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The Biden administration’s historic auction went even worse than expected on Tuesday. Here’s why.
The Biden administration’s historic auction for the rights to develop offshore wind in the Gulf of Mexico on Tuesday morning was something of a flop. Developers were even more hesitant to invest than expected, and no one wanted to be the first to try and build wind farms off the coast of Texas.
Though sixteen companies showed interest in the sale, only two participated, and the event was over after just two rounds of bidding. Both companies vied for a lease area near Lake Charles, Louisiana, with RWE, a German multinational energy company, making the winning offer of $5.6 million, or about $54 per acre. Two other leases for sale near Galveston, Texas, were rejected entirely.
It’s been a rough few months for the offshore wind industry. Projects underway in the Northeast are struggling to fight misinformation about whale deaths and facing higher costs than expected due to high interest rates, inflation, and supply chain issues.
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It’s possible those challenges played into Tuesday's lackluster sale in the Gulf, where the business case for developing offshore wind energy is already relatively uncertain. The region experiences lower wind speeds than the East Coast, but infrastructure must also be fortified to withstand regular hurricanes. Texas and Louisiana also have relatively low electricity rates, which will make it harder for offshore wind projects to compete for utility contracts.
But these factors don’t entirely explain the response. An auction held in December for the rights to develop floating offshore wind farms off the coast of California — another economically challenging prospect — played out over 31 roundfs as companies vied for five lease areas. They sold for an average of $2,061 per acre.
The lack of interest in the two Texas areas may have more to do with politics than the Gulf’s unique weather. The state has not put forward any goals or intentions to procure electricity from offshore wind projects or otherwise support the industry. In fact, Lone Star lawmakers have become increasingly hostile to the idea in recent months. Republican state Senator Mayes Middleton sponsored a bill earlier this year that would allow the Texas General Land Office to deny permits for transmission lines to connect offshore wind projects to the state’s grid.
In July, Middleton criticized the Biden administration’s “wind boondoggle” on X (formerly Twitter), writing that it “puts nearly $900 billion of ship channels economic impact at risk and will destroy grid frequency in our grid,” and vowed to “re-file the bill to stop it.”
Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham jumped into the conversation, noting that she has “serious concerns” about offshore wind development near Galveston. “Texans deserve reliable and dispatchable energy.”
In mid-August, a member of Texas’ Railroad Commission, the agency that regulates the oil and gas industry, penned a letter to Buckingham and Governor Greg Abbott urging them to “stop President Biden’s offshore wind farms from invading the Gulf of Mexico, which endanger our Gulf Coast by harming delicate ecologies and vital industries and further cripple our electrical grid with more unreliable power.”
These views are supported by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an influential conservative think tank based in Austin that receives millions of dollars from fossil fuel interests and has a history of opposing efforts to fight climate change. The group has already attempted to sue the Biden administration over Vineyard Wind, an offshore wind project under development near Massachusetts, claiming it would harm the commercial fishing industry.
Bo Delp, executive director of the Texas Climate Jobs Project, a nonprofit that works with unions in Texas to make sure new clean energy industries create good jobs, told me the group blames Texas lawmakers for scaring away developers. "State leadership is really failing Texans by antagonizing this new industry," he said. "It is just a total abdication of leadership, from our perspective, while Texas is struggling to keep the lights on, to undermine the certainty for this really critical industry to create electricity and stabilize our grid."
Louisiana, on the other hand, has been more welcoming. The state has a Climate Action Plan that recommends the procurement of 5,000 megawatts of offshore wind energy by 2035. It has already opened up state-controlled waters to developers, with at least three offshore wind projects in the pipeline.
“The Lake Charles area being of the most serious interest is an indicator that states stepping up to create a market is important,” Jenny Netherton, a senior program manager at the Southeastern Wind Coalition, told me on Tuesday morning after the auction closed. The coalition is made up of nonprofits and energy companies. “Offshore wind needs stable offtake mechanisms to support development and while Louisiana has made progress in this area, work still remains.”
The Biden administration claimed the Gulf sale as a win for Bidenomics, touting the 1.24 gigawatts of offshore wind energy capacity that could be generated when RWE develops its holding, which it said could power nearly 435,400 homes.
“The Biden-Harris administration is making once-in-a-generation investments in America’s infrastructure and our clean energy future as we take steps to bring offshore wind energy to additional areas around the country,” said Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland in a press release.
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management did not respond to an inquiry about why there was no interest in the Galveston lease areas and whether the agency might re-list them in a future auction.
Read more about wind power in the Gulf:
The Gulf of Mexico Is a Very Hard Spot to Build a Wind Farm
Editor's note: A previous version of this article misstated the purview of Texas’ Railroad Commission. It has been corrected. We regret the error.
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A renewables fight in Arizona turns ugly.
Autumn Johnson told me some days it feels like she’s shouting into a void.
Johnson is the executive director for the Arizona branch of the Solar Energy Industries Association, the nation’s pre-eminent solar power trade group. Lately, she told me, she’s seeing an increasing number of communities go after potential solar farms, many of them places with little or no previous solar development. There’s so many she’s had to start “tracking them on a spreadsheet,” she tells me, then proceeding to rattle off the names of counties and towns like battles in a war. Heatmap Pro data reveals how restricted Arizona is today, with six out of the state’s 15 counties showing a restrictive ordinance on solar and/or wind energy.
One of those battles: Chino Valley, a small town in northern Arizona. For two years, Johnson and others in the solar industry worked to try and massage the town into enacting restrictions on solar that wouldn’t all but ban the industry. But a town council meeting in mid-March turned ugly, as a debate over the restrictions ultimately devolved to heckling and hollering. “I’m surprised they didn’t throw things,” she recalled to me over the phone.
Playing back tape of that meeting, I watched as anyone who even spoke up in favor of solar was booed. When Johnson got up to speak and say SEIA recommended a smaller setback than drafted – 150 feet – audience members loudly laughed at her. Ultimately she was interrupted so many times that her time to speak expired before she finished her comments.
She asked the Chino Valley town council: “Could I finish my thought since I had to stop several times?” BOO! The audience wasn’t having it. And neither was the town council, who declined to let her continue.
After another hour-plus of testimony, the town council was swayed: Chino Valley dropped the regulation their staff spent years on and instead instructed them to draft a complete ban on all solar – as well as battery storage and wind farms.
If enacted, this regulation would all but doom Draconis, a large-scale utility solar farm proposed by bp in Chino Valley. A bp representative briefly testified at the town council meeting to say members of the public who’d previously spoken had mischaracterized the water usage required for the solar farm, but was booed off the microphone. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Johnson told me Arizonans in many pockets of the state are starting to turn on solar for two major reasons. One: There’s a partisan affiliation with renewables and climate change due to the Inflation Reduction Act and Joe Biden’s involvement in crafting the law. The other motivation? “Part of it is old school NIMBYism,” Johnson told me. “We’re acting like this is a new thing but NIMBYism is not new. Everybody wants electricity but nobody wants the infrastructure that is necessary to facilitate their use of electricity.”
She added: “The way things are moving, the number of cities and counties that have restrictions is going to be more and more.” While some communities may be accepting utility-scale development now, she is concerned they’ll hit a “saturation point where people start to build up some kind of resentment about the quantity of projects.”
“It’s domino-y,” Johnson confessed.
I’m no Arizonan. But to me, what’s happening in Arizona is essentially one big redux of an infamous prank TV segment from the show “Who Is America?” in which actor Sasha Baron Cohen plays a coastal liberal stereotype posing as an economic development entrepreneur.
Cohen’s character visits Kingman, Arizona, a town northwest of Chino Valley. In that prank, Cohen walked Kingman residents through a presentation about a promising new source of tax revenue and local employment, only to reveal… he’s talking about building a mosque in Kingman funded by the Clinton Foundation.
Kingman is in Mohave County, which happened to be the first county Johnson mentioned when we spoke. Mohave – represented in Congress by far-right Republican Paul Gosar – is one of the sunniest parts of the country, smack dab in the Mohave Desert. It’s also one of the counties with a restrictive ordinance that routinely rejects solar farms, despite a willingness among local officials to approve new fossil energy. Why? Well, in the view of some folks out there, you might as well be building a Hillary Clinton-branded mosque. Not to mention Mohave has quite a few telltale signs of being tough to develop, according to Heatmap Pro – it’s an extremely white county with an economy heavily dependent on tourism and agriculture, making land use and property value pronounced day-to-day concerns.
Stan Barnes, a lobbyist in Arizona who represents large-scale solar developers, told me that for “so long, renewable energy has been tightly embraced – even bearhugged – by the center-left side of the political spectrum.” Barnes said this fact alone has made it much harder to build in rural areas of Arizona that voted heavily for Donald Trump. “The center-right side of the political spectrum feels like it needs to resist.”
Developers are finding ways around this sticky wicket, Barnes said, but it requires being “wise” and “a certain degree of authenticity on the ground with local officials.” He noted the Palo Verde energy hub, a federally-designated energy and transmission project area in a mostly remote area that expands off of an existing power plant. Barnes also mentioned Mohave, where utility-scale solar is not banned outright but restricted to light industrial areas, as a place where development is still possible.
“There likely will not be that kind of development in Chino Valley and that’s the way it’s going to be in some jurisdictions," he said. “In other jurisdictions there’s going to be thoughtful ordinances that accommodate a variety of interests.”
And more of the week’s top renewable energy fights.
1. Long Island, New York – We begin today with a crucial stand-off for the future of energy off the coast of New York City: Rep. Chris Smith – one of the loudest anti-wind voices in Congress – is asking the Trump administration to shut down active work on the Empire Wind project.
2. Gulf of Maine – American floating offshore wind is now taking one more step backwards, as Mitsubishi pulls out of the test arrays it was working on under Biden with researchers at the University of Maine.
3. Nantucket County, Massachusetts – Speaking of bad wind news, the town of Nantucket has sued to block the SouthCoast offshore wind project.
4. Washington County, Rhode Island – If you want a small piece of good news for offshore wind, the primary lawsuit against Revolution Wind’s environmental review suffered a major setback this week.
5. Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania – In another piece of good news, Scranton, Pennsylvania, approved the city’s first solar project, despite nearby residents speaking in opposition to it.
6. Carroll County, Arkansas – Less positive solar news: they’re banning solar and wind in the Ozarks.
7. Noble County, Indiana – Landowners opposed to plans for a Geenex solar farm are escalating their war on the project to a lawsuit against their board of supervisors, alleging conflicts of interest around solar decisionmaking.
8. Olmstead County, Minnesota – It seems local control won’t win the day over a Ranger Power utility-scale solar project in the Gopher State.
9. Van Zandt County, Texas – A Texas County is issuing a stop work order on a Taaleri Energia battery project alleging it is violating the local fire safety code.
10. Sacramento County, California – A D.E. Shaw Renewables utility-scale project is taking one step forward after a local planning council recommended county officials give it the green light.
11. Shasta County, California – Elsewhere in California, ecological concerns about renewables are winning out over the pace of decarbonization.
12. Ada County, Idaho – We conclude today’s hotspots with, as Jon Stewart likes to say, a ‘Moment of Zen’: the city of Boise is rejecting a challenge to battery storage development.
A conversation with Dustin Mulvaney, professor of environmental studies at San Jose State University
Today’s conversation is with Dustin Mulvaney, an environmental studies professor at San Jose State University. Mulvaney is a social scientist who spent much of his time before January 2025 advocating for more considerate and humane renewable energy development. Then Moss Landing happened. Mulvaney – who was there at Moss Landing the first day – is now obsessed with the myriad safety concerns laden in large-scale utility battery storage and what plans were in place to deal with the fire. His reasoning? A failure to grapple with safety concerns could undermine public trust in battery storage and make a transition away from fossil fuels more difficult.
The following is an abridged version of our conversation, which was the interview that first prompted me to investigate the mystery of the health concerns surrounding the fire.
Why are you so concerned about what safety plan was in place before the Moss Landing battery fire?
Three o’clock was when the battery started smoking. The giant fire doesn’t happen until six o’clock and there were reporters on scene saying, the smoke’s gone. Then all of the sudden: boom. Just blows up, big time.
They didn’t evacuate the neighborhood until six. The neighborhood should’ve been evacuated at three when the smoke started.
Wait – they didn’t evacuate the neighborhood until three hours after the fire?
It depends what you mean by fire. There weren’t flames the first few hours. From the planning side, they should’ve at least been notified they would be evacuated if the fire got worse.
That’s part of the problem. You’ve got all these people looking around at this gigantic fire and that’s scary. And on the monitoring part, there should be a plan for how to monitor the fire. How come no one flew a drone into the cloud of smoke to look for whatever’s in there to just get a sense? And they were checking for hydrofluoric acid all around but they were all at ground level. It just feels like they weren’t prepared.
Why does it concern you that they were only checking for that chemical at ground level?
We had an inversion that night and when we get a little inversion off the bay, the air is really clean and clear. I got pretty close to the fire that night. I got as close as the police would let me go. And I was breathing clean air at ground level. I want to say I was a mile away.
So what do you think was most missing from a regulatory standpoint here? What should’ve been done that wasn’t done at a state level?
If you think about it, the pipeline explosion killed all those people in San Bruno before the California Public Utilities Commission said maybe we should regulate pipelines a little better, and then burned down cities with hooks that were 100 years old from power lines and [said] maybe we should do something better on power lines. To me it feels like the CPUC is the one who has been dragging their feet on all of this.
Because they’re behind on planning?
The CPUC is in charge of safety. It’s part of CPUC’s job to make sure that pipelines don’t explode and transmission lines don’t catch fire.
I agree that we need to be safer, but there’s some pretty serious urgency to build a lot more of these batteries, fast, no?
So, the analogy that I was trying to go with was that when CPUC doesn’t do its job, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has threatened to come in. When pipeline explosions happen and if CPUC doesn’t do its job–
So do you want a Trump administration FERC to step in?
Absolutely not, that is not what I am saying. I’m not advocating for that. No way.
It’s the question of where is everybody? The CPUC should’ve stepped in and implemented regulations immediately. Maybe we’d see something different here. Maybe someone goes in and inspects that battery facility and sees we need corrugated metal from Home Depot.
This is going to get worse. I’m sure if there’s anybody with battery storage in a building like Moss Landing they are now being asked, I’m sure their insurers are asking, where’s your thermal runaway certification for that facility?