The Massive Budget Budget Bill that President Trump reported earlier this month has targeted a solid system of tax credits that have helped the US wind and solar energy explosion in recent years. While this decision was mainly intended to allow the extension by the law of tax alleviation for high Americans, some Republicans estimated that the law was not going far enough to discourage the growth of wind and solar energy. These selected, however, voted for the bill after having said that they had received insurance from President Trump that he would use his executive authority to attach energy sources more.
“We believe that we are going to get more than 90 percent of all future projects,” the American representative Chip Roy of Texas told Politico after the fact that the bill was adopted. “And we talked to lawyers for administration.”
Last week, Trump’s interior ministry announced what seemed to be a realization of the president’s promise to the right wing of his party. The new directives of the ministry for wind and solar promoters now require all federal approvals for clean energy projects to undergo a “high review” by interior secretary Doug Bergum, who was appointed by President Trump in January.
The new guidelines include a granular overview of the stages which will now require the personal approval of the Bergum office, rather than being delegated to the bureaucrats of the department as had been customary before. Experts who spoke in Grist say that this could create an unmanageable slowdown for developers and allow the administration to quietly kill wind and solar projects on public land. Some even fear that the effect of updated regulations spread in private projects, which must sometimes consult the internal department when their work bleeds in federal land or habitat for threatened species.
Given that only 4% of existing renewable energy projects are on public land, the initiates of the own industry who have interpreted the new policy are not yet panicked. But those who have a broader interpretation of the text – or those who suspect that the administration will take a large interpretation – wonder if the new rules will be equivalent to a de facto tag prescription on the industry. For the moment, only time will tell us how many of their fears take place.
A large part of the power of the memo to wreak havoc for renewable energies depends on the strictly applied. The Interior Department maintains a website called information for planning and consultation, or iPac, that developers often use to plan large -scale projects. You type the name of a place, draw a border around the general area of your proposed project, and iPac will tell you what type of federal permit you may need to move forward. (For example, this would point out if there are protected wetlands or endangered species that would be affected by your development.) Last week, the website now displays a pop-up warning that “solar and wind projects are not currently eligible to use information on the planning and consultation website.” This type of opacity could make it particularly difficult for developers to plan an endless bureaucratic battle with the interior.
“This is one thing to take away our [tax] Credits, but it is another to set up obstacles so that projects cannot be built, “said a source that works for a developer of renewable energies in E & E News. (He obtained anonymity because of his continuous professional commitment to the federal government.) “The level of revision here is so ridiculous.”
Others say that, although the prospects for wind and solar energy have become much darker, the new internal rules are not necessarily a stroke of death. “I was personally very worried when I saw him come out,” said Jason Kaminsky, CEO of KWH Analytics, a solar risk management company. “But after having read more, it seems that it affects, hopefully, a minority of assets.”
An internal report of the investment bank and the Roth Capital Partners research company, which was obtained by Grist, estimated that only 5% of projects on private land – in particular, those who need easement or who need to cross public land to link a line of transmission to the main electrical network – would be affected by the new regulations.
“If [projects are on] Private field is a totally different story that would not be affected by this, “said Doug Vine, director of energy analysis at the non -profit center for climate and energy solutions.” There are a lot of projects that will move forward. »»
Others warn that it will be difficult to know anything with certainty until the dust breaks and the authorization process begins to take place. “How large and widely listed in the memo note, points to an attempted cancellation [private] Projects, not only those on federal lands, “said Dan O’Brien, senior modeling analyst at Clean Energy Think Tank Innovations, noting that developers often end up consulting the interior department on issues such as fauna protection.
Whatever the scope of the note, any movement with the potential to slow down the deployment of renewable energies is almost certainly bad news for American energy, because most other sources of new electricity are simply not built: 93% of the new energy which is put online in 2024 has been renewable. But when he took office, President Trump warned that the United States depended on a “precariously inadequate and intermittent energy supply” and immediately required to revoke federal funding previously approved by green energy projects, to try to cancel offshore wind leases and to cancel the clean energy tax credits that had been extended by his predecessor. The way in which this will lead the nation to the current promise of the “energy domination” of the current administration is not clear.
“You don’t have enough [electricity] The supply to meet a new demand, “said O’Brien.” Instead of new online capacity – inexpensive renewable energies – you have existing gas factories longer, and therefore the demand for gas increases and prices increase, both for power plants and for household consumers. … All signs indicate that it is a bad and bad scenario. »»
