Dive Brief:
- The U.S. Department of Energy is expected to reinstate $82.1 million in funding for 11 cancelled clean energy grants that were awarded by the Biden administration, after a federal judge vacated the cancellations on Thursday.
- The plaintiffs — a coalition of groups led by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers — cited a similar case settled in January, in which DOE was ordered to reverse $27.6 billion in grant cancellations and did not contest that a primary reason for their cancellation was that the grantees were located in states that voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris.
- “Plaintiffs in the present case are seven DOE awardees who, like the Saint Paul plaintiffs, are located in a Blue State and had one or more DOE awards terminated in the same October 2025 set of DOE terminations that were at issue in Saint Paul,” the plaintiffs wrote.
Dive Insight:
The grantees in this case sought funding for projects in New York, Oregon, Connecticut, Minnesota and Colorado. One plaintiff, the New Buildings Institute, had four Oregon grants cancelled. All 11 grants were issued by DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, which last year was consolidated into DOE’s Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation.
“The Court enters judgment in favor of Plaintiffs,” wrote U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Amit Mehta in his Thursday ruling. “This is a final, appealable judgment.”
During a Wednesday appearance by Energy Secretary Chris Wright before the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee regarding DOE’s fiscal year 2027 budget request, Congressman Gabe Amo, D-R.I., cited the resolution of the January case and asked Wright when the department would “restore funding to all the projects that were wrongfully terminated.”
“We did not involve politics in the decision-making of our review process. Hands down,” Wright said. “I keep hearing that charge. It’s bulls–t, we’re going to say it a million times.”
DOE’s full set of October terminations included more than $7.5 billion in financial awards to clean energy projects in states that voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris.
The plaintiffs cited in their initial April complaint a post on X from Russell Vought, Director of the United States Office of Management and Budget, which said, “Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left's climate agenda is being cancelled. More info to come from @ENERGY . The projects are in the following states: CA, CO, CT, DE, HI, IL, MD, MA, MN, NH, NJ, NM, NY, OR, VT, WA.” Vought and OMB were also listed as defendants.
“The equal protection guarantee of the Fifth Amendment does not countenance Defendants’ conduct; partisan discrimination and retribution are not a rational basis for differentiating between similarly situated federal grantees,” the plaintiffs wrote.
The award cancellations they contested included a $49.8 million award to the American Institute of Chemical Engineers to support a project to “develop commercially viable processes to reclaim critical minerals and materials from manufactured electrolyzers and fuel cells,” and a $6.1 million award to Proton Energy Systems Inc. for a project “designed to reduce the cost of hydrogen produced through electrolysis to $2/kg by 2026, which would help make this technology competitive with natural gas derived hydrogen.”
“As a direct and proximate result of Defendants’ differential treatment, Plaintiffs have suffered concrete economic and non-economic harm, including loss of funding, loss of funding opportunities, loss of access to federally funded programs and resources, loss of investments, costs of mitigation, diversion of resources, reputational harm, and chilled association,” the complaint said.
