Trump Halts Construction on Onshore Wind Turbines

Current conditions: The weekend’s polar vortex chill in New York City is over as temperatures are set to hit 70 degrees Fahrenheit today, your humble correspondent’s birthday • A winter storm blanketing the Sierra Nevadas with as much as four feet of snow on Interstate 80’s Donner Pass, the primary route between Sacramento and Reno named for the notorious 1846 episode of snowbound settlers driven to cannibalism • Days after thermometers finally slid from an almost sauna-like 118 degrees to somewhere in the 90s, thunderstorms are deluging India’s northern Uttar Pradesh state as dust storms blast cities such as Kanpur.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Trump halts construction on onshore wind, citing national security

The Trump administration is bringing construction of virtually all new onshore wind turbines to a halt, putting as many as 165 projects on pause on the grounds that they may threaten national security. The projects, sited on private land, are being stalled by the Department of Defense, and include “wind farms which were awaiting final sign-off, others in the middle of negotiations, and some that typically would not require oversight” by the military, according to the Financial Times. Wind farms require routine approvals from the Pentagon to make sure turbines don’t interfere with radar systems. Normally these assessments are done in a few days. But developers told the newspaper they have faced a mix of setbacks since last August.

Back in December, the administration made a similar argument to justify an order to stop work on all offshore wind farms. Developers sued, and it only took weeks for federal courts to put a pause on the order. That legal strategy is now expected to play out once again on land.

2. U.S. oil majors defy Trump’s call to ramp up drilling as the Iran War strains supply

Exxon Mobil and Chevron are resisting the White House’s pressure to increase oil production as the administration presses U.S. oil majors to ramp up supply to ease the demand shock from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. In an interview with the Financial Times, Exxon’s finance chief Neil Hansen said there would be “no change” to the company’s strategy in the Permian Basin, while Chevron’s chief financial officer Eimear Bonner said “the crisis has not prompted any change to any of our plans.” The statements come days after the price per barrel of crude hit $126 last Thursday. “There’s really no need for us to shift up because we’re already up, we’re already in high gear,” Hansen said. “That doesn’t mean we aren’t looking at the potential to expand that but there are limitations.”

That doesn’t mean the industry isn’t happy to play along with Trump’s other foreign policy ventures. In a post on X last week, Bloomberg columnist Javier Blas highlighted the rapid shift of Exxon Mobil CEO Darren Woods’ views on Venezuela, which went from “uninvestable” in January” to, just four months later, “a huge resource that’s now opened up more freely to the world” where “we’ll be uniquely positioned and play an important role in bringing those barrels to market.” Meanwhile, the U.S. Senate candidate who could become the first Democrat to win statewide in Texas in 32 years has sought to ease the oil industry’s concerns about his political views. In an interview on Tejano singer Bobby Pulido’s podcast, Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico disavowed his party’s past rhetoric promising to phase out oil and gas production. “The idea that politicians in Washington think they can just eliminate this industry, eliminate these jobs, is something we had to fight against, something we have to fight against in our own party,” he said. “I’m a big fan of the renewable industry we’ve got in Texas … but it’s going to take an all-of-the-above approach.” Killing off the U.S. industry while global demand remains in effect is “not practical” and “it’d do so much damage to our state,” he said.

3. North America’s first small modular reactor just hit a critical construction milestone

For all the hype over nuclear power in the United States, the Canadians are the North Americans on track to build the hemisphere’s first small modular reactor. On Friday, Ontario Power Generation’s project to expand its Darlington atomic station just east of Toronto with the world’s first BWRX-300 hit a critical milestone as the province-owned utility completed installation of the reactor’s basement some 35 meters, or about 115 feet, underground. The 300-megawatt unit was designed by GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy, the heir to General Electric’s 20th-century legacy of building the world’s fleet of boiling water reactors that today still makes up the second-largest share of all commercial fission plants after the Westinghouse-pioneered pressurized water reactor. If the reactor enters into service on time in 2029 — a big if — it will be the first on multiple counts: The first SMR from GE Hitachi. The first SMR in either Canada, North America, or the Western Hemisphere. Indeed, the first SMR in the entire democratic world, an overdue moment as China completes its Linglong-1 project in Hainan and Russia’s floating Akademik Lomonosov nuclear station remains in operation. “Ontario is building the Western World’s first small modular reactor,” Stephen Lecce, Ontario’s minister of energy and mines, said in a statement. “Ontario just executed with great precision the first foundation of a new nuclear reactor in Ontario in over 30 years. This is a major achievement as the world turns to Ontario to refurbish and build large scale nuclear on-time and on-budget.”

Ontario set a model for the rest of the region on how to pursue nuclear power despite modern development constraints. Its government-owned utility opted for the reactor over cheaper renewables and batteries by examining a whole systems-cost approach that included the transmission and back-up generation implied by a big solar and wind buildout. That ownership model also inspired neighboring New York to tap in its New York Power Authority, the largest state-owned utility the U.S., to lead the charge on building at least a gigawatt of new reactor capacity, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin explained last year. In December, as I wrote at the time, New York Governor Kathy Hochul forged a nuclear alliance with Ontario’s government to work together on issues related to building new reactors. The U.S. last year pumped $400 million into GE Hitachi’s plan to build America’s first BWRX-300 at the federally owned Tennessee Valley Authority’s Clinch River facility, as I reported for Heatmap.

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4. The Trump administration is still going after New York’s congestion pricing

The Trump administration hasn’t abandoned its effort to kill New York’s congestion pricing scheme. On Friday, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy filed a notice of appeal to U.S. District Judge Lewis Liman’s March 3 decision to dismiss the administration’s lawsuit arguing that New York had overstepped its federal authorization by putting the toll in place. Before New York City implemented congestion pricing, experts warned that the apparent opposition captured in the pages of the New York Post was a paper tiger. Successful efforts to impose tolls on cars driving into dense urban areas with lots of public transit in Singapore and London had followed the same arc: Vehement blowback before the tolls take effect, contented acceptance once the charges become as normal as any other toll on the city’s roads and drivers start enjoying the easing of the gridlock. Within months of congestion pricing taking effect, polls showed that, already, support had flipped with more New Yorkers wanting to keep the tolls in place than eliminate them. But a year in, the results were hard to debate. As The City put it: “Less traffic. Faster buses. More subway riders.”

The latest legal challenge comes as New York grapples with mounting energy issues. In March, the Hochul administration proposed pushing back a key deadline in the state’s landmark decarbonization law. The state has yet to broker a final budget as legislators struggle to reach a deal with the governor’s office. Meanwhile, the state’s grid operator has issued a warning urging regulators to allow two barge-mounted power plants in Brooklyn to stay open past their planned closure.

5. U.S. regulators approve The Metals Company’s deep sea mining bid

What a future deep sea mining control room will look like. The Metals Company

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has ruled that The Metals Company’s deep-seabed mining application is fully compliant with U.S. regulations. On Friday, the Canadian company, which is aiming to harvest mineral-rich nodules from a 1.7-million-acre swath of the Pacific called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, called the approval “a key milestone” toward commercialization that puts the firm on track to start producing metals by the first three months of next year. Under a new regulatory framework NOAA put out, which The Metals Company applied to use, “applicants with exploration-phase data to submit a consolidated application for both an exploration license and commercial recovery permit,” establishing “a more efficient” permitting timeline. “This determination marks an important step forward in NOAA’s transparent, rules-based process, and brings us ever closer to providing the U.S. with a new, abundant and lower-impact source of critical metals,” Gerard Barron, chairman and chief executive of The Metals Company, said in a statement. “It reflects the sheer scale of scientific, environmental, and engineering effort and expertise that have been brought to bear on this project over the last 15 years, which provides us with sufficient information to move efficiently and responsibly into commercial operations under NOAA’s oversight.” Shares in the company surged on Friday in response to the news.

In March, the United Nations’ International Seabed Authority vowed to establish a global framework for regulating deep seabed mining this year, as I wrote at the time. Japan, meanwhile, is stepping up its efforts to create its own seabed mining industry.

THE KICKER

The kiwi disappeared from the hills around New Zealand’s capital more than a century ago. But now the country’s flightless national bird is once again living in Wellington. Last week, the Capital Kiwi Project, a charitable trust that aims to bring the birds back to the city, released its 250th kiwi. “They are a part of who we are and our sense of belonging here,” Paul Ward, founder of the Capital Kiwi Project, told Euronews. “But they’ve been gone from these hills for well over a century and we decided as Wellingtonians that wasn’t right.”