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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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Defenders of the Inflation Reduction Act have hit on what they hope will be a persuasive argument for why it should stay.
With the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and its tax credits for building and producing clean energy hanging in the balance, the law’s supporters have increasingly turned to dollars-and-cents arguments in favor of its preservation. Since the election, industry and research groups have put out a handful of reports making the broad argument that in addition to higher greenhouse gas emissions, taking away these tax credits would mean higher electricity bills.
The American Clean Power Association put out a report in December, authored by the consulting firm ICF, arguing that “energy tax credits will drive $1.9 trillion in growth, creating 13.7 million jobs and delivering 4x return on investment.”
The Solar Energy Industries Association followed that up last month with a letter citing an analysis by Aurora Energy Research, which found that undoing the tax credits for wind, solar, and storage would reduce clean energy deployment by 237 gigawatts through 2040 and cost nearly 100,000 jobs, all while raising bills by hundreds of dollars in Texas and New York. (Other groups, including the conservative environmental group ConservAmerica and the Clean Energy Buyers Association have commissioned similar research and come up with similar results.)
And just this week, Energy Innovation, a clean energy research group that had previously published widely cited research arguing that clean energy deployment was not linked to the run-up in retail electricity prices, published a report that found repealing the Inflation Reduction Act would “increase cumulative household energy costs by $32 billion” over the next decade, among other economic impacts.
The tax credits “make clean energy even more economic than it already is, particularly for developers,” explained Energy Innovation senior director Robbie Orvis. “When you add more of those technologies, you bring down the electricity cost significantly,” he said.
Historically, the price of fossil fuels like natural gas and coal have set the wholesale price for electricity. With renewables, however, the operating costs associated with procuring those fuels go away. The fewer of those you have, “the lower the price drops,” Orvis said. Without the tax credits to support the growth and deployment of renewables, the analysis found that annual energy costs per U.S. household would go up some $48 annually by 2030, and $68 by 2035.
These arguments come at a time when retail electricity prices in much of the country have grown substantially. Since December 2019, average retail electricity prices have risen from about $0.13 per kilowatt-hour to almost $0.18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Massachusetts and California, rates are over $0.30 a kilowatt-hour, according to the Energy Information Administration. As Energy Innovation researchers have pointed out, states with higher renewable penetration sometimes have higher rates, including California, but often do not, as in South Dakota, where 77% of its electricity comes from renewables.
Retail electricity prices are not solely determined by fuel costs Distribution costs for maintaining the whole electrical system are also a factor. In California, for example,it’s these costs that have driven a spike in rates, as utilities have had to harden their grids against wildfires. Across the whole country, utilities have had to ramp up capital investment in grid equipment as it’s aged, driving up distribution costs, a 2024 Energy Innovation report argued.
A similar analysis by Aurora Energy Research (the one cited by SEIA) that just looked at investment and production tax credits for wind, solar, and batteries found that if they were removed, electricity bills would increase hundreds of dollars per year on average, and by as much as $40 per month in New York and $29 per month in Texas.
One reason the bill impact could be so high, Aurora’s Martin Anderson told me, is that states with aggressive goals for decarbonizing the electricity sector would still have to procure clean energy in a world where its deployment would have gotten more expensive. New York is targetinga target for getting 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, while Minnesota has a goal for its utilities to sell 55% clean electricity by 2035 and could see its average cost increase by $22 a month. Some of these states may have to resort to purchasing renewable energy certificates to make up the difference as new generation projects in the state become less attractive.
Bills in Texas, on the other hand, would likely go up because wind and solar investment would slow down, meaning that Texans’ large-scale energy consumption would be increasingly met with fossil fuels (Texas has a Renewable Portfolio Standard that it has long since surpassed).
This emphasis from industry and advocacy groups on the dollars and cents of clean energy policy is hardly new — when the House of Representatives passed the (doomed) Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill in 2009, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told the House, “Remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.”
More recently, when Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich and Tim Kaine hosted a press conference to press their case for preserving the Inflation Reduction Act, the email that landed in reporters’ inboxes read “Heinrich, Kaine Host Press Conference on Trump’s War on Affordable, American-Made Energy.”
“Trump’s war on the Inflation Reduction Act will kill American jobs, raise costs on families, weaken our economic competitiveness, and erode American global energy dominance,” Heinrich told me in an emailed statement. “Trump should end his destructive crusade on affordable energy and start putting the interests of working people first.”
That the impacts and benefits of the IRA are spread between blue and red states speaks to the political calculation of clean energy proponents, hoping that a bill that subsidized solar panels in Texas, battery factories in Georgia, and battery storage in Southern California could bring about a bipartisan alliance to keep it alive. While Congressional Republicans will be scouring the budget for every last dollar to help fund an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a group of House Republicans have gone on the record in defense of the IRA’s tax credits.
“There's been so much research on the emissions impact of the IRA over the past few years, but there's been comparatively less research on the economic benefits and the household energy benefits,” Orvis said. “And I think that one thing that's become evident in the last year or so is that household energy costs — inflation, fossil fuel prices — those do seem to be more top of mind for Americans.”
Opinion modeling from Heatmap Pro shows that lower utility bills is the number one perceived benefit of renewables in much of the country. The only counties where it isn’t the number one perceived benefit are known for being extremely wealthy, extremely crunchy, or both: Boulder and Denver in Colorado; Multnomah (a.k.a. Portland) in Oregon; Arlington in Virginia; and Chittenden in Vermont.
On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.
If you live in Illinois or Massachusetts, you may yet get your robust electric vehicle infrastructure.
Robust incentive programs to build out electric vehicle charging stations are alive and well — in Illinois, at least. ComEd, a utility provider for the Chicago area, is pushing forward with $100 million worth of rebates to spur the installation of EV chargers in homes, businesses, and public locations around the Windy City. The program follows up a similar $87 million investment a year ago.
Federal dollars, once the most visible source of financial incentives for EVs and EV infrastructure, are critically endangered. Automakers and EV shoppers fear the Trump administration will attack tax credits for purchasing or leasing EVs. Executive orders have already suspended the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program, a.k.a. NEVI, which was set up to funnel money to states to build chargers along heavily trafficked corridors. With federal support frozen, it’s increasingly up to the automakers, utilities, and the states — the ones with EV-friendly regimes, at least — to pick up the slack.
Illinois’ investment has been four years in the making. In 2021, the state established an initiative to have a million EVs on its roads by 2030, and ComEd’s new program is a direct outgrowth. The new $100 million investment includes $53 million in rebates for business and public sector EV fleet purchases, $38 million for upgrades necessary to install public and private Level 2 and Level 3 chargers, stations for non-residential customers, and $9 million to residential customers who buy and install home chargers, with rebates of up to $3,750 per charger.
Massachusetts passed similar, sweeping legislation last November. Its bill was aimed to “accelerate clean energy development, improve energy affordability, create an equitable infrastructure siting process, allow for multistate clean energy procurements, promote non-gas heating, expand access to electric vehicles and create jobs and support workers throughout the energy transition.” Amid that list of hifalutin ambition, the state included something interesting and forward-looking: a pilot program of 100 bidirectional chargers meant to demonstrate the power of vehicle-to-grid, vehicle-to-home, and other two-way charging integrations that could help make the grid of the future more resilient.
Many states, blue ones especially, have had EV charging rebates in places for years. Now, with evaporating federal funding for EVs, they have to take over as the primary benefactor for businesses and residents looking to electrify, as well as a financial level to help states reach their public targets for electrification.
Illinois, for example, saw nearly 29,000 more EVs added to its roads in 2024 than 2023, but that growth rate was actually slower than the previous year, which mirrors the national narrative of EV sales continuing to grow, but more slowly than before. In the time of hostile federal government, the state’s goal of jumping from about 130,000 EVs now to a million in 2030 may be out of reach. But making it more affordable for residents and small businesses to take the leap should send the numbers in the right direction, as will a state-backed attempt to create more public EV chargers.
The private sector is trying to juice charger expansion, too. Federal funding or not, the car companies need a robust nationwide charging network to boost public confidence as they roll out more electric offerings. Ionna — the charging station partnership funded by the likes of Hyundai, BMW, General Motors, Honda, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, and Toyota — is opening new chargers at Sheetz gas stations. It promises to open 1,000 new charging bays this year and 30,000 by 2030.
Hyundai, being the number two EV company in America behind much-maligned Tesla, has plenty at stake with this and similar ventures. No surprise, then, that its spokesperson told Automotive Dive that Ionna doesn’t rely on federal dollars and will press on regardless of what happens in Washington. Regardless of the prevailing winds in D.C., Hyundai/Kia is motivated to support a growing national network to boost the sales of models on the market like the Hyundai Ioniq5 and Kia EV6, as well as the company’s many new EVs in the pipeline. They’re not alone. Mercedes-Benz, for example, is building a small supply of branded high-power charging stations so its EV drivers can refill their batteries in Mercedes luxury.
The fate of the federal NEVI dollars is still up in the air. The clearinghouse on this funding shows a state-by-state patchwork. More than a dozen states have some NEVI-funded chargers operational, but a few have gotten no further than having their plans for fiscal year 2024 approved. Only Rhode Island has fully built out its planned network. It’s possible that monies already allocated will go out, despite the administration’s attempt to kill the program.
In the meantime, Tesla’s Supercharger network is still king of the hill, and with a growing number of its stations now open to EVs from other brands (and a growing number of brands building their new EVs with the Tesla NACS charging port), Superchargers will be the most convenient option for lots of electric drivers on road trips. Unless the alternatives can become far more widespread and reliable, that is.
The increasing state and private focus on building chargers is good for all EV drivers, starting with those who haven’t gone in on an electric car yet and are still worried about range or charger wait times on the road to their destination. It is also, by the way, good news for the growing number of EV folks looking to avoid Elon Musk at all cost.