New Jersey governor-elect Mikie Sherrill (D.) turned to former energy secretary Jennifer Granholm, an architect of Biden-era green energy policies—which polls show are unpopular with Garden State voters—to co-chair her transition team’s energy task force.
The governor-elect’s energy team is a quasi-reunion of Biden administration alumni—in addition to Granholm, former Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) member Allison Clements will serve as its other co-chair.
It’s a signal that although Sherrill ran to the middle on energy issues during her gubernatorial campaign, she is prepared to govern as a climate hawk. Granholm and Clements have a long history of supporting far-left policies, such as EV mandates, gas stove bans, and expensive offshore wind projects—policies New Jerseyans broadly do not support.
Granholm was one of the Biden administration’s leading cheerleaders of EVs. As energy secretary, she urged Americans to switch from gas-powered cars to EVs, downplayed concerns about EV ownership like cost and range anxiety, and boasted of the administration’s billion-dollar handouts directed to the EV industry.
Fewer than 10 percent of new car purchases in New Jersey are battery electric, according to the latest industry data, even with a state law requiring electric cars make up 43 percent of new car purchases by 2027. The figure also reflects the views of New Jerseyans, the majority of whom say they wouldn’t consider buying an EV and oppose EV mandates, according to a 2024 Rutgers University poll.
Granholm’s EV promotion culminated in a 2023 four-day road trip where she drove an EV across four states in an attempt to prove the battery-powered cars are reliable. The road trip, though, was derailed after Granholm’s team used gas-powered SUVs to block open EV chargers at a stop in Georgia to make space for her vehicle, a move that prompted angry drivers waiting for a charge to call the police.
Granholm eventually blamed her staff for the incident, explaining that “it was poor judgment on the part of the team.” The road trip resulted in both a congressional investigation and an inspector general probe, which found the trip cost taxpayers $124,823 and that Granholm’s staff’s expenses were higher than the set per diem.
In addition, Granholm, who later acknowledged she owned a gas-powered stove, led the Biden administration’s charge to ban a large swath of gas-powered stove models. Under her leadership, the Energy Department introduced regulations that would have banned half of the gas stove models on the market.
But banning gas stoves is at odds with New Jersey voters’ public opinion. A March 2024 Affordable Energy for New Jersey survey found 67 percent of registered voters prefer natural gas to power their appliances and heat their homes. Only 20 percent prefer electricity to power appliances like stoves. Similarly, only 20 percent of voters support a Garden State proposal to require all homes to transition from natural gas to electric heat.
Granholm was also a proponent of offshore wind during the Biden administration. She helped craft the goal of deploying 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2030, offered $3 billion in federal funding to offshore wind developers, and facilitated power contracts between developers and state regulators.
Two of the offshore wind projects the Biden administration approved were planned for federal waters off the coast of New Jersey. After vigorous opposition from locals, environmental groups, and lawmakers, however, both projects were canceled. The wind farms would have raised electricity rates for residents, according to experts.
Just 29 percent of New Jersey voters support the installation of offshore wind turbines off the state’s coast, according to an October 2024 Stockton University poll. Even among those who agree with the policy, New Jerseyans do not rank creating offshore wind farms as a priority—only 24 percent of voters think offshore wind turbines should be a major priority for lawmakers, according to the Stockton survey.
Granholm’s tenure was marred by conflict-of-interest concerns. She introduced the gas stove rules less than a month after promoting a study about the alleged health harms associated with gas stove use. That study was funded by the Rocky Mountain Institute, an environmental think tank with ties to the Chinese Communist Party and which Granholm met privately with as energy secretary.
Granholm also engaged in private talks with Chinese energy official Zhang Jianhua days before she and Biden announced the United States would sell off tens of millions of barrels of emergency oil reserves, a move critics panned for weakening energy security and giving leverage to adversaries like China.
Jianhua served as an executive of China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation, which purchased at least two million barrels of oil from the emergency reserves the Biden administration sold off.
After former president Biden nominated Granholm to lead the Energy Department in 2021, she reported that she served on the board of directors of and owned a $1 million-$5 million stake in Silicon Valley-based electric bus maker Proterra. She then waited months—and only after Biden personally promoted the company at the White House—before finally selling the stake.
It was the first of several high-profile blunders Granholm made related to stock trades. In 2022, she failed to disclose a series of trades in a timely manner in violation of the STOCK Act, and a year later she admitted to giving false testimony during a Senate hearing when she denied owning individual stocks, sparking calls for her to resign.
As for Clements, the former energy regulator who will co-chair Sherrill’s energy team with Granholm, she also faced conflict-of-interest issues during her tenure.
Clements received criticism in 2022 after internal government correspondences revealed she privately briefed donors of the U.S. Energy Foundation, her former employer. She agreed to go through with the briefing even after an Energy Foundation official suggested it may be inappropriate for her to do so.
Clements also met with leaders of the Natural Resources Defense Council, another left-wing environmental nonprofit she had worked for.
And Clements was the subject of a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee investigation after she failed to recuse herself from matters related to solar firm Sol Systems, which her husband worked for at the time. “Your failure to identify your connection with the green industry is troubling,” the committee wrote to Clements.
Her presence on the five-person FERC ensured Democrats held a 3-2 majority during the Biden administration. While she served, the commission notably issued policies making it easier to block natural gas pipeline projects. Clements also dissented in a case last year in which the commission approved a gas pipeline expansion project in the Pacific Northwest.
Sherrill did not return a request for comment.
Original News Source – Washington Free Beacon
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