Trump admin’s new anti-renewables rule rooted in fossil-fuel misinformation
A Heartland Institute policy brief released this spring also relied on information about the land areas needed for solar and wind energy to conclude that large-scale electricity production from those sources “requires substantial ecological damage and impact.” The institute’s funders have included Exxon Mobil, coal-mining company Murray Energy (now American Consolidated Natural Resources), and foundations supported by the Koch brothers.
Another speaker at Knox Smart Development’s town hall, a lobbyist named Mitch Given, had previously represented The Empowerment Alliance in a 2023 presentation to the Ohio legislature’s Business First Caucus. His slides on the “nonsense of turning corn fields into solar fields” compared 6,050 acres for an Ohio solar project to just 5 acres for a similar-sized combined-cycle gas power plant.
A 2024 rally against the Frasier agrivoltaics project then brought in Robert Bryce, a former Manhattan Institute fellow who spent an entire chapter of his 2010 book arguing that wind and solar energy are not green because of their land use and power density. The argument is also featured in an anti-solar video he released this month.
The Manhattan Institute has received funding from fossil-fuel interests, such as Exxon Mobil and organizations linked to the Koch brothers. The Checks and Balances Project, a pro-clean-energy watchdog group, has criticized Bryce multiple times for failing to disclose those links. Bryce did not respond to Canary Media’s request for comment for this story.
“Everybody needs to come to this debate with a full picture of who they’re talking to and why they’re saying what they’re saying,” said Ray Locker, executive director for the Checks and Balances Project. Companies in the fossil-fuel industry “have a vested interest in preserving their business,” so when they present renewable energy “as somehow dirty, then that furthers their interest.”
This month’s Interior Department order is not the only recent federal attack on clean energy based on the land-use argument. Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said that the agency’s longstanding Rural Energy for America Program would no longer fund large solar projects on “prime farmland,” a major shift for a program whose main use case has been helping farmers install solar energy.
“An absurd metric”
Burgum’s order to the Department of the Interior is “really implementing an ideological agenda,” said Brendan Pierpont, director of electricity modeling at think tank Energy Innovation. In his view, the mandate’s definition of capacity density is an “absurd metric,” with multiple flaws.
Among other things, the capacity-density measurement does not capture the full picture of what it takes to produce electricity from a fossil-fueled or nuclear power plant.
The metric focuses only on the step where electricity is generated. A full life-cycle analysis would consider all stages for producing equipment, obtaining and transporting fuel, and dealing with waste. The Interior Department’s recent order is “entirely designed to make these [renewable] resources they don’t like look bad,” Pierpont said.
The definition of capacity density also fails to account for the fact that renewable projects can coexist with other activities, such as livestock grazing or farming certain crops, noted Matthias Fripp, global policy research director at Energy Innovation.
Additionally, land used for solar or wind energy can produce electricity for decades, he said, unlike fossil fuels, where the industry must “keep finding new land” for resource extraction. Researchers made a similar point in a 2016 study in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS One, which found the land requirements for coal-fired electricity could equal or exceed those for renewable energy within two to 31 years.
Anderson at the Energy and Policy Institute called the rationale for the Interior Department’s order “a red-herring argument to focus on just one of the impacts of different energy sources.”
Nowhere does the order address environmental and health concerns about mining for coal or uranium, drilling for oil and gas, or transporting and burning those fuels. Waste disposal, particularly for coal and nuclear plants, also poses a challenge.
Renewables “are obviously leaps and bounds ahead of fossil fuels in terms of their net benefits,” Anderson said.