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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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The Loan Programs Office is good for more than just nuclear funding.
That China has a whip hand over the rare earths mining and refining industry is one of the few things Washington can agree on.
That’s why Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, found it “astounding”when he read in the Washington Post this week that the White House was trying to figure out on the fly what to do about China restricting exports of rare earth metals in response to President Trump’s massive tariffs on the country’s imports.
Rare earth metals have a wide variety of applications, including for magnets in medical technology, defense, and energy productssuch as wind turbines and electric motors.
Jacquez told me there has been “years of work, including by the first Trump administration, that has pointed to this exact case as the worst-case scenario that could happen in an escalation with China.” It stands to reason, then, that experienced policymakers in the Trump administration might have been mindful of forestalling this when developing their tariff plan. But apparently not.
“The lines of attack here are numerous,” Jacquez said. “The fact that the National Economic Council and others are apparently just thinking about this for the first time is pretty shocking.”
And that’s not the only thing the Trump administration is doing that could hamper American access to rare earths and critical minerals.
Though China still effectively controls the global pipeline for most critical minerals (a broader category that includes rare earths as well as more commonly known metals and minerals such as lithium and cobalt), the U.S. has been at work for at least the past five years developing its own domestic supply chain. Much of that work has fallen to the Department of Energy, whose Loan Programs Office has funded mining and processing facilities, and whose Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains hasfunded and overseen demonstration projects for rare earths and critical minerals mining and refining.
The LPO is in line for dramatic cuts, as Heatmap has reported. So, too, are other departments working on rare earths, including the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. In its zeal to slash the federal government, the Trump administration may have to start from scratch in its efforts to build up a rare earths supply chain.
The Department of Energy did not reply to a request for comment.
This vulnerability to China has been well known in Washington for years, including by the first Trump administration.
“Our dependence on one country, the People's Republic of China (China), for multiple critical minerals is particularly concerning,” then-President Trump said in a 2020 executive order declaring a “national emergency” to deal with “our Nation's undue reliance on critical minerals.” At around the same time, the Loan Programs Office issued guidance “stating a preference for projects related to critical mineral” for applicants for the office’s funding, noting that “80 percent of its rare earth elements directly from China.” Using the Defense Production Act, the Trump administration also issued a grant to the company operating America's sole rare earth mine, MP Materials, to help fund a processing facility at the site of its California mine.
The Biden administration’s work on rare earths and critical minerals was almost entirely consistent with its predecessor’s, just at a greater scale and more focused on energy. About a month after taking office, President Bidenissued an executive order calling for, among other things, a Defense Department report “identifying risks in the supply chain for critical minerals and other identified strategic materials, including rare earth elements.”
Then as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the Biden administration increased funding for LPO, which supported a number of critical minerals projects. It also funneled more money into MP Materials — including a $35 million contract from the Department of Defense in 2022 for the California project. In 2024, it awarded the company a competitive tax credit worth $58.5 million to help finance construction of its neodymium-iron-boron magnet factory in Texas. That facilitybegan commercial operation earlier this year.
The finished magnets will be bought by General Motors for its electric vehicles. But even operating at full capacity, it won’t be able to do much to replace China’s production. The MP Metals facility is projected to produce 1,000 tons of the magnets per year.China produced 138,000 tons of NdFeB magnets in 2018.
The Trump administration is not averse to direct financial support for mining and minerals projects, but they seem to want to do it a different way. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has proposed using a sovereign wealth fund to invest in critical mineral mines. There is one big problem with that plan, however: the U.S. doesn’t have one (for the moment, at least).
“LPO can invest in mining projects now,” Jacquez told me. “Cutting 60% of their staff and the experts who work on this is not going to give certainty to the business community if they’re looking to invest in a mine that needs some government backstop.”
And while the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act remains very much in doubt, the subsidies it provided for electric vehicles, solar, and wind, along with domestic content requirements have been a major source of demand for critical minerals mining and refining projects in the United States.
“It’s not something we’re going to solve overnight,” Jacquez said. “But in the midst of a maximalist trade with China, it is something we will have to deal with on an overnight basis, unless and until there’s some kind of de-escalation or agreement.”
A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.