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After Trump’s executive orders took aim at wind developers, they’re mostly keeping a stoic silence.
The newly inaugurated president does not like the wind industry. Especially the offshore wind industry.
Donald Trump on Monday night issued an expansive executive order targeting the sector that the industry is only just starting to digest. And while the executive order was mostly being seen as a pause or moratorium on new offshore leasing, it could have much more wide-ranging effects. It calls for the Secretary of the Interior and the Attorney General to “conduct a comprehensive review of the ecological, economic, and environmental necessity of terminating or amending any existing wind energy leases, identifying any legal bases for such removal,” thus calling gigawatts of existing, permitted projects into doubt.
“The executive order pausing new offshore wind leasing and permitting is a blow to the American offshore wind industry and hurts the hundreds of U.S. supply chain companies and thousands of workers already building more American energy,” Liz Burdock, the chief executive officer of the Oceantic Network, an offshore wind industry group, said in a statement. “Today’s actions threaten to strand $25 billion already flowing into new ports, vessels, and manufacturing centers, and curtail future investments across our country.” Companies that have active offshore projects have been largely mum on the order. A spokesperson for Orsted, the Danish company behind the under-construction Revolution Wind project off the coast of Rhode Island and the Sunrise Wind project off the coast of Long Island, told me only that it was “in the process of reviewing it to assess the impact on our portfolio.”
A spokesperson for Equinor, which is working on the Empire Wind project, projected to start serving New York City in 2026, told me, “Equinor is committed to advancing a broad energy portfolio that supports a domestic supply chain, generates skilled jobs, and makes a lasting contribution to American energy security. We will continue to assess all policy developments and work with the Trump administration as we deliver long-term energy solutions for the growing American economy.”
Several other major offshore and onshore wind developers, including Pattern Energy, Avangrid, and NextEra either did not respond to requests for comment or would not comment on their ongoing projects in light of the order.
Trade group officials and outside experts were skeptical that the order would stop projects currently under construction like Revolution Wind, Vineyard Wind in Massachusetts, or the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind Project, backed by the utility Dominion. Projects like Empire and Sunrise Wind, which have started some onshore construction, may survive as well. But the Biden Administration also permitted a flurry of projects in its final year, including SouthCoast Wind, New England Wind, Atlantic Shores South, and the Maryland Offshore Wind Project, and those may now be in doubt.
“Projects with steel in the water are probably safe,” Cy McGeady, a fellow in the Energy Security and Climate Change Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me. “I’d be shocked if a project with steel in the water has its permit revoked.” But of those that haven’t yet gotten started, he cautioned, “It’s those projects that are most at risk.”
Shares of Orsted fell over 9% in the United States Tuesday after the company announced $1.7 billion in impairments due to delays on its Sunrise Wind project — not related to the executive orders. The company also said it was marking down the value of its leases off the coasts of New Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware, and cited “considerably increased project costs,” as well as delays linked to transmission equipment for the wind turbines.
“Delivering the project within the updated schedule and cost is an absolute top priority for Orsted,” the company’s chief executive Mads Nipper said in a statement on the accounting changes.
The executive order comes after a dreadful few years for the offshore wind industry, which has been hammered by high costs, delays, and interest rate hikes, which led to several project cancellations even before Trump’s victory. The wind industry as a whole has seen slowing growth, thanks to difficulties building adequate transmission, exposure to high interest rates, and rising local opposition. New wind energy additions in the United States peaked in 2020 and 2021 with 14 gigawatts of added capacity, falling to just over 6 gigawatts in 2023.
The executive order also, at best, means no more new leasing for the duration of Trump’s time in office, calling into question the growth prospects of the whole offshore wind industry in the United States. Onshore wind may be on firmer ground, as many projects, especially in Texas, are not built on federal lands and do not require the full federal permitting process to be built.
“If the growth prospects are curtailed or drastically limited or at least diminished for the next four-plus years,” McGeady told me, referring to the offshore wind industry, “then it’s much harder to justify costs in the near term investment and expenditure of capital for an industry that might never launch.”
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A conversation with Mary King, a vice president handling venture strategy at Aligned Capital
Today’s conversation is with Mary King, a vice president handling venture strategy at Aligned Capital, which has invested in developers like Summit Ridge and Brightnight. I reached out to Mary as a part of the broader range of conversations I’ve had with industry professionals since it has become clear Republicans in Congress will be taking a chainsaw to the Inflation Reduction Act. I wanted to ask her about investment philosophies in this trying time and how the landscape for putting capital into renewable energy has shifted. But Mary’s quite open with her view: these technologies aren’t going anywhere.
The following conversation has been lightly edited and abridged for clarity.
How do you approach working in this field given all the macro uncertainties?
It’s a really fair question. One, macro uncertainties aside, when you look at the levelized cost of energy report Lazard releases it is clear that there are forms of clean energy that are by far the cheapest to deploy. There are all kinds of reasons to do decarbonizing projects that aren’t clean energy generation: storage, resiliency, energy efficiency – this is massively cost saving. Like, a lot of the methane industry [exists] because there’s value in not leaking methane. There’s all sorts of stuff you can do that you don’t need policy incentives for.
That said, the policy questions are unavoidable. You can’t really ignore them and I don’t want to say they don’t matter to the industry – they do. It’s just, my belief in this being an investable asset class and incredibly important from a humanity perspective is unwavering. That’s the perspective I’ve been taking. This maybe isn’t going to be the most fun market, investing in decarbonizing things, but the sense of purpose and the belief in the underlying drivers of the industry outweigh that.
With respect to clean energy development, and the investment class working in development, how have things changed since January and the introduction of these bills that would pare back the IRA?
Both investors and companies are worried. There’s a lot more political and policy engagement. We’re seeing a lot of firms and organizations getting involved. I think companies are really trying to find ways to structure around the incentives. Companies and developers, I think everybody is trying to – for lack of a better term – future-proof themselves against the worst eventuality.
One of the things I’ve been personally thinking about is that the way developers generally make money is, you have a financier that’s going to buy a project from them, and the financier is going to have a certain investment rate of return, or IRR. So ITC [investment tax credit] or no ITC, that IRR is going to be the same. And the developer captures the difference.
My guess – and I’m not incredibly confident yet – but I think the industry just focuses on being less ITC dependent. Finding the projects that are juicier regardless of the ITC.
The other thing is that as drafts come out for what we’re expecting to see, it’s gone from bad to terrible to a little bit better. We’ll see what else happens as we see other iterations.
How are you evaluating companies and projects differently today, compared to how you were maybe before it was clear the IRA would be targeted?
Let’s say that we’re looking at a project developer and they have a series of projects. Right now we’re thinking about a few things. First, what assets are these? It’s not all ITC and PTC. A lot of it is other credits. Going through and asking, how at risk are these credits? And then, once we know how at risk those credits are we apply it at a project level.
This also raises a question of whether you’re going to be able to find as many projects. Is there going to be as much demand if you’re not able to get to an IRR? Is the industry going to pay that?
What gives you optimism in this moment?
I’ll just look at the levelized cost of energy and looking at the unsubsidized tables say these are the projects that make sense and will still get built. Utility-scale solar? Really attractive. Some of these next-gen geothermal projects, I think those are going to be cost effective.
The other thing is that the cost of battery storage is just declining so rapidly and it’s continuing to decline. We are as a country expected to compare the current price of these technologies in perpetuity to the current price of oil and gas, which is challenging and where the technologies have not changed materially. So we’re not going to see the cost decline we’re going to see in renewables.
And more news around renewable energy conflicts.
1. Nantucket County, Massachusetts – The SouthCoast offshore wind project will be forced to abandon its existing power purchase agreements with Massachusetts and Rhode Island if the Trump administration’s wind permitting freeze continues, according to court filings submitted last week.
2. Tippacanoe County, Indiana – This county has now passed a full solar moratorium but is looking at grandfathering one large utility-scale project: RWE and Geenex’s Rainbow Trout solar farm.
3. Columbia County, Wisconsin – An Alliant wind farm named after this county is facing its own pushback as the developer begins the state permitting process and is seeking community buy-in through public info hearings.
4. Washington County, Arkansas – It turns out even mere exploration for a wind project out in this stretch of northwest Arkansas can get you in trouble with locals.
5. Wagoner County, Oklahoma – A large NextEra solar project has been blocked by county officials despite support from some Republican politicians in the Sooner state.
6. Skagit County, Washington – If you’re looking for a ray of developer sunshine on a cloudy day, look no further than this Washington State county that’s bucking opposition to a BESS facility.
7. Orange County, California – A progressive Democratic congressman is now opposing a large battery storage project in his district and talking about battery fire risks, the latest sign of a populist revolt in California against BESS facilities.
Permitting delays and missed deadlines are bedeviling solar developers and activist groups alike. What’s going on?
It’s no longer possible to say the Trump administration is moving solar projects along as one of the nation’s largest solar farms is being quietly delayed and even observers fighting the project aren’t sure why.
Months ago, it looked like Trump was going to start greenlighting large-scale solar with an emphasis out West. Agency spokespeople told me Trump’s 60-day pause on permitting solar projects had been lifted and then the Bureau of Land Management formally approved its first utility-scale project under this administration, Leeward Renewable Energy’s Elisabeth solar project in Arizona, and BLM also unveiled other solar projects it “reasonably” expected would be developed in the area surrounding Elisabeth.
But the biggest indicator of Trump’s thinking on solar out west was Esmeralda 7, a compilation of solar project proposals in western Nevada from NextEra, Invenergy, Arevia, ConnectGen, and other developers that would, if constructed, produce at least 6 gigawatts of power. My colleague Matthew Zeitlin was first to report that BLM officials updated the timetable for fully permitting the expansive project to say it would complete its environmental review by late April and be completely finished with the federal bureaucratic process by mid-July. BLM told Matthew that the final environmental impact statement – the official study completing the environmental review – would be published “in the coming days or week or so.”
More than two months later, it’s crickets from BLM on Esmeralda 7. BLM never released the study that its website as of today still says should’ve come out in late April. I asked BLM for comment on this and a spokesperson simply told me the agency “does not have any updates to share on this project at this time.”
This state of quiet stasis is not unique to Esmeralda; for example, Leeward has yet to receive a final environmental impact statement for its 700 mega-watt Copper Rays solar project in Nevada’s Pahrump Valley that BLM records state was to be published in early May. Earlier this month, BLM updated the project timeline for another Nevada solar project – EDF’s Bonanza – to say it would come out imminently, too, but nothing’s been released.
Delays happen in the federal government and timelines aren’t always met. But on its face, it is hard for stakeholders I speak with out in Nevada to take these months-long stutters as simply good faith bureaucratic hold-ups. And it’s even making work fighting solar for activists out in the desert much more confusing.
For Shaaron Netherton, executive director of the conservation group Friends of the Nevada Wilderness, these solar project permitting delays mean an uncertain future. Friends of the Nevada Wilderness is a volunteer group of ecology protection activists that is opposing Esmeralda 7 and filed its first lawsuit against Greenlink West, a transmission project that will connect the massive solar constellation to the energy grid. Netherton told me her group may sue against the approval of Esmeralda 7… but that the next phase of their battle against the project is a hazy unknown.
“It’s just kind of a black hole,” she told me of the Esmeralda 7 permitting process. “We will litigate Esmeralda 7 if we have to, and we were hoping that with this administration there would be a little bit of a pause. There may be. That’s still up in the air.”
I’d like to note that Netherton’s organization has different reasons for opposition than I normally write about in The Fight. Instead of concerns about property values or conspiracies about battery fires, her organization and a multitude of other desert ecosystem advocates are trying to avoid a future where large industries of any type harm or damage one of the nation’s most biodiverse and undeveloped areas.
This concern for nature has historically motivated environmental activism. But it’s also precisely the sort of advocacy that Trump officials have opposed tooth-and-nail, dating back to the president’s previous term, when advocates successfully opposed his rewrite of Endangered Species Act regulations. This reason – a motivation to hippie-punch, so to speak – is a reason why I hardly expect species protection to be enough of a concern to stop solar projects in their tracks under Trump, at least for now. There’s also the whole “energy dominance” thing, though Trump has been wishy-washy on adhering to that goal.
Patrick Donnelly, great basin director at the Center for Biological Diversity, agrees that this is a period of confusion but not necessarily an end to solar permitting on BLM land.
“[Solar] is moving a lot slower than it was six months ago, when it was coming at a breakneck pace,” said Patrick Donnelly of the Center for Biological Diversity. “How much of that is ideological versus 15-20% of the agencies taking early retirement and utter chaos inside the agencies? I’m not sure. But my feeling is it’s less ideological. I really don’t think Trump’s going to just start saying no to these energy projects.”