The Senate Should Not Surrender

Energy Capital Podcast

0:00

-24:04

The Senate Should Not Surrender

From AI supremacy to national security to economic growth, energy is *the* critical factor. The House's budget bill would wave the white flag of economic surrender to China.

Doug Lewin

and

Nathan Peavey

Jun 13, 2025

Transcript

On Wednesday, I published Energy Submission, a piece on how the U.S. is at risk of abandoning the battle for 21st economic supremacy as China accelerates its energy dominance. I recorded this podcast episode to go a little deeper into the consequences of the House-passed reconciliation bill and what we risk losing if we dismantle the tools driving the energy future.

It’s available on YouTube with full charts and visuals

Energy isn’t just one issue among many, it’s a foundational issue. In what the IEA has dubbed the Age of Electricity, if we don’t have enough of it, we enter the economic race to power the future with one arm tied behind our backs.

That’s what makes the House-passed budget reconciliation bill so dangerous: it guts the clean energy incentives that are powering our present and could power our future.

It dismantles the Inflation Reduction Act’s momentum just as the world is moving into a new industrial era, one that will be defined by who has enough affordable electricity to fuel growth.

Let’s zoom out.

Globally, energy investment is booming.

In 2024, $3 trillion was invested in energy. Two-thirds of that ($2 trillion) is going into clean power: wind, solar, nuclear, storage, and efficiency. Only $1 trillion is going into coal, oil, and gas.

China, in particular, is accelerating at breakneck speed, building 277 gigawatts of solar in 2024 alone. To put that into perspective, that’s more clean energy in one year than the entire installed capacity of Texas’s grid (~180GW).

Meanwhile, the U.S. is considering a bill that would eviscerate the progress we’ve made. It would slash the tax credits that have driven private investment into renewables, energy storage, and domestic manufacturing, just as that investment is beginning to deliver.

More than 270 clean energy factories have been announced since the IRA passed. If this bill becomes law, many of them will be canceled outright.

This isn’t theoretical. Projects are already being canceled in Texas due to market uncertainty. This bill pours cold water on an area where the U.S. has been gaining ground in manufacturing, jobs, and grid reliability.

And it’s happening just as we’re entering a new age of electricity demand. AI data centers, robotics, industrial electrification, and electric vehicles are pushing power use higher than it’s been in decades. Even Elon Musk is warning that we could see electricity shortfalls by next year.

You cannot meet 21st-century energy demand with 20th-century thinking. And yet, that's exactly what some policymakers are trying to do by doubling down on fossil fuel exports, suggesting "LNG power plants" (which aren’t a thing) are going to power our grids, and pretending we can drill our way to abundance while dismantling the tools that are actually scaling our grid.

In fact, LNG export facilities consume massive amounts of power, up to 700 megawatts each. If you want to power exports and data centers, and still have enough for people to use in their homes, you need a vastly more flexible, modern grid.

That means a diversified portfolio: wind, solar, storage, gas, geothermal, advanced nuclear, and demand-side solutions. It means better transmission planning, smarter markets, and policies that attract investment rather than repel it.

This isn’t just about clean energy anymore. Clean energy is now simply energy. It’s about competitiveness, reliability, affordability and national security.

While we debate whether clean energy tax credits are “too generous,” China is becoming the world’s first electrostate, a nation that doesn’t just consume energy, but manufactures and exports the infrastructure to produce it. China isn’t waiting for the market to figure it out. They’re building fast, and they’re controlling and locking up global supply chains along the way.

The U.S. still has the innovation advantage. We lead in software, in AI, in energy entrepreneurship. But without enough power to run it all, that advantage becomes a bottleneck. As David Friedberg put it recently, energy abundance is necessary for every other kind of abundance. Without it, AI, biotech, and automation all stagnate.

This reconciliation bill would deepen that bottleneck and cut off any hope of growing our way out of our deficit.

We cannot cut our way to energy dominance. We have to build.

If you care about growth, if you care about leadership, if you care about national security, you should care about energy policy. And if you care about energy policy, this bill should concern you.

We need the Senate to fix what the House broke. The tools are there. The economics are clear. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

Timestamps

00:00 – Introduction
01:30 – China’s energy dominance by the numbers
03:00 – What is an Electrostate? China's strategy to be the first
04:30 – Some Republicans’ preference to surrender clean energy dominance to China
06:00 – Doug Burgum on the All-In Podcast
09:00 – Debunking the “LNG Power Plant” Myth
14:00 – All-In Podcast: If the Senate fix the House bill, we’re in trouble
16:25 – All In Podcast: The gating factor for abundance
18:26 – What's Next: Senate’s role and the urgency and importance of this moment