President Donald Trump declared his much-anticipated “energy emergency” Monday that says the U.S. energy supply is “precariously inadequate” to meet the needs of a booming technology industry and national defense.
“The United States’ insufficient energy production, transportation, refining, and generation constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to our Nation’s economy, national security, and foreign policy,” Trump declared.
In his inaugural address, Trump riffed on plans to dismantle the Democratic climate agenda (a version of the “Green New Deal”) and go after more “liquid gold” oil and gas. He echoed his pledge during the campaign to declare an emergency over rising energy costs.
But it wasn’t until 9:30 p.m. that details and text of the energy emergency emerged. In the preamble to an executive order that carries the weight of the presidency, Trump blamed local and state officials in the Northeast and along the West Coast for risking the nation’s security through their opposition to fossil fuel production and pipelines. Then, he turned to policies under former President Joe Biden.
“The policies of the previous administration have driven our Nation into a national emergency, where a precariously inadequate and intermittent energy supply, and an increasingly unreliable grid, require swift and decisive action,” the order said.
“Without immediate remedy,” said the order, “this situation will dramatically deteriorate in the near future due to a high demand for energy and natural resources to power the next generation of technology.”
The drip, drip, drip of rumors of executive orders turned into a flood of real ones. Almost as soon as Trump entered the Oval Office for the start of his second term, he rescinded orders signed by Biden directing federal action on energy and climate change. Seventeen in all.
Then the new White House began coloring in the lines of a Trump “energy dominance” agenda that, by its very nature, is a dramatic shift away from the American pursuit of lower greenhouse gas emissions and a much cleaner energy portfolio.
In one order, Trump directed agencies and departments to “eliminate harmful, coercive ‘climate’ policies that increase the costs of food and fuel.”
“In particular, the assault on plentiful and reliable American energy through unnecessary and illegal regulatory demands has driven up the cost of transportation and manufacturing,” wrote the White House as it described one of Trump’s first major energy orders.
Before heading to the inaugural balls, Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris international climate agreement for a second time in eight years. He froze pending regulations, a step toward the promised deregulatory blitz.
Soon, he would sign orders to boost domestic mining of critical minerals used by big technology companies, battery makers and the defense industry. He planned to halt federal leasing for wind power and reverse pollution standards that have spurred the production of electric vehicles.
With the flare of a master showman, Trump sat in front of the cameras, signed orders and complimented his nominees for Interior and Energy secretaries, Doug Burgum and Chris Wright. With that, U.S. energy policy swung again toward fossil fuels.
The United States produces more oil than any other country, and it exports the most natural gas. The crisis is in electricity — the need for more power plants and pipelines to produce more electricity isn’t keeping up with a rapidly expanding high-tech economy.
Trump’s emergency declaration tied actions to increase the nation’s electricity to a national defense purpose.
The order directs the secretary of Defense, working with the Interior and Energy secretaries, to make a 60-day assessment of vulnerabilities that could limit the supply of electricity, oil, gas and other fuels “needed to protect the homeland.” A 2015 law requires the Energy Department to identify military facilities that could be immobilized if the power grid were knocked out by an attack or natural disaster.
A focus of the 60-day study will be inadequate refining and transportation infrastructure needed to move energy within the Northeast and West Coast.
Shortages of electric power during extreme weather didn’t get a mention. But the secretary of Energy has wide-ranging authority to take actions to protect or restore the reliability of electricity infrastructure in an emergency. How the Trump administration will use that authority remains to be seen.
‘Electricity is at the brink’
The North American Electric Reliability Corp., the nation’s power grid monitor, has warned of the dangers of blackouts during periods of extreme heat and cold. Most of America’s electric grids face “mounting resource adequacy challenges over the next 10 years,” NERC said in a December report.
Power demand for new data centers to serve the booming artificial intelligence business is surging. Solar power and battery storage projects are not keeping up with the announced and planned retirements of coal- and gas-fired generation.
“The trends point to critical reliability challenges facing the industry: satisfying escalating energy growth, managing generator retirements, and accelerating resource and transmission development,” the report said.
NERC Chief Executive Jim Robb spelled out the challenge.
“We’ve got to figure out how to build a new generation,” he said last week. “We’ve got to figure out how to build long-distance transmission, and those projects don’t happen quickly, despite exhortations.”
“To the extent that a presidential emergency order can grease the skids for permitting reform to get projects in place to address some of the fuel supply issues that we’re starting to see, particularly with natural gas. God bless them!” Robb said. “That’s exactly what this country needs right now.”
Clues to Trump’s energy emergency plans may have been dropped last week by Burgum during his Senate confirmation hearing as Trump’s choice to lead Interior. Burgum has also been assigned to coordinate a new White House National Energy Council.
Following Burgum’s appearance, ClearView Energy Partners published an analysis noting that Burgum repeatedly described the grid’s crisis as a shortage of “baseload” power, most likely referring to gas- and coal-fired power plants that can run steadily, independent of the weather or sunlight.
“Electricity is at the brink,” Burgum said. “Our grid is at a point where it could go completely unstable.”
Older coal-plants that struggle to compete in energy markets are candidates for retirement. But with electricity prices relatively high, gas-fired power plants have reason to stay open, particularly if Trump cancels the Biden administration’s restrictions on power plant carbon emissions.
“Trump’s only legal directive is to order EPA to reconsider regulations that impact fossil fuel generation, as he is likely to do, in order to keep such entities profitable,” said Brett Hartl, governmental affairs director for the Center for Biological Diversity.
Powering AI
Almost 80,000 megawatts of power plants, dominated by gas- and coal-fired units, are listed as confirmed retirements over the next decade.
Plant owners have announced plans to retire another 115,000 MW in the coming decade. Most of new generation projects proposed to replace the shuttered capacity are either solar or solar-battery combinations, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reports.
EIA projects that about 50,000 MW of new generation will come online by the end of 2026, not a one-for-one replacement because renewable power meets only one-third to one-half of the same amount of gas-fired capacity that shuts down.
Robb has warned that grid operators have to face the possibility that more than 200,000 MW of new power demand than was anticipated just a few years ago will be needed for new data centers.
The crisis point could come in a future brutal winter storm when gas production pumps and processing equipment freezes and wind and solar power drops to near zero.
Moreover, even if gas infrastructure holds up, pipeline capacity additions over the past seven years have trended downward, and some parts of the U.S. could run short of gas resources in the worst winter weather.
Democrats and Republicans both say energy is in crisis because of extreme weather. That’s one thing that is hard to deny. Democrats talk about climate change. Republicans lean on the idea that climate policies affecting the power grid are a threat to electric reliability.
To Trump, it’s simply about incompetence.
“Our country can no longer deliver basic services in times of emergency,” Trump said during his inaugural speech.
People are still suffering from Hurricane Helene that touched down in Florida and barreled across the Southeast, Trump noted.
“More recently Los Angeles, where we’re watching fires still tragically burned from weeks ago without even a token of defense,” he said.
Trump the candidate repeated false claims that the Federal Energy Management Agency had run out of funds because it had spent its budget helping immigrants illegally enter the United States. California Gov. Gavin Newsom opened a webpage to counter Trump’s claims about the causes of the wildfire catastrophe.
“Everyone is unable to do anything about it. That’s going to change,” Trump said Monday.
How FEMA responds to disasters and how federal agencies charged with ensuring the reliability of electricity in the face of climate change are now his responsibility.
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