What is and isn’t in Trump’s National Energy Emergency Order

By K Kaufmann 

President Donald Trump’s executive order declaring a National Energy Emergency talks a lot about energy and energy resources ― referring to different fuels, fossil and otherwise ― but relatively little about generation, defined as the use of those fuels to produce electricity, according to Keith Martin, co-head of projects for Norton Rose Fulbright.

Electricity is “not the operative part of the executive order,” despite the fact that an alleged shortage of electric power across the U.S. is the ostensible reason for its issuance, Martin said in an interview Jan. 21. The order is inconsistent in that respect, he said, “promoting energy defined to exclude electricity. … A more careful draftsman would have connected all the dots.”

Signed just after Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, the emergency declaration and some of the other energy-related orders are essentially policy statements aimed at “messaging,” Martin said. “They are press releases on fancier paper … directions to the agencies, but they’re not specific legal actions.”

What’s left out of the order is as significant as what’s included. While calling for “a reliable, diversified and affordable supply of energy,” it omits any mention of solar, wind or storage and makes only passing reference to transmission as part of its definition of generation.

So, what impact, if any, might the declaration and Trump’s other energy-related executive orders have? It varies, Martin said.

Trump’s order on “Unleashing American Energy” calls for an immediate pause on “the disbursement of funds appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 … or the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.”

The wording calls for agencies to “review their processes, policies and programs for issuing grants, loans, contracts or other financial disbursements of such appropriated funds for consistency with the law” and Trump’s own fossil fuel-leaning energy policies spelled out in the order.

“The Biden administration had been rushing to get to legal commitments for these types of things,” Martin said, referring to the Department of Energy’s efforts to finalize contracts with a range of grant and loan recipients in the first weeks of January.

According to a final report from the White House, 90% of IRA and IIJA funds available through the end of 2024 have finalized contracts. But, Martin said, “the choice of words ― pausing disbursements ― suggests that Trump intends to ignore the legal commitments and just block any further disbursements.”

Industry analysts ClearView Energy Partners agreed, saying the wording could be interpreted “expansively so that it applies to obligated undisbursed monies as well as those which have yet to be obligated.”

The emergency declaration, on the other hand, calls on department and agency heads to “identify and exercise any lawful emergency authorities available to them, as well as all other lawful authorities they may possess to facilitate the identification, leasing, siting, production, transportation, refining and generation of domestic energy sources.”

DOE’s emergency powers are limited, under the Federal Power Act Section 202(c), to temporary actions in response to emergency-related power shortages. For example, DOE issued an emergency order on Oct. 9, 2024, for Duke Energy Florida to operate some generating plants at low output because of the impacts of Hurricane Milton.

Other sections of the order call for streamlining and accelerating the Fish and Wildlife Service’s emergency consultations on projects that might raise concerns about endangered species or critical habitat “in order to ensure an initial determination within 20 days of receipt” and to get to a final decision within 140 days.

Tom Falcone, president of the Large Public Power Council, does not expect immediate changes. “It’s early days on a lot of these things,” he said, noting that the energy emergency order calls for reviews, assessments and recommendations, as do some of the provisions of the “Unleashing” order. “We read them as general direction with an awful lot of process to come, because each one of those things calls for administrative processes and other processes that are still to come.”

‘A Period of Power Politics’

Karen Wayland, CEO of the GridWise Alliance, is similarly skeptical of Trump’s claims of an energy emergency. “I think managing our energy system requires constant attention, but I don’t see anything that constitutes an emergency,” she said.

Wayland framed Trump’s rhetoric as overreach. “We know where infrastructure constraints are. We know both on the transmission [side] and the pipelines. We know where they are. There’s nothing in the presidential authorities that allows him to just say, ‘OK, everything has been approved. You can go ahead and go build that.’”

ClearView Energy Partners took a broader view of the current political context for Trump and his executive orders and how they might be implemented. The U.S. and other countries “have entered a period of power politics” in which American presidents first “learn from, and build upon, their predecessors’ actions” and appear “increasingly willing to test the outer peripheries of regular order, established norms and American political traditions.”

ClearView anticipates legal challenges to Trump’s more controversial orders, but should federal courts overturn an order, Trump “might iteratively pursue new tactics to achieve his original objectives.”

Like Martin, ClearView sees the emergency declaration as setting direction; “however, it does not appear to immediately change policies that might directly impact supply, demand or price.”

Lisa Jacobson, president of the Business Council for Sustainable Energy, sees Trump’s orders as an opportunity for bipartisan action in support of clean energy.

The U.S. may not have an energy emergency, “but we clearly have challenges,” Jacobson said. “We need to understand and respect them, and if this creates an opportunity to really amplify the urgency of moving us into a better position to modernize and expand our energy infrastructure, I’m going to take that moment.”

But Jacobson also argued that the way forward requires “durable” bipartisan legislative action, especially on permitting. “We know there’s an appetite for that. Hopefully raising it to the level that the president has done on Day 1 will yet again underscore the fact that for our economy, for our security, for the environment, we need to be able to move much faster with energy infrastructure, and energy infrastructure of all kinds.”