Republicans once said the free market should decide how the US uses energy. No more.

Politico

22-07-2025

Addressing grid reliability is crucial for a Trump economic agenda that places a huge priority on growing artificial intelligence, which forecasters have said will require vast amounts of electricity. Trump administration officials contend that ending renewable power subsidies and reversing Biden's environmental rules will attract more AI investment by preventing retirement of coal and natural gas power plants.
'The need for power is scaling so fast that if President Trump hadn't been elected president, I think we would already be in trouble,' said Carla Sands, vice chair of the center for energy and environment at the Trump-aligned think tank America First Policy Institute. 'The American regulatory environment had become anti-production, anti-energy, anti-business, and this is changing under President Trump's brilliant leadership.'
An energy and AI summit that Sen. David McCormick (R-Pa.) convened last week in Pittsburgh — which included an appearance by Trump — crystallized the emergence of the president's brand of industrial policy. The administration touted $90 billion in announcements for new AI investments from U.S. tech companies, investment houses and the 'hyperscalers' that build the data centers such as Google, CoreWeave, Blackstone and Brookfield Asset Management.
'The AI revolution will change the way the world works, and we cannot lose. The Trump administration will not let us lose,' Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said during the event. 'We need to do clean, beautiful coal. We need to do natural gas. We need to embrace nuclear. We need to embrace it all because we have the power to do it — and if we don't do it, we're fools.'
But wind, solar and battery storage projects have been the United States' leading source of new power in recent years, while backlogs for new natural gas turbines, yearslong timelines to build nuclear power plants and the remote chances of greenlighting new coal-fired power plants have stunted growth of those sources. Solar, wind and batteries accounted for 93 percent of all new power added to the grid last year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
People who identify themselves as traditional small government conservatives expressed wariness of some of Trump's moves. They say the party is using the same heavy-handed tactics to reward favorites for which they criticized Democrats. Republicans have even dialed it up a notch, they said.
Republicans have cast aside the all-of-the-above mindset of the pre-Trump era, said Drew Bond, CEO of conservative climate organization C3 Solutions and an Energy Department adviser in the George W. Bush administration. Now, they preach a 'best of the above' mentality that invites subjective choice over the ebbs and flows of a free market, he said.