ACORE Statement on Interior’s Clean Energy Review Process

July 17, 2025

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The following is a statement from Ray Long, President and CEO of the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE), on the Department of the Interior’s announcement that the Secretary will begin new and extensive review procedures for clean energy development:

“Today’s announcement by the Department of the Interior amounts to a tsunami of red tape and roadblocks for private investment in wind and solar energy projects. Requiring Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s personal approval on at least 69 distinct permitting actions — from site leasing to rights of way applications — on potentially hundreds of projects represents an unnecessary and inefficient approach to permitting that will lead to significant delays and uncertainty. It stands in direct conflict with the Secretary’s stated goals as chair of the National Energy Dominance Council: to increase domestic energy production and streamline development.

“Electricity demand is surging, driven by AI, data center expansion, and the successful reshoring of U.S. manufacturing. The only viable way to meet this demand reliably and affordably is by building all technologies, including wind and solar. Handcuffing energy deployment in this way directly undermines U.S. energy competitiveness and risks ceding global leadership in both energy production and AI.

“The Administration seems set on derailing an industry that has brought manufacturing back to communities across the country, lead to thousands of good-paying American jobs, and is backed by billions of dollars of private investment. Worse still, moves like this inject new uncertainty throughout the entire energy sector, driving up costs for American homes and businesses, and leading to energy shortages, all within the next few years.”

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ABOUT ACORE

For over 20 years, the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE) has been the nation’s leading voice on the issues most essential to clean energy expansion. ACORE unites finance, policy, and technology to accelerate the transition to a clean energy economy. For more information, please visit http://www.acore.org.

Media Contacts:
Stephanie Genco
Senior Vice President, Communications
American Council on Renewable Energy
genco@acore.org

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https://acore.org/news/acore-statement-on-interiors-clean-energy-review-process/

Renewable Energy

Renewable Energy Concepts Can’t Violate the Laws of Physics

Published

17 hours ago

February 28, 2026

Alice Rush

In the early days of 2GreenEnergy, my people and I were vigorously engaged in finding solid ideas in cleantech that needed funding in order to move forward.

I vividly remember a conversation with a guy in Maryland who was trying to explain the (ostensible) breakthrough that he and his team had made in hydrokinetics. When I was having trouble visualizing what we was talking about, he asked me to “think of it as a river in a box.”

“Oh!” I exclaimed. “You mean you take a box full of standing water, add energy to it get it moving, then extract that energy, leaving you with more energy that you added to it.”

“Exactly.”

I politely explained that the laws of physics, specifically the first and second laws of thermodynamics, make this impossible.

He wasn’t through, however, and insisted that, in his office, his people had constructed a “working model.”

Here’s where my tone descended into something less than 100% polite. I told him that he may think he has a working model, but he’s wrong; if he believes this, he’s ignorant; if he doesn’t, but is conducting this conversation anyway, he’s a fraud.

“But don’t you want to come see it?” he implored.

“No. Not only would not fly across the country to see whatever it is you claim to have built, I wouldn’t walk across the street to a “working model” of something that is theoretically impossible.”

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I tell this story because the claim made at the upper left is essentially identical. You’re pumping water up out of a stream, and then claiming to extract more energy when the water flows back into the stream.

Of course, social media today is rife with complete crap like this. We’ve devolved to a point where defrauding money out of idiots is rapidly replacing baseball as our national pastime.