You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
It’s been just over a week since one of the 350-foot-long blades of a wind turbine off the Massachusetts coast unexpectedly broke off, sending hunks of fiberglass and foam into the waters below. As of Wednesday morning, cleanup crews were still actively removing debris from the water and beaches and working to locate additional pieces of the blade.
The blade failure quickly became a crisis for residents of Nantucket, where debris soon began washing up on the island’s busy beaches. It is also a PR nightmare for the nascent U.S. offshore wind industry, which is already on the defensive against community opposition and rampant misinformation about its environmental risks and benefits.
The broken turbine is part of Vineyard Wind 1, which is being developed by Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners. The project was still under construction when the breakage occurred, but it was already the largest operating offshore wind farm in the US, with ten turbines sending power to the New England Grid as of June. The plan is to bring another 52 online, which will produce enough electricity to power more than 400,000 homes. Now both installation and power generation have been paused while federal investigators look into the incident.
There’s still a lot we don’t know about why this happened, what the health and safety risks are, and what it means for this promising clean energy solution going forward. But here’s everything we’ve learned so far.
Vineyard Wind
On the evening of Saturday, July 13, Vineyard Wind received an alert that there was a problem with one of its turbines. The equipment contains a “delicate sensoring system,” CEO Klaus Moeller told the Nantucket Select Board during a public meeting last week. Though he did not describe what the alert said, he added that “one of the blades was broken and folded over.” Later at the meeting, a spokesperson for GE Vernova, which manufactured and installed the turbines, said that “blade vibrations” had been detected. About a third of the blade, or roughly 120 feet, fell into the water.
Two days later, Vineyard Wind contacted the town manager in Nantucket to explain that modeling showed the potential for debris from the blade to travel toward the island. Sure enough, fiberglass shards and other scraps began washing up on shore the next day, and all beaches on the island’s south shore were quickly closed to the public.
On Thursday morning, another large portion of the damaged blade detached and fell into the ocean. Monitoring and recovery crews continued to find debris throughout the area over the weekend. The beaches have since reopened, but visitors have been advised to wear shoes and leave their pets at home as cleanup continues.
During GE’s second quarter earnings call on July 24, GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik and Vice President of Investor Relations Michael Lapides said the company had identified a “material deviation” as the cause of the accident, and that the company is continuing to work on a "root cause analysis" to get to the bottom of how said deviation happened in the first place.
The turbine was one of GE’s Haliade-X 13-megawatt turbines, which are manufactured in Gaspé, Canada, and it was still undergoing post-installation testing by GE when the failure occurred — that is, it was not among those sending power to the New England grid. This was actually the second issue the company has had at this particular turbine site. One of the original blades destined for the site was damaged during the installation process, and the one that broke last week was a replacement, Craig Gilvard, Vineyard Wind’s communications director, told the New Bedford Light.
By Vineyard Wind’s account at the meeting last week, the accident triggered an automatic shut down of the system and activated the company’s emergency response plan, which included immediately notifying the U.S. Coast Guard, the federal Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, and regional emergency response committees.
Moeller, the CEO, said during the meeting that the company worked with the Coast Guard to immediately establish a 500 meter “safety zone” around the turbine and to send out notices to mariners. According to the Coast Guard’s notice log, however, the safety zone went into effect three days later. In response to my questions, the Coast Guard confirmed that the zone was established around 8pm that night and announced to mariners over radio broadcast.
Two days after the turbine broke, on Monday, Vineyard Wind contacted the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for aid in modeling where the turbine debris would travel in the water. The agency estimated pieces would likely make landfall in Nantucket that day. Vineyard Wind put out a press release about the accident and subsequently contacted the Nantucket town manager. At the Nantucket Select Board meeting last week, Moeller said the company followed regulatory protocols but that there was “really no excuse” for how long it took to inform the public, and said, “we want to move much quicker and make sure that we learn from this.”
The Interior Department’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement has ordered the company to cease all power production and installation activities until it can determine whether this was an isolated incident or affects other turbines.
By Tuesday, Vineyard Wind said it had deployed two small teams to Nantucket in addition to hiring a local contractor to remove debris on the island. The company later said it would “increase its local team to more than 50 employees and contractors dedicated to beach clean-up and debris recovery efforts.”
GE Vernova is responsible for recovering offshore debris and has not published any public statements about the effort. In response to a list of questions, a GE Vernova spokesperson said, “We continue to work around the clock to enhance mitigation efforts in collaboration with Vineyard Wind and all relevant state, local and federal authorities. We are working with urgency to complete our root cause analysis of this event.”
There have been no reported injuries as a result of the accident.
Vineyard Wind and GE Vernova have stressed that the debris are “not toxic.” At the Select Board meeting, GE’s executive fleet engineering director Renjith Viripullan said that the blade is made of fiberglass, foam, and balsa wood. It is bonded together using a “bond paste,” he said, and likened the blade construction to that of a boat. “That's the correlation we need to think about,” he said.
One of the board members asked if there was any risk of PFAS contamination as a result of the accident. Viripullan said he would need to “take that question back” and follow up with the answer later. (This was one of the questions I asked GE, but the company did not respond to it.)
That being said, the debris poses some dangers. Photos of cleanup crews posted to the Harbormaster’s Facebook page show workers wearing white hazmat suits. Vineyard Wind said “members of the public should avoid handling debris as the fiber-glass pieces can be sharp and lead to cuts if handled without proper gloves.”
Though members of the public raised concerns at the meeting and to the press that fiberglass fragments in the ocean threaten marine life and public health, it is not yet clear how serious the risks are, and several efforts are underway to further assess them. Vineyard Wind is developing a water quality testing plan for the island and setting up a process for people to file claims.GE hired a design and engineering firm to conduct an environmental assessment, which it will present at a Nantucket Select Board meeting later this week. The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection has requested information from the companies about the makeup of the debris to evaluate risks, and the Department of Fish and Game is monitoring for impacts to the local ecosystem.
As of last Wednesday morning, Vineyard Wind had collected “approximately 17 cubic yards of debris, enough to fill more than six truckloads, and several larger pieces that washed ashore.” It is not yet known what fraction of the turbine that fell off has been recovered. Vineyard Wind did not respond to a request for the latest numbers in time for publication, but I’ll update this piece if I get a response.
Yes. In May, a blade on the same model of turbine, the GE Haliade-X, sustained damage at a wind farm being installed off the coast of England called Dogger Bank. At the Nantucket Select Board meeting, a spokesperson for GE said the Dogger Bank incident was “an installation issue specific to the installation of that blade” and that “we don’t think there’s a connection between that installation issue and what we saw here.” Executives emphasized this point during the earnings call and chalked up the Dogger Bank incident to “an installation error out at sea.”
Several blades have also broken off another GE turbine model dubbed the Cypress at wind farms in Germany and Sweden. After the most recent incident in Germany last October, the company used similar language, telling reporters that it was working to “determine the root cause.”
A “company source with knowledge of the investigations” into the various incidents recently told CNN that “there were different root causes for the damage, including transportation, handling, and manufacturing deviations.”
GE Vernova’s stock price fell nearly 10% last Wednesday.
The backlash was swift. Nantucket residents immediately wrote to Nantucket’s Select Board to ask the town to stop the construction of any additional offshore wind turbines. “I know it's not oil, but it's sharp and maybe toxic in other ways,” Select Board member Dawn Holgate told company executives at the meeting last week. “We're also facing an exponential risk if this were to continue because many more windmills are planned to be built out there and there's been a lot of concern about that throughout the community.”
The Select Board plans to meet in private on Tuesday night to discuss “potential litigation by the town against Vineyard Wind relative to recovery costs.”
“We expect Vineyard Wind will be responsible for all costs and associated remediation efforts incurred by the town in response to the incident,” Elizabeth Gibson, the Nantucket town manager said during the meeting last week.
The Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe is also calling for a moratorium on offshore wind development and raised concerns about the presence of fiberglass fragments in the water.
On social media, anti-wind groups throughout the northeast took up the story as evidence that offshore wind is “not green, not clean.” Republican state representatives in Massachusetts cited the incident as a reason for opposing legislation to expedite clean energy permitting last week. Fox News sought comment from internet personality and founder of Barstool Sports David Portnoy, who owns a home on Nantucket and said the island had been “ruined by negligence.” The Texas Public Policy Foundation, a nonprofit funded by oil companies and which is backing a lawsuit against Vineyard Wind, cited the incident as evidence that the project is harming local fishermen. The First Circuit Court of Appeals is set to hear oral arguments on the case this Thursday.
Meanwhile, environmental groups supportive of offshore wind tried to do damage control for the industry. “Now we must all work to ensure that the failure of a single turbine blade does not adversely impact the emergence of offshore wind as a critical solution for reducing dependence on fossil fuels and addressing the climate crisis,” the Sierra Club’s senior advisor for offshore wind, Nancy Pyne, wrote in a statement. “Wind power is one of the safest forms of energy generation.”
This story was last updated July 24 at 3:15 p.m. The current version contains new information and corrects the location where the turbine blades are produced. With assistance from Jael Holzman.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
On back-to-back storms, enhanced rock weathering, and SCOTUS
Current conditions: Another atmospheric river is taking aim at southern Oregon and northern California • Temperatures in southeastern Australia could reach 113 degrees Fahrenheit this weekend for the first time in four years • Nearly 50 inches of snow have been recorded in Erie, Pennsylvania.
Climate change “supercharged” this year’s typhoon season in the Philippines, according to new research from the World Weather Attribution. Six typhoons slammed into the country in November alone, double the “typical” number of storms for the month. At one point, four typhoons were churning in the Pacific basin simultaneously. Some areas were hit three times, highlighting “the challenges of adapting to back-to-back extreme weather events.” More than 170 people were killed, and the estimated economic toll is nearly half a billion dollars. “The storms were more likely to develop more strongly and reach the Philippines at a higher intensity than they otherwise would have,” said Ben Clarke, a weather researcher at Imperial College London and one of the authors on the report. The image below shows the tracks of seven storms between September and November:
World Weather Attribution
A couple of Supreme Court updates today: The Biden administration is recommending the Court reject an appeal from a group of Big Oil firms regarding a 2023 ruling out of Hawaii that permitted Honolulu to sue Exxon Mobil, BP, Shell, Chevron, and Sunoco for allegedly lying to the public about the climate damages caused by burning fossil fuels. The Hawaii Supreme Court initially rejected the companies’ claim that the suit was overstepping into regulatory territory reserved for the federal government. The solicitor general is also urging the Supreme Court to reject an attempt by 19 GOP state attorneys general to block a lawsuit from five Democratic-led states against major oil companies.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court this week said it would not pause an EPA rule, issued earlier this year, requiring the cleanup of coal ash dumping sites. A Kentucky electric utility had requested the rule be put on hold.
Beleaguered hydrogen-battery electric truck company Nikola is scrambling to avoid bankruptcy by laying off another chunk of its workforce. It cut 15% of its staff back in October, and it’s unclear how deep this next round will be. The company is losing about $200 million a quarter, Electrekreported. Earlier this week Nikola announced it would sell company shares to try to raise $100 million. In a filing with the SEC, the company wrote: “We currently estimate that our existing financial resources are only adequate to fund our forecasted operating costs and meet our obligations into, but not through, the first quarter of 2025.”
In case you missed it: A carbon removal startup backed by Google and Microsoft launched yesterday with nearly $60 million in funding. Terradot is one of several companies utilizing enhanced rock weathering (by spreading crushed rock over farmland) to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Coinciding with the launch, Google announced it was purchasing 200,000 tons of removal credits from Terradot to be delivered by the early 2030s, which the tech giant said is its largest ERW deal to date and its first direct investment in an ERW company. In all, Terradot launches with signed agreements to remove nearly 300,000 tons of CO2. The company has a scaled pilot in Brazil.
“To unlock enhanced rock weathering as a useful tool for CO2 removal, we need to deploy it at scale and learn how to measure the results rigorously using real-world data,” said Google’s head of carbon credits and removals, Randy Spock. “Terradot is well-positioned to do that work in an especially promising geography, and we’re excited to support them to help deliver significant amounts of CO2 removal both for Google’s net zero goal and for the planet.”
New research published in the journal Science concluded that a recent marine heat wave killed off more than half of Alaska’s population of common murres, resulting in “the largest documented wildlife mortality event in the modern era.” In total, some 4 million of the birds died between 2014 and 2016 due to fish die-off from rising temperatures in the north Pacific. “Population abundance estimates since then have found no evidence of recovery,” the researchers wrote, “suggesting that the heatwave may have led to an ecosystem shift.”
A common murre colony in Alaska in 2014 and 2021. Nora Rojek/USFWS; Brie Drummond/USFWS
A common murre colony in Alaska in 2021. Nora Rojek/USFWS; Brie Drummond/USFWS
Tiktok’s annual carbon footprint is estimated to be about 50 million metric tons of CO2, which, for context, is more than Greece emits in a year.
At least for the foreseeable future. But is the Manchin-Barrasso bill actually worth it?
So … is the permitting reform bill any good or not?
Earlier this year, Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and John Barrasso of Wyoming proposed a bill that would change federal environmental rules so as to spur a buildout of new energy infrastructure around the country.
Their proposal would have loosened rules for oil and gas drilling and exporting while changing federal law to encourage the construction of more clean energy.
These renewables-friendly changes included creating a new legal regime that would push utilities and grid operators to build significantly more long-distance power lines, triggering a nationwide boost to renewable resources. They would also have changed the regulations governing geothermal power generation, allowing new enhanced geothermal wells to play by the same federal rules that bind oil and gas.
The legislation was announced in July and then … nothing happened.
Now it seems likely to come back. Congress is eyeing its final agenda items for the year, and permitting reform is one of them. Representative Bruce Westerman, a Republican who chairs the House Committee on Natural Resources, is currently said to be revamping Manchin and Barrasso’s proposal to include reforms to the National Environmental Policy Act, a bedrock law that guides the process — but not the outcome — of virtually every major decision that the federal government makes and requires it to study the environmental impact of its policies.
We don’t know what those changes will look like yet, though they’ll have to come soon — the new Congress gets sworn in in just a few weeks. Which means lawmakers will have to get the proposed changes, process them, and decide whether to vote for them in a very short period of time — just a few days.
So during this liminal period, then, I wanted to take a moment to look at the other parts of the bill. Earlier this year, we got a sense of what the bill’s quantitative effects might be. They suggest that the legislation — at least in the initial version proposed by Manchin and Barrasso — could very well help cut U.S. emissions, or at least leave them flat. But after that? It starts to get complicated.
Republicans have long pushed for changes to the federal government’s permitting regime.
But in recent years, Democrats — who hope to prompt a national surge of clean energy construction — have come aboard too. The Biden administration, frustrated that some parts of the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law haven’t resulted in the large-scale projects they hoped for, has come to back permitting reform explicitly, although they have not endorsed Manchin and Barrasso’s bill.
“The president has been clear … that we believe permitting reform should pass on a bipartisan basis — and that we believe permitting needs to be optimized for building out a clean energy economy,” John Podesta, a White House senior advisor who is now the country’s top climate diplomat, said in a speech last year.
The White House’s support of bipartisan permitting reform is more than just posturing: Because of Senate math, any changes to the country’s permitting laws almost certainly must be bipartisan. Until a bare majority of Democratic senators exists to kill the legislative filibuster, it will take a vote of at least 60 senators — a so-called supermajority — to alter most pre-existing federal legislation.
So the question, then, is: Is this attempt at permitting reform worth passing? Is this package of fossil fuel concessions and clean energy incentives likely to reduce emissions more than it increases them?
I won’t try to answer that question comprehensively today, and we can’t even answer it fully until we know the scope of Westerman’s changes. But I do want to share an analysis from the center-left think tank Third Way and other researchers that suggests that the answer is “yes.”
This analysis, released in September, argues that Manchin and Barrasso’s bill would modestly increase emissions by encouraging more oil and gas drilling on federal lands. But that increase would likely be dwarfed by a large decrease in emissions prompted by building out the country’s electricity transmission grid.
More specifically, it finds that while the pro-fossil fuel provisions could raise global climate pollution by as much as 6.1 million metric tons by 2050, the bill’s support for transmission could cut emissions by as much as 15.7 million metric tons in that time (although the final number, as you’ll see, is a very high end estimate). That’s because, as I’ve written before, building the grid will allow for more renewable, geothermal, and other forms of zero-carbon electricity generation to get built. And the country can only reduce emissions by building more zero-carbon electricity.
Some of those emissions increases from oil and gas are now likely to occur whether or not the bill passes — the Trump administration will encourage fossil fuel extraction and export far beyond what a Harris administration would have done.
But even in a more conservative scenario, the transmission provisions would still cut emissions by 6.5 million metric tons by 2050, Third Way’s synthesis says. That would mean — when compared to the pro-fossil policies — that the bill has a much more modest effect overall, cutting emissions by just over 400,000 tons through 2050. That is a rounding error on the U.S. economy’s more than 6 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions a year.
These aren’t the only numbers out there. An analysis by Jeremy Symons, the former vice president of public affairs at the Environmental Defense Fund, argues that the bill’s loosening of some Biden-era restrictions on liquified natural gas export terminals will result in a tremendous LNG boom. He asserts that the bill’s LNG provisions could increase global emissions by 8.5 to 11 gigatons; his analysis, however, draws heavily from a controversial, initially erroneous, and now updated study from the Cornell ecologist Robert Howarth that contends American natural gas is far worse for the climate than coal.
Third Way did not include Symons’ study in its analysis. Instead, it cites a different study led by the Princeton professor Jesse Jenkins (with whom I cohost Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast) that uses natural-gas emissions estimates more in line with the broader scholarly literature. That modeling study indicates that the LNG provisions in the Manchin-Barrasso bill could increase emissions by as much as 3.3 gigatons — or decrease them by 2.4 gigatons.
I’m not going to get more into the LNG question in this story. And it’s somewhat less important than it was earlier this year because Trump administration is likely to approve as many LNG export terminals as it can. (That doesn’t mean those terminals will get built: Right now, a dozen LNG terminals have been approved but not built due to a lack of global demand for more LNG.) Instead, I want to dive into two specific provisions in the bill — on oil and gas leasing and transmission — that reveal the broader challenges of trying to speak concretely about this proposal.
By far the most climate-friendly provisions in EPRA concern its support of long-distance electricity transmission. As I’ve covered before, the lack of electricity transmission is now one of the biggest barriers to building new wind, solar, and other clean energy in the United States; the construction of new wind farms, in particular, seems to be slowing down because of a lack of available power lines to carry their electrons.
Manchin and Barrasso’s proposal aims to build more transmission largely by granting new powers to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the independent agency that oversees the country’s power grids. EPRA would, for instance, allow FERC to step in and approve transmission lines that are “in the national interest” if a state has not acted on a given project within a year. The law also clarifies who should pay for a new power line, encoding the idea that customers who benefit from a line should pay for it. And it lets FERC approve payments from developers to the communities where new transmission infrastructure gets built, potentially smoothing approvals at the local level.
The bill also instructs FERC to write a rule that will require each part of the country to build a minimal amount of power lines that allow regions to exchange power with their neighbors. This measure — meant to spur new “interregional” transmission infrastructure — aims to knit the national grid more closely together and lower power costs on average.
How much would these policies reduce national emissions? The truth is, that’s extremely difficult to model. “There’s nothing in the EPRA that says, Thou shalt build this much transmission,” Charles Teplin, a grid expert at the think tank RMI, told me.
Instead, the bill aims to kick off a process that will result in more transmission getting built. That transmission should — in theory — bring more renewables online. But what will the size of that buildout be, and how many emissions will those renewables displace?
Answering these questions requires, again, estimating the uncertain. To come up with a reasonable, conservative figure to represent the amount of regional transmission that might get built under the new FERC process, they looked at what happened when a similar process was overseen by the Midwest’s grid. Then they rounded down that figure significantly.
Teplin and his colleagues also assumed that some big power lines that have already been proposed nationwide — roughly 15 gigawatts, to be exact — will get completed faster because of these new laws, so their analysis starts to bring them online by 2029. One only need look at the nearly two-decade saga of SunZia, a large power line that crosses New Mexico and Arizona, to see how long it can take to finish those projects today.
Under those assumptions, the law should more than double the rate of America’s transmission buildout, Teplin and his team estimated. Right now, the country builds perhaps 1 gigawatt of new transmission lines every year; under their assumptions, that would leap to 2 to 4 gigawatts a year.
So how many emissions would these new lines avoid? Using a report published by Grid Strategies, a power sector consulting firm that advocates for more transmission, Teplin and his colleagues estimate that each “gigawatt-mile” of new transmission will let operators add about 32 gigawatts of solar and wind to the grid each year. (This suggests that, most of the time, the lines would run at about 30% of capacity.)
Finally, the team assumed that electricity from these new renewable projects will replace power from natural gas plants. That, too, is an approximation: Some of those new wind and solar farms will drive out coal plants; others might replace non-emitting resources like nuclear or hydroelectric dams; but in general they will reduce gas burning.
When you put all those figures together, RMI’s analysis suggests that the legislation could build roughly twice as much new clean energy generation by 2050 as exists in all fossil-fuel power plants today. These new resources would help avoid about 6.5 gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions by the middle of the century.
That may seem like a big number — but Third Way was actually able to reach an even larger estimate. Teplin and his team didn’t try to differentiate, for instance, between the effects of a recent FERC order, which requires utilities to build more transmission within regions, and the proposed Manchin-Barrasso bill, which shores up the legality of that FERC order and would also induce utilities to build more power lines between regions. Some legal experts argue that the recent FERC order will be on shaky ground if the Manchin-Barrasso bill doesn’t pass; others say it’s stable enough as-is.
If you assume that courts will kill the FERC order unless Congress acts, then that should raise your estimate of what Manchin-Barrasso might do. That’s essentially what Third Way did — by giving the bill more credit for the resulting regional transmission buildout, they say that its carbon upside could be as large as 15.7 gigatons over the next 25 years. I’m not sure I would be that aggressive, but I think the transmission provisions would likely initiate a big buildout of renewables.
The Manchin-Barrasso bill contains a number of provisions that aim to increase the leasing of federal land for oil and gas drilling. One set requires that the Interior Department must offer a minimum amount of acres every year for oil and gas leasing. It also says that the land offered must be land that oil and gas companies actually want to lease.
This would address one of Republicans’ biggest objections to how the Biden administration has handled oil and gas extraction on federally owned land. As part of the Inflation Reduction Act, Manchin required that the government offer a minimum amount of oil and gas acreage for every acre of public land it leased to wind and solar developers. But Republicans have accused the Biden administration of getting around this rule by, in essence, offering useless or otherwise undesirable land.
(This concession, I should add, is now essentially moot until 2029, as the Trump administration will hasten to nominate the parcels that oil and gas companies are most excited to drill on. But it could bind a future Democratic administration, requiring them to offer good parcels for oil and gas leasing at the same time that they offer federal land for renewable development.)
The bill would also change some of the rules around the drilling allowed on the borders of federally owned land. Under the Manchin-Barrasso bill, companies could drill a vertical well on privately owned land, then extend it horizontally underground into federal land to extract oil or gas.
These provisions, too, are difficult to model. Much like the transmission proposal, they won’t lead to a guaranteed amount of drilling (although they will essentially produce a minimumamount of fossil fuel leasing). Nor will they substantially change the drilling that happens under Donald Trump or a future Republican president because any fossil fuel-loving administration is already free to go much further than these provisions would require them to.
To estimate the emissions impact of these provisions, the think tank Resources for the Future first tried to draw some error bars around their analysis. As a worst-case scenario, analysts modeled what would happen if the onshore drilling that happened during the Trump administration occurred every year from 2025 to 2050. Under this “Trump forever” scenario, emissions increase about 2.1 gigatons from 2025 to 2050. Under a less dire scenario, they would increase by about 0.6 gigatons during the same period.
These estimates almost certainly exceed what EPRA would actually do, Kevin Rennert, the director of RFF’s federal climate policy initiative, told me.
“None of the provisions would require the levels of leasing that we’re analyzing in the high-leasing scenario,” he said. “It’s clear [that the model is] a high upper bound on what EPRA itself would drive.” The provisions in the Manchin-Barrasso bill, in other words, are aimed much more at putting a floor under a future Democratic administration than they are raising a ceiling for a future Republican administration.
(Over all these discussions hangs a curious question about drilling for oil and gas on public land: How important is it, really? But that’s a question for another time.)
How you feel about this reform effort ultimately depends on how you feel about gambling. Is it worth hamstringing a future Democratic president’s ability to hem in oil production in exchange for unleashing a wave of new transmission under the Trump administration? How much do you weigh building more renewables versus selling more fossil fuels to the world?
Trump’s victory last month also changes the calculus. His administration will increase onshore oil and gas leasing regardless of whether this bill passes or not. He will stop the Energy Department’s effort to slow down the construction of LNG terminals and approve a new wave of projects. All of the bill’s support for fossil fuels, in other words, would be moot — Trump will do that stuff anyway. So the question becomes whether the bill’s support for new transmission infrastructure 1) actually builds new power lines, and 2) provides a useful tailwind for renewables and clean energy during what would otherwise be a difficult four years.
You can go in almost endless loops through the politics here. Given Trump’s antipathy toward renewables, why should we expect his administration to allow a transmission buildout in the first place, regardless of what Congress says? In which case, maybe the bill isn’t worth it. But on the other hand, maybe it is — since Trump’s going to do everything he can to juice fossil fuels and fight renewables, why not pass the bill and give power system regulators in blue and purple states an extra tool to juice clean energy construction? And hey, given Trump’s friendliness toward the AI boom, maybe he’ll wind up having to build more transmission just to service data centers.
We can’t make that political call quite yet. Until we know exactly how Westerman’s addition to the legislation would change NEPA, it’s hard to say where lawmakers should come down. But what’s clear is that this may be Congress’s last chance to deal with permitting reform for a while. Next year, the Republican majority is likely to be focused on tax cuts, and it’s not even clear that the reconciliation process would allow for changing permitting law. “We’re pretty pessimistic that you could include anything on permitting or transmission or any of these other things in the reconciliation process,” Devin Hartman, a policy director at the center-right think tank the R Street Institute, told Heatmap this week.
So this is it for permitting reform — it’s now or never for this set of changes. In a year full of surprises for climate and environmental law, we may yet get one more.
Jael Holzman contributed reporting.
Why an attorney for Dominion Voting Systems is now defending renewables companies.
My biggest takeaway of this year? Bad information is breaking the energy transition – and the fake news is only getting more powerful.
Across the country, we’re seeing solar, wind, and battery storage projects grind to a halt thanks to activism powered by fears of health and safety risks, many of which are unfounded, unproven, exaggerated, or conspiratorial in nature. There are some prominent examples, like worries about offshore wind and whales, but I’ve spent a large chunk of The Fight’s lifespan so far investigating a few crucial case studies, from wildfire fears confronting battery developers in California to cancer concerns curtailing a crucial transmission line in New Jersey. To tell you the honest truth, it is difficult to quantify just how troubling this issue is for the industry.
False information is something Mark Thomson, a D.C.-based attorney with the law firm Meier Watkins Phillips Pusch LLP, thinks about a lot these days. Thomson was one of the lawyers who won a record $787 million settlement for Dominion Voting Systems from Fox News Network after it broadcast incorrect claims about how the company’s ballot machines were used in the 2020 election. Today his attention is elsewhere – conspiracy-powered defamation against renewables developers and their projects. .
“This is a sizable and growing part of what we do here,” Thomson told me. “I think it’s because the developer sector writ large increasingly understands the severity and the pervasiveness of falsehoods in that space, and also just as importantly how quickly groups and communities can latch onto these falsehoods in ways that critically interrupt and even endanger some of these projects.”
Why are we talking about conspiracy theorists as an opposition powerhouse? Well, studies show that like working in agriculture or owning large tracts of land, scientific skepticism can be a big signal that someone will oppose a renewables project. A 2022 study published in the journal Nature Energyfound “moderate-to-large” relationships between indices of conspiracy beliefs and the likelihood that someone would oppose a wind farm, and that the relationship between wind farm opposition and conspiracy beliefs was “many times greater than its relationship with age, gender, education, and political orientation.”
Conspiracies or misinformation can also be weaponized by hostile local, state, or federal regulators if they have other reasons to try and curtail development.
Take St. Clair County, Michigan, where a leading local public health official is leveraging theories about the impact of solar energy to try and limit development. St. Clair County is home to its own fun blend of renewables consternation. The most acerbic fight is in the town of Fort Gratiot, where Ranger Power subsidiary Portside Solar has proposed to construct a 100 MW solar facility. The project is in a rural, largely agricultural region and has faced incredible resentment. (If you want a primer on the conflict, watch this interview segment – in between featured ads for Ivermectin.)
Last Thursday evening, St. Clair County medical director Remington Nevin testified before the county’s board of commission that “very clear health threats” caused by solar energy required “extraordinary actions” under the state public health code. Nevin specifically addressed noise, claiming that the sound produced by hypothetical solar facilities could “presumably be an unreasonable threat to public health” if not kept below certain decibel thresholds.
“This should not be controversial,” Nevin told the audience, which erupted into rapturous applause after his testimony.
This testimony, prompted by public comments from disgruntled residents, came after Nevin issued a report detailing his desires for quick action under the public health code that circulated widely on anti-renewables Facebook groups.
Nevin is definitely a qualified medical professional. “Occupational medicine is the successor to the field of industrial medicine,” Nevin told me when I emailed him about his qualifications, “and is the medical speciality most applicable to the health effects of industrial activities such as these.” He noted that he has a doctoral public health degree in mental health and psychiatric epidemiology, and has done fellowship training in occupation and environmental medicine.
But he is not a specialist in the health effects of solar panels. He’s actually an expert in quinism, a brain and brainstem disease caused by a toxic exposure to anti-malaria drugs. This position made him relevant during the COVID-19 lockdowns, when he spoke out about the risks of taking hydroxychloroquine, an unproven COVID-19 treatment that Trump and other socially conservative figures began recommending at the height of the pandemic lockdowns. Nevin took a more contrarian view of the scientific debate around COVID-19 during those lockdowns, signing a declaration to open society up before a vaccine was widely available. He still feels passionately about this topic today, celebrating Trump’s pick to run the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who coauthored that declaration.
When I asked Nevin about his lack of expertise in the health risks of technology like solar panels, he responded by saying he believes a court would consider him expert enough for his views to hold legal weight.
“In matters such as these, a court ultimately determines the validity of an expert's qualifications,” he said. “I am confident that my background is particularly germane and well-suited to this topic, and that my qualifications and recommendations will withstand judicial review should these matters become subject to litigation in due course.”
For what it is worth, it’s incredibly hard to find evidence that the noise emitted from solar farms creates a risk to public health. Industry says such data is infinitesimal.
There is also at least some apparent temptation of the courts at work in all this, too. Nevin, local leaders, and activists have in public comments about the health risks repeatedly referenced Act 233, a new state law that allows an independent agency to adjudicate conflicts between developers and towns with restrictions on renewable energy projects. As we previously scooped, municipalities and counties are challenging the legality of how that law is being implemented. It is entirely possible that part of Nevin’s crusade against the health impacts of solar on county residents is an attempt to stop the state from usurping the county’s local control.
As opponents of renewable energy look to use the court system in this way, it may be worthwhile for developers to do the same to combat misinformation. Courts can decide when a company is being defamed or unjustly maligned, and the legal system can be an avenue for resolving the vexing issue of conspiracies and misinformation about the health and safety of a renewables project.
Hence why as renewables deployment rises in the U.S., and opposition does too, attorneys like Thomson are going to see a lot more business from developers.
“The law provides some remedies in some circumstances,” Thomson told me. “It’s not a silver bullet. But for specific types of falsehoods, the law can provide an important source of accountability and just as importantly, invoking the law can help people realize that there is a price to be paid for just blatantly and often willfully misleading groups of citizens about this stuff.”