Trump would be ‘devastating’ for offshore wind, warns Massachusetts governor

Good morning, and welcome back to Energy Source, coming to you from Washington.

All eyes are on the first US presidential debate tonight in Atlanta, where Donald Trump and President Joe Biden will probably spar over energy and climate policy. How much Biden will emphasise his administration’s efforts to tackle climate change and create green jobs, as opposed to the country’s record fossil fuel production, is what we are tallying.

The US Supreme Court could also rule this week on a legal doctrine known as the “Chevron deference”, which, if overturned, will curtail the ability of federal agencies to regulate everything from the environment to food safety.

In today’s newsletter we have an interview with Massachusetts governor Maura Healey, who is vying to make her state the country’s “offshore wind capital”. Healey warns that a Trump victory in November would be “devastating” for the nascent sector.

Republican governors, meanwhile, are shrugging off Trump’s anti-green rhetoric. More on that in our second item.

Lastly, the FT has a new report taking the pulse of the global energy transition, with stories ranging from the UAE and Saudi Arabia’s efforts to reduce their reliance on oil and gas and China’s doubling down on coal.

Thanks for reading,

Amanda 

Massachusetts governor: Trump would be ‘devastating’ for US offshore wind

A Donald Trump presidential victory in November would be “devastating” for US offshore wind, warned the governor of Massachusetts, a state that is a pioneer of the renewable energy source.

“We know Donald Trump’s position on [offshore] wind . . . He is going to do everything he can to make sure that industry is killed, and that there are further giveaways to oil and gas,” Maura Healey, Democratic governor of Massachusetts, told Energy Source in an interview.

“A Trump presidency would be devastating.” She added that the upcoming presidential election created “heightened urgency” to speed up the buildout of the nascent sector.

Massachusetts is home to Vineyard Wind 1, a project by Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners and the largest operating offshore wind facility in the US. The New England state has a target to procure 5.6GW of offshore wind by 2027, one of the more ambitious targets in the country. 

The warning from Healey comes as Trump has promised on the campaign trail to stop offshore wind development and as projects receive strong pushback from Republican voters on the US eastern coastline.

“They ruin the environment, they kill the birds, they kill the whales,” Trump told thousands of supporters at a New Jersey rally in May. “We are going to make sure that that ends on day one. I’m gonna write it out in the executive order.”

Unlike other renewable sources such as solar and onshore wind, offshore wind requires federal approvals to start development and are more vulnerable to changes from whoever may be in office.

The Biden administration has approved the country’s first eight utility-scale offshore wind projects as part of its target to deploy 30GW of offshore wind by 2030, a goal analysts have said was likely unreachable after a bruising year of high interest rates and supply chain constraints pushed developers to renegotiate contracts and cancel commitments. 

ClearView Energy Partners, a research firm, warned in a note earlier this month that a Trump presidency could deny projects awaiting federal approval, and that judicial challenges to environmental reviews could provide an avenue for him to cancel already approved projects.

Theodore Paradise, a partner at the K&L Gates law firm, said that growing demand for electricity and the buildout of the offshore wind supply chain in Republican states and districts could force Trump to backpedal on some of his campaign rhetoric if he were to win the election.

“For a second Trump administration looking at these new [power] loads that are big and didn’t exist in the first administration . . . offshore wind may be a part of the picture to solve for that,” said Paradise. “It becomes a matter of potential necessity.”

The first US offshore wind project was a 30MW wind farm approved under the Obama administration off the coast of Rhode Island. The Trump administration approved one 12MW pilot project off the coast of Virginia.

Phil Murphy, New Jersey’s Democratic governor, was also more sanguine. The state has also placed big bets on offshore wind, with a target to deploy 11GW by 2040. 

“Government policy is a different reality than what people might say on the campaign trail,” he said.

Republican governors court green dollars at investment summit

On the campaign trail, Trump has vowed to undo President Joe Biden’s landmark climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes lucrative subsidies for clean energy and has helped attract billions in investment into the US.

The irony here is that Republican-controlled areas are among the biggest winners of the IRA. An FT analysis last year found that nearly three-quarters of all cleantech manufacturing projects announced within one year of the law were headed to Republican districts.

Energy Source asked a handful of Republican governors and commerce secretaries this week at the SelectUSA conference in Washington what a Trump victory might mean for their clean energy ventures. Long story short, they aren’t worried and expect the tailwinds for clean energy to continue regardless of who sits in the White House.

“It’s a little bit of a concern of what the new administration, if there is a new administration, will do, but I do think the US has a history of keeping their promises,” said Oklahoma’s Republican governor Kevin Stitt, who announced a $620mn factory from Norwegian solar manufacturer NorSun at the event. Greg Brabec, an adviser to NorSun, said the IRA tax credits were the “single biggest motivator” for their decision to invest in the US.

Stitt also joined a panel discussion on the clean energy workforce with Biden’s climate adviser Ali Zaidi on Tuesday, along with Indiana’s Republican governor Eric Holcomb and Democratic governors Maura Healey of Massachusetts and Roy Cooper of North Carolina, in a rare moment of bipartisan support for the sector.

Republican governor Joe Lombardo of Nevada, a leading state for electric vehicle and battery investment, told ES that “whether Biden or Trump is in office, we won’t see much change in what we’re trying to achieve”.

The statements from the Republican governors highlight how the growing economic opportunity of renewables is making it a winning case regardless of partisanship.

“How often are Healey and Stitt agreeing on stuff?” said Aaron Brickman, senior principal at RMI, a research and consulting non-profit. “If you want to compete at the highest level for new projects, you need to build out clean power.”

Republican-led states including Alabama, Iowa, Tennessee and Texas were among the top sponsors of the US commerce department event, dishing out tens of thousands of dollars for elaborate booths that often advertised their state’s renewable energy resources. Iowa called itself the “#1 in the US for Renewable Energy” and Oklahoma displayed prominently at its booth that 47 per cent of its power mix came from renewables. 

“With the global pressure on all things decarbonisation . . . Louisiana has this opportunity that is so acute. It’s just before us and it’s tremendous,” said Susan Bourgeois, secretary of economic development under Louisiana’s Republican governor Jeff Landry.

“The politics of it really don’t matter . . . it’s not driven by the politics. It’s driven by opportunity.”

Job moves

• Bill Fehrman, former chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway Energy, has been named CEO of American Electric Power.

• Goldman Sachs appointed oil tycoon John Hess to its board of directors, just as the investment bank advises his family-run oil company’s sale to Chevron.

• Former BP executive David Lawler, who abruptly left the oil major just weeks after the resignation of its chief executive Bernard Looney, will head Kimmeridge Texas Gas as CEO.

• Jennifer Kirk is joining the board of directors at Sempra, a US developer of liquefied natural gas terminals. Kirk, global controller and chief accounting officer at Medtronic, previously worked at Occidental Petroleum for more than two decades.

• Europe’s largest copper producer Aurubis appointed Toralf Haag as its chief executive, Tim Kurth as chief operating officer, and Markus Kramer as chief transformation officer. Haag joins Aurubis in September from Voith Group, where he serves as CEO and chair of the board.

Power Points

• The giant Exxon project that could create the world’s last petrostate

• Europe’s largest renewable producer scales back plans for wind and solar plants

Energy Source is written and edited by Jamie Smyth, Myles McCormick, Amanda Chu, Tom Wilson and Malcolm Moore, with support from the FT’s global team of reporters. Reach us at energy.source@ft.com and follow us on X at @FTEnergy. Catch up on past editions of the newsletter here.