Granholm Says Energy Sector Gains Won’t Be Undone After Election

WASHINGTON — Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm on Thursday said steps are being taken now to ensure President Joe Biden’s clean energy and climate change agenda won’t be “undone” regardless of who wins the November election.

Speaking to a large, early morning audience at The Atlantic Festival 2024, Granholm said the Energy Department plans to add 60 GW of clean energy to the nation’s grid this year — the equivalent of the power that could be produced by 30 Hoover Dams.

The majority of this, 38 GW, will come from adding solar power to the grid, the secretary said, adding that the department is continuing to move forward with significant investments in long-duration battery storage and next-generation technologies like enhanced geothermal and small modular reactors.

But with just four months to go for the Biden administration, and polls suggesting a close race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, to whom most of Biden’s climate and energy policies are anathema, Vann Newkirk II, a senior editor at The Atlantic, wanted to know if this momentum is something that can be banked on in the future.

“Well, we’re a department of over 100,000 people, most of whom are civil servants, so they take the responsibility of shepherding the department and its mission very seriously,” Granholm said.

She went on to say the majority of civil servants who work at the Energy Department “are all about science.”

“So they are excited to be able to work on the technologies that get us to these goals of solving climate change and of adding clean electricity to the grid, and we reorganized the department to reflect and capitalize on that excitement,” Granholm said.

“You know, we are now considered one of the best places to work in the federal government,” she said, turning from Newkirk to the audience gathered before the festival’s Idea Stage. 

“And that’s because people love the mission. Of course, if you’ve got a mission that says you’ve been tasked with solving the biggest existential problem we have, who wouldn’t want to be there if you are investing at an unbelievable rate to solve that problem,” she said.

Returning to the thrust of Newkirk’s question, Granholm said because of the “huge amount of resources” that have been dedicated to advancing the Biden climate and energy agenda, “our focus has been on making sure we make the [funding and project] selections that are necessary so that the money is secured and the work will move forward.

“We’ve been doing really well in terms of being able to make those selections,” she assured the Atlantic editor. “So by the time there is a transition, we believe things will have been well in motion in such a way that they can’t be undone.”

Granholm attributed all this activity to the need to meet the nation’s ever-growing thirst for energy, and making sure that the dramatic scaling up of new demand — mainly from the increasingly electrified transportation sector and the large number of new data centers that will be required to serve the growth of artificial intelligence — doesn’t impinge on other consumers.

“That’s what we are focusing on,” she said. “This is why we’re adding so much power to the grid and making these investments in next-generation technologies.”

“I mean, when you talk about these data centers, everybody wants to see clean base-load power, right? That’s the power that’s available not just when the sun is shining and not just when the wind is blowing. So we’re investing in technologies that will ensure solar and wind energy is available 24/7,” she said.

“Right now, the biggest technology to do that is battery storage. … If you can get long-duration batteries that last 10 hours or more, then wind and solar become like base-load energy,” Granholm said.

“At the same, we’re also investing in other types of clean energy that can be made available for use 24/7,” she said. “For example, one of my favorites is enhanced geothermal — drawing energy from the heat beneath our feet.

“This is especially exciting because of just how much energy we believe is down there — something like 150 Hoover Dams-worth of base-load power that we can add to the grid,” she said.

(For the curious, the U.S. Energy Information Administration says that if all of its generators are working at full capacity, the Hoover Dam Hydroelectric Plant, which spans the Colorado River on the border between Nevada and Arizona, is capable of producing more than 4 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year, enough to service about 1.3 million people.)

Granholm also noted that many of those seeking to build new data centers are already partnering with next-generation geothermal companies and the makers of small modular nuclear reactors to ensure they can meet their energy needs.

“So the bottom line is, we can totally add the amount of clean power to the grid that we’re going to need in the future, and it’s the laws that President Biden signed — the Inflation Reduction Act, the bipartisan infrastructure law, and so on — that is enabling us to do this,” she said.

Dan can be reached at [email protected] and @DanMcCue