'What would he do?' Donald Trump was ghost at the feast at America's biggest green energy event

Donald Trump was in a New York City courtroom last week, but he was front and centre more than a thousand miles to the west in Minneapolis at the largest annual US clean energy conference.

From the start, there was an undercurrent of nervousness at Cleanpower 2024 over the increasingly real possibility that the sector’s perceived main antagonist could return to power for another four years in January 2025.

“What would Trump do if elected?” That question predominated among the 9,000 or so attendees during the three-day gathering of grid-scale battery storage, solar, and wind developers, financiers, and supply chain executives, along with federal and state officials and regulators.

There were no easy or immediate answers, which served to feed speculation and generate more than a little exasperation that the former president and presumptive Republican Party nominee could, if elected, potentially undermine four years of US progress on clean energy and climate under the Democrats.

While some in attendance remained hopeful the mercurial Trump would somehow self-destruct politically in the runup to 6 November national elections as he did during his undisciplined first term, others appeared ready to accept the country may be ready for change.

Despite his legal battles, early polls show Trump leading President Joe Biden nationwide and in most key battleground states, although several results fall within the margin of error. He faces 91 criminal counts across four cases, all brought by prosecutors who are Democrats.

The only criminal trial likely to be heard by a jury before Americans vote is in Manhattan where he is accused of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal. That trial is now in its fourth week.

Despite advantages that come with occupying the oval office such as media exposure and use of federal money to advance policies with favoured constituencies such as clean energy, Biden faces voter disquiet over his age (81) and fitness for office and must overcome record low approval ratings.

Biden’s fall from grace in little more than three years, while not necessarily irreversible as some conference participants were quick to note, is still hard for the industry and its supporters to accept given his administration’s full-throated support to accelerate the energy transition and leadership to combat global warming.

Yet, frustratingly for Biden and echoed by some at the gathering, is that polls also show a strong majority of Americans view climate change far down their list of pressing concerns this election cycle after cost of healthcare, crime, economy/jobs, illegal immigration, and inflation. His job performance on those issues will determine whether he wins a second term.

Should he prevail, Biden vows to press harder with his administration’s aggressive top-down party-line policy and regulatory approach to accelerate clean energy adoption.

Some of the cascade of policy changes, rules, and standards imposed through his cabinet departments and executive orders undid most of his predecessor’s efforts to weaken environmental protections and promote oil and natural gas drilling and production.

Trump would return the favour. He promises to “cancel” at least part of Biden’s climate agenda from the White House, taking early aim at automobile and fossil power plant emission standards, offshore wind development, and Paris agreement US participation and pledges.

Should Republicans control Congress, Trump would also seek to rescind parts of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the partisan watershed climate law passed by Democrats, that he calls the “biggest tax hike in history.”

Repealing certain lucrative IRA tax credits, particularly those for electric vehicles (EVs), solar, and wind, would raise substantial revenue that would ease the fiscal impact from Trump’s planned extension of roughly $4trn in tax cuts enacted during his first administration.

How many Republicans would go along is uncertain, given about 70% of IRA-driven clean energy investments are in their electoral districts, and the party has a three-decade record of not revoking solar and wind tax credits.

The tit-for-tat by Biden and Trump to dissemble and overturn each other’s policies has already hurt efforts to forge consensus over a national response to global warming and how best to transition to cleaner energy – a complex and formidable undertaking whose cost and disruption are only starting to be felt by ordinary Americans.

'Woke agenda'

Against that backdrop, Jason Grumet, CEO of event organiser American Clean Power Association (ACP), a national trade group, argued that clean energy, climate change, domestic supply chain development, energy security, infrastructure investment, and job creation should not be partisan issues.

Grumet founded the non-profit Bipartisan Policy Center think tank in Washington in 2007 and spent the next 15 years as its president working with policymakers across party lines to help devise passable laws including the landmark $1.2trn Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021.

Yet, the temperamental Trump, the dominant Republican at the national level, is less concerned about his party’s policy positions or willingness to engage Democrats in Congress, often preferring to take decisions based on personal likes and dislikes. Topping the dislikes list for clean energy are EVs, imported Chinese solar panels and components, and wind turbines.

Grumet also took aim at conservative critics of clean energy telling the opening session that the industry is not trying to advance the Democratic left’s “woke agenda,” whose definition varies but often refers to a belief that there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.

If elected, Trump would likely seek to reverse, or at least downplay, the Biden administration’s environmental justice policy focus for energy and other infrastructure project permitting.

Meanwhile, C-suite attendees, at least those willing to talk publicly about US political risk with Trump looming on the horizon, noted that this is not the first time the industry would have to navigate policy twists and turns over successive Democratic and Republican administrations.

“Policies can change overnight. We have to pivot and be resilient. We generally got pretty good at that. We also got to a point where we make decisions based on the fundamentals without the policy influence included in that analysis,” said Mark Widmar, CEO of First Solar, the largest solar panel manufacturer in the western hemisphere.

He said his Arizona-based company has invested $8bn in the US across three presidential terms since 2016 – Barack Obama, Trump, and now Biden – with “about half of that before there was even a mention of the IRA.”

Widmar added: “We have invested heavily but from a point of sustainability being enduring independent of any policy environment. You have to do that. We don’t know what the next day is going to look like.”

'Here's the real answer'

Dan Shugar, CEO of NextTracker, a leading California manufacturer of solar tracking technologies and software, said when asked on a television show what would happen in Trump comes back, he gave both a “public answer” then the “real” response.

“The public answer is we grew a lot under Obama, we grew more under Trump, and we are growing more now. It’s not about politics, it’s about fundamental technology and economics. That’s true,” he said.

“Here’s the real answer. It really matters, ok?” he continued, referring to the upcoming election impact on his company’s current decisions and future federal government support.

“We don’t want naysayers throwing sand into the gears of local permitting and things like that. The clean energy transition is happening. It’s just a fact. People in the manual typewriter industry tried to slow down computers. Speed matters, right?”

Steven Swift, chief commercial officer, GE Vernova, onshore wind, argued the energy transition, “Has to happen. We have a responsibility to do it. I don’t think there is a debate about the destination, it’s just how do you get there.”

He said no executive wants to go to his or her board of directors and say, “Sorry about this stranded investment because of a policy decision.”

Swift highlighted that whether you are a Republican or Democrat, there are economic benefits from the energy transition such as jobs.

"We’re going to scale an industry at five times what it did for the last decade, and we’re going to do it having more US jobs than we did before. Just hope that narrative carries through and we really aren’t debating what the destination is,” he said.