President Donald Trump spent much of his first year in office in an all-out war against solar power, even going so far as to change regulations so that renewable energy faces vastly more permitting. But now, many prominent MAGA voices are beginning to enthusiastically promote solar development.
The reason for the shift is simple, The Washington Post reported on Monday: artificial intelligence.
One of the most notable figures in Trump’s orbit to be touting the benefits of solar power is Katie Miller, the wife of Trump’s infamous anti-immigrant strategist Stephen Miller.
“‘Solar energy is the energy of the future,’ Katie Miller posted recently. ‘Giant fusion reactor up there in the sky — we must rapidly expand solar to compete with China.’ Another of her posts suggested solar is more vital to the U.S. than coal power, contradicting White House messaging and policy.”
Nor is Miller alone, noted the report, as “a growing number of prominent Trump allies — including former House speaker Newt Gingrich, veteran strategist Kellyanne Conway and GOP pollster Tony Fabrizio — are promoting solar as electricity demand surges and energy affordability climbs the list of voter concerns.”
Perhaps nowhere is this starker than Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who previously called solar power a “parasite” on the power grid, but last week, while speaking with reporters, said, “Is there a commercial role for solar power that can add to the grid affordable, reliable energy? Certainly there is.”
It isn’t a newfound attention to climate change driving the shift, the report said — rather, the big change that has happened over the last year is “a realization taking hold more broadly among Republicans that solar power — long embraced by liberals — is increasingly indispensable to America’s bid to dominate AI, close a yawning ‘electron gap’ with China and contain runaway residential electricity costs. These conservatives describe it as crucial to U.S. competitiveness, the grid’s reliability and their own movement’s political survival.”
It also comes as communities all over America that voted for Trump begin to rise up against the construction of AI data centers near them, driven by a fear that these facilities will consume all the local energy and drive up people’s power bills. Trump himself responded to these concerns in his State of the Union Address, promising he would push technology companies to generate all their power onsite — a plan experts have said is just not that simple.
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