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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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Current conditions: Thousands are without power and drinking water in the French Indian Ocean territory of Réunion after Tropical Cyclone Garance made landfall with the strength of a Category 2 hurricane • A severe weather outbreak could bring tornadoes to southern states early next week • It’s 44 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny in Washington, D.C., where Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will meet with President Trump today to sign a minerals deal.
The 16th United Nations Biodiversity Conference, known as COP16, ended this week with countries agreeing on a crucial roadmap for directing $200 billion a year by 2030 toward protecting nature and halting global biodiversity loss. Developed nations are urged to double down on their goal to mobilize $20 billion annually for conservation in developing countries this year, rising to $30 billion by 2030. The plan also calls for further study on the relationships between nature conservation and debt sustainability. “The compromise proved countries could still bridge their differences and work together for the sake of preserving the planet, despite a fracturing world order and the dramatic retreat of the United States from international green diplomacy and foreign aid under President Donald Trump,” wrote Louise Guillot at Politico. The decision was met with applause and tears from delegates. One EU delegate said they were relieved “about the positive signal that this sends to other ongoing negotiations on climate change and plastics that we have.”
The Trump administration yesterday fired hundreds of workers across the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service, key agencies responsible for monitoring the changing climate and communicating extreme weather threats. The National Hurricane Center and the Tsunami Warning Center both operate under NOAA, and the layoffs come ahead of the upcoming hurricane season. “People nationwide depend on NOAA for free, accurate forecasts, severe weather alerts, and emergency information,” said Democratic Rep. Jared Huffman, the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee. “Purging the government of scientists, experts, and career civil servants and slashing fundamental programs will cost lives.” A federal judge yesterday temporarily blocked the administration’s mass firings of federal workers, so the status of those affected in this latest round is unclear. Somewhat relatedly, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports that the Nature Conservancy, an environmental nonprofit, was told by NOAA it had to rename a major conservation program as the “Gulf of America” or else lose federal funding.
The FBI reportedly has been questioning Environmental Protection Agency employees about $20 billion in climate and clean energy grants approved under the Biden administration, which EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has insisted were issued hastily and without oversight. According toThe Washington Post, the Justice Department has asked several U.S. attorneys to submit warrant requests or launch grand jury investigations, but those efforts have been rejected due to lack of evidence or “reasonable belief that a crime occurred.” “It’s certainly unusual for any case to involve two different U.S. attorney offices declining a case for lack of probable cause and to have the Department of Justice continue to shop it,” Stefan D. Cassella, a former federal prosecutor, told the Post. Several nonprofits said their Citibank accounts holding the funding have been frozen without explanation.
Some Democratic states are apparently freezing out Tesla in response to Elon Musk’s political maneuvers within the Trump administration. Tesla operates on a direct-to-consumer sales model, so it doesn’t have to go through dealerships. More than 25 states ban or restrict direct EV sales in some way. The company has been lobbying to get permission to sell directly in these states, but some Democratic lawmakers are “disgusted” by Musk’s moves in Washington and are rebuffing lobbyists or dropping their support for proposed legislation allowing direct sales.
Apple is in trouble for claiming some of its Apple Watches are “carbon neutral.” A group of customers are suing the company after learning its claims relied on carbon offsetting projects in protected national parks or heavily forested areas, instead of “genuine” carbon reductions. “The carbon reductions would have occurred regardless of Apple’s involvement or the projects’ existence,” the plaintiffs said in their complaint. “Because Apple’s carbon neutrality claims are predicated on the efficacy and legitimacy of these projects, Apple’s carbon neutrality claims are false and misleading.” The lawsuit seeks damages, as well as an injunction that prevents Apple from using the carbon neutral claim to market its watches. Apple has a goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2030.
Researchers in Amsterdam have examined the nests of birds known as common coots and discovered plastic items dating back to the 1990s, including a McDonald’s McChicken wrapper from 1996, and a Mars wrapper promoting the 1994 USA FIFA World Cup. “History is not only written by humans,” said Auke-Florian Hiemstra, who led the research. “Nature, too, is keeping score.”
Auke-Florian Hiemstra
Did a battery plant disaster in California spark a PR crisis on the East Coast?
Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.
Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs where development is actually happening, capturing rapt attention from other residents as well as members of the media. In Staten Island, a petition against a NineDot Energy battery project has received more than 1,300 signatures in a little over two months. Two weeks ago, advocates – backed by representatives of local politicians including Rep. Nicole Mallitokis – swarmed a public meeting on the project, getting a local community board to vote unanimously against the project.
According to Heatmap Pro’s proprietary modeling of local opinion around battery storage, there are likely twice as many strong opponents than strong supporters in the area:
Heatmap Pro
Yesterday, leaders in the Queens community of Hempstead enacted a year-long ban on BESS for at least a year after GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, other local politicians, and a slew of aggrieved residents testified in favor of a moratorium. The day before, officials in the Long Island town of Southampton said at a public meeting they were ready to extend their battery storage ban until they enshrined a more restrictive development code – even as many energy companies testified against doing so, including NineDot and storage developer Key Capture Energy. Yonkers also recently extended its own battery moratorium.
This flurry of activity follows the Moss Landing battery plant fire in California, a rather exceptional event caused by tech that was extremely old and a battery chemistry that is no longer popular in the sector. But opponents of battery storage don’t care – they’re telling their friends to stop the community from becoming the next Moss Landing. The longer this goes on without a fulsome, strident response from the industry, the more communities may rally against them. Making matters even worse, as I explained in The Fight earlier this year, we’re seeing battery fire concerns impact solar projects too.
“This is a huge problem for solar. If [fires] start regularly happening, communities are going to say hey, you can’t put that there,” Derek Chase, CEO of battery fire smoke detection tech company OnSight Technologies, told me at Intersolar this week. “It’s going to be really detrimental.”
I’ve long worried New York City in particular may be a powder keg for the battery storage sector given its omnipresence as a popular media environment. If it happens in New York, the rest of the world learns about it.
I feel like the power of the New York media environment is not lost on Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella, a de facto leader of the anti-BESS movement in the boroughs. Last fall I interviewed Fossella, whose rhetorical strategy often leans on painting Staten Island as an overburdened community. (At least 13 battery storage projects have been in the works in Staten Island according to recent reporting. Fossella claims that is far more than any amount proposed elsewhere in the city.) He often points to battery blazes that happen elsewhere in the country, as well as fears about lithium-ion scooters that have caught fire. His goal is to enact very large setback distance requirements for battery storage, at a minimum.
“You can still put them throughout the city but you can’t put them next to people’s homes – what happens if one of these goes on fire next to a gas station,” he told me at the time, chalking the wider city government’s reluctance to capitulate on batteries to a “political problem.”
Well, I’m going to hold my breath for the real political problem in waiting – the inevitable backlash that happens when Mallitokis, D’Esposito, and others take this fight to Congress and the national stage. I bet that’s probably why American Clean Power just sent me a notice for a press briefing on battery safety next week …
And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state.
2. Logan County, Ohio – Staff for the Ohio Power Siting Board have recommended it reject Open Road Renewables’ Grange Solar agrivoltaics project.
3. Bandera County, Texas – On a slightly brighter note for solar, it appears that Pine Gate Renewables’ Rio Lago solar project might just be safe from county restrictions.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, Armoracia Solar is struggling to get necessary permits from Madison County.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington is getting into a public spat with East Kentucky Power Cooperative over solar.
In Michigan, Livingston County is now backing the legal challenge to Michigan’s state permitting primacy law.