Energy Department Cuts Two Major Clean-Energy Offices

 The Energy Department is eliminating the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations and the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.

WASHINGTON—The Energy Department is eliminating two of its biggest offices that channeled billions of dollars into clean-energy projects, another step in President Trump’s efforts to put a chokehold on federal funds for technologies designed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

The DOE is cutting the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations and the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, according to an organizational chart the agency unveiled Thursday as the Trump administration moves to further unwind Biden-era climate policies and advance fossil-fuel projects.

The department is “aligning its operations to restore common sense to energy policy, lower costs for American families and businesses and ensure the responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in a statement.

Functions of the energy-efficiency office and several other offices were folded into a new entity called the Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation, according to a DOE spokesman.

In early October, the administration said it would terminate more than $7 billion in awards for over 200 projects included in the clean-energy and energy-efficiency offices and several other offices. Most of the projects were in Democratic-led states and districts.

The cancellations covered a range of technologies, including hydrogen, battery storage, grid improvements and electric vehicles, and projects such as a $6.5 million engineering-and-design study to consider a carbon-capture project at the Four Corners Power Plant, on Navajo Nation land in New Mexico.

U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright 

 

Days later, the DOE said it would slash nearly $24 billion in funding for climate projects. Early-stage climate projects across the U.S., from Louisiana to New York to Washington state, were put on the chopping block, putting thousands of jobs at risk, especially in the burgeoning carbon-capture and hydrogen sectors, according to a list reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The department in May said it was terminating $3.7 billion in awards from the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, saying the projects “failed to advance the energy needs of the American people.” Most of the projects had been fast-tracked by the Biden administration after Trump won the November 2024 election, the DOE said at the time.

The Trump administration’s assault on clean energy is raising concerns that the global push to cut greenhouse emissions is slowing. The International Energy Agency last month slashed its forecast for renewable energy capacity growth in the U.S. this decade, citing the early phaseout of federal tax incentives and regulatory shifts under the Trump administration.

The attacks aren’t only hitting Democratic-led states. Red states are also losing funding for projects in sectors such as wind energy. Texas, Oklahoma, Iowa and Kansas—all states that backed Trump—are the nation’s top wind energy producers, but that hasn’t kept the administration from taking actions that threaten jobs and tens of billions of dollars in new investment.

Write to Scott Patterson at scott.patterson@wsj.com