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The Wall Street Journal's coverage of threats to the power grid gets twisted on Fox Business

The Journal explicitly credits solar for reducing the risk of blackouts, but on Fox Business “blue state anti-fossil fuel policies” are “by far the biggest threat”

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Allison Fisher

Published 07/08/26

During the July 7 edition of Fox Business’ Varney & Co., guest host David Asman claimed that a recent Wall Street Journal article warned that a “perfect storm” of “high temperatures, new A.I. data centers pulling a lot of energy and those blue state anti-fossil fuel policies” are threatening the stability of the electric grid.

In reality, the article explicitly cites “an influx of 58.5 gigawatts of new resources, dominated by solar and battery storage” for reducing “the widespread blackout risks the country faced in recent years.” In fact, nowhere in the article are “anti-fossil fuel policies” cited as a threat, nor does it suggest blue states are more vulnerable to blackouts than red states.

The Journal does make clear that “hotter-than-usual” temperatures and other climate-driven disruptions — like droughts, wildfires and hurricanes — are not only a threat to the grid but are driving up electricity costs. The article notes that “summer cooling costs have increased nearly 40% since 2020, driven by a combination of rising electricity prices and hotter summers.”

Relatedly, CNN reported yesterday on a new analysis that found “the collective impact of the administration’s actions will raise costs on American households by more than half a trillion dollars by 2040.” To date, “382 clean energy projects have been canceled or stalled since Trump’s election,” according toClimate Power. Even some Fox figureshave questioned killing renewable energy projects at a time of rising electricity cost and demand.

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From the July 7, 2026, edition of Fox Business' Varney & Co.

DAVID ASMAN [FOX BUSINESS HOST]: Take a look at this Wall Street journal article, “The ‘Five Alarm’ Risk Facing the Power Grid This Summer.” It talks about a perfect storm, if we have high temperatures, new A.I. data centers pulling a lot of energy, and those blue state anti-fossil fuel policies. People are really worried, particularly in blue states about blackouts because of all of this. Is that a possibility?

CHRIS WRIGHT: [US ENERGY SECRETARY]: David, and the last one is by far the biggest threat. These are blue state policies and they were Obama administration policies and Biden administration policies. Seventeen years ago, the Democrats decided they're the party of expensive energy. They're the party of unreality. We're going to oppose fossil fuels even though they're 80% of American energy and 80% of global energy, and we're going to close coal plants and make it hard to build new gas plants, close nuclear plants, and bet the farm on the sun and the wind. That was a disastrous bet that drove high electricity prices and stopped any growth of American electricity production.

Fortunately, with the working families tax cut, we just — July 4 — we just passed the day that those subsidies are no longer available if you start construction on a project today. Ironically spending hundreds of billions of dollars on government subsidies was a driver of increased electricity prices. Normally you have a huge subsidy and you push the price of something down. They lost twice: spend massive subsidies, make electricity more expensive. But the Trump administration is reversing all of that. You will see an end to the rise of the electricity prices and our pragmatic policies will keep the lights on and keep the air conditioners running this summer, but it will be a massive challenge given 17 years of Democrat policies degrading the quality of our electric grid.

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Critics say Erika Kirk’s Turning Point USA (TPUSA) has gone toxic in red-state Arizona, possibly to the point of derailing races it sticks its nose in.

“Turning Point USA has been blamed by a senior Arizona Democrat after conservative‑backed candidates fell short in a closely watched election for control of the Salt River Project (SRP) board, which oversees the state’s largest public utility,” reports Newsweek.

The races involve the critical Salt River Project board, which makes decisions over access and pricing for resources, and it sets the economic structure of the state and some of its neighbors. But Newsweek reports Arizona House Democratic Leader Oscar De Los Santos saying the conservative activist group’s heavy involvement in the race mobilized opposition voters and gave his own party an unintended boost toward clean‑energy aligned candidates.

“TPUSA pumped an unprecedented amount of money into this election,” De Los Santos wrote on X. “Voters came out in droves against TPUSA. Turnout was more than 400 percent of 2024 turnout.”

Turning Point USA worked arm-in-arm with the brand of President Donald Trump, at least until TPUSA factions began opposing Trump’s invasion of Iran. But the two appear to still smell enough alike to make a vote against one a vote against both.

“Leadership elections for the Salt River Project are usually sleepy affairs, but this year’s races were unusually high-profile,” reported the Phoenix New Times. “That’s because Turning Point Action, the political arm of the Charlie Kirk-founded Turning Point USA, decided to flex its financial and organizational might in the battle to control the massive public utility, which serves 2 million customers throughout much of the East Valley. Turning Point spent gobs of money advertising for a pro-industry slate of candidates and even sent an army of employees and volunteers to harvest ballots — a legal practice in SRP elections — in hopes of fending off a progressive slate called the Clean Energy Team.”

“For all that effort, Turning Point’s toxic brand may have worked against it,” the Times said.

The Clean Energy Team flipped two seats on the 14-member district board, shifting control of the body to clean-energy-friendly board members more open to renewable energy investment and more skeptical of fossil fuels and data centers. But team also “gained several seats on the district’s 30-member advisory council,” said The Times. “In fact, in 13 head-to-head races for district leadership — including races for president and vice president — Clean Energy Team candidates won 11 of the matchups.”

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Turning Point USA (TPUSA) has been blamed by a senior Arizona Democrat after conservative‑backed candidates fell short in a closely watched election for control of the Salt River Project (SRP) board, which oversees the state’s largest public utility.

Newsweek has contacted Turning Point Action, TPUSA's advocacy and campaign arm, through its website for comment.

Why It Matters

The SRP is one of the most critical water and power systems in the Southwest, providing water to hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland as well as electricity to millions of residents. The composition of its board therefore shapes decisions over access and pricing for these resources, while also influencing the state’s economic structure and that of the wider region.

What To Know

Arizona House Democratic Leader Oscar De Los Santos said the conservative activist group’s heavy involvement in the race mobilized opposition voters and helped tip the balance toward clean‑energy aligned candidates.

“TPUSA pumped an unprecedented amount of money into this election,” De Los Santos wrote on X. “Voters came out in droves against TPUSA. Turnout was more than 400 percent of 2024 turnout.”

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News

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Charlie Kirk Ally Says He’d Back Trump Impeachment Under This Circumstance](https://www.newsweek.com/charlie-kirk-ally-trump-impeachment-andrew-kolvet-11799764)

Elections were held this week for control of the SRP board, pitting a group of conservative-backed candidates against clean-energy advocates.

According to unofficial results published on the SRP website, several TPUSA-backed candidates were successful, including President Chris Dobson and Vice President Barry Paceley. However, their opponents have secured an eight-to-six majority on the board, per reporting from The New York Times and The Arizona Republic.

Early voting for the utility board election began in March, with the race quickly shaping into a contest by between clean-energy candidates and those backed by Turning Point USA, the group founded by the late activist Charlie Kirk.

Turning Point Action chief operating officer Tyler Bowyer said that the race, and the group’s involvement, could set the stage for other upcoming elections in the state, telling E&E News: “The SRP territories, they’re pretty blue. If we can get turnout and activate the toughest place in the state for us right now, that could play a huge role for us later on in November.”

According to The Arizona Republic, citing a spokesperson for the SRP, around four times as many ballots were cast in this year’s race as in 2024.

And those on the clean-energy slate were able to make sizable gains, flipping a number of board seats—and taking control of the board—while securing victories in advisory council elections, doubling their representation from four to eight out of 30 seats, The Arizona Republicreported on Wednesday.

However, as well as the presidency and vice presidency, traditional SRP candidates maintained control of the water board—results Turning Point celebrated as denying clean-energy advocates full control of the project.

What People Are Saying

Arizona House Democratic Leader Oscar De Los Santos posted to X:“MONUMENTAL ELECTION EARTHQUAKE IN ARIZONA TONIGHT: Consumer advocates & clean energy candidates defeated Turning Point USA in a huge utility election and FLIPPED the majority of the utility board. SRP will be the largest utility in the country with a clean energy majority.”

“After the massive Democratic victories we’ve seen across the country, the blue wave has now hit Arizona,” he wrote in a separate post. “Just wait until November: TPUSA is going to get crushed at the ballot box. Mark my words.”

SRP vice president Barry Paceley told The Arizona Republic:“We will strive to keep the most affordable rates, highest reliability, and seek the most economic and clean energy generation. We are saddened that several of our highly qualified candidates were not elected who would've been instrumental in the future success of Salt River Project."

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In January, the Trump administration announced that it had completed its dismantling of yet another Biden-era climate program. This time, the target was the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, which Democrats had injected with almost $400 billion to support ambitious new clean energy projects.

The Biden administration pursued climate policy primarily by having Congress pass massive subsidies for solar power, wind energy, and electric vehicles. But much of the infrastructure needed to push the U.S. further away from fossil fuel dependence — like new nuclear power plants, high-voltage transmission lines, and battery factories — needed more than the tax credits at the core of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act to get off the ground. The Loan Programs Office was meant to fill that gap by making prudent loans to ambitious projects that the private sector saw as too risky. With its $400 billion windfall, the once-obscure office became the largest energy lender in the world.

That ambition apparently put the office in the crosshairs of Trump’s Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright. He said the Biden administration “rushed [loans] out the door in the final months after Election Day,” and said he had rooted out projects that “do not serve the best interest of the American people.” Wright claimed to have scrubbed or “revised” around 80 percent of the Biden administration’s $100 billion loan portfolio, and he teased plans to advance new loans that would support President Donald Trump’s anti-renewable-energy agenda. He even rechristened the office as the “Energy Dominance Financing” program — a reference to Trump’s catchphrase for his fossil-fuel-friendly energy policy.

The truth, however, bears little resemblance to Wright’s combative rhetoric. Former federal officials and sources who have worked with the Loan Programs Office say that the program has survived the Trump-era purge in something close to its Biden-era form — and that it is still supporting the buildout of clean energy. Wright has vastly overstated his revisions and left untouched projects that will support emissions-free energy at the country’s utilities, including major transmission upgrades and nuclear power plants.

(The anonymous sources quoted below requested anonymity to avoid retaliation or because they have ongoing work with the federal government; the Department of Energy declined to answer questions or make Wright and other program leaders available for interviews.)

Republicans finally pushing back against 'problematic' signature Trump issue

The quiet about-face by the Trump administration may signal a recognition that carbon-free energy can play a major role in managing the electricity price hikes that have angered voters in recent years.

“It sounds like the Trump administration seems to be responding to the energy affordability politics in a way that is, if not constructive, at least acknowledges that steel needs to get in the ground,” said Advait Arun, a policy analyst at the Center for Public Enterprise, a nonprofit that supports government-led economic development. “There are ways to reframe all these projects for their agenda.”

Here’s how the Loan Programs Office typically works: A utility or startup approaches the Department of Energy proposing to build a new power plant, transmission line, or battery factory. Once the applicant is approved, it borrows money from the U.S. Treasury at a lower rate than it could get from private banks, and the Department of Energy guarantees the loan. If the project falls through, the Department pays back the Treasury with the money appropriated by Congress. If the project succeeds, the government grows its pool of funding for future loans.

This program was first established during George W. Bush’s presidency in 2005, to help spur clean energy development. But under Bush’s successor, President Barack Obama, the Loan Programs Office became a magnet for controversy. That’s because the authority lent around $500 million to the solar cell manufacturer Solyndra, which later collapsed, leading the government to lose almost its entire investment. Republicans seized on the episode as evidence of the program’s failure — despite the fact that the loan authority also financed success stories such as Tesla, and its overall loss rate of 3 percent is much lower than that of many private sector lenders. The controversy was largely a distant memory by 2022, when Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act gave the office almost $400 billion — around 10 times its initial mandate — in guarantee authority to invest in battery startups, new renewables, and grid upgrades to support a clean energy transition.

But the office was slow to deploy its new authority, and former officials later said it suffered from an excess of post-Solyndra caution and bureaucracy. This led to long negotiations and risk analysis around every individual loan. A report from three former Energy Department staffers later found that the “executive branch machinery … defaulted to caution, process, and reactive strategies.” It took more than a year for the office to develop a fast-track process for major utility loans, and many deals weren’t completed until after Trump’s 2024 win. The projects that Wright claimed were “rushed out the door” had in fact suffered from too much due diligence, in the eyes of many observers, rather than too little.

When Secretary Wright arrived in D.C., he jammed up the program even more. The Loan Programs Office had three different leaders in the first six months of the Trump administration, lost more than half its staff to Elon Musk’s workforce reduction efforts, and halted almost all communication with borrowers.

“Moving any application through any milestone would require political appointee approval as part of a new consolidation of decision rights, and approvals were not granted,” said Jen Downing, who served as a senior adviser at the Loan Programs Office under the Biden administration and stayed on for the first few months of the Trump administration, in a letter to Congress last summer. Downing, who left the office last May and is now a partner at the clean tech investing firm Ara Partners, told lawmakers that the new Trump administration leadership spent months examining almost every loan made under Biden, in an apparent search for wrongdoing or poor lending decisions.

Wright did nix a few major loans such as the Grain Belt Express, a wind power transmission line in Missouri opposed by Republican senator Josh Hawley. But former Energy Department staffers said that many of the $30 billion in loans that Wright claimed to have shut down were in fact cancelled by the borrowers themselves, which is typical for risky and complex projects. Many withdrew even before Trump’s election, including a battery recycling plant project that fell apart due to market conditions.

“The number is fake,” said Jigar Shah, who led the Loan Programs Office under Biden. “I think in some ways, it’s to convince Trump that they’re shutting down loans.”

Other Biden-approved projects have survived, like a $1.45 billion loan to a solar panel manufacturer in Georgia called QCells, which has continued without interruption. In the case of a loan for a mine at Nevada’s Thacker Pass, which was supposed to produce lithium for electric vehicle batteries, the department doubled down and took an equity stake in the project, rather than cancelling the loan.

The new leader of the loan office is Greg Beard, a former executive at the private equity firm Apollo who also ran a crypto mining company. Thus far, Beard has only advanced projects that began under Biden. That includes the office’s most recent announcement of a massive $26.5 billion loan to Southern Company, the regional utility that serves Georgia and Alabama. The loan will fund upgrades at the utility’s new nuclear power plant in Georgia, new long-duration batteries that can store solar power, and upgrades to 1,300 miles of transmission lines.

That said, the final version of the loan also substitutes 5 gigawatts of new gas power in place of a solar project that was included under the Biden-era version of the deal, according to former Loan Programs Office officials. But this change isn’t as big a deal as it might sound; the utility was always planning to build both solar and natural gas as part of its response to surging power demand, and it will still build both. The only thing that changed between administrations is which power plants will receive low-cost federal financing. The Trump administration’s three other announced loans are also holdovers from Biden. They have little to do with fossil energy, despite Trump’s repeated promises to revive coal and oil. They include a new transmission line and the restart of another nuclear plant in Pennsylvania.

“I do think that it’s in many ways a branding exercise,” said another former Department of Energy official who worked in the loan division.

Beard has said he wants to use the office to “make energy more affordable,” “win AI,” “bolster the grid,” and “get us out from under the China strategy to dominate certain critical minerals.” But it’s unclear how much appetite utilities have for the reconfigured program. The Energy Department has held roadshow meetings with data center developers, courting hyperscalers such as Meta with the promise that they will build nuclear power for data centers on federal land. Beard told CNBC that he has a pipeline of around 80 projects waiting to move forward, but that’s less than half of the 191 projects that were in the pipeline in December of 2024, as Biden prepared to leave office.

Shah said that was in part due to the fact that Beard has applied similar standards to those he maintained in his private sector job at Apollo. Beard has suggested he wants all applicants to provide corporate guarantees for their debt, which makes it hard for many projects to qualify.

“Not only are they sending the signal that they’re canceling loans, but then the other side, they’re sending a signal that they’re only going to approve projects that a New York private equity firm would finance,” said Shah. Sources familiar with the program say that the office has already received at least one major new loan application, which is related to nuclear energy, but it’s still in the early stages. The loan office is also trying to coordinate multiple utilities to purchase nuclear reactor parts in bulk.

Thanks to a change in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the major tax law signed by President Trump last summer, the program can now directly support fossil generation such as natural gas. This federal loan support was illegal under the Biden administration, when projects had to reduce greenhouse gases. But it’s far from clear that Wright and Beard could succeed in repurposing the loan program for pure fossil fuel finance, if that’s their goal. Interest in new coal plants is almost nonexistent, and there is plenty of other capital available for new natural gas generation, including from data center developers themselves. A more likely outcome is that the revamped office will continue to support a handful of deals for “clean firm” energy projects that Trump and Wright find appealing, like nuclear, as well as critical minerals production.

Spokespeople for the Department of Energy and the Energy Dominance Financing office, as the loan program has been renamed, declined to answer questions or make Beard available for an interview.

Experts say that even if the deal flow in the office slows down, there’s still a silver lining for the energy transition. More important than the exact shape of the new loans is the fact that Congress did not slash the program altogether, as it did with other Inflation Reduction Act programs such as the electric-vehicle tax credits and the Environmental Protection Agency’s “green bank.” Still, the long-term future of the program is uncertain. When Republicans in Congress modified the loan office with Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year, they also added an expiration date. Unless lawmakers choose to renew the program, the last date that the office can make loans is September 30, 2028.

Even so, the fact that two presidents with opposite views on climate policy have both made use of the program may bode well for its survival.

“I still think that the program is an important tool,” said a consultant in the energy field who has interacted with the loan office. “The technology areas that the current administration is prioritizing, all of those sort of squarely fit into the boundaries or the authorities that exist.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/energy/trump-biden-chris-wright-loan-programs-office/.

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