The Department of Energy said this week it is canceling another tranche of funding, this time a total of 321 awards worth up to $7.5 billion.
According to a list of all 321 terminated awards obtained by Latitude Media, every single canceled award was for a project led by a company based in a Democrat-led state. The canceled funding ranges from several hundred million dollars for projects focused on reducing methane emissions from oil and gas operators, to a $50 million grant for National Grid to add distributed energy resources to the Massachusetts electric grid.
The vast majority of cancellations — 200 — target projects funded by the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. In many cases, EERE has made several different awards to a single company or project, each through a different program. One example is Plug Power, a green hydrogen company headquartered in New York state that has received funding from several DOE offices to ramp up domestic electrolyzer production.
Plug Power has received at least eight DOE grants since 2018, plus a $1.6 billion loan guarantee from the Loan Programs Office. Four of its grants were cancelled this week, including a $1.7 million grant to design an advanced hydrogen dispensing system, and a $42 million grant to establish manufacturing processes for PEM electrolyzers. At least three of the canceled grants were issued under Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding, and one was issued during the first Trump administration, in 2018.
But it wasn’t just renewable energy offices that were hit. The Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management — now just known as “Fossil Energy” — is canceling 68 awards. Among those are several of the office’s regional direct air capture projects, which are smaller and earlier-stage than the large hubs managed by OCED in Louisiana and Texas, which had landed on the administration’s so-called hit list earlier this year.
Meanwhile, the Grid Deployment Office is canceling 25 awards, including $464 million in Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships funding (or GRIP) that was earmarked for the transmission stud process for five high-voltage transmission lines spanning seven states — Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota.
Six awards from the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains are also being canceled, including a $5 million grant to ramp up domestic manufacturing of heat pumps, and another grant funding the buildout of new plants to process glass waste for use in low-emissions concrete.
The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, ARPA-E, is canceling a single award: $550,000 for the University of Illinois to develop an open-source software tool to design and optimize floating offshore wind turbines.
The news of the projects’ cancellation came initially via a tweet from Russ Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, posted on the first day of the ongoing federal government shutdown.
The impact of such widespread cancellations, though generally considered to be an effort to hit back at Democrats amid the government shutdown, will be broad. According to a fact sheet circulated by House Appropriations Committee Democrats this week, the impacted projects are in districts represented by 108 individual Democrats, and 28 Republicans.
Several awards, including the GDO award to the Minnesota Department of Commerce and its partners MISO and SPP for transmission studies, and a $90 million award to Mineral Basin Solar Power, are categorized on DOE’s list as targeting blue states, but were actually slated to support the buildout of physical projects in states that voted for President Trump, in this case Louisiana and Pennsylvania, respectively.
Editor’s note: This story was updated on October 2 to add specifics on the awards that have been canceled, including the details about Plug Power, the direct air capture hubs. It was also updated to include details about the political leaning of the districts where projects are located.
