Secret Energy Department "hit list" targets renewable energy industry

Today’s edition is a special collaboration by Popular Information and HEATED. You can subscribe to HEATED, a newsletter about the climate crisis, HERE.

During his confirmation hearing, Energy Secretary Chris Wright tried to convince senators he wasn’t your typical fracking executive.

Wright—the CEO of $3 billion methane gas company Liberty Energy—promised to support all types of energy production, including solar and wind.”The solution to climate change is to evolve our energy system,” he said. “I am for improving all energy technologies that can better human lives and reduce emissions.”

But, after his confirmation, Wright walked back that promise, claiming renewable technologies are inherently unreliable. “There is simply no physical way that wind, solar and batteries could replace the myriad uses of natural gas,” he claimed at a fossil fuel industry conference this month.

Wright is wrong. There is a physical way that wind, solar and batteries could replace gas for electricity generation: long-duration energy storage systems. These are essentially big battery facilities that can take cheap wind and solar generation and make it available for extended periods when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing.

But Wright may be planning to sabotage the future of long-duration energy storage systems, according to a “hit list” of DOE clean energy projects obtained by HEATED and Popular Information.

The existence of the “hit list” was first reported by E&E News on Friday. The "hit list" is a collection of clean energy projects already awarded billions of dollars in grants and loans under the Inflation Reduction Act, bipartisan infrastructure law, and annual appropriations. The DOE is now seeking to cancel these projects. The list will be submitted to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and the Office of Management and Budget, according to two people familiar with the plan.

Among many other proposed cuts, the “hit list” includes six long-duration energy storage projects that have already had $156 million in federal funding obligated under the bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The grants for those projects were awarded in 2023, and “seen as vital for turning variable wind and solar production into a reliable, round-the-clock power source,” Canary Media reported at the time.

The reason these grants were seen as so vital for wind and solar’s future is because they were commercial test-runs of newer technologies. They were intended to “convince private investors as well as utility regulatory commissions that these are trustworthy investments,” Canary Media reported. “If that succeeds, power companies will greenlight more of these projects in the near future.”

If the Department of Energy terminates these grants, it will further delay the transition to renewables and make the fossil fuel industry’s claim that solar and wind can never compete a self-fullfiling prophecy. It will also be a blow to private investors, who are funding more than 50 percent of all the energy storage projects on the list.

The energy storage grants being considered for elimination are:

• The $50 million Westinghouse project grant, slated to help the remote community of Healy, Alaska, transition from coal power to renewables.
  

• The $49 million NextEra project grant, slated to help develop, build, and operate zinc-bromide battery energy storage systems in Oregon, Wisconsin, and North Dakota.
  

• The $30 million Chargebliss project grant, slated to build a non-lithium-ion battery energy storage system at a pediatric hospital in Madera, CA. (While California is a blue state, the hospital is in Republican Congressman Tom McClintock’s district.)

• Two $10 million grants for the Rejoule and Smartville projects, slated to repurpose used electric-car batteries to power low-income communities as an alternative to high-polluting peaker plants in Minnesota, New Mexico, California, Louisiana, Georgia, and South Carolina.

• The $6.5 million Urban Electric grant to test zinc manganese dioxide batteries in New York.

These energy storage grants, however, are just one small portion of a massive list of proposed cuts. The list, for example, proposes $900 million in cuts to grants issued by DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy (EERE). The proposed cuts range from developing electric vehicle infrastructure in underserved areas to researching the impact of offshore windmills on wildlife. Over a quarter of the grants were slated to fund research at universities across the country.

The hit list also includes over $760 million in proposed cuts from the DOE’s Grid Deployment Office (GDO), which works to advance electric infrastructure across the country. The largest proposed GDO cut is a $389 million grant to Power Up New England, which, among other things, are slated to fund the development of enough offshore wind projects in Massachusetts and Connecticut to “power about 2 million homes.”

The rest of the proposed GDO cuts were grants awarded through the office’s Transmission Siting and Economic Development Grants Program, which would have funded 20 projects to advance transmission infrastructure and support economic development across 16 states. Those proposals seem to contradict Wright’s confirmation hearing pledge to support expanding and strengthening the U.S. transmission system.

Additional reporting by Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims.