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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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The saga of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund takes another turn.
On July 3, just after the House voted to send the reconciliation bill to Trump’s desk, a lawyer for the Department of Justice swiftly sent a letter to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Once Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law, the letter said, the group of nonprofits suing the government for canceling the biggest clean energy program in the country’s history would no longer have a case.
It was the latest salvo in the saga of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, former President Joe Biden’s green bank program, which current Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin has made the target of his “gold bar” scandal. At stake is nearly $20 billion to fight climate change.
Congress created the program as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. It authorized Biden’s EPA to award that $20 billion to a handful of nonprofits that would then offer low-cost loans to individuals and organizations for solar installations, building efficiency upgrades, and other efforts to reduce emissions. The agency announced the recipients last summer, before its September deadline to get the funds out.
Then Trump took office and ordered his agency heads to pause and review all funding for Inflation Reduction Act programs.
In early March, buoyed by a covert video of a former EPA employee making an unfortunate and widely misunderstood comparison of the effort to award the funding to “throwing gold bars off the edge” of the Titanic, Zeldin notified the recipients that he was terminating their grant agreements. He cited “substantial concerns” regarding “program integrity, the award process, programmatic fraud, waste, and abuse, and misalignment with agency’s priorities.”
In court proceedings over the decision, the government has yet to cite any specific acts of fraud, waste, or abuse that justified the termination — a fact that the initial judge overseeing the case pointed out in mid-April when she ordered a preliminary injunction blocking the EPA from canceling the grants. But the EPA quickly appealed to the D.C. Circuit Court, which stayed the lower court’s injunction. The money remains frozen at Citibank, which had been overseeing its disbursement, as the parties await the appeals court’s decision.
As all of this was playing out, Congress wrote and passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The new law rescinds the “unobligated” funding — money that hasn’t yet been spent or contracted out — from nearly 50 Inflation Reduction Act programs, including the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. According to an estimate from the Congressional Budget Office, the remaining balance in the fund was just $19 million.
The Trump administration, however, is arguing in court that the OBBBA doesn’t just recoup that $19 million, but also the billions in awards at issue in the lawsuit. Congress has rescinded “the appropriated funds that plaintiffs sought to reinstate through this action,” Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Yaakov Roth wrote in his July 3 letter, implying that the awards were no longer officially “obligated” and that all of the money would have to be returned. Therefore, “it is more clear than ever that the district court’s preliminary injunction must be reversed,” he wrote.
Roth cited a statement that Shelley Moore Capito, chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, made on the floor of the Senate in June. She said she agreed with Zeldin’s decision to cancel the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund grants, and that it was Congress’ intent to rescind the funds that “had been obligated but were subsequently de-obligated” — about $17 billion in total. She did not acknowledge that Zeldin’s decision was being actively litigated in court.
On Monday, attorneys for the plaintiffs fired back with a message to the court that the reconciliation bill does not, in fact, change anything about the case. They argued that the EPA broke the law by canceling the grants, and that the OBBBA can’t retroactively absolve the agency. They also served up a conflicting statement that Capito made about the fund to Politico in November. “We’re not gonna go claw back money,” she said. “That’s a ridiculous thought.”
Capito’s colleague Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat, offered additional evidence on the floor of the Senate Wednesday. He cited the Congressional Budget Office’s score of the repeal of the program of $19 million, noting that it was the amount “EPA had remaining to oversee the program” and that “at no point in our discussions with the majority, directly or in our several conversations with the Parliamentarian, was this score disputed.” Whitehouse also called up a previous statement made by Republican Representative Morgan Griffith, a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, during a markup of the bill. “I just want to point out that these provisions that we are talking about only apply as far, as this bill is concerned, to the unobligated balances,” Griffith said.
Regardless, it will be up to the D.C. Circuit Court as to whether the lower court’s injunction was warranted. If it agrees, the nonprofit awardees may still, in fact, be able to get the money flowing for clean energy projects.
“Wishful thinking on the part of DOJ does not moot the ongoing litigation,” Whitehouse said.
A renewable energy project can only start construction if it can get connected to the grid.
The clock is ticking for clean energy developers. With the signing of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, wind and solar developers have to start construction (whatever that means) in the next 12 months and be operating no later than the end of 2027 to qualify for federal tax credits.
But projects can only get built if they can get connected to the grid. Those decisions are often out of the hands of state, local, or even federal policymakers, and are instead left up to utilities, independent system operators, or regional trading organizations, which then have to study things like the transmission infrastructure needed for the project before they can grant a project permission to link up.
This process, from requesting interconnection to commercial operation, used to take two years on average as of 2008; by 2023, it took almost five years, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. This creates what we call the interconnection queue, where likely thousands of gigawatts of proposed projects are languishing, unable to start construction. The inability to quickly process these requests adds to the already hefty burden of state, local, and federal permitting and siting — and could mean that developers will be locked out of tax credits regardless of how quickly they move.
There’s no better example of the tension between clean energy goals and the process of getting projects into service than the Mid-Atlantic, home to the 13-state electricity market known as PJM Interconnection. Many states in the region have mandates to substantially decarbonize their electricity systems, whereas PJM is actively seeking to bring new gas-fired generation onto the grid in order to meet its skyrocketing projections of future demand.
This mismatch between current supply and present-and-future demand has led to the price for “capacity” in PJM — i.e. what the grid operator has greed to pay in exchange for the ability to call on generators when they’re most needed — jumping by over $10 billion, leading to utility bill hikes across the system.
“There is definitely tension,” Abe Silverman, a senior research scholar at Johns Hopkins University and former general counsel for New Jersey’s utility regulator, told me.
While Silverman doesn’t think that PJM is “philosophically” opposed to adding new resources, including renewables, to the grid, “they don’t have urgency you might want them to have. It’s a banal problem of administrative competency rather than an agenda to stymie new resources coming on the grid.”
PJM is in the midst of a multiyear project to overhaul its interconnection queue. According to a spokesperson, there are around 44,500 megawatts of proposed projects that have interconnection agreements and could move on to construction. Of these, I calculated that about 39,000 megawatts are solar, wind, or storage. Another 63,000 megawatts of projects are in the interconnection queue without an agreement, and will be processed by the end of next year, the spokesperson said, likely making it impossible for wind and solar projects to be “placed in service” by 2028.
Even among the projects with agreements, “there probably will be some winnowing of that down,” Mark Repsher, a partner at PA Consulting Group, told me. “My guess is, of that 44,000 megawatts that have interconnection agreements, they may have other challenges getting online in the next two years.”
PJM has attempted to place the blame for project delays largely at the feet of siting, permitting, and operations challenges.
“Some [projects] are moving to construction, but others are feeling the headwinds of siting and permitting challenges and supply chain backlogs,” PJM’s executive vice president of operations, planning, and security Aftab Khan said in a June statement giving an update on interconnection reforms.
And on high prices, PJM has been increasingly open about blaming “premature” retirements of fossil fuel power plants.
In May, PJM said in a statement in response to a Department of Energy order to keep a dual-fuel oil and natural gas plant in Pennsylvania open that it “has repeatedly documented and voiced its concerns over the growing risk of a supply and demand imbalance driven by the confluence of generator retirements and demand growth. Such an imbalance could have serious ramifications for reliability and affordability for consumers.”
Just days earlier, in a statement ahead of a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission conference, PJM CEO Manu Asthana had fretted about “growing resource adequacy concerns” based on demand growth, the cost of building new generation, and, in a direct shot at federal and state policies that encouraged renewables and discouraged fossil fuels, “premature, primarily policy-driven retirements of resources continue to outpace the development of new generation.”
The Trump administration has echoed these worries for the whole nation’s electrical grid, writing in a report issued this week that “if current retirement schedules and incremental additions remain unchanged, most regions will face unacceptable reliability risks.” So has the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which argued in a 2024 report that most of the U.S. and Canada “faces mounting resource adequacy challenges over the next 10 years as surging demand growth continues and thermal generators announce plans for retirement.”
State officials and clean energy advocates have instead placed the blame for higher costs and impending reliability gaps on PJM’s struggles to connect projects, how the electricity market is designed, and the operator’s perceived coolness towards renewables.
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro told The New York Times in June that the state should “re-examine” its membership in PJM following last year’s steep price hikes. In February, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin wrote a letter calling for Asthana to be fired. (He will leave the transmission organization by the end of the year, although PJM says the decision was made before Youngkin’s letter.)
That conflict will likely only escalate as developers rush to start projects — which they can only do if they can get an interconnection services agreement from PJM.
In contrast to Silverman, Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s energy program, told me that “PJM, internally and operationally, believes that renewables are a drag on the grid and that dispatchable generation, particularly fossil fuels and nuclear, are essential.”
In May, for instance, PJM announced that it had selected 51 projects for its “Reliability Resource Initiative,” a one-time special process for adding generation to the grid over the next five to six years. The winning bids overwhelmingly involved expanding existing gas-fired plants or building new ones.
The main barrier to getting the projects built that have already worked their way through the queue, Repsher told me, is “primarily permitting.” But even with new barriers thrown up by the OBBBA, “there’s going to be appetite for these projects,” thanks to high demand, Repsher said. “It’s really just navigating all the logistical hurdles.”
Some leaders of PJM states are working on the permitting and deployment side of the equation while also criticizing the electricity market. Pennsylvania’s Shapiro has proposed legislation that would set up a centralized state entity to handle siting for energy projects. Maryland Governor Wes Moore signed legislation in May that would accelerate permitting for energy projects, including preempting local regulations for siting solar.
New Jersey, on the other hand, is procuring storage projects directly.
The state has a mandate stemming from its Clean Energy Act of 2018 to add 2,000 megawatts of energy storage by 2030. In June, New Jersey’s utility regulator started a process to procure at least half of that through utility-scale projects, funded through an existing utility-bill-surcharge.
New Jersey regulators described energy storage as “the most significant source of near-term capacity,” citing specifically the fact that storage makes up the “bulk” of proposed energy capacity in New Jersey with interconnection approval from PJM.
While the regulator issued its order before OBBBA passed, the focus on storage ended up being advantageous. The bill treats energy storage far more generously than wind and solar, meaning that New Jersey could potentially expand its generation capacity with projects that are more likely to pencil due to continued access to tax credits. The state is also explicitly working around the interconnection queue, not raging against it: “PJM interconnection delays do not pose a significant obstacle to a Phase 1 transmission-scale storage procurement target of 1,000 MW,” the order said.
In the end, PJM and the states may be stuck together, and their best hope could be finding some way to work together — and they may not have any other choice.
“A well-functioning RTO is the best way to achieve both low rates for consumers and carbon emissions reductions,” Evan Vaughan, the executive director of MAREC Action, a trade group representing Mid-Atlantic solar, wind, and storage developers, told me. “I think governors in PJM understand that, and I think that they’re pushing on PJM.”
“I would characterize the passage of this bill as adding fuel to the fire that was already under states and developers — and even energy offtakers — to get more projects deployed in the region.”
On Neil Jacobs’ confirmation hearing, OBBBA costs, and Saudi Aramco
Current conditions: Temperatures are climbing toward 100 degrees Fahrenheit in central and eastern Texas, complicating recovery efforts after the floods • More than 10,000 people have been evacuated in southwestern China due to flooding from the remnants of Typhoon Danas • Mebane, North Carolina, has less than two days of drinking water left after its water treatment plant sustained damage from Tropical Storm Chantal.
Neil Jacobs, President Trump’s nominee to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, fielded questions from the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee on Wednesday about how to prevent future catastrophes like the Texas floods, Politico reports. “If confirmed, I want to ensure that staffing weather service offices is a top priority,” Jacobs said, even as the administration has cut more than 2,000 staff positions this year. Jacobs also told senators that he supports the president’s 2026 budget, which would further cut $2.2 billion from NOAA, including funding for the maintenance of weather models that accurately forecast the Texas storms. During the hearing, Jacobs acknowledged that humans have an “influence” on the climate, and said he’d direct NOAA to embrace “new technologies” and partner with industry “to advance global observing systems.”
Jacobs previously served as the acting NOAA administrator from 2019 through the end of Trump’s first term, and is perhaps best remembered for his role in the “Sharpiegate” press conference, in which he modified a map of Hurricane Dorian’s storm track to match Trump’s mistaken claim that it would hit southern Alabama. The NOAA Science Council subsequently investigated Jacobs and found he had violated the organization’s scientific integrity policy.
The Republican budget reconciliation bill could increase household energy costs by $170 per year by 2035 and $353 per year by 2040, according to a new analysis by Evergreen Action, a climate policy group. “Biden-era provisions, now cut by the GOP spending plan, were making it more affordable for families to install solar panels to lower utility bills,” the report found. The law also cut building energy efficiency credits that had helped Americans reduce their bills by an estimated $1,250 per year. Instead, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will increase wholesale electricity prices almost 75% by 2035, as well as eliminate 760,000 jobs by the end of the decade. Separately, an analysis by the nonpartisan think tank Center for American Progress found that the OBBBA could increase average electricity costs by $110 per household as soon as next year, and up to $200 annually in some states.
EIA
Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company Saudi Aramco is in talks with Commonwealth LNG in Louisiana to buy liquified natural gas, Reuters reports. The discussion is reportedly for 2 million tons per year of the facility’s 9.4 million-ton annual export capacity, which would help “cement Aramco’s push into the global LNG market as it accelerates efforts to diversify beyond crude oil exports” and be the “strongest signal yet that Aramco intends to take a material position in the U.S. LNG sector,” OilPrice.com notes. LNG demand is expected to grow 50% globally by 2030, but as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has reported, President Trump’s tariffs could make it harder for LNG projects still in early development, like Commonwealth, to succeed. “For the moment, U.S. LNG is still interesting,” Anne-Sophie Corbeau, a research scholar focused on natural gas at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, told Emily. “But if costs increase too much, maybe people will start to wonder.”
Ford confirmed this week that its $3 billion electric vehicle battery plant in Michigan will still qualify for federal tax credits due to eleventh-hour tweaks to the bill’s language, The New York Times reports. Though Ford had said it would build its factory regardless of what happened to the credits, the company’s executive chairman had previously called them “crucial” to the construction of the facility and the employment of the 1,700 people expected to work there. Ford’s battery plant is located in Michigan’s Calhoun County, which Trump won by a margin of 56%. The last-minute tweaks to save the credits to the benefit of Ford “suggest that at least some Republican lawmakers were aware that cuts in the bill would strike their constituents the hardest,” the Times writes.
Italy and Spain are on track to shutter their last remaining mainland coal power plants in the next several months, marking “a major milestone in Europe’s transition to a predominantly renewables-based power system by 2035,” Beyond Fossil Fuels reported Wednesday. To date, 15 European countries now have coal-free grids following Ireland’s move away from coal in 2025.
Italy is set to complete its transition from coal by the end of the summer with the closure of its last two plants, in keeping with the government’s 2017 phase-out target of 2025. Two coal plants in Sardinia will remain operational until 2028 due to complications with an undersea grid connection cable. In Spain, the nation’s largest coal plant will be entirely converted to fossil gas by the end of the year, while two smaller plants are also on track to shut down in the immediate future. Once they do, Spain’s only coal-power plant will be in the Balearic Islands, with an expected phase-out date of 2030.
“Climate change makes this a battle with a ratchet. There are some things you just can’t come back from. The ratchet has clicked, and there is no return. So it is urgent — it is time for us all to wake up and fight.” — Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island in his 300th climate speech on the Senate floor Wednesday night.