Project 2025? More Like Project 1925 on Energy. Ask Texas.
A policy blueprint aimed at Republicans proposes rules that raise costs for renewables and reward plants burning fossil fuels, ignoring the evidence in some red states.
All kinds of energy.
Photographer: Brandon Bell/Getty Images
Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s policy blueprint for a second Trump administration — notwithstanding the former president’s vaunted antipathy — dedicates 54 of its 900-odd pages to energy, including the power grid. One of its chief targets there is renewable energy, subsidized and supposedly ruining the grid’s reliability, in contrast to “dispatchable” plants running mostly on natural gas and coal. Lest you think this is about market purity, Heritage proposes regulations that would raise costs for renewables and skew rewards to those dispatchable plants via “reliability markets.”
It is all as if clean technology was still just an unproven lab project and climate change wasn’t really a thing. Indeed, in the very next chapter, on the Environmental Protection Agency, Heritage touts a plan to “update the 2009 endangerment finding” that underpins regulation of greenhouse gases — and not, I’m guessing, in a fashion that would enhance such regulation.