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The Owyhee River watershed is among the country’s largest areas of pristine wilderness. It’s also prime for green development.
On a stormy May evening in 1882, approximately 10 gigawatts of electricity split from the sky above southeastern Oregon and struck a cattleman named Hiram Leslie as he approached his camp on the Owyhee River.
Leslie’s horse died instantly; Leslie did not. Legend has it the pioneer survived for six days after the lightning strike — his brain pulsing and visible through his cleaved-open skull — only to finally expire in his bed back in the boomtown of Silver City, Idaho. Dugout Gulch, an 8-mile canyon near the ranchers’ camp that contains some of the most jaw-dropping scenery in all of Oregon state, was renamed in Leslie’s honor. One can’t help but wonder, though, whether the decision to rechristen also came from some nervous sense of deference to the land.
Today, Silver City is a ghost town, and Leslie’s grisly demise is relegated to a single sentence on a Bureau of Land Management sign lining the way down to a boat ramp that passing F-150s don’t bother braking to read. But the tremendous power and possibility of the Owyhee watershed has never been less in dispute — or, perhaps, more in jeopardy.
The Owyhee (pronounced “oh-why-hee,” an old spelling of “Hawaii” in honor of more doomed explorers) is a 7 million-acre ecoregion that runs through Oregon’s southeasternmost county, Malheur, though it spreads as far east as Idaho and as far south as Nevada. On Google Maps, it looks like a big blank space; the core of the Canyonlands is crossed by just three paved roads. In fact, it’s the largest undeveloped region left in the Lower 48. On a resource management map, the area reveals itself to be a complicated patchwork of BLM, tribal, state, Forest Service, and privately owned lands, as well as a smattering of quasi-protected “Wilderness Study Areas” and “Land with Wilderness Characteristics” that exist at the whims of Congress. The region contains many of the materials and geographic features necessary for the clean energy transition, making one of the most pristine regions in the state also potentially one of its most productive.
But it can’t be both.
In person, it’s easy to see why the area has excited developers. Towering river canyons inspire dreams of pumped storage hydropower. There has been talk of constructing a second geothermal plant in the area, and uranium mining has intermittently returned to the conversation. Gold and silver claims stud the hillsides, a testament to the presence of metals that, amongst other things, are used for making electric vehicle circuit boards and solar panels. Draw a line through the region’s gentler northern sagelands and you’ve plotted the proposed, much-needed Boardman-to-Hemingway transmission route to bring hydropower from Washington state to Boise, one of the fastest-growing cities in the nation. And just outside the Owyhee watershed, to the west, is the upper edge of the McDermitt Caldera, a shockingly remote volcanic depression where there is said to be enough concentrated lithium to build 40 million electric vehicles.
Even Leslie Gulch, with its weekend crowds from Boise and recent Instagram Reels virality, is “quietly open to mining,” Ryan Houston, the Bend-based executive director of the Oregon Natural Desert Association, told me when I met him in the Canyonlands last month.
Courtesy of the Oregon Natural Desert Association.
Amid all this frenzy, Oregon Senators Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, local Shoshone-Paiute tribal leaders, and a large coalition of regional and national conservation groups are working to close off 1.1 million acres of the most ecologically important land to the development nipping at its edges. Their hope is that Congress will designate four “units” in Malheur County, including the upper and lower Owyhee, as a single federally protected wilderness area — a pipe dream, given the partisan dysfunction of the current House of Representatives. The more realistic alternative is for President Biden to swoop in with the Antiquities Act and make it a new national monument.
Such an action would be in keeping with Biden’s 30x30 executive order to conserve 30% of U.S. land and water by 2030. It could also be perceived as clipping the wings of the kinds of clean energy projects his administration has proudly touted and funded.
Potential land-use conflicts like these are part of why conservation goals and the current green building movement are often portrayed as incompatible, or at least in tension. But “conservation and clean energy build-out aren’t necessarily opposing forces,” Veronica Ung-Kono, an attorney and clean energy transmission policy specialist at the National Wilderness Federation, told me. “They’re just forces that have to figure out how to interact with each other in a way that makes sense.”
No one is more aware of this than the campaigners I spoke with in Oregon. “For us as an organization, something we’re pushing ourselves on is, ‘How do we say yes to where solar and wind should be?’ Rather than just, ‘No, not there, not there, not there,’” Houston, the organizer at ONDA, which is helping to manage the monument campaign, said by way of example. Later, he told me that by setting aside 1.1 million acres for an Owyhee Monument, the conservationists essentially say that the remaining 75% of the local BLM district is open for all other possible uses.
“We’re not closing off vast swaths of the high desert to renewable energy,” he said. “What we’re doing is protecting the best of the best, so we can focus on other types of development — like renewable energy or off-road-vehicle play areas — in places where it’s most appropriate.”
To better understand the land-use issues in Malheur County, I traveled to Boise last month to attend what’s called a lek, when sage grouse gather to perform their mating rituals. The visit was organized by the NWF, which is supporting the monument push with ONDA. On the appointed day, I left my airport hotel at 3:30 a.m., crossed the state line on a two-lane highway during what I later learned was the height of mule deer migration season, and followed a poorly marked gravel road literally off the map on my phone (which, for good measure, had no reception).
It was so dark in the Owyhee that I felt more like I was rattling across the bottom of the ocean than an actual terrestrial landscape. I repeatedly mistook the full moon for oncoming headlights whenever it briefly appeared from behind the hills, and at random intervals, my car would drop into shallow streams I didn’t see coming until I was already in them. As I approached Succor Creek Campground, the designated meeting spot, I became aware that I was being hemmed in by canyon walls — perceptible only as a blackness even blacker than that of the night sky. When I finally spotted the headlamp of Aaron Kindle, NWF’s director of sporting advocacy, my overriding sense of the Owyhee Canyonlands was that they were bumpy.
Needless to say, I had absolutely no idea at the time that I had driven directly beneath what might one day become the Boardman-to-Hemingway transmission line.
The B2H, as it’s known, would be a nearly 300-mile, 500-kilovolt interstate line to send hydroelectric power generated in Washington State down to Boise. The project has become a textbook example of the permitting woes facing transmission projects in America, however. “By the time we build this, B2H is not only going to be old enough to vote, it’s going to be old enough to go to a bar and have a drink,” Adam Richins, the senior vice president and chief operating officer of Idaho Power, the electric utility that serves southern Idaho and eastern Oregon, told me.
Richins likes to joke, but the B2H’s halting progress makes him weary. More than 18 years of environmental reviews, permitting revisions, archeological and cultural studies, siting headaches, and landowner protests have plagued the planning and implementation of the transmission line, which Idaho Power owns jointly with another northwest utility, PacifiCorp. (Set to break ground this fall, B2H recently stalled again due to a scandal involving an affiliated consulting firm’s work on an unrelated project.) Originally conceived as a way to help Idaho Power meet its clean-energy goals during the summer and winter peaks that follow the region’s agricultural calendar, “I will say now that if we don’t get some of these transmission lines permitted on time, it’s possible we’re going to have to look at other resources such as natural gas,” Richins said.
Though some early plans for the B2H would have seen it cut straight through the boundaries of a future Owyhee monument, the current proposal keeps the transmission path safely outside the existing Wilderness Study Areas that surround Lake Owyhee, the reservoir at the center of what could become the “Lower Owyhee Unit.” (Somewhat confusingly, the Owyhee River flows north into the Snake River, meaning its “upper” watershed is actually to the south.)
That’s not a coincidence. The monument proposal almost entirely consists of parcels pre-designated as Lands with Wilderness Characteristics and Wilderness Study Areas, both of which are managed by the BLM and exist in a kind of limbo until Congress decides what to do with them. “If you’re a developer of solar, wind, pump storage, whatever, you’re not going to put your project in an area that’s in a quasi-protected status because that makes it extremely hard to develop,” Houston said. In other words, it’s not that the monument boundaries were drawn to avoid projects like the B2H; they were drawn to “protect the most important areas, and the most important areas have been in this quasi-slash-temporary protected status for a long time.”
Still, the transmission lines wouldn’t be entirely out of sight. The planned B2H route crosses close to the scenic northern mouth of the Owyhee Canyon before it makes its southeast turn toward Succor Creek and the Idaho border, where I’d driven across its path. More to the point, any future monument designation would mean that if permitting reform actually happens and America begins a transmission-building boom, power lines connecting the various substations of the Northwest would have to go around it, requiring diversions of 50 miles or more. Richins told me that as far as Idaho Power goes, though, “I haven’t seen anything [in the monument proposal] that has made me overly concerned.”
So far, Biden’s team hasn’t given any indication of its thinking about an Owyhee Monument, even as it has picked up the pace on conservation efforts elsewhere. Eight other national monument campaigns are also competing for attention from a friendly administration that is by no means guaranteed to remain in office next year; these include efforts to conserve California’s Chuckwalla, which would create a contiguous wildlife corridor between Joshua Tree National Park and the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge, and Colorado’s Dolores Canyons, which have both ecological and Indigenous cultural importance. “We have shared with [the administration] our binder of support and all of our petition signatures — we’ve got like 50,000 petition signatures, and hundreds and hundreds of letters — and they have said, ‘Thank you, the Owyhee is on our radar, we’ve known about it for a long time, we are tracking it, we are following it,’” said Houston.
There were rumors in the conservation community before Biden expanded two California monuments just a couple of weeks ago, meaning Owyhee organizers might get a tip-off if or when the administration makes up its mind. But November draws closer every day, and the grapevine has stayed silent. Still, after previously thwarted attempts to protect the Owyhee in 2016, 2019, and 2022, organizers think they’ve negotiated a workable compromise: The monument proposal as it currently stands is less than half the size of an earlier, more contiguous 2.5-million-acre proposal Houston and other conservationists preferred. But it also means that much more land is available for green development.
Even some of the more controversial renewable energy projects in the area have been able to move forward. On the lone stretch of shoreline on Lake Owyhee that doesn’t fall within the monument proposal, Utah-based developers are exploring the construction of a pumped storage hydropower facility. Proponents say the technology is a solution for the intermittency concerns of solar and wind since the facilities pump water from a lower reservoir to a higher one during off-peak hours, then release the water to spin turbines and generate electricity during times of high demand — effectively, a kind of massive hydroelectric battery.
Pumped storage projects require very particular geographic conditions, namely steep slopes of 1,000 feet or more, to give the water enough gravitational potential energy to work. “You have to choose your sites carefully — there are bad places to propose doing pumped storage and there are great places,” Matthew Shapiro, the CEO of rPlus Hydro, the company behind the exploration project, told me.
Lake Owyhee, with its high plateaus, is one of 11 promising sites across the country rPlus Hydro has picked out. “We were looking at a site with about 1,600 feet of vertical drop and a very large existing lower reservoir, meaning we would only have to build an upper,” Shapiro said. The proximity to the existing Midpoint-Hemingway-Summer Line and the future Boardman-Hemingway line is also appealing since it would mean rPlus Hydro would only have to build a short transmission line from the site.
There are environmental concerns about pumped storage, including its possible effect on trout below the Owyhee Dam (which, despite being a Hoover Dam prototype when it was built in 1932, does not produce hydroelectricity but instead stores water for the local irrigation district). While there might be petitions, protests, and siting issues yet, rPlus Hydro’s pumped storage project will “do whatever it does entirely independent” of the Owyhee monument protection efforts, Houston said.
Other strange alliances abound. The local ranching community, for one, is largely on board with the congressional proposal to protect Owyhee — a minor miracle given that this corner of Oregon is also home to the wildlife refuge that was infamously occupied for 41 days by the Bundy brothers in 2016. Both that and the current monument proposal intentionally exclude any lands that would have overflowed into the more combative neighboring jurisdiction, where conservation efforts might have ignited a national-headline-making backlash.
“We don’t want the ranchers to be so pissed off that the first thing they do is go to the Trump administration” to appeal for a reversal, Houston said. The Owyhee monument is designed, in other words, to fly under the radar, lest it become another political tennis ball ricocheting between presidents like Bears Ears.
It’s designed to fly under the radar when it comes to clean energy projects, too. Houston and others were adamant that they don’t oppose the projects encircling the core conservation area — climate change, after all, is one of the biggest threats to the Owyhee, which is one of the fastest warming places in the entire county. Still, it was clear in conversations that the proposals are also spurring some of their urgency. “It’s about protecting what you have left,” is how Kindle, the NWF advocate I met at the Succor Creek Campground, put it to me.
More to the point, Houston told me that the lithium mining abutting what would become the Owyhee Monument’s westernmost unit, Oregon Canyon Mountains, is “a reminder of what can happen” if conservationists don’t act fast enough.
“You can see he is missing like four tail feathers. That one must be a fighter — and got his ass kicked.” Skyler Vold, an Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife employee with the delightful title of “sage-grouse conservation coordinator,” stepped aside from the scope so I could check out the avian incarnation of Rocky Balboa.
The light was finally coming up over the Owyhee, but it was still so cold that my toes were starting to numb in my boots. That wasn’t what had my attention, though: At one point, Vold counted nearly two dozen sage grouse, all thumping away in the low point between two hills where they’d gathered for the lek. Kindle also spotted a lone elk on a faraway hillside, and we later heard the call of a sandhill crane, but the funny little birds with their spiky agave-leaf tails had us all enraptured.
No single creature better encapsulates the land-use fights in the West than the sage grouse. In 2018, the Trump administration stripped the birds of protections in order to open 9 million acres of the McDermitt Caldera to drilling and mining — mainly for lithium. While the Biden administration is considering new protections for sage grouse, of which there are only about 800,000 left and for whom the caldera is prime habitat, it has also dumped money into building up a domestic lithium supply chain. Sourcing lithium at home, however, will likely require access to McDermitt’s deposits.
Much of the caldera is located in Nevada, but the top rim bumps up into Oregon. It’s in this northernmost crescent that the Australian company Jindalee is considering opening its lithium mine. While the team told me it is still many years (and many environmental reviews) away from actually breaking ground, Jindalee’s executives also stressed that they see themselves as a critical player in America’s clean energy future if or when they do so.
“There’s a huge elephant in the room, which is: Where’s this lithium supply going to come from?” Ian Rodger, the Jindalee Lithium CEO, told me. The answer so far has been mainly from China, where lithium is “processed under really different social and environmental standards,” he said. “Our aspiration for the [Oregon] project is to develop it in the most responsible way.”
Simon Jowitt, an economic geologist at the University of Nevada, Reno, told me Rodger’s argument has a lot of merit. Social and environmental conditions are indeed “a lot better here than they would be in other countries,” he said, meaning that if we don’t extract the metals and minerals we’re going to use anyway locally, “then what we’re doing is we’re shipping problems away elsewhere.” There is ongoing discussion and division in the local Paiute and Shoshone Tribe about the economic and environmental pros and cons of mining near their community, as well.
The fact remains, however, that “as a human race, we need these metals and minerals if we want to do something meaningful about climate change mitigation,” Jowitt added. That requires stomaching a potentially sizeable physical footprint, especially in the case of lithium mining.
“If we are all going to go to electric vehicles by 2050,” Jowitt said, then that’s great — but policymakers and the public also “need to realize that there’s a mineral cost of this.”
Conservationists are quick to point out that mining laws in the U.S. — which have barely changed since Hiriam Leslie’s time — are stacked so in favor of the claimants that there is often no chance to get a word in edgewise. “Mining sure as heck trumps a funny chicken that goes ‘womp womp,’” is how Houston put it — a fair description of the sage grouse mating ritual. In the strange game of land-use rock-paper-scissors, mining also trumps cattle, which is why some local ranchers have approached the Protect the Owyhee organizers to unite against the miners. (There are slight differences in protections depending on whether the Owyhee is made a wilderness area by Congress or a monument by Biden; the latter option can’t be as prescriptive about flexible grazing operations for ranchers, which is why, on the whole, the ranching community strongly prefers a legislative route.)
Most of the would-be monument is outside the McDermitt Caldera, but the fear isn’t so much that any one transmission project or hydro facility or lithium mine would “ruin” the Owyhee. “Everyone says, ‘Well, why do you have to protect it? Is there a threat?’” Houston said. “There are potential threats; people have been talking about different things like interstate highways or transmission or new mines. If we wait until those threats are real, then we’ve got a conflict, and then everyone’s going to say, ‘Well, why didn’t you protect it before?’”
Ironically, some fear that a formal monument designation will draw attention from the crowds that are loving to death other popular parks across the West. Standing in Leslie Gulch, where the red blades of rhyolite rock strongly resemble plates on the back of an enormous Stegosaurus, I sympathized with the impulse to gatekeep the landscape; driving from one remarkable site to the next, we’d barely seen another car all day. That’s changing regardless of whether the Owyhee is signposted as a destination in name or not: Chris Geroro, a local fly fisher who’s been guiding on the Owyhee River for 16 years, said he’s gone from “being the only person on the river to being one of the people on the river.”
The landscape certainly leaves an impression. “You go over this hill and then all of a sudden, boom! You’re in this amazing canyon,” he told me, describing the reaction of his out-of-town clients when they visit. “I just watch their jaws drop and the surprise of ‘Where did this come from? This is an hour outside of Boise?’” Those people then go home and post pictures, and more people understandably want to visit. A monument could help address the currently mostly unmanaged recreation.
But if Biden declines to move forward on protecting the Owyhee and an indifferent or actively hostile administration takes office in January, then the Oregon Natural Desert Association will have to switch strategies. Houston told me his team is already considering alternative approaches like pursuing a wilderness designation through the legislative branch. If, in a worst-case scenario, Trump decides to go after the land in the Owyhee, ONDA is prepared to go to court.
As we were leaving Leslie Gulch, Houston told me that he studied to be an evolutionary biologist. “What evolutionary biology is all about is understanding how species evolve based on what they have at that moment. They go forward with what they’ve got,” he said. “That’s what we’re doing in conservation — we’re going forward with what we’ve got.”
When it finally came time for me to return to Boise, I retraced the route I’d taken that morning into Succor Creek. The light was fading, but there was still enough for me to make out the hoodoo rock towers and the rolling sagebrush hills that I’d missed in the dark on my way into the canyon. To my surprise, enormous high-tension transmission towers also came into view; I’d driven beneath them hours before without even realizing it. Now, the silver power lines — future companions of the B2H — looked gossamer in the setting sun.
I parked to take a photo, and when I got out of the car, I felt a staticky tingle, like how a storm might excite the hairs on your arm. It was probably just a Placebo effect of standing under transmission lines and having spent the day thinking about electricity. But at that moment, I would have believed it was the passing ghost of an old cattleman glaring in my direction or perhaps the presence of something yet to come, something buzzing with potential, slung over my head.
I returned to my car and continued on to the highway. Soon, houses and small towns started to reappear, and I followed their lights through the dark back to Boise.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify which version of the proposed federal protections for Owyhee the local ranching community approves.
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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.