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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.
What happened?
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.
Why did the blade break?
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.
How did Vineyard Wind respond?
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.”
Did anyone get hurt?
There have been no reported injuries as a result of the accident.
What are the risks now?
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.
How is the cleanup going?
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.
Has anything like this happened before?
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.”
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.
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.
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Current conditions: The polar vortex that keeps air circulating around the North Pole collapsed months ahead of schedule, threatening to send frigid temperatures southward • India’s east coast Andhra Pradesh state is facing down yet another major storm as Severe Cyclone Murasu makes landfall • The catastrophic atmospheric river over the American Southwest has dumped more than 20 trillion gallons of water across Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah.
THE TOP FIVE
1. Gas prices hit a record high on the eve of America’s midterm elections
The average price of a gallon of gasoline during President Donald Trump’s second term topped $3.46 as of Monday, a record that exceeds the previous high set under the Biden administration. That’s according to a new analysis by the Financial Times. And that’s just the average across the past 22 months. The average price nationwide on November 2 clocked in at just under $4.17 per gallon. “If modern living boiled down to a price, it’s the price at the pump,” Bob McNally, a former energy advisor to the George W Bush administration and president of consultancy Rapidan Energy, told the newspaper. “Whether a voter is filling up that day or not, it’s likely that they see a pump price.”
Oil prices, meanwhile, plunged Monday on hopeful signals from Iran about potential progress in peace talks to end the war with the United States. West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark, fell nearly 8% to $96 per barrel. Brent crude, the global measure, dropped over 8% to $104 per barrel. Murban crude, the stuff that flows out of the United Arab Emirates and therefore faces the worst impacts from Tehran’s attacks on tankers exiting the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz, dove over 11%.
2. OpenAI vows to design its data centers for grid flexibility
When energy researcher (and now Google wonk) Tyler Norris came out with his landmark paper last year arguing for data centers that can flexibly respond to conditions on the grid, my colleague Matthew Zeitlin quipped that the policy amounted to “one weird trick to get more data centers” online. ChatGPT-maker OpenAI is now making that trick routine. On Monday, the company announced its “grid protectors program,” under which it plans to make all the data centers serving its artificial intelligence software responsive to the grid wherever they’re located. That way, rather than drumming up neighbors’ concerns over power prices and blackouts, data centers are welcomed as assets that keep the lights on. “Power lines, substations and other grid infrastructure builds are a fixed cost whether demand is low or high,” the company said in a post on its website. “By using more electricity when the grid has room and reducing our use when it is under strain, we can help pay for that infrastructure while limiting the need for costly upgrades to meet peak demand. That can help keep costs down for other customers.”
3. Exclusive: Green groups challenge Trump’s argument against carbon restrictions on power plants
When the Environmental Protection Agency rescinded its plans to restrict how much carbon dioxide U.S. power plants can emit, the Trump administration argued that shutting down the coal- and gas-fired stations that supply most of America’s electricity “would have no more than a trivial effect” on health outcomes due to climate change. But a lengthy new formal comment co-signed by eight of the largest mainstream green groups in the country said the EPA “misinterprets the Clean Air Act, ignores scientific evidence, and entirely misunderstands its own duty as the agency responsible for protecting public health and the environment,” and accused the agency of using its flawed approach as the basis for a “tectonic and unreasoned policy shift.” The remarks, which the Natural Resources Defense Council shared exclusively with me for this newsletter, was endorsed by a range of groups that includes the Clean Air Task Force, the Center for Biological Diversity, Earthjustice, Environmental Defense Fund, Sierra Club, and the Union of Concerned Scientists.
As part of the 271-page comment, the groups submitted a new analysis that projected emissions from U.S. power plants to cause $20.4 trillion in health-related damages by 2100. That’s nearly equal to the entire U.S. gross domestic product in 2024. “We present our own modeled scenarios, which illustrate the gravity of EPA’s technical errors and the sensitivity of the agency’s findings to inputs and assumptions,” the group wrote. “Under our alternate illustrative scenarios, U.S. power-plant emissions’ impacts on global temperature and sea level rise easily exceed EPA’s alleged de minimis thresholds, showing such impacts are in fact meaningful even under EPA’s flawed futility methodology.”
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4. Trump-linked mining project in Kazakhstan plans to IPO
W-what more can I say? W-wheezing in LA. ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images
A mining company with ties with two of Trump’s sons is preparing to go public. On Monday, The Wall Street Journal broke news that Kaz Resources plans to start selling shares next year through a direct U.S. listing after giving Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump a stake in a major tungsten project in Kazakhstan. The venture, a partnership with the Kazakh government, is part of a broader effort through Cove Capital, a mining prospector led by Australian-American executive Pini Althaus, to expand U.S. mineral deals in Central Asia. Originally, Althaus planned to bring Kaz Resources public through a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. But Althaus abandoned the SPAC deal Monday in favor of a direct listing. The move is likely to draw scrutiny after today’s election. “I would be surprised if we weren’t,” Althaus told the Journal. “There’s no smoking gun here.”
Meanwhile, Graphite One, a startup that has won over $2 billion in funding from the Export-Import Bank of the U.S., took a big step forward. On Monday, the company said the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency had issued the final air permit for its debut anode factory in the state. “Receiving the final Ohio air permit is an important step toward establishing a domestic synthetic anode material supply chain,” Graphite One CEO Anthony Huston said in a press release. “This approval advances Phase 1 plant toward first revenue and supports our goal of becoming the first U.S. company commercially producing synthetic graphite anode material.”
5. U.S. automakers press Congress for a permanent ban on Chinese cars
Beep beep. CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images
Nearly all major U.S. automakers are urging Congress to enact a permanent ban on Chinese vehicles when lawmakers reconvene next week for a short session following the midterm elections. On Monday, Reuters reported that a bipartisan group of Senators met in September to discuss fast-tracking a bill, but decided to hold off until after the November election. “We need to protect the U.S. market from a flood of Chinese imports that carry surveillance risk and disadvantage current manufacturers that have made generational investments in American communities,” John Bozzella, who heads the trade group Alliance for Automotive Innovation, told the newswire.
Detroit automakers may have been slow to take electric vehicles seriously. But the narrative around one of America’s biggest homegrown success stories, Rivian, may be focused on the wrong vehicle. While the California-based manufacturer’s R2 electric sports utility vehicle attracts attention, its humble commercial van — the one popularized by Amazon — “is turning into a secret weapon,” according to InsideEVs. The company’s latest earnings suggest the van is becoming a significant revenue driver.
THE KICKER
The country’s largest utility will spend up to $7 billion on a battery buildout. Exelon, the largest U.S. regulated electric and gas company in the country, with six utilities serving 11 million Americans, plans to spend up to $7 billion to build as much as 3.5 gigawatts of battery storage. In an earnings call last week, the utility giant said that it is spending a minimum of $3 billion for at least 1.5 gigawatts of storage. “With regulated storage, we have certainty that projects get built, and control over when and how they’re deployed,” Robert Kleczynski, Exelon’s CFO, said during the call, according to Utility Dive. “We view utility-owned storage as one option alongside competitive development, not a replacement for it.”
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As you may have seen, my colleague Emily Pontecorvo and I got the first look at the Rhodium Group’s analysis of what the bipartisan permitting bill will do to emissions.
You can read our story at Heatmap. The upshot is that the bill’s most significant provisions are likely neutral for climate change in a worst-case scenario — and could, in more optimistic scenarios, help reduce emissions. (Those scenarios aren’t about how the bill will be interpreted, to be clear, but about what might happen in the broader energy economy — with economic growth, for instance, or oil prices — that will feed back into the emissions math.)
I won’t give away much more about our story, but there is one irony I want to note about the Rhodium study and the broader morass of American electricity policy. One of the Rhodium study’s big findings is that BAAJA will help expand the transmission system. Power lines are essential for decarbonization because they move electricity from the country’s sunniest and windiest places to its cities, towns, and suburbs.
BAAJA will help transmission both because the law affirmatively expands the power grid and because the bill’s changes to environmental review law could help power lines. Today, for instance, it takes twice as long on average to conduct a federal environmental impact study for transmission lines as it does for pipelines, according to Rhodium data. All in all, the Rhodium analysis estimates BAAJA could increase the amount of new transmission capacity added per year by 167% to 262% nationwide, compared to the average rate over the past decade.
Which is very interesting. But it’s worth noting that the Rhodium analysis may— emphasis on may — undercount the bill’s transmission benefits. This is because the Rhodium authors did not have time to conduct a full network study of the U.S. transmission system, which would take into effect the grid’s physical footprint, power flows, and existing bottlenecks. Instead, they looked at power supply and demand within the context of the broader U.S. energy system.
That’s a reasonable decision; indeed, it was probably the only decision they could make. Because of how energy system models work, a more fulsome analysis might have taken weeks to complete, not to mention a very large amount of money and computational power. When the National Renewable Energy Lab studied how quickly Los Angeles could switch to 100% renewable energy earlier this decade, for instance, it ran such a study, modeling every transmission line and substation in LA. Its supercomputer wound up churning through more than 100 million simulations; the research effort took three years. If the Rhodium analysts had done even a fraction as much work to examine what BAAJA would mean for the country’s power grid, then they would have of course finished their analysis well after the window to vote on BAAJA would have closed.
One of the ironies here is that while the LA 100 study was particularly exhaustive, we actually require clean energy projects to conduct similar studies all the time. Right now, one of the primary reasons it takes so long to hook up a new power plant to the grid is that it has to undergo an interconnection study in many parts of the country. In those regions, a new solar farm or battery project can’t connect to the grid until operators study its effect on grid congestion everywhere else.
As it happens, BAAJA aims to fix this process, allowing power plants to join the grid in batches.
I want to note the irony that a process we mandate for the power sector is actually too slow to deliver speedy policy analysis to legislators. If Rhodium had tried to study BAAJA the way we make power plants study the grid, then it never would have delivered its verdict in time. If you think Congress is slow, in other words, you should meet the electricity sector.
Current conditions: The Pineapple Express, an atmospheric river originating in the Pacific near Hawaii, is arriving in the Southwest laden with heavy rain that’s set to flood the region • Indonesia has the worst air quality in the world as forest fires rage along Sumatra’s southern coast • A cross-country storm will soak much of the United States on Tuesday’s Election Day.
THE TOP FIVE
1. Permitting bill’s worst-case climate scenario is still carbon neutral
The Senate’s grand compromise to simplify federal permitting on energy projects would likely drop emissions slightly as the benefits to accelerating deployments of clean energy infrastructure outweigh the boost the legislation could give to fossil fuels. Even under the worst-case scenario, emissions remain on the same trajectory as today. That’s according to a hotly anticipated new analysis by the Rhodium Group, the consultancy whose U.S. emissions estimates are among the most widely cited in American politics. The report, shared first with my colleague Emily Pontecorvo, found that provisions in the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act largely counteract each other on climate. The bill makes building transmission lines much easier, a key step to patching more renewables onto the grid. But it also makes new gas pipelines simpler to permit, clearing the way for a buildout of the infrastructure for the fossil fuel already dominating U.S. electricity and heating systems. Still, under the best-case scenario, the legislation could cut U.S. economy-wide emissions by 5% below where they would otherwise go in 2040. The bill could also slash energy bills by $78 per year and support construction of more than 200 gigawatts of clean energy capacity, as compared to a world where it didn’t pass. The Rhodium report is at least the second analysis yet to find that the bill could modestly lower emissions. The first, as I reported last week, came from the think tank Resources for the Future, which saw a slight drop in power-sector emissions relative to a world without BAAJA.
If overhauling national permitting rules to make building green energy infrastructure easier doesn’t work to lower emissions, traditional negotiations in favor of regulations that can deliver cuts looks no more promising. Two weeks of United Nations-led talks in Armenia ended Saturday without a settled approach to meeting 2030 deadlines for preserving more nature. “We don’t need to spend more to close the biodiversity funding gap, we need to spend better,” Marina Von Weissenberg, a Finnish senior ministerial advisor, said in a statement. “Governments have a real opportunity here to reshape public spending with future generations in mind, but they can’t do it alone. International coordination is key to giving governments the confidence to lead change.”
2. China’s hydrogen investments doubled in the first 9 months of this year
Last week, my colleague Katie Brigham published a detailed feature highlighting China’s tightening grip over the global supply chain for electrolyzers, the technology that zaps water with electricity to separate the molecule’s hydrogen from its oxygen and harvest the former as fuel. Keen readers of this newsletter recognize the story. Even before the Iran War, China had beefed up its public support for green hydrogen and related technologies. After the conflict constricted the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, the People’s Republic redoubled its efforts. Quite literally. New data from the National Energy Administration shows that investments into the hydrogen industry doubled in the first nine months of this year, according to Hydrogen Insight.
3. Fresh chaos at Fermi
Fermi America went public in a gangbusters initial public offering last year as the company, with a board of directors including former Texas governor and U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, pledged to build the world’s largest data center and power the facility with gas and four large-scale Westinghouse AP1000 nuclear reactors. In April, the chief executive and chief financial officer quit. The board room drama continued into the next month. The company’s stock recovered somewhat over the summer as investors bet on a turnaround pegged to a series of deals with companies looking to lease space on its future servers. But fresh chaos enveloped the startup Friday when The Texas Tribune reported that Perry had failed to earn enough support from the board of directors to win reelection to his seat.
In a statement posted to X on Friday evening, Fermi said that neither Perry nor investor Jeffrey Stein had been removed from the company’s board. “In fact, both Governor Perry and Jeffrey Stein received a majority of the votes cast by shareholders,” the statement read. “Let’s be clear: Governor Perry and Mr. Stein remain members of Fermi’s Board of Directors and will continue serving until their successors are duly elected. Both remain eligible for reelection.”
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4. LA wildfire smoke exposed 7 million people to toxic metals
W-what more can I say? W-wheezing in LA. ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images
If you thought the fine particulate matter from last year’s catastrophic Los Angeles firestorm was bad, you weren’t thinking imaginatively enough about just how dangerous all that airborne material could be. A new study published in the journal Science Advances suggests that upward of 7 million people were exposed to high levels of airborne lead and other toxic metals released when homes and vehicles caught flame. The January 2025 Eaton inferno that destroyed more than 9,400 buildings and killed 19 people spewed 80 times the normal concentration of lead found in the atmosphere through a plume that settled over 70% of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. “I can envision that in the future we have these evacuation zones for smoke exposure as well,” Haroula Baliaka, the study’s lead author, who was a PhD candidate at Caltech last year, told Bloomberg. “Unfortunately, this is not a one-time event. It’s a new reality and we need to adapt to it and we need to do it sooner rather than later.”
The findings come a week after a study published in JAMA Pediatrics showed a link between wildfire smoke exposure during pregnancy and autism diagnoses in children. The research from Rutgers University examined 893,212 mother-child pairs enrolled in Medicaid, with children born between 2007 and 2014. Each increase of 0.75 micrograms per cubic meter in average concentrations of wildfire-related air pollution during pregnancy was associated with a 30% higher risk of a subsequent autism diagnosis. Exposure in the second and third trimesters had the highest risk. “Wildfire smoke can travel far beyond the communities where fires are burning, and exposure may occur even when smoke is not visible,” Stefania Papatheodorou, an epidemiologist at the Rutgers School of Public Health and lead author of the study, said in a press release. “Our findings highlight the importance of awareness of wildfire events and their potential effects on air quality during pregnancy.”
5. U.K. signals a potential crackdown on offshore wind
The United Kingdom is building out more than 10 gigawatts of offshore wind as London looks to shore up its electricity supplies amid the global energy shock. But Chancellor of the Exchequer John Healey said he would veto any offshore wind projects that don’t lower bills. While clean power is “how we break the grip of international gas prices on our bills,” he said the infrastructure “has to come at the right pace, in the right places, with the grid to carry it.” The statement fueled what The Guardian called “concerns that the government is moving away from the pro-renewables agenda.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. midterms aren’t the only election this week. In Sunday’s runoff election, Bulgaria’s pro-Russian acting President Iliana Iotova appeared to eke out a victory over the former prime minister Andrei Gyurov, a pro-Western banker. Her win unites the government with her close ally, Prime Minister Rumen Radev, ensuring stronger support for the leader’s two signature energy policies. One, a plan to build a pair of Westinghouse AP1000s at the Kozloduy nuclear plant, is scheduled to advance to the next planning stage next year. The other, the easing of sanctions on Russian uranium to ensure a supply of fuel for the plant’s existing reactors, looks likely to continue under Iotova’s friendly diplomacy with the Kremlin.
THE KICKER
William Nordhaus, the pioneering Yale University economist who won the Nobel Prize in 2018 for integrating climate change into macroeconomic analysis, has died at 85 following a battle with an aggressive form of brain cancer. His nephew, Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute, referred to his father, Robert Nordhaus, as “the original environmental lawyer and Bill as the original environmental economist,” he wrote in a blog post after his uncle’s passing. “It is safe to say that the Nordhaus brothers were doing environmental law and economics, respectively, long before either label existed. Not bad for two kids who grew up in the intellectual hotbed of Albuquerque, New Mexico, population 40,000, during and after the second world war.” Their legacies are something of the Nordhaus family brand: Pragmatism. May his memory be a blessing.
W-what more can I say? W-wheezing in LA. ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images
Beep beep. CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images
