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If one were to go looking for a Permian Basin of wind — a wind energy superregion waiting to be born — the actual Permian Basin wouldn’t be a bad place to start.
Wind potential is everywhere in the U.S., off the coasts and in the Mountain West especially, and the Inflation Reduction Act is expected to catalyze 127 gigawatts of onshore wind by 2030, some of which has already been built. It’s Texas, however, that produces more wind power than any other state in the country. And while neighboring New Mexico has fewer turbines, it was one of the country’s leading installers of utility-scale wind in 2021; last month, Pattern Energy announced it had closed financing on SunZia, a long-awaited 3.5 GW wind farm about three hours northwest of the Permian Basin’s New Mexico portion. Once it’s completed, the project will make the state a national leader in installed capacity.
Texas and New Mexico have, respectively, the most and third-most potential wind capacity in the country. While the bulk of jobs created by wind farms come during their construction, turbines still require long-term maintenance and operation — “Jiffy Lube 300 feet in the air,” Andy Swapp, a faculty member at Mesalands Community College’s Wind Energy Technology program in Tucumcarie, New Mexico, called it. According to data from Revelio Labs, a workforce tracking company, more than 20% of wind jobs created in the past year were in Texas.
There’s no comprehensive estimate of how many wind technicians will be necessary to serve America’s wind farms by 2030, but we can make some educated guesses. In 2022, 11,200 Americans worked as wind technicians, with just under half of them in Texas, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, servicing a total of 144 GW of capacity (including a negligible amount of offshore wind) — about 0.08 jobs per megawatt. (Other estimates range from 0.1-10.8 permanent jobs per megawatt.)
By that math, just for the buildout of onshore wind spurred by the IRA — and leaving aside the 30 GW of offshore wind that the Biden administration has pledged to build by 2030 — the U.S. will need nearly 10,000 new wind technicians, a fair chunk of whom will be living, spending, and paying taxes in New Mexico and Texas.
Regardless of how the actual numbers shake out (many technicians travel between sites, almost everyone who I spoke with for this story told me), they raise a thorny question: How can the nascent wind industry nearly double the size of its workforce in a matter of years — especially where the industry is already strong?
In and around the Permian Basin, onshore wind is primed for a breakout. SunZia’s turbines will sit about 200 miles away from New Mexico’s Lea and Eddy counties, which account for 29% of the Permian Basin’s oil production. Slightly northwest of Lea is the Oso Grande Project, with 247 MW of wind power; Sweetwater, Texas, is surrounded by wind projects ranging from around 40 to 420 MW. The Permian Basin itself has plentiful wind — more than 2 GW — but there is broad agreement that much more of the area is ripe for wind projects.
All of these wind farms, of course, will need technicians, along with managers and operations and maintenance personnel. Pattern, a spokesperson told me, will “prioritize local vendors, suppliers and workforce,” and is building out its own GWO — short for Global Wind Organisation training, which has become an industry standard certification for working at heights — with training partners for SunZia, which promises more than 100 full-time jobs.
To work as an entry-level wind technician, the company asks for a one-year college or technical school certificate, or else a similar amount of experience in wind-power or other related training programs, or some combination of the two. Other employers in the area make similar asks, though a handful require just a high school diploma.
When more wind farms arrive, locals in West Texas looking for local training programs will have a handful of options, including a course at Texas Tech, a paid training institution, and a few community colleges with wind training, four of which are west of San Antonio.
As of summer 2023, roughly 200 students were enrolled in Texas State Technical College programs, Jones told me, and around 75% of them are on some form of financial aid to cover the $13,000 tuition for the 20-month course. Texas’s powerhouse for creating technicians doesn’t always serve its own state, or even the wind industry. Jones’s students don’t always go into wind — some even go into oil and gas — and they don’t always stay in Texas.
Texas Tech’s wind energy program is robust, Suhas Pol, the director of the university’s renewable energy programs, told me, but it’s primarily aimed at sending students into project management, development and engineering. As of this year, he estimated around 100 students are majoring in renewables, but he thinks awareness on campus is low. Pol and his fellow administrators have conjectured that “many folks are not aware that there is such a program available,” he said.
By next academic year, the university is planning to launch a course that offers additional qualifications for students who want to expand on their associates’ degrees, Pol added. Still, he thinks the field as a whole suffers from a lack of faculty to teach students — because so few people enter the industry, not enough can teach others how to join.
Adrian Cadena’s career path is pretty typical of wind technicians in the U.S., at least according to the BLS. Cadena, a former paramedic in San Antonio, was exhausted by the COVID-19 pandemic. While on a road trip in Texas, he wound up pulling over and walking into the middle of a wind farm, where he took out a cell phone and called his wife. “I said, ‘I think I’m done with medicine,’” Cadena told me. “My wife said, ‘I think you’ve lost your mind.’”
While working at a local hospital, Cadena completed a wind training program at a community college. At a clean energy career fair, he landed a job in safety at a small firm based near Houston. That firm paid for his GWOs. Soon after, an opportunity came up at Vestas Wind Systems — one of the industry’s giants — to work as a traveling safety contractor. Then last summer, the call came from another contractor to serve as a project manager on the safety side for Vineyard Wind, one of the country’s first large-scale offshore wind farms, which began delivering electricity just this week.
The federal government is also considering laying its own paths, as evidenced by the launch of the American Climate Corps in September; its first cohort could start as soon as this summer. Other roads leading to wind farms can pass through union-based apprenticeships, although those generally create “well-rounded electricians,” not necessarily wind specialists, according to Bo Delp, executive director of the Texas Climate Jobs Project.
Still, people who understand electronics are in high demand. Many job openings on Indeed across Texas this summer noted that a certification or degree in wind energy is preferred, while experience with mechanics and electronics is typically required, even for entry-level positions. George Jackiewicz, a safety coordinator currently based in Long Island who has worked around the country, told me that “if you’ve got common sense, some mechanical skills, a little bit of electrical, you can get in with zero experience.”
Companies, he explained, will train their own workers, including through their own apprenticeships. In conjunction with Vestas, Sky Climber Renewables runs TOP Technicians. The program finishes out three weeks of training with an assignment at a Vestas wind project. As Jones said, in earlier times “you just came in off the street, they gave you an electrical test and an aptitude test. If you could pass both of those, they could find a place for you. Now there’s more to it.”
In New Mexico, three institutions teach future wind technicians, but only Mesalands has a dedicated wind program and turbine, graduating roughly 20 students each semester, Andy Swapp told me. Unlike TSTC, Mesalands doesn’t give students their GWO certifications, though climbing towers is part of the curriculum.
While TSTC’s Jones doesn’t have much of a recruiting operation, Swapp runs a full-court press, including online ads and trips to high schools for “kid wind” competitions to design turbines, on top of word-of-mouth recruiting from previous students.
“The hardest part of this job is filling the classroom,” Swapp said. “I think if we could fill our classroom every semester, we could meet the need.”
In Lea County, 180 miles away from Mesalands, wind training is scarce, said Jennifer Grassham, president and CEO of the local economic development corporation. She thinks it has to do with demand — too few projects nearby to spur the need for trained technicians.
Meanwhile, a well-coordinated economic engine brings people into oil and gas in Hobbs, the county’s largest city, with 5,808 residents employed in the industry. New recruits can easily find training through company-sponsored programs (the industry norm, according to Grassham); New Mexico Junior College, located conveniently in town; or even the city’s technical high school, which offers “very specific oil and gas training,” Grassham explained.
Individuals interested in entering the field can also easily get a certification ahead of time. One method is to take an online course for around $600 from the University of Texas’s Petroleum Extension, which includes about a week’s worth of work.
“To get a job on a rig is fairly easy,” John Scannell, PETEX’s operations manager, said. “The companies that hire for those jobs, they don’t expect a lot of existing knowledge, so I know a lot of the drilling companies will hire people if they just take our basic overview of working on a rig.”
Lea County’s economic development council is thinking about wind and solar development, Grassham noted, but conversations about the workforce haven’t begun. If more wind farms like SunZia pop up offering hundreds of jobs, that might spur those conversations. “I think we still respond to supply and demand,” she said. “If there was a density around the demand for wind-related job training, the junior college would stand up a wind program almost overnight.”
Even when the demand arrives, workers may still face challenges. Some wind industry workers I spoke to for this story told me they struggled to secure raises, even with years of training and experience. “We really have to take a step back and think about how this transition is going to happen in a way that produces a more resilient economy,” Delp said. “If we build this transition on the backs of workers, we are going to be dealing with the political and economic consequences of that for decades.”
But presuming the industry can train enough people and keep them happy, every person I spoke to emphasized the same thing: Wind jobs are good jobs, especially if working at heights is a thrill and not a deterrent.
Jackiewicz — skeptical that the labor force as a whole will meet the moment at the pace required — is still a booster. “This is the only place I know that where someone without a high school education can earn six digits a year,” he said. “People I meet, I encourage them — ‘hey if you’ve got common sense, you can make a lot of money.’ I would recommend it as long as it’s here. Clean money, dirty hands.”
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Look more closely at today’s inflation figures and you’ll see it.
Inflation is slowing, but electricity bills are rising. While the below-expectations inflation figure reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics Wednesday morning — the consumer price index rose by just 0.1% in May, and 2.4% on the year — has been eagerly claimed by the Trump administration as a victory over inflation, a looming increase in electricity costs could complicate that story.
Consumer electricity prices rose 0.9% in May, and are up 4.5% in the past year. And it’s quite likely price increases will accelerate through the summer, thanks to America’s largest electricity market, PJM Interconnection. Significant hikes are expected or are already happening in many PJM states, including Maryland,New Jersey,Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Ohio with some utilities having said they would raise rates as soon as this month.
This has led to scrambling by state governments, with New Jersey announcing hundreds of millions of dollars of relief to alleviate rate increases as high as 20%. Maryland convinced one utility to spread out the increase over a few months.
While the dysfunctions of PJM are distinct and well known — new capacity additions have not matched fossil fuel retirements, leading to skyrocketing payments for those generators that can promise to be on in time of need — the overall supply and demand dynamics of the electricity industry could lead to a broader price squeeze.
“Trump and JD Vance can get off tweets about how there’s no inflation, but I don’t think they’ll feel that way in a week or two,” Skanda Amarnath, executive director of Employ America, told me.
And while the consumer price index is made up of, well, almost everything people buy, electricity price increases can have a broad effect on prices in general. “Everyone relies on energy,” Amarnath said. “Businesses that have higher costs can’t just eat it.” That means higher electricity prices may be translated into higher costs throughout the economy, a phenomenon known as “cost-push inflation.”
Aside from the particular dynamics of any one electricity market, there’s likely to be pressure on electricity prices across the country from the increased demand for energy from computing and factories. “There’s a big supply adjustment that’s going to have to happen, the data center demand dynamic is coming to roost,” Amarnath said.
Jefferies Chief U.S. Economist Thomas Simons said as much in a note to clients Wednesday. “Increased stress on the electrical grid from AI data centers, electric vehicle charging, and obligations to fund infrastructure and greenification projects have forced utilities to increase prices,” he wrote.
Of course, there’s also great uncertainty about the future path of electricity policy — namely, what happens to the Inflation Reduction Act — and what that means for prices.
The research group Energy Innovation has modeled the House reconciliation bill’s impact on the economy and the energy industry. The report finds that the bill “would dramatically slow deployment of new electricity generating capacity at a time of rapidly growing electricity demand.” That would result in higher electricity and energy prices across the board, with increases in household energy spending of around $150 per year in 2030, and more than $260 per year in 2035, due in part to a 6% increase in electricity prices by 2035.
In the near term, there’s likely not much policymakers can do about electricity prices, and therefore utility bills going up. Renewables are almost certainly the fastest way to get new electrons on the grid, but the completion of even existing projects could be thrown into doubt by the House bill’s strict “foreign entity of concern” rules, which try to extricate the renewables industry from its relationship with China.
“We’re running into a set of cost-push dynamics. It’s a hairy problem that no one is really wrapping their heads around,” Amarnath said. “It’s not really mainstream yet. It’s going to be.”
In some relief to American consumers, if not the planet, while it may be more expensive for them to cool their homes, it will be less expensive to get out of them: Gasoline prices fell 2.5% in May, according to the BLS, and are down 12% on the year.
Six months in, federal agencies are still refusing to grant crucial permits to wind developers.
Federal agencies are still refusing to process permit applications for onshore wind energy facilities nearly six months into the Trump administration, putting billions in energy infrastructure investments at risk.
On Trump’s first day in office, he issued two executive orders threatening the wind energy industry – one halting solar and wind approvals for 60 days and another commanding agencies to “not issue new or renewed approvals, rights of way, permits, leases or loans” for all wind projects until the completion of a new governmental review of the entire industry. As we were first to report, the solar pause was lifted in March and multiple solar projects have since been approved by the Bureau of Land Management. In addition, I learned in March that at least some transmission for wind farms sited on private lands may have a shot at getting federal permits, so it was unclear if some arms of the government might let wind projects proceed.
However, I have learned that the wind industry’s worst fears are indeed coming to pass. The Fish and Wildlife Service, which is responsible for approving any activity impacting endangered birds, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with greenlighting construction in federal wetlands, have simply stopped processing wind project permit applications after Trump’s orders – and the freeze appears immovable, unless something changes.
According to filings submitted to federal court Monday under penalty of perjury by Alliance for Clean Energy New York, at least three wind projects in the Empire State – Terra-Gen’s Prattsburgh Wind, Invenergy’s Canisteo Wind, and Apex’s Heritage Wind – have been unable to get the Army Corps or Fish and Wildlife Service to continue processing their permitting applications. In the filings, ACE NY states that land-based wind projects “cannot simply be put on a shelf for a few years until such time as the federal government may choose to resume permit review and issuance,” because “land leases expire, local permits and agreements expire, and as a result, the project must be terminated.”
While ACE NY’s filings discuss only these projects in New York, they describe the impacts as indicative of the national industry’s experience, and ACE NY’s executive director Marguerite Wells told me it is her understanding “that this is happening nationwide.”
“I can confirm that developers have conveyed to me that [the] Army Corps has stopped processing their applications specifically citing the wind ban,” Wells wrote in an email. “As I have understood it, the initial freeze covered both wind and solar projects, but the freeze was lifted for solar projects and not for wind projects.”
Lots of attention has been paid to Trump’s attacks on offshore wind, because those projects are sited entirely in federal waters. But while wind projects sited on private lands can hypothetically escape a federal review and keep sailing on through to operation, wind turbines are just so large in size that it’s hard to imagine that bird protection laws can’t apply to most of them. And that doesn’t account for wetlands, which seem to be now bedeviling multiple wind developers.
This means there’s an enormous economic risk in a six-month permitting pause, beyond impacts to future energy generation. The ACE NY filings state the impacts to New York alone represent more than $2 billion in capital investments, just in the land-based wind project pipeline, and there’s significant reason to believe other states are also experiencing similar risks. In a legal filing submitted by Democratic states challenging the executive order targeting wind, attorneys general listed at least three wind projects in Arizona – RWE’s Forged Ethic, AES’s West Camp, and Repsol’s Lava Run – as examples that may require approval from the federal government under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. As I’ve previously written, this is the same law that bird conservation advocates in Wyoming want Trump to use to reject wind proposals in their state, too.
The Fish and Wildlife Service and Army Corps of Engineers declined to comment after this story’s publication due to litigation on the matter. I also reached out to the developers involved in these projects to inquire about their commitments to these projects in light of the permitting pause. We’ll let you know if we hear back from them.
On power plant emissions, Fervo, and a UK nuclear plant
Current conditions: A week into Atlantic hurricane season, development in the basin looks “unfavorable through June” • Canadian wildfires have already burned more land than the annual average, at over 3.1 million hectares so far• Rescue efforts resumed Wednesday in the search for a school bus swept away by flash floods in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa.
EPA
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to announce on Wednesday the rollback of two major Biden-era power plant regulations, administration insiders told Bloomberg and Politico. The EPA will reportedly argue that the prior administration’s rules curbing carbon dioxide emissions at coal and gas plants were misplaced because the emissions “do not contribute significantly to dangerous pollution,” per The Guardian, despite research showing that the U.S. power sector has contributed 5% of all planet-warming pollution since 1990. The government will also reportedly argue that the carbon capture technology proposed by the prior administration to curb CO2 emissions at power plants is unproven and costly.
Similarly, the administration plans to soften limits on mercury emissions, which are released by burning coal, arguing that the Biden administration “improperly targeted coal-fire power plants” when it strengthened existing regulations in 2024. Per a document reviewed by The New York Times, the EPA’s proposal will “loosen emissions limits for toxic substances such as lead, nickel, and arsenic by 67%,” and for mercury at some coal power plants by as much as 70%. “Reversing these protections will take lives, drive up costs, and worsen the climate crisis,” Climate Action Campaign Director Margie Alt said in a statement. “Instead of protecting American families, [President] Trump and [EPA Administrator Lee] Zeldin are turning their backs on science and the public to side with big polluters.”
Fervo Energy announced Wednesday morning that it has secured $206 million in financing for its 400-megawatt Cape Station geothermal project in southwest Utah. The bulk of the new funding, $100 million, comes from the Breakthrough Energy Catalyst program.
Fervo’s announcement follows on the heels of the company’s Tuesday announcement that it had drilled its hottest and deepest well yet — at 15,000 feet and 500 degrees Fahrenheit — in just 16 days. As my colleague Katie Brigham reports, Fervo’s progress represents “an all too rare phenomenon: A first-of-a-kind clean energy project that has remained on track to hit its deadlines while securing the trust of institutional investors, who are often wary of betting on novel infrastructure projects.” Read her full report on the clean energy startup’s news here.
The United Kingdom said Tuesday that it will move forward with plans to construct a $19 billion nuclear power station in southwest England. Sizewell C, planned for coastal Suffolk, is expected to create 10,000 jobs and power 6 million homes, The New York Times reports. Sizewell would be only the second nuclear power plant to be built in the UK in over two decades; the country generates approximately 14% of its total electricity supply through nuclear energy. Critics, however, have pointed unfavorably to the other nuclear plant under construction in the UK, Hinkley Point C, which has experienced multiple delays and escalating costs throughout its development. “For those who have followed Sizewell’s progress over the years, there was a glaring omission in the announcement,” one columnist wrote for The Guardian. “What will consumers pay for Sizewell’s electricity? Will it still be substantially cheaper in real terms than the juice that will be generated at Hinkley Point C in Somerset?” The UK additionally announced this week that it has chosen Rolls-Royce as the “preferred bidder” to build the country’s first three small modular nuclear reactors.
The European Union on Tuesday proposed a ban on transactions with Nord Stream 1 and 2 as part of a new package of sanctions aimed at Russia, Bloomberg reports. “We want peace for Ukraine,” the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said at a news conference in Brussels. “Therefore, we are ramping up pressure on Russia, because strength is the only language that Russia will understand.” The package would also lower the price cap on Russian oil to $45 a barrel, down from $60 a barrel, von der Leyen said, as well as crack down on Moscow’s “shadow fleet” of vessels used to transport sanctioned products like crude oil. The EU’s 27 member states need to unanimously agree to the package for it to be adopted; their next meeting is on June 23.
The world’s oceans hit their second-highest temperature ever in May, according to the European Union’s Earth observation program Copernicus. The average sea surface temperature for the month was 20.79 degrees Celsius, just 0.14 degrees below May 2024’s record. Last year’s marine heat had been partly driven by El Niño in the Pacific, so the fact that the oceans remain warm in 2025 is alarming, Copernicus senior scientist Julien Nicolas told the Financial Times. “As sea surface temperatures rise, the ocean’s capacity to absorb carbon diminishes, potentially accelerating the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and intensifying future climate warming,” he said. In some areas around the UK and Ireland, the sea surface temperature is as high as 4 degrees Celsius above average.
Image: Todd Cravens/Unsplash
The Pacific Island nation of Tonga is poised to become the first country to recognize whales as legal persons — including by appointing them (human) representatives in court. “The time has come to recognize whales not merely as resources but as sentient beings with inherent rights,” Tongan Princess Angelika Lātūfuipeka Tukuʻaho said in comments delivered ahead of the U.N. Ocean Conference in Nice, France.