Clean energy isn’t dead in the Trump era. But it does look different these days.
Since returning to office, President Trump has dismantled federal efforts to fight climate change and vowed to stop new wind turbines from going up. His administration has canceled billions of dollars in funding for technologies that might one day help reduce planet-warming emissions, and it has instead pushed to expand domestic oil and gas drilling.
Those moves have taken a brutal toll on America’s budding clean energy industry, including canceled offshore wind farms, shuttered electric-car factories and layoffs at climate technology start-ups.
Yet many clean energy executives say they are finding ways to adapt, and some promising technologies that might help slow global warming are moving forward.
Some industries, such as geothermal energy or nuclear power, still receive support from the Trump administration. Start-ups that could help cut emissions from factories are figuring out how to survive without federal support. Others, such as battery companies, are looking to pitch themselves as a solution for the artificial intelligence and data center boom.
More than 300 start-ups attended a major annual energy industry summit this week, known as CERAWeek by S&P Global, showcasing ideas for investors and policymakers like advanced batteries that can store power for multiple days and lower-emission jet fuel.
“We’ve just gone through an era of radical uncertainty” for clean energy, said Alex Kizer, an executive vice president at the Energy Futures Initiative, a Washington nonprofit organization. “And for a lot of companies, there are big questions on how they’ll evolve going forward.”
‘Wishful thinking’
One big shift is how the industry seeks to find new investments for ideas that could bring major climate benefits. Many executives said they were no longer counting on government subsidies or the good will of environmentally minded politicians to support their business.
“For years, the clean tech world had a lot of idealistic founders who felt that the rules of capitalism had changed, that politics would entirely reorient itself around stopping carbon dioxide emissions, and that’s how we were going to make money,” said Cody Finke, the founder of a start-up called Brimstone. “And I think that was wishful thinking.”
When Brimstone was founded in 2019, the company aimed to produce cement with half the carbon-dioxide emissions of regular cement, by using carbon-free silicate rocks instead of limestone. The Biden administration awarded the company a $189 million grant as part of its push to reduce carbon emissions from heavy industry. But the Trump administration abruptly canceled the grant last year.
Mr. Finke said Brimstone hasn’t been deterred. The company recently announced that it had refined its process so it can harvest those same silicate rocks to produce both cement and other valuable industrial materials like alumina, a precursor to aluminum that the United States typically imports. The bet is that by producing multiple products together, Brimstone can become economically competitive with traditional cement makers.
“If you’re going to solve the climate problem,” Mr. Finke said, “you’re going to have to find solutions that just have fundamentally better economics.”
Other companies are making similar bets that they can displace fossil fuels even without government subsidies.
Another start-up, AtmosZero, is developing giant heat pumps that can be used instead of gas-fired boilers to generate steam for industrial facilities. The company is already testing its technology at a brewery in Fort Collins, Colo., trying to demonstrate that electrifying can make financial sense for companies — while also being cleaner.
“A decade ago, you might’ve called us clean tech or climate tech, but we’re really focused on the value of electrification,” said Addison Stark, the start-up’s chief executive. “We want our technology to be cost-effective no matter which way the policy pendulum swings.”
New energy winners
Other clean energy firms are increasingly billing themselves as a solution to the A.I. boom.
Electricity demand is rising for the first time in decades as tech giants build hundreds of energy-hungry A.I. data centers. Although many are being powered by new natural gas plants, big tech companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon say they are still committed to reducing their overall carbon emissions. That has provided a boost to wind and solar firms that have otherwise faced major obstacles from the Trump administration.
“The reality is that renewables are often the fastest energy source we can deploy,” said Sandhya Ganapathy, chief executive of EDP Renewables North America, a leading wind and solar developer. “So even if we have not had very favorable clean energy policy in the last 12 months, we continue to see significant amounts of procurement from corporates and utilities.”
Batteries are also benefiting. Crusoe, a data center developer, announced this week major partnerships with Form Energy, which has developed a new type of iron-air battery that can store 100 hours’ worth of electricity, far more than traditional batteries, as well as with Redwood Materials, which is recycling old electric car batteries to provide grid storage.
The Trump administration has largely scorned wind and solar power and has sought to promote fossil fuels like natural gas and coal as the most important near-term solutions to rising electricity demand. Yet officials have also provided support and money to low-emissions energy sources like advanced nuclear power and next-generation geothermal.
Geothermal energy, in particular, is emerging as one of the big renewable energy winners of the current era. Traditionally, geothermal production was limited to a handful of locations, such as Iceland or California, where companies could easily tap underground hot water reservoirs close to the surface.
But in recent years, some start-ups — most notably, a company called Fervo Energy — have sought to adapt modern drilling techniques from the oil and gas industry to tap underground heat in more places. This has raised hopes that geothermal could offer a vast new source of emissions-free power that, unlike wind and solar, can run at all hours. The industry has also received significant investments from oil and gas firms that have experience with large-scale drilling.
“We’re at the very beginning of this potential revolution that I think we’re entering into in a big way,” Kyle Haustveit, a former petroleum engineer who is now at the Energy Department as assistant secretary for the hydrocarbons and geothermal energy office, said at a CERAweek panel. He compared it to the early days of the shale revolution, which unlocked enormous amounts of natural gas in the United States.
And casualties, too
Yet Trump’s return to office has also brought a lot of clean energy casualties.
Last month, Sublime Systems, a Boston-based clean tech start-up, announced that it was laying off two-thirds of its workers. The company had developed a novel process to make carbon-free cement using electricity and signed a deal to produce more than 600,000 tons of cement for Microsoft. With the help of an $87 million grant from the Biden administration, it was building its first factory in Holyoke, Mass.
The Trump administration terminated that grant last year as part of billions of dollars in cuts to Biden-era funding. In a statement, Sublime said the cancellation created “compounding challenges” for financing, and work on the Holyoke facility has paused. The company says it still hopes to build its first factory, whether in North America or Europe, and continues to talk to the Energy Department about restoring its award.
Another technology that has faltered is known as “green hydrogen,” the production of clean-burning hydrogen fuel using wind or solar power. Many firms have abandoned those efforts, in part because the Trump administration has cut funding and because the process requires vast amounts of cheap electricity — electricity that is now being diverted to data centers.
“If you’re a clean energy technology that was depending on cheap grid power for your business, you’re in a lot of trouble right now,” said David Crane, who served as the under secretary for infrastructure at the Energy Department in the Biden administration. “Especially with how much the hyperscalers are willing to pay for that electricity.”
During the Biden years, there was also a surge of interest — and more than $3 billion in federal funding — for companies that were experimenting with techniques to pull carbon dioxide from the air in an effort to slow climate change.
But many of those companies are now scaling back, as global warming has faded as a national political priority and federal funds have been in limbo. Climeworks, one Swiss start-up that was pursuing carbon-removal, laid off one-fifth of its staff last May. The company cited “shifting policy priorities where climate tech is seeing reduced momentum in some areas” and uncertainty surrounding a project in Louisiana backed by the federal government.
“Carbon removal is definitely an out-of-favor category for early-stage investors,” said Johanna Wolfson, a co-founder of the venture capital firm Azolla Ventures. “And from a climate perspective, that’s worrying. We know what the climate trends are. So the risk is when concern swings back, these solutions won’t be ready when we need them.”
Some clean tech start-ups facing an unfavorable political landscape in the United States could end up looking for opportunities overseas, Ms. Wolfson added. She mentioned companies in Azolla’s portfolio that make floating offshore wind turbines or that are trying to capture carbon dioxide from the exhaust of ships.
China has vowed in its latest five-year plan to invest heavily in nascent clean-energy technologies, including green hydrogen and nuclear fusion. Some analysts wonder whether China, which has come to dominate industries like solar panels and electric vehicles, could soon eclipse the United States in those realms, too.
“The United States has historically been the best at inventing new technologies,” said Mr. Kizer of the Energy Futures Initiative. “But where we are absolutely losing our edge is in scaling new technologies and developing a domestic market for them so that we can export them. So where else could we see that happen?”
Brad Plumer is a Times reporter who covers technology and policy efforts to address global warming.
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