Governors' Wind Energy Coalition

President Joe Biden will tout his economic and clean energy policies on Wednesday in Colorado while taking on right-wing Republican U.S. lawmaker Lauren Boebert, a close ally of former President Donald Trump. Biden, who blamed Trump at a fundraising event in Denver on Tuesday for taking away women’s right to an abortion, will visit a wind tower manufacturer in Pueblo, part of Boebert’s congressional district.

Pueblo might be known as the Steel City, but it is also home to the world’s largest wind turbine manufacturing plant. It is that manufacturing presence that is drawing President Joe Biden, Gov.Jared Polis and other officials to visit the CS Wind turbine tower manufacturing facility Wednesday in Pueblo. CS Wind, a South Korean-based company, owns the plant located in southeast Pueblo County at 100 Tower Road, approximately 10 miles southeast of downtown. The plant is the world’s largest producer of wind turbine towers and is the only American facility owned by CS Wind.

Biden convened many of his top officials at the White House for an inaugural meeting of a Council on Supply Chain Resilience, a group of agency leaders hoping to guard against the types of major supply chain disruptions that occurred due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The president unveiled dozens of new actions across the government aimed at securing supply chains for products including critical minerals, wind turbines and battery components that are central to the administration’s push to expand renewable energy and slash emissions.

“All I ever really want is a fair fight on the merits,” said Bill Scherman, a partner at the law firm Vinson & Elkins, “and I don’t think targets of investigations at FERC can get due process.” Scherman has signed on to two amicus briefs in the Jarkesy case — one on behalf of TotalEnergies Gas & Power North America, which faces a FERC-imposed fine of nearly a quarter-billion dollars for alleged market manipulation, and one on behalf of Energy Transfer, which faces millions of dollars in civil penalties for removing a 180-year-old farmhouse along the route of its Rover natural gas pipeline.

The CHIPS and Science Act included a $50 billion authorization for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science and pumped billions of dollars to help U.S. manufacturers produce the semiconductors and chips necessary for electric cars and other clean tech. It also created a program to fund Regional Technology and Innovation Hubs, which will compete for up to $75 million to develop and implement projects to “supercharge a critical technology ecosystem.”

Earlier this month, Ørsted wrote down the value of its U.S. portfolio by $4 billion after canceling two projects off New Jersey. The company’s stock price has lost more than half its value since the start of the year, and it recently announced a reshuffling of its management team, with the departure of the company’s chief financial officer and chief operations officer. David Hardy is one executive who has weathered the storm. He has led the Danish-based company’s operations in the U.S. since 2020. Hardy sat down for an interview Monday with E&E News at a critical time for the company.

Attacking the backlog of stalled transmission projects like SunZia was an opening move in what White House officials say is the largest investment in electric grid infrastructure in U.S. history. Almost three years into Biden’s first term, the government is speeding deployment of more than $30 billion in federal support for transmission through the 2021 infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, Biden’s signature climate law.

Conversion of old coal plant sites to new storage and renewable projects is happening in New Jersey, Nevada, Louisiana and elsewhere across the country. “Reuse of these interconnections is critical to driving down the cost of replacement generation,” said Justin Tomljanovic, a vice president of corporate development at Xcel Energy, which has 3.1 million electric customers in eight states and is building two battery arrays near retiring coal plants in Becker, Minnesota, and Pueblo, Colorado.

According to a White House official who asked to remain anonymous to discuss the president’s schedule, Mr. Biden will not travel to the summit in Dubai. Aides say he is consumed by other global crises, namely trying to secure the release of hostages held by Hamas in its war with Israel and working to persuade Congress to approve aid to Ukraine in its fight against Russia.

These are all projects getting federal funding designed to help small- and medium-sized manufacturers bring clean-energy jobs to former coal communities, part of a $1 trillion infrastructure package signed by President Biden in 2021. The Energy Department announced the projects on Monday. The program is an effort by the Biden administration to win support for its agenda to reduce American dependence on coal, oil and gas, the main drivers of global warming. But it also points to the broad realization that as the world transitions toward cleaner energy sources like wind and solar, workers in fossil-fuel industries — as well as regions that depend on them — risk getting left behind.