View / Trump’s unlikely clean power legacy

Who needs climate policy when you’ve got data centers?

You might think Miguel Stilwell d’Andrade would be steering far clear of the US these days. The CEO of Portuguese power company EDP, which controls one of the world’s biggest portfolio of renewable energy projects, found out firsthand what it’s like to butt heads with the Trump administration’s “energy dominance” strategy when leases it had secured under Joe Biden to build offshore wind farms in New Jersey and California were revoked this year.

But EDP and its partners were able to work out a deal with the Interior Department to get their money back (d’Andrade said he’s tracking, but not yet worried about, a legal challenge launched this week against a similar deal offered to TotalEnergies). Despite the legal kerfuffles and looming wind-down of wind and solar tax credits, d’Andrade told me he still believes we’re “living in what arguably is one of the best periods to invest in renewables in the US over the last 20 years.” In fact, he’s doubling down, with a $5.3 billion plan to build US renewables projects over the next three years, a sum which accounts for more than half of the company’s total capex.

The majority of that buildout (mostly solar and battery storage; d’Andrade’s in no hurry to get burned on wind again) will be for the benefit of Big Tech. EDP is racing to sign power deals with all the usual suspects, most recently for a big solar farm in Arkansas for Meta. But one of the tricky things with the AI race is that despite the record amounts of capital tech companies are throwing at it, there are still plenty of prospective data centers that, for one reason or another, won’t ultimately get built. So d’Andrade isn’t doing anything on spec, and only moving forward on new projects once they’ve locked in a decade-plus contract. In fact, he said the limited number of genuinely bankable projects is the hardest cap on how fast the company can move — not supply chains, workforce, tax credits, permitting, or other of-cited issues.

Still, there’s enough real demand to more than counteract any political headwinds, d’Andrade said. So try as he might to the contrary, Trump will likely preside over the biggest clean-energy buildout in US history.

Contrast that with Europe, ostensibly a redoubt of strong climate policy. There’s a data center rush there, too, but at a much smaller scale, with proposed power projects each in the tens of megawatts rather than hundreds of megawatts like the US. And even though Europe has suffered two major energy price shocks in the past five years — first Ukraine, now Iran — many countries on the continent are still bogged down in red tape and haven’t learned the right lessons about energy security, d’Andrade said: “You’re already in the second crisis and you still haven’t implemented the recommendations of the first.”