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It looks to me like a perfect storm for energy is coming to the United States. The Trump administration is trying to push energy resources that cannot be built quickly, while attempting to kill some that can. And this is happening just as demand is increasing. I believe we will have severe problems as a result. Let’s consider our biggest energy sources, coal, oil & gas, nuclear, wind, and solar.
1. Reinvigorating coal. According to a post by the US EIA, a quarter of the coal-burning power plants in the US are scheduled to shut down by 2029, and the last time a coal-burning plant was brought online was 2013. Coal plants were closed during Trump’s first term, and he didn’t manage to see any opened up. We can’t expect him to do better now, because the situation is economically even less in favor of coal than it was when he was a presidential newbie.
2. “Drill, baby, drill.” Trump’s solution has a problem. The oil & gas industry, despite the promises Trump made to encourage opening up new oil and gas supplies, seems not to be bothering to drill. A CleanTechnica article, “Trump Promised to ‘Drill, Baby, Drill.’ Big Oil Won’t Let Him,” gives the reason why that is not happening. The oil price, at about $60 per barrel, is too low for the industry to make money. We might suspect that the tariffs Trump imposed on anything imported are not helping.
OPEC is increasing production, and that will keep prices low. CleanTechnica just published a forecast, “US EIA Forecasts World Oil Consumption Growth To Slow.” Supplies are available and prices are too low already, so why would American oil & gas companies increase production?
Also, CleanTechnica has posted many articles showing that manufacturing is flat or declining for internal combustion cars, while it is ramping up for almost all EVs. This is a worldwide phenomenon. It indicates that the oil and gas industry is entering into decline while the world is transitioning to clean power.
Perhaps the best indicator of this is China, which was covered in a recent CleanTechnica article, “Clean Energy Shifts China’s CO₂ Emissions From Growth To Decline.”
3. Pushing nuclear power. Nuclear power is the center of a lot of news activity. Big tech companies want to build nuclear power plants. The problem is that this can’t happen quickly enough to supply them with the power they will soon need.
According to an article at Energy Intelligence, the Trump administration’s answer to the problem is to reduce regulations and speed things up. New executive orders are expected that would circumvent NRC controls, making it possible for the Department of Energy and Department of Defense to take over some of regulatory functionality. That bit of news speaks to a stunning extension of executive power.
Part of the problem for the Trump administration is that it is not just regulations that stand in the way. Small Modular Reactors (SMR) may need to be approved, but that is not all they need. They are to be built in factories, and the factories themselves have to be built. This takes time. And even when the factories are built, turning out functional reactors will not happen overnight.
One other problem for all this is that there will be opposition. The time it will take to get a new SMR built in a factory would probably collide with the next election cycle, and it will be a big issue if it does. My guess is that not many people will like the idea of having a lower level of protections than the NRC has provided.
4. Blowing away wind energy. The Trump administration seems to be out to ruin American wind power. In the process, however, it is teaching the world that investing in the United States is a risky business.
Donald Trump took office and immediately started issuing orders on wind power. New onshore wind farm leases would no longer be offered on federal land. Offshore wind farms, however, have been ordered to stop construction.
Equinor, a Norwegian company, was ordered to halt construction of the Empire Wind project after it had already put $2.5 billion into building the infrastructure necessary to do the job. This is a $7 billion wind farm. Its loss means Equinor was damaged financially, possibly just because Donald Trump really hates wind power. Equinor’s reaction was that it will announce soon whether it will continue the project or withdraw. A story about this appeared at reNews.
Only a couple days after the news from Equinor, we had another story saying that National Grid was writing off $403 million because the Trump administration had created regulatory uncertainty. The story, also reported by reNews, was very similar to the one about Equinor’s losses.
Such developments mean that any company interested in investing in energy, or possibly in anything at all, can find places to do that without risking the losses it might face in the US.
5. Adopting solar power. It can be built, but will it be built fast enough?
Of the five sources of electricity listed above, I expect that only solar can really be built. One problem with that is that the factories making solar cells in the US will not be able to make enough of them, so the cells and panels will have to be imported. But the imported solar cells and panels will have tariffs. This is not ideal, by any means.
The result does not seem good for the United States.
To me, it is clear that in the next three years the amount of energy available in this country will probably not increase as fast as demand. There are countries in the world that would have been willing to help in earlier times, when America really was great, but this president has insisted on bullying everyone in sight, and he does not seem at all bothered by the fact that he is making enemies. This is only made worse by the fact that the people he thinks of as friends are not friends at all.
In short, the policies of the Trump administration look to me like they could create a perfect storm for energy, which is that the demand is increasing faster than the generating capacity. This administration would have to change direction to deal with that, or this country will not have enough energy.
In the meantime, readers who feel as I do, that we are entering dangerous territory, might consider their options as individuals.
Image: Looming storm, by Frank Mittermeier, Unsplash.
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