President Trump’s energy secretary, Dan Brouillette, says he supports the incoming Biden administration’s plans to accelerate investments in clean energy and electric vehicles to combat climate change.
While Trump is known for promoting fossil fuel development and questioning climate change science, Brouillette, his understated energy secretary, has been quietly working to develop technologies that he believes will be crucial to realizing a lower-carbon energy economy.
Now, as he prepares to hand off the reins of the Energy Department, Brouillette argues his agency has “positioned” the United States on a course to be able to meet President-elect Joe Biden’s accelerated goal of eliminating greenhouse gases from the economy by 2050.
“Some who are skeptical of the Trump administration’s commitment to this might be surprised,” Brouillette told the Washington Examiner in an exclusive interview before Inauguration Day. “Our approach has been different. The approach has been to innovate rather than regulate, to develop technologies that get us to the same goal rather than harshly prohibit fuels, and to develop technologies to use fuels more cleanly.”
Productive transition to Biden
Brouillette had his first substantive conversation Wednesday with his presumed successor, Jennifer Granholm, Biden’s nominee for energy secretary, as part of his commitment to carry out a responsible transition.
“I do think once she is here, once she understands not only the work we’ve done but the work our national labs have done, she may be a bit surprised,” Brouillette said. “It truly is extraordinary. Without question, we have positioned the U.S. government very, very well in the last four years.”
Brouillette, who has condemned last week’s “politically motivated” mob attack of the Capitol, decided to stay in his position, unlike some Cabinet secretaries who resigned.
He only became energy secretary in December 2019, replacing Rick Perry, the former Texas governor whom Brouillette worked under as top deputy.
“We are sworn in to these roles to do the job,” Brouillette said. “I committed to president to do the job until the day he told me to stop doing the job. And that’s why I decided early on to stay to the end.”
Dan Reicher, a former assistant secretary of energy and DOE chief of staff under President Bill Clinton, noted that Trump routinely sought 60-70% budget cuts in the Energy Department’s clean energy offices, only to be overruled by Congress. The Trump Energy Department started up a few key initiatives, such as the Energy Storage Grand Challenge, Advanced [Nuclear] Reactor Demonstration Program, and American-Made Solar Prize. But Granholm has a lot of work to do to make net-zero emissions by 2050 a possibility, Reicher said.
“Granholm will take over with relatively healthy budgets and real prospects for more,” Reicher told the Washington Examiner. “The challenge now is to accelerate the spending to get clean energy technologies developed and deployed at scale to address the climate the crisis.”
Supportive of Granholm’s agenda
Brouillette says he has no problem with Granholm’s promise to focus the Energy Department on promoting the development of electric vehicles as a way to revive the U.S. manufacturing base and create new jobs in clean energy.
“I don’t have any challenges with that,” Brouillette said.
Brouillette and Granholm had previous interactions, albeit limited, when she was Democratic governor of Michigan from 2003 to 2011 and he was vice president of Ford.
Granholm, when she was governor, worked with Biden, then Barack Obama’s vice president, on the 2009 bailout of auto companies from the Great Recession, saving the dominant industry in her state and encouraging a transition to electric vehicles.
Granholm can help companies accelerate their building of electric vehicles through a program of the Energy Department’s clean energy loan office called Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing.
Brouillette, a former GOP chief of staff for the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the panel that oversees the agency he now leads, says he helped write the legislative language authorizing the program in 2005.
It’s best known for being used by Obama in 2010 to provide a $465 million loan to electric vehicle company Tesla to build a manufacturing plant in Fremont, California.
“If [Granholm] wants to use those programs to advance electric vehicles, it’s very important for her to work with appropriators and authorizers to make sure she makes decisions consistent with the way we funded the program,” Brouillette said. “I know she’ll do that.”
Advice for his successor
Under Brouillette, the Energy Department did not make much use of the agency’s Loan Programs Office, which oversees Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing and an associated Title XVII program intended to support clean energy projects. Trump called for elimination of the loan programs office in his budget requests and has only used it to support the Vogtle nuclear reactors being built by the Southern Company in Georgia.
Brouillette said the Title XVII program is cumbersome to implement and encouraged Granholm to work with Congress to make it better.
“This administration has been criticized unfairly about its quote ‘unwillingness’ to use the Loan Program Office,” Brouillette said. “The fact of the matter is if you talk to anyone in the country who has tried to apply for a loan, it has been damn near impossible.”
The Energy Department last month issued new guidance directing the Title XVII program to provide “preference” in its loan-giving on projects that would boost the U.S. supply chain of critical minerals.
Areas of policy continuity
Brouillette said he hopes that the focus on critical minerals would be one of the policies the Biden administration continues because it would need to have easier access to materials used in producing clean energy technologies, such as batteries that power electric vehicles, wind turbines, and solar panels.
Brouillette also cited as areas of potential continuity the DOE’s investments in researching and developing technologies such as small nuclear reactors, long-duration energy storage, carbon capture, and higher-efficiency solar.
He touted progress in newer, smaller forms of nuclear technology that proponents hope to be safer and cheaper, allowing it to be a tool for combating climate change. Biden has signaled support for nuclear power, despite liberal opposition.
“I would hope they would find support for these in the new administration, and I think they will,” Brouillette said. “If anyone is truly serious on reducing carbon intensity around the world, nuclear will be part of equation. It’s inescapable.”
Brouillette, however, acknowledged it remains unproven whether new forms of nuclear will be able to be cost-competitive with cheaper wind and solar, along with natural gas.
“Whenever you are obligating taxpayer dollars, it’s important we have some measure of discipline with cost,” Brouillette said. “Are we there yet? There is more work to be done. We are not completely there.”
Setbacks of Trump agenda
The Trump administration was less successful stemming the closure of coal plants and traditional large nuclear plants that have struggled from high costs.
The Energy Department suffered one of its highest-profile setbacks in 2017, when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission rejected a contentious proposal from Perry to subsidize coal and nuclear plants.
Coal has accelerated its downward spiral under Trump.
Promoting oil and gas exports
Brouillette said he’s proud of the Energy Department’s efforts to promote exports of liquefied natural gas, or LNG, especially to European countries that are dependent on Russia for energy.
The Energy Department has also been active in helping oil companies weather a historic price collapse from the coronavirus by making emergency storage space available for companies to leave excess crude supply and providing easier access to loans. The U.S. became a net petroleum exporter, on a monthly basis, for the first time in 2019, before the pandemic thwarted that momentum.
Biden is murky about whether he’d continue encouraging exports of oil and LNG, but it’s unlikely Granholm and Biden would adopt the pro-fossil fuel component of the Trump administration agenda.
‘Practical approach’
Brouillette, however, said he expects his successor will be “realistic” to recognize oil and gas will continue to be demanded globally for decades.
“If any of the climate goals are to be met, until we solve the challenges of storage, gas will be there as a reliable partner to wind and solar,” Brouillette said. “Our approach has been very practical, and one that makes a difference in the real world.”
