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New York’s Attentive Energy is now on pause, meaning more pollution, stalled plans, and a tighter margin for error.
As soon as Donald Trump was declared the winner of November’s presidential election, climate advocates vowed to continue making progress at the state and local level. But some local projects may still depend too much on federal policy to move forward.
The president-elect’s influence has already put a highly anticipated plan to convert New York City’s biggest power plant into a renewable energy hub on shaky ground. Central to the conversion is a 1,400-megawatt offshore wind farm called Attentive Energy developed by TotalEnergies. Trump, a longtime critic of the industry, has made vague threats to “end” offshore wind “on day one.” While that overstates his capabilities, his administration will, at the very least, have the power to slow the processing of permits.
The regulatory uncertainty was enough to convince Patrick Pouyanne, the CEO of TotalEnergies, to put Attentive Energy on pause, he said at the Energy Intelligence Forum in London, according to Bloomberg — though he left open the possibility of reviving it “in four years.”
That’s bad news for the Ravenswood Generating Station in Long Island City, Queens. Ravenswood consists of three steam turbines built in the 1960s that run mostly on natural gas, though sometimes also on oil, plus a natural gas combined cycle unit built in 2004. Together, they emitted nearly 1.3 million metric tons of CO2 in 2023, or about 8% of the city’s carbon emissions from electricity production, while representing more than 20% of the city’s local generating capacity. Ravenswood is also situated across the street from the largest public housing project in the country, and has spewed pollution into the area colloquially referred to as “asthma alley” for decades.
Rise Light and Power, the company that owns the plant, has said it will redress those harms to the community by transforming the site into “Renewable Ravenswood.” The aspiration includes retiring the three 1960s-era generators and replacing them with offshore wind, battery energy storage, and additional renewable energy delivered from upstate New York via a new transmission line. Long term, the company says it will repurpose the plant’s cooling infrastructure to provide clean heating and cooling to buildings in the neighborhood.
Members of the community and local political leaders celebrated the proposal and showed up at rallies and public hearings to support it. Rise Light and Power also incorporated clean energy job training into the plan and earned the support of the union workers who operate the plant. The environmental group Earthjustice recently cited Renewable Ravenswood in a state filing as a shining example of “a more community-centered approach to energy planning.”
The website for Renewable Ravenswood declares that the plan “starts with offshore wind,” and says that “Attentive Energy One is the first step.” When Attentive Energy submitted its initial bid for a power contract with the state last year, Rise Light and Power CEO Clint Plummer told the local outlet City Limitsthat the wind farm “essentially unlocks ‘Renewable Ravenswood.’”
Now, it's unclear when the promised air quality benefits and jobs will materialize.
When I hopped on the phone with Plummer, the Ravenswood CEO, last week, he downplayed the implications of the pause.
“I don’t think it changes that much,” he told me, stressing that “project delays don't impact our commitment to the vision” and that “it’s simply part of the process of developing these large scale energy infrastructure projects.” Plummer said the company could continue to make progress on permitting, engineering, and other related work on the site and in the community in the meantime. Since New York state has significantly more control over onshore renewables and transmission, he said, it may be possible to move more quickly on those.
The pause on Attentive Energy may have come with or without Trump — the project, which is a joint venture between Rise Light and Power, TotalEnergies, and Corio, had already withdrawn its revised bid for a contract to sell power into New York’s energy market in October. When I asked Attentive for clarification, however, representatives didn’t respond.
The wind farm pause is the third big setback to the company’s replacement plans in as many years.
The first effort to bring clean energy to Ravenswood was a 316-megawatt battery project the New York Public Service Commission approved in 2019. It was slated to be completed by April 2021, but by January of that year, the company had not yet secured an offtake agreement with Con Edison, the local utility, and so asked for a three-year extension. The development still has not broken ground. “Our project, and most like it that have been proposed in New York City, are awaiting the State’s expected battery procurement next year,” a spokesperson told me when I asked for a status update. “We expect that projects that received State incentives through that program will likely be able to proceed to construction quickly.”
The company also submitted a bid to the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority in May of 2021 to build a transmission line called the Catskills Renewable Connector that would be capable of delivering 1,200 megawatts of renewable energy from upstate solar and wind farms to the Ravenswood site, meeting up to 15% of the city’s electricity needs. But the agency passed over the proposal in favor of two other transmission lines — Clean Path New York, which would bring renewable power to the city from Western New York, and the Champlain Hudson Power Express, which would deliver hydropower from Canada. (While construction on the latter project is well underway, Clean Path was cancelled the day before Thanksgiving.)
“We weren't selected then, but we’ve continued to mature and advance that project,” Plummer told me, regarding the Catskills line. “All these projects take a very long period of time to realize.”
The only aspect of Renewable Ravenswood that’s still alive and kicking, at least publicly, is the Queensborough Renewable Express, a set of high-voltage power lines that would connect the site to any future offshore wind farms in New York Harbor. The company is currently awaiting approval on a key permit for the line from the New York Public Service Commission. But while much of the project is located within the jurisdiction of New York, part of it will also need federal approvals.
Plummer may not be too concerned about the wind farm’s delay, but a freeze on offshore wind development for the next four years would further stretch New York’s already strained climate goals.
New York law requires the state to get 70% of its energy from renewable sources by 2030 and 100% from zero-emissions sources by 2040. The most recent progress report on those goals, compiled by the New York Power Authority, found that the state had enough renewable energy operating and contracted so far to supply about 44% of expected demand in 2030.
A separate state analysis showed that offshore wind would play a key role in reaching the target, with an expected 6 gigawatts of offshore wind generation getting New York about 15% of the way there. But so far, the state has finalized contracts for only about 1.7 gigawatts. Though New York has several additional contracts pending awards, none of those potential projects has yet submitted construction plans to the federal Bureau of Ocean Management. If that office freezes its offshore wind work for the next four years, it’s possible none of them will be able to start construction until the 2030s at the earliest.
“Four years may not be significant for project development time frames,” Daniel Zarrilli, the former chief climate policy advisor for the city of New York, told me. “But the state has these 2030 and 2040 goals, and so many pieces of what makes up the ability to hit those goals are under stress. So it’s certainly not good news.”
New Yorkers aren’t the only ones who will be affected by the pause. Attentive Energy was also working on two additional offshore wind projects that would send power to New Jersey. The developer had already secured a contract to sell power into that state from a 1.3-gigawatt project called Attentive Energy Two. In July, it submitted a bid to New Jersey’s fourth offshore wind solicitation for an additional, unnamed 1.3-gigawatt project. The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities is expected to reach a decision on that solicitation this month.
I reached out to TotalEnergies to ask whether all three projects were paused or just the New York one, but the company said it would not comment on Pouyanne’s speech. The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities also did not respond as to whether Attentive had pulled either its awarded contract or bid.
It’s true that developing these projects takes a long time, and that anyone excited about Renewable Ravenswood should not have expected any new clean power to come into the site until the end of this decade, anyway. But further delays could have real consequences. “Any of these projects faltering is just going to keep New York City reliant on an aging and dirty fossil fleet,” said Zarrilli. The city is in a hole, he said, after the Indian Point nuclear plant closed and made it even more reliant on natural gas for electricity.
On my call with Plummer, he emphasized several times that the city has “the thinnest reserve margins we’ve had in decades” — in other words, it doesn’t have much wiggle room to meet increases in electricity demand. Rise Light and Power has already shut down 17 small gas “peaker” plants that were previously part of Ravenswood to make room for new renewable energy infrastructure. The city will be in better shape in 2026, assuming the Champlain Hudson Power Express finishes on time, according to the New York grid operator NYISO. But by the early 2030s, when additional peaker plants are expected to be shut down due to pollution regulations, New York could be back on thin ice.
By then, the steam turbines at Ravenswood will be nearly 70 years old. Unless significant additional generation comes online by then, Rise Light and Power could be forced to re-invest in those gas generators rather than retire them. “It’d be terrible if they were forced to make that choice in the future,” said Zarrilli.
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The company says its first Optimus robots will start rolling off the line in “2026.”
Tesla is a car company everywhere except Wall Street. It delivered some 1.7 million cars in 2024, which were built in factories in Texas, California, Germany, and China. These car sales (and leases and sales of regulatory credits) generated some $77 billion in revenue. Its gross margin on these cars is about 18.5%, or around $14 billion.
When Tesla reported its first quarter earnings, it announced a more than 70% decline in profits, continued falling sales, and ahit to its business from the trade war with China. But its stock climbed the next day, and is now trading at around $350 a share, from $238 before the report, giving it an overall value of over $1 trillion. By some metrics, Tesla makes up more than half of the overall value of the automotive industry.
That’s because it’s not valued like a car company. The company’s investors are putting a huge stake on future innovations that largely spring from the head of Elon Musk, the company’s chief executive. These include promised self-driving cars and a self-driving taxi service, as well as the Optimus humanoid robot, which Musk has said could turn into a $10 trillion business. (For reference, Walmart’s annual revenue is just under $650 billion; Walmart is also worth less than Tesla today.) So far, all we know about the Optimus is that it can dance.
One reason analysts and shareholders cheered its most recent results is because Musk committed to spending less time in Washington trying to reshape the federal government and more time with the company that makes up the lion’s share of his immense personal wealth. But just getting more of Musk’s time is the easy test. A more consequential challenge for the thesis that Tesla can be more than just a company that sells cars to people who drive them is its upcoming robotaxi pilot in Austin, Texas, scheduled for next month.
While Google’s Waymo already has a fully autonomous taxi system available in a few areas of a few cities, Musk has repeatedly promised that Tesla could reach full autonomy globally far more cheaply than Waymo — or, as he puts it, “Waymo needs ‘way mo’ money to succeed 😂.”
But the initial rollout of the robotaxi may be modest. Adam Jonas, a bullish Tesla analyst with Morgan Stanley, wrote in a note to clients on Friday after a conversation with Tesla’s head of investor relations that the Austin debut will “have 10-20 cars” and “plenty of tele-ops to ensure safety levels.”
Another future Tesla business, its Optimus robot, might be able to open up its factory to tours for investors sometime in the last three months of the year, Jonas reported, with commercialization coming by the middle of 2026 at a cost of around $20,000 per unit. The company aims to produce “several thousand” robots by the end of this year, he said. (Though you should be skeptical of any and all dates and deadlines given by Tesla — Musk has been promising an imminent fleet of autonomous Teslas for over five years.) Right now, Jonas wrote, about 12 are being produced at a time, more or less by hand.
And that’s just the mechanics. The software for humanoid autonomy also isn’t there yet: “Tesla admits both intelligence and cost ‘need to come a long way’ to unlock the true potential of humanoid robots,” Jonas wrote. “The neural nets for Optimus are far larger than for cars given greater degrees-of-freedom and far more open-ended tasks.”
Tesla also has more prosaic worries for these next generation businesses. Company officials told Jonas that they’re in an “incredibly competitive” hiring market, especially compared to Chinese companies, which “own the supply chain” for advanced technologies.
While Tesla and Musk are eager to tell the public that the company is orienting itself toward an AI-driven robotic future, some of its other corporate actions may reflect the more present-day concerns of brand management. Tesla sales have declined sharply overseas, and its showrooms have become sites for protest, driven by anger over Musk’s role in the Trump administration.
The company said Friday that it would welcome a new member of its board: Jack Hartung, president and chief strategy officer of Chipotle, a brand with its own history of crisis, stock market volatility, and precarious executive leadership. While it’s unlikely Tesla will get involved in the food business anytime soon, it may benefitfrom learning from Chipotle’s struggles over the last few years of giving people what they expect.
At least one target of Chris Wright’s grant review may run into some sticky statutory issues.
The Department of Energy announced on Thursday that it’s reviewing some 179 awards made by the Biden administration worth $15 billion to ensure they were “consistent with Federal law and this Administration’s policies and priorities.”
But what happens when federal law and Trump’s priorities are at odds?
In the case of at least one awardee, the major U.S. steel producer Cleveland Cliffs, the DOE’s review process may become a mechanism to take funding that is statutorily designated for projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and channel it into long-lived fossil fuel assets.
Lourenco Goncalves, the CEO of Cleveland Cliffs, a major U.S. steel producer, said on an earnings call last week that the company was in the process of renegotiating its $500 million award under the Industrial Demonstrations Program. The DOE program funded 33 projects to decarbonize heavy industry, including cement, steel, aluminum, and glass production, with first-of-its-kind or early-scale commercial technologies.
Cleveland Cliffs was originally going to use the money to replace its coal-fired blast furnace at a steel plant in Middletown, Ohio, with a new unit that ran on a mix of hydrogen and natural gas as well as new electric furnaces. Now, the company is working with the Department of Energy to “explore changes in scope to better align with the administration’s energy priorities,” Goncalves told investors. The project would no longer assume the use of hydrogen and “would instead rely on readily available and more economical fossil fuels.”
The CEO later clarified that the company planned to “reline” its blast furnace at Middletown, extending its life, “now that the project is changing scope.”
But the Inflation Reduction Act, which created the Industrial Demonstrations Program, says the funds must be used for “the purchase and installation, or implementation, of advanced industrial technology,” which it defines as tech “designed to accelerate greenhouse gas emissions reduction progress to net-zero.”
“I don’t know at this point what Cleveland Cliffs can confidently say they’re going to do to substantially reduce greenhouse gasses and also deliver gains in public health and jobs to local communities, which is a prerequisite for IDP grant money,” Yong Kwon, a senior advisor for the Sierra Club’s Industrial Transformation Campaign, told me.
The memo announcing the Department of Energy’s review says that it has already reached some “concerning” findings, though it does not describe what was concerning or provide any further detail about the awards under review.
Compared to his peers at other agencies, Energy Secretary Chris Wright has been noticeably quiet about the Department of Government Efficiency’s efforts to slash funding across the Department of Energy. But in March, Axiosobtained documents that said more than 60% of grants awarded under the Industrial Demonstrations Program were being targeted. The following month, CNN reported that Cleveland Cliffs’ Middletown project was on the list slated for termination, noting that it would have secured 2,500 jobs and created more than 100 new, permanent jobs in JD Vance’s hometown.
At the time, Energy Department spokesperson Ben Dietderich told CNN that “no final decisions have been made” about the funding and that “multiple plans are still being considered.” Now it appears the Department may be negotiating with Cleveland Cliffs to develop a cheaper and more politically palatable project.
Meanwhile, House Republicans have also introduced a bill that would rescind any money from the Industrial Demonstrations Program that isn’t obligated, meaning that if the Department of Energy can find a way to legally terminate its contracts with companies, Congress may claw back the money.
The Industrial Demonstrations Program was the Biden administration’s “missing middle” grant program, designed to support projects that were past the early experimental stage, in which case they were no longer candidates for funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency, but were also not ready for mass deployment, like those supported by the Loan Programs Office. In the case of Cleveland Cliffs, the funding was also aimed at making the U.S. a leader in the future of steelmaking, retaining thousands of jobs, saving the company money, and enabling it to command a higher price for its products.
“If you’re going to maintain blast furnaces, it means you have one foot in a technology that is now quickly becoming outdated that the rest of the global steel industry is transitioning away from,” Kwon told me.
David Super, an expert in administrative law at Georgetown University, told me in an email that if the Department of Energy provides and Cleveland Cliffs accepts funding that does not comply with statute, “the Department officials involved could be in violation of the Antideficiency Act and Cleveland Cliffs could be required to return the money, a modified contract notwithstanding.” The Antideficiency Act prohibits federal employees from obligating funds for projects that are not authorized by law.
Super added that the law also specifies that the money be awarded “on a competitive basis.” As Cleveland Cliffs won the competition with its hydrogen project, allowing it to use the money for a different project at the company’s plant “would thus violate the requirement of competitive awards and would allow the unsuccessful bidders to challenge this funding award.”
Neither Cleveland Cliffs nor the Department of Energy responded to a request for comment.
Leaks to the press have signaled that the Department of Energy may be taking a similar approach with the hydrogen hubs, potentially terminating contracts to develop renewable energy-based projects — all of which are in blue states — while allowing natural gas-based projects in red states to continue.
It is still not clear how the agency will handle its $3.5 billion direct air capture hubs, which news outlets have reported may also be under threat. On Friday, however, the oil and gas company Occidental, which was awarded a contract to develop a DAC hub in Texas, announced that the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company is considering investing up to $500 million in the project as part of a new joint-venture agreement. The press release notes that the agreement was signed during President Trump’s visit to the United Arab Emirates.
Last week, Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said during a confirmation hearing for Kyle Haustveit, the nominee to head the Office of Fossil Energy, that two carbon capture projects in her state were “in limbo” due to the agency’s spending review. The same day, in another hearing, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida accused Wright of having frozen $67 billion worth of funds and asked him to commit to releasing it.
Wright denied this. “We’re not withholding any funds and we’ve paid every invoice we’ve had for work done and funds that are due,” he replied. But he went on to clarify that the agency is “engaging with” recipients “to make sure American taxpayer monies are being spent in thoughtful, reasonable ways.”
According to efficiency department data, the DOE has “terminated” 39 contracts worth $60 million and five grants worth $3.4 million. The contracts include news subscriptions, various technical support services, and a $22 million contract with consulting firm McKinsey for “rapid response deliverables” for the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, the department that runs the Industrial Demonstrations Program. The grants include three Advanced Research Projects Agency awards to explore using geologic stores of hydrogen, and another to reduce methane emissions from natural gas flares.
On budget negotiations, Climeworks, and DOE grants
Current conditions: It’s peak storm season in the U.S., with severe weather in the forecast for at least the next six days in the Midwest and East• San Antonio, Texas, is expected to hit 108 degrees Fahrenheit today• Monsoon rains have begun in Sri Lanka.
The House Budget Committee meeting to prepare the reconciliation bill for a floor vote as early as next week appears to be a go for Friday, despite calls from some Republicans to delay the session. At least three GOP House members, including two members of the Freedom Caucus, have threatened to vote no on the budget because a final score for the Energy and Commerce portion of the bill, which includes cuts to Medicaid, won’t be ready from the Congressional Budget Office until next week. That is causing a “math problem” for Republicans, Politico writes, because the Budget Committee “is split 21-16 in favor of Republicans, and Democrats are expecting full attendance,” meaning Republicans can “only lose two votes if they want to move forward with the megabill Friday.” Republican Brandon Gill of Texas is currently out on paternity leave, further reducing the margin for disagreement.
House Speaker Mike Johnson is also contending with discontent in the ranks over cuts to clean energy tax credits. “It’s not as bad as I thought it was going to be, but it’s still pretty bad,” New York Republican Andrew Garbarino, a co-chair of the House Bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus, told Politico on Thursday. But concerns about the cuts, which would heavily impact Republican state economies and jobs, do not appear to be a “red line” for many others, including Georgia’s Buddy Carter, whose district benefits from Inflation Reduction Act credits for a Hyundai car and battery plant that is among the targets for elimination. You can learn more about the cuts Republicans are proposing to the IRA in our coverage here.
The Swiss carbon removal company Climeworks is preparing for significant cuts to its workforce, citing the larger economic landscape and the Trump administration’s lack of consistent support. The company currently has 498 employees, but is undergoing a consultation process, indicating it is looking to cut more than 10% of its workforce at once, SwissInfo.ch reports. “Our financial resources are limited,” Climeworks’ co-founder and managing director Jan Wurzbacher said in comments on Swiss TV.
Though Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is a known proponent of carbon capture, and there had been excitement in the industry that Trump’s attempts to expedite federal permitting would benefit carbon storage sites, the administration has also hollowed out the Department of Energy’s carbon removal team, my colleague Katie Brigham has reported. The ongoing funding cuts and uncertainty have made it difficult to get information from the government that could affect Climework’s Project Cypress in Louisiana, although Wurzbacher stressed that “we are not currently aware that our project would be stopped.”
Energy Secretary Chris Wright announced in a Thursday memo that the department will be reviewing at least $15 billion worth of grants awarded to “power grid and manufacturing supply chain projects” under the Biden administration, Reuters reports. “With this process, the Department will ensure we are doing our due diligence, utilizing taxpayer dollars to generate the largest possible benefit to the American people and safeguarding our national security,” Wright said in his statement.
The memo goes on to note that the DOE plans to prioritize “large-scale commercial projects that require more detailed information from the awardees for the initial phase of this review, but this process may extend to other DOE program offices as the reviews progress.” Projects that don’t meet the DOE’s standards could be denied, as could projects of grantees who fail to “respond to information requests within the provided time frame, does not respond to follow-up questions in a timely manner.” As of last week, Wright told lawmakers, “we’ve canceled zero” existing projects so far, E&E News writes; the agency will reportedly be reviewing at least 179 different awards during its audit.
The number of National Weather Service offices ending 24-hour operations and severe weather alerts is increasing. On Thursday, The San Francisco Chronicle confirmed that California’s Sacramento and Hanford offices, which provide information to more than 7 million people in the Central Valley, have been forced to reduce service due to “critically reduced staffing.”
Eliminating 24-hour service is especially concerning for the Central Valley and surrounding foothills, where around-the-clock weather updates can be critical. “These are offices that have both dealt with major wildfire episodes most of the past 10 years, and we are now entering fire season,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA and UC Agriculture and Natural Resources, told the Chronicle. “That’s a big, big problem.” Swain additionally shared on LinkedIn a map he’d put together of regions in the U.S. that no longer have full-service weather coverage, including “a substantial chunk of Tornado Alley during peak tornado season and the entirety of Alaska’s vast North Slope region.” The NWS is additionally seeking to fill 155 vacancies in coastal states that could face risks as the Atlantic hurricane season begins at the end of the month, The Washington Post reports. An estimated 500 of 4,200 NWS employees have been fired or taken early retirements since the start of Trump’s term.
Heatmap’s “most fascinating” EV of 2025 just got pushed back to 2026. The Ram 1500 Ramcharger — which has a 140-mile electric range as well as a V6 engine attached to a generator to power the car when the battery runs out — is now set to launch in the first quarter of next year due to “extending the quality validation period,” Crain’s Detroit Business reported this week. Parent company Stellantis also pushed back the launch of its fully electric Ram 1500 REV until summer 2027, with a planned model year of 2028. “Our plan ensures we are offering customers a range of trucks with flexible powertrain options that best meet their needs,” Stellantis spokeswoman Jodi Tinson told Crain’s in an email. Though you now have even longer to wait, you can read more about the car Jesse Jenkins calls “brilliant” here.
GMC
The 2026 GMC Hummer EV just got even more ridiculous. “Thanks to the new Carbon Fiber Edition,” the 9,000-pound car “can zoom to 60 miles per hour in 2.8 seconds,” InsideEVs reports.