battery energy storage capacity at the end of 2020. But as of July, we’re at 20 gigawatts, “and there’s just exponential growth in projections,” she said. With their ability to hold power and feed it back into the grid when needed, “batteries are now the fastest-growing secondary electricity source for the grid.”
The Energy Department’s current direction seems closer to its 1977 origins when then-President Jimmy Carter tasked it with finding alternative energy sources at a time when embargoes and price spikes by oil-rich Middle Eastern countries undermined the U.S. economy. It was also charged with overseeing the country’s nuclear power industry, a critical role in the wake of 1979’s Three Mile Island power plant disaster. Over the years, and particularly as domestic oil and gas production rebounded, DOE’s role grew less prominent even as it continued to award research grants for early-stage clean energy projects and ran federal energy laboratories.
It wasn’t until the Obama Administration that Energy’s role was amped up again when it was tasked with overseeing a loan program for clean energy initiatives created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and awarding low-cost funds from a similar program for automakers passed in late 2008. The latter proved to be profoundly helpful for Tesla, Ford and Nissan, which got and repaid loan guarantees to build and retool plants to make electric and highly fuel-efficient vehicles. But two of those loans – $528 million for startup Fisker Automotive and $535 million for solar panel maker Solyndra – were flops after the companies went bankrupt – and came to symbolize the risk of the government betting on unproven companies and technology. Solyndra’s 2011 failure even became a talking point in the 2012 presidential election.
The DOE “needs more freedom to operate and a willingness to take bigger risks”
Granholm’s agency is still haunted by Solyndra and concerns that, despite her intentions, it isn’t moving fast enough to combat the climate crisis. The clock is ticking too: If Trump were to be elected, his administration would pivot away from the cleantech push. So some believe DOE needs to take more risks, not fewer.
“It needs more freedom to operate and a willingness to take bigger risks with shorter periods between the appropriation of the allocation of funding and the disbursement of funds,” said Gaurav Sant, director of UCLA’s Institute for Carbon Management, which is incubating and launching cleantech industrial companies. “You have an action window that’s 25 years and given that capital projects take three to six years to execute, it’s a short amount of time period to act.”
Granholm is a Canadian native who became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1980. She grew up in California, was a high school beauty queen, graduated from UC Berkeley and earned a Harvard law degree. As governor of Michigan during the Obama Administration, she saw firsthand the benefits federal support could provide for domestic manufacturers. And while disbursing DOE funds helps curb carbon emissions, they’re also critical for creating jobs.
Wind turbines reflected on a solar field.
getty
“We as a nation sat by and watched as other countries poached our jobs. I mean, I was the governor of Michigan,” she said. The federal government “saw all of these jobs leave, all these factories leave, and did nothing about it.”
The infrastructure and energy legislation passed under Biden was designed to reverse that, with “incentives that make the United States irresistible,” she said. That’s resulted in more than 800 clean energy-related projects nationwide that have benefited from Inflation Reduction Act funds. That includes pushing for a domestic supply base to produce components for batteries, solar panels and wind turbines, or things like electrolyzers to make hydrogen from water and electricity.
“It’s not just the factories. It’s also the mapping of the supply chains to make sure that we’re filling in the gaps so that we’re not substituting some reliance on OPEC with reliance on China. We are doing this – building up this clean energy supply chain in the United States.”
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