Thom Tillis on energy, China, and leaving the Senate

His diagnosis starts with the institution rather than with energy. Eleven years in the Senate have convinced him that populism has arrived permanently, which he attributes to Barack Obama creating its modern form at the same moment social media changed how news travels, with social media as both amplifier and sustainer. Previous populist eras were built around a personality and burned out within an administration or two; this one, on his account, will not. The consequence for legislating is that sustaining coalitions are hard to build and everything has become transactional. Pundits and social media get inside decision cycles fast enough to create friction, and members retreat to their partisan corners. His working model of a vote is three levers, conscience, constituents and conference, and the job is figuring out which will move a given colleague.

Applied to energy, this produces a position with two halves that a summary would flatten into one. His template is the North Carolina renewable portfolio standard he negotiated as a freshman in the permanent minority, having warned Democrats that a California-modeled version would not work and offered to get in a room and bring Republicans along. What he objects to now is not that subsidies are ending. He says he was already persuadable on ramping the solar credit down and that it is time for solar subsidies to find a sunset; the objection is that it was done too early and too precipitously, with collateral damage. Wind projects cancelled at 70, 80 or 90 percent complete send what he calls a horrible signal and strand costs. He immediately applies the same standard in the other direction, and the target is selective outrage: the people who denounce the cancellation of an Orsted project and tell him he is right about it said nothing when the pipeline he calls XL was killed, which he says pulled two billion dollars of capital back out of the ground. Both parties own where things now stand. His sharpest charge is about business literacy rather than ideology. Whoever cancelled these projects, he suspects, never asked what happens to the forward power purchase agreements behind them, where electrons were already committed to meeting a share of aggregate demand that now has to be met some other way, at the same moment new demand is arriving that cannot possibly be serviced just by traditional generation. He says some of the rate spikes people are seeing will trace back to the administration taking generation assets offline.

On China he breaks with his own party’s instinct twice. He thinks countering China by manufacturing everything domestically is not sustainable for an economy as developed as the American one, and would not survive a change of administration anyway, because brute-forcing industries home only holds if the same priorities persist across presidencies. What he wants instead is a universe of supply chain links near-shore, ideally in this hemisphere, built on relationships that benefit the neighborhood; “Fortress America,” he says, is both unsustainable and not strategic. The exception is anything mineable. The minerals-extraction strategy has to be environmentally sustainable but indigenous, and he has worked for years on a lithium spodumene deposit about forty-five minutes outside Charlotte, one of the largest in North America, where the permits are in hand and the prices are not there to justify developing it. The obstacle he singles out is local: China-hating conservatives who do not want a lithium mine, notwithstanding that this one would be among the most sophisticated electrically driven mining operations ever built and would process on site rather than shipping ore out. He agrees there is a real bipartisan opening here, since one side wants clean battery supply chains and the other wants security of supply, and then closes it off: with 172 days left in this Congress and fewer than 55 of them scheduled legislative days, in an election year, he sees no outcome beyond missionary work, and says this administration will not budge on the near-shoring point.

The constructive half of his prescription is a two-track grid plan and a light touch on AI, and both return to the sequencing claim. On the grid he wants a short and intermediate plan built on technology that exists or can reasonably be expected to arrive on schedule, and alongside it something he calls a Manhattan Project for a capability nobody is currently thinking about. Separately, on what incubators should be pointed at, he asks how to prioritize next-generation wire, if it is wire, or other forms of low-resistance media that would get more of what is generated to the user and eliminate loss. He raises the standard objection himself, that government should not pick winners, and answers it by distinguishing picking one from placing a few hedged bets. He wanted North Carolina to have the most resilient and hardened grid in the country, on the theory that reliability is a site-selection differentiator for data centers and advanced manufacturing, and thinks that should now be a national ambition alongside distributed generation and efficiency. On AI he wants the industry to converge on its own standards body with certification, so buyers can distinguish good actors from the unproven, and a light federal framework quickly, before some sympathetic tragedy produces what he calls a Dodd-Frank for AI that takes years to dig out of while international competitors gain ground. He points at several dozen states already regulating and at Europe’s data privacy regime, which he names only by its initials and calls a failure that had to be fixed after the fact. But none of it, he argues, can start before the ideological argument is finished. He reaches for project management language: this is a finish-to-start relationship, and the first task is getting people to accept that none of these technologies is evil and all of them are necessary.