Companies remain committed to climate targets amid US energy policy shifts

With the US and global energy landscapes changing under the Trump administration as policy priorities shift, reducing emissions remains a priority for some large companies, creating opportunities for power sector technologies and energy efficiency, corporate officials and energy experts said April 9.

"We have seen record growth in renewable energy in recent years, but emissions have still risen," Jason Bordoff, founding director of Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy, said at the Columbia Global Energy Summit 2025.

In this increasingly fractured world, some parts of the clean energy transition are in doubt, he said.

Additionally, amid the "urgent race for leadership in AI," the world is seeing a "complete rethink of the post-Breton Woods neoliberal economic order and all these trends matter for energy markets and the energy transition," Bordoff said.

During a panel discussion about "energy dominance" and the global energy transition, Gretchen Watkins, president of Shell USA, said "we are still deeply committed to low-carbon fuels and energy" with about $20 million of capital deployed in low-carbon energy today and by 2030 the oil and gas company plans to have 10% of its capital deployed in low-carbon businesses.

Those businesses currently make a 3% return, but the company's goal is for that to increase to 10% by 2030, she said.

"We are going to continue supplying all forms of energy. Oil and gas, yes, but also low-carbon solutions," Watkins said, adding that policies that allow for profitability are important.

Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, did not mince words regarding the Trump administration's climate policies, calling them "downright reckless." While the politics have changed, the science regarding climate change impacts remains compelling, he said.

President Donald Trump on April 8 signed four executive orders directing new federal measures to support the nation's ailing coal industry, including designating the fuel source as a critical mineral and promoting the use of coal to power artificial intelligence data centers.

Additionally, the US Environmental Protection Agency has launched a formal reconsideration of its 2009 landmark greenhouse gas endangerment finding, a rule underpinning all federal efforts to regulate and reduce climate-warming emissions.

Energy market, infrastructure impacts

Part of the discussion centered around policy uncertainty and how it can disrupt energy markets and energy project investment.

The importance of legislative strategies that can withstand political swings cannot be overstated, Jane Flegal, executive director of the non-profit Blue Horizons Foundation, said.

For example, the Inflation Reduction Act passed under the Biden administration sought to embed climate policy within economic and national security policies, she said. And some Republican officials have said the policy is critically important to their constituents and that power prices could increase 10% without IRA tax credits, Flegal said.

Regarding power demand for AI, Kathleen Barrón, executive vice president and chief strategy and growth officer at Constellation, said that when evaluating power system impacts the power demand growth, the numbers vary widely.

'There is a fair amount of double counting in some of these load forecasts," she said.

Nevertheless, flexibility in operating the power grid will be needed to accommodate data center demand growth and it will be important to expand energy efficiency.

Melanie Nakagawa, chief sustainability officer at Microsoft, said that "first and foremost is looking at where we will build data centers" and figuring out how to bring more power to those areas and do it cleanly.

The company has a goal to match 100% of its load with renewable energy by the end of this year and is on track toward meeting it, she said.

One of the ways they are doing that is by expanding power purchase agreements as their data center demand grows.

"To date we have around 34 GW of PPAs in over 24 countries," Nakagawa said. Microsoft is also looking at using natural gas-fired power plants with carbon capture to mitigate their emissions impact, she said.

Barrón said there is also an opportunity to uprate existing power plants to get additional capacity and the company is working to relicense some of its nuclear power plants.

Calling this an "incredible moment for innovation," Nakagawa said, "we have to look at resources that already exist and how to enhance them."