Talking About the Election With Renewable Energy Nonprofit Leaders: “I Feel Very Nervous”

The final days of this election season are wearying for the people who do research and advocacy on the transition away from fossil fuels.

For this group, the Biden administration has been a champion, developing landmark legislation and building a policy team that included some of the brightest experts from universities and think tanks. Vice President Kamala Harris would continue on this path.

And yet, polling indicates that there is about a 50-50 chance that President Joe Biden’s successor will be former President Donald Trump, whose antipathy for the energy transition includes talk of “wind cancer” and close ties to the oil industry.

I spoke with four nonprofit leaders this week to get an idea of how they are feeling about the election. All of the groups they represent are nonpartisan, but their worldviews tend to be much more in line with those of Harris than Trump.

“I feel very nervous, because this election seems like it’s going to be very close, and one of the candidates is an anti-democratic fascist who seems not to be interested in respecting the results of what are very safe and secure elections,” said John Farrell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

His organization, with offices in Washington, D.C., Portland, Maine, and Minneapolis, works to make energy systems more democratic by decentralizing the sources of electricity and encouraging community ownership of utilities.

The Biden administration has taken many actions that support the institute’s agenda, including extending and expanding incentives for rooftop solar.

“This could be really stressful next week for people, and everybody’s going to react in different ways,” he said. “Some people might be like, ‘I just want to bury myself in my work,’ and other people may be like, ‘I need to take two days off and just not look at anything.’”

Sonia Aggarwal, CEO of the think tank Energy Innovation, came to her current role after serving in the Biden administration as special assistant to the president for climate policy, innovation and deployment.

“Just looking at the two paths we have in front of us, I would say they could not be more different in terms of American leadership, in terms of our economy and, of course, in terms of climate and our energy choices,” she said. “I think they couldn’t be more different in terms of the capability for people to have good lives and take control of their energy bills, reduce those energy bills and make them less volatile.”

Energy Innovation, based in San Francisco, does analysis of what various policy options would do for the climate, public health and energy markets.

“I think it’s a stark choice, and there’s no minimizing that,” she said.

One comfort, she said, is that renewable energy technologies are inexpensive and will grow in the market regardless of who is president. But policies matter a lot, and can hinder the rate of growth.

“We need to pick up the pace, and that certainly will not be the case under the wrong federal leadership,” she said.

I found less alarm when talking to people who mainly work with state governments.

“Clean energy is a bipartisan issue,” said Simon Mahan, executive director of the Southern Renewable Energy Association, a trade group based in Little Rock, Ark. “While all eyes will be on the presidential election, arguably the state-level elections have a larger impact on the nation’s energy policy.”

Inside Climate News has written about some of these state-level races, including three seats on the Arizona Corporation Commission and one seat on the Texas Railroad Commission.

“State-level energy policy has been an underappreciated venue for supporting reliable, clean, low cost energy resources,” he said.

Bernadette Del Chiaro, executive director of the California Solar and Storage Association, agrees. Her trade group is based in Sacramento.

“Obviously there’s a lot of attention on the top of the ticket this year but what matters most for the transition to clean energy is who sits in your governor’s office, who runs your state legislature and how many local mayors champion rooftop solar,” she said.

Her view is informed by recent clashes with California Gov. Gavin Newsom on a variety of issues that affect the financial benefits of solar and energy storage.

“Despite the actions of the Biden administration and Congress, the Newsom administration clobbered rooftop solar, costing us tens of thousands of jobs, dozens of company bankruptcies and set our market back 10 years,” she said. “The same could be said about the experiences of Hawaii, Arizona and other states.”

 None of the people I talked to specifically said they were exhausted. So let me speak for many of the people involved in the conversation about the energy transition in this election year: I’m exhausted.

Other stories about the energy transition to take note of this week:

Federal Government Chooses Winning Bids in First Commercial Sale for Floating Offshore Atlantic Wind: Two firms cast winning bids this week in an auction for four offshore wind lease areas in the Gulf of Maine, the first lease auction in Atlantic waters so deep that the firms will need to use floating turbines. The winning bids, with a total of about $22 million, came from Avangrid Renewables and Invenergy NE Offshore Wind, as Patrick Whittle reports for the Associated Press. Floating turbines are attached to the ocean floor by cables instead of a rigid shaft, and they are an opportunity to expand the areas capable of supporting offshore wind.

Judge Blocks Texas Restrictions on Who Can Build Transmission Lines: A federal judge has struck down a Texas law that limits who can build new transmission lines in the state, as Nate Raymond reports for Reuters. The ruling is the latest in a larger legal fight over state “right-of-first-refusal” laws, with utilities supporting laws that give them the exclusive right to build new transmission lines within their territories, and others arguing that this discriminates against energy companies that might build the lines faster and more effectively. I’ve written about how this debate is playing out in several states.

How Will the Presidential and Senate Election Outcomes Affect FERC and Its Policies? Even if Donald Trump wins the presidential election, Democrats would likely maintain their majority on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for at least 18 months, as Ethan Howland reports for Utility Dive. The next president will be able to select the panel’s chairman, but Democrats will still have a 3-2 majority, so there likely will be little change to FERC’s approach to managing energy markets and the interstate transmission of energy.

The Tax Code Change Unleashing $25B in Clean Energy Investment: The Inflation Reduction Act’s provision allowing transferability of tax credits is showing results, as Jeff St. John reports for Canary Media. The provision allows companies to receive tax credits even if they otherwise wouldn’t have enough tax liability to fully benefit from the credits. The upshot is an expansion in the kinds of entities that can develop carbon-free energy and emissions-reducing projects, as opposed to before when the tax credits made the most sense for large and sophisticated companies, and made little sense for others.

Competing Visions for the U.S. Auto Industry Clash in Presidential Election, With the EV Future Pressing at the Border: The U.S. presidential election will help to determine whether the country will try to close the gap on EVs with China, or double down on fossil-fuel-powered transportation, as Marianne Lavelle and I report for ICN. We visited a BYD dealership in Mexico City to understand how the Chinese automaker has established a foothold in Mexico and most of the world. China has a lead in the global EV market, but the United States may be able to catch up. This story is part of our yearlong series, Politically Charged, about the intersection of U.S. politics and the shift to electric transportation.

Inside Clean Energy is ICN’s weekly bulletin of news and analysis about the energy transition. Send news tips and questions to [email protected].