From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By AUDREY STREB

“A lot of the push to keep these subsidies alive isn’t about good energy policy — it’s about keeping industries afloat that can’t meet reliability and affordability standards on their own.”

Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on Friday that his agency plans to cut billions in grant funds for Biden-era loans as the Trump administration conducts a review of the department’s $400 billion clean energy investments, a decision that energy policy experts who spoke with the Daily Caller News Foundation cheered on.

Before leaving office, former President Joe Biden squeezed $25 billion into the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Loan Programs Office (LPO) for various projects, with the bulk of the funds going toward renewable energy development. Wright’s newly announced plans to review and cancel a majority of the loans has the backing of several energy policy experts who told the DCNF that the LPO has stripped cash from taxpayers and contributed to U.S. grid instability.

“We’ve got a lot of reasons to be worried and suspicious about that,” Wright told Bloomberg in response to a question about the LPO. “Some of these loans will go forward, some of it, it’s too late to change course. A lot of them won’t go forward, but that’s a very careful review process that we’ve just put in place and just got a team to execute on.”

The LPO has previously dished out loans for nuclear energy, an industry championed by the Trump administration. However, among the loans finalized after the election were $6.57 billion to an electric vehicle manufacturing facility in Georgia and $289.7 million to solar energy development and battery storage in Massachusetts.

“[The LPO] may have been well-intended, but it’s morphed into a clean energy slush fund that dooms energy projects by making them tied to federal funding,” Gabriella Hoffman, the director of the Center for Energy and Conservation at Independent Women’s Forum wrote to the DCNF. “LPO investing currently undermines competition and market innovation of energy technologies. In the event it stays, however, it must be radically reformed to not prop up reliable energy sources like solar and wind.”

Notably, the rush to get these loans greenlit under Biden prompted a November inspector general report, which highlighted several potential risks to taxpayers related to the LPO, including concerns that the office may be moving too quickly to distribute funds, possibly at the expense of properly vetting loan applicants.

Other noteworthy projects approved under Biden’s watch included a $2.5 billion in loan for EV technology, 1.45 billion for a solar manufacturing facility in Georgia and $584.5 million for a solar photovoltaic (PV) system with an integrated battery energy storage system in Puerto Rico.

Founded in 2005, the loan office was created to help advance clean energy infrastructure, and it was increasingly active under the Obama administration, which approved a $535 million loan to Solyndra, a green energy company that collapsed just two years later. Activity slowed during President Donald Trump’s first administration, but under Biden, the office received a massive funding boost from Congress — totaling $400 billion — to support green tech firms.

“These past four years have been the most productive in LPO’s history,” LPO wrote in a fact sheet three days before Trump returned to the White House. “Under the Biden-Harris Administration, the Office has announced 53 deals totaling approximately $107.57 billion in committed project investment – approximately $46.95 billion for 28 active conditional commitments and approximately $60.62 billion for 25 closed loans and loan guarantees.”

“If the government’s going to use my money as a taxpayer through LPO investments, that money should be going to investments that actually provide reliable power,” André Béliveau, senior manager of energy policy at the Commonwealth Foundation told the DCNF. “A lot of the push to keep these subsidies alive isn’t about good energy policy — it’s about keeping industries afloat that can’t meet reliability and affordability standards on their own.”

While the majority of the LPO’s support in Congress and the White House has come from the left, some right-of-center organizations recently urgedWright on April 14 to “preserve” the LPO for the sake of “American dominance.” The organizations argue that the LPO plays a “critical role” in enabling “new nuclear power development.”

“LPO continues to play a critical role in financing infrastructure that enables new nuclear power development, revitalizes domestic mineral production, and modernizes both grid and gas systems — all central to the administration’s goals of lowering energy costs, reshoring manufacturing, and achieving energy dominance,” the letter reads.

Subsidizing energy projects that are not able to survive on their own in the free market is questionable, Amy Cooke, the co-founder and president of Always on Energy Research and the director of the Energy and Environmental Policy Center, told the DCNF. “The calls to eliminate it are well-founded, and at the very least, it should be dramatically reformed,” she said. “If the market isn’t interested in it, is it the responsibility of the Department of Energy to fund [these projects]?” she asked.

“We should be funding improvements for firming the grid and not arbitrarily add more intermittency,” Béliveau said in reference to wind and solar projects that provide less inertia — the grid’s ability to continue running smoothly after a disturbance occurs between energy supply and demand for the electrical grid.

“If it’s going to exist, then reforms need to make sure that we’re being good stewards of taxpayer dollars,” he added, pointing to natural gas and nuclear as options that could help “firm the grid.”

“The Trump administration’s version of energy dominance has created a source-neutral way of picking winners and losers,” he continued, noting that reliability, affordability and security are the priorities of the administration, as opposed to a climate-change centric approach to energy policy.

Trump declared a national energy emergency on his first day back in office and signed an executive order to boost domestic energy generation. He signed a series of other EOs within his first 100 days in office to speed up the permitting process and clear red tape for several industries including coal and critical mineral mining.

By Jim Warren

Call me a cockeyed optimist but before giving up entirely on the country or selling our energy shares we might want to wait a while to see what a Carney led government actually does.

That being said, lowering the collective blood pressure on the prairies will require answers to some key questions.

Is Mark Carney serious about getting more oil and gas to Canadian tidewater? Does Carney really think this can be done without altering Bill C-69 and ditching the tanker ban, Bill C-48? Is he actually going to leave the emissions cap on oil production, the industrial carbon tax and the clean electricity standard in place, or is he planning to pleasantly surprise us?

Notwithstanding Carney’s penchant for resumé inflation he appears to be a reasonably intelligent guy and a shrewd investor, who understands how national economies work. Assuming this is the case, Carney’s pledge to get more oil and gas exported to customers besides the US may not have been an insincere sop to voters in the West. If so, is he still naïve enough to think pipelines can be built without dismantling the barriers put up by the Trudeau Liberals to block development and stifle growth in the oil and gas sector?

Were his platitudes about zealously protecting the environment and drastically cutting emissions simply an effort to appease the left wing of the Liberals’ electoral base?  Will he accept that the radical green agenda outlined in his 600 hundred page door stopper book needs to be put on the back burner during these economically challenging times?

It seems reasonable to imagine Carney was loathe to make too nice with the oil and gas industry prior to the election lest he alienate the Liberal caucus members whose support he needed to win the party’s leadership. Similarly, keeping some of the Liberals’ most radical environmentalists such as Steven Guilbeault out of cabinet could have caused unnecessary embarrassment and friction within the party during the actual election campaign.

Now that he has produced an election win that was nowhere in sight before he became the front runner for the Liberal leadership, Carney is relatively unassailable. True, he can’t be so exceedingly arrogant and dictatorial that he inspires caucus members to cross the floor of the Commons. What is more likely is that those members of the Liberal caucus with the capacity to face reality understand they were headed for political oblivion before Carney came to the rescue. It was he, not them, who secured the victory. They owe him their political lives. This provides Carney with considerable freedom of action when it comes to setting the policy agenda.

He can do some of the things he said he wouldn’t do and refrain from doing others he said he would do. For the Liberals’ communications professionals, explaining why Carney changed his positions from the wrong side of the oil, gas and pipeline debates to the right side should be nowhere near as challenging as the 24/7 turd polishing they had to do for Justin Trudeau.

Yes, the Carney government is currently enjoying its honeymoon period. For a brief while the Liberals get to feel like they are ten feet tall and politically bullet-proof. While his caucus is guzzling champagne and dividing the spoils Carney has the opportunity to plot the policy trajectory of his government.