Cleveland-Cliffs got $500M for a big green-steel push. Under Trump, the firm is ​“rescoping” to work that perpetuates coal use and will boost local pollution.

Steel giant Cleveland-Cliffs was supposed to use up to $500 million from a Biden administration grant to usher in cleaner steelmaking in southwestern Ohio. Now, the company plans to instead put those funds toward a project that locks in old coal-based tech for decades and amps up local air pollution.

In a July 23 earnings call, Cliffs CEO Lourenco Goncalves confirmed that the company aims to redirect the 2024 grant — which Congress originally earmarked for work that accelerates industrial decarbonization — to align with the pro-fossil-fuel Trump administration’s priorities.

“We have made major progress on the re-scoping of the Middletown project in compliance with the Trump administration’s energy dominance goals,” Goncalves said.

The money from the Department of Energy’s now-dismantled Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations was meant to build a new facility to replace a coke-powered blast furnace at Cliffs’ Middletown Works. Blast furnaces use the dirty, coal-based fuel to purify iron ore into iron, which is then made into steel.

The new ​“direct reduced iron” facility would have purified iron ore without coal or coke by employing ions from natural gas or hydrogen to strip away unwanted oxygen ions. Then, two electric melting furnaces would then have readied the resulting iron for the final steps of steelmaking in the plant’s basic oxygen furnace.

Cliffs had indicated it hoped to eventually use hydrogen at Middletown Works, and the DOE estimated the facility upgrades could have slashed greenhouse gas emissions by up to 1 million tons annually.

But last summer, amid the Trump administration’s clawbacks of Biden-era clean energy funding, Cliffs began reevaluating the plan. A February air-permit application submitted to the state revealed the firm’s new idea: Simply refurbish Middletown Works’ blast furnace so it can run for another few decades, and add a cogeneration plant that uses the furnace’s waste heat to generate electricity and steam for the facility.

It wasn’t clear back in February that this work would be funded by the DOE grant, given that Congress originally allocated the funds for ​“advanced industrial technology,” which is defined as something ​“designed to accelerate greenhouse gas emissions reduction progress to net-zero at an eligible facility.”

Goncalves’ comments in last month’s earnings call confirm that Cliffs does still plan to use the money for the Middletown Works, but to install run-of-the-mill technologies with questionable climate benefits.

“The Middletown blast furnace is due for a reline by 2030,” he said. ​“And this DOE grant will allow us to go further in optimizing the furnace and maximizing energy efficiency by capturing and using blast furnace gas to generate electricity on-site.”

Making electricity from the blast furnace’s gas is better than simply spewing it into the air, and would presumably offset some emissions from producing that power elsewhere. However, the project would still result in many more tons of greenhouse gases than the initial plan.

Goncalves noted that Cliffs would have another public announcement about the project within a month or so. Company representatives did not answer Canary Media’s follow-up questions about the work, its costs, emissions, or other issues.

Climate advocates are lamenting Cliffs’ walkback.

“The original proposal would have cut climate pollution, it would have cut health-harming pollution, and it would have created jobs,” said Hilary Lewis, steel director at Industrious Labs, which advocates for decarbonizing heavy industry.

The cleaner-steel project would also have positioned the facility to compete favorably in markets where buyers still aim to lower their greenhouse gas emissions, she said.

“This is a horrible trade,” Lewis said.

How much more polluting is Cliffs’ new initiative?

Along with its climate impacts, Cliffs’ U-turn will result in its neighbors breathing in more dangerous chemicals.

Already, Middletown Works ranks in the top 10 polluters statewide for several health-harming contaminants, according to a 2024 report from Industrious Labs.

With the cogeneration plant and related upgrades, the plant is expected to annually emit 534 more tons of sulfur dioxide, 334 more tons of carbon monoxide, 179 more tons of nitrogen oxides, and 12 more tons of chemicals that increase smog, according to a draft permit issued by the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency in June. There would also be nearly 100 additional tons of different sizes of particle pollution.

Yet while projected emissions would be higher than those for almost all times during the past five years, the draft permit concludes net reductions will occur for all those health-harming chemicals except carbon monoxide.

That’s because instead of comparing the projected emissions with those in recent years, the Ohio EPA uses data from 2013 to 2015 as a baseline. Back then, Middletown Works still ran a hyper-polluting facility to make coke on-site. That group of ovens shut down in October 2021.

Comments filed by Industrious Labs and other environmental advocates challenge the Ohio EPA’s use of old data to calculate those offsets. They argue that if the agency had used emissions numbers from the past decade as the baseline, it might have found that the plan surpassed thresholds that would trigger further regulation or pollution limits.

Meanwhile, the Ohio EPA’s offset calculation offer little comfort for some area residents who have long felt plagued by the plant’s pollution.

“The cogen plant will reduce Cliffs’ energy use, saving them money, while they continue to harm [my] family and my neighbors’ health, and [with] even more pollution,” said Donna Ballinger, who lives approximately 1,000 feet from the Middletown Works and spoke at a July 9 public hearing.

Another local, Amy Wray, wrote to the Ohio EPA, ​“If it’s going to increase pollutants then we don’t want it. This town is already a toxic chemical soup.”

Still, Cliffs has substantial support from locals who see the plan as an environmentally sound way to keep the Middletown Works going.

“The proposed improvements to Cleveland-Cliffs will significantly reduce the facility’s carbon footprint while securing high-quality manufacturer and construction jobs for generations to come,” said Brian Kuhbander, who spoke for the Construction and General Laborers’ Local 534 union at the July 9 hearing.

It’s worth noting that the original green steel plan would have had big employment benefits, too. Besides protecting more than 2,000 existing jobs at the Middletown Works, the new facilities would have created 170 new permanent positions in addition to 1,200 construction jobs.

The public comment period on the draft permit is over, and the Ohio EPA expects to make a decision on a final permit by the end of this year, according to Dina Pierce, a public information officer for the agency. Cliffs has 18 months to begin construction once a permit is issued.

How long it may take to finish the project remains unclear. As power demand from data centers skyrockets, waiting lists for turbines needed for the cogeneration plant have grown to five years or more.

Lewis of Industrious Labs said it’s ​“not too late” to switch back to the earlier approach, particularly since the company did a lot of work to develop the cleaner-steel plan. A 2024 press release from Cliffs said it was prepared to invest more than $1 billion in addition to the government funding for that project, which would also have curbed its future production costs.

“They can — and they should — bring back that original plan,” Lewis said.

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The Department of Energy has canceled or stalled funding for thousands of projects that would improve the country’s stressed grid — and not just in blue states.

In Wisconsin, utility Alliant Energy has called off a project meant to reduce power outages in disadvantaged and tribal communities, after the Trump administration terminated a federal grant that would have supported it.

In California, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, which has deployed and upgraded hundreds of thousands of advanced smart meters, has not received any reimbursement from the U.S. Department of Energy for the work since October, when the Trump administration declared it was killing grants that it described as fueling ​“the Left’s climate agenda.”

And in the upper Midwest, a consortium of regional grid operators, utilities, and state agencies is still waiting for $464 million in DOE funds meant to help build high-voltage transmission lines to reduce grid congestion — although the agency in charge of the project says the funding will soon be restored.

Across the country, hundreds of such projects to improve grid reliability and make electricity more affordable face a highly uncertain future — the result of Trump administration actions that have slowed the outflow of billions of dollars of DOE funds to a trickle.

Some of those projects in ​“blue states” were targeted as political retribution, as recent reporting from The New York Times has made clear. A handful of grant awardees in this category have won favorable court rulings, and more are seeking legal redress.

But many others are suffering from the DOE’s broader failure to carry out work that Congress has tasked it to do, according to groups that have been monitoring the agency since the start of last year. In red and blue states alike, the DOE is forcing thousands of grantees to undergo a laborious review process, so even projects that have not been officially terminated are stuck, unable to determine when or if they’ll start getting the money they’re owed.

According to an April report from the DOE Alumni Network, a group of former agency employees, the DOE has announced the termination of 356 awards totaling $12.5 billion since January 2025, and has threatened to terminate 303 additional awards worth $12.2 billion.

But the DOE has also stalled projects for ​“a large number of awardees who have never appeared on any list,” the report found. ​“This means the agency is not moving forward to resolve disputes, finalize conditional awards, or respond to continuation applications, leaving projects in administrative limbo and functionally freezing promised funds.”

“DOE both overtly canceled a set of projects, then had this pattern of behavior where for 15 months they stopped actively managing projects,” said one former DOE official. ​“Projects can’t proceed to the next stages and get their next tranche of funding.”

The former official, who asked not to be named, described a pattern of stalling, stonewalling, and ​“ghosting” utilities, state governments, energy companies, and nonprofit groups awarded grants under the Biden administration.

Many of those projects have been caught up in a process the DOE announced in May 2025 to review all financial assistance ​“on a case-by-case basis to identity [sic] waste of taxpayer dollars, protect America’s national security and advance President Trump’s commitment to unleash affordable, reliable and secure energy for the American people.”

Then, in October, the DOE announced the ​“termination of 321 financial awards supporting 223 projects” — all of them tied to states that voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. The DOE’s termination announcement came right after Russ Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, declared in a social media post that the administration would cancel ​“nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding.”

Canary Media reached out to a subset of DOE grantees that had won funding from the Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) program created by the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law. The DOE issued a total of more than 100 GRIP grants — in October 2023, August 2024, and October 2024 — for projects to enlarge the grid, harden it against extreme weather, build microgrids to protect vulnerable communities, and deploy technologies to integrate solar, wind, EVs, and batteries.

Some of the GRIP projects involve expanding clean energy and serving disadvantaged communities, two bugbears of the Trump administration. But many more are straightforward grid improvement projects that need federal dollars to reduce the costs borne by utilities and regional or state agencies.

The largest of these is in California. In 2024, the DOE awarded a $630.6 million grant aimed at upgrading more than 100 miles of high-voltage power lines in the state with advanced power cables capable of carrying more electricity along existing transmission corridors, a project estimated to be capable of delivering about $200 million in savings from improved energy efficiency. That project appeared on the termination list in October, and the DOE has not disbursed money for it, according to federal records, though negotiations for resuming funding are underway.

This uncertainty appears to apply to the majority of GRIP projects, according to Emlyn Bottomley, founder of the consultancy High Road Analytics, which focuses on workforce development, and a former Department of Labor deputy policy director in the Biden administration.

According to his tracking of federal spending, of the roughly $11.4 billion in DOE funds obligated to grid infrastructure and resilience — a category that includes GRIP program funds — $9.1 billion remains ​“at risk,” with funding stalled or timelines for completion shortened. That’s compared with $400 million in grants that have been canceled outright and $1.3 billion not yet disbursed but showing no signs of being stalled.

“It’s a shame these projects are being held up or canceled, especially since the case for them is fairly bipartisan — spanning national security, economic competitiveness, and cost and affordability,” Bottomley said.

All of the GRIP projects required partners to provide matching funds at an amount at least equal to the money DOE is providing, the former DOE official added. ​“You’re talking about folks putting hundreds of millions of dollars on the line. People have skin in the game for these awards.”

The costs of losing federal funding

Many of the GRIP grantees contacted by Canary Media declined to comment, citing ongoing discussions with DOE. Others reported that they are no longer pursuing the projects as described in their grant applications, at least not with the help of DOE money.

The latter is the case for Alliant Energy’s Smart Power Automation in Rural Communities (SPARC) project, which won a $50 million grant in late 2024 to add grid visibility and control devices to 140 grid circuits in disadvantaged and tribal communities served by subsidiary Wisconsin Power & Light — a utility in a blue state.

Those devices could allow the utility to quickly find and isolate faults on its grid, cutting power outages in targeted communities by up to 50%. They could also support grid-management software to help integrate more renewable and distributed energy, and potentially expand wireless communications access to these remote areas.

Alliant ​“voluntarily withdrew” from the grant award process in April, six months after its grant was terminated by the DOE, Alliant spokesperson Melissa McCarville told Canary Media. The agency has disbursed no funds to the project, according to federal records.

Alliant is ​“actively pursuing many of the goals that were outlined in the SPARC project,” McCarville wrote in a May email, but as part of a 10-year strategic plan with no set timeline. ​“While the grant did provide valuable funding, it also required a significant investment, and we want to ensure our contributions are properly prioritized,” she wrote.

Still, at least one grant-funded project in a blue state is proceeding despite the absence of DOE funds.

That’s the case for the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, which serves the state’s capitol and environs. In 2023, SMUD won a $50 million grant to support a project to deploy 200,000 smart meters and grid devices and underlying software controls to ​“improve grid reliability, resilience, visibility and efficiency,” utility spokesperson Gamaliel Ortiz told Canary Media in an email.

SMUD has carried out much of that work, which includes close to $100 million in utility spending, and has received almost $33 million in reimbursements from DOE, according to federal records. However, SMUD ​“has not received reimbursement for any costs incurred after the grant was cancelled on October 10, 2025,” Ortiz wrote. ​“We remain committed to this critical work and stay flexible as we evaluate how the loss of grant funding may impact the project timeline.”

In other blue states, some grants have been canceled and others are still under negotiation. In Oregon, utility Portland General Electric has recently learned that the DOE may reinstate a previously terminated $50 million grant to support next-generation ​“grid edge computing” devices, utility spokesperson John Farmer told Canary Media in an August email. That project had received only $1.2 million in DOE funding, according to federal records.

The purpose of the project was to integrate batteries, EVs, and community solar into its grid to ​“improve resilience, enable the integration of distributed energy resources, and maximize customer investments in home energy solutions.”

“PGE is evaluating the benefits and risks of reinstating the grant,” Farmer told Canary Media. The utility ​“recognizes that there are inherent risks of additional and changing demands by the DOE as the administration’s priorities change.”

At the same time, PGE remains in discussion with the DOE on a $250 million grant to build a high-voltage transmission line with the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, Farmer wrote. ​“Without this funding, we would lose the opportunity to offset those costs with external dollars, which could limit how efficiently we can advance needed grid improvements.”

Red state projects are also being held up because the grantee is located in a blue state. Such is the case of the aforementioned $464 million DOE grant for the Joint Targeted Interconnection Queue project to build new transmission lines between the Midcontinent Independent System Operator and Southwest Power Pool, two grid operators spanning nearly a dozen Midwestern states.

The $464 million GRIP grant was meant to bolster $1.3 billion in matching funds from utilities in the region to enable nearly 30 gigawatts of new generation to be built in Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota. All but one of those states voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 election — but the Minnesota Department of Commerce, the entity awarded the grant, is in a blue state.

In May, the Minnesota Department of Commerce announced that the DOE ​“will honor its $464 million grant,” which will ​“unlock more than $1 billion in additional private investment and provide communities across the region with economic and infrastructure benefits.”

A DOE spokesperson told Canary Media in a July email that the DOE has conducted its review of GRIP projects based on a ​“number of criteria,” including whether it has ​“achieved the milestones set forth in the terms of the award,” whether it ​“remains technically and economically feasible,” and whether it ​“continues to effectuate the purpose of the program or the Department’s priorities.”

The spokesperson added that ​“none of the termination decisions were based on political considerations.” That statement is belied by court testimony reported by The New York Times last month, in which a DOE lawyer stated that none of the October grant terminations were ​“based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction or performance-based factor,” and that all but one of them ​“had a recipient location and/​or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing senators.”

During a series of congressional hearings in April, Energy Secretary Chris Wright stated that the DOE’s review of more than 20,000 grants was almost complete, and that more than 80% of grantees had received notice that their awards could proceed as is or with modifications.

But an Alumni Network analysis of DOE data shared with Congress showed that the DOE’s review both failed to restore the vast majority of projects caught up in the ​“blue state” termination action in October and failed to address the hundreds of projects that have never been officially terminated but remain unable to secure funds.

The revelation of the DOE’s explicit targeting of blue states for grant termination spurred 39 Senate Democrats to sign a letter to Wright and Vought demanding the immediate restoration of funding for DOE projects terminated in October.

“Once an Administration begins punishing Americans for how they vote,” the senators wrote, ​“the threat extends far beyond these projects: no state, community, business, or worker can trust that the federal government will apply the law fairly.”

A correction was made on Aug. 12, 2026. The story initially stated that a DOE grant to the California Energy Commission was terminated. That grant appeared on a list of grants targeted for termination, but was not officially terminated, according to the CEC.

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The startup, newly valued at $13 billion, is now manufacturing batteries in Texas. It offers an affordable way for homeowners to get backup power and it helps the grid too.

Home battery startup Base Power seems constitutionally incapable of standing still. After raising $1 billion last October, the Texas company has raised another $1 billion, and upped its valuation from $4 billion to $13 billion.

The latest investment, led by Ribbit, Addition, Valor Equity Partners, and JPMorganChase’s Strategic Investment Group, amounts to one of the largest validations so far for the theory that small-scale energy devices can play a role in meeting the nation’s ravenous demand for new power.

Households could easily spend more than $10,000 to buy their own batteries, but Base Power installs unusually powerful batteries at customers’ homes for an up-front fee ($95 to $695, depending on location) plus an ongoing electricity supply subscription. This model lets more homes access emergency backup power when the grid goes down, and cheaper power on normal days. In exchange, Base Power uses those energy storage systems to provide power to the grid when it’s most stressed — a service that makes money for the company.

Clean energy advocates have called for this kind of distributed energy model for years, saying that generating and storing power in homes and businesses can make more sense than relying on an increasingly expensive centralized grid, if only someone would compensate the systems properly. The market has been slow to heed their calls. But now AI companies are paying top dollar for energy wherever they can find it, and the idea of controlling thousands of dispatchable home batteries lights up investors like never before.

“There’s a real need on the grid for capacity in Illinois and Texas and frankly everywhere else in the U.S. now,” said Base Power co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Justin Lopas. ​“Distributed batteries are a way that we can add meaningful capacity to the grid.”

In less than three years of operating, Base Power has installed batteries at 17,000 homes, mostly in Texas but recently in Illinois as well. With the ability to provide more than 500 megawatt-hours of power, that aggregated fleet stores as much energy as one of the large utility-scale batteries you could find in the Texas countryside or the California desert. But those projects take years of development and permitting before they can enter construction, while Base Power installers add multiple batteries in a day.

The new funding will equip Base Power to expand its team and increase the rate of installs, Lopas said. But the company has also been working to speed deployments another way: by taking over its own supply chain.

Base Power has been installing batteries that were manufactured to its specifications by a ​“non-China” overseas supplier, Lopas said. Now, the company has multiple production lines up and running in the former Austin American-Statesman newspaper building in Austin, Texas. This means products can come off the line and go right on a truck for delivery, instead of getting shipped in from overseas.

Base Power’s engineers finessed their design to make life easier for the company’s in-house installers. Many home batteries are mounted on walls, but Base Power has decided to go a different route.

“Ours are installed on the ground, not the wall,” Lopas said. ​“That simplifies the install, and you don’t have to carry different screws for brick and stone and siding and all this other stuff.”

Base Power has a contract to begin sourcing domestic battery cells by the end of the year, and already buys all the data-processing ​“smart” components for the battery systems from the U.S., to improve cybersecurity. That also sets up the company to avoid bureaucratic snarls around electronics from China; the White House recently banned new foreign inverters on national security grounds.

The new Base Core model coming off the line in Austin also packs more of a punch in terms of energy. It can push 20 kilowatts of instantaneous power, and stores nearly 40 kilowatt-hours. That’s far beyond the conventional format popularized by the Tesla Powerwall, which discharges 5 kilowatts and stores 14 kilowatt-hours. Customers can stack more than one Base Core for even more storage.

“Our financial model is very aligned with our customers,” Lopas said. ​“They want as long a duration of backup as they can get, and we want to put as much energy as we can on the home.”

Now the company has a vast war chest to hire more installers, who will each install more energy capacity per visit. Different states are working on mechanisms to nudge AI hyperscalers to pay for distributed energy to meet some of their capacity needs. Those policies are in their infancy, but Base Power sees plenty of runway to grow using the current market rules in Texas and Illinois, Lopas said. The startup also works with utilities to set up home battery networks to solve grid problems, a model that could scale in the states that lack a Texas-style competitive power market.

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