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“We all need to get our heads wrapped around more fire, in more places, at more times of the year.”
When I initially set out to interview Justin Angle, one of the authors of This Is Wildfire: How to Protect Yourself, Your Home, and Your Community in the Age of Heat, I’d expected we’d mostly be talking about California.
The forthcoming book is a practical guide and a history of living in the age of wildfires, and has been an invaluable resource in my own reporting on the subject. Written with environmental journalist Nick Mott, This Is Wildfire springs from the co-authors’ six-part 2021 podcast Fireline, and is shrewdly scheduled to be published on August 29, when western fire season really starts to pick up (you can preorder the book here).
Though midsummer is often considered “peak wildfire season,” it is September and October that are “far more destructive and burn through many more acres” due to the abundance of dried-out vegetation and blustery autumnal winds, the Western Fire Chiefs Association writes. In fact, the 2018 Camp Fire — the most deadly and destructive wildfire in California’s history — didn’t start until early November. But last week, as a benchmark for modern wildfire devastation, the Camp Fire was surpassed by the horrific wildfires in Maui; so far, there are 96 confirmed fatalities, a number that authorities expect to rise as search efforts continue.
When I spoke to Angle at the end of last week, we were both still reeling from the news. Our conversation touched on why the tragedy in Hawaii is “shocking but not surprising,” the practicalities of home-hardening and evacuation preparedness, and how Americans will need to come together to learn to live with wildfire. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
This Is Wildfire feels like a natural progression from your podcast, Fireline, but I wanted to go back before that, to when you first became interested in wildfires. What was — if you’ll excuse the pun — the spark?
It might not seem obvious; I’m a business school professor at the University of Montana. But when I moved here in 2012, it was a particularly bad fire and smoke year and I’d never really been exposed to those things in my life. Living through it for the first time, I quickly learned that fire plays a large role not only in the ecosystem here in the northern Rocky Mountains but also in the culture. Missoula is an epicenter for so much important fire work, whether it’s the smokejumper training center and the base, the Rocky Mountain research lab, or the Forest Service and the University of Montana College of Forestry and Conservation doing some really important fire science.
Many of the people I was meeting were prominent players doing important work on fire. So I set out to understand it myself and quickly realized that there seemed to be a lack of general understanding in the community. You know, you read about wildfires and there will be all kinds of vocabulary and jargon, “type three this,” “type one this,” “incident response team,” all sorts of stuff that seemed like gobbly-gook to the average person. It seemed like there was a need for a general explainer. And I was a podcaster — I’d been doing a current affairs radio show for a few years at the time — and I thought about doing a single episode [on wildfire] and quickly realized that, wow, this is a much bigger project that needs journalistic treatment. I’m not trained in journalism so I teamed up with Nick [Mott], who’s an outstanding journalist, and we made Fireline together.
This has been a strange fire year so far, from the smoke event on the East Coast in June to the deadly fires in Maui this week. I have the uneasy sense that your book is going to be increasingly relevant to people who live beyond the traditional borders of the American West in the coming years. As an expert on the topic of wildfire, what are you making of all this?
It’s shocking but not surprising. If you think back to a very formative moment in our country’s relationship with fire, that was the Big Blowup in 1910 when 3 million acres burned [in the inland Northwest]. The smoke from that event blanketed New York City and caused a lot of folks living in that area to think a lot more about wildfire. So maybe we’re witnessing a similar moment where the smoke effects reach more people.
Fiery images in the media this time of year are common, but seeing it in a place that’s unusual, that people don’t associate with burning to the extent they’re seeing now — maybe it breaks through and helps. I mean, one of the big themes of the book is trying to help people imagine and grasp how they can be a part of solutions moving forward. Maybe this is a little motivation for people to, you know, not necessarily wake up, that might be too pejorative a framing, but for fire to be more on the radar screen and for folks to think, Oh, this is a thing that I should be more cognizant of and be thinking about protecting myself and my family from.
One of the really scary things we saw in the Maui fire was how little time people had to evacuate, in part because the fire spread so quickly and unpredictably due to the high winds. In writing a guide for wildfires, what did you want your readers to understand about what they should do in the seconds and minutes after getting an evacuation alert?
First off, be tuned in to all those sources of information. Be signed up for evacuation notices and air quality notices. How that information is disseminated varies a lot from locality to locality. It’s often organized at the county level, but it’s hard to give a one-size-fits-all recommendation; you really have to investigate it in your own area. But that’s absolutely worth the effort, it’s critical.
In the book, we talk about a simple thing called a go bag. If you live in wildfire-prone lands, or any place where natural disaster is a risk — and that’s almost everywhere now — have a go bag with your essential items ready to go. If you need to scramble out the door in moments, it’s ready with your critical items. And it helps put you in that mindset of preparedness.
The other thing for homeowners, with a wind-driven fire — in Maui, I don’t know exactly how much of this occurred — but one of the biggest risks to homes is floating embers finding a weak spot in your home, whether that’s some pine needles in your gutter, or a wooden roof, or some spare wood under your deck. Understand the risks to your home and how they manifest and the work you can do to make your home safer. That could provide a margin of safety and protection that, as a homeowner, you have a lot of control over. Understand how home ignitions work and how they can be prevented with sound maintenance and in some communities, better zoning and better construction and better materials. Some of it is very much accessible to the individual and some of it is going to take more change at the system and policy level.
How close to your home does a wildfire have to be in order to be considered a threat? When should someone start to follow the progress and alerts?
I would advise any distance, and what I mean by any distance is a couple of considerations. If a fire is throwing smoke into your breathing air, then you should be paying attention, you should be in tune with the air quality ratings and how that has an effect on your health, and you should be moderating your activities according to the air quality.
The studies on embers and how far they can float — it’s up to two miles in some of the studies, although some of these fires are creating more intense wind systems. I don’t think I’d want to put a number on it. If there’s a fire within 20 miles of my home, I’m paying attention to it for sure. It’s most likely throwing smoke my way and these fires can spread really fast.
Understanding not only the distance away, but: What are the prevailing wind patterns? What’s the landscape like between your home and the fire? And how much vegetation is there? What areas of defense are there — existing burn scars or areas that have been thinned from previous work by the Forest Service? What sort of access does the Forest Service and other agencies have to that area? So a few different things make it hard to say, like, “This is the number,” but if you’re getting smoke from a fire, generally speaking, it’s close enough for you to be paying attention.
In the book you write, “When [fire is] on the news, it’s nearly always an enemy — something wreaking havoc that we must put an end to.” How should people who write about and cover wildfires rethink the narrative?
Fire is a scary thing and it’s a scary thing for good reason: It can cause tremendous loss of life and property. But I think the notion that it’s always this terrible thing that we have to eradicate from the natural world is, one, incorrect, and two, impossible.
We got really good at suppressing fire for a really long time — so much so that the public expected it to be this thing that the government did for us. Clearly, seeing by the intensity of many of these fires we’re experiencing, that is no longer the case. These fires, if they get out of hand, nobody can control them.
And the other piece of that is: A certain amount of fire is needed. We actually need more fire at the right times of the year in the right places to create more balance in the ecosystem. Our forests will be more resilient to fire; there will be better species health. Some species of trees and animals require fire to germinate, to be healthy. And so I think framing fires as an enemy, as this imminently scary thing, has had some consequences that we now need to think through a little bit more and with a little bit more complexity.
How do you tell the difference between a good and bad fire?
A fire that can burn without creating any risk to human values, homes, and life; a fire that can rejuvenate a forest, clean out the understory, thin out the trees, and create defensible space for future fires to run into or for firefighters to base operations out of — they’re called “resource benefit fires” by the agencies. The takeaway is that not all fire is bad: some are good and in general, we need more of them.
We need to accept that, and also be more accepting of smoke from prescribed fires at different times than we expect it. Here in Missoula, people commonly expect August to be a smoky time of the year and we brace ourselves for it. But sometimes when we get smoke in May, people get cranky, people get upset, and they might even get a little PTSD. Like, “Oh my gosh, is my summer gonna be ruined.” And you know, the truth of the matter is maybe some smoke in those times, when it’s safer to do prescribed burns, is something we need to adapt to. A lot of times, the smoke from prescribed burns or lower-intensity fires is much less concentrated and much shorter in duration. So cumulative exposure to smoke — even though any exposure can have consequences — might lead to better air quality in general if it is spread across a wider period of time.
That was one of the parts of the book that was both very surprising to me and also a lightbulb moment. I can’t remember what the quote was exactly, but it was something along the lines of, like, You’re going to have smoke one way or the other. Do you want it from a megafire, and to have that horrible choking thick smoke, or from a lower intensity burn?
That’s a quote the Forest Service uses commonly and it’s attributable, to the best of my knowledge, to Mark Finney, a scientist based out here in Missoula. He basically says: “How do you want your smoke and when do you want it?” I mean, you’re going to get it regardless.
One of the things we talked about in the book is the relationship between the climate and fire; higher temperatures mean more fire. If you were to look at the historical relationship between temperature and fire, we’re actually in a fire deficit. You would expect to see more fire right now. That’s largely attributable to our suppression. So that doesn’t necessarily mean what we’re seeing in Maui is the new normal, but I think we all need to get our heads wrapped around more fire, in more places, at more times of the year.
A major theme of This Is Wildfire is that we need to tackle these problems as a community, even when that runs against the rugged individualism and libertarian bent of much of the rural West. Are you optimistic that wildfires are something we can come together on?
I think so, mostly because I think we have to. The fire doesn’t care who you voted for if comes for you and your home. And though there is a sense of rugged individualism in the West, there’s also often a spirit of community, particularly in rural areas.
There are things that people can do at the individual level that we outlined in the book about making sure your home ignition zone is resilient to fire. But your efforts need to be part of a community effort. And that can just increase the need for neighborly relations and making fire more salient in community conversations. I’m optimistic that there is a pathway to more communication and coordination.
Where it gets a little thornier, I think, and where I’m still optimistic but maybe not as optimistic, is: Are we going to be able to have more productive conversations around zoning and building policies and saying, “Hey, is it a good idea to build in that place? Is it a good idea to rebuild in that place? Is that appropriate?”
Historically, particularly with wildfire, we’ve not done a good job of asking the hard questions of whether or not we should build in a certain place and how we should build in a certain place. We’re starting to see more and more of it with hurricanes and tornadoes in a variety of states with a variety of political sentiments, so I am optimistic that it can be done with fire and hopefully some of the fire events that we’re having are going to motivate the necessity for those types of hard conversations.
If there’s one thing readers walk away from your book understanding, what would you want that to be?
That not all fires are bad. Some are really beneficial and we actually, on balance, need more fire in the system. And doing so well, I think, gets us to a healthier place on a variety of levels.
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Here at Heatmap, we write a lot about decarbonization — that is, the process of transitioning the global economy away from fossil fuels and toward long-term sustainable technologies for generating energy. What we don’t usually write about is what those technologies actually do. Sure, solar panels convert energy from the sun into electricity — but how, exactly? Why do wind turbines have to be that tall? What’s the difference between carbon capture, carbon offsets, and carbon removal, and why does it matter?
So today, we’re bringing you Climate 101, a primer on some of the key technologies of the energy transition. In this series, we’ll cover everything from what makes silicon a perfect material for solar panels (and computer chips), to what’s going on inside a lithium-ion battery, to the difference between advanced and enhanced geothermal.
There’s something here for everyone, whether you’re already an industry expert or merely climate curious. For instance, did you know that contemporary 17th century readers might have understood Don Quixote’s famous “tilting at windmills” to be an expression of NIMYBism? I sure didn’t! But I do now that I’ve read Jeva Lange’s 101 guide to wind energy.
That said, I’d like to extend an especial welcome to those who’ve come here feeling lost in the climate conversation and looking for a way to make sense of it. All of us at Heatmap have been there at some point or another, and we know how confusing — even scary — it can be. The constant drumbeat of news about heatwaves and floods and net-zero this and parts per million that is a lot to take in. We hope this information will help you start to see the bigger picture — because the sooner you do, the sooner you can join the transition, yourself.
Without further ado, here’s your Climate 101 syllabus:
Once you feel ready to go deeper, here are some more Heatmap stories to check out:
The basics on the world’s fastest-growing source of renewable energy.
Solar power is already the backbone of the energy transition. But while the basic technology has been around for decades, in more recent years, installations have proceeded at a record pace. In the United States, solar capacity has grown at an average annual rate of 28% over the past decade. Over a longer timeline, the growth is even more extraordinary — from an stalled capacity base of under 1 gigawatt with virtually no utility-scale solar in 2010, to over 60 gigawatts of utility-scale solar in 2020, and almost 175 gigawatts today. Solar is the fastest-growing source of renewable energy in both the U.S. and the world.
There are some drawbacks to solar, of course. The sun, famously, does not always shine, nor does it illuminate all places on Earth to an equal extent. Placing solar where it’s sunniest can sometimes mean more expense and complexity to connect to the grid. But combined with batteries — especially as energy storage systems develop beyond the four hours of storage offered by existing lithium-ion technology — solar power could be the core of a decarbonized grid.
Solar power can be thought of as a kind of cousin of the semiconductors that power all digital technology. As Princeton energy systems professor and Heatmap contributor Jesse Jenkins has explained, certain materials allow for electrons to flow more easily between molecules, carrying an electrical charge. On one end of the spectrum are your classic conductors, like copper, which are used in transmission lines; on the other end are insulators, like rubber, which limit electrical charges.
In between on that spectrum are semiconductors, which require some amount of energy to be used as a conductor. In the computing context these are used to make transistors, and in the energy context they’re used to make — you guessed it — solar panels.
In a solar panel, the semiconductor material absorbs heat and light from the sun, allowing electrons to flow. The best materials for solar panels, explained Jenkins, have just the right properties so that when they absorb light, all of that energy is used to get the electrons flowing and not turned into wasteful heat. Silicon fits the bill.
When you layer silicon with other materials, you can force the electrons to flow in a single direction consistently; add on a conductive material to siphon off those subatomic particles, and voilà, you’ve got direct current. Combine a bunch of these layers, and you’ve got a photovoltaic panel.
Globally, solar generation capacity stood at over 2,100 terawatt-hours in 2024, according to Our World in Data and the Energy Institute, growing by more than a quarter from the previous year. A huge portion of that growth has been in China, which has almost half of the world’s total installed solar capacity. Installations there have grown at around 40% per year in the past decade.
Solar is still a relatively small share of total electricity generation, however, let alone all energy usage, which includes sectors like transportation and industry. Solar is the sixth largest producer of electricity in the world, behind coal, gas, hydropower, nuclear power, and wind. It’s the fourth largest non-carbon-emitting generation source and the third largest renewable power source, after wind and hydropower.
Solar has taken off in the United States, too, where utility-scale installations make up almost 4% of all electricity generated.
While that doesn’t seem like much, overall growth in generation has been tremendous. In 2024, solar hit just over 300 terawatt-hours of generation in the U.S., compared to about 240 terawatt-hours in 2023 and just under 30 in 2014.
Looking forward, there’s even more solar installation planned. Developers plan to add some 63 gigawatts of capacity to the grid this year, following an additional 30 gigawatts in 2024, making up just over half of the total planned capacity additions, according to Energy information Administration.
Solar is cheap compared to other energy sources, and especially other renewable sources. The world has a lot of practice dealing with silicon at industrial scale, and China especially has rapidly advanced manufacturing processes for photovoltaic cells. Once the solar panel is manufactured, it’s relatively simple to install compared to a wind turbine. And compared to a gas- or coal-fired power plant, the fuel is free.
From 1975 to 2022, solar module costs fell from over $100 per watt to below $0.50, according to Our World In Data. From 2012 to 2022 alone, costs fell by about 90%, and have fallen by “around 20% every time the global cumulative capacity doubles,” writes OWID analyst Hannah Ritchie. Much of the decline in cost has been attributed to “Wright’s Law,” which says that unit costs fall as production increases.
While construction costs have flat-lined or slightly increased recently due to supply chain issues and overall inflation, the overall trend is one of cost declines, with solar construction costs declining from around $3,700 per kilowatt-hour in 2013, to around $1,600 in 2023.
There are solar panels at extreme latitudes — Alaska, for instance, has seen solar growth in the past few years. But there are obvious challenges with the low amount of sunlight for large stretches of the year. At higher latitudes, irradiance, a measure of how much power is transmitted from the sun to a specific area, is lower (although that also varies based on climate and elevation). Then there are also more day-to-day issues, such as the effect of snow and ice on panels, which can cause issues in turning sunlight into power (they literally block the panel from the sun). High latitudes can see wild swings in solar generation: In Tromso, in northern Norway, solar generation in summer months can be three times as high as the annual average, with a stretch of literally zero production in December and January.
While many Nordic countries have been leaders in decarbonizing their electricity grids, they tend not to rely on solar in that project. In Sweden, nuclear and hydropower are its largest non-carbon-emitting fuel sources for electricity; in Norway, electricity comes almost exclusively from hydropower.
There has been some kind of policy support for solar power since 1978, when the Energy Tax Act provided tax credits for solar power investment. Since then, the investment tax credit has been the workhorse of American solar policy. The tax credit as it was first established was worth 10% of the system’s upfront cost “for business energy property and equipment using energy resources other than oil or natural gas,” according to the Congressional Research Service.
But above that baseline consistency has been a fair amount of higher-level turmoil, especially recently. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 kicked up the value of that credit to 30% through 2007; Congress kept extending that timeline, with the ITC eventually scheduled to come down to 10% for utility-scale and zero for residential projects by 2024.
Then came the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which re-instituted the 30% investment tax credit, with bonuses for domestic manufacturing and installing solar in designated “energy communities,” which were supposed to be areas traditionally economically dependent on fossil fuels. The tax then transitioned into a “technology neutral” investment tax credit that applied across non-carbon-emitting energy sources, including solar, beginning in 2024.
This year, Congress overhauled the tax incentives for solar (and wind) yet again. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed in July, solar projects have to start construction by July 2026, or complete construction by the end of 2027 to qualify for the tax credit. The Internal Revenue Service later tightened up its definition of what it means for a project to start construction, emphasizing continuing actual physical construction activities as opposed to upfront expenditures, which could imperil future solar development.
At the same time, the Trump administration is applying a vise to renewables projects on public lands and for which the federal government plays a role in permitting. Renewable industry trade groups have said that the highest levels of the Department of Interior are obstructing permitting for solar projects on public lands, which are now subject to a much closer level of review than non-renewable energy projects.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Researchers attributed the falling cost of solar this century to “scale economies.” Much of this scale has been achieved in China, which dominates the market for solar panel production, especially for export, even though much of the technology was developed in the United States.
At this point, however, the cost of an actual solar system is increasingly made up of “soft costs” like labor and permitting, at least in the United States. According to data from the National Renewables Energy Laboratory, a utility-scale system costs $1.20 per watt, of which soft costs make up a third, $0.40. Ten years ago, a utility-scale system cost $2.90 per watt, of which soft costs was $1.20, or less than half.
Beyond working to make existing technology even cheaper, there are other materials-based advances that promise higher efficiency for solar panels.
The most prominent is “perovskite,” the name for a group of compounds with similar structures that absorb certain frequencies of light particularly well and, when stacked with silicon, can enable more output for a given amount of solar radiation. Perovskite cells have seen measured efficiencies upwards of 34% when combined with silicon, whereas typical solar cells top out around 20%.
The issue with perovskite is that it’s not particularly durable, partially due to weaker chemical bonds within the layers of the cell. It’s also more expensive than existing solar, although much of that comes down inefficient manufacturing processes. If those problems can be solved, perovskite could promise more output for the same level of soft costs as silicon-based solar panels.
The country’s largest source of renewable energy has a long history.
Was Don Quixote a NIMBY?
Miguel de Cervantes’ hero admittedly wasn’t tilting at turbines in 1605, but for some of his contemporary readers in 17th-century Spain, windmills for grinding wheat into flour were viewed as a “dangerous new technology,” author Simon Winchester writes in his forthcoming book, The Breath of the Gods: The History and Future of the Wind. One interpretation of Cervantes’ novel might be that Quixote was “actually doing battle with progress.”
Nearly four and a half centuries later, harnessing the energy of the wind remains controversial, even if the breeze is one of humankind’s longest-utilized resources. While wind is the largest source of renewable electricity generation in the United States today, high construction costs and local opposition have more recently stymied the industry’s continued expansion. The new presidential administration — suspicious of wind’s reliability and place in the American energy mix — has also been doing its very best to stunt any future growth in the sector.
Whether you’re catching up on Trump’s latest regulatory moves, you have your own concerns about the safety of the technology, or this is your first time even thinking about this energy resource, here is the blow-by-blow — sorry! — on wind power in the U.S.
At their most basic conceptual level, wind turbines work by converting kinetic energy — the energy of an object in motion; in this case, air particles — into electrical energy that can be used to power homes, buildings, factories, and data centers.
Like hydroelectric dams, turbines do this by first converting kinetic energy into mechanical energy. The wind turns the turbine blades, which spin a rotor that is connected to a generator. Inside the generator are magnets that rotate around coils of copper wire, creating a magnetic field that pushes and pulls the electrons within the copper. Voilà — and with gratitude to Michael Faraday — now you have an electrical current that can be distributed to the grid.
Turbines typically require an average wind speed of about 9 miles per hour to generate electricity, which is why they are constructed in deserts, mountain passes, on top of hills, or in shallow coastal waters offshore, where there is less in the way to obstruct the flow of wind. Higher elevations are also windier, so utility-scale wind turbines are frequently around 330 feet tall (though the largest turbines tower 600 feet or higher).
It depends on the size of the turbine and also the wind speed. The average capacity of a new land-based wind turbine in the U.S. was 3.4 megawatts in 2023 — but that’s the “nameplate capacity,” or what the turbine would generate if it ran at optimal capacity around the clock.
U.S. Department of Energy
In the U.S., the average capacity factor (i.e. the actual energy output) for a turbine is more like 42%, or close to two-fifths of its theoretical maximum output. The general rule of thumb is that one commercial turbine in the U.S. can power nearly 1,000 homes per month. In 2023, the latest year of data available, land-based and offshore wind turbines in the U.S. generated 425,235 gigawatt-hours of electricity, or enough to power 39 million American homes per year.
A common criticism of wind power is that it “stops working” if the wind isn’t blowing. While it’s true that wind is an intermittent resource, grid operators are used to coping with this. A renewables-heavy grid should combine different energy sources and utilize offline backup generators to prevent service interruptions during doldrums. Battery storage can also help handle fluctuations in demand and increase reliability.
At the same time, wind power is indeed dependent on, well, the wind. In 2023, for example, U.S. wind power generation dropped below 2022 levels due to lower-than-average wind speeds in parts of the Midwest. When you see a turbine that isn’t spinning, though, it isn’t necessarily because there isn’t enough wind. Turbines also have a “cut out” point at which they stop turning if it gets too windy, which protects the structural integrity of the blades and prevents Twisters-like mishaps, as well as keeps the rotor from over-spinning, which could strain or break the turbine’s internal rotating components used to generate electricity.
Though Americans have used wind power in various forms since the late 1800s, the oil crisis of the 1970s brought new interest, development, and investment in wind energy. “The American industry really got going after the suggestion from the Finns, the Swedes, the Danes,” who’d already been making advances in the technology, albeit on single-turbine scales, Winchester, the author of the forthcoming history of wind power, The Breath of the Gods, told me.
In the early 1970s, the Department of Energy issued a grant to William Heronemus, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, to explore the potential of wind energy. Heronemus became “really enthusiastic and built wind generators on the campus,” helping to modernize turbines into the more familiar construction we see widely today, Winchester said.
Some of Heronemus’ former students helped build the world’s first multi-turbine wind farm in New Hampshire in 1981. Though the blades of that farm interfered with nearby television reception — they had to be paused during prime time — the technology “seemed to everyone to make sense,” Winchester said. The Energy Policy Act of 1992, which introduced production tax credits for renewables, spurred further development through the end of the millennium.
Heronemus, a former Naval architect, had dreamed in the 1970s of building a flotilla of floating turbines mounted on “wind ships” that were powered by converting seawater into hydrogen fuel. Early experiments in offshore wind by the Energy Research and Development Administration, the progenitor of the Department of Energy, weren’t promising due to the technological limitations of the era — even commercial onshore wind was still in its infancy, and Heronemus’ plans looked like science-fiction.
In 1991, though, the Danes — ever the leaders in wind energy — successfully constructed the Vindeby Offshore Wind Farm, complete with 11 turbines and a total installed capacity of 5 megawatts. The Blyth offshore wind farm in northern Wales soon followed, with the United States finally constructing its first grid-connected offshore wind turbines off of Maine in 2013. The Block Island wind farm, with a capacity of 30 megawatts, is frequently cited as the first true offshore wind farm in the U.S., and began operating off the coast of Rhode Island in 2016.
Though offshore wind taps into higher and more consistent wind speeds off the ocean — and, as a result, is generally considered more efficient than onshore wind — building turbines at sea comes with its own set of challenges. Due to increased installation costs and the greater wear-and-tear of enduring saltwater and storms at sea, offshore wind is generally calculated to be about twice as expensive as onshore wind. “It’s unclear if offshore wind will ever be as cheap as onshore — even the most optimistic projections documented by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory have offshore wind more expensive than the current price of onshore in 2035,” according to Brian Potter in his newsletter, Construction Physics, though he notes that “past projections have underestimated the future cost reductions of wind turbines.”
Scott Eisen/Getty Images
In the decade from 2014 to 2023, total wind capacity in the U.S. doubled. Onshore and offshore wind power is now responsible for over 10% of utility-scale electricity generation in the U.S., and has been the highest-producing renewable energy source in the nation since 2019. (Hydropower, the next highest-producing renewable energy source, is responsible for about 5.7% of the energy mix, by comparison.) In six states — Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, South Dakota, and North Dakota — onshore wind makes up more than a third of the current electricity mix, Climate Central reports.
Offshore wind has been slower to grow in the U.S. Even during the Biden administration, when the government targeted developing 30 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030, the industry faced financing challenges, transmission and integration obstacles, and limits in access to a skilled workforce, per a 2024 paper in Energy Research & Social Science. That same year, the Department of Energy reported that the nation had a total of 80,523 megawatts for offshore wind in operation and in the pipeline, which, under ideal conditions, could power 26 million homes. Many of those offshore projects and plans now face an uncertain future under the Trump administration.
Though we’re far removed from the 1880s, when suspicious Scots dismissed wind energy pioneer James Blyth’s home turbine as “the devil’s work,” there are still plenty of persistent concerns about the safety of wind power to people and animals.
Some worry about onshore wind turbines’ effects on people, including the perceived dangers of electromagnetic fields, shadow flicker from the turning blades, and sleep disturbance or stress. Per a 2014 systematic review of 60 peer-reviewed studies on wind turbines and human health by the National Institutes of Health, while there was “evidence to suggest that wind turbines can be a source of annoyance to some people, there was no evidence demonstrating a direct causal link between living in proximity to wind turbines and more serious physiological health effects.” The topic has since been extensively studied, with no reputable research concluding that turbines have poor health impacts on those who live near them.
Last year, the blade of a turbine at Vineyard Wind 1 broke and fell into the water, causing the temporary closure of beaches in Nantucket to protect people from the fiberglass debris. While no one was ultimately injured, GE Vernova, which owns Vineyard Wind, agreed earlier this year to settle with the town for $10.5 million to compensate for the tourism and business losses that resulted from the failure. Thankfully, as my colleague Jael Holzman has written, “major errors like blade failures are incredibly rare.”
There are also concerns about the dangers of wind turbines to some wildlife. Turbines do kill birds, including endangered golden eagles, which has led to opposition from environmental and local activist groups. But context is also important: The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has found that wind farms “represent just 0.03% of all human-related bird deaths in the U.S.” (Illegal shootings, for example, are the greatest cause of golden eagle deaths.) The continued use of fossil fuels and the ecological impacts of climate change also pose a far graver threat to birds than wind farms do. Still, there is room for discussion and improvement: The California Department of Fish and Wildlife issued a call earlier this year for proposals to help protect golden eagles from turbine collisions in its major wind resource areas.
Perhaps the strongest objection to offshore wind has come from concern for whales. Though there has been an ongoing “unusual mortality event” for whales off the East Coast dating back to 2016 — about the same time the burgeoning offshore wind industry took off in the United States — the two have been falsely correlated (especially by groups with ties to the fossil fuel industry). A recent government impact report ordered by Republicans even found that “NOAA Fisheries does not anticipate any death or serious injury to whales from offshore wind-related actions and has not recorded marine mammal deaths from offshore wind activities.” Still, that hasn’t stopped Republican leaders — including the president — from claiming offshore wind is making whales “a little batty.”
Polling by Heatmap has found that potential harm to wildlife is a top concern of both Democrats and Republicans when it comes to the deployment of renewable energy. Although there has been “no evidence to date that the offshore wind build-out off the Atlantic coast has harmed a single whale … studies have shown that activities related to offshore wind could harm a whale, which appears to be enough to override the benefits for some people,” my colleague Jael has explained. A number of environmental groups are attempting to prevent offshore and land-based wind development on conservationist grounds, to varying degrees of success. Despite these reservations, though, our polling has found that Americans on the coast largely support offshore wind development.
Aesthetic concerns are another reason wind faces opposition. The proposed Lava Ridge wind farm in Idaho, which was Heatmap’s most imperiled renewable energy project last year, faced intense opposition, ostensibly due to the visibility of the turbines from the Minidoka National Historic Site, the site of a Japanese internment camp. Coastal homeowners have raised the same complaint about offshore wind that would be visible from the beach, like the Skipjack offshore wind project, which would be situated off the coast of Maryland.
Not good. As one of President Trump’s first acts in office, he issued an executive order that the government “shall not issue new or renewed approvals, rights of way, permits, leases, or loans for onshore or offshore wind projects” until the completion of a “comprehensive assessment” of the industry’s impacts on the economy and the environment. Eight months later, federal agencies were still not processing applications for onshore wind projects.
Offshore wind is in even more trouble because such projects are sited entirely in federal waters. As of late July, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management had rescinded all designated wind energy areas — a decision that applies to some 3.5 million acres of federal waters, including the Central Atlantic, California, and Oregon. The Department of the Interior has also made moves to end what it calls the “special treatment for unreliable energy sources, such as wind,” including by “evaluating whether to stop onshore wind development on some federal lands and halting future offshore wind lease sales.” The Interior Department will also look into how “constructing and operating wind turbines might affect migratory bird populations.”
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, meanwhile, put strict restrictions on tax credits available to wind developers. Per Cleanview, the bill jeopardizes some 114 gigawatts of wind energy projects, while the Center for American Progress writes that “more than 17,000 jobs are connected to offshore wind power projects that are already canceled, on hold, or at risk from the Trump administration’s attacks on wind power.”
The year 2024 marked a record for new wind power capacity, with 117 gigawatts of wind energy installed globally. China in particular has taken a keen interest in constructing new wind farms, installing 26 gigawatts worth, or about 5,300 turbines, between January and May of last year alone.
Still, there are significant obstacles to the buildout of wind energy even outside of the United States, including competition from solar, which is now the cheapest and most widely deployed renewable energy resource in the world. High initial construction costs, deepened by inflation and supply-chain issues, have also stymied wind development.
There are an estimated 424 terawatts worth of wind energy available on the planet, and current wind turbines tap into just half a percent of that. According to Columbia Business School’s accounting, if maximized, wind has the potential to “abate 10% to 20% of CO2 emissions by 2050, through the clean electrification of power, heat, and road transport.”
Wind is also a heavy player in the Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Scenario, which aims for
7,100 terawatt hours of wind electricity generation worldwide by the end of the decade, per the International Energy Agency. But current annual growth would need to increase annual capacity additions from about 115 gigawatts in 2023 to 340 gigawatts in 2030. “Far greater policy and private-sector efforts are needed to achieve this level of capacity growth,” IEA notes, “with the most important areas for improvement being facilitating permitting for onshore wind and cost reductions for offshore wind.”
Wind turbines continue to become more efficient and more economical. Many of the advances have come in the form of bigger turbines, with the average height of a hub for a land-based turbine increasing 83% since the late 1990s. The world’s most powerful offshore turbine, Vestas’ V236-15.0 megawatt prototype, is, not coincidentally, also the world’s tallest, at 919 feet.
Advanced manufacturing techniques, such as the use of carbon fiber composites in rotor blades and 3D printed materials, could also lead to increases in efficiency. In a 2024 report, NREL anticipated that such innovations could potentially “unlock 80% more economically viable wind energy capacity within the contiguous United States.”
Floating offshore wind farms are another area of active innovation. Unlike the fixed-foundation turbines mainly used offshore today, floating turbines could be installed in deep waters and allow for development on trickier coastlines like off of Oregon and Washington state. Though there are no floating offshore wind farms in the United States yet, there are an estimated 266 gigawatts of floating turbine capacity in the pipeline globally.