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Today’s lease auction actually went kinda well.
Just days before what is sure to be a close presidential election in which one of the candidates has promised to shut down the offshore wind industry “on day one,” an auction for the rights to develop wind energy projects in the Gulf of Maine on Tuesday was a surprise success.
Two developers, Avangrid and Invenergy, purchased four of the eight leases that were up for sale. If turned into wind farms, they have the potential to generate about 6.8 gigawatts, or enough electricity to power about 2.3 million homes, according to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.
Compared with the optimism on display just two years ago, when more than a dozen companies competed in a three-day bidding war for the right to develop six areas off the coast of New York and New Jersey, Tuesday’s sale was a flop. Just two companies participated. The bidding closed after one round. The leases sold for a flat $50 per acre, compared to an average of nearly $9,000 per acre in the New York sale.
But put in context of how things are going in 2024, it’s a miracle anyone showed up at all. The offshore wind industry has been struggling with supply chain issues and inflation, not to mention increasing opposition from coastal communities. Just a month ago, an offshore wind lease sale off the coast of Oregon was canceled after the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management learned that there was only one interested party. The agency also canceled an auction for the Gulf of Mexico earlier this year citing a lack of interest.
“It’ll be a win if anything gets leased,” Francis Eanes, executive director of the Maine Labor Climate Council, told me Tuesday morning before the results came in. “And honestly, it won’t be surprising if it doesn’t.”
Outside of the existential threat of a Trump presidency, developing wind projects in the Gulf of Maine was already a challenging prospect. The water is upwards of 200 meters deep — too deep to affix the foundation of a wind turbine to the seafloor. Instead, developers will need to build floating structures that are moored to the seabed with giant cables. Floating offshore wind is a proven technology — there are a handful of projects already operating around the world. But it is more expensive to build, and there are none yet operating in the U.S. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates that floating offshore wind farms will have a levelized cost of energy that’s at least 40% higher than fixed-bottom projects.
On top of that, just days ago, the U.S. Department of Energy rejected Maine’s application for a $456 million grant to build a floating offshore wind assembly port on Sears Island, a protected area in Penobscot Bay about the size of New York City’s Central Park. A new port is a necessary prerequisite for developing projects in the Gulf of Maine, as floating offshore wind assembly requires different infrastructure than fixed-bottom projects.
Nonetheless, Tyler Hansen, a research associate studying offshore wind at Dartmouth College, told me he thought the results of the auction “make sense” when weighing the prospects for the technology against the political risks. He expects the cost of floating offshore wind to come down as governments around the world invest in research and development. The Department of Energy has a “Floating Offshore Wind Shot,” a program aimed at reducing the cost of floating technology 70% by 2030.
The winds that blow over the Gulf of Maine are especially strong and steady, making them one of the best potential renewable energy resources in the United States. The northeast is also “particularly blessed” with available substations where projects could connect to the grid, Eric Hines, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Tufts University told me. Several recent coal plant closures on the Massachusetts coast have created “an enormous amount of coastal transmission capacity that are prime locations for plugging in offshore wind,” he said.
The area also boasts favorable policy paired with relatively strong grassroots support. States in the Northeast are counting on floating offshore wind to hit their climate goals. Maine has set a goal of achieving 100% clean electricity by 2040, with at least 3 gigawatts of power prescribed to come from the Gulf. Massachusetts, too, anticipates needing some 23 gigawatts from offshore wind by 2050, with at least 10 coming from the Gulf of Maine.
Environmental groups in Maine have spent the past two years building political coalitions with fishermen, tribes, and labor unions in support of developing an offshore wind industry. Those efforts culminated in a major victory last summer when the state passed a bill that set strong labor standards for offshore wind development, created a requirement for tribal engagement in project development, and enshrined a policy of avoiding development in a key fishery known as Lobster Management Area One. Later, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management amended its map of lease areas in the Gulf of Maine to exclude that management area.
“That was a huge win,” Eanes said, and never would have happened without the environmental and labor movement’s proactive efforts to build consensus around where offshore wind should happen, if it were going to happen. As a result, they’ve been able to cultivate a different attitude toward offshore wind in Maine than you will find right now in New Jersey, for example.
“To be clear, if you go to a coastal community in Maine, especially one that lands a lot of lobsters, you’re not going to find support for offshore wind,” he said. “But the level of organized opposition has not been as pitched as it would have been had we seen lease areas in Lobster Management Area One.”
In a press release, Avangrid touted the Gulf of Maine’s strong wind speeds and access to interconnection, as well as the fact that it was “largely deconflicted from other ocean users following a rigorous federal public engagement process.” The company is already developing more than 5 gigawatts of offshore wind along the East Coast, including Vineyard Wind, which is currently under construction. This will be its first project to utilize floating technologies, however it is also owned by Iberdrola, a Spanish company with a pipeline of floating offshore wind projects in Europe.
Maine officials celebrated the results of the auction on Tuesday.
“The federal lease sale represents a significant milestone for Maine and the region as we advance offshore wind in a responsible manner to help us reduce our reliance on expensive, harmful fossil fuels, diversify our sources of energy, grow our economy, and fight climate change,” said Dan Burgess, Director of the Maine Governor’s Energy Office, in an emailed statement.
The Maine Department of Transportation, the agency leading the development of the would-be port, emphasized that it's undeterred despite losing out on the federal grant. “Maine has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to develop a port facility to create good-paying jobs while serving the entire region as we harness abundant clean wind energy in the Gulf of Maine,” Bruce Van Note, the transportation commissioner, said in a statement last week. “Our work will continue as we examine other opportunities to secure funding to advance this critical port infrastructure.”
The agency anticipates filing federal permit applications for the project in the next few months, kicking off a process anticipated to take two years, and securing additional funding for it by the end of 2025. But that timeline may depend on the results of the presidential election next week.
While it’s not always the best advice to take Donald Trump at his word, the former president promised supporters at a rally in New Jersey in May that he would “end” offshore wind development. “You won’t have to worry about Governor Murphy’s 157 windmills,” he said. “I’m going to write it out in an executive order. It’s going to end on day one.”
In its most recent quarterly market report, the industry association Oceantic Network noted that private investment and activity in the offshore wind sector “are decelerating … due largely to the uncertainty around the presidential election.”
At the same time, developers are used to long time horizons. Offshore wind projects can take a decade to permit and build, and as long as state support doesn’t slide, a slowdown of four years isn’t make-or-break. Even with a supportive administration, it will likely be impossible for Avangrid or Invenergy to begin construction in the Gulf of Maine before 2030, as that’s the absolute soonest Maine expects to get its port built.
The fact that two developers took the leap now rather than waiting for 2028 — which is when the next lease sale in the Gulf of Maine is scheduled — shows some level of confidence in the long-term prospects for the industry.
“These leases don’t come up for auction very often,” Hines told me. “And if you don’t have a lease, you can’t build a project.”
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Whichever way you cut it, this has been an absolute banner year for nuclear deals in the U.S. It doesn’t much matter the metric — the amount of venture funding flowing to nuclear startups, the number of announcements regarding planned reactor restarts and upgrades, gigawatts of new construction added to the pipeline — it’s basically all peaking. Stock prices are up across all major publicly traded nuclear companies this year, in some cases by over 100%.
“This year is by far the biggest year in terms of nuclear deals that has occurred, probably, since the 70s,” Adam Stein, the director of nuclear innovation at The Breakthrough Institute, told me. “It’s spanning the gamut from bringing a 40-year-old reactor back to things that have not even been proven scientifically yet.”
To name just a few announcements from this year: planning for a 4.4-gigawatt nuclear power complex is now underway in Texas; South Carolina’s state-owned utility is seeking buyers to restart construction on two partially built AP1000 reactors; New York governor Kathy Hochul is looking to build a new reactor in upstate New York; The Tennessee Valley Authority submitted a construction permit for a small modular reactor; Google signed a power purchase agreement with Commonwealth Fusion Systems; and another fusion company, Helion Energy, raised a whopping $425 million round of venture capital. On top of all that there’s the Palisades nuclear power plant in Michigan, which is targeted to restart by year’s end, bringing 800 megawatts of new nuclear power online.
Heading into the second Trump term, there were plenty of indications that the administration would support this technology with increasingly bipartisan appeal. So it wasn’t exactly a surprise that while the One Big Beautiful Bill eviscerated tax credits for solar and wind, it preserved them for both existing and new nuclear facilities. Now that this support is assured, Stein expects the nuclear announcements to keep rolling in. “We might have seen more deals earlier this year if there wasn’t uncertainty about what was going to happen with tax credits. But now that that’s resolved, I expect to hear more later this year,” he told me.
How much of this is, I asked him, is due to data centers and their seemingly insatiable demand for clean, firm power? “Most of it,” he said simply. By way of example, he pointed out how data center load growth has changed the outlooks for two small modular reactor companies in particular. “NuScale has been trying to find their first project for a long time now, after they had to cancel their [Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems] project. Kairos didn’t have a clear buyer for its first-of-a-kind, even though it was building two test reactors,” Stein explained. “Then all of a sudden, they all had additional deals in the works because of data center demand.”
Last year, Kairos inked a 500-megawatt deal with Google to meet the hyperscaler’s growing data center needs, while this year, Texas A&M selected the company — along with three others — to build a reactor at the university’s research and development campus. And while NuScale infamously canceled its first project in 2023 due to rising costs, this year it received approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a new and improved reactor design. Now the company’s CEO, John Hopkins, told Reuters that NuScale is in talks to deploy its tech with five unnamed “tier one hyperscalers.” Its stock is up more than 150% on the year.
That’s a big turnaround for a company that, less than two years ago, was widely considered a cautionary tale — and it’s not the only one in the industry with this type of comeback story. Right before NuScale’s project failed, another nuclear company, X-energy, announced that it would no longer go public due to “challenging market conditions” and “peer company trading performance.” But while X-energy still has yet to IPO, it appears to be doing just fine. In February, the company announced the close of a $700 million Series C follow-on round, coming on the heels of Amazon’s strategic investment last year.
“I think every company has their stories about how things are changing,” Seth Grae, CEO of the advanced nuclear fuel company Lightbridge, told me. Things have moved a lot faster, Grae said, since Trump released a series of executive orders aimed at accelerating nuclear energy deployment. “Just since May, we’ve received this highly enriched uranium [from the Department of Energy], made these fuel samples, got them qualified already at Idaho National Lab. We expect they’ll be in the reactor this year. Grae told me. “Things didn’t used to happen that fast in nuclear.”
Trump’s plans to fast track nuclear development have also raised serious concerns, however, as critics worry that acceleration could lead to laxer safety standards The executive orders call for, among other things, cutting staff at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, just as the industry enters a period of intense activity. In June, the President fired one of the agency’s commissioners, Christopher Hanson, without cause. Another commissioner, Annie Caputo, resigned in July.
But right now, the nuclear industry is mostly basking in optimism. Grae credits the government’s strong support for the surge in nuclear stocks — Lightbridge’s own stock price has jumped 180% this year, while another nuclear fuel company, Centrus Energy, is up even more. The small modular reactor company Oklo is up 285% for the year, on the heels of last year’s 12-gigawatt non-binding deal with the data center company Switch — one of the largest corporate clean power agreements to date.
Last year’s slew of deals involving Oklo, X-energy, and Kairos show that the sector’s momentum had been building well before Trump took office. By 2023, the writing was already on the wall in terms of data center load growth, as grid planners began to predict a sharp rise in electricity demand after over a decade of stagnation. But when I asked Erik Funkhauser of the Good Energy Collective whether the prior two years compared with this one, he concurred with Stein. “Nope,” he told me. “We’re seeing capital infusion at a really, really high pace, as high of a pace as the company’s suppliers can keep up with on projects.”
Still, the party may not go on forever. “I see a potential for a Valley of Death,” Stein told me, similar to what many startups go through when they’re trying to raise later-stage funding rounds.
“If things don’t start to actually move forward with real progress, either getting licenses or building prototypes on time, then all of that investment will be pulled back.” That’s what the U.S. saw during the last so-called “nuclear renaissance” in the late 2000s, he explained, when a rash of large reactors were proposed with only two actually reaching completion.
These were the notorious Vogtle reactors 3 and 4 in Georgia, which finally came online in 2023 and 2024 respectively, running billions over budget and years behind schedule. In order for this latest round of nuclear enthusiasm to avoid the same fate, Stein told me it’s critical that leading projects demonstrate enough early success to maintain developer confidence in the economic and technical viability of new — and old — nuclear technologies.
That being said, the sector will inevitably contract. “Back when we saw this last scale-up, there were three designs that were really competing for attention, and now there are 75. So we’re going to see a lot of failures,” Stein said. The question for venture investors, he told me, is “how many failures of startups that you didn’t invest in are you willing to tolerate before you start to think the whole segment has trouble?”
The second main way this could all fall to pieces, he told me, is if “somebody tries to move too fast,” and that recklessness leads to “either a bankruptcy or an accident or something like that that will send ripples or shock waves through the whole sector.”
Indeed, a metaphorical or literal meltdown in the sector could put a quick halt to this year’s frenzied momentum. But within the next few years, as these announced projects begin to line up their licenses and come online — or fall apart— we’ll soon see whether this latest nuclear revival is a true turning point or just another bubble.
On the Senate’s climate whip, green cement deals, and a U.S. uranium revival.
Current conditions: Flash flooding strikes the Southeastern U.S. • Monsoon rains unleash landslides in southern China • A heat dome is bringing temperatures of up to 107 degrees Fahrenheit to France, Italy, and the Balkans.
An August 5 chart showing last month's record electricity demand peaks.EIA
The United States’ demand for electricity broke records twice last month. Air conditioners cranking on hot days, combined with surging demand from data centers, pushed the peak in the Lower 48 states to a high of 758,053 megawatts on July 28, between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. EST, data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Hourly Electric Grid Monitor shows. The following day, peak demand set another record, hitting 759,180 megawatts. That’s nearly 2% above the previous record set on July 15, 2024.
The EIA predicted demand to grow by more than 2% per year between 2025 and 2026. Forecasts are even higher in areas with large data centers and factories underway, such as Texas and northern Virginia. The milestone comes as the Trump administration cracks down on solar and wind energy, two of the fastest-growing and quicker-to-build sources of new generation. On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that the Environmental Protection Agency is moving to eliminate $7 billion in spending on grants for solar energy, though when Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo asked the agency, it said only that, “With the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill, EPA is working to ensure Congressional intent is fully implemented in accordance with the law.”
Senator Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, locked down enough votes on Tuesday to replace Illinois Senator Dick Durbin as the Democrats’ whip in the chamber. Durbin, who is retiring next year, has served in the Senate Democrats’ No. 2 position since 2005. In his endorsement on Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York called Schatz “a close friend and one of my most valued allies.”
Schatz crusaded for the Inflation Reduction Act and told Heatmap he supported last year’s failed bipartisan permitting reform deal, even as progressive greens campaigned against its giveaways to fossil fuels. In a Shift Key podcast interview with my colleague Robinson Meyer and his co-host, Princeton professor Jesse Jenkins, in February, Schatz pitched a big tent for climate action. “We all have to hang together. It’s the American Clean Power Association. It’s the energy company that does both clean and fossil energy. It’s the transmission and distribution companies. It’s the manufacturers. It’s labor. It’s Wall Street. It’s K Street. Everyone has to hang together and say, not only is this good for business, but there’s something that is foundationally worse for business than any individual policy decision.”
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The Trump administration may be clawing back funding for cleaning up heavy industry, but Big Tech is still inking deals. On Monday, Amazon agreed to buy low-carbon cement from the startup Brimstone. Then on Tuesday, the data center developer STACK Infrastructure announced the completion of “a pilot pour” of green cement from rival startup Sublime. The moves highlight the growing demand for cleaner industrial materials amid increased scrutiny of the energy and pollution linked to server farms.
America’s uranium enrichment went out of business in the early 2000s after the Clinton-era megatons-to-megawatts program essentially ceded the industry to cheap Russian imports made from disassembled atomic weapons. Since banning imports from Russia last year, the U.S. has been ramping up funding for nuclear fuel again, especially as the industry looks to build new types of reactors that rely on fuel other than the low-enriched uranium that virtually all the country’s operating 94 commercial reactors use. On Monday, the Department of Energy announced its first pilot project for advanced nuclear fuels, giving the startup Standard Nuclear the first federal deal. On Tuesday, the agency signed a $1.5 billion deal to restore the so-called Atomic City on the 100-acre parcel of federal land at the former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plan in Kentucky.
The Trump administration gave permission to the National Weather Service to hire up to 450 meteorologists, hydrologists, and radar technicians after sweeping cuts from the Department of Government Efficiency, CNN’s Andrew Freedman reported. The agency, which was partly blamed for its warnings going unheeded ahead of the deadly Texas floods last month, also received an exemption from the federal hiring freeze.
The move came the same day as a federal judge blocked the administration from diverting billions of dollars in Federal Emergency Management Agency funding for disaster resilience and flood mitigation. The injunction warned FEMA against spending the money on anything else.
Beyond Meat is finally getting beyond meat. The company plans to shed the flesh reference in its name this week as it launches its new Beyond Ground product that promises more protein than ground beef. “With this launch,” Fast Company’s Clint Rainey reported, “Beyond Meat is becoming merely Beyond and turning its focus away from only mimicking animal proteins to letting plant-based proteins speak for themselves. The radical move is cultural, agricultural, and financial.”
Rob and Jesse talk through the proposed overturning of the EPA’s “endangerment finding” on greenhouse gases with Harvard Law School’s Jody Freeman.
The Trump administration has formally declared that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are not dangerous pollutants. If the president gets his way, then the Environmental Protection Agency may soon surrender any ability to regulate heat-trapping pollution from cars and trucks, power plants, and factories — in ways that a future Democratic president potentially could not reverse.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, we discuss whether Trump’s EPA gambit will work, the arguments that the administration is using, and what it could mean for the future of U.S. climate and energy policy. We’re joined by Jody Freeman, the Archibald Cox Professor of Law at Harvard and the director of Harvard’s environmental and energy law program. She was an architect of the Obama administration’s landmark deal with automakers to accept carbon dioxide regulations.
Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: I just want to make a related question, which is, you can actually say some of the sentences in the DOE report — you can believe tornadoes don’t show any influence from climate change and still believe heatwaves do, and still believe extreme rainfall events do. In fact, you could believe the cost of heat waves getting worse could justify the entire regulatory edifice.
Jody Freeman: What I love about you, Rob, right now, is you’re kind of incensed about little points that might individually sort of be right, maybe each one separately, but none of it adds up to even a chink in the armor. Right? And what’ll have to happen is the scientific community writ large, en masse, is going to have to come back and say, even if one or two or three of these sentences could possibly, plausibly be actually accurate, it does nothing to change the overwhelming —
Jesse Jenkins: It doesn’t matter.
Freeman: Right. What I think is happening is we’re all getting poked and distracted and tweaked into outrage over science, when in fact, the first argument they’re making is the one where they could actually attract some judges and justices to say, Oh wait, maybe you have a little more discretion here to set a threshold level. You know, Maybe it matters that you’re saying nothing we do here in the U.S. will make a difference in the end to global warming, and maybe that is a reason you don’t want to regulate. Hmm, maybe we’ll accept that reason. And that’s what we need, I think, to be more concerned about.
Jenkins: You’re saying, don’t get distracted by the fight over the climate science. That fight is very clear. It’s this legal argument that this isn’t an air pollutant because it’s not a local air pollutant, it mixes globally with all the other CO2, and we can’t, you know, each class of cars is a tiny contributor to that, and so we shouldn’t worry about it —
Freeman: And much of this is a replay, or a rehash of arguments that the George W. Bush administration lost in Massachusetts vs. EPA. So a lot of this is like, let’s take another run at the Supreme Court.
Mentioned:
The EPA Says Carbon Pollution Isn’t Dangerous. What Comes Next?
The EPA on its reconsideration of the endangerment finding
Jody’s story on the change: Trump’s EPA proposes to end the U.S. fight against climate change
Jesse’s upshift (and accompanying video); Rob’s sort of upshift.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.