Orsted’s Offshore Wind Projects Are Back on Track

Current conditions: The Seattle Seahawks returned home to a classically rainy, overcast city from their win in last night’s Super Bowl, though the sun is expected to come out for Wednesday's victory parade • Severe Tropical Cyclone Mitchell is pummeling Western Australia with as much as 8 inches of rain • Flash floods from Storm Marta have killed at least four in Morocco.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Orsted’s offshore wind projects are back on track

Orsted’s two major offshore wind projects in the United States are back on track to be completed on schedule, its chief executive said. Rasmus Errboe told the Financial Times that the Revolution Wind and Sunrise Wind projects in New England would come online in the latter half of this year and in 2027, respectively. “We are fully back to work and construction on both projects is moving forward according to plan,” Errboe said. The U.S. has lost upward of $34 billion worth of clean energy projects since President Donald Trump returned to office, as I wrote last week. A new bipartisan bill introduced in the House last week to reform the federal permitting process would bar the White House from yanking back already granted permits. For now, however, the Trump administration has signaled its plans to appeal federal courts’ decisions to rule against its actions to halt construction on offshore turbines.

The fight over the billions in federal funding the White House is holding up for the Gateway rail project between New Jersey and New York, meanwhile, heated up over the weekend. On Friday night, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to unfreeze the nearly $16 billion to the project, just hours after construction ground to a halt as funding ran dry. In her ruling, U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas of the Southern District of New York wrote that “plaintiffs have adequately shown that the public interest would be harmed by a delay in a critical infrastructure project.” Trump had his own idea in mind. Over the weekend, the White House proposed releasing the money only if Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York agreed to rename Penn Station after Trump.

2. Tesla has begun staffing up for its big solar buildout

Tesla has started hiring staff to ramp up production of solar panels as the company looks to build 100 gigawatts of panel-manufacturing capacity supplied with raw materials produced in America. In a job posting on LinkedIn, Seth Winger, Tesla’s senior manager for solar products engineering, wrote that the panel-producing buildout was “an audacious, ambitious project.” For that, he wrote, “we need audacious, ambitious engineers and scientists to help us grow to massive scale. If you want to solve tough manufacturing problems at breakneck speed and help the U.S. breakthrough on renewable energy generation, come join us.” One of the listings indicated that the target date for bringing the new factories online was the “end of 2028,” giving an indication of timing that Reuters noted had been previously absent from Elon Musk’s public statements. Bloomberg reported last week that Tesla is already looking at sites in New York, Arizona, and Idaho for its manufacturing expansion.

3. Trump opens Atlantic Ocean marine preserve to fishing

The Trump administration tried to yank permits from the offshore wind projects off New England on the grounds that the towering turbines caused more ecological destruction than the electricity is worth. On Friday, however, Trump signed a proclamation reopening a giant marine preserve in the Atlantic Ocean to commercial fishing. First established at the end of the Obama administration, the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument lies 130 miles off the coast of Cape Cod, encompassing what The New York Times described as “an area the size of Connecticut that is home to dolphins, endangered whales, sea turtles, and ancient deep-sea corals.” While Trump lifted the ban on commercial fishing in the zone during his first administration, President Joe Biden reinstated the restrictions. But this isn’t the first time Trump reopened a national marine national monument to fishing. In April, he ended protections for the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument located 750 miles west of Hawaii and designated by President George W. Bush in 2009.

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4. Connecticut launches website showing climate risks of every property in the state

Connecitcut’s Department of Insurance has launched a website that displays extensive information about the climate risk of every property in the state in what E&E News called “an unprecedented move to alert residents and to promote flood insurance.” The details include each property’s history of damage from floods and other events predicted to get worse as the planet warms. “A single risk score does not fully convey flood and climate risk,” department spokesperson Mary Quinn said. The department plans a marketing campaign this year with ads on radio, TV, and social media, and workshops for insurance agents on how to use the website. Nationwide, climate change is already raising household costs by $900 per year, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported last year. Wildfires have already “destroyed California’s insurance market,” according to an interview with Heatmap's Shift Key podcast last year with an expert at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

5. Yet another new Chinese nuclear plant prepares to come online

Unit 1 of the Taipingling nuclear power station in China’s Guangdong has reached criticality seven years after construction began on the gigawatt-sized Hualong One reactor. The debut atom-splitting means the newest reactor is months, if not weeks, from entering into commercial operation. If that enticingly single-digit number of years to build a piece of infrastructure that takes the U.S. more than a decade wasn’t enough of a sign of China’s nuclear strengths, the country this week hit another milestone on a separate atomic station. At the Zhangzhou-3 nuclear reactor, workers last week installed the inner steel dome of the containment building.

THE KICKER

Bad Bunny, making fireworks out of Puerto Rico's power struggles.Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images

Nearly a decade after Puerto Rico’s power grid collapsed and plunged America’s most populous territory into the second-longest blackout in world history, the island’s biggest musical star performed a Super Bowl halftime show that included linemen working on transformers. Bad Bunny’s performance, a revue of his reggaeton hits, served as an ode to what he called “my motherland, my homeland, Puerto Rico.” The grid still suffers regular outages. When it’s working, the power system sends occasional surges through wires that fry appliances. Electricity rates are higher than almost any state, despite Puerto Rico suffering worse poverty rates than Mississippi. At one point, Bad Bunny climbed a utility pole on stage waving a light-blue Puerto Rican flag, a symbol of the movement to establish the island territory as its own independent nation. It was a powerful political statement at America’s most-watched sporting event. For energy nerds, it was a rare opportunity to reflect on one of the worst, most prolonged infrastructure disasters in modern American history.