Der neu unter Druck gesetzte Abschnitt von Deutschlands Wasserstoff-Backbone ohne Lieferanten und ohne Abnehmer wird oft als klarer Bruch mit der Vergangenheit beschrieben, als notwendige frühe Investition in eine künftige Wasserstoffwirtschaft. Der Stahl erzählt eine andere Geschichte. Trasse, Durchmesser, Alter und Wirtschaftlichkeit der Pipeline verweisen zurück auf russisches Erdgas, nicht ... [continued]
Two major utilities are protesting a federal order requiring them to operate the Craig Unit 1 coal power plant in Colorado, originally scheduled to retire on December 31 of 2025.
This week Colorado utilities filed a request for reconsideration against the Trump administration’s illegal coal orders following similar requests from public interest groups and Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser. Tri-State Generation and Transmission and Platte River Power Authority’s (PRPA) argue the federal government’s intervention to keep the Craig 1 coal unit operating violates ... [continued]
Alberta’s January 2026 Order in Council authorizing expanded powers and funding for the province’s petroleum marketing agency shouldn’t exist, and if it had, it should have been a bill. Authorizing up to $900 million across borrowing, advances or investments by the Minister of Finance and provincial debt with broad powers ... [continued]
Der Vergleich zwischen Deutschlands Wasserstoff-Backbone von nirgendwo nach nirgendwo und Chinas angeblich über 1.000 km langer Wasserstoffpipeline taucht immer wieder auf und wird oft als Beleg dafür gerahmt, dass Deutschland lediglich früh dran sei und nicht falsch liege. Das ist eine berechtigte Frage, denn aus der Distanz wirken beide Projekte ... [continued]
Washington, D.C. — Today, the Trump administration released yet another coal industry handout by proposing to undo the Environmental Protection Agency’s previous disapproval of State Implementation Plans from states failing to meet their Clean Air Act obligations under the federal ozone air quality standard. Previously in 2023 the EPA had ... [continued]
Order required broken plant to stay online to address unproven emergency DENVER — Public interest organizations today challenged the Department of Energy’s illegal emergency order extending the life of Unit 1 at Colorado’s Craig Station. The groups include Sierra Club and Environmental Defense Fund, and Earthjustice on behalf of GreenLatinos, Vote Solar, ... [continued]
As the Trump administration doubles down on its energy and AI dominance agenda, U.S. energy companies have found themselves navigating tricky communication strategies. Touting the clean, carbon-free nature of renewable energy no longer carries the clout it did under the Biden administration, and policy has shifted against certain forms of renewables. At the same time, energy companies are being called upon to meet rising power demands of data-center developers, many of which are prioritizing carbon-free options.
This has forced energy companies to shift the way they communicate: They must garner political favor while also positioning themselves as an answer to the coming onslaught of electricity demand.
The wind and solar industries are focusing on electricity affordability and the fact that wind farms and photovoltaics are the cheapest and fastest way to add new energy generation. Battery storage developers are aligning themselves with Trump’s domestic manufacturing push, scaling up efforts to shift supply chains to the United States as they battle uncertainty over tariffs.
Nuclear power companies are touting their ability to go small and modular—theoretically a faster way to get reactors running. Next-generation geothermal developers are staying the course but playing up the industry’s crossovers with oil and gas. Hydrogen, too, is being highlighted as similar to fossil fuels. And the offshore wind industry is mostly preoccupied with using the courts to fight the Trump administration’s repeated attempts to ban development.
It’s not that the renewable technologies themselves have changed, says Samuel Furfari, former European Commission senior energy official and current energy geopolitics professor at ESCP Business School in London. “Mr. Trump has made a communication revolution, not an energy revolution,” he says about the state of the industry in the United States and abroad.
Trump Declares His Energy Darlings
Trump’s affinity for fossil fuels and his disdain for certain renewables, such as wind, have constructed a new federal hierarchy of energy sources. On day one of his second term as U.S. president, Trump issued an executive order listing which energy resources his country should promote. The list mentions fossil fuels, geothermal, and nuclear but excludes solar, wind, and hydrogen.
Then, in July, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act slashed renewable energy incentives for wind and solar while extending the tax credits for geothermal through 2033. On 1 December, Trump’s Department of Energy renamed the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to the National Laboratory of the Rockies—a moniker to demote renewables and reflect the lab’s “expanding mission” under Trump. And in an eleventh-hour move, the Department of the Interior at the end of 2025 halted all offshore wind projects under construction, citing national security risks.
At first, the wind and solar industries attempted to fit into the Trump administration’s agenda by leaning into his energy dominance rhetoric, says clean energy consultant Lloyd Ritter in Washington D.C. But after the government gutted tax incentives for wind and solar, and concerns over high electricity bills became a top election issue, industry players prioritized messaging about affordability for consumers, Ritter says.
“Electricity costs are now a thing in politics, and I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon,” Ritter says. The cost concerns stem from estimates that electricity use in the United States is projected to increase 32 percent by 2030, mostly from data centers, according to the latest forecast from Grid Strategies.
The solar and storage industries are welcoming these demand projections. That’s because solar is still the “fastest and cheapest form of electronics to get onto the grid,” says Raina Hornaday, cofounder of Austin, Texas–based Caprock Renewables, a solar and storage developer. In her view, meeting the load demands of data centers is going to take care of the political backlash that solar and storage have endured under the Trump administration.
Hornaday sees a particular opening for batteries. “The R&D for battery storage is really the winner across the board, and we don’t consider battery storage renewable. It can utilize renewable energy electrons, but it doesn’t have to,” she says. “It can be power from the grid.”
Sage Geosystems harvests heat from underground water reservoirs. The company has recently shifted from talking about geothermal energy as clean to its ability to get electricity to the grid faster to accommodate data-center growth. Sage Geosystems
Geothermal Inherits Fortuitous Position
The communications framing for next-generation geothermal power has shifted too, despite it being a political favorite. Companies in this sector say they are continuing to emphasize geothermal as a baseload power source—something that can crank out electricity 24/7, like fossil fuels can. But projected increases in power demand have shifted other elements of the conversation.
The leading communication strategies now are less about geothermal’s carbon-free benefits and more about getting energy to the grid faster to address data-center growth, says Cindy Taff, CEO of Houston-based startup Sage Geosystems. Geothermal companies are also talking about how their use of drilling technology, know-how, and other synergies borrowed from the oil and gas industries can fast-track development.
“When we first started Sage four and a half years ago, we were talking about it being clean and renewable, but if you think about it, there’s now a little bit more allergic connotation with clean and renewable,” says Taff, who spent more than 35 years in well construction and project management at Shell before founding Sage.
Lessening the use of climate-focused language is something “the whole industry” is doing, adds Geoffrey Garrison, vice president of operations at Quaise Energy, headquartered in Houston. “I think you have to be cognizant of who’s listening and who has got their hands on the lever.… You tailor your message,” he says.
Other Trump administration priorities, like moving industry and manufacturing back to U.S. soil, are top of mind for geothermal companies, says Sarah Jewett, senior vice president of strategy at Fervo Energy, also in Houston. “We are thinking a lot more about localization of [the] supply chain, in large part due to this administration’s focus,” Jewett says.
In its pitches to investors, Fervo Energy includes talking points about how geothermal energy drilling uses technology from the oil and gas industry. Fervo Energy
Overall, Fervo’s messaging has remained “pretty consistent” between U.S. presidential administrations, Jewett says. In its pitch to investors, Fervo includes talking points about how next-generation geothermal uses drilling technology from the oil and gas industry. But clean energy isn’t completely missing from Fervo’s communications. “Some sides of the aisle like parts of it, and other parts of the aisle like other parts of it,” Jewett says.
It’s not just U.S. companies that are shifting the message. In November at ADIPEC, the world’s largest annual energy conference, held in Abu Dhabi, widely adopted buzzwords such as “energy transition”—a term referring to the shift away from fossil fuels—were being swapped with “energy addition.”
That’s not solely a result in shifting political tides. The surge in energy demand may indeed necessitate more of an addition, rather than a complete transition. It’s a reasonable shift, given the “hockey stick” demand increase the industry is facing, says Taff at Sage. “Energy transition was, in my opinion, when [demand] uptick was very steady. But now that you’ve got the hockey stick, the use of ‘addition’…is much more applicable,” she says.
Abroad, Trump’s impact reverberates, Furfari says. “We were shy to mention fossil fuel. Mr. Trump does not care, and says, ‘No, we need fossil fuel.’ This is changing the world.”
The idea that heavy freight would be the last redoubt of diesel has been repeated for decades, often with confidence and rarely with evidence. In December 2025, that idea finally collapsed. Battery-electric heavy duty trucks crossed 50% of new sales in China, a segment that had long been treated as ... [continued]
The Michigan State Attorney General has filed an antitrust lawsuit against BP, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Shell, and oil industry organizations, citing a 50-year effort to illegally restrain competition from renewable energy.
OLYMPIA, Washington — On January 22, 2026, the Washington State Supreme Court heard oral arguments centering on the legality of I-2066, centering on how the initiative’s title misled voters by its ballot title and instead silently amended existing climate and clean air laws and programs across multiple state agencies, utilities, ... [continued]
Governor-appointed commissioners allow SWEPCO to raise rates by 23% Little Rock, Arkansas — Yesterday, as the region focused on an impending winter storm, the Arkansas Public Service Commission approved a move to raise customers’ electricity costs in much of Northwest Arkansas. With the go-ahead from the three governor-appointed PSC commissioners, SWEPCO will ... [continued]
ATLANTA — Yesterday, environmental groups pushed back on Georgia Power’s defense of its plan to build the most expensive gas plants in the nation. The Sierra Club, the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, and the Southern Environmental Law Center filed a response to Georgia Power and the Georgia Public Service Commission’s reply ... [continued]
Germany’s hydrogen backbone now exists as steel in the ground and pressurized pipe, but the more important infrastructure was laid long before any trench was dug. That infrastructure was intellectual. A long sequence of studies, models, and policy-facing analyses created the impression that large scale hydrogen for energy use was ... [continued]
The idea that heavy freight would be the last redoubt of diesel has been repeated for decades, often with confidence and rarely with evidence. In December 2025, that idea finally collapsed. Battery-electric heavy duty trucks crossed 50% of new sales in China, a segment that had long been treated as ... [continued]
Washington, D.C. — Today, seven environmental and consumer advocacy groups filed rehearing requests after Donald Trump’s Department of Energy unlawfully invoked Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act and forced two coal power plants in Indiana to stay online after their planned retirements. The seven groups include Sierra Club, Environmental Law and ... [continued]
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