'A Collective WTF': National Renewable Energy Laboratory Gets a Trumpian Name Change
NREL employees, many of whom joined the lab specifically to work toward its clean energy mission, are not happy about the oil-soaked leadership's moves.
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If you head to the "Mission and Vision" page of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's website this morning, you will find a largely inoffensive top-line statement:
NREL strives to achieve our vision of an affordable and secure energy future through our mission: leading research, innovation, and strategic partnerships to deliver integrated solutions for an affordable and secure energy future.
Given the "R" in that acronym, still sitting there even though the banner at the top of the page says otherwise, one might wonder about the broad scope. And yes, head to an archived older version of the same page, and some slight differences emerge:
NREL strives to achieve our vision of a clean energy future for the world through our mission: leading research, innovation, and strategic partnerships to deliver solutions for a clean energy economy.
Finally, our long national nightmare involving a research laboratory trying to further "clean" energy is over. NREL leadership announced an absurdist name change on Monday, dubbing the institution that has helped expand renewable resources and bring costs down in a wide variety of ways the National Laboratory of the Rockies. It is in Colorado, you see.
"There was a collective WTF?" one NREL employee told me on Monday night, after Assistant Secretary of Energy Audrey Robertson informed staff of the change at an all-hands meeting. "Morale is bad. Funding is tenuous," they went on. "I've been through two W administrations, many R congresses, and [the first] Trump admin. This is the worst."
NREL has its origins in the oil shocks of the 1970s, starting out as the Solar Energy Research Institute under Gerald Ford. It took a couple of decades before it was granted National Laboratory status; George H.W. Bush renamed it NREL in September, 1991, and over its history the scientists there have produced close to 1,000 patents, more than 50,000 scientific publications, and have generated billions in economic benefit.
According to multiple sources who were either in the room with Robertson for the announcement or attending via video call, she seems to share the Trumpian aversion to the very idea of energy sources that don't involve burning dirty things. She repeatedly referred to an "energy crisis," echoing the day-one executive order creating an "emergency" out of whole cloth, claimed that "renewable energy" in the lab's name was somehow "anti-science," and for some reason invoked "foreign adversaries" multiple times during the meeting.
According to another NREL source, there have been rumors or discussion about a name change for a while, but there was no real indication of it happening until Monday. "There are multiple national labs in the Rocky Mountains" — like the Idaho National Laboratory, for example — "so it doesn't even make sense," they said. "Thank fucking goodness it's not the Energy Dominance Lab."
Robertson is a logical Trump pick to run the DOE's renewables office — she was an oil executive. She founded Franklin Mountain Energy, a fracking firm with various EPA violations that has since been sold, and sat on the board of oil and gas services company Liberty Energy — where Secretary of Energy Chris Wright was the CEO. A cozy little oil-soaked crew, over at the DOE.
One NREL source said she "loved to mention" her history as an oil company founder on Monday. Robertson apparently justified the name change by saying it keeps the researchers there from being "pigeonholed" — heaven forbid the renewable energy researchers be expected to focus on renewable energy. She claimed that working toward a clean energy future was not actually NREL's mission for a long time, which is a straight-up lie.
"It was our mission until it changed this year and most people I know were drawn to work here because of the clean energy mission," another staffer told me on Tuesday morning. "They are politicizing something that has always been apolitical – renewables are growing around the world. More policing of verbiage than focusing on good science."
Another agreed that many staff are disappointed with the name change. "We are proud of what we do and why we do it. Most of us moved here to work at NREL not some weapons lab."
They added that it doesn't seem clear if Robertson understands the difference between "energy" and "electricity," which seems like an issue. She repeatedly said she "hates" — or even "doesn't believe in," per one source — "clean energy," explaining that adjusted mission mentioned above. She told staff that she was not herself considering any reductions in staff given the changes, though the administration may have other priorities. Which is, surely, comforting — and another source pointed out that many NREL projects remain in funding limbo, and if they don't start to get more approvals staff attrition is likely inevitable.
The best-case scenario here is that maybe the lab will be largely left alone outside of the name change, and this could be considered largely symbolic. Some had speculated earlier that just getting "renewable" out of there would help pry Trump's Sauron-like eye away and just let the scientists there continue their work; but that doesn't mean the people there are happy about it.
"Ridiculous on the surface," one source told me on Monday. "Many work at NREL since it has a noble mission." The staffer attended the all-hands meeting remotely, and a group were chatting on the side throughout. "They are not taking this well at all."
