In July, Donald Trump’s administration announced a staggering 93.5 percent tariff on Chinese graphite—a material essential to battery production. China not only dominates graphite mining but also controls 96 percent of the global supply of processed anode-grade graphite, a key component of lithium ion batteries. The move sent shockwaves through the already fragile battery supply chain and all but guarantees higher costs for U.S. manufacturers. It’s only the latest in a string of irrational policies that make it harder, not easier, to bring manufacturing back home.

This summer, congressional Republicans passed the president’s massively unpopular budget bill, rolling back Joe Biden’s signature clean energy legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). While much of the attention on the bill’s energy components has focused on the damage to the wind and solar industries, the legislation will also upend the booming battery business, gutting one of the economy’s fastest-growing and strategically vital industries. While the Biden administration made substantial progress in building a domestic battery supply chain, Trump is kneecapping battery manufacturing in the U.S. by crushing demand and hiking up input costs.

The contradictions in Trump’s “America First” strategy are hard to miss: The White House pushes policies to streamline critical minerals production while dismantling the industries that need such minerals; it taxes essential imports without supporting adequate domestic replacements; and it proclaims its mission to bring back American manufacturing jobs while enacting policies that shut down factories.

America’s clean energy transition cannot be stopped, but it can be slowed. Trump and the Republicans have decided to do just that—even if it means fewer jobs, higher prices, and more energy dependence.

The industrial policies passed under Biden ushered in a resurgence in American manufacturing by employing carrots (tax credits) and sticks (tariffs and domestic content requirements). The IRA, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), and the CHIPS Act jump-started a clean energy boom, using targeted public investment to catalyze trillions in private capital.

The Biden administration strategically designed an industrial policy for batteries. Tax credits “derisked” investment and improved the cost-competitiveness of domestic battery manufacturing, while Foreign Entity of Concern (FEOC) provisions penalized companies that continued to rely on imported battery components. Those restrictions were set to tighten gradually, giving American firms more time to build out a domestic supply chain.

It worked. According to the Clean Investment Monitor, Biden’s green industrial strategy tripled quarterly investment in clean manufacturing from 2022 to 2025. Since the IRA was passed, more than 380 clean tech factories have been announced, with 161 already operational. Of the $115 billion in manufacturing investment the IRA attracted, batteries led the way, accounting for 69 percent. In a short time, the Biden incentives made U.S. battery production cost-competitive with China—which dominates over three-quarters of the global battery supply chain—and put the nation on track to meet all of domestic battery demand with a Made in America battery manufacturing industry by 2030.

But then the Republican Party returned to power.

Trump’s signature legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed in July, guts the tax credits that help American manufacturing catch up to China, while his administration continues to impose tariffs in a blunderbuss manner. The main outcome of this so-called economic “strategy” will be higher inflation and persistent shortages of foreign goods and commodities. And the effects of Trump’s tariffs are only beginning to reach consumers.

Since Trump’s inauguration, more than $27 billion of investment in clean energy manufacturing has been canceled, bankrupted, delayed, or scaled back, taking nearly 19,000 jobs. More EV manufacturing facilities, including battery plants, were canceled in the first three months of 2025 than in all 2023 and 2024 combined.

The elimination of the EV tax credit and the EPA’s move to rescind Biden-era tailpipe emissions regulations deals a blow to EV adoption, but it will cripple America’s battery manufacturing. A report by Princeton’s ZERO Lab estimates that not only could these repeals result in the cancellation of an eyepopping 100 percent of planned battery facilities, but they also potentially threaten to shut down up to 72 percent of battery manufacturing plants. Withdraw market incentives, and the market dries up. EV sales could also fall 30 percent by 2027 and 40 percent by 2030. That translates to 8.3 million fewer EVs, and 8.3 million fewer batteries needed to power them.

The IRA didn’t just spur investment in battery manufacturing; it helped create over 133,000 decent blue-collar jobs in battery production in just two years. Within the first five months of Trump’s presidency, more than 6,000 of those jobs were wiped out.

With the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill, the nonpartisan energy policy think tank Energy Innovation projects that 31,000 battery jobs will evaporate by 2030. But the more profound tragedy is the number of American jobs—approaching 1 million—in manufacturing, supporting industries, and local economies that will now never materialize.

These aren’t workforce reductions for a dying industry. They are layoffs in the sectors of tomorrow—cuts to a technology that makes a more resilient, affordable energy system for America possible.

Trump and the GOP are doubling down on fossil fuels as the economics of renewables—even paired with the costs of battery storage—make that strategy irrational. Batteries absorb electricity during the day while prices are low and discharge it during peak demand hours, improving grid reliability and cutting energy costs for consumers.

Look at Texas, the country’s largest deregulated electricity market, where battery storage is booming to take advantage of dirt-cheap solar power. The growth of solar and batteries there has significantly reduced the risk of grid emergencies for which the Lone Star State had become infamous. Solar provides power during the hottest hours of the day, while batteries store the excess and release it as the sun sets. In California, where battery capacity has exploded 30-fold since 2018, record discharges of battery power during last year’s extreme heat meant that the state didn’t need to issue a single energy conservation alert.

Ironically, battery storage provides precisely the type of dispatchable energy that Trump administration officials claim they want. A recent report by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a nonprofit regulatory authority that sets and enforces grid reliability standards, found that battery expansion improved overall grid reliability even as the rapid uptake of data centers increases strain on the system.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright has pulled support for long-duration battery storage projects and cut funding for scientific research into advanced battery technologies. As one former senior Department of Energy official told The Guardian, “If you stop any research for next generation solar or battery technology, or wind or geothermal or other pieces, what you’re effectively doing is compromising a huge range of technology that has the potential to reduce costs.”

For all its talk about American energy dominance and lower prices, raising energy costs is exactly what the Trump administration’s policies are accomplishing. Since January, thanks to Trump’s tariffs, short-term battery storage costs have risen 56 percent to 69 percent. Unsurprisingly, deployment of battery storage on the grid is expected to fall 30 percent over the next decade. The Trump administration likes to harp constantly about supporting “affordable, reliable, and secure energy”—they forget to add “as long as it suits my party’s ideological priors.”

This comes as Trump and the GOP rail against U.S. dependence on Chinese batteries and the need to reshore American manufacturing, after passing a bill that decimates the domestic battery industry.

While the final version of the GOP mega bill technically retains the advanced manufacturing tax credit for battery producers, new FEOC rules (read: China) impose unworkable domestic content requirements that make the credits inaccessible. Both complex and overly restrictive, the FEOC provisions will require regulatory guidance from the Treasury Department—a process that took two years under Biden. Until then, it’s unlikely that companies will invest without knowing whether they’ll qualify for the credits.

Meanwhile, the GOP is aggressively deregulating extractive industries. While boosting critical mineral production can support the buildout of a domestic supply chain, it makes little sense to simultaneously undercut the high-value-add industries like battery manufacturing that create the very demand for those minerals.

Yet Trump is doing just that. He has leaned on the Cold War–era Defense Production Act to boost investment in critical mineral production. The Department of the Interior is streamlining permitting processes for lithium mines. Trump strong-armed Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky into granting the U.S. sweeping economic privileges over Ukraine’s mineral resources. However, these resources are critical because they serve the transition to clean energy. Why produce more lithium if not to make more batteries?

Trump announced a 50 percent tariff in July on copper imports, citing the critical need for the conductive metal in everything from semiconductors to ships to batteries. But the U.S. imports 40 percent of its copper, and there’s no alternative path to achieve copper self-sufficiency in the near or long term. Whereas a new battery plant can come online within two years, a new mine can take over 20 years to open up production. In the U.S., the average development time to open a new copper mine takes up to 32 years. Investors can hardly expect American trade policy to remain stable for 30 days, let alone during the remaining three-plus years of Trump’s term in office. Ultimately, the Trump administration and congressional Republicans have been pursuing policies to expand domestic mining, refining, and processing of critical minerals—arguably worthy goals, but not if you’re simultaneously destroying the manufacturing of products derived from such resources. They are ceding the lead in clean tech to China so the U.S. can become a raw materials exporter like so many Third World nations trapped in the cycle of extraction without development.

Justin Wolfers, the University of Michigan economist, accurately sums up Trump’s “plan” to restore U.S. manufacturing: “Raise the price of inputs like steel, aluminum & copper; create shortages of rare earths; invite retaliatory tariffs; cut R&D; raise borrowing costs by blowing out the budget; and … cover it all in a thick cloud of uncertainty.”

The 50 percent tariff on imported steel has doubled the price of domestic steel, yet many companies still import because even inflated foreign steel is cheaper. The nascent American battery industry hasn’t had enough time to relocate its supply chain. China still dominates the global market for key battery components, which U.S. companies must depend on until suitable (and competitive) domestic alternatives emerge. Trump’s on-again, off-again tariff wars don’t guide investment—they paralyze it.

Trump returned to office partly under the dubious promise to “Make America Great Again” by reviving domestic manufacturing and restoring high-wage blue-collar jobs. Now he and the GOP aren’t just breaking that promise, they’re spitting in the face of the Americans who believed them.

The post How to Crush the American Battery Boom appeared first on Washington Monthly.

President Donald Trump has famously challenged traditional free-market conservative dogma in the name of America First. He’s taken a ‘golden share’ in U.S. Steel that grants him control over the company’s decisions; he’s pressured Intel to convert federal grants received through the 2022 CHIPS Act into a 10 percent equity stake for the U.S. government; and he even removed a national security ban on chip sales to China by Nvidia and AMD in exchange for 15 percent of the revenue.

Commentators from The Wall Street Journal to The Atlantic have decried Trump’s economic nationalism as “state capitalism with American characteristics,” comparing Trump’s state interventionism with Xi Jinping’s China.

While China and the U.S. may increasingly share authoritarian traits—the centralization of executive authority and the suppression of free speech are just a couple—they fundamentally differ in their economic strategies. In China, state-managed capitalism advances industrial innovation through top-down strategic policies; in the U.S., a state-directed cronyism leverages executive power to satisfy the whims—and, perhaps, fill the pockets of favored actors.

China’s state-managed capitalism—rooted in decades of industrial policy—has fostered world-leading growth in advanced technologies, energy infrastructure, and manufacturing capacity. Trump’s interventions, by contrast, lack any strategic vision. His administration has turned industrial policy into a personal patronage system—using tariffs, subsidies, and regulatory power not to build national capacity, but to reward allies and punish enemies.

Trump has deployed federal power more than any recent president, but instead of using it for practical purposes, he has turned it into a tool for repression and self-promotion. Unlike China, Trump’s “state capitalism” blunders forward according to the president’s impulses, not the nation’s priorities. A closer comparison would be authoritarian cronyism: unconstitutional, self-enriching, and strategically confused. (For an explanation of how a future administration could refocus Trump’s industrial policies to achieve strategic goals, constitutionally, see Joel Dodge’s recent piece in the Washington Monthly: “Trump’s Industrial Policy: What’s Right and Wrong.”)

Trump’s Cronyism

Zooming in on the realities of Trump’s economic policies reveals their irrationality.

After initially banning the export of AI chips to China for national security reasons, Trump reversed his decision when Nvidia’s CEO personally appealed for leniency. Trump agreed to resume chip exports to China only in exchange for 15 percent of the revenue. 

The move is not only baldly unconstitutional—Article I of the U.S. Constitution states that “No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State”—it’s self-defeating. The White House’s chip policy places tariffs on imports and fees on exports, making it both expensive to compete internationally and sell at home, all while undermining the U.S. tech industry’s advantage over Chinese competitors.

Trump’s equity stake in Intel follows the same I-need-a-taste playbook. Biden’s 2022 CHIPS Act allocated billions to boost U.S. semiconductor manufacturing, but by 2025, $8.9 billion of those funds had not yet been distributed to Intel. Trump used the unspent funds as leverage, pressuring Intel to give up equity in exchange for money Congress had already approved. 

To be fair, Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont Independent, who introduced an amendment to the CHIPS Act in 2022 that would have taken equity in return for government funding, approved, arguing that “the taxpayers of America have a right to a reasonable return” on federal investment. However, it’s unclear how the Trump administration will collect or distribute such returns. With Russ Vought at the Office of Management and Budget, bypassing Congress to direct appropriated funds as the White House pleases, there’s no reason to believe any returns will ever redound to the American taxpayer. This isn’t a socialist scheme to redistribute American wealth, or even the opening salvo to a sovereign wealth fund—it’s just another step in the consolidation of power in Trump’s person.

To what end? Political theater. Trump’s ‘golden share’ in U.S. Steel, which gives the government control over major company decisions, has led to absurd results: a steel mill in Illinois is shutting down production but keeping its workers on the payroll to keep the facility idle. Instead of offering severance pay or job training to help workers move on, the White House simply wants to avoid bad headlines showing American steel mills—MAGA’s cultural icon of America First—laying off blue-collar workers. Meanwhile, for those working outside Trump’s Rust Belt nostalgia photo ops, more than 42,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost since he announced his ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs. 

Trump’s theatrics are already generating massive blowback. Recently, the Department of Homeland Security led its largest-ever immigration raid at Hyundai’s battery plant in Georgia, arresting hundreds of skilled South Korean workers brought in to get the facility up and running quickly. Footage of shackled South Korean businessmen and engineers, which ICE proudly posted online, sparked outrage across the political spectrum in South Korea and now threatens billions in foreign investment. Trump seemed to grasp the misstep, acknowledging that “we have to learn from others how to make [sic].” It may already be too late. One South Korean worker, describing the squalid conditions in ICE detention, said upon his return to South Korea, “I will never visit the United States again.”

From extorting blue-chip companies to arresting foreign engineers, it’s clear that Trump has no strategic priorities. There is no ‘Made in America 2035’ vision. He can hardly commit to a firm policy for more than a few days, let alone years. His heavy-handed transactionalism distorts market decisions as businesses scramble to divine the president’s caprices—and curry his favor. Until industrial strategy becomes a hit on Fox & Friends, the president will unlikely ever think about it.

Actually Successful Industrial Policy

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, China has become the paradigm of industrial development.

Through decades of interventionist industrial policies, China’s state-managed capitalism has pursued long-term growth and prosperity—and delivered, lifting 800 million people out of poverty over the past 40 years. Since Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in the 1970s, the nation has embraced market mechanisms with a “negotiated receptivity,” borrowing what works from abroad, discarding what doesn’t, and constantly adapting policy to Chinese realities rather than importing Western dogmas wholesale. In contrast to Trump’s phony populism, China has shown what it means to treat economic development as a national project.

Rather than be led down the developmental dead-end of the neoliberal Washington Consensus, China drew lessons from the experiences of Soviet-style public enterprise and East Asian state-led sectoral development. It has cultivated domestic champions, moved steadily up the value-added chain, and invested heavily in technological innovation. China has allowed the state to co-evolve with markets by building experimental, adaptable institutions.

This long-term strategy has already transformed the global economy. The first “China Shock” witnessed the country’s transformation into the world’s factory, displacing long-established American industries like furniture and textiles. The second China Shock is poised to be far more consequential, threatening to overtake the U.S. lead in advanced hi-tech sectors from aviation to robotics to batteries.

This extraordinary leap began in 2015 with the launch of Made in China 2025 (MIC25), an industrial strategy explicitly designed to catapult China from a low-cost assembler of goods to a global leader in advanced technology. Targeting ten priority sectors, including aerospace, biopharma, and clean energy, MIC25 aimed to achieve self-sufficiency in the core components of advanced manufacturing. This included tax incentives and subsidies into private and state R&D, technology transfers traded for market access, joint ventures, foreign acquisitions, licensing high-tech equipment, and even outright cyber and industrial espionage.

The strategy has been largely successful. China has dramatically reduced its dependency on imports and foreign firms by localizing high-tech production and research in exchange for market access. It has also become globally competitive in high-tech sectors like EVs and drones and risen to technological leadership through world-class research and patents.

While the U.S. and European Union have accused China of ‘unfairly’ subsidizing industry, the Head of Research at the China Institute at the University of Alberta, Anton Malkin, argues that MIC25 follows America’s historical playbook for achieving economic dominance: “a system of government-funded research initiatives underlined by strategic and defense priorities that are meant to feed into eventual commercial adaptation by the private sector.”

China’s industrial strategy represents a new Fordist model of production. By vertically integrating supply chains from raw materials to final assembly, Chinese firms hedge against geopolitical and environmental risks while gaining unprecedented control over production. China took the West’s playbook to beat them at their own game.

Authoritarianism Without Chinese Characteristics

This is what the current state-managed capitalism really looks like. China doesn’t just punish companies with tariffs to encourage manufacturing—a so-called ‘strategy’ that is clearly failing—it uses targeted government intervention to develop entire industries, bring in foreign technology, and steadily move up the value chain. Nothing better illustrates the success of China’s approach than the fact that the U.S. and EU are now seeking joint ventures and technology transfers from China—the very tools that built China’s economy. 

If the Trump administration and Xi Jinping’s CCP share anything in common, it’s their authoritarian impulse. The CCP stifles dissent, enforces traditional hierarchies, suppresses labor, restricts movement, and arbitrarily detains minority populations in reeducation camps. The Trump administration attacks First Amendment rights, promotes a return to patriarchy, crushes unions and collective bargaining, and rounds up immigrants and even lawful residents into mass detention centers.

China has successfully combined political repression with a coherent economic plan—much to the dismay of many. In contrast, Trump’s America uses political repression to mask the absence of any real economic vision. Trump’s so-called “state capitalism” is not a serious industrial policy. It resembles China’s authoritarianism but lacks its strategic coherence and economic dynamism. 

The post Industrial Policy, Trump Style appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Reliability is the buzzword in Republican energy policy today. While the White House and its allies tout ‘energy dominance,’ they engage in energy subtraction. MAGA supporters argue that America needs ‘secure’ or ‘reliable’ energy that operates “twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.” Energy Secretary Chris Wright blames Biden’s “radical green agenda” for causing “power outages” and “threatening America’s energy security.” Representative Randy Weber, a Texas Republican and vice chairman of Energy and Commerce, warns of an “energy crisis” unless we quickly develop “dispatchable, dependable, reliable energy.” Additionally, Trump often makes unfounded claims about what he calls “the worst form of energy,” wind.  

These claims conflict with decades of grid research. Energy Innovation, a nonpartisan think tank, conducted a meta-analysis of 11 clean energy policy studies and found that renewables, paired with battery storage and expanded transmission, can provide a reliable grid with 80 percent clean electricity. The Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) reached the same conclusion in a two-decade review of renewables’ impact on grid reliability. A grid with 80 percent or more of clean power can maintain reliability through greater flexibility, a diverse mix of renewables with storage and clean firm sources like nuclear and geothermal, full use of frequency-stabilizing technology, and expanded transmission. (Alas, the Department of Energy is laying off hundreds of NREL staff.)  

Attacks on renewables are an attempt to reframe the coming affordability crisis as a reliability crisis. The gutting of renewable subsidies in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act ensures that less energy gets connected to the grid at the exact moment that energy demand is rising due to the rapid buildout of AI datacenters. By kneecapping wind and solar production, an ideologically driven energy agenda guarantees higher energy prices. Americans are already starting to feel the pinch.  

The Worst Forms of Energy? 

Not only are wind and solar the fastest and cheapest energy sources to deploy, accounting for over 92 percent of all capacity additions to the grid in 2025, but they can also make the grid more reliable. In recent years, the Texas grid has added nearly 1,000 percent more solar and 700 percent more battery storage, lowering its blackout risk from 12 percent to just .03 percent. 

In other words, renewables are naturally strengthening the grid just as the Trump administration is waging an all-out war against them. This month, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued an order that effectively bans wind and solar projects on federal lands, under the specious reasoning that “gargantuan, unreliable, intermittent energy projects hold America back from achieving U.S. Energy Dominance.” 

With electricity demand rising for the first time in decades, the administration and its allies deliberately spread a misleading narrative about grid reliability. They want to shift the blame for rising energy costs from their own disastrous policies to renewables. 

But a modern, smart grid with diverse clean energy can provide everyone with reliable, affordable, and abundant power.  

How Grid Reliability Actually Works 

The real obstacle to clean energy isn’t technology—it’s politics. Increasing solar and wind penetration and improving grid reliability can, and often do, go hand in hand, but only if we let them. To understand why, look at how the grid works. 

The grid is a vast, interconnected network that spans the continent. Power plants (coal, solar, nuclear, etc.) generate electricity. High-voltage transmission lines—the interstate highways of electrons—carry this energy over long distances. Local substations and transformers convert this electricity to safe voltages and distribute it to your home via local utility lines.  

Unlike other industries, electricity cannot be stored. Supply must always match demand across the grid. Grid operators constantly balance electricity production to respond to fluctuations in daily demand and ensure safe operations. If grid voltage or frequency drops too low or spikes too quickly, the system can fail—sometimes suddenly and dramatically, as in the Northeast blackout of 2003, which left over 50 million people without power in Canada and the U.S.  

No grid operator can predict when you plug in your phone, run your dishwasher, or turn up your speakers. But on a system-wide level, consumption patterns emerge—from spikes in the early morning when people wake up to seasonal trends like midsummer heatwaves when air conditioners are blasting.  

Renewables fit neatly into this system. Solar and wind power show similar predictable patterns. Solar peaks during the afternoon and summer, while wind increases at night and blows more consistently in winter. The variability also decreases as renewables grow, helping to smooth out supply fluctuations.  

U.S. grids already demonstrate this capacity. Last year, renewables supplied 100 percent of California’s electricity demand for up to 10 hours a day over nearly 100 days from late winter to early summer. Texas produces more energy from wind and solar than California, with over 40 percent of net utility-scale electricity coming from renewables in the past year. Combined with battery storage, both Texas and California have been able to store excess solar power generated during the day and discharge it when the sun sets and lights turn on. Texas broke a record last month by discharging over 7,000 megawatts of electricity from large-scale batteries, enough to power 1.4 million homes. 

The technology to run a reliable, high-renewables grid is already in some of the country’s largest and most complex energy markets. The only barrier is political. 

Renewables Are Reliable 

True grid reliability—the ability to supply the right amount of power when needed—depends on flexibility, coordination, and planning. Conservatives often equate reliability only with nonintermittent energy sources because it’s an easy talking point (What if the sun doesn’t shine?) that favors always-on ‘baseload’ power fueled by coal.  

But baseload’s role shrinks as renewables scale. Since renewables don’t require fuel, their marginal cost for each additional kilowatt-hour is zero. Even the cheapest baseload power cannot compete with a solar farm on a sunny California afternoon. In fact, the Golden State produces more energy than it can use. Battery storage, increasingly cheap and widespread, absorbs that surplus and delivers it at peak demand. 

Where energy experts express concern about renewables and reliability, it’s less about intermittency and more about what they don’t supply: inertia and reactive power. These two features are vital for grid stability and are naturally provided by spinning coal or gas turbines. Their kinetic energy smooths out sudden frequency shifts, giving grid operators a buffer to respond. They also generate reactive power—the passive current that sustains the grid’s electric and magnetic fields, keeping voltage stable. 

By contrast, solar panels and wind turbines generate direct current that must be inverted into alternating current. That difference changes how they interact with the grid and creates new advantages. Modern electronic inverters can deliver fast frequency response far quicker than traditional turbines. And newer ‘smart’ inverters can now manage reactive power actively—some even let solar panels supply it at night.  

Meanwhile, retiring coal and gas plants don’t need to be scrapped; their turbines can be repurposed into synchronous condensers that provide inertia and reactive power without burning fuel, making them perfect complements to renewable-heavy grids.  

And when solar and wind fall short for longer stretches, a toolbox of solutions exists. From simple yet efficient pumped storage hydropower—pumping water uphill during low demand and releasing it through turbines when needed—to advanced 100-hour ‘iron-air’ batteries, long-duration energy storage technologies can cover days-long gaps in wind and solar output. Additionally, newer ‘clean firm’ technologies like molten-salt nuclear reactors and advanced geothermal can provide reliable, clean baseload and dispatchable power to keep the grid stable.  

Put together, these technologies prove the point: The U.S. can build a grid with 100 percent clean energy. But the administration would rather cling to 19^th-century energy sources.  

The MAGA Rearguard Action on Electricity Prices 

MAGA accusations—like many of their bugbears—are confessions. It is Trump and the GOP’s irrational energy agenda that is actively undermining the stability of the U.S. grid. 

A key to grid reliability is resource adequacy, which involves long-term planning to ensure supply meets growth. Yet, according to the Energy Department’s own (flawed) assessment, the U.S. will face a significant shortfall in electricity generation by 2030. The Department arrives at this conclusion—contradicting the assessments of grid operators and utilities—by largely ignoring the contributions of solar and wind projects. The Trump administration’s policies could bring about the DOE’s apocalyptic energy scenario.  

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act repeals tax credits for wind and solar, guaranteeing higher costs. Trump’s tariffs raise prices from solar panels to gas pipelines. His administrative agencies impose permitting roadblocks to end wind and solar expansion. A recent Interior Department order could effectively stop every American wind project by withholding Federal Aviation Administration permits for turbine height clearances. The move would strand $317 billion of investment and prevent 213 Gigawatts of wind energy from coming online. 

Critics who blame renewables for rising electricity prices ignore the real culprits—natural gas price volatility, uneconomic coal plants, and increasingly severe extreme weather. The Wall Street Journal editorial board, for example, claimed a 40 percent price increase in Texas over the past seven years was due to renewables. This charge confuses correlation with causation. Adjusted for inflation, Texas prices have remained stable, and while electricity costs have risen nationwide, Texas has seen smaller increases than most states. The economics of renewables are simply too good. 

Despite the president’s best efforts, the world is transitioning into the Age of Electricity. A clean, affordable, and reliable grid isn’t just possible. We’re building it. 

The post The Republicans’ Reliability Ruse  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Last week, Donald Trump’s administration announced a staggering 93.5% tariff on Chinese graphite—a material essential to battery production. China not only dominates graphite mining but controls 96% of the global supply of processed anode-grade graphite, a necessary component of lithium-ion batteries. The move will send shockwaves through the already fragile battery supply chain and all but guarantee higher costs for U.S. manufacturers. It’s only the latest in a string of irrational policies that make it harder, not easier, to bring manufacturing back home.

Earlier this month, Congressional Republicans passed the president’s massively unpopular budget bill, effectively repealing Joe Biden’s signature clean energy legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

While most attention on the bill’s energy components has focused on the damage to the wind and solar industries, the GOP’s mega bill will also upend the booming battery business, gutting one of the economy’s fastest-growing and strategically vital industries. While the Biden administration made substantial progress in building a domestic battery supply chain, Trump is kneecapping battery manufacturing in the U.S. by crushing demand and hiking up input costs.

The contradictions in Trump’s “America First” strategy are hard to miss: the White House pushes policies to streamline critical minerals production while dismantling the very industries that need such minerals; it taxes essential imports without supporting domestic replacements; and it proclaims its mission to bring back American manufacturing jobs while enacting policies that shut down factories.

America’s clean energy transition cannot be stopped but can be slowed. Trump and the Republicans have decided to do just that—even if it means fewer jobs, higher prices, and more energy dependence.

The Industrial Policy That Was

The industrial policies passed under Biden ushered in a resurgence in American manufacturing by employing carrots (tax credits) and sticks (tariffs and domestic content requirements). The Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), and the CHIPS Act jump-started a clean energy boom, using targeted public investment to catalyze trillions in private capital.

The Biden administration strategically designed an industrial policy for batteries. Tax credits ‘derisked’ investment returns and improved the cost-competitiveness of battery storage, while Foreign Entity of Concern (FEOC) provisions penalized companies that continued relying on imported battery components. Those restrictions were carefully thought out and set to tighten gradually, giving American firms time to build out a domestic supply chain.

And it worked. According to the Clean Investment Monitor, Biden’s green industrial strategy tripled quarterly investment in clean manufacturing from 2022 to 2025. Since the IRA passed, over 380 clean-tech factories have been announced, with 161 already operational. And of the $115 billion in manufacturing investment the IRA attracted, batteries led the way, accounting for 69 percent. In a short time, the Biden incentives made U.S. battery production cost-competitive with China—which dominates over two-thirds of the global battery supply chain—and put the nation on track to achieve a 100-percent Made-in-America battery supply chain by 2030.

Well, it did—until the Republican Party returned to power and proved that their “America First” rhetoric is hollow.

Killing America’s Manufacturing First

Trump’s signature legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed this month, guts the tax credits that help American manufacturing catch up to China, while imposing tariffs in a blunderbuss manner. The only outcome of this so-called economic “strategy” will be higher inflation and persistent shortages of overseas goods and commodities. And the effects of Trump’s tariffs are only beginning to reach consumers.

Since Trump’s inauguration, over $21 billion of investment in clean energy manufacturing has been canceled, bankrupted, delayed, or scaled back, taking over 21,000 jobs. More EV manufacturing facilities, including battery plants, were cancelled in the first three months of Trump’s second term than in all 2023 and 2024 combined.

The repeal of the EV tax credit and Biden-era tailpipe emissions regulations deals a blow to EV adoption, but it will cripple America’s battery manufacturing. A report by Princeton’s ZERO Lab for energy research estimates that not only will these repeals result in the cancellation of an eyepopping 100 percent of planned battery facilities, but they also threaten to shut down up to three-fourths of battery manufacturing plants. Withdraw market incentives, and the market dries up. EV sales are projected to fall 30 percent by 2027 and 40 percent by 2030. That translates to 8.3 million fewer EVs, and 8.3 million fewer batteries needed to power them.

The IRA didn’t just spur investment in battery manufacturing; it helped create over 100,000 decent blue-collar jobs in battery production in just three years. However, within the first five months of Trump’s presidency, more than 6,000 of those jobs were wiped out.

With the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the nonpartisan energy policy think tank, Energy Innovation, projects that over 31,000 battery jobs will evaporate by 2030. But the more profound tragedy is the millions of American jobs in manufacturing, supporting industries, and local economies that will now never materialize.

These aren’t workforce reductions for a dying industry. They are layoffs in the sectors of tomorrow—cuts to a technology that makes a more resilient, affordable energy system for America possible.

The Reliability Boogieman

Trump and the GOP are doubling down on fossil fuels, even as the economics of renewables—even paired with battery storage—make that strategy irrational. Batteries absorb electricity during the day while prices are low and discharge it during peak demand hours, improving grid reliability and cutting energy costs for consumers.

Look at Texas, the country’s least regulated electricity market, where battery storage is booming to take advantage of dirt-cheap solar power. The growth of solar and batteries there has significantly reduced the risk of grid emergencies for which the Lone Star State had become infamous. Solar provides power during the hottest hours of the day, while batteries store the excess and release it as the sun sets. In California, where battery capacity has exploded 30-fold since 2018, record discharges of battery power during last year’s extreme heat meant that the state didn’t need to issue a single energy conservation alert.

Ironically, battery storage provides precisely the type of dispatchable energy that Trump administration officials claim they want. A recent report by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a not-for-profit regulatory authority that sets and enforces grid reliability standards, found that battery expansion improved overall grid reliability even as the rapid uptake of data centers increases strain on the system.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright has pulled support for long-duration battery storage projects and cut funding for scientific research into advanced battery technologies. As one senior DOE official told The Guardian, “If you stop any research for next generation solar or battery technology, or wind or geothermal or other pieces, what you’re effectively doing is compromising a huge range of technology that has the potential to reduce costs.”

For all its talk about American energy dominance and lower prices, raising energy costs is exactly what the Trump administration’s policies are accomplishing. Since January, thanks to Trump’s tariffs, short-term battery storage costs have risen 56 percent to 69 percent. Unsurprisingly, deployment of battery storage on the grid is expected to fall 30 percent over the next decade. The Trump administration likes to harp constantly about supporting “affordable, reliable and secure energy”—they forget to add “as long as it suits my party’s ideological priors.”

Making America Competitive, by Removing the Competition

This comes as Trump and the GOP rail against U.S. dependence on Chinese batteries and the need to reshore American manufacturing, after passing a bill to decimate the domestic battery industry.

While the final version of the GOP megabill technically retains the advanced manufacturing tax credit for battery producers, new “Foreign Entity of Concern” (FEOC) rules—read: China—impose unworkable domestic content requirements that make the credits inaccessible. Both complex and vague, the FEOC provisions will require regulatory guidance from the Treasury Department—a process that took two years under Biden. Until then, companies won’t invest without knowing whether they’ll qualify for the credits.

Meanwhile, the GOP is aggressively deregulating extractive industries. While boosting critical mineral production can support the buildout of a domestic supply chain, it makes little sense to simultaneously undercut the high-value-add industries like battery manufacturing that create the very demand for those minerals.

Yet Trump is doing just that. He has leaned on the Cold War-era Defense Production Act to boost investment in critical mineral production. The Department of the Interior is streamlining permitting processes for lithium mines. Hell, Trump strong-armed Ukraine into signing over its mineral resources in exchange for protection from Russia. However, these resources are critical because they serve the transition to clean energy. Why produce more lithium if not to make more batteries?

To wit: Trump just announced a 50-percent tariff on copper imports from Brazil, citing the critical need for the conductive metal in everything from semiconductors to ships to batteries. Ignoring that Trump is wielding tariffs against Brazil to undermine their democratic government and force a pardon of their MAGA-like former president, the U.S. imports nearly half of its copper. There’s no alternative path to achieve copper self-sufficiency in the near or long term. Whereas a new battery plant can come online within two years, a mine or refinery typically takes 5 to 7 years to deploy—investors can hardly expect U.S. trade policy to remain stable for 30 days, let alone during the remaining three-and-a-half years of Trump’s term in office.

Ultimately, the Trump administration and congressional Republicans have been pursuing policies to expand domestic mining, refining, and processing of critical minerals—arguably worthy goals, but not if you’re simultaneously destroying the manufacturing of products derived from such resources. They are ceding the lead in clean tech to China so the U.S. can become a raw materials exporter like so many Third-World nations trapped in the cycle of extraction without development.

I Guess We’re Screwed?

Justin Wolfers, the University of Michigan economist, accurately sums up Trump’s “plan” to restore U.S. manufacturing: “raise the price of inputs like steel, aluminum, & copper; create shortages of rare earths; invite retaliatory tariffs; cut R&D; raise borrowing costs by blowing out the budget; and to cover it all in a thick cloud of uncertainty.”

Trump’s tariffs raise prices without incentivizing investment in domestic manufacturing. The 50-percent tariffs on imported steel have doubled the price of domestic steel, yet many companies still import because even inflated foreign steel is cheaper.

The still-young American battery industry hasn’t had enough time to relocate its supply chain. China still dominates the global market for key battery components—controlling over 90 percent of anode materials, for instance—which U.S. companies must depend on until suitable (and competitive) domestic alternatives emerge. Raising input costs by 30 to 150 percent doesn’t guide investment—it paralyzes it.

Trump returned to office partly under the dubious promise to ‘Make America Great Again’ by reviving domestic manufacturing and restoring high-wage blue-collar jobs. Now he and the GOP aren’t just breaking that promise, they’re spitting in the faces of the Americans who believed them.

The post How Trump’s Policies Crush the American Battery Boom appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Editor’s note (June 30, 2025): This article, originally published on June 16, has been updated to reflect the latest version of the GOP budget, now advancing as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” and its expanded rollback of clean-energy programs.

As Donald Trump championed “drill, baby, drill” on the 2024 campaign trail, Republicans quietly coalesced around an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy—embracing fossil fuels, nuclear, geothermal, and, at least rhetorically, renewable sources such as wind and solar. As the growing share of renewable energy in deep red states showed, even anti-climate Republicans couldn’t forswear cheap renewable energy. Business was willing to ditch Trumpian rhetoric about the dangers of windmills for bottom-line logic: The economics of renewables—solar is the cheapest energy source in human history—spoke for itself. But Trump’s war on renewable energy since returning to office demonstrates the triumph of MAGA dogma over free-market principles. As the irrationality of the “Liberation Day” tariffs reveals, Trump won’t let what’s good for business get in his way this time.

Anything-but-renewables

The Trump administration has launched a full-throated war on renewable energy. From killing the residential solar industry to freezing billions earmarked for clean energy projects in low-income communities to crippling the Department of Energy’s ability to connect renewables to the grid, Trump 2.0 does not compromise.

This isn’t “all of the above,” it’s anything but renewables. Trump’s declaration of a national energy emergency, under the National Emergencies Act, explicitly defines ‘energy’ to exclude wind and solar. The Interior Department is fast-tracking permitting for all energy projects except wind and solar. The Republican-controlled Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) allows natural gas plants to leapfrog clean energy projects stuck in the permitting queue.

Trump’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill Act,’ now advancing through Congress, would effectively kill the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) with its myriad clean-energy programs and incentives. But the GOP isn’t just pulling the rug out from under the thousands of wind and solar developers who counted on the IRA’s technology-neutral tax credits—credits that helped create over 330,000 jobs and catalyzed nearly half a trillion in private investment. Senate Republicans have taken it even further. The latest draft of the bill imposes a new tax hike on wind and solar projects that fail to meet unworkable domestic content requirements after tax credits phaseout in 2027—all while sneaking in a new subsidy for coal. That’s just the worst of a bill that also axes grid modernization loans, energy efficiency programs, and electric vehicle (EV) rebates. If successful, repealing the IRA would decimate America’s nascent manufacturing renaissance, solidify China’s global green-tech dominance, and raise utility bills for American families.

As electricity demand rises, Republicans insist that only “reliable” energy—fossil fuel-powered plants that run 24/7 instead of “intermittent” renewable sources—can keep the lights on and the utility bills low. But solar, wind, and battery storage can and do meet demand affordably and reliably. It also ignores that Republican budget cuts will hamstring even non-intermittent clean energy technologies like nuclear and geothermal, the same tech Republicans have publicly endorsed. Unfortunately for Americans, this war on renewable energy comes with a higher cost.

Trump’s ‘clean coal’ policies purport to reinvigorate America’s coal industry but will only prolong the life of aging coal plants—99 percent of which are more costly to keep running than to replace with wind and solar. Trump recently issued executive orders promoting nuclear power. But many of the administration’s policies make building nuclear power more difficult, including cutting the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s budgets and limiting the latter’s traditional independence. Indeed, the budget that cleared the House last month requalified nuclear projects for tax credits but moved the start date to 2028, a timeline many nuclear projects cannot meet. Even natural gas, the only fossil fuel price competitive with renewable energy, can’t make up the slack. More investment in gas-fired power plants is unlikely to lower energy prices in the near term: Gas projects will take until at least 2030 to come online, and a massive backlog for new gas turbines stretches beyond 2029.

Of course, affordability was never really the point. The point is the MAGA worldview, where the wind never blows and the oil always flows.

MAGA Has Taken the Oil Pill

If Trump’s gutting of cutting-edge scientific research and persecuting corporations perceived as ideologically suspect didn’t alarm Washington, Trump’s on-and-off tariff policy seems to have broken through as ill-planned and doomed to fail.

Naïve as it was to claim to ‘reshore’ American manufacturing without an industrial policy (while gutting its predecessor’s), the administration has yet to lift tariffs on coffee, mangoes, and bananas—tropical crops that cannot be grown in the U.S. (Hawaii and Puerto Rico produce less than 1 percent of U.S. coffee demand.) Trump insists that tariff revenues are enough to obviate income taxes, and he simultaneously celebrates that tariffs will make imports unnecessary altogether. Both can’t be true.

Those with the most financial, ideological, and personal influence can, maybe, capture the president’s ear. The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s 90-day tariff delay announced earlier this spring only happened because his Treasury and Commerce Secretaries ambushed the president while Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade advisor and the administration’s most prominent booster of massive tariffs on every nation, had stepped out. They didn’t leave until Trump made the pause official on Truth Social.

The health of American industry now hinges on one’s informal and personal ties to the president, which doesn’t bode well for clean energy, especially since the president’s falling out with Tesla CEO Elon Musk. The GOP is still, and has always been, the party of Big Oil. Trump’s tariffs may still harm long-term profits, but, notably, oil interests were one of the rare exceptions in Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs. Unfortunately, the logic behind Trump’s Fossil Fuels First strategy is the same as his tariff policy: there is none.

Fossil fuels are such a fundamental part of conservative identity that realism no longer applies.

As Energy Secretary Chris Wright put it: Climate change is “a side effect of building the modern world.” Trump recently posted a clip from the television show Landman, in which Billy Bob Thornton’s oilman character claims that pumping crude is too fundamental to the American way of life to stop: “We don’t do it ’cause we like it. We do it ’cause we run out of options.” But that’s precisely the lie. Trump and his movement drill because they like the war on renewable energy. despite having better options.

The MAGA agenda is irrational. Trump wants energy abundance but kneecaps the fastest-growing energy sector; he wants economic prosperity but imposes the greatest regressive tax in U.S. history. It’s a reflection of the modern conservative movement that has succumbed to far-right conspiracism, becoming so divorced from reality that not even a self-inflicted recession might check it.

Sabotage and Strategy

That’s precisely where Democrats can play their hand. There is an energy crisis: natural gas price volatility, climate-induced extreme weather, and the high cost of aging coal plants have created a perfect storm of rising energy prices. And Trump, Republicans, and their big oil donors are willfully exacerbating it by kneecapping clean energy. Democrats need a unified message that defends climate action as the response to the right’s economic sabotage.

While cheap solar and wind energy projects languish on the sidelines, Republicans are forcing Americans to pay more for dirty fuel. Keep it simple: Fossil fuels = higher prices; clean energy = lower prices.

But Democrats also need to counter the Republican agenda with a bold vision of the nation’s energy future, one of abundant clean supplies and good-paying union jobs.

If Democrats fail to act, they won’t just lose a net-zero-carbon future—they’ll lose the country to a movement that values ideology over prosperity and fantasy over fact.

The post War on Renewable Energy: MAGA Ideology Over Economics appeared first on Washington Monthly.