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Does America actually need the renewable energy source to hit its decarbonization goals by 2030?
The Biden administration wants 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power capacity by the end of the decade and East Coast states have taken it upon themselves to do much of the work to get there. But as wind projects up and down the East Coast face problems — developers threatening to pull the plug unless they get more subsidies, higher costs, supply chain issues, local opposition, and possibly astroturfed concerns about whales — experts have questioned whether this goal can really be hit.
But it may not even be necessary to substantially decarbonize the American economy — or at least not by 2030.
The recent stream of news about offshore wind has been bad. Developers up and down the East Coast have been asking states for more money in order to continue deals they struck years ago, citing higher costs throughout the supply chain. A recent auction for offshore wind rights in the Gulf of Mexico was almost a total flop, with only two companies participating in the bidding.
The Danish wind developer Orsted said a few weeks ago that three of its U.S. offshore wind projects were “adversely impacted by a handful of supplier delays” and that “there is a continuously increasing risk in these suppliers’ ability to deliver on their commitments and contracted schedules,” adding up to a lengthening timeline and increased costs that could lead to billions of dollars of write-offs.
The company’s chief executive Mads Nipper, who is in a standoff with the Biden administration over its eligibility for further subsidies, has said they are willing to “walk away” from wind projects. The company said that its Ocean Wind 1 project, planned for the New Jersey coast, would be delayed from 2025 to 2026.
So what happens if offshore wind doesn’t materialize at the level once expected?
There are any number of reports and projections showing how the United States can transition to 100% carbon-free electricity and even a whole economy that contributes net zero greenhouse gas emissions, and they’re typically less optimistic about offshore wind than the Biden administration. Princeton’s Net-Zero America Project, for instance, forecast offshore wind capacity would be between three and 10 gigawatts by 2030 in five scenarios for reaching zero emissions by midcentury. It largely sees additional onshore wind and solar making up the difference.
In fact, the government’s own forecasts don’t really envision the U.S. hitting the 30 gigawatt figure either. The National Renewable Energy Lab’s analysis of how to reach 100% carbon-free electricity by 2035, which is the Biden administration’s nominal goal, projects that in the “mid-range” case, offshore wind production would hit 24 gigawatts by 2030. Both the Net-Zero Project and the NREL foresee massive offshore wind installation, just on a slower timeline than the administration.
“The 30 GW by 2030 offshore wind goal is definitely still within striking distance, thanks in part to investments like the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law , as well as state-level policies,” Jocelyn Brown-Saracino, the Department of Energy's Wind Energy Lead, said in an emailed statement. “The actual size and speed of U.S. offshore wind build-out will depend on continued regulatory efficiency, the availability of installation vessels and port infrastructure, proactive onshore and offshore grid planning and upgrades, the successful commercialization of 15-MW wind turbine platforms, and sustained market demand. DOE and other federal agencies are working on a number of initiatives to accelerate efforts in these areas.”
And, at least until we build the grid of our dreams, eastern seaboard states need to get carbon-free energy from somewhere. They have collectively set goals for some 50 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity over the coming decades. In the Northeast especially, the desire for large amounts of offshore wind generation reflects a combination of ambition to decarbonize the states’ electricity systems and lack of other politically palatable options. New York, for instance, shut down its Indian Point nuclear power plant in 2021, taking 2,000 megawatts of carbon-free power off the grid, with the promise that offshore wind would soon replace it. It hasn’t yet.
Those states are not in the wind corridor that is the Great Plains or the sunny expanse of the Southwest. While residential and business solar has been more widespread than anticipated in New England, offshore wind has consistently been the energy source that was promised from the New York Bight to the Gulf of Maine.
And it makes sense why. The East Coast’s population centers are, well, near the coast, meaning the Atlantic’s shallow and windy waters an attractive option for energy development. And by building offshore, these states can avoid grueling fights over land use that accompany wind farm developments in rural areas far from where most of the states’ residents actually live. Offshore wind can also complement solar, as winds can pick up in the afternoon and evening as solar power falls off.
This has all added up to an odd situation, where the country’s immediate goals for decarbonization may actually be overserved by ambitious development plans that, as of now, seem to be imperiled.
According to the Department of Energy, over 50 gigawatts of offshore wind is in the so-called pipeline, but there are only a few projects that have been approved or are under construction.
“The Biden-Harris administration is using every legally available tool to advance American offshore wind opportunities and achieve the goal of 30 GW by 2030, including by approving the nation’s first major offshore wind projects and leveraging historic resources from the President’s Investing in America agenda to support offshore wind infrastructure and supply chain buildout,” White House spokesperson Michael Kikuawa said in an email when asked about the 30 gigawatt target.
BloombergNEF recently marked down its own projection for offshore wind capacity by the end of decade to just over 23 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030.
In New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, out of 13 gigawatts of planned offshore wind, developers for 10 gigawatts of it are seeking to get their contracts amended.
“Never say never,” Allegra Dawes, an associate fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, responded when I asked if these state targets — or the national target — were plausible. “I wouldn’t say they’re impossible. They’re highly unlikely at state level and federal level.”
In those four states, which Dawes said were the furthest along in their planning (the Vineyard Wind project in Massachusetts is actually under construction), the current wrangling over contracts could end up delaying everything.
“Even if that means those projects don’t get cancelled, there will be significant delays,” Dawes told me. “Those delays add up. We’re talking about a short amount of time until 2030 and that pushes back the entire timeline.”
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They are even less popular than clean energy projects, an exclusive Heatmap Pro survey found.
Renewables projects aren’t always popular. Heatmap regularly reports on local opposition to solar panels on farmland, wind turbines in the ocean, and grid-scale batteries just about anywhere. But data centers may be even less popular, according to a national poll conducted by our energy intelligence platform Heatmap Pro.
The poll of 3,741 American voters asked, “Would you support or oppose a data center being built near where you live?” and found that 44% of respondents would support or strongly support a data center being built near them while 42% would oppose or strongly oppose it. That’s a net support of only +2%.
Nearly all energy projects, renewable or not, fared better with the public. When a similar question was asked about natural gas, net support was 34%; for a wind farm it was 19%; for solar it was 34%; for batteries, it was 11%; for geothermal, net support was 36%; for carbon removal, it was 23%; for nuclear power, it was 10%.
It’s worth stepping back and thinking of how remarkable this is. The American public, according to Heatmap’s polling, is more skeptical of data centers which, once built, are essentially warehouses than they are of gas-fired power plants which emit, besides the greenhouse gases, nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide.
They oppose data centers more than they do wind farms with their towering turbines and mechanical hums; more than they do battery storage facilities which can erupt into super-hot fires; or even nuclear power plants, long the go-to reference for “scary energy facility.”
This suggests that political polarization around energy, where Democrats oppose fossil fuels and Republicans oppose renewables, is less potent when it comes to decisions on the ground, although there is a political gradient.
Net support among Democrats was -8%, while among Republicans it was +14%, with independents at -5%. Natural gas projects, by contrast, had positive net support among all groups, while solar projects had overwhelming net support among Democrats (+72%), strong support among independents (+42%), and mild opposition from Republicans at -3%.
The two pieces of energy infrastructure with less net support that data centers are transmission — captured in the survey by the descriptive phrase “large-scale power line” — at net 1% and coal power — by far the most polluting power infrastructure deployed at scale in the United States — at -18%.
Heatmap asked further questions about how Americans understand the benefits and drawbacks of data centers in their communities.
The most convincing was that “data centers create high-paying construction and operations jobs,” which 63% of respondents found very or somewhat convincing — a net convincing of +26%. Just below that was “Data centers can increase local tax revenue that supports schools, emergency services, and infrastructure,” with a net convincing of +24%.
Respondents were far more skeptical of reasons to support data centers that were less tangible or more global. “Many data centers are powered by renewable energy,” was +10% net convincing, while “Data centers are necessary for America to win the AI race against China,” was only +4%. (That question also featured the biggest partisan split. While 61% of Republicans found “the AI race against China” argument convincing, only 45% of Democrats and 40% of independents did.) But when asked about the most convincing reasons to oppose data centers, the idea that they “might require wind or solar farms to be constructed nearby” was only +6% net convincing, while the argument that they could lead to a natural gas power plant being built nearby was +22% net convincing.
Again, tangible, local effects were the most compelling to respondents, as was suggested by the data on specific projects.
The argument that data centers consume too much water was +34% net convincing; while “data centers consume large amounts of electricity, which may increase utility bills,” was +46% net convincing.
These results are consistent with some of the anti-data-center activism that has popped up in opposition to proposed projects. The city council of Tucson, Arizona, rejected an Amazon project in part due to concerns about effects on drinking water. A $2 billion data center project in Indiana was rejected this week after a public meeting where residents “raised issues around energy usage, environmental impact, and public health,” Data Center Dynamics reported.
Earlier this year, another Indiana data center project was rejected after “residents cited a number of concerns, including noise, power and water consumption and the impact on property values,” Lakeshore Public Media reported.
These concerns should be familiar to anyone who follows the fight around renewable siting. All of these concerns — construction impacts, sightliness and property values, taking up agricultural land — are commonly brought up when local communities oppose a solar or wind farm.
The Heatmap Pro poll of 3,741 American registered voters was conducted by Embold Research via text-to-web responses from August 22 to 29, 2025. The survey included interviews with Americans in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 1.7 percentage points.
On a copper mega merger, California’s solar canal, and Bahrain’s deep-sea mining bet
Current conditions: Cooler air is dropping temperatures on the Pacific Coast and Nevada by as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit • Hurricane Kiko lost intensity and passed north of Hawaii • The volcano Mount Semeru in East Java, Indonesia, is erupting today for the 19th time this week, spewing an ash plume nearly 2,000 feet high.
The Trump administration disbanded a group of five climate contrarians brought together to write the Department of Energy’s controversial report challenging the scientific consensus on the severity of climate change, CNN’s Ella Nilsen reported. In a lawsuit last month, the Environmental Defense Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists alleged that the formation of the group of researchers — the University of Alabama’s John Christy and Roy Spencer, the Hoover Institution’s Steven Koonin, Georgia Tech professor emeritus Judith Curry, and Canadian economist Ross McKitrick — violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act’s public disclosure rules by failing to promptly disclose its formation and make its meeting and notes available to the public. The litigation also accused the Trump administration of breaking the law by assembling a government working group deliberately designed to represent a one-sided argument, which is prohibited under the same statute. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright confirmed in a September 3 letter that the group was dissolved. Still, the Energy Department has not retracted its assessment.
Wright’s regular messages on X about climate science and clean energy have drawn blowback and corrections appended by followers as Community Notes. “I can’t claim to know what’s happening in Wright’s mind. But I do know what’s happening with his policy — and this weak messaging, in my view, points to the intractability of Wright’s position,” Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer wrote on Tuesday. Wright is both the chief lieutenant in Trump’s culture war against those who advocate for a transition to clean energy and the mouthpiece of the president’s effort to convince the country he’s fulfilling his promise to curb energy prices. Wright’s social media behavior, however, “is not how someone acts when he is focused on energy affordability above all,” Robinson wrote.
The price of copper hit a record high this summer as the Trump administration slapped 50% tariffs on imports of the globally-traded metal needed for new electrical infrastructure and growth in demand far eclipsed any associated increase in supply. Now a mega-merger of two mining giants is set to capture a larger share of the fortunes generated by the new copper boom. Anglo American and Teck Resources inked a deal to merge, creating a mining behemoth with a combined market value of more than $53 billion. It’s one of the largest-ever deals in the mining industry. If completed, the tie-up will form one of the world’s top-five biggest copper producers, with mines stretching from the bottom of the Western Hemisphere in Chile to the top in Canada producing some 1.2 million metric tons of metal per year. More than 70% of that combined production would be copper.
“The energy industry has been dealing with the copper issue for years,” Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported in March, when prices were even lower. “More specifically, it’s worrying about how domestic and global production will be able to keep up with what forecasters anticipate could be massive demand.” This deal doesn’t necessarily quell those concerns, since, as The Wall Street Journal noted, it “also illustrates a challenge for bolstering commodity supply: Many miners figure it is easier and cheaper to buy rather than build mines.”
Wright’s posts about climate change and solar energy may be drawing criticism. But his agency’s support for nuclear energy has largely won praise across the political spectrum. That now includes fusion. On Wednesday, the Energy Department announced $134 million in funding for two programs designed to boost U.S. efforts to harness the type of atomic reaction that powers the sun, long considered the holy grail of clean energy. The agency pledged to give out a combined $128 million through the Fusion Innovative Research Engine to seven teams working on fusion energy science and technology. Another $6.1 million is set to flow to 20 projects through the Innovation network for Fusion Energy program to improve research in materials science, laser technologies, and fusion modeling. “DOE is unleashing the next frontier of American energy,” Wright said in a press release. “Fusion power holds the promise of limitless, reliable, American-made energy—and programs like INFUSE and FIRE ensure our innovators have the tools, talent, and partnerships to make it a reality.”
As I reported in this newsletter last month, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinout Commonwealth Fusion just raised one of the biggest venture rounds of the year. In July, Heatmap’s Katie Brigham reported on $10 million funding for the Seattle-area startup Avalanche Energy, which promises to build “micro” fusion reactors.
Shadeless land is a constraint on solar power’s expansion, inspiring high-profile projects in Portugal, Brazil, and China to build vast floating panel arrays on dammed bodies of water, a whole sector of the industry called agrovoltaics that marries farming and solar power production, and recent studies forecasting huge potential to line highways with panels. A new 1.6-megawatt solar installation in California that just came online highlights another option involving a manmade waterway: covering canals. Project Nexus, a $20 million state-funded pilot, has transformed stretches of the Turlock Irrigation District's canal system throughout California's Central Valley into what Canary Media’s Maria Gallucci called “hubs of clean electricity generation in a remote area where cotton, tomatoes, almonds, and hundreds of other crops are grown.”
President Donald Trump stirred a global controversy this year with his executive order directing the U.S. to stockpile minerals obtained through deep-sea mining, an as-yet nonexistent industry still awaiting a global agreement on international regulations that would create a global legal framework for commercially harvesting nodules from as deep as 20,000 feet down. As I previously reported in this newsletter, countries that opposed Trump’s push to unilaterally kick off mining without worldwide agreement on how to regulate the activities ended up siding with China, which opposed the U.S. move, along with conservationists, who say it risked damaging one of the last wildernesses untouched by humans. Yet this week Bahrain placed a big bet on the future of U.S. efforts, the Financial Times reported. The Gulf kingdom and U.S ally backed the California startup Impossible Metals’ plan to explore an area of ocean largely controlled by Beijing. Bahrain is also the first Middle Eastern country to sponsor the measure to legalize deep-sea mining at the obscure United Nations-linked agency, the Jamaica-headquartered International Seabed Authority. The investment is more proof that, as Katie wrote this week, “everybody wants to invest in critical mineral startups.”
A view of the Russell Glacier in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, where I visited in 2017. Alexander C. Kaufman
Anyone who has been to northern Greenland can tell you how eerily lifeless the ice cap can seem when you’re looking out to a boundless horizon of treeless frozen expanse. But in what looks like dirt spotted in ice cores taken from the outer edges of the polar cap are diatoms — single-celled algae with outer walls made of glass. Far from a new presence, these non-plant photosynthetic organisms were long believed to be entombed and dormant in ice. But researchers from Stanford University extracted diatoms from ice cores and recreated their environments in a lab. The scientists discovered that diatoms travel through the ice via narrow channels as thin as a strand of hair. “This is not 1980s-movie cryobiology,” Manu Prakash, associate professor of bioengineering in the Schools of Engineering and Medicine and senior author of the paper, said in a press release. “The diatoms are as active as we can imagine until temperatures drop all the way down to -15 [degrees Celsius], which is super surprising.”
On Rick Perry’s loan push, firefighters’ mask rules, and Europe’s heat pump problems
Current conditions: The Garnet Fire has scorched nearly 55,000 acres in Sierra National Forest, east of Fresno, California, and now threatens 2,000-year-old sequoia trees • Hurricane Kiko is losing intensity as it reaches Hawaii • Tropical Storm Tapah has made landfall over China, forcing evacuations and school closures.
U.S. emissions cuts under Trump's current policy versus the Biden-era policies. Rhodium Group
The United States’ output of planet-heating pollution is on track to continue double-digit declines through 2040, even if the Trump administration successfully eliminates all the policies it’s targeting to cut greenhouse gas emissions. That’s according to the latest assessment from the Rhodium Group consultancy. A new report published Wednesday morning found that U.S. emissions are set to decline by 26% to 43% relative to 2005 levels in 2040. While that sounds like a significant drop, it’s a “meaningful shift” away from Rhodium’s estimates last year, which showed a steeper decline of 38% to 56%. In all, as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote, the Trump administration’s policies could halve U.S. emissions cuts.
“Perhaps the only bright side in the report is a section on household energy costs,” Emily added. “The loss of tax credits for renewables and home efficiency upgrades will raise electricity bills compared to the projections in last year’s report. But despite that, Rhodium expects overall household energy costs to decrease in the coming decades — in all scenarios. That’s primarily due to the switch to electric vehicles, which lowers transportation costs for EV drivers and puts downward pressure on the cost of gasoline for everyone else.”
Fermi America, the company former Secretary of Energy Rick Perry founded to build one of the world’s biggest data center complexes in Texas, plans to push the Department of Energy for loans to finance its project, E&E News reported. In a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission for its initial public offering on Monday, the developer laid out its vision for a 5,263-acre gas and nuclear complex in Armadillo, Texas, on land owned by the Texas Tech University. The company said it was in “pre-approval” process with the Energy Department’s loan office, which it hoped would “finance key components” of its energy infrastructure. The company has filed an application for up to four Westinghouse nuclear reactors at the site, which federal regulators confirmed they’re reviewing. In his executive orders on nuclear power in May, Trump directed the Energy Department to approve at least 10 new large-scale reactors. “We believe the Trump Administration’s renewed focus on expedited permitting and the expansion of nuclear infrastructure in the United States presents a favorable backdrop for Fermi to replicate its business model,” the filing said.
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Solar developer Pine Gate Renewables has started consulting advisers to deal with liquidity constraints amid the Trump administration’s push to derail the clean energy industry, Bloomberg reported. The company is working with Lazard Inc. and Latham & Watkins. It has some high-profile backers with loans from Brookfield Asset Management and Carlyle Group, while Blackstone provided preferred equity.
The move to enlist advisers is a sign of the challenges ahead for renewables. With new restrictions on imported solar panels coming into force, solar prices could soon rise. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported in April, that could erode solar’s price advantage over gas. With tariffs staying in place and tax credits going away, Morgan Stanley analysts warned that power purchase agreement prices for solar could go up as high as $73. That’s just a few dollars off from the cost of natural gas.
For decades, the U.S. government banned wildfire fighters from wearing masks that officials deemed too cumbersome, allowing only bandannas that offer no protection against toxins in wildfire smoke. But the Forest Service proposed new guidance Monday acknowledging for the first time that masks can protect firefighters against harmful particles in the smoke, The New York Times reported. The move came as part of a series of safety reforms meant to improve conditions for firefighters. In its reversal, the agency said it has now stockpiled some 80,000 N95 masks and will include them in standard equipment packs for all large fires.
Keeping firefighters employed has been difficult as blazes grow with each passing year. As Heatmap’s Jeva Lange wrote last year, “retirements and defections from skill-based work like firefighting are especially damaging because with every senior departure goes the kind of on-the-job expertise that green new hires can’t replace. But that’s if there are new hires in the first place. Rumors abound that the agencies are struggling to fill their openings even this late in the training cycle, with a known vacancy rate of 20% in the Forest Service force alone.” As I reported last week in this newsletter, the Trump administration’s arrest of immigrant firefighters battling the largest blaze in Washington last month has spurred blowback from lawyers who say the move jeopardized the effort to contain the disaster.
After booming in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, European heat pump sales are slumping. It’s part of what one of the world’s largest manufacturers of the appliances called a “structural problem,” as demand dropped to a third of previous projections. In an interview with the Financial Times, Daikin president Naofumi Takenaka said orders for heat pumps have fallen as the economy has weakened and subsidies have decreased. “When we compare the market demand we had projected for 2025 at the time to the current market, it has stopped at roughly one-third of that, so it will take three to five years to return to such levels,” Takenaka said, speaking at Daikin’s headquarters in Osaka. “This is a structural problem.”
Beaked whales are considered one of the least understood mammals in the world due to their cryptic behavior and distribution in offshore waters, diving deeper than any other mammals on record and going below the surface for more than two hours. But scientists at Brazil’s Instituto Aqualie, Juiz de Fora Federal University, Mineral Engenharia e Meio Ambiente, and Santa Catarina State University set out to record the elusive whales. By doing so, they identified at least three different beaked whale species. “The motivation for this research arose from the need to expand knowledge on cetacean biodiversity in Brazilian waters, with particular attention to deep-diving species such as beaked whales,” author Raphael Barbosa Machado said in a press release.