The Other Country Losing Offshore Wind Developers

Current conditions: A sprawling heat dome stretching from the Midwest to the East Coast is raising temperatures for more than 200 million Americans upward of 100 degrees Fahrenheit this week • Three firefighters died battling wildfires along the Colorado-Utah border on Saturday, while winds fanned the flames of the Cottonwood Fire in southwest Utah into the largest blaze in the U.S. right now • Back-to-back tropical storms Mekkhala and Higos battered Japan’s coast over the weekend, leaving at least one dead in a landslide.

THE TOP FIVE

1. The U.S. isn’t the only country losing offshore wind developers

For much of the past decade, Japan looked primed for offshore wind development for the same reasons the American industry first took root in the Northeast: It’s coastal, densely populated, and — with its nuclear power stations either shut down or idled — it’s more reliant on fossil fuels that it doesn’t locally produce than ever before. But building turbines off Japan’s shores has proven tricky as project costs ballooned. On Friday, Norway’s Equinor announced its decision to close its offshore wind division in Japan, after failing to win any leases at repeated auctions over the past eight years. “This decision reflects a reassessment of Equinor’s strategic direction, with a strengthened focus on integrated power markets,” the company said in a statement on its Japanese website.

The move comes two years after Denmark’s Orsted exited Japan. Last August, a consortium led by the industrial giant Mitsubishi pulled out of Japan’s first three offshore wind projects citing what Reuters described as concerns of surging costs. Last October, as I told you at the time, the newly elected government of Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi postponed a key procedural step for setting government funding levels for offshore wind projects. Instead, as you may recall, Takaichi has put a heavy focus on restarting the nuclear reactors mothballed after the 2011 Fukushima disaster and even expanding the fleet.

2. Greenland rejects controversial rare earths miner’s license renewal

Scaling the capacity of ports like this to handle ore isn’t the only challenge.Lokman Vural Elibol/Anadolu via Getty Images

For much of the 20th century, the geopolitical relevance of the world’s largest island stemmed from its central location as a kind of poker table situated right where Washington, Brussels, and Moscow meet. More recently, it’s been about Greenland’s untapped mineral riches. As polar ice recedes, the autonomous Danish territory has opened previously inaccessible deposits of rare earths and copper to prospecting. For Greenland, whose population of fewer than 60,000 is roughly 85% Indigenous, mining has offered an opportunity to diversify its economy beyond just fishing, augmenting an expanding tourism sector with some heavy industry. In 2017, when I visited local political officials in Nuuk, the capital, sustainability-minded liberals pined for an alternative development approach that took advantage of Greenland’s unique and pristine wilderness to, for example, build out a biomedical industry that draws upon research into the survival traits that allow life to thrive in harsh polar environments. At the time, the populists pitching industrialism as a fast track to independence seemed, to me at least, destined to win the argument. But the green techno-optimists may yet get the chance to prove their approach.

Last week, regulators in Nuuk formally rejected an Australian mining company’s bid to renew its exploration license for one of the most advanced rare earths projects in Greenland. The Western Australia-based Energy Transition Minerals had been locked in litigation with the Greenlandic government over whether its project could safely extract rare earths such as neodymium, praseodymium, and terbium for magnets and batteries without producing uranium as a byproduct. A previous government in Greenland had banned uranium mining in 2021, effectively halting ETM’s Kvanefjeld project. But the company had told investors in February that it “remains confident in the merits” of its position in negotiations with Greenland and “resolute in our intention to develop Kvanefjeld responsibly and in accordance with international best practice.” Just last week, the company published data showing that it had identified 10 new rare earth deposits “with uranium levels recorded below regulatory thresholds.” If it factored into negotiations at all, it wasn’t enough to change the outcome. Following the rejection on Friday, the company told Reuters: “Greenland has positioned itself as open for business. This decision creates a different impression.” In a sign of how the political winds may be shifting, the headline on Sunday’s front-page story in Sermitsiaq, one of Greenland’s only national newspapers, warned of the “environmental bombs” coming just from future American military bases on the island.

3. Baker Hughes makes a big bet on geothermal

Of all the ways to build up, shore up, and clean up America’s grid, geothermal energy is easily among the most elegant, narratively speaking. We already quietly operate the world’s largest geothermal power plant. The new generation of companies racing to build new power stations require the very same battle-hardened drilling equipment, technologies, and workers that sustained the fracking boom and turned the U.S. into a top global producer of oil and gas. Many of the best-mapped hot rocks are located out west, where the federal government owns vast tracts of land, meaning the strong bipartisan consensus in support of geothermal energy development can, in fact, translate into faster approvals for projects. It’s a bet that one of the nation’s largest oilfield services providers is now making. Last week, Baker Hughes inked a deal with the geothermal developer Mantle Reach Power to support construction of as much as 500 megawatts of new generating capacity. As part of the deal, Baker Hughes will provide its drilling technologies, in a move the company said would “de-risk and deliver” on the promises of geothermal power. “Geothermal is a clean power solution that is proving to be a vital contributor to advancing sustainable energy development, with incredible potential to enhance U.S. energy security, support digital infrastructure, and ensure energy remains accessible and affordable,” Baker Hughes CEO Lorenzo Simonelli said in a statement.

Meanwhile, federal regulators just approved the environmental review of a new conventional geothermal project. Once complete, Ormat Technologies’ Pearl geothermal project in Nevada’s Esmeralda County will generate up to 60 megawatts of power. It’s just the latest approval of what Think Geo Energy called a series of approvals for Ormat’s proposed expansion in Nevada.

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4. China makes a big bet on green hydrogen

Even before the Iran War, momentum was gathering in China for a green hydrogen buildout. The “most important low-carbon policy for 2025,” according to the analyst Jian Wu, was China’s decision to start subsidizing green hydrogen-related applications from central government coffers for the first time as Beijing sought to wean off fossil fuel imports and make use of solar and wind farms that had grown so abundant that the country’s grid operators recently phased out key incentives for renewables. Since the war, Beijing has turned its attention to shoring up its domestic fuel supplies, whether by increasing its domestic drilling, chemically-processing coal, or zapping water with enough renewable electricity to cleanly separate out the hydrogen molecules. Now it’s placing a big bet on the latter. China just put out a new five-year plan for the energy sector with a goal to install more than 2 million metric tons of annual capacity to produce green hydrogen by the end of the decade, Hydrogen Insight reported. That would more than double the existing capacity.

Overall, the document raises the target for China to generate half its electricity from non-fossil sources by 2030. But its goals for the wind and solar sectors represent a significant slowdown from the recent pace of development, indicating the government’s interest in diversifying its carbon-free electricity sector.

5. Another day, another new nuclear reactor comes online in China

At present, I see three guarantees in my life: Death, taxes, and the likelihood that another Chinese nuclear plant will make significant enough progress to merit telling you about it. Readers hoping to understand the stakes of America’s incipient nuclear renaissance are wise to keep track of how successfully China’s state-owned reactor developers have been building their own domestically-sourced version of the flagship U.S. reactor design. I can’t keep track of how many times we have covered Chinese reactor milestones. But add this to the list: Last week, World Nuclear News reported, the second of six Hualong One reactors at the Taipingling nuclear power plant in Guangdong province started up, sustaining a chain reaction for the first time. The speed with which China General Nuclear completed the domestically-supplied reactor — the design for which is largely cribbed from the Westinghouse AP1000 — highlights the strategy American atomic energy advocates are increasingly promoting. A nonprofit called the Nuclear Scaling Initiative launched in 2024 to propound the idea of focusing on reactors that can be built identically over and over.

THE KICKER

Investors debate the right way to bet on the nuclear revival, and the growing list of startups debuting on the stock market through reverse merger deals that require less scrutiny than traditional initial public offerings provides ample grist for disagreement. But here’s a surefire wrong way: Selling $1.5 million of call option contracts for your employer’s stock on the day of a major announcement that you are playing a pivotal role in overseeing. Yet that’s exactly what the Department of Justice accuses Casey Muggleston, a former engineering manager in charge of relicensing the shuttered Three Mile Island power plant, of doing on the very day his employer, Constellation, announced a landmark deal with Microsoft to reopen the facility to supply its data centers with electricity. If convicted, Muggleston could face a maximum of 25 years in prison, according to ABC27, a TV news station in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.