Killing green energy tax credits–as Trump has pledged to do–could prove difficult. Anyway, much of the industry can survive and grow without those subsidies.
By Christopher Helman, Forbes Staff
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on’t overestimate the damage that President-elect Donald Trump’s energy policy could do to the global green transition. Yes, he has promised to undo the Democrats’ 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), deriding it on the campaign trail as a “green new scam” for its $500 billion in tax credits and other subsidies for renewable energy projects. Cleantech companies and their backers understandably fear losing benefits like an investment tax credit worth up to 30% (or sometimes even 50%) of a project’s costs. And both environmental groups and investors in clean energy stocks have reacted with alarm to Trump’s triumph.
But repeal of the IRA is hardly a done deal, given that most of those projects have been bringing jobs and investment dollars to Republican held Congressional districts. Cleantech could even benefit from some other Trump policies–like cutting both the corporate tax rate and red tape, including time-consuming environmental reviews, that hold up the siting of green projects and electricity transmission lines.
And here’s the most important reason green energy should still thrive during Trump 2.0: The industry is past the point of liftoff. Subsidies add extra rocket fuel (and are important for the most novel technologies that aren’t yet commercial), but they aren’t absolutely necessary for the green revolution to continue. Economics, customers and the surging demand for electricity–particularly from all the new data centers being built to serve the needs of artificial intelligence–will continue to drive the growth of alternative energy.
“To make the world a better place you need more, reliable, affordable, secure energy,” says Liberty Energy CEO Chris Wright, a Trump advisor who has been mentioned as a candidate for Secretary of the Department of Energy (DOE). “We want abundant cheap energy.” Still, Wright concedes, “If you are worried about collecting subsidies for clean energy, maybe you do have reason to be concerned.” It’s worth noting that like other oil industry players, Denver-based Liberty, a $4.5 billion (revenue) oilfield services company, is itself dabbling in green energy—it has invested in advanced nuclear startup Oklo as well as Fervo, a startup aiming to tap zero-carbon deep geothermal energy using fracking.
“Our ability to solve this problem profitably is better than anybody understands,” argues billionaire climate tech investor Tom Steyer of Galvanize Capital. Talking a month before the election at the Forbes Sustainability Leaders Summit, Steyer pointed to data showing 86% of all new electricity generation equipment deployed worldwide last year is powered by renewables.
“Nobody in Vietnam put up a solar panel because they were worried about [climate change induced] flooding in Houston. Nobody did that to be nice,” Steyer said, but rather because it’s cheap. Consider China, now the world’s largest car market, where more than half of sales are electric vehicles. “They will sell more EVs than we sell cars. Why would they do that? Not to help America, but because they cost $14,000 and go 1,200 miles on one charge.”
“Cheaper, faster, better — it goes up like a rocket, everybody buys it, and that is how you win at capitalism,” Steyer said. “If the United States doesn’t want to participate in it and we want to draw a moat around the United States and go back to the 1950s, the rest of the world will progress. They will succeed and we will fail.”
Make no mistake, fossil fuel producers are among the big winners from the November 5 results. For example, former U.S. Rep. Lee Zeldin, Trump’s nominee to run the Environmental Protection Agency, is sure to take an ax to the EPA’s new methane rule (finalized just this week), which would fine oil and gas drillers billions a year for fugitive releases of natural gas.
But there are lots of reasons alternative energy will do just fine. Here are 10 of them:
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Green is already cheap. Even without subsidies, wind and solar are the cheapest electric generation in the country at 9 cents per kilowatt hour or less for newly built utility scale projects, according to Lazard. Add in batteries to store their energy (for times when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine) and the cost goes up to around 13 cents. That’s competitive with new natural gas turbines, and way cheaper than trying to build new large-scale nuclear at 20 cents per kwh.
There’s lots of green in red states. An impressive 80% of IRA benefits so far have gone to Republican congressional districts. Texas already generates more green power than California and is set to add 36 gigawatts of solar, wind and batteries over the next 18 months, the most of any state, according to Cleanview, an energy data consultancy. Runner-up California will be adding just 11 gigawatts. Renewable energy giant NextEra Energy told analysts last week that it thinks the IRA will mostly survive because green jobs are politically popular. That’s the hope of 18 Republican House members who wrote a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson in August stressing “a full repeal would create a worst-case scenario where we would have spent billions of taxpayer dollars and received next to nothing in return.” Johnson said this week that Congress should use a scalpel and not a sledgehammer to modify the IRA. The likelihood is that a Republican controlled Congress will deal with any changes to the IRA as part of the budget reconciliation process—a process that avoids a Democratic filibuster in the Senate, but still requires horse trading among Republicans, including those with IRA projects in their districts.
America’s power grids need more of everything. For decades, electric generation has simply kept pace with the nation’s economic growth. That’s set to change as cloud computing giants ramp up construction of data centers to meet demand for online services like artificial intelligence leader OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In other words, electric generation must now grow faster than the economy. Utility company AEP anticipates robust demand growth, particularly in states like Indiana, where it projects as much as a 60% increase in commercial electricity demand in coming years, mostly from data centers, like the $11 billion project Amazon is erecting in New Carlisle, the largest capital project in state history.
Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft can afford to pay for it. Currently, taxpayers are effectively subsidizing data centers for the world’s most profitable companies by paying 30% of the costs of new power plants that support them, through green tax credits. Why? It’s not as if Big Tech could build a data center but not arrange for sufficient electricity to power it. Plus, grid operators can mandate they use renewables. If Trump follows through on his promises to cut both green tax incentives and the corporate income tax rate (from the current 21% to 15%), these big electricity hogs will be just fine.
Capitalists will find a way. Even though ESG-based investing has come under political attack (from Republican state officials, among others), some $7 trillion in green, socially responsible, ESG-designated stock and bond funds remains allocated worldwide. Getting government money out will make companies compete for the smaller pool of private capital. The best tech that doesn’t need subsidies will rise to the top faster. (Still, it’s worth remembering that even before the Inflation Reduction Act was a thing, the government played an active role in supporting long-shots–like advanced nuclear technology– with potentially huge payoffs. TerraPower, the Bill Gates-founded startup building a new type of nuclear reactor in Wyoming, expects half of its $4 billion cost to be covered by the DOE as part of the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program launched by the first Trump Administration. And, of course, Elon Musk’s Tesla famously developed the Model S sedan with a $465 million federal loan from President Obama’s DOE, which it repaid ahead of schedule.)
Energy systems will keep getting more efficient. AI-driven and materials-driven breakthroughs are coming, especially in small-scale nuclear and geothermal. More zero-carbon tech will follow wind and solar down the cost curve even without federal assistance. A new MIT study followed 1,000 researchers working at an American company and found that when they added AI to their work, they discovered 44% more materials and filed 39% more patents and the output of top researchers nearly doubled. System optimizations are just getting started.
State and local policies are beyond Trump’s reach. State utility commissioners and grid operators can sway what gets built and even mandate green power generation. Nowhere in this country could you build a coal plant even if you could get it financed. Compared to coal, everything else is green. Voters in California just approved a $10 billion climate solutions fund. If California were a country, its economy would rank as the fourth largest in the world; its moves historically have had massive influence nationwide. True, Trump has threatened to withhold federal dollars (even for disaster relief) as a punishment for states which don’t tow his line on environmental (or other) issues. But the state isn’t one to back down. Gov. Gavin Newsom has already called for a special legislative session to find money to fund a legal response to Trump’s efforts and “protect California values.”
Big Oil likes green subsidies too. While it’s not keen on heavy-handed and unpredictable regulations, big oil has a stake in climate solutions too. ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods has long called for the imposition of a global carbon tax (a solution economists favor, but politicians don’t have the stomach for) and doesn’t want to see Trump pull the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accords again, arguing that it’s better for Washington to have a seat at the table. “I don’t think the stops and starts are the right thing for business,” Woods said this week at the COP29 summit in Azerbaijan. Exxon has been trying to burnish its green bonafides for a decade. It only just recently gave up trying to figure out how to squeeze commercial quantities of oil out of algae. It has been planning a vast hydrogen project co-located at one of its Texas refineries, but says it will only pull the trigger if it’s certain it can claim the IRA’s generous hydrogen tax credits.
Natural gas is green. Don’t tell Tom Steyer (or former Vice President Al Gore, whose Generation Investment Management has $15 billion in climate-friendly investments), but natural gas is the single biggest contributor to America’s 40% reduction in electricity-related carbon emissions. Since the dawn of the shale gas fracking revolution, domestic CO2 emissions are down from a peak of 2.4 billion tons per year in 2007 to 1.5 billion metric tons in 2023, as gas displaces coal. Meanwhile, global emissions have continued to climb. Yes natural gas, or methane, is a fossil fuel, but when combusted in a power plant it emits just half the carbon dioxide of coal, and without the soot, heavy metals and smog. Trump is set to sweep aside Biden’s moratorium on Federal approval of new liquefied natural gas export facilities. America in a decade has gone from exporting almost no gas, to now leading even Qatar and Australia in exports. Despite Biden’s LNG export facility approval pause, myriad plants are still under construction. Trump will lift the moratorium and be able to take credit for a near doubling of LNG exports. “The expected glut of LNG is still coming,” says analyst Neil Beveridge at Bernstein Research. “Better to be a buyer than a seller [of LNG] under Trump,” since prices will be falling, he says. This is great news for world emissions and countries that still rely on coal – like Germany, which decided after Japan’s 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident to phase out its own nuclear power plants and closed the last of them in 2023. (It’s a decision that many in Germany now regret.)
The green revolution has momentum. From the looks of it, we’re still just getting started. Over the past decade, the U.S. has nearly quadrupled electric generation from wind and solar to about 660,000 billion kilowatt hours of renewable power generation in 2023. Sounds big, and yet from 4% a decade ago wind and solar now provide just 16% of America’s electricity (compared with 39% for natural gas). It might surprise some to hear that worldwide, humans have never used more oil (103 million barrels per day), natural gas (410 billion cubic feet/day), and coal (8.5 billion tons/year). Market share is shifting, but even under Biden wasn’t moving nearly fast enough, says Tom Steyer, who ran for president in 2020 and looks forward to the day when it may become politically feasible for world leaders to enact a global price on carbon. “You need a cap-and-trade system across the world,” he says. “The U.S. can’t do the right thing and have the rest of the world polluting for free.” He’ll just need to wait an election cycle or two.
