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How Team Biden learned to stop worrying and love carbon removal.
What does the new American climate policy look like?
Last week, we got a better sense. On Friday, the Biden administration unveiled a massive investment — more than $1.2 billion — that aims to create a new industry in the United States out of whole cloth that will specialize in removing carbon from the atmosphere.
As President Joe Biden’s climate law hits its one-year anniversary, the investment shows the audacity, the potential, and — ultimately — the risks of his approach to climate and economic policy.
If successful, the investment will establish a new sector of the American economy and remake another one, while providing the world with an important tool to fight climate change. If unsuccessful, then the investment could set back an important climate technology and forever link it to the fossil-fuel industry.
The investment’s centerpiece is two large industrial facilities in Louisiana and Texas that will remove more than 1 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere every year. But the program is much broader than those hubs, encompassing more advanced and experimental approaches to carbon removal, or CDR, than the government has previously funded. The government has unleashed old industrial policy tools, such as advanced market guarantees, toward the nascent field.
Although Biden is implementing this policy, the approach will almost certainly outlive his administration. America’s support for carbon removal is strongly, perhaps surprisingly, bipartisan. The new hubs and the other policies announced last week were funded by the bipartisan infrastructure law or by other bipartisan legislation.
Given all that, it’s worth it to spend some time on these investments to better understand how they work and what they might mean for the future of the American economy.
Let’s start here: Yes, we will probably need carbon dioxide removal, or CDR, to meet the world’s and the country’s climate goals.
This wasn’t always clear. When I started as a climate reporter in 2015, carbon removal was taboo, something that only climate deniers and other folks who wanted to delay decarbonization brought up. An influential Princeton study from earlier in the decade had concluded that carbon removal — especially capturing carbon in the ambient air, a strategy called direct air capture, or DAC — would never pencil out financially and that it would always be cheaper to reduce fossil-fuel use rather than suck carbon out of the sky.
But in 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change made a startling announcement: So much carbon dioxide had accumulated in the atmosphere that it would be virtually impossible to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius without carbon removal.
The IPCC studied global energy models and found that even in optimistic scenarios, humanity would release too much carbon by the middle of the century to keep temperatures from briefly rising by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. But if we began removing carbon from the atmosphere, then we could avoid locking in that spike in temperatures for the long term. That is, in order to hit the 1.5-degree goal by 2100, humanity must spend much of the 21st century removing carbon from the atmosphere and sequestering it for thousands of years.
We need carbon removal, in other words, not so we can keep burning fossil fuels, but to deal with the fossil-fuel pollution that is already in the atmosphere.
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This change was only possible because CDR’s costs were falling. A few months earlier, a company called Carbon Engineering had announced that it would soon cut direct air capture’s cost to $230 a ton. (DAC was once thought to cost $600 a ton.) This suggested that in a handful of cases — a small handful — it might make financial sense to use DAC instead of decarbonizing a particular activity.
Even so, the numbers involved in this effort are mind-boggling. This year, several thousands tons of carbon will be removed from the atmosphere worldwide, at a cost of $200 to $2,000 a ton, according to one industry expert. Perhaps 100,000 tons of carbon have ever been removed from the atmosphere by a human-run process, according to CDR.fyi, a community-run database.
But by 2050, in order to hit the IPCC’s targets, humanity must remove about 5 billion tons a year at a cost of roughly $100 a ton.
For context, the global shipping industry moves about 11 billion tons of material each year.
In other words, in the next three decades, humanity must perfect the technology of CDR, find a way to pay for it, and massively scale it up to the degree that it captures roughly half of the amount of material that travels via oceanborne trade today. And it must do this while decarbonizing the rest of the energy system — because if we fail to bring fossil-fuel use nearly to zero during this period, then all of this will be for naught.
Q: Well, if we have to store all this carbon for a very long time, why don’t we plant a lot of trees?
A: For a few years in the mid 2010s, trees did seem like the cheapest way to pull carbon out of the atmosphere.
But the scale of the carbon problem exceeds what biology alone can fix. Since 1850, humanity has pumped 2.5 trillion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This is nearly twice the total biomass of all life on Earth. Only geology can deal with such a massive (literally) problem. To truly undo climate change, we must put carbon back into geological storage. Plus, even if you sopped up a lot of carbon with trees, they might burn down. Then you’d be back where you started.
Yet CDR isn’t just a logistical problem.
Fossil fuel companies have long used the rhetoric of carbon removal — and its relative, carbon capture and storage, which sucks up climate pollution from a smokestack or industrial process — as an excuse to keep drilling for oil and gas. At the same time, they’ve resisted any federal regulation that would require them to actually capture carbon when they burn fossil fuels.
What’s more, the infrastructure and the expertise best-suited for carbon removal is largely in the same places that have fossil-fuel industries today. (Think of the Gulf Coast or North Dakota.) Some people who live in those places want to see decarbonization end the fossil-fuel industry forever — not transform it into something different, like a carbon management industry.
And although the technology to inject captured carbon dioxide into the ground is decades-old, concentrated CO2 can be dangerous if mishandled.
It’s not hard to imagine a world where the promise of CDR allows oil and gas companies to keep drilling and polluting, but where a lack of any binding regulation — and local pushback whenever a CDR facility is announced — means that very little carbon actually gets removed from the atmosphere. In that world, no matter how powerful CDR is technologically, the politics of CDR would make climate change worse.
Which brings us to the Biden administration’s strategy for scaling up the CDR industry. It has three components:
1. Build massive direct air capture facilities around the country.
2. A slew of new programs to boost alternative (and maybe less energy-intensive) approaches to CDR.
3. A new “Responsible Carbon Management” guideline.
In short, the administration is seeking to scale up the most straightforward carbon-removal technology, financially support other promising approaches, and then ensure it all happens in an above-board way.
The marquee announcement here are the carbon capture hubs, which were widely covered last week. The Energy Department will spend $1.2 billion on large-scale facilities in Louisiana and Texas that will use industrial processes to cleanse carbon from the ambient air. Each will remove about one million tons of carbon a year when complete.
Project Cypress, the Louisiana hub, will be run by the federal contractor Battelle in conjunction with Climeworks, a Swiss DAC company, and Heirloom, which stores carbon dioxide in concrete.
The boringly named South Texas DAC Hub will be run by Occidental Petroleum, an oil company, in conjunction with the DAC company Carbon Engineering and Worley, an engineering firm.
These are going to be the charismatic megaprojects of the CDR industry. They are meant to create clusters of expertise and infrastructure, concentrated in a geographic core, that will give rise to more innovation. You can think of them as little Silicon Valleys — or, more pointedly, little Shenzens — of carbon removal.
As goes these hubs, so goes CDR. If the hubs have an accident, or take too long to build, then the industry will struggle; if they succeed, it will have a running start. Therefore, the Energy Department has made a big fuss about how these projects should help local residents: When selecting these projects, it took the unusual step of ranking these projects’ “community benefits” as highly as their more technical aspects.
Last week, an Energy Department official was quick to point out to me that these projects have merely been selected and that neither has received any money yet. Next, the department and these hubs will negotiate binding contracts that will seek to lock in community benefits for locals. Only then will the funds flow.
What’s more interesting, though, is what’s not here. In the infrastructure law, Congress required that the Energy Department establish four DAC hubs. Only two have been announced. That’s because officials realized last year that fewer than four places nationwide had the expertise and understanding of DAC necessary to erect a massive million-ton facility on demand.
So the department set up a kind of starter DAC hub program — a series of grants that will allow cities, nonprofits, universities and companies to study the feasibility of establishing a DAC hub in their town. It gave out more than a dozen of these grants last week to companies and universities in Utah, California, Illinois, Kentucky, and more.
Officials clearly hope that these starter grants may produce more than two full-fledged DAC hub projects, which Congress can then fund at the same level as the Texas and Louisiana facilities.
Even those starter projects will specialize in DAC, though, which means that each approach will use industrial machinery to capture carbon from the ambient air and inject it underground.
But removing carbon doesn’t necessarily require DAC. It may be possible to remove carbon passively by using certain kinds of rock, for instance, or by growing lots and lots of algae. These approaches will probably use less energy than DAC, and they may even remove more carbon than DAC, but they will be harder to measure and verify, and there will be more uncertainty about exactly how much carbon you’re taking out of the atmosphere.
But federal policy has a strong pro-DAC bias. That’s not only because of the DAC hubs, but also because of the Inflation Reduction Act: Biden’s climate law pays companies $180 for each ton of carbon that they remove from the atmosphere, but it is written such that it can essentially only be used for DAC.
The department is trying to diversify away from DAC within the bounds that Congress has given. Last week, it announced that it would soon sponsor small pilot programs that use alternative technologies, including rock mineralization, biomass, and ocean-based processes. It will also fund efforts to measure and verify those techniques so as to make sure they remove a dependable amount of carbon from the atmosphere.
The Energy Department also announced that it will create a new pilot purchase program for carbon removal efforts, providing an “early market commitment” to carbon-removal companies in the same way that it provided one to COVID vaccine makers. This program, which will have an initial budget of $35 million, will use federal expertise to identify which CDR techniques are the most viable and promising, allowing a DOE purchase contract to function as a de facto stamp of approval. (Heatmap first covered the existence of this program earlier this month.)
Finally, the department will launch a separate prize for commercial DAC providers with the goal of cutting its costs down to $100 a ton.
These programs have the unfortunate name “Carbon Negative Shot,” which is meant to evoke a “moonshot” but sounds more like an overpriced product for deer hunters. We will not dwell on it any longer.
All these efforts will turn the Department of Energy into the world’s biggest public buyer and supporter of carbon removal. That lays the groundwork for the final aspect of its strategy that launched last week: a “Responsible Carbon Management Initiative.”
This is a nonbinding list of principles that any carbon-management project will have to follow: These include engaging respectfully with communities before setting up a project, consulting with local tribes, developing the local workforce and ensuring good jobs, and monitoring local air and water quality. (The department is seeking public comment on what, exactly, these principles should be.)
Eventually, the Energy Department hopes to use these principles to provide “technical assistance” to projects that meet the guidelines. It will also recognize developers that have demonstrated they meet the principles.
In other words, the initiative could, over time, become a kind of soft standards-setting body for the industry — a way to distinguish good carbon-removal projects from the bad (and hopefully eliminate the bad in the first place). It will help that the same department publishing these guidelines will also be where all the funding is coming from.
Will all this work? I don’t know. But the scale of the effort is meaningful in itself, because it shows how the Biden administration approaches the task of erecting an industry de novo. If there’s such a thing as Bidenomics, this is what it looks like: a place-based development strategy that admires industrial clustering, supports domestic supply and demand, and applies an optimistic approach to regulation.
You can also see the risk of Biden’s approach. Decarbonization requires technical expertise and real-world know-how; in America, most of that expertise resides in the private sector. Occidental, an oil company that describes itself (optimistically) as a carbon management company, will operate one of the DAC hubs. Although it is prohibited by law from doing anything really egregious — like using the carbon that it’s capturing to drill for more oil — the Biden team cannot ensure that its heart or actions will remain pure. Occidental will be a good carbon-removal team player only so long as it benefits its bottom line.
Yet I don’t want to overstate the importance of this investment either. The vast majority of the Biden administration’s climate investment is going to cutting emissions: If anything, the Biden administration is spending too little on carbon removal, not too much. By my estimate, these programs, including the DAC hubs, will amount for 2% of the roughly $173 billion that the bipartisan infrastructure law devotes to climate or environmental projects. And when you include the Inflation Reduction Act’s climate spending — which is where most federal climate spending is in the first place — the programs discussed here drop to perhaps one percent of total climate spending, although that will depend on how many facilities use the DAC tax credit.
That is a small price for a big prize. If this funding “works,” then these investments will represent the beginning of a new industry — a carbon management industry capable of pulling millions of tons of pollution out of the sky. But even if they fail, then we’ll have learned something too: that carbon removal — and especially DAC — may in fact be unworkable, and that we should not comfort ourselves in the years to come with the hope of cleaning up the atmosphere.
“Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on. It is our responsibility to leave the people of the future a free hand,” the physicist Richard Feynman once wrote. A couple billion seems a worthy price for learning if that hand is free or not.
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Here at Heatmap, we write a lot about decarbonization — that is, the process of transitioning the global economy away from fossil fuels and toward long-term sustainable technologies for generating energy. What we don’t usually write about is what those technologies actually do. Sure, solar panels convert energy from the sun into electricity — but how, exactly? Why do wind turbines have to be that tall? What’s the difference between carbon capture, carbon offsets, and carbon removal, and why does it matter?
So today, we’re bringing you Climate 101, a primer on some of the key technologies of the energy transition. In this series, we’ll cover everything from what makes silicon a perfect material for solar panels (and computer chips), to what’s going on inside a lithium-ion battery, to the difference between advanced and enhanced geothermal.
There’s something here for everyone, whether you’re already an industry expert or merely climate curious. For instance, did you know that contemporary 17th century readers might have understood Don Quixote’s famous “tilting at windmills” to be an expression of NIMYBism? I sure didn’t! But I do now that I’ve read Jeva Lange’s 101 guide to wind energy.
That said, I’d like to extend an especial welcome to those who’ve come here feeling lost in the climate conversation and looking for a way to make sense of it. All of us at Heatmap have been there at some point or another, and we know how confusing — even scary — it can be. The constant drumbeat of news about heatwaves and floods and net-zero this and parts per million that is a lot to take in. We hope this information will help you start to see the bigger picture — because the sooner you do, the sooner you can join the transition, yourself.
Without further ado, here’s your Climate 101 syllabus:
Once you feel ready to go deeper, here are some more Heatmap stories to check out:
The basics on the world’s fastest-growing source of renewable energy.
Solar power is already the backbone of the energy transition. But while the basic technology has been around for decades, in more recent years, installations have proceeded at a record pace. In the United States, solar capacity has grown at an average annual rate of 28% over the past decade. Over a longer timeline, the growth is even more extraordinary — from an stalled capacity base of under 1 gigawatt with virtually no utility-scale solar in 2010, to over 60 gigawatts of utility-scale solar in 2020, and almost 175 gigawatts today. Solar is the fastest-growing source of renewable energy in both the U.S. and the world.
There are some drawbacks to solar, of course. The sun, famously, does not always shine, nor does it illuminate all places on Earth to an equal extent. Placing solar where it’s sunniest can sometimes mean more expense and complexity to connect to the grid. But combined with batteries — especially as energy storage systems develop beyond the four hours of storage offered by existing lithium-ion technology — solar power could be the core of a decarbonized grid.
Solar power can be thought of as a kind of cousin of the semiconductors that power all digital technology. As Princeton energy systems professor and Heatmap contributor Jesse Jenkins has explained, certain materials allow for electrons to flow more easily between molecules, carrying an electrical charge. On one end of the spectrum are your classic conductors, like copper, which are used in transmission lines; on the other end are insulators, like rubber, which limit electrical charges.
In between on that spectrum are semiconductors, which require some amount of energy to be used as a conductor. In the computing context these are used to make transistors, and in the energy context they’re used to make — you guessed it — solar panels.
In a solar panel, the semiconductor material absorbs heat and light from the sun, allowing electrons to flow. The best materials for solar panels, explained Jenkins, have just the right properties so that when they absorb light, all of that energy is used to get the electrons flowing and not turned into wasteful heat. Silicon fits the bill.
When you layer silicon with other materials, you can force the electrons to flow in a single direction consistently; add on a conductive material to siphon off those subatomic particles, and voilà, you’ve got direct current. Combine a bunch of these layers, and you’ve got a photovoltaic panel.
Globally, solar generation capacity stood at over 2,100 terawatt-hours in 2024, according to Our World in Data and the Energy Institute, growing by more than a quarter from the previous year. A huge portion of that growth has been in China, which has almost half of the world’s total installed solar capacity. Installations there have grown at around 40% per year in the past decade.
Solar is still a relatively small share of total electricity generation, however, let alone all energy usage, which includes sectors like transportation and industry. Solar is the sixth largest producer of electricity in the world, behind coal, gas, hydropower, nuclear power, and wind. It’s the fourth largest non-carbon-emitting generation source and the third largest renewable power source, after wind and hydropower.
Solar has taken off in the United States, too, where utility-scale installations make up almost 4% of all electricity generated.
While that doesn’t seem like much, overall growth in generation has been tremendous. In 2024, solar hit just over 300 terawatt-hours of generation in the U.S., compared to about 240 terawatt-hours in 2023 and just under 30 in 2014.
Looking forward, there’s even more solar installation planned. Developers plan to add some 63 gigawatts of capacity to the grid this year, following an additional 30 gigawatts in 2024, making up just over half of the total planned capacity additions, according to Energy information Administration.
Solar is cheap compared to other energy sources, and especially other renewable sources. The world has a lot of practice dealing with silicon at industrial scale, and China especially has rapidly advanced manufacturing processes for photovoltaic cells. Once the solar panel is manufactured, it’s relatively simple to install compared to a wind turbine. And compared to a gas- or coal-fired power plant, the fuel is free.
From 1975 to 2022, solar module costs fell from over $100 per watt to below $0.50, according to Our World In Data. From 2012 to 2022 alone, costs fell by about 90%, and have fallen by “around 20% every time the global cumulative capacity doubles,” writes OWID analyst Hannah Ritchie. Much of the decline in cost has been attributed to “Wright’s Law,” which says that unit costs fall as production increases.
While construction costs have flat-lined or slightly increased recently due to supply chain issues and overall inflation, the overall trend is one of cost declines, with solar construction costs declining from around $3,700 per kilowatt-hour in 2013, to around $1,600 in 2023.
There are solar panels at extreme latitudes — Alaska, for instance, has seen solar growth in the past few years. But there are obvious challenges with the low amount of sunlight for large stretches of the year. At higher latitudes, irradiance, a measure of how much power is transmitted from the sun to a specific area, is lower (although that also varies based on climate and elevation). Then there are also more day-to-day issues, such as the effect of snow and ice on panels, which can cause issues in turning sunlight into power (they literally block the panel from the sun). High latitudes can see wild swings in solar generation: In Tromso, in northern Norway, solar generation in summer months can be three times as high as the annual average, with a stretch of literally zero production in December and January.
While many Nordic countries have been leaders in decarbonizing their electricity grids, they tend not to rely on solar in that project. In Sweden, nuclear and hydropower are its largest non-carbon-emitting fuel sources for electricity; in Norway, electricity comes almost exclusively from hydropower.
There has been some kind of policy support for solar power since 1978, when the Energy Tax Act provided tax credits for solar power investment. Since then, the investment tax credit has been the workhorse of American solar policy. The tax credit as it was first established was worth 10% of the system’s upfront cost “for business energy property and equipment using energy resources other than oil or natural gas,” according to the Congressional Research Service.
But above that baseline consistency has been a fair amount of higher-level turmoil, especially recently. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 kicked up the value of that credit to 30% through 2007; Congress kept extending that timeline, with the ITC eventually scheduled to come down to 10% for utility-scale and zero for residential projects by 2024.
Then came the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which re-instituted the 30% investment tax credit, with bonuses for domestic manufacturing and installing solar in designated “energy communities,” which were supposed to be areas traditionally economically dependent on fossil fuels. The tax then transitioned into a “technology neutral” investment tax credit that applied across non-carbon-emitting energy sources, including solar, beginning in 2024.
This year, Congress overhauled the tax incentives for solar (and wind) yet again. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed in July, solar projects have to start construction by July 2026, or complete construction by the end of 2027 to qualify for the tax credit. The Internal Revenue Service later tightened up its definition of what it means for a project to start construction, emphasizing continuing actual physical construction activities as opposed to upfront expenditures, which could imperil future solar development.
At the same time, the Trump administration is applying a vise to renewables projects on public lands and for which the federal government plays a role in permitting. Renewable industry trade groups have said that the highest levels of the Department of Interior are obstructing permitting for solar projects on public lands, which are now subject to a much closer level of review than non-renewable energy projects.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Researchers attributed the falling cost of solar this century to “scale economies.” Much of this scale has been achieved in China, which dominates the market for solar panel production, especially for export, even though much of the technology was developed in the United States.
At this point, however, the cost of an actual solar system is increasingly made up of “soft costs” like labor and permitting, at least in the United States. According to data from the National Renewables Energy Laboratory, a utility-scale system costs $1.20 per watt, of which soft costs make up a third, $0.40. Ten years ago, a utility-scale system cost $2.90 per watt, of which soft costs was $1.20, or less than half.
Beyond working to make existing technology even cheaper, there are other materials-based advances that promise higher efficiency for solar panels.
The most prominent is “perovskite,” the name for a group of compounds with similar structures that absorb certain frequencies of light particularly well and, when stacked with silicon, can enable more output for a given amount of solar radiation. Perovskite cells have seen measured efficiencies upwards of 34% when combined with silicon, whereas typical solar cells top out around 20%.
The issue with perovskite is that it’s not particularly durable, partially due to weaker chemical bonds within the layers of the cell. It’s also more expensive than existing solar, although much of that comes down inefficient manufacturing processes. If those problems can be solved, perovskite could promise more output for the same level of soft costs as silicon-based solar panels.
The country’s largest source of renewable energy has a long history.
Was Don Quixote a NIMBY?
Miguel de Cervantes’ hero admittedly wasn’t tilting at turbines in 1605, but for some of his contemporary readers in 17th-century Spain, windmills for grinding wheat into flour were viewed as a “dangerous new technology,” author Simon Winchester writes in his forthcoming book, The Breath of the Gods: The History and Future of the Wind. One interpretation of Cervantes’ novel might be that Quixote was “actually doing battle with progress.”
Nearly four and a half centuries later, harnessing the energy of the wind remains controversial, even if the breeze is one of humankind’s longest-utilized resources. While wind is the largest source of renewable electricity generation in the United States today, high construction costs and local opposition have more recently stymied the industry’s continued expansion. The new presidential administration — suspicious of wind’s reliability and place in the American energy mix — has also been doing its very best to stunt any future growth in the sector.
Whether you’re catching up on Trump’s latest regulatory moves, you have your own concerns about the safety of the technology, or this is your first time even thinking about this energy resource, here is the blow-by-blow — sorry! — on wind power in the U.S.
At their most basic conceptual level, wind turbines work by converting kinetic energy — the energy of an object in motion; in this case, air particles — into electrical energy that can be used to power homes, buildings, factories, and data centers.
Like hydroelectric dams, turbines do this by first converting kinetic energy into mechanical energy. The wind turns the turbine blades, which spin a rotor that is connected to a generator. Inside the generator are magnets that rotate around coils of copper wire, creating a magnetic field that pushes and pulls the electrons within the copper. Voilà — and with gratitude to Michael Faraday — now you have an electrical current that can be distributed to the grid.
Turbines typically require an average wind speed of about 9 miles per hour to generate electricity, which is why they are constructed in deserts, mountain passes, on top of hills, or in shallow coastal waters offshore, where there is less in the way to obstruct the flow of wind. Higher elevations are also windier, so utility-scale wind turbines are frequently around 330 feet tall (though the largest turbines tower 600 feet or higher).
It depends on the size of the turbine and also the wind speed. The average capacity of a new land-based wind turbine in the U.S. was 3.4 megawatts in 2023 — but that’s the “nameplate capacity,” or what the turbine would generate if it ran at optimal capacity around the clock.
U.S. Department of Energy
In the U.S., the average capacity factor (i.e. the actual energy output) for a turbine is more like 42%, or close to two-fifths of its theoretical maximum output. The general rule of thumb is that one commercial turbine in the U.S. can power nearly 1,000 homes per month. In 2023, the latest year of data available, land-based and offshore wind turbines in the U.S. generated 425,235 gigawatt-hours of electricity, or enough to power 39 million American homes per year.
A common criticism of wind power is that it “stops working” if the wind isn’t blowing. While it’s true that wind is an intermittent resource, grid operators are used to coping with this. A renewables-heavy grid should combine different energy sources and utilize offline backup generators to prevent service interruptions during doldrums. Battery storage can also help handle fluctuations in demand and increase reliability.
At the same time, wind power is indeed dependent on, well, the wind. In 2023, for example, U.S. wind power generation dropped below 2022 levels due to lower-than-average wind speeds in parts of the Midwest. When you see a turbine that isn’t spinning, though, it isn’t necessarily because there isn’t enough wind. Turbines also have a “cut out” point at which they stop turning if it gets too windy, which protects the structural integrity of the blades and prevents Twisters-like mishaps, as well as keeps the rotor from over-spinning, which could strain or break the turbine’s internal rotating components used to generate electricity.
Though Americans have used wind power in various forms since the late 1800s, the oil crisis of the 1970s brought new interest, development, and investment in wind energy. “The American industry really got going after the suggestion from the Finns, the Swedes, the Danes,” who’d already been making advances in the technology, albeit on single-turbine scales, Winchester, the author of the forthcoming history of wind power, The Breath of the Gods, told me.
In the early 1970s, the Department of Energy issued a grant to William Heronemus, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, to explore the potential of wind energy. Heronemus became “really enthusiastic and built wind generators on the campus,” helping to modernize turbines into the more familiar construction we see widely today, Winchester said.
Some of Heronemus’ former students helped build the world’s first multi-turbine wind farm in New Hampshire in 1981. Though the blades of that farm interfered with nearby television reception — they had to be paused during prime time — the technology “seemed to everyone to make sense,” Winchester said. The Energy Policy Act of 1992, which introduced production tax credits for renewables, spurred further development through the end of the millennium.
Heronemus, a former Naval architect, had dreamed in the 1970s of building a flotilla of floating turbines mounted on “wind ships” that were powered by converting seawater into hydrogen fuel. Early experiments in offshore wind by the Energy Research and Development Administration, the progenitor of the Department of Energy, weren’t promising due to the technological limitations of the era — even commercial onshore wind was still in its infancy, and Heronemus’ plans looked like science-fiction.
In 1991, though, the Danes — ever the leaders in wind energy — successfully constructed the Vindeby Offshore Wind Farm, complete with 11 turbines and a total installed capacity of 5 megawatts. The Blyth offshore wind farm in northern Wales soon followed, with the United States finally constructing its first grid-connected offshore wind turbines off of Maine in 2013. The Block Island wind farm, with a capacity of 30 megawatts, is frequently cited as the first true offshore wind farm in the U.S., and began operating off the coast of Rhode Island in 2016.
Though offshore wind taps into higher and more consistent wind speeds off the ocean — and, as a result, is generally considered more efficient than onshore wind — building turbines at sea comes with its own set of challenges. Due to increased installation costs and the greater wear-and-tear of enduring saltwater and storms at sea, offshore wind is generally calculated to be about twice as expensive as onshore wind. “It’s unclear if offshore wind will ever be as cheap as onshore — even the most optimistic projections documented by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory have offshore wind more expensive than the current price of onshore in 2035,” according to Brian Potter in his newsletter, Construction Physics, though he notes that “past projections have underestimated the future cost reductions of wind turbines.”
Scott Eisen/Getty Images
In the decade from 2014 to 2023, total wind capacity in the U.S. doubled. Onshore and offshore wind power is now responsible for over 10% of utility-scale electricity generation in the U.S., and has been the highest-producing renewable energy source in the nation since 2019. (Hydropower, the next highest-producing renewable energy source, is responsible for about 5.7% of the energy mix, by comparison.) In six states — Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, South Dakota, and North Dakota — onshore wind makes up more than a third of the current electricity mix, Climate Central reports.
Offshore wind has been slower to grow in the U.S. Even during the Biden administration, when the government targeted developing 30 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030, the industry faced financing challenges, transmission and integration obstacles, and limits in access to a skilled workforce, per a 2024 paper in Energy Research & Social Science. That same year, the Department of Energy reported that the nation had a total of 80,523 megawatts for offshore wind in operation and in the pipeline, which, under ideal conditions, could power 26 million homes. Many of those offshore projects and plans now face an uncertain future under the Trump administration.
Though we’re far removed from the 1880s, when suspicious Scots dismissed wind energy pioneer James Blyth’s home turbine as “the devil’s work,” there are still plenty of persistent concerns about the safety of wind power to people and animals.
Some worry about onshore wind turbines’ effects on people, including the perceived dangers of electromagnetic fields, shadow flicker from the turning blades, and sleep disturbance or stress. Per a 2014 systematic review of 60 peer-reviewed studies on wind turbines and human health by the National Institutes of Health, while there was “evidence to suggest that wind turbines can be a source of annoyance to some people, there was no evidence demonstrating a direct causal link between living in proximity to wind turbines and more serious physiological health effects.” The topic has since been extensively studied, with no reputable research concluding that turbines have poor health impacts on those who live near them.
Last year, the blade of a turbine at Vineyard Wind 1 broke and fell into the water, causing the temporary closure of beaches in Nantucket to protect people from the fiberglass debris. While no one was ultimately injured, GE Vernova, which owns Vineyard Wind, agreed earlier this year to settle with the town for $10.5 million to compensate for the tourism and business losses that resulted from the failure. Thankfully, as my colleague Jael Holzman has written, “major errors like blade failures are incredibly rare.”
There are also concerns about the dangers of wind turbines to some wildlife. Turbines do kill birds, including endangered golden eagles, which has led to opposition from environmental and local activist groups. But context is also important: The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has found that wind farms “represent just 0.03% of all human-related bird deaths in the U.S.” (Illegal shootings, for example, are the greatest cause of golden eagle deaths.) The continued use of fossil fuels and the ecological impacts of climate change also pose a far graver threat to birds than wind farms do. Still, there is room for discussion and improvement: The California Department of Fish and Wildlife issued a call earlier this year for proposals to help protect golden eagles from turbine collisions in its major wind resource areas.
Perhaps the strongest objection to offshore wind has come from concern for whales. Though there has been an ongoing “unusual mortality event” for whales off the East Coast dating back to 2016 — about the same time the burgeoning offshore wind industry took off in the United States — the two have been falsely correlated (especially by groups with ties to the fossil fuel industry). A recent government impact report ordered by Republicans even found that “NOAA Fisheries does not anticipate any death or serious injury to whales from offshore wind-related actions and has not recorded marine mammal deaths from offshore wind activities.” Still, that hasn’t stopped Republican leaders — including the president — from claiming offshore wind is making whales “a little batty.”
Polling by Heatmap has found that potential harm to wildlife is a top concern of both Democrats and Republicans when it comes to the deployment of renewable energy. Although there has been “no evidence to date that the offshore wind build-out off the Atlantic coast has harmed a single whale … studies have shown that activities related to offshore wind could harm a whale, which appears to be enough to override the benefits for some people,” my colleague Jael has explained. A number of environmental groups are attempting to prevent offshore and land-based wind development on conservationist grounds, to varying degrees of success. Despite these reservations, though, our polling has found that Americans on the coast largely support offshore wind development.
Aesthetic concerns are another reason wind faces opposition. The proposed Lava Ridge wind farm in Idaho, which was Heatmap’s most imperiled renewable energy project last year, faced intense opposition, ostensibly due to the visibility of the turbines from the Minidoka National Historic Site, the site of a Japanese internment camp. Coastal homeowners have raised the same complaint about offshore wind that would be visible from the beach, like the Skipjack offshore wind project, which would be situated off the coast of Maryland.
Not good. As one of President Trump’s first acts in office, he issued an executive order that the government “shall not issue new or renewed approvals, rights of way, permits, leases, or loans for onshore or offshore wind projects” until the completion of a “comprehensive assessment” of the industry’s impacts on the economy and the environment. Eight months later, federal agencies were still not processing applications for onshore wind projects.
Offshore wind is in even more trouble because such projects are sited entirely in federal waters. As of late July, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management had rescinded all designated wind energy areas — a decision that applies to some 3.5 million acres of federal waters, including the Central Atlantic, California, and Oregon. The Department of the Interior has also made moves to end what it calls the “special treatment for unreliable energy sources, such as wind,” including by “evaluating whether to stop onshore wind development on some federal lands and halting future offshore wind lease sales.” The Interior Department will also look into how “constructing and operating wind turbines might affect migratory bird populations.”
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, meanwhile, put strict restrictions on tax credits available to wind developers. Per Cleanview, the bill jeopardizes some 114 gigawatts of wind energy projects, while the Center for American Progress writes that “more than 17,000 jobs are connected to offshore wind power projects that are already canceled, on hold, or at risk from the Trump administration’s attacks on wind power.”
The year 2024 marked a record for new wind power capacity, with 117 gigawatts of wind energy installed globally. China in particular has taken a keen interest in constructing new wind farms, installing 26 gigawatts worth, or about 5,300 turbines, between January and May of last year alone.
Still, there are significant obstacles to the buildout of wind energy even outside of the United States, including competition from solar, which is now the cheapest and most widely deployed renewable energy resource in the world. High initial construction costs, deepened by inflation and supply-chain issues, have also stymied wind development.
There are an estimated 424 terawatts worth of wind energy available on the planet, and current wind turbines tap into just half a percent of that. According to Columbia Business School’s accounting, if maximized, wind has the potential to “abate 10% to 20% of CO2 emissions by 2050, through the clean electrification of power, heat, and road transport.”
Wind is also a heavy player in the Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Scenario, which aims for
7,100 terawatt hours of wind electricity generation worldwide by the end of the decade, per the International Energy Agency. But current annual growth would need to increase annual capacity additions from about 115 gigawatts in 2023 to 340 gigawatts in 2030. “Far greater policy and private-sector efforts are needed to achieve this level of capacity growth,” IEA notes, “with the most important areas for improvement being facilitating permitting for onshore wind and cost reductions for offshore wind.”
Wind turbines continue to become more efficient and more economical. Many of the advances have come in the form of bigger turbines, with the average height of a hub for a land-based turbine increasing 83% since the late 1990s. The world’s most powerful offshore turbine, Vestas’ V236-15.0 megawatt prototype, is, not coincidentally, also the world’s tallest, at 919 feet.
Advanced manufacturing techniques, such as the use of carbon fiber composites in rotor blades and 3D printed materials, could also lead to increases in efficiency. In a 2024 report, NREL anticipated that such innovations could potentially “unlock 80% more economically viable wind energy capacity within the contiguous United States.”
Floating offshore wind farms are another area of active innovation. Unlike the fixed-foundation turbines mainly used offshore today, floating turbines could be installed in deep waters and allow for development on trickier coastlines like off of Oregon and Washington state. Though there are no floating offshore wind farms in the United States yet, there are an estimated 266 gigawatts of floating turbine capacity in the pipeline globally.