President-elect Joe Biden plans to nominate former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm to be his energy secretary.
Biden confirmed his choice of Granholm as a member of his “climate team” Thursday night, crediting her with “creating clean energy jobs in America” by helping “retool and electrify” the U.S. auto industry during her tenure as governor in response to the Great Recession.
Granholm, a Democrat, currently teaches policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and is a senior research fellow at the California Institute for Energy and Environment.
Biden’s top official at the Energy Department will help implement his plans to spend heavily on clean energy research, development, and deployment in order to reach his goal of net-zero emissions across the economy by 2050.
The agency is expected to play a major role in shepherding clean energy funding appropriated through pandemic-related stimulus legislation early in Biden’s term.
Under President Barack Obama, with Biden as vice president, the department helped distribute $90 billion in clean energy stimulus spending through the Recovery Act of 2009.
Granholm beat out other contenders, including Arun Majumdar, a Stanford professor who was the Energy Department’s first director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, an incubator for clean energy technologies, in the Obama administration.
Biden also considered Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, a professor at Georgia Tech who was deputy secretary of energy in the Obama administration and previously worked as an adviser to Biden when he was the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
He also bypassed former Obama administration Energy Secretary Ernie Moniz, who was a target of liberal climate activists because of his stance that natural gas should play a role in the clean energy transition and his ties to the fossil fuel industry. Liberals also opposed Sherwood-Randall because of her connection to Moniz. She is currently an advisory board member on Moniz’s Energy Futures Initiative.
Granholm, by contrast, has campaigned against oil pipelines and declared in 2016 that “we ought to be doing everything we possibly can to keep fossil fuel energy in the ground and developing the renewable side.”
Biden is likely to task his energy chief with prioritizing curbing climate change. For example, his campaign climate plan called for the agency to “redouble efforts” to accelerate new efficiency standards for household appliances and equipment, which the Trump administration weakened.
The Energy Department will also help lead other Biden climate initiatives, such as electrifying cars and buildings and boosting the development and use of clean energy technologies, including carbon capture at fossil fuel power plants and smaller nuclear reactors.
