We Need Another Hero: Fossil Fuels Versus Renewable Energy Production — Which Is the Alternative? (Part 2)

Read Part 1: We Need Another Hero: Fossil Fuels Versus Renewable Energy Production — Which Is the Alternative? (Part 1)

Energy diversification cannot happen without substantial — and well thought-out — infrastructure investment. Electric vehicle (EV) adoption, industrial electrification, artificial intelligence (AI) data center expansion, and advanced manufacturing all require enormous amounts of reliable electricity and transmission capacity. Recognizing this challenge, the Biden Administration announced several initiatives in April 2024 aimed at strengthening the U.S. electric grid, accelerating transmission deployment, supporting clean energy, and improving permitting coordination. The Administration framed these actions not solely as climate initiatives, but as investments in infrastructure modernization, domestic manufacturing, grid reliability, and job creation. Whether one agrees with the scope or cost of those initiatives, they reflected an acknowledgment that electrification at scale requires long-term planning and sustained investment.

Transmission infrastructure has become one of the most significant bottlenecks facing the modern energy economy. Renewable generation projects often remain delayed for years due to interconnection queues and permitting challenges. Grid congestion increasingly impacts industrial expansion. Data centers supporting AI development are expected to place unprecedented demands on electricity systems over the next decade, and carry the potential for significant human and animal disruption when not carefully planned. In this context, energy diversification and grid modernization are not fringe policy issues. They are rapidly becoming central social and economic infrastructure questions, and a way of protecting America from the turbulence of the oil and gas markets in the Middle East.

Many companies across the manufacturing, chemical, transportation, and infrastructure sectors responded to the Biden-era regulatory and investment environment by pursuing cleaner technologies, electrification strategies, recycling initiatives, and lower-carbon manufacturing investments. Businesses made capital allocation decisions based on the expectation that the United States was entering a sustained period of industrial transition. Recent policy reversals have complicated those assumptions. The “One Big Beautiful Bill” significantly curtailed or accelerated the phaseout of several renewable and EV-related incentives while reshaping portions of the Inflation Reduction Act’s energy framework. Simultaneously, the Trump Administration has paused or restricted certain offshore wind leasing activities, redirecting nearly two billion dollars in U.S. taxpayer money to buy out developers that had already spent years laying the groundwork for offshore energy projects — along with the anticipated jobs and regional economic development — later reframing it as a repurpose of funds toward expanded fossil fuel projects as part of a central energy policy objective. Businesses can adapt to regulation. What is far more difficult to navigate is regulatory and policy volatility. (And humans and regions are not businesses.)

Large-scale industrial investments often operate on timelines measured not in election cycles, but in decades. Battery manufacturing facilities, advanced recycling infrastructure, transmission projects, hydrogen hubs, semiconductor fabrication facilities, and chemical manufacturing expansions require enormous upfront capital commitments and long-term planning certainty. Abrupt policy reversals can create hesitation that extends well beyond the renewable sector itself. Investors, manufacturers, and infrastructure developers may become reluctant to commit capital if federal policy direction appears likely to dramatically oscillate every four years. Importantly, this concern is not limited to renewable energy developers. It affects domestic manufacturing competitiveness more broadly.

It is worth noting that some American companies may not wait around for direction from the federal government. In mid-May 2026, automaker Ford officially announced the subsidiary Ford Energy, set to focus on battery energy storage system manufacture and sale to utilities, industrial customers, and data centers, and repurposing the now-unused production lines in a Kentucky plant once reserved for the manufacture of EV batteries. It is a shift that takes advantage of federal support that still exists for commercial battery storage projects, Ford’s ongoing partnership with Chinese battery manufacturer Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited (CATL), and — perhaps ironically — a repurposed EV facility. Ford is not alone in the long game; General Motors announced a similar plan last year and this year indicated that it would partner with LG Energy Solution to transition an EV battery plant in Tennessee to instead produce energy storage system batteries. Other companies, like Stellantis and Tesla, have been heading that direction for some time now. A March 2026 count by research provider BloombergNEF listed eleven battery cell manufacturing plants being transitioned over for energy storage, with 8 of those on U.S. soil. American facilities on American soil creating American products for the American market is all well and good, but it will also be worth keeping an eye on just how many American human workers are employed in the venture.

States may also not await guidance from above as they seek out cleaner, reliable energy. Both Republican- and Democratic- led states have apparently begun considering whether abandoned oil and gas well sites can be converted into new wells for the production of geothermal energy. The state Senate in Oklahoma is currently considering a bill, that passed its House in March and was shaped after a similar law adopted by New Mexico last year, that would allow for companies to purchase inactive wells and repurpose them for geothermal energy or underground energy storage. These are not the only states with an eye to turn liability into energy leverage. A law passed last month in Alabama gave the green light to the approval and regulation of the conversion of oil and gas wells, with North Dakota launching a feasibility study on the use of nonproductive wells for the generation of geothermal power and Colorado state agencies undertaking a technical study to determine whether old wells can be repurposed for geothermal development and carbon capture and sequestration. While a complicated undertaking, the fact that geothermal energy is one of the few renewable energy projects left standing in the wake of Trump Administration policies makes it an attractive bipartisan effort on the state level.

The Administration’s recent Executive Order aimed at revitalizing the coal industry illustrates a broader philosophical divide emerging within U.S. energy policy. Supporters argue that preserving traditional energy industries protects jobs, grid reliability, and American energy independence. Critics counter that excessive focus on legacy systems risks diverting investment and political attention away from the next-generation technologies dominating global markets. This is not necessarily an either-or proposition. Fossil fuels will continue to play major roles in the global economy for the foreseeable future. The more difficult question is whether prioritizing the preservation of legacy energy systems should come at the expense of investment in emerging ones. The same pressure appears in the debates surrounding offshore wind development, EV infrastructure, transmission expansion, and industrial permitting reform. In some cases, existing laws and regulatory structures designed for a different industrial era may unintentionally complicate modernization efforts.

The Jones Act, signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson in 1920, provides one example frequently discussed in the offshore wind context. While the law was originally intended to both protect and secure the U.S. maritime fleet and industry post-World War I, the law limits the vessels that can transport goods between U.S. ports to vessels that are manufactured in the United States, banning foreign-flagged, foreign-manufactured ships from providing the same. Not only does this complicate offshore wind turbine construction, as few U.S. vessels possess the necessary components to carry equipment and materials used for construction and maintenance of such turbines, but it means that even transporting domestic energy and oil products between U.S. ports can be both logistically and financially impossible. In short, domestic shipping can be more expensive and less feasible because transporting goods and oil between U.S. ports requires Jones Act-compliant vessels in a modern landscape where domestic shipbuilding has not kept up. The broader issue extends beyond any single statute. Many aspects of America’s energy and industrial regulatory framework were designed around twentieth-century infrastructure systems and concerns. Policymakers increasingly face difficult questions regarding how to balance domestic industry protections, labor priorities, national security concerns, and the need for modernization.

Perhaps the most significant long-term question is whether U.S. energy policy as a whole intends to support the domestic manufacture of the next generation of energy technologies or eventually import them from elsewhere, if and when possible. That concern extends well beyond EVs. Batteries, advanced semiconductors, grid-scale storage systems, critical mineral processing, advanced materials, and electrified transportation infrastructure are rapidly becoming central components of global industrial competition. The rationale behind the Jones Act was to ensure that the United States maintains control over all it needs to ensure national security of core technology. But in a globalized economy, is “American-made” or “America First” still possible?

The chemical industry sits directly at the center of these crossroads. Advanced polymers, battery chemistries, coatings, recycling technologies, semiconductors, specialty materials, and grid infrastructure components will all shape the next generation of industrial development. The United States still possesses advantages: world-class universities, deep capital markets, abundant energy resources, advanced engineering expertise, and substantial manufacturing capacity. But industrial leadership is not permanently guaranteed.

The global energy transition is no longer a distant environmental aspiration. It is an active industrial competition shaping manufacturing, infrastructure, transportation, and geopolitical influence. The United States, without sustained investment in alternative, renewable energies — and seemingly lacking the from-the-top will to acknowledge that at a crucial time — is not poised to pivot in the way that some of its global neighbors can, and will, in the face of a looming, self-made energy crisis. The question is not whether change is coming, but whether the United States intends to help shape that change, depend upon technologies developed elsewhere, or go without.