Dealing with the Changing Political Winds: Where Does Clean Energy Go from Here?

Every presidential transition brings a new agenda and new priorities that can be challenging for any industry. The changes brought about by the new Trump administration have come faster than most, which has left many companies scrambling for strategic shifts and responses that will set them on the right path in both the short and long terms. While policy changes pertaining to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) continue to grab the most headlines, there is another policy area that is a bit more nuanced: energy.

The U.S. has always had a complicated relationship with the energy sector. U.S. energy consumption was higher than U.S. energy production every year from 1958–2018, forcing us to fill that gap with imports of crude oil and petroleum. However, the natural gas boom that began in the mid-2000s reversed this trend, culminating in the U.S. becoming a net total energy exporter since 2019. Becoming energy independent was a bipartisan priority that was pushed by both Democratic and Republican administrations.

Political pressure, economic priorities, and climate change realities quickly created a divergence, one that we have seen play out during this transition.

Spending on clean energy in the United States topped $280 billion in 2023, up from about $200 billion in 2020, according to the International Energy Agency. Many of these investments were encouraged by President Biden’s signature bill in 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which was the largest investment in clean power in American history. With a mix of tax incentives, federal subsidies and policy tweaks, the IRA spurred hundreds of billions of dollars into new investments in clean energy – largely coming from private investments.

Despite these massive planned investments and initial steps toward energy diversification, the delay in deploying the allocated funding and the slow pace of development, these policy changes did not deliver politically, which led to a large pendulum swing in the other direction.

“We’re going to drill, baby, drill and do all of the things that we wanted to,” was one of the more notable lines from President Trump, just hours after being sworn in for his second term.

On Inauguration Day, President Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris climate agreement, making it the only nation to walk away.

The Trump administration has frozen funds appropriated by Congress for clean energy projects, taking particular aim at energy produced by wind turbines, the country’s largest source of renewable power. At the same time, President Trump has declared an energy emergency, giving himself the authority to fast-track the construction of oil and gas projects as he works to stoke supply as well as demand for fossil fuels.

This massive swing has created a lot of challenges for those that made massive financial investments just 3 years ago, requiring a swift course correction. Despite the current political and economic challenges for clean energy producers, there are a few areas in which there is an opportunity to get strategically aggressive:

The AI revolution will need to be powered by an all-the-above approach.

The US technology sector is currently focused on largely one thing – artificial intelligence (AI). The AI race has led to a massive boom in spending by some of the largest companies in the world, all trying to crack the AI code to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars in investment.

While the technological advancements have been fascinating to watch, I would like to focus on just one aspect of the AI revolution – compute power. In the next three years alone, data centers are expected to as much as triple their energy use, according to a report published in December of 2024 by the Biden U.S. Department of Energy. Under that forecast, data centers could account for as much as 12 percent of the nation’s electricity consumption by 2028. McKinsey & Company expects global demand for data centers to grow at roughly 20 percent a year through the end of the decade.

With this massive expansion in data centers comes the need to power them all. This is why we are seeing big players like Meta, Amazon, and Google all making moves toward alternative energy production – mostly nuclear. One headline making the biggest waves is Constellation Energy’s plan to restart Unit 1 at its infamous Three Mile Island nuclear facility by 2028 in order to provide 24/7 carbon-free energy to fuel Microsoft’s growing data center fleet across the Mid-Atlantic. But it is not just nuclear that is getting all the attention: Google recently announced a $20 billion investment in an effort that will use an equal amount of wind, solar, and battery storage projects.

Aside from the massive amount of resources these companies have, they currently have a bully pulpit in Washington DC (as evident by the number of tech CEOs on the dais at President Trump’s inauguration) and in the media that can be leveraged to drive clean power initiatives and stave off the reversal of the last administration’s priorities.

Drafting off the big oil players.

Some great reporting from the Wall Street Journal prior to the election highlighted an interesting trend: Oil companies lobbied then-candidate Trump to spare the IRA, especially the provisions that earmark billions of dollars for low-carbon energy projects on which the big players had already placed large bets. Exxon and Chevron both made plans to pump more than $30 billion combined into carbon capture, hydrogen, biofuels, and other low-carbon technologies, driven by tax credits in the IRA. Their most impactful pitch is the boon for US jobs and manufacturing that clean energy can deliver.

Similarly, there is an opportunity to highlight Community Benefit Agreements (CBA), which compensate citizens for the disruption caused by the construction of renewable projects in their communities. Offshore wind developers are giving hundreds of millions of dollars to Long Island communities to be allowed to do construction in their community and allow for power to be distributed all around NYC (and on Long Island itself).

This pairs well with the marketing and advocacy campaigns focused on an “all-the-above” approach leading us into the future and marketing materials that provide updates on energy diversification efforts.

This messaging from the big oil players has created an opportunity for clean energy companies to leverage similar messaging in their own campaigns as an endorsement for continued investment in new technologies. Using these campaigns to create a feeling of a consensus among a diverse and often-competing stakeholder mix can help stave off some cuts to shared priorities.

Young audiences are eager to support and engage with clean energy content. So feed them some.

It is no surprise that younger generations are very engaged on the issue of climate change. As a millennial myself, I have my own concerns about the impact climate change will have on my daughter as she grows up. Climate was a big issue for younger voters in the 2024 election. While youth voter turnout was down from 2020, that does not necessarily indicate that this audience has completely tuned out on climate content.

One climate coalition delivered a $55 million ad campaign during the 2024 election – all deployed on YouTube in battleground states focused on reducing energy costs and creating good-paying American jobs in clean energy manufacturing. While this ultimately didn’t have the desired impact, it shows that climate groups are meeting their audience where they are.

There is still plenty of room for improvement on that front. A 2023 survey conducted by Oxford University asked respondents how they accessed news and information about climate change over the course of a specific week. Even though about half of Americans surveyed encountered climate-change news that week, only 18 percent of them came across such news on social media platforms.

The best avenue to deliver this type of content continues to be via influential voices that can create compelling content in partnership with clean power organizations. Younger audiences don’t care as much about a post being sponsored if the content is compelling and focused on a topic they are interested in.

What’s next?

Industries must make strategic adjustments that fit the shifting winds of political power; this is not a new phenomenon.

Environmental sustainability is simply less important to the Trump administration than global competitiveness. But this administration loves the ability to broker deals. There is a good case to make that diversity in our domestic energy mix makes great business sense for the United States. While such an approach may be novel and outside the sector’s comfort zone, it is probably good for the renewable industry to meet the President where he is, just as it should meet consumers and voters where they are.

The speed at which these policy preference shifts have come continues to accelerate. Taking a targeted, aggressive approach is the best way to either advance your goals or fight for parity until the next shift in power becomes more favorable. Either way, failing to seize the opportunities presented to you in challenging times can lead to paralysis that will dig an even deeper hole for companies to climb out of.