This week, the Department of Energy canceled nearly $8 billion worth of awards — a move touted by the Trump administration as an effort to protect fossil fuels at the expense of renewables. But documents obtained by TechCrunch show that the reality is more complex than that simple message.
The agency has not released a list of the canceled awards, but TechCrunch has obtained a copy and has analyzed the 321 contracts that the DOE is seeking to undo.
Not all projects focused on renewable energy, though.
Two listed in the document, one for $300 million to Colorado State University and another for $210 million to the Gas Technology Institute, would have helped oil and gas producers large and small reduce methane emissions from their wells.
The Gas Technology Institute is a research and development organization that mostly caters to the natural gas industry. The group had a dozen awards canceled, according to the document, totaling $417 million.
Carbon capture and removal also took a hit, with 10 of the 21 projects canceled totaling around $200 million. Many are in Harris-voting states, though that rubric doesn’t explain the entire picture.
“Three categories are popping up,” Erin Burns, executive director at Carbon180, told TechCrunch. “Where are they located? Who are the partners in it? Were these projects going to move forward?”
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It’s true that states which voted for Kamala Harris in the last presidential election were hit hardest by the move. California lost the most, with at least $2.2 billion worth of contracts canceled. Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Oregon each have around half a billion dollars’ worth of awards that were killed, with New York State losing at least $309 million.
Those that voted for Trump tended to have contracts canceled worth single-digit millions of dollars.
One of the largest awards canceled was granted to the state of Minnesota for $467 million. Awarded as part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law in 2021, the money was intended to revamp electrical grid interconnections throughout seven states in the Midwest. When complete, it would have unlocked around 28 gigawatts of new generating capacity, mostly solar and wind. For context, the world’s data center fleet draws 58 gigawatts, according to Goldman Sachs.
Another worth $630 million would have likewise revamped California’s electrical grid, testing advanced conductors and dynamic line rating devices to increase transmission capacity. The project effectively would have been a showcase for grid modernization that could be applied throughout the country.
Yet another grid modernization project would have installed a transmission line to the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs in Oregon. The tribes have roughly half a dozen renewable projects waiting on a better grid connection, which the now-canceled $250 million award would have enabled. The project would also have strung fiber-optic lines along the transmission line’s path, bringing high-speed data to a rural part of the state.
“The recipients who have survived in blue states are perhaps more aligned with the administration and participating in industries that are more of a priority for this administration,” said Courtni Holness, managing policy advisor at Carbon180.
Some of the smaller awards might have been nixed anyway. “That’s just how the U.S. approaches energy innovation in general,” Burns said. “Take a lot of shots on goal because you’re not sure what’s going to move forward regionally, technologically, economically. And so you take a bunch of shots on goal at a lower cost.”
Still others appear to be pulling up stakes to move where government support and policies are going to be more predictable, like Canada. “You’re going to see more of that, and it’s having impact on private sector investments,” Burns said.
“I think it’s a bigger question,” Holness added, “about the stability of our Department of Energy and their ability to be a partner to U.S. businesses and have some form of predictability.”
