Talking points in the wake NREL’s gutting

Why we must defend the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and also NCAR

 

by David Hurlbut

When the regime controlling the Department of Energy announced on Dec. 1, 2025, that it had renamed the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), I was pissed. Not surprised, but still pissed.

Over the following week, though, I came to realize that it wasn’t the name. What truly angered me was what the act symbolized.  Renewable research quietly defunded. Researchers — many of them my friends — intimidated and told never to use the terms climate change, clean energy, or emission reduction. More Orwellian orders from Washington.

On top of that, I began noticing an aggressive social media spin campaign: things at the lab were normal, and changing the name was no big deal. The worst part of that propaganda campaign was that people I knew began to buy the spin. The lab was still there, they said, so maybe a new name is actually something we can live with.

Let’s be clear: It’s not the name, it’s the mission. Erasing “renewable energy” from the name is a visible symbol of a pernicious ploy that’s less visible: deliberately undermining America’s capacity for clean energy science that has been NREL’s core mission for a half-century.

I retired from NREL two years ago. I was the lab’s senior expert on wholesale power markets and transmission policy. I came to NREL in 2007 from the staff of the Texas Public Utilities Commission, and I was on the agency’s team that oversaw the creation of the Energy Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s grid operator. Once we got the market up and running in 2001, I and my colleagues closely monitored its daily activity to make sure the market collapse that happened in California during 2001-2001 didn’t happen in Texas.

Among the areas I led was renewable energy. It was during this time that Texas began to blow everyone away with how fast it deployed wind power. Even today, that makes folks scratch their heads. Ruby-red Texas leading in renewables? When they’re so in love with their fossil fuels? Many are stumped as to how Texas went from diddly-squat in 2000 to getting 30% of its electricity from renewables in 2024 (that’s the whole year, the whole state).

Trust me, Texas was no accident, and I can tell you chapter and verse how it happened. (I wrote a few of those chapters myself.) It was done by thinking differently, grounding every step in empirical fact, anticipating the opposition, giving private innovation room to flourish in a competitive market, and leaning into the state’s strengths.

Thinking differently is what we have to do now. We need to keep the message of clean energy and climate change visible in a political environment of engineered chaos. Climate change is different from other issues. It doesn’t involve federal agents gunning down civilians, or children being separated from their parents, or perfidious war crimes, or other visceral visuals that crowd the news cycle. Nevertheless, climate change has a place on a turbulent public agenda, alongside all the other challenges before our eyes that are threatening democracy and our children’s future.

More than other issues, climate change depends on science. We need science to see it, science to fix it. Therefore, it’s no surprise that a key part of President Donald Trump’s war on clean energy is an assault on scientific institutions like NREL and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The question for 2026 is: How do we score enough wins in the midterm elections so that we have a chance of protecting these institutions?

First, we need to lean into facts. The lies and disinformation coming from the regime are legion, and it may seem as though truth is already a casualty. But it isn’t. It’s vital not to surrender to cynicism, for if we give up on the efficacy of truth, we will fail.

So, what’s the message? There are many themes — the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events resulting from a warming planet, health impacts, grid operations, losing technological competitiveness to China — and they all different notes of the same chord. We need to strike that chord together, loudly.

Here, I’ll focus on affordability. One lie we hear often is that renewables are expensive. The truth is that ever since 2008, America has seen an astounding transformation. Wind and solar are up by a lot, coal is down by a lot. At the same time, our electricity bills have actually remained stable, taking inflation into account. (In a minute I’ll talk about why prices are up now.)

That’s fact number one: the long-term picture is that renewables are up, coal is down, prices are stable. America is succeeding.

Another fact jumps out from the data: there’s still much more to do. What we’ve accomplished as a nation since 2008 is proof that we can do more. To do it, we need science. As it has done in the past, we need NREL pushing out the patents, grid management tools, and analysis that keep clean energy growing, affordable, and reliable. We need NREL solidly carrying forward its historical mission.

Last year, 2025, was a different story. Trump escalated his war on clean energy by cancelling renewable energy leases and trying to keep aging coal plants open by executive fiat. This, at a time when some state grids were already stressed by new data centers and other big leaps in electricity demand, as well as the need to harden the grid against wildfires, hurricanes, and other increasingly frequent disasters related to climate change. The economic result has been undeniable: electricity prices are going up. If you take each month this regime has been in power and compare inflation-adjusted prices to a year earlier, there’s no doubt that electricity is less affordable now than it was a year ago.

Utility rate cases are always complicated. Many, many things affect electricity prices, and these things vary from state to state and utility to utility. But two trends are emerging. First, states that already have large amounts of wind and solar on their systems (like Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Arizona, and Nevada) aren’t getting hit by price increases as much as the rest of the nation. Second, customers in several states that lean on coal the most (like Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky) are in fact seeing their bills go up faster. In short, it isn’t renewables that are driving prices up now.

All this comes down to three critical points:

• First, America’s energy transformation has been working. Renewables have gone up, coal has gone down, and through 2024 prices have been stable. Renewables did not raise electricity prices, and it’s a lie to say they did.
• Second, Trump’s war on clean energy is helping push electricity prices higher—more in some states that still lean on coal, less in some states that have come to embrace renewables.
• Third, there’s still much more to do, and we’ve got 16 years of momentum to build on. For that, we need the science. We need the National Center for Atmospheric Research. We need the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and its historical mission. We need the science, now more than ever. That is what the time calls us to defend.

This essay was based on remarks delivered by David Hurlbut to the Colorado Renewable Energy Society on Jan. 15. He is author of a 2017 book, “Creative Destruction and the Electric Utility of the Future.”