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Tech Brew

Green Tech

Tricia Crimmins

techbrew.com

The Trump administration appears to be deviating from the all-of-the-above energy strategy that 

During National Clean Energy Week, Brittany Kelm, a former Shell policy advisor who now works as a senior policy advisor for the administration’s National Energy Dominance Council, told renewables industry attendees that the council will “run to the ground anything [they] need for [their] company’s specific projects.”

That is, if those projects are oil, gas, or nuclear energy. When Tech Brew asked Kelm why the administration had lengthened permitting timelines for proposed solar and wind projects on federal lands by requiring Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum to execute an “elevated review” of all such projects, she said that the administration’s focus is on oil, gas, and nuclear power.

“It’s down to prioritizing [the] baseload power directive of President Trump…We wake up every day with no question of what our priority objectives are,” Kelm said. “That has just been a focus of permitting for those specific energies, which are oil and gas—obviously inclusive of pipelines—the nuclear side, and the permitting for such on federal lands.”

An approach that excludes solar and wind runs perpendicular to the ideology of Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, a nonprofit that encourages Republican support for clean energy. In an interview with Tech Brew, CEO Heather Reams said “we need to make sure that we’re treating all of these energies, these technologies, the same way.” Reams is also the chair of National Clean Energy Week.

“What you do for one kind of industry you do for everybody,” Reams said. “We’re wanting the government to be more of a fair arbitrator.”

This isn’t the first time that clean energy conservatives have taken issue with the Trump administration’s energy strategy at National Clean Energy Week. During 

, Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), said that Trump’s halting of construction on clean energy projects is “counterproductive” and “unfair.”

“The federal government is again departing from that all-of-the-above approach, particularly for wind and solar,” Murkowski said. “The worst thing that we can do is take the resources off the table.”

Image of Brittany Kelm, a former Shell policy advisor who now works as a senior policy advisor for the Trump administration’s National Energy Dominance Council, onstage during National Clean Energy Week in September 2025

Trump’s National Energy Dominance Council splits from all-of-the-above energy strategy

A senior policy advisor said during National Clean Energy Week that the administration's priorities are oil, gas, and nuclear. 

Hackers nearly taking over US energy plants. Federal cybersecurity groups thwarting the attacks. These alarming events aren’t plot points in a geopolitical thriller—this 

 in 2022 when operators connected to Russia hacked into the US energy supply. Such an attack would have left everyday Americans without power and potentially no way to get it.

That is, unless they had distributed generation systems on or near their homes and businesses. Distributed generation is power at or near the location where it’s being consumed, like residential solar or heat pumps. It can also be solar panels on the roofs of commercial buildings that help power their business operations.

At a time when the US grid is under a lot of strain from 

, distributed generation stands to be an impactful solution, according to Richard Dovere, CEO of Dispatch Energy, which designs behind-the-meter renewable energy systems.

According to Dovere, one of the “best applications of distributed generation” is helping utilities avoid pricey infrastructure updates, by incentivizing consumers to invest in distributed generation resources like rooftop solar that increase resiliency when the grid is experiencing outages.

“Utilities are regulated monopolies, but they have an obligation to serve their customers reliably,” Dovere told Tech Brew. “And they get into a lot of trouble when they don’t, so they’re supposed to appropriately invest in a resilient infrastructure.”

And in a crisis situation like the one that nearly occurred in 2022, distributed generation could be a literal lifesaver.

“Our grid stability is a major vulnerability,” Dovere said. “If your power goes out and your grandmother’s on an oxygen machine, I don’t think you care about the [internal rate of return] of the [power] system.”

Dovere added that the Trump administration is using renewable energy resources as a “punching bag” by phasing out 

 for solar energy. The administration has 

 and nuclear energy, and many Republicans in Congress have pushed for an “

Dovere told Tech Brew that regardless of price, distributed solar is the best way “to service the largest amount of people to provide them at least some modicum of power.”

“Getting rid of solar renewable tax credits makes it more expensive,” Dovere said, but “people need the power.”

Image of rooftop solar panels against a city skyline.

How ‘distributed generation’ could help in the event of a grid collapse

The nation’s grid instability is a huge vulnerability. Distributed generation can help, one stakeholder tells Tech Brew.

No one’s letting Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski forget that she voted for President Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill. Seconds after she took the stage at National Clean Energy Week on Wednesday, a protester yelled at her and said she’s a “climate criminal.”

“You were the tie-breaking vote for the Big Beautiful Bill,” the protester yelled. “You have doomed us all.”

Murkowski didn’t entirely rebuke their chants. In her remarks, she acknowledged that the bill created many obstacles for wind and solar energy, which help to generate 

 in her state, while shifting some of the blame for tamping down clean energy production to the Trump administration.

“This is not necessarily the happiest year on record for clean energy,” Murkowski said. “You’ve lost policy support at the federal level. Not really sure on any given day what the day is going to hold, what orders may be given, what projects may be impacted…It’s not just unfortunate. I think it’s unfair. I think it’s certainly counterproductive, and yet this is where we are.”

Murkowski later called out one “impacted project” by name: 

, which the Trump administration halted construction on last month. She also advocated for an “

” energy strategy, which many clean energy-supporting Republicans favor. The Trump administration has seemed to spurn the strategy by targeting solar and wind energy.

“The worst thing that we can do is take the resources off the table,” Murkowski said. “Nothing good will come from halting already permitted, nearly complete projects.”

The saving grace that will get renewables back on the table, she said, will be 

. Because renewable energy is the cheapest form of power and the fastest to deploy, Murkowski said “nothing changes minds and policies like rising prices.”

Clean energy tax policy experts that spoke on a panel after Murkowski’s speech echoed that sentiment.

“The best news, given all the headwinds that the sector faces, is that [energy] demand is growing,” climate change policy consultant Joe Britton said. Rising prices will “catch up with” Republicans “and consumers are pushing back,” he said.

And like Murkowski, Britton said that the Trump administration breaking promises and rescinding permits hurts the renewable industry and the country’s ability to meet rising energy demand as a whole.

“The value of the permit itself for this sector is diminished, because if the permit can be yanked, if it’s not going to be defended in court, if [grants and] loans are going to be pulled back,” Britton said, “those are all really concerning elements in this marketplace.”

Murkowski, experts forecast rocky road for renewables at National Clean Energy Week

The Alaska senator’s remarks were interrupted by protesters lambasting her for voting for Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.”

A congressional hearing went into the kitchens and laundry rooms of most US households earlier this week—metaphorically speaking.

Members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee discussed the Department of Energy’s energy efficiency 

 and the Energy Policy and Conservation Act, which allows the DOE to create and regulate those standards.

The biggest issue on the docket, however, was the potential cost savings of energy efficiency as a whole. Republicans claimed high-tech 

 cost too much, while Democrats noted that tax credits to lower the price of energy-efficient home upgrades are being phased out by the president’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill.

“Donald Trump and Republicans have broken their promise to lower costs, and their reckless policies are making life more expensive,” Representative Kathy Castor (D-FL) said in the hearing. “They want to trap Americans with outdated and expensive technologies forever while the rest of the world moves on without us.”

Republicans’ solution, as explained by committee chair Representative Brett Guthrie (R-KY), would be to ease efficiency standards to lower prices without subsidies.

“It doesn’t make products cheaper to make them more expensive and just subsidize on the back end,” Guthrie said. “What we need to do is allow manufacturers to make products that people want to buy at the price they want to pay for it.”

Hearing witness Buddy Hughes said this could be done by reducing regulations on appliances that run on natural gas, a non-renewable resource facing bans in multiple states. Hughes is the chairman of the National Association of Home Builders and said his members are “on the front lines of an affordability crisis.”

“One of the biggest drivers of those costs are restrictions on energy choice, appliance standards, and mandates on energy codes,” Hughes said. “Congress can protect families from higher costs by preventing appliance standards from being turned into backdoor gas bans.”

Still, witness Kara Saul Rinaldi, the chief policy officer of the Building Performance Association, said it will cost homeowners less to have their houses built to the highest standards now than to have to update them later.

“A home built today is an existing home tomorrow, and may be part of our housing infrastructure for a century,” she said. “If it is not built with adequate insulation, air sealing, efficient duct work, heating and cooling, and windows, homeowners will be hard pressed to spend the time and money to upgrade their home at a cost significantly more than building the home efficiently in the first place.”

House hearing on energy efficiency standards puts home appliances on trial

Energy and Commerce committee members listed the pros and cons of high-tech dishwashers, washing machines, and stoves.

Charging your phone in rural Alaska is a bit more expensive than doing so in the contiguous United States—or the Lower 48, as Alaskans call them. Once you plug your charging cable into the wall, the electricity that flows into your phone comes from a diesel generator that runs a microgrid.

Almost all of rural Alaska is powered by microgrids, and not the types of 

 that regularly connect to a larger, centralized electrical grid. These are true islands, and though Alaska itself isn’t one, fuel for the generators must come by air or sea. In the winter, pricey diesel fuel, which can cost more than $15 per gallon, is flown into rural communities; in the spring and summer, once the ice has thawed, diesel arrives via river barge.

And warmer months bring an excess of sunshine, which many rural communities want to harness to 

 a portion of their high diesel bills. In June, the Department of Energy 

 that it selected 14 municipalities, nonprofits, unions, and businesses to receive shares of its new Community Microgrid Assistance Partnership, or C-MAP, funding. Twelve of the awardees are based in Alaska, and many of them are rural tribes hoping to use the money to update the generators that power their villages to be hybrid—that is, run on diesel 

One of the awardees is Kawerak Inc., a nonprofit corporation that serves the Bering Straits Native Association in western Alaska. The organization received $575,000 to integrate renewable energy—specifically solar energy and battery systems—into microgrids that power the villages of Brevig Mission, Teller, Koyuk, Elim, and Savoonga. Currently, the villages get diesel barged in once or twice a year, or have diesel flown to them in emergencies.

Under the new setup, the renewable power generated by the new systems would be owned by the villages as an Independent Power Producer (IPP) and sold to the local utility, and reduce the amount of diesel they need to use per year. Amanda Toerdal, Kawerak’s community planning and development program director, told Tech Brew the award is “about the administration and structure for how the power is run in the communities” just as much as the power generation itself.

“The ownership of a separate energy system,” Toerdal said, “means that that money is going back into the local community instead of going to a diesel fuel company far away.”

Another awardee is the Kuskokwim Corporation, an organization of 10 villages along the Kuskokwim River. The corporation stewards the land, development, and conservation efforts of the villages, and received nearly $300,000 in C-MAP funding to update a microgrid that serves two of the villages to include a solar power and battery system. The villages, Upper and Lower Kalskag, are the only two communities in the Kuskokwim Corporation that are connected by a road.

Andrea Gusty, CEO of the Kuskokwim Corporation, told Tech Brew that the C-MAP project will offset around 25,000 gallons of diesel every year, thereby bringing down energy costs for residents and making village power more reliable. The new system will be owned by the corporation’s nonprofit arm, TKC Fish Wheel, which will act as the IPP.

An important part of the project is also about workforce development and ensuring that Upper and Lower Kalskag locals are trained to operate and maintain the technology, Gusty said.

“In rural Alaska, there seems to be a history of an influx of funding, or a project is created, but the maintenance of that project is—for whatever reason—outside of the community’s ability to maintain,” Gusty said. “We’re deeply committed to ensuring that we bring that training to the people whose projects are in their backyard. Because they’re the ones who are going to live there…and ultimately the ones benefiting from it.”

The Kuskokwim Corporation’s ethos of building a system the community can maintain is in line with the DOE’s conception of the project. Dan Ton, the DOE program manager of smart grid R&D and lead on the C-MAP funding, told Tech Brew in a statement that the DOE has not made “specific commitments” to provide further funding to awardees, as the program was “built on an understanding‬ that long-term maintenance and operational sustainability must be built into any new‬‭ project.”

According to Ton, the funding is really about getting these innovative, highly customized, and expensive projects off the ground by “improving interoperability and standardization,” as local utilities usually don’t want to take on microgrids because they’re so complex. Insights from the projects will then be shared on a new DOE web portal to be used by future rural microgrid developers to help them “reduce some of the hardships and delays that the early adopters faced.”

And that “role modeling” for future microgrid projects will have the most lasting impact, Brian Hirsch, CEO of Alaska energy engineering company DeerStone Consulting, told Tech Brew. DeerStone is a partner in both the Kawerak and Kuskokwim awards. He said because awardees’ “needs are extreme,” the grants won’t be able to entirely solve many of the issues—or “even come close.” But C-MAP can jump-start momentum.

“The reality oftentimes is you do what you can with the money you’re allocated,” Hirsch said. “There’s still a very long way to go.”

The Teller Power Plant, a diesel power plant in Alaska.

New DOE microgrid fund aims to wean remote Alaskan villages off diesel

Federal funding will allow rural microgrids to be fueled by renewables and bring revenue back to local communities.

In terms of allowing developers to access clean energy tax credits before they’re 

 in coming years, recent IRS rules on applicable projects aren’t as bad as some feared—but they also could be more clear on the particulars, a lawyer told Tech Brew.

The rules were drafted by the Department of Treasury as a follow-up to the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, and in response to a Trump executive order to clarify what counts as “

” on a wind or solar energy project. A project’s ability to claim tax credits is based on when it begins construction, or what the rules call “physical work.” And the new rules say that the “physical work test” is now the only way that projects can prove they’ve commenced construction, though passage of the test will be decided on a case-by-case basis.

“Construction of an applicable wind or solar facility begins when physical work of a significant nature begins,” the rules state. “Provided that physical work performed is of a significant nature, there is no fixed minimum amount of work or monetary or percentage threshold required.”

“Significant nature” are the key words there, and one of the biggest changes in the 

, lawyer Keith Martin told Tech Brew. Martin is an expert in tax law and the co-head of US projects at law firm Norton Rose Fulbright.

“The notice said that physical work of a significant nature ‘must be performed.’ Before it had said [work] must merely ‘have begun,’” Martin said. “So does that mean more work will have to be done?”

The IRS was clear on one thing, though: Physical work doesn’t mean anything developers have to do to a construction site to get it ready for building—it’s all the work that comes after that.

Overall, though, Martin told Tech Brew the new rules are a compromise between renewable enthusiasts and their allies in Congress, and opponents of wind and solar energy on Capitol Hill.

“Everybody reacted favorably,” Martin said, “suggesting that the Treasury did a good job of threading a needle.”

New IRS rules for clean energy tax credits aim to clarify what ‘starting construction’ means

Lawyer Keith Martin said the new rules satisfy opposing groups, but include some unclear language.

For some “shovel-ready” solar infrastructure projects, the cancellation of federal Solar for All grants means scrambling to find other sources of funding.

In the nearly a year and a half since the Biden administration announced the $7 billion in 

 funding, the Trump administration then froze and unfroze the money before the Environmental Protection Agency ultimately 

According to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, a Trump appointee, the agency “no longer has the statutory authority to administer the program or the appropriated funds,” after the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill did away with Solar for All’s parent fund, the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.

The funding had been awarded to 60 states, nonprofits, municipalities, and tribal consortiums to bring solar power to nearly a million low-income homes across the country.

GRID Alternatives, a solar nonprofit, was awarded over $312 million via two grants to bring solar energy to affordable housing units in 29 states and in southwestern tribal communities. CEO Erica Mackie told Tech Brew that it was a huge disappointment for everyone involved to learn of the cancellation of the grant projects, which were aimed at lowering energy bills, providing more reliable electricity, and creating jobs for local contractors.

“It’s not really about the money,” Mackie said. “It’s about all of the impact that this was going to have in communities that have been really saddled by high energy costs [and] not enough jobs.”

According to Mackie, GRID Alternatives is working on finding a solution to this sudden funding issue and hoping to secure philanthropic contributions, private investment, money from public-private partnerships, and some sort of state or city governmental support.

“We would like to do the work that we dreamed. Our partners would like us to do the work we dreamed. Our communities would like us to do the work we dreamed,” Mackie said. “We’ve got a lot of the pre-work done…and, by and large, many of these projects are really shovel-ready.”

Other Solar for All awardees had already gotten to work, too: The Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara (MHA) Nation, which received a nearly $136 million grant, completed solar infrastructure construction in Montana and South Dakota earlier this year. Nonprofit Indigenized Energy helped MHA Nation manage the grant, and CEO Cody Two Bears told Tech Brew that the organization is looking to take on investments, loans, and philanthropic contributions to continue their planned Solar for All projects.

“To pull the funds of an award that has already been ongoing was just unheard of and unprecedented,” Two Bears said, adding that, “we’re ready to be able to take the next steps.”

GRID Alternatives workers installing solar panels.