US President Donald Trump has pretty consistently been opposed to renewable energy and policies seeking to promote its expansion as a response climate change. Amongst other things his ‘one big beautiful bill’ phases out tax credits for wind and solar energy and opens up federal land and water for oil and gas drilling, while creating new federal support for coal.
Though it may be presented as a tax saving measure: the bill’s cuts to clean energy tax incentives are expected to save the Treasury $499 billion. But Trump also uses wider anti-green invective. In one his key new Presidential Orders he says renewable energy is ‘unreliable, expensive, displaced more dependable energy sources, dependent on foreign-controlled supply chains & harmful to the natural environment & electric grid’.
It really feels like a vindictive attack. For example, the US Department of the Interior may no longer issue permits for wind or solar on federal lands unless they generate as much energy per acre as a coal, gas or nuclear plants. And so it’s not just anti renewables like wind, with, for example, an almost complete offshore wind farm being halted on national security grounds, it’s also strongly backing fossil and also fissile energy, including more gas and oil drilling and more uranium mining.
The bottom line is that so far we’ve seen $22 bn in cuts to green energy projects and according to a Carbon Brief analysis, Trump’s new climate and energy policies will mean the US will add an extra 7bn tonnes of emissions to the atmosphere from now until 2030, compared to meeting its former climate impact pledge under the Paris Agreement.
Moreover, Trump is not just imposing change in the USA, his imposition of major tariffs on energy tech related imports, for example of solar PV equipment, looks like having major impact globally, especially in Asia. On China in particular, which has been pushing PV hard at home (1TW so far) and also in the export market, including to the USA. To try to compensate for US import tariffs, China has expanded its PV export drive to other countries. But it doesn’t seem to be to working so far- with its exports falling. And some say it may anyway have overdone the pace of its PV expansion, with some big job losses reported.
All in all, a bit of a mess. Trump may have a plan, but he often seems to act off the cuff. Thus he was reported as saying that China had ‘very, very few’ wind farms! In fact, it has nearly 600GW of wind generation capacity, compared to around 150GW or so in the USA. Occasional rhetorical errors like that may not matter that much, but he seems to make a lot of them, and that can make you a bit fearful for the future.
However, at the same time we may be prone to look to China for some hope. Under its ‘dual-carbon’ goals, announced in 2020, it aims to get to (and then past!) peak carbon emissions by 2030 and reach carbon neutrality by 2060, and that still is the official stance. Is that realistic, especially given its continued and indeed expanding use of coal?
A post on the Carbon Brief web site says that China has already surpassed its 2030 renewable deployment target – 1,200GW of wind and solar – six years ahead of schedule, due to record-breaking annual additions of around 300GW of new capacity for two years in a row. But given what seems like recent slow-downs, at least with PV, can it really keep going at this rate? Carbon Brief says that to achieve its energy and climate aims, it ‘ would need to deploy 2,350-2,780 gigawatts (GW) of wind and solar by 2030 and 2,910-3,800GW by 2035 – roughly double current levels – to be consistent with a target of limiting the rise in global temperatures to 2C this century. Furthermore, ensuring that the share of wind and solar generation reaches around 40% by 2030 and 50% by 2035 would set the power sector up for the longer-term transition to carbon neutrality by 2060’.
The Carbon Brief post looks at two routes forward, one with renewables supplying 40% of power and cutting fossil use in power generation by 35% by 2030 and then supplying 50% in 2035 to cut emissions by 25%. And another with renewables at 44% by 2030 and 54% by 2035, then cutting emissions by 42%. While it says that either could be done, with emissions staying under the 2C level, the report guardedly says that ‘due to the rapidly evolving economic and geopolitical situation, there are good reasons to expect that China’s top-line emissions number may be underwhelming’. But it says ‘there is an opportunity to emphasise and expand ambition within the power sector through additional sectoral targets’.
Basically, what it seems to be saying is that, although China is resolute in its aim to base its future on clean energy, there’re may be more limited targets for the share of electricity generation from wind and solar technologies, and/or for clean energy more broadly. Maybe a hint there that nuclear might be playing more of a role. It currently it is at around 57 GW. One recent report talked the aim being to expand nuclear capacity by 2040 to 200GW. But that’s still a very small contribution compared with multi-TW renewables…
However, given the economic situation, the energy future is still all bit uncertain, perhaps reflecting what Michael Liebreich has called for globally- a progressive ‘pragmatic climate reset’, in response to the constraints on renewable expansion, but ‘not the pragmatism of defeat. Not the pragmatism of believing fossil fuels hold the key to further human progress. Not the pragmatism of addressing climate change only if it suits the interests of fossil-fuel companies. What is needed is the pragmatism of robust but affordable climate action’.
Nevertheless, Liebreich seems to say that we may have no choice but to go a bit slower- and that this may not be a bad idea at first. Renewables can be built up in stages, with a small bit of nuclear too. But will that be enough to cope with climate change? It does seem we have problems, with renewable growth being constrained in some countries in part due to rising energy and material costs, some of which relate to Putin’s war on Ukraine. And now we also face the impacts of Trump’s various interventions - they are hurting renewables everywhere. For example wind as well as PV: he has set up a national inquiry in to wind turbine imports with a view to perhaps imposing new tariffs, with Danish wind developer Orsted already suffering economically from Trump’s policies.
There may be disagreements about direction and pace for green energy, but it will be tragic if these big reactionary political acts undermine urgent response to climate change. Especially given that, as the Energy Institute’s president put it, ‘the pace of renewable deployment continues to be outstripped by overall demand growth, 60% of which was met by fossil fuels.’ Shouldn’t we be accelerating ahead with renewables as fast as possible?
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