Where to Listen:
The Big Beautiful Budget will have some ugly consequences. In this episode, why the fallout from Trump’s budget will include bigger bills, more toxic emissions, and a higher risk of blackouts.
Host:
Amy Barrilleaux
Guest:
Ciaran Gallagher, PhD, Energy & Air Manager, Clean Wisconsin
Resources for You:
Join Clean Wiscosin’s Action Network
Transcript:
Amy Hello and welcome. This is the Defender, Wisconsin’s environmental podcast. I’m your host, Amy Barrilleaux. The Defender is powered by Clean Wisconsin, your environmental voice since 1970. So we have a new federal budget, also known as One Big, Beautiful Bill, but it’s going to have some pretty ugly consequences. There’s a lot in it. I don’t have time to list everything that harms our environment, but here are a few highlights… or lowlights. The plan takes away incentives to help families and businesses save energy. It eliminates tax credits for wind and solar projects, for rooftop solar, for electric cars and school busses, and it dismantles vehicle and methane emission standards. At the same time, it gives more tax breaks to big oil and gas. It mandates at least four million more acres of federal land to be opened for coal mining. It allows oil companies to access the carbon capture tax credit, which was meant to support new technology that captures carbon emissions and stores them underground. But now oil companies can get that tax break for injecting carbon into wells to extract more oil. And it allows corporations to pay to fast-track projects that will emit pollution, kind of like a Disney fast pass, but to sidestep the environmental regulatory process. So basically, clean energy is out, burning coal is in, and there are a lot more incentives for fracking and drilling. And it goes beyond this budget. The Department of Energy has started forcing retiring coal plants to stay open. The shift in energy priorities over the last six months has pushed us backwards and in a hurry. Find out why experts say the fallout is going to be dramatic, higher energy bills, a lot more pollution, and blackouts. That’s right now on the Defendant. So, it does appear that we are turning backwards as a country. We are not looking at the clean energies of the future, the wind and the solar and the geothermal. We are looking at coal and gas. Joining me is Ciaran Gallagher, Air and Energy Manager with Clean Wisconsin. Thank you so much for being here.
Ciaran Thanks for having me.
Amy How would you, I guess, characterize what’s been happening in terms of how the United States is prioritizing energy right now.
Ciaran We’ve seen the federal government go really hard to try to push us backwards. There is a clean energy transition that is happening. It’s happening in the United States, and it’s happening globally. And momentum has grown. It was turbocharged with Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. And we’ve seen… Projects being built across the country. We’ve seen more and more homeowners and renters adopt clean energy technologies, electric vehicles. We have seen retiring coal power plants and all of this is the future. But the Trump administration and Senate and House Republicans are afraid of the future. And want to push us back into the past. We know clean energy, solar, wind, batteries are the technologies of the future. And every other country in the world knows this, but Republicans are killing these industries while subsidizing the industries of the 19th century. Big oil, big gas, big coal.
Amy People may not realize, like here in Wisconsin, the cheapest way to produce energy is through wind and solar farms. Why is that? Why, because I’ve heard people say, well, isn’t coal cheap? Why is it that wind and solar is cheaper here in WIsconson?
Ciaran Wind and solar are cheaper for one main reason, and that is a sunny, shiny day is free. A windy day is free. And the fuel of coal is expensive. So when you build and operate a power plant, there’s kind of two buckets of costs. You have the capital cost to build it, and then the ongoing operational and maintenance costs. It can be more expensive to build solar and wind. But over the lifetime, however many years, 20 years, that these plants and installations are on the ground, when they’re generating electricity, that’s basically free. Whereas when you build a coal power plant and a gas power plant, first you have to build the massive power plant. And then every time you want to burn coal, you want to burn gas, you’re… Burning something that you’ve had to source, you’ve to buy. And at this point, coal power plants are not economical. It, coal is expensive to source. It is expensive burn. And these power plants that are still on our landscapes are just hemorrhaging money. Utilities want to close them. Grid operators understand that they’re not being called upon enough because cheap. Wind and solar is just so plentiful and much more available. And to turn on a coal power plant and burn away that money and that fuel is just racks up your energy bills.
Amy Not only are wind and solar the cheapest ways to produce energy in Wisconsin, they’re also quick. And I think that matters because you’ve talked about how we’re going to see energy demand increasing here in the near future. So what’s going on in terms of the demand that we’re gonna see and the ability of coal and oil and gas to meet it? You know, we’re going to open up some… Coal reserves, right? We’re gonna start mining for a little bit more coal. We’re going to start drilling for a little bit of more gas, and the thought is that’s gonna meet demand, but is it really?
Ciaran More Wisconsinites and folks across America buying more electric vehicles and air source heat pumps, so electric heating. We’re seeing this gradual increase in electricity demand across the country. And at the same time, technology companies want to build really massive data centers all of a sudden, as fast as they can in the race to win AI. All of this means that the amount of electricity this country is going to demand and that we need to generate to meet that demand is growing substantially in the next five to ten years. And we’ve seen that there’s a big rush to build gas. We know that very intimately here Wisconsin with the Public Service Commission just approving some massive gas plants in the southeast Wisconsin area. But that has caused a back order of gas power plant parts. If you try to order a gas turbine today, you won’t get it in your hands until five to seven years.
Amy Five to seven years from now is when you’re going to get the gas turbine?
Ciaran Yes, they are so back-ordered. So solar, wind, storage batteries can be built much faster than that, even with some of the COVID lingering supply chain constraints. It is faster to source those parts than five to seven years. So it is just faster to build solar, wind, and storage at this point in time than it is to build gas, and no one is building coal like that. That is uneconomical, no utility wants to do that. So when you’re repealing these Biden Inflation Reduction Act credits, that’s just gonna raise prices for all Americans and less clean energy is gonna be built. That with the backordered gas plant parts, the explosive AI demand, this growing electricity across our entire economy. Is going to really threaten the reliability of our electricity grid. I think there is a real risk of blackouts and a true energy emergency with the repeal of these tax credits and the slowing down of the clean wind and solar infrastructure in our country.
Amy So, okay, there’s a lot to unpack in what you just said. First of all, you said we’re not building coal plants anymore, that utilities don’t want to do that. And we know about that utility in Michigan that had already shut down a coal plant that was ordered by the Department of Energy under a wartime energy crisis authority, I guess, to reopen that plant after it was totally, there was no coal there, employees had left the gates, to keep burning coal. And we know that there’s going to be more coal leases now put out on federal lands. So we’re going to actively be trying to get more coal. How does that make sense, then, if utilities aren’t building more coal plants?
Ciaran I think we’ll see more delayed retirements, either voluntarily, like WeEnergies has just done for the third time, I might add, and forced delayed retirement by the Department of Energy. This plant in Michigan, the utility wanted to shut it down, the grid operator, MISO, wanted to shut it down, state regulators want to shut it down and. Because of some fabricated emergency through these wartime powers, the DOE ordered that it open its gates and remain operating. But no one’s going to build a new coal power plant, even if the amount of coal that is burned in the near term increases during Trump’s four years in office. It’s a dying industry, and it’s dying because it is horribly polluting, it’s horribly expensive, it doesn’t make economic environmental sense for anyone. And we have these new technologies that can more cheaply and in a less harmful way be backbone of our electricity grids. California and Texas have massive amounts of solar and storage on their grids. And in Texas, they also have a ton of wind. And these have kept their grides resilient despite having record electricity demand during heat waves last year. And so we’ve seen that as the sun goes down, batteries are able to keep the lights on. And the system… May be more complicated to operate, but these two drastically different states politically, geography, they’re able to keep their lights on and are benefiting from the deployment of all of these clean energy technologies.
Amy You mentioned the fabricated energy emergency by the Trump administration that we’re kind of seeing being used to keep some of these coal plants open, used for really all kinds of things. But your prediction is we could end up in a real-life energy emergency because of these actions.
Ciaran I think that’s right, and I’m afraid that if when that day comes, solar and wind will be blamed, even though we know that if we had the opportunity to build more and build more quickly, then some of those blackouts could have been avoided. So it’s, yeah, it’s… A sad day for Wisconsinites today and the future generations that, being able to reliably turn on our lights, might be at risk. We’re in the middle of an affordability crisis and our electricity bills are going to get higher and we will just continue to feel both the health harming and economic effects of air pollution and climate change.
Amy When you say you’re afraid that clean energy is going to be blamed, I think, are you seeing that kind of already, that clean energy is being blamed for really a lot of the ills of the energy industry right now?
Ciaran Yeah, I think we’ve seen it for a while. There’s a deep winter freeze some years ago in Texas. And a couple of wind turbines froze. And so they weren’t able to produce energy. And every news outlet and… Republican talking point was about how wind failed because wind turbines cannot withstand the cold. But what froze more and caused more blackouts and electricity to go down was freezing gas power plants and gas pipelines to deliver that gas. And some reporting and data investigations after the fact found that gas caused the majority of the blackouts in that event. But in the moment, it was just easy to point to these visible turbines that weren’t spinning. So we’ve seen that happen time and time again, especially in moment of an event. Some months ago, there was this massive, widespread blackout in Spain and Portugal. And without anyone knowing the real facts of the event, very smart people were pointing to the fact that it was all renewable energy’s fault. And since more data has come out, that has not been found to be the case.
Amy And are utilities like WeEnergies, for example, kind of playing into this false narrative saying, well, we need this gas plant because we need reliability and we need energy when the sun’s not shining and the wind’s not blowing, kind of ignoring the fact that there is battery storage. Is this kind of line that we keep hearing, and we hear it, it’s not just WeEnergies. We’ve heard it from utility after utility as an excuse to build more fossil fuel infrastructure. Has that been kind of a successful?
Ciaran Yeah, I do think it’s been a successful tact is why that is what the Trump administration is talking about in their press releases about this energy emergency. It’s why utilities bring up reliability so much. I do want to make the point that like, we also care about reliability, like environmental advocates, clean energy advocates. Clean energy developers. We want to make sure the lights stay on, that electricity running is so important for our lives and it saves lives to keep the lights on. And we want that just as much as the utilities and the other cautious actors working in this space. And at the same time, we think that we can have a reliable electricity grid with these new novel technologies. It’s just more complicated. It involves more weather forecasting. Because a lot of your energy is now dependent on how windy it is or how sunny it is, you have to know exactly how windy and how sunny it is so you can know when to charge those batteries and when to discharge them onto the grid. Even though it is a more complicated future, it’s one that can be done, but utilities are cautious actors and they don’t want to be the first to try something new. I think they also want to maximize their profits as much as they can. So they’ll want to build big gas plants for reliability now and then in 10 years when potentially there’s federal regulations on gas power plants because they still contribute to harmful air pollution and climate change. They will want to build more solar and storage and wind because that’s how they get their money. They build stuff and they get a rate of return on it. So I think that we will see some utilities do some double dipping, building stuff now. Than rebuilding in 10, 15 years when they could have just been building those technologies and investing in those technologies today.
Amy I just want to say, you know, what you’re saying, a good example of that is We Energies with their Power the Future coal plant that was built in 2012, so long after the harms of coal pollution were very well known. And now they are spending money to convert that facility to gas, a lot of money. It’s kind of like this short-sighted, well, we can make a buck now and then in 10 years, we’ll make another buck, is that it basically?
Ciaran I think we are seeing the same thing happen again and with the same utility. I wish we had learned some lessons from that past, but here we are.
Amy You’re painting a picture, at least here in the United States, of one that is, I guess, desperately clinging to something that was once profitable, these old technologies propping up fossil fuels when they’re clearly not the future. And Wisconsinites and other folks are going to be paying for that. So what can happen, what can be done here as we know that the federal government is starting to try to, try to actively push us backwards.
Ciaran Well, we know that there are projects that are still being built in Wisconsin. They are going through the process at the Public Service Commission, seeking needed state approval. We know that some of the utilities in our state are looking creatively at energy efficiency and demand response programs. We know there are some outside companies that are doing novel things with demand response and aggregating all of our air conditioners to help manage the load on the hot day so we can manage not just how much electricity we are generating but also the amount of load that is demanded at the hottest part of the day. So there is a lot of energy and creativity and really smart, hardworking people in these spaces. I don’t think that the energy transition is going to stop. I think it will slow down. I think we are already feeling that. We are seeing that Wisconsin doesn’t have as much of the manufacturing investment from the Inflation Reduction Act. We saw more of those types of investments in states like Michigan. With EV electric car manufacturing and South Carolina with battery manufacturing. And we’re seeing those start to slow down and with the repeal of these tax credits, potentially shut those doors. I think that the United States is ceding leadership in this space, but the rest of the world isn’t. And we will just have to play, continue to do what we can in the next four years, and play catch-up after that.
Amy And I think people are going to have to pay attention to what’s happening. And there’s so much chaos going on right now. But pay attention when a utility says, hey, we want to build gas here. Hey, we’re going to be pushing at that coal plant retirement. Or when maybe the Trump administration comes in and orders a retirement to be delayed in your community. To really pay attention and understand that this is part of a push to embrace coal, oil and gas that is basically a dying industry.
Ciaran I think this is the last gasping breaths of the coal industry, but this is just delaying the inevitable.
Amy Ciaran, thank you so much for your insight and for taking the time to talk with me.
Ciaran It’s been a pleasure.
Amy And thank you for listening to The Defender. As Ciaran mentioned, there are clean energy projects in the pipeline happening right here in Wisconsin. To find out how you can take action to support wind and solar and fight new fossil fuel power plants, head to cleanwisconsin.org slash action. And I’m going to put a link in the show notes as well. I’m Amy Barrilleaux. Talk to you later.
