Democrats shouldn’t be afraid to take more aggressive actions on clean energy, former Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said.
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President Donald Trump’s scorched-earth approach toward renewable energy can offer inspiration for a future Democratic administration looking to retake the initiative to cut emissions, according to Jennifer Granholm, energy secretary under former President Joe Biden.
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In other words, she said Monday at a BloombergNEF summit in San Francisco, “don’t be afraid to break some eggs.”
Such an approach would create another wave of whiplash for a domestic power industry struggling to secure new power capacity to meet surging data center demand. Trump, of course, favors traditional fuel sources, including natural gas, while Democrats want clean sources, including solar and wind.
Granholm oversaw an effort by the agency to allocate billions in loans and grants for clean technologies, such as hydrogen and carbon removal. Much of that funding has since been clawed back or wiped out by the Trump administration.
“The cancellation of all of these loans and grants was stunning to a lot of people who had worked on those because we thought we had commitments, we had obligations,” Granholm said. “Had we known that there would be such a slash-and-burn mentality about it, I think we would’ve done things differently.”
For Granholm, now a senior counselor for advisory firm DGA Group, the big lesson of Trump’s second term for Democrats is to go faster on clean energy and pursue even more ambitious goals. “Hats off to the Trump administration for being willing to break eggs,” she said.
Granholm said Trump’s anti-renewables campaign has systematically dismantled many of Biden’s climate and energy policies. And yet, she remains optimistic about the growth of clean power.
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which killed subsidies for solar and wind, is still “irresistible” for other clean power sources, she said, pointing to incentives for nuclear, geothermal and long-duration storage.
“All is not lost, unless you are offshore wind,” Granholm said. BNEF significantly dialed back its installation forecast for the US after Trump returned to the White House. But Granholm is still hopeful that the industry will grow post-Trump. That’s because of the benefits of job creation in port communities and the likelihood that the cost of technology will decrease as China and Europe build out capacity.
Another lesson for Democrats: Tie renewables, the cheapest form of energy in many markets, to the rising issue of electricity affordability. And don’t talk about climate.
“On Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs, climate does not rise as much as how much I’m paying for my electricity bill,” Granholm said.
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