Despite clear instructions from federal courts, the Trump administration is continuing to withhold legally obligated funding from certain energy and grid programs, including $365 million committed late last year to build backup power at hospitals in Puerto Rico.
In an effort supported by the island’s governor, Jenniffer Gonález-Colón, the administration has spent several weeks working to redirect funding allocated for the Programa de Comunidades Resilientes. They plan to instead add that money to the billions of federal funding already earmarked for grid modernization, which has yet to be deployed.
Today, in a hearing before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, the Trump appointee behind those efforts largely dismissed concerns about repurposing the funding, pointing to the administration’s desire to spend money on projects that “impact not just those that are in need, but also the entire grid.”
Katie Jereza, Trump’s nominee to head DOE’s Office of Electricity, is currently leading an informal task force at DOE focused on the agency’s grid projects in Puerto Rico, sources told Latitude Media.
But when asked directly about the $365 million resiliency fund, Jereza, who traveled to the island in March for meetings with a variety of energy stakeholders, shrugged off her involvement. She told Senator Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) that the review of funding for projects in Puerto Rico is being conducted by the Grid Deployment Office.
“They’re the ones who are leading the efforts,” she said. “Secretary Wright and President Trump have made it clear that we need to look at what we can do to improve the security and resiliency of the grid.”
A history at DOE
Jereza, a chemical engineer with a long career in the power sector, isn’t new to the Department of Energy. For around two years during the first Trump administration, she served as deputy assistant secretary for transmission permitting and technical assistance at the Office of Electricity, a role that does not require nomination or Senate confirmation.
During that time, Jereza personally made a significant impact on national transmission infrastructure, through her efforts to suppress transmission connection research done by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
The 2018 Interconnections Seam Study showed that stronger connections between the eastern and western power grids in the U.S. would speed up the growth of wind and solar energy and reduce reliance on coal. Doing so, NREL found, would increase overall grid resilience and save American consumers billions of dollars.
According to reporting by Investigate West and The Atlantic, Jereza was in the audience when NREL researchers first presented the results of their study to experts and policymakers at a gathering in Kansas.
Before the presentation had concluded, Jereza had raised the alarm at DOE about the study’s “anti-coal findings.” And her efforts got quick results. The report’s authors were barred from presenting or discussing their findings beyond NREL, and the study itself was blacklisted — pulled from the NREL website and scrubbed from other sources online. (The report’s authors declined to speak with Latitude Media for this story.)
Over the next several months the report underwent heavy edits. Its “higher renewables” scenario became a “variable-generation scenario.” Statements that carbon dioxide emissions were projected to drop significantly by 2038 vanished, as did bar charts illustrating how added transmission would shrink the share of power generation made up by coal.
But by October of 2018, DOE was still withholding the study, stating it was still under review, and that career staff were working to “strengthen” the study’s “preliminary results.” The full study, in its initial form, was eventually published in 2022, during the Biden administration.
Jereza, who had departed DOE for the Electric Power Research Institute in May 2019, returned to the agency in January of this year, as a senior advisor to the undersecretary of infrastructure, according to her Linkedin.
In her written testimony to the Senate ahead of her confirmation hearing this week, Jereza described her experience working to “unleash baseload power, including fossil fuels, advanced nuclear, geothermal, and hydropower.”
“If confirmed, I will tackle one of the most challenging problems our nation has ever faced – helping add the baseload power America needs to meet its energy demands today and in the future,” she added. “President Trump and Energy Secretary Wright have made their agenda clear…I will work every day to advance U.S. leadership in innovation, reduce costs for American families, and strengthen grid reliability and security.”
