Net Zero

1. Tariffs hit renewables
2. Coal’s long goodbye
3. Grids are struggling
4. Energy R&D falls
5. Picking up from USAID

Hydrogen trucks go bankrupt and coal plants go boom.

Trump’s tariffs are a major setback for AI

Sweeping global tariffs announced by US President Donald Trump this week will significantly raise the costs of renewable energy, making it harder for US Big Tech companies to meet their data center energy needs.

Although the clean energy tax credits implemented under President Joe Biden sparked a resurgence of investment in domestic climate tech manufacturing, the renewable energy industry is still predominantly reliant on imports of hardware such as solar panels, wind turbine components, and EV batteries — and will be for the foreseeable future. The new tariffs hit China and Southeast Asian countries that are critical suppliers of those goods particularly hard.

Higher costs will be passed on to energy consumers at a moment when, as NextEra Energy CEO John Ketchum recently told Semafor, renewables are still the cheapest and most readily available solution to the looming US power deficit. Tariffs on critical minerals, steel, aluminum, and components for power transformers will also make energy projects of all kinds more expensive.

Trade wars are bad for the energy transition. It’s clear that the fastest route to a lower-carbon economy is through global trade. That may not be a priority for the Trump administration, but low-cost energy ostensibly is. The tariffs do exempt imported oil and gas, a recognition that there are limits to how much domestic drilling can replace imports without causing untenable consumer price hikes.

Coal’s long goodbye

US power companies are pumping the brakes on their transition away from coal. The volume of new coal power capacity launched in 2024 was the lowest in two decades, analysis from Global Energy Monitor concluded, although the global coal fleet is still growing on balance as more coal is built — predominantly in China — than is retired elsewhere.

In the US, coal retirements fell to their lowest level since 2014: The scramble for data center power and the absence of political pressure from the Trump administration to decarbonize has led many of the country’s top coal-reliant utilities to extend the lives of old plants, even if doing so is more expensive for ratepayers than replacing them with gas or renewables, Christine Shearer, the report’s author said.

Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO, Uber, will join top global leaders at Semafor’s 2025 World Economy Summit, taking place Apr. 23 — 25, 2025, in Washington DC. As the first major gathering since the new US administration took office, the summit will feature on-the-record discussions with 100+ CEOs.

Bringing together leaders from both the public and private sectors — including congressional leaders and global finance ministers — the three-day summit will explore the forces shaping the global economy and geopolitics. Across twelve sessions, it will foster transformative, news-making conversations on how the world’s decision-makers are tackling economic growth in increasingly uncertain times.

April 23-25 | Washington, DC | Learn More

Grids are struggling

Global grids are struggling to handle a huge expansion of renewable power.

Construction of solar and wind farms has outpaced that of the infrastructure required to transport the electricity generated to homes and businesses, forcing grids in Britain, China, and the European Union to curtail the production of green power, often by paying producers to stay idle. China — which is adding renewables capacity at a breakneck pace — curtailed about 6% of its wind and solar power in January and February, up from 4% last year. In Europe, prices are increasingly turning negative and last year, nearly a tenth of Britain’s wind power, 5% of Germany’s renewables output, and 2.5% of France’s solar generation was curtailed.

Energy R&D falls

International Energy Agency member countries’ average public spending on energy R&D as a share of GDP. Despite a small increase since 2018, that’s still less than half of the level seen in the early 1980s, when there was a major push for technological innovation to boost energy security after the oil crisis — even though “new and emerging risks” to energy security now pile on top of traditional ones, the IEA warned in a new report.

— Mizy Clifton

Picking up from USAID

European governments are working to fill a hole in financing for the reconstruction of Ukraine’s energy system that was deepened by the dismantling of USAID, the official leading that effort told Semafor. The Ukraine Energy Support Fund, an initiative paid for primarily by European Union countries, has since 2022 been helping Ukraine rebuild from attacks by Russian forces that have destroyed more than half of the country’s energy infrastructure. The fund is now trying to pivot from merely repairing, to proactively constructing new gas and renewable energy capacity with a view toward more fully integrating Ukraine’s energy system with Europe’s, said Artur Lorkowski, the fund’s director. But the fund is about half a billion euros short of what Kyiv has requested. During the Biden administration, USAID was also a major contributor to energy aid in Ukraine; without it, more of that responsibility will now fall on Europe.

Although US Vice President JD Vance, during his recent visit to Greenland, said that Kyiv and Moscow had agreed to a ceasefire on energy infrastructure, attacks are ongoing from both sides. Even if an energy ceasefire is truly enacted, Lorkowski said, it will take a lot of foreign government funding to entice private energy investors back into Ukraine, both because of the risk that hostilities will resume and because of Ukraine’s own murky regulations.

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New Energy

• GE Vernova has finished building more than half of the turbines for a wind farm in the southwest US that will be one of the world’s largest upon completion.

Fossil Fuels

• One of the biggest coal-fired power plants in the US was blown up to make room for a massive new gas-powered data center.
• BP has started production at a new major gas field in Trinidad, the latest example of the company’s return to fossil fuels after investors pushed back against a pivot to renewables.

Finance

• Wall Street banks are walking back their climate commitments and seem open to financing fossil fuels projects that they recently had sought to cut off.

Tech

• The US Department of Energy has put together a list of more than a dozen sites nationwide on federal land where data centers and new power plants could be built.

Minerals & Mining

• US President Donald Trump is reportedly weighing an executive order that would fast track permitting for deep-sea mining in international waters and let companies bypass a UN-backed review process.
• Lithium Americas said it had reached a final investment decision for constructing the first phase of the Thacker Pass lithium mine in Nevada, US.

EVs

• Tesla sales plummeted 13% year-on-year, the company’s worst quarter since 2022 — though shares surged following reports that owner Elon Musk will soon be leaving his role in the Trump administration.
• Several top makers of hydrogen fuel cell trucks have gone bankrupt, the latest sign that using hydrogen for transportation remains a dubious bet.

Personnel

• Trump’s drastic cuts to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are causing chaos at the research agency, with key staff fired and rehired and vital weather forecasting operations disrupted.

A bipartisan pair of US senators is warning the White House that recent US strikes on the Houthis in Yemen risk “emboldening” the Iranian-backed group.

The letter from Sens. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., shared first with Semafor’s Morgan Chalfant, did not mention the recent headline-grabbing Signal debacle around the strikes. Instead, the lawmakers raised concerns that the strikes flouted the law regarding congressional oversight of military operations.