Climate change and energy Heat Exchange

Aug 21 2025

How to make clean energy progress under Trump in the states—blue and red alike

The second Trump administration is proving to be more disastrous for the climate and the clean energy economy than many had feared.

Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act repealed most of the clean energy incentives in former president Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. Meanwhile, his EPA administrator moved to revoke the endangerment finding, the legal basis for federal oversight of greenhouse gases. For those of us who have been following policy developments in this area closely, nearly every day brings a new blow to past efforts to salvage our climate and to build the clean energy economy of the future.

Heat Exchange

MIT Technology Review’s guest opinion series, offering expert commentary on legal, political and regulatory issues related to climate change and clean energy. You can read the rest of the pieces here.

This has left many in the climate and clean energy communities wondering what do we do now? The answer, I would argue, is to return to state capitals—a policymaking venue that climate and renewable energy advocates already know well. This can be done strategically, focusing on a handful of key states rather than all fifty.

But I have another piece of advice: Don’t get too caught up in “red states” versus “blue states” when considering which states to target. American politics is being remade before our eyes, and long-standing policy problems are being redefined and reframed.

Let’s take clean energy, for example. Yes, shifting away from carbon-spewing resources is about slowing down climate change, and for some this is the single most important motivation for pursuing it. But it also can be about much more.

The case can be made just as forcefully—and perhaps more effectively—that shifting to clean energy advances affordability at a time when electricity bills are skyrocketing. It promotes energy freedom by resisting monopolistic utilities’ ownership and gatekeeping of the grid. It increases reliability as battery storage reaches new heights and renewable sources and baseload power plants like nuclear or natural gas facilities (some of which we certainly do and will need) increasingly complement one another. And it drives job creation and economic development.

Talking about clean energy policy in these ways is safer from ideological criticisms of “climate alarmism.” Research reported in my forthcoming book, Owning the Green Grid, shows that this framing has historically been effective in red states. In addition, using the arguments above to promote all forms of energy can allow clean energy proponents to reclaim a talking point deployed in a previous era by the political right: a true “all-of-the-above” approach to energy policy.

Every energy technology—gas, nuclear, wind, solar, geothermal and storage, among others—has its own set of strengths and weaknesses. But combining them enhances overall grid performance, delivering more than the sum of their individual parts.

To be clear, this is not the approach of the current national administration in Washington, DC. Its policies have picked winners (coal, oil, and natural gas) and losers (solar and wind) among energy technologies—ironically, given conservative claims of blue states having done so in the past. Yet a true all-of-the-above approach can now be sold in state capitals throughout the country, in red states and even in fossil-fuel producing states.

To be sure, the Trump-led Republican party has taken such extreme measures that it will constrain certain state policymaking possibilities. Notably, in May the US Senate voted to block waivers allowing California to phase out gas guzzlers in the state, over the objections of the Senate parliamentarian. The fiscal power of the federal government is also immense. But there are a variety of other ways to continue to make state-level progress on greenhouse gas emissions.

State and local advocacy efforts are nothing new for the clean energy community. For decades before the Inflation Reduction Act, the states were the primary locus of activity for clean energy policy. But in recent years, some have suggested that Democratic state governments are a necessary prerequisite to making meaningful state-level progress. This view is limiting, and it perpetuates a false—or at least unnecessary—alignment between party and energy technology.

The electric grid is nonpartisan. Struggling to pay your utility bill is nonpartisan. Keeping the lights on is nonpartisan. Even before renewable energy was as cheap as it is today, early progress at diversifying energy portfolios was made in conservative states. Iowa, Texas, and Montana were all early adopters of renewable portfolio standards. Advocates in such places did not lead with messaging about climate change, but rather about economic development and energy independence. These policy efforts paid off: The deeply red Lone Star State, for instance, generates more wind energy than any other state and ranks only behind California in producing solar power.

Now, in 2025, advances in technology and improvements in cost should make the economic arguments for clean energy even easier and more salient. So, in the face of a national government that is choosing last century’s energy technologies as policy winners and this century’s technologies as policy losers, the states offer clean energy advocates a familiar terrain on which to make continued progress, if they tailor their selling points to the reality on the ground.

Joshua A. Basseches is the David and Jane Flowerree Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies and Public Policy at Tulane University. His research focuses on state-level renewable energy politics and policymaking, especially in the electricity sector.

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments

App Heat Exchange Opinion Policy

Apr 19 2025

We need targeted policies, not blunt tariffs, to drive “American energy dominance”

President Trump and his appointees have repeatedly stressed the need to establish “American energy dominance.”

But the White House’s profusion of executive orders and aggressive tariffs, along with its determined effort to roll back clean-energy policies, are moving the industry in the wrong direction, creating market chaos and economic uncertainty that are making it harder for both legacy players and emerging companies to invest, grow, and compete.

Heat Exchange

The current 90-day pause on rolling out most of the administration’s so-called “reciprocal” tariffs presents a critical opportunity. Rather than defaulting to broad, blunt tariffs, the administration should use this window to align trade policy with a focused industrial strategy—one aimed at winning the global race to become a manufacturing powerhouse in next-generation energy technologies.

By tightly aligning tariff design with US strengths in R&D and recent government investments in the energy innovation lifecycle, the administration can turn a regressive trade posture into a proactive plan for economic growth and geopolitical advantage.

The president is right to point out that America is blessed with world-leading energy resources. Over the past decade, the country has grown from being a net importer to a net exporter of oil and the world’s largest producer of oil and gas. These resources are undeniably crucial to America’s ability to reindustrialize and rebuild a resilient domestic industrial base, while also providing strategic leverage abroad.

But the world is slowly but surely moving beyond the centuries-old model of extracting and burning fossil fuels, a change driven initially by climate risks but increasingly by economic opportunities. America will achieve true energy dominance only by evolving beyond being a mere exporter of raw, greenhouse-gas-emitting energy commodities—and becoming the world’s manufacturing and innovation hub for sophisticated, high-value energy technologies.

Notably, the nation took a lead role in developing essential early components of the cleantech sector, including solar photovoltaics and electric vehicles. Yet too often, the fruits of that innovation—especially manufacturing jobs and export opportunities—have ended up overseas, particularly in China.

China, which is subject to Trump’s steepest tariffs and wasn’t granted any reprieve in the 90-day pause, has become the world’s dominant producer of lithium-ion batteries, EVs, wind turbines, and other key components of the clean-energy transition.

Today, the US is again making exciting strides in next-generation technologies, including fusion energy, clean steel, advanced batteries, industrial heat pumps, and thermal energy storage. These advances can transform industrial processes, cut emissions, improve air quality, and maximize the strategic value of our fossil-fuel resources. That means not simply burning them for their energy content, but instead using them as feedstocks for higher-value materials and chemicals that power the modern economy.

The US’s leading role in energy innovation didn’t develop by accident. For several decades, legislators on both sides of the political divide supported increasing government investments into energy innovation—from basic research at national labs and universities to applied R&D through ARPA-E and, more recently, to the creation of the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, which funds first-of-a-kind technology deployments. These programs have laid the foundation for the technologies we need—not just to meet climate goals, but to achieve global competitiveness.

Early-stage companies in competitive, global industries like energy do need extra support to help them get to the point where they can stand up on their own. This is especially true for cleantech companies whose overseas rivals have much lower labor, land, and environmental compliance costs.

That’s why, for starters, the White House shouldn’t work to eliminate federal investments made in these sectors under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, as it’s reportedly striving to do as part of the federal budget negotiations.

Instead, the administration and its Republican colleagues in Congress should preserve and refine these programs, which have already helped expand America’s ability to produce advanced energy products like batteries and EVs. Success should be measured not only in barrels produced or watts generated, but in dollars of goods exported, jobs created, and manufacturing capacity built.

The Trump administration should back this industrial strategy with smarter trade policy as well. Steep, sweeping tariffs won’t build long-term economic strength.

But there are certain instances where reasonable, modern, targeted tariffs can be a useful tool in supporting domestic industries or countering unfair trade practices elsewhere. That’s why we’ve seen leaders of both parties, including Presidents Biden and Obama, apply them in recent years.

Such levies can be used to protect domestic industries where we’re competing directly with geopolitical rivals like China, and where American companies need breathing room to scale and thrive. These aims can be achieved by imposing tariffs on specific strategic technologies, such as EVs and next-generation batteries.

But to be clear, targeted tariffs on a few strategic sectors are starkly different from Trump’s tariffs, which now include 145% levies on most Chinese goods, a 10% “universal” tariff on other nations and 25% fees on steel and aluminum.

Another option is implementing a broader border adjustment policy, like the Foreign Pollution Fee Act recently reintroduced by Senators Cassidy and Graham, which is designed to create a level playing field that would help clean manufacturers in the US compete with heavily polluting businesses overseas.

Just as important, the nation must avoid counterproductive tariffs on critical raw materials like steel, aluminum, and copper or retaliatory restrictions on critical minerals—all of which are essential inputs for US manufacturing. The nation does not currently produce enough of these materials to meet demand, and it would take years to build up that capacity. Raising input costs through tariffs only slows our ability to keep or bring key industries home.

Finally, we must be strategic in how we deploy the country’s greatest asset: our workforce. Americans are among the most educated and capable workers in the world. Their time, talent, and ingenuity shouldn’t be spent assembling low-cost, low-margin consumer goods like toasters. Instead, we should focus on building cutting-edge industrial technologies that the world is demanding. These are the high-value products that support strong wages, resilient supply chains, and durable global leadership.

The worldwide demand for clean, efficient energy technologies is rising rapidly, and the US cannot afford to be left behind. The energy transition presents not just an environmental imperative but a generational opportunity for American industrial renewal.

The Trump administration has a chance to define energy dominance not just in terms of extraction, but in terms of production—of technology, of exports, of jobs, and of strategic influence. Let’s not let that opportunity slip away.

Addison Killean Stark is the chief executive and cofounder of AtmosZero, an industrial steam heat pump startup based in Loveland, Colorado. He was previously a fellow at the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E division, which funds research and development of advanced energy technologies.

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments

Climate change and energy Heat Exchange Opinion

Mar 11 2025

The cheapest way to supercharge America’s power grid

US electricity consumption is rising faster than it has in decades, thanks in part to the boom in data center development, the resurgence in manufacturing, and the increasing popularity of electric vehicles.

Accommodating that growth will require building wind turbines, solar farms, and other power plants faster than we ever have before—and expanding the network of wires needed to connect those facilities to the grid.

Heat Exchange

But one major problem is that it’s expensive and slow to secure permits for new transmission lines and build them across the country. This challenge has created one of the biggest obstacles to getting more electricity generation online, reducing investment in new power plants and stranding others in years-long “interconnection queues” while they wait to join the grid.

Fortunately, there are some shortcuts that could expand the capacity of the existing system without requiring completely new infrastructure: a suite of hardware and software tools known as advanced transmission technologies (ATTs), which can increase both the capacity and the efficiency of the power sector.

ATTs have the potential to radically reduce timelines for grid upgrades, avoid tricky permitting issues, and yield billions in annual savings for US consumers. They could help us quickly bring online a significant portion of the nearly 2,600 gigawatts of backlogged generation and storage projects awaiting pathways to connect to the electric grid.

The opportunity to leverage advanced transmission technologies to update the way we deliver and consume electricity in America is as close to a $20 bill sitting on the sidewalk as policymakers may ever encounter. Promoting the development and use of these technologies should be a top priority for politicians in Washington, DC, as well as electricity market regulators around the country.

That includes the new Trump administration, which has clearly stated that building greater electricity supply and keeping costs low for consumers are high priorities.

In the last month, Washington has been consumed by the Trump team’s efforts to test the bounds of executive power, fire civil servants, and disrupt the basic workings of the federal government. But when or if the White House and Congress get around to enacting new energy policies, they would be wise to pick up the $20 bill by enacting bipartisan measures to accelerate the rollout of these innovative grid technologies.

ATTs generally fall into four categories: dynamic line ratings, which combine local weather forecasts and measurements on or near the transmission line to safely increase their capacity when conditions allow; high-performance conductors, which are advanced wires that use carbon fiber, composite cores, or superconducting materials to carry more electricity than traditional steel-core conductors; topology optimization, which uses software to model fluctuating conditions across the grid and identify the most efficient routes to distribute electricity from moment to moment; and advanced power flow control devices, which redistribute electricity to lines with available capacity.

“This would allow utilities to earn a profit for saving money, not just spending it, and could save consumers billions on their electricity bills every year.”

Other countries from Belgium to India to the United Kingdom are already making large-scale use of these technologies. Early projects in the United States have been remarkably successful as well. One recent deployment of dynamic line ratings increased capacity by more than 50% for only $45,000 per mile—roughly 1% of the price of building new transmission.

So why are we not seeing an explosion in ATT investment and deployment in the US? Because despite their potential to unlock 21st-century technology, the 20th-century structure of the nation’s electricity markets discourages adoption of these solutions.

For one thing, under the current regulatory system, utilities generally make money by passing the cost of big new developments along to customers (earning a fixed annual return on their investment). That comes in the form of higher electricity rates, which local public utility commissions often approve after power companies propose such projects.

That means utilities have financial incentives to make large and expensive investments, but not to save consumers money. When ATTs are installed in place of building new transmission capacity, the smaller capital costs mean that utilities make lower profits. For example, utilities might earn $600,000 per year after building a new mile of transmission, compared with about $4,500 per mile annually after installing the equipment and software necessary for line ratings. While these state regulatory agencies are tasked with ensuring that utilities act in the best interest of consumers, they often lack the necessary information to identify the best approach for doing so.

Overcoming these structural barriers will require action from both state and federal governments, and it should appeal to Democrats and Republicans alike. We’ve already seen some states, including Minnesota and Montana, move in this direction, but policy interventions to date remain insufficient. In a recent paper, we propose a new approach for unlocking the potential of these technologies.

First, we suggest requiring transmission providers to use ATTs in some “no regrets” contexts, where possible downsides are minor or nonexistent. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, for example, is already considering requiring dynamic line ratings on certain highly congested lines. Given the low cost of dynamic line ratings, and their clear benefit in cases of congestion, we believe that FERC should quickly move forward with, and strengthen, such a rule. Likewise, the Department of Energy or Congress should adopt an efficiency standard for the wires that carry electricity around the country. Every year, approximately 5% of electricity generated is lost in the transmission and distribution process. The use of high-performance conductors can reduce those losses by 30%.

In addition, federal agencies and state lawmakers should require transmission providers to evaluate the potential for using ATTs on their grid, or provide support to help them do so. FERC has recently taken steps in this direction, and it should continue to strengthen those actions.

Regulators should also provide financial incentives to transmission providers to encourage the installation of ATTs. The most promising approach is a “shared savings” incentive, such as that proposed in the recent Advancing GETS Act. This would allow utilities to earn a profit for saving money, not just spending it, and could save consumers billions on their electricity bills every year.

Finally, we should invest in building digital tools so transmission owners can identify opportunities for these technologies and so regulators can hold them accountable. Developing these systems will require transmission providers to share information about electricity supply and demand as well as grid infrastructure. Ideally, with such data in hand, researchers can develop a “digital twin” of the current transmission system to test different configurations of ATTs and help improve the performance and efficiency of our grids.

We are all too aware that the world often faces difficult policy trade-offs. But laws or regulations that facilitate the use of ATTs can quickly expand the grid and save consumers money. They should be an easy yes on both sides of the aisle.

Brian Deese is an innovation fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and served as director of the White House National Economic Council from 2021 to 2023. Rob Gramlich is founder and president of Grid Strategies and was economic advisor to the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission during the George W. Bush administration.

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments