President Donald Trump on Jan. 23 appeared via video from Washington, D.C. to the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, announcing the U.S. departure once again from the Paris Climate Accords and that the U.S. would be doubling its electricity output to accommodate the growing population and the expansion of artificial intelligence infrastructure in the U.S.
In his remarks, Trump outlined some of the many actions he had already taken including ending the Green New Deal and was once again withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accords, stating, “I terminated the ridiculous and incredibly wasteful Green New Deal — I call it the green new scam — withdrew from the one-sided Paris Climate Accord and ended the insane and costly electric vehicle mandate.”
The announcements by Trump come as he has also declared a national energy emergency on Jan. 20, which is stated to include plans to use eminent domain and even the National Defense Production Act as necessary to dramatically expand U.S. energy production.
This means quite a lot in Davos at the World Economic Forum, which for years has outlined a rapid decarbonization that it expects advanced economies to implement. On the organization’s agenda for 2025 on its website, it once again outlined the proposal for “global emissions reductions needed… to reach net zero by 2050” through use of technology but also through rationing.
Something that Trump explicitly campaigned against in 2024 when he won the election convincingly. Instead, Trump let the assembled gathering know that he intended to double electricity output in the U.S. substantially including through the use of natural gas and coal.
In taking questions, Trump stated, “the more that you do the lower the price is going to go and what I’d like to see is… rapid approvals. We’re going to give very rapid approvals in the United States, like with the AI plans, talking to many people who want to build them. That’s going to be a very big thing. We’re going to build electric generating facilities — they are going to build, I’m going to get them the approval. Under emergency declaration, I can get the approvals done myself without having to go through years of waiting and the big problem is we need double the energy we currently have in the United States.”
Trump also outlined his idea for the new artificial intelligence data centers to build their own power plants, stating, “I told them that what I want you to do is build your electric generating plant right next to your plant as a separate building, connect it and they said, wow you’re kidding and I said no, no I’m not kidding, you don’t have to hook into the grid which is old…”
And Trump said they can use coal if they want, stating, “they can fuel it with anything they want and they may have coal as a backup, good clean coal. You know, if there were a problem with a with a pipe coming in as an example, you’re going with gas, oil and gas and a pipe gets blown up or for some reason doesn’t work, there are some companies in the U.S. that have coal sitting right by the plant so that if there’s an emergency they can go to that on a short term basis and use our very clean coal…” adding, “coal is very strong as a backup, it’s a great backup to have that facility and it wouldn’t cost much more… money and we have more coal than anybody.”
In the context of the national energy emergency, Trump is planning on rolling out rapid approvals for these expansions with the goal of unlocking America as the best place in the world to build technology, and comes days after commitments by Soft Bank, Oracle and OpenAI to invest $500 billion on AI data centers after years of outsourcing to Taiwan, China, Japan and elsewhere.
The lack of expanding the U.S. electricity grid has definitely also been fueling price increases. Between Feb. 2021 and the Nov. 2024 election, electricity prices had skyrocketed by 26 percent — helping President Trump to win by ousting the incumbent Democratic administration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
But personal incomes, including government transfer payments, are still only up 18.6 percent, meaning most households are feeling the pinch more than ever when their utility bills come due — and for everything else too, including groceries, filling up the gas tank and so forth, which similarly have not kept up.
One of the reasons is because of the transition away overall from thermal sources of electricity, especially coal, and a failure to keep up with population growth and therefore demand on the overall electricity grid.
In 2008, the U.S. total electric power industry was producing 4.119 billion megawatt hours (MWh), including 1.985 billion MWh from coal, 882.4 million MWh from natural gas and 56.2 million MWh from solar and wind combined, data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) shows.
In 2012, total electricity output had declined to 4.047 billion MWh, including 1.514 billion MWh from coal, 1.225 billion MWh from natural gas and 145 million MWh from solar and wind combined.
And then in 2022, total electricity output was up to 4.230 billion MWh, including 831 million MWh from coal, 1.687 billion MWh from natural gas and 578 million MWh from solar and wind combined.
In the meantime, the U.S. population has increased by more than 30 million to 334.9 million, a 10.1 percent increase. But overall electricity generation has only increased by 2.6 percent. Demand is up, but electricity production has not kept up—by design—and so prices have skyrocketed.
Since 2008, coal electricity generation is down 44.4 percent. And, thanks to the Obama era regulations, natural gas, wind and solar were incentivized, with natural gas increasing 91 percent and solar and wind combined increasing 928 percent.
However, because coal electricity generation has decreased faster than natural gas electricity generation has increased, the overall amount of thermal electricity produced from those two sources that most Americans depend on has decreased from 2.868 billion MWh in 2008 to 2.518 billion MWh in 2022, a 12.2 percent decrease. That, even though coal and natural gas still make up 59.5 percent of the entire electricity grid.
So, it’s a big problem. The population is growing faster than electricity output, and now technology is about to grow faster, too — meaning we need more energy. And we won’t get there with the Green New Deal or unattainable Paris Climate Accord goals, but we might with Trump’s emergency declaration and the “very rapid approvals” he is promising. While the World Economic Forum merely discusses economic growth while curtailing the use of energy, Trump is putting in a place a plan that will help the U.S. to expand dramatically in ways it has not done for decades and boosting energy production across the board. It’s about time.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government.
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