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Marvel at America’s green transition on your next vacation.
Scroll past San Jacinto Mountain, Brandini Toffee, a bicycle-powered bar crawl, and 13 other attractions on Tripadvisor’s list of “Things to Do in Palm Springs” and you’ll come to “Palm Springs Windmill Tours.” Its user-generated blurb tells would-be visitors to expect “a tour in the middle of wind turbine generators,” lest the name suggests something slightly more romantic and Dutch. In the accompanying photo, a black convertible noses toward the white gyrating towers that have become synonymous with the north entrance to the Coachella Valley.
If you leave your uncannily verdant gated community and drive up Highway 10 — away from the Mod Squad architectural tour and the horseback rides at Smoke Tree Stables, past signs advertising breast augmentations and the Air Force Reserve to homebound Angelenos — you’ll eventually reach a frontage road where a WINDMILL TOURS PARKING sign directs visitors toward an unassuming green trailer for check-in. All around the parking lot, and on both sides of the highway, you can already see the main attractions: wind turbines, many of them taller than the Statue of Liberty, though perspective is difficult here since there are hardly any normal-sized reference points, like palm trees, around for orientation.
One thing is immediately clear: This is “not Disneyland,” as Tom Spiglanin, Palm Springs Windmill Tours’ enthusiastic education director, will be the first to admit. “We’re not fun and games,” Spiglanin adds on a video call, about a week after I take a tour for myself. “Here, we are education.”
Once wind tour visitors have their curiosity piqued, “then we force the history down their throat, and it all turns out to be this great experience at the end,” says Tom Spiglanin.Heatmap/Jeva Lange
Visiting a wind farm on vacation admittedly might not be at the top of most people’s to-do lists. They still have a reputation as eye-sores: “Palm Springs, California, has been destroyed — absolutely destroyed — by the world’s ugliest wind farm at the Gateway on Interstate 10,” one future president tweeted in 2012. Even today, wind naysayers will leave fake one-star reviews that Spiglanin and his team have to dutifully remove.
But while it might not be much to look at from the parking lot, Palm Springs Windmill Tours sits at the intersection of two rich niches of the modern travel industry: eco-tourism and industrial tourism. The former is considered to be the fastest-growing segment within the global tourism industry; the latter is why I spent many a family car trip being shuttled to places like Grand Coulee Dam and Hoover Dam to marvel at the wonders of human engineering and hydroelectric power.
Though commercial wind farms are younger than Depression-era public works projects (Palm Spring’s just turned 40) and less scenic than a carbon-neutral eco-lodge in Costa Rica, they might have a place in the travel plans of the future: For one thing, as Spiglanin said, they’re educational. But they’re also an experience of history in real-time, almost like watching the Hoover Dam being built, something Palm Springs Windmill Tours impresses upon you with its first stop, an exhibit of obsolete and phased-out designs, the newest of which, the massive Zond Z-50, was removed from operation as recently as August 2022. Visiting a wind farm might still mostly be the dominion of nerds, but perhaps not for much longer; to tour one is to witness the unfolding story of America’s green transition.
The day I talk to Spiglanin, the wind is buffeting the tour trailer at 35 to 50 miles per hour — he shows me an app on his phone that caught one gust clocking in at 63 mph. April to June is windy season on the farm, when the phenomenon that makes the region so desirable for the renewable energy sector — hot air in the Valley rising, allowing cold air from the coast to funnel, with gusto, through San Gorgonio Pass — is at its most forceful. Across the highway from the trailer, a cluster of turbines have stopped turning, which sometimes happens to protect the machinery when the wind speeds are too high, though Spiglanin doesn’t think that’s the issue today. Maybe a circuit got shut off?
The Windmill Tours operate on Wintec Energy-owned land, but there is little communication between the tour company and the businesses that run the turbines, Spiglanin says. Though the tours initially began as a promotional arm of Wintec in the 1990s, intended to dispel negative local perceptions about the turbines, those ended after 9/11, when it seemed like it might not be such a good idea to have strangers tromping around on a piece of the local power grid. In 2014, Palm Springs Windmill Tours started anew as an LLC; though it’s still located on Wintec-owned land, its purposes are no longer strictly promotional — which is great for visitors, but leaves Spiglanin to wonder about things like why Brookfield Renewables, a Canadian power company that leases public land in the nearby hills, recently removed over 450 older turbines but hasn’t yet replaced them with its planned nine newer machines.
The tours are actually a bit of a joke among the techs who work on the turbines. “They laugh at the word ‘windmill’ because they're like, ‘dude, it’s not a windmill, it doesn’t have a grist stone,’” Spiglanin says. “And I'm like, ‘well, windmills don’t just have grist stones. They also pumped water, they started with grinding grain, but then—.’ And so we get into this whole thing, and it turns out I know a lot more about their business than they do.”
Spiglanin has a PhD in chemical physics and retired to the Coachella Valley after working as an educator at the Aerospace Corporation, in Los Angeles, for years. Driving past the windmills, he used to wonder if they had a tour; “lo and behold,” they did, and he ended up marrying the woman who ran their marketing. When it comes to wind, he’s thus a bit of a self-taught enthusiast, doing his own research for the exhibits and joining wind energy Facebook groups to geek out over, and glean more information about, the archival photos he uploads. He has also independently published a book of his research, Backstories of the Palm Springs Windmills, which is available in the gift shop along with stickers that read “I’m a big FAN of renewable energy.” (Wind nerds love puns; when I was checking in for my tour, I was asked what a turbine’s favorite music genre is. Heavy metal).
A view of a turbine out the sun roof during a recent self-driving tour.Heatmap/Jeva Lange
Recently, Palm Springs Windmill Tours learned they’re not the only land-based wind tour in the nation. Another wind farm in Washington State offers tours from a sparkling new visitor’s center that has vistas of the Cascades, as well as a hard-hat experience that allows visitors to actually look inside a turbine (in Palm Springs, guests have to stay 100 yards back from the operating machinery, something my dad, who was with me, eagerly pressed by counting out his strides). But the Washington tour is run by Puget Sound Energy, the regional energy supplier; Palm Springs Windmill Tours is uniquely independent and history-focused, taking what Spiglanin — with a nod to the Alcatraz Island tours — calls the National Park approach: “We have something here. We’re interpreting it. We’re helping people and our guests who come through here understand it.”
Other nations have also caught onto the draw wind farms have for visitors. In Scotland, England, and Denmark, wind farm tours have taken off with an added dash of adventure — boats bring visitors beneath the blades of offshore farms, while others offer mountain biking or hiking trails around the turbines. “While there’s no data to indicate the size of this nascent slice of the hospitality sector,” writes Bloomberg, “there is ample research to suggest that travelers are not only unfazed by wind farms, but find them objects of fascination.” As a boat captain who runs tours at a wind farm off of Rhode Island told the publication, “I thought, ‘This is definitely going to be a moneymaker.’”
It’s not necessarily a heightened interest in renewable energy, though, that is bringing visitors. Spiglanin says many of the guests who come to Palm Springs are actually interested in robotics. That is particularly true this year, since the world’s major high school robotics competition is focused this season on the future of sustainable energy and power: “As a result of that, we had a family fly down in a private jet from San Jose so that these kids could learn about wind energy, and they flew back the same day,” Spiglanin tells me.
Palm Springs Windmill Tours doesn’t mind shifting to fit the interests of its visitors, whether they’re engineers or curious passing travelers to whom “325 megawatts” — the storage capacity of an enormous new battery facility being built on the grounds — is just a number. The tour adapted to COVID-19 with a self-driving tour (the one I took, facilitated by an app) as well as an open-air golf cart tour. They’re bringing back bus tours this summer, too, both so tourists can stay air-conditioned as the temperatures begin to crest 100 degrees, but also because — as I increasingly realized speaking with Spiglanin — you can’t beat the experience of having a live, personal wind “fan” lead your way.
You won’t get views like you do from taking “the tram up to the top [of San Jacinto Mountain]” — the 8th-ranked attraction — “and we don’t give you good food. We actually don’t serve any food,” Spiglanin says. People still mostly come to Palm Springs for the music and the golf courses, the casinos and the Elvis honeymoon house, the sun and the stargazing. But maybe one day, they’ll come for the wind, too.
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The nonprofit laid off 36 employees, or 28% of its headcount.
The Trump administration’s funding freeze has hit the leading electrification nonprofit Rewiring America, which announced Thursday that it will be cutting its workforce by 28%, or 36 employees. In a letter to the team, the organization’s cofounder and CEO Ari Matusiak placed the blame squarely on the Trump administration’s attempts to claw back billions in funding allocated through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
“The volatility we face is not something we created: it is being directed at us,” Matusiak wrote in his public letter to employees. Along with a group of four other housing, climate, and community organizations, collectively known as Power Forward Communities, Rewiring America was the recipient of a $2 billion GGRF grant last April to help decarbonize American homes.
Now, the future of that funding is being held up in court. GGRF funds have been frozen since mid-February as Lee Zeldin’s Environmental Protection Agency has tried to rescind $20 billion of the program’s $27 billion total funding, an effort that a federal judge blocked in March. While that judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, called the EPA’s actions “arbitrary and capricious,” for now the money remains locked up in a Citibank account. This has wreaked havoc on organizations such as Rewiring America, which structured projects and staffing decisions around the grants.
“Since February, we have been unable to access our competitively and lawfully awarded grant dollars,” Matusiak wrote in a LinkedIn post on Thursday. “We have been the subject of baseless and defamatory attacks. We are facing purposeful volatility designed to prevent us from fulfilling our obligations and from delivering lower energy costs and cheaper electricity to millions of American households across the country.”
Matusiak wrote that while “Rewiring America is not going anywhere,” the organization is planning to address said volatility by tightening its focus on working with states to lower electricity costs, building a digital marketplace for households to access electric upgrades, and courting investment from third parties such as hyperscale cloud service providers, utilities, and manufacturers. Matusiak also said Rewiring America will be restructured “into a tighter formation,” such that it can continue to operate even if the GGRF funding never comes through.
Power Forward Communities is also continuing to fight for its money in court. Right there with it are the Climate United Fund and the Coalition for Green Capital, which were awarded nearly $7 billion and $5 billion, respectively, through the GGRF.
What specific teams within Rewiring America are being hit by these layoffs isn’t yet clear, though presumably everyone let go has already been notified. As the announcement went live Thursday afternoon, it stated that employees “will receive an email within the next few minutes informing you of whether your role has been impacted.”
“These are volatile and challenging times,” Matusiak wrote on LinkedIn. “It remains on all of us to create a better world we can all share. More so than ever.”
A battle ostensibly over endangered shrimp in Kentucky
A national park is fighting a large-scale solar farm over potential impacts to an endangered shrimp – what appears to be the first real instance of a federal entity fighting a solar project under the Trump administration.
At issue is Geenex Solar’s 100-megawatt Wood Duck solar project in Barren County, Kentucky, which would be sited in the watershed of Mammoth Cave National Park. In a letter sent to Kentucky power regulators in April, park superintendent Barclay Trimble claimed the National Park Service is opposing the project because Geenex did not sufficiently answer questions about “irreversible harm” it could potentially pose to an endangered shrimp that lives in “cave streams fed by surface water from this solar project.”
Trimble wrote these frustrations boiled after “multiple attempts to have a dialogue” with Geenex “over the past several months” about whether battery storage would exist at the site, what sorts of batteries would be used, and to what extent leak prevention would be considered in development of the Wood Duck project.
“The NPS is choosing to speak out in opposition of this project and requesting the board to consider environmental protection of these endangered species when debating the merits of this project,” stated the letter. “We look forward to working with the Board to ensure clean water in our national park for the safety of protection of endangered species.”
On first blush, this letter looks like normal government environmental stewardship. It’s true the cave shrimp’s population decline is likely the result of pollution into these streams, according to NPS data. And it was written by career officials at the National Park Service, not political personnel.
But there’s a few things that are odd about this situation and there’s reason to believe this may be the start of a shift in federal policy direction towards a more critical view of solar energy’s environmental impacts.
First off, Geenex has told local media that batteries are not part of the project and that “several voicemails have been exchanged” between the company and representatives of the national park, a sign that the company and the park have not directly spoken on this matter. That’s nothing like the sort of communication breakdown described in the letter. Then there’s a few things about this letter that ring strange, including the fact Fish and Wildlife Service – not the Park Service – ordinarily weighs in on endangered species impacts, and there’s a contradiction in referencing the Endangered Species Act at a time when the Trump administration is trying to significantly pare back application of the statute in the name of a faster permitting process. All of this reminds me of the Trump administration’s attempts to supposedly protect endangered whales by stopping offshore wind projects.
I don’t know whether this solar farm’s construction will indeed impact wildlife in the surrounding area. Perhaps it may. But the letter strikes me as fascinating regardless, given the myriad other ways federal agencies – including the Park Service – are standing down from stringent environmental protection enforcement under Trump 2.0.
Notably, I reviewed the other public comments filed against the project and they cite a litany of other reasons – but also state that because the county itself has no local zoning ordinance, there’s no way for local residents or municipalities opposed to the project to really stop it. Heatmap Pro predicts that local residents would be particularly sensitive to projects taking up farmland and — you guessed it — harming wildlife.
Barren County is in the process of developing a restrictive ordinance in the wake of this project, but it won’t apply to Wood Duck. So opponents’ best shot at stopping this project – which will otherwise be online as soon as next year – might be relying on the Park Service to intervene.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Dukes County, Massachusetts – The Supreme Court for the second time declined to take up a legal challenge to the Vineyard Wind offshore project, indicating that anti-wind activists' efforts to go directly to the high court have run aground.
2. Brooklyn/Staten Island, New York – The battery backlash in the NYC boroughs is getting louder – and stranger – by the day.
3. Baltimore County, Maryland – It’s Ben Carson vs. the farmer near Baltimore, as a solar project proposed on the former Housing and Urban Development secretary’s land is coming under fire from his neighbors.
4. Mecklenburg County, Virginia – Landowners in this part of Virginia have reportedly received fake “good neighbor agreement” letters claiming to be from solar developer Longroad Energy, offering large sums of cash to people neighboring the potential project.
5. York County, South Carolina – Silfab Solar is now in a bitter public brawl with researchers at the University of South Carolina after they released a report claiming that a proposed solar manufacturing plant poses a significant public risk in the event of a chemical emissions release.
6. Jefferson Davis County, Mississippi – Apex Clean Energy’s Bluestone Solar project was just approved by the Mississippi Public Service Commission with no objections against the project.
7. Plaquemine Parish, Louisiana – NextEra’s Coastal Prairie solar project got an earful from locals in this parish that sits within the Baton Rouge metro area, indicating little has changed since the project was first proposed two years ago.
8. Huntington County, Indiana – Well it turns out Heatmap’s Most At-Risk Projects of the Energy Transition has been right again: the Paddlefish solar project has now been indefinitely blocked by this county under a new moratorium on the project area in tandem with a new restrictive land use ordinance on solar development overall.
9. Albany County, Wyoming – The Rail Tie wind farm is back in the news again, as county regulators say landowners feel misled by Repsol, the project’s developer.
10. Klickitat County, Washington – Cypress Creek Renewables is on a lucky streak with a solar project near Goldendale, Washington, getting to bypass local opposition from the nearby Yakama Nation.
11. Pinal County, Arizona – A large utility-scale NextEra solar farm has been rejected by this county’s Board of Supervisors.