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Power line permitting was overdue for an overhaul. Here’s what the bill would unlock.
If everything goes smoothly, the first commercial output could begin as soon as 2029.
Rob talks with David Pomerantz, the executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute, about how the bill would remake the electricity grid — and strike against utilities’ political power.
A new Brown University report argues powering down a misaligned artificial intelligence would be tougher — and take longer — than many experts assume.
‘When China wants to do something, boy, they move fast.’
Only upgrades for pre-existing wind projects have been approved.
In September, the Trump administration told a reporter that the president directed the Pentagon to finally process wind projects through routine airspace approvals as required under a court order. By doing this, it created the appearance of real headway and good faith in talks with Democrats in Congress on energy permitting legislation before the November midterm elections.
But the White House’s assurances are not what they seem.
All of the projects the administration has reportedly advanced over the past week are repowerings, meaning they’re only upgrades of existing projects, and two of the “projects” they’ve advanced were just two individual turbines, the American Clean Power Association on Tuesday told members involved in litigation with the administration.
Over the course of his presidency, the president’s team has turned what was once a sleepy bureaucratic check for radar or flight interference into a weapon against wind energy in the United States. You need Federal Aviation Administration clearance for any structure above 200 feet in the air and that process includes a Pentagon review. By claiming wind projects suddenly needed new scrutiny for national security reasons, the Pentagon held up FAA airspace approvals for apparently hundreds of projects.
This has been a key part of bipartisan energy legislation talks back in D.C., as Democrats in Congress have demanded at least some semblance of regular order be returned to renewable energy in federal permitting. The permitting bill ostensibly has ways to strengthen wind companies’ hand in dealing with a hostile Trump administration but negotiators, including Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, have also previously called attacks on wind projects during negotiations harmful to a final deal becoming law.
In September, Politico reported Trump told his aides he would agree to direct the Defense Department to “start clearing its queue of long-delayed onshore wind projects to strike a deal” citing “two people familiar with the talks and granted anonymity.” Among the commitments Politico reported were made: to approve about 30 projects awaiting a countersignature from the Pentagon on a mitigation agreement related to airspace impacts.
In federal court, the renewable energy trade groups who brought the lawsuit clearly don’t think the Trump administration actually followed through with that promise.
On Oct. 20, after updates from the Justice Department showed little signs of progress (which I wrote about), the trade groups filed a motion to enforce the judge’s stay on their air clearance freeze, saying that very little had advanced since the ruling in early August, and that none of the 30 projects awaiting countersignature on their mitigation agreements actually had advanced from Pentagon review. In addition, they said the government was now asking project developers to sign onto a litany of new requirements in exchange for a sign-off on mitigation agreements. They submitted a joint declaration from subject matter experts, including from former military personnel, who described these requirements as a vast departure from precedent with little basis in security rationale that they said also had terms that could violate state or local laws, like a blanket prohibition on aircraft detection light systems. (You can read the declaration here.)
Two days later, on Oct. 22, it started to look like we were getting somewhere when news outlets reported the Trump administration was "advancing" two “wind projects” in South Dakota and Maine, citing statements from the White House and the Pentagon.
Bob Ditchey, a spokesperson for the Pentagon, told us in an email that the two “wind projects” were Crowned Ridge, which he said consisted of 87 turbines in “Grant, SD,” and “Blue Sky/Hill,” which he said was made up of 19 turbines in “Hancock, ME.” Ditchey described them both as “proposed” wind energy “developments.”
“Following rigorous evaluation of potential impacts on military readiness, radar installations, and airspace operations, the DoW has cleared both projects to proceed to the next phase of federal evaluation,” Ditchey said in an email. “The projects have been formally referred to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for final aeronautical study and determination.”
The South Dakota wind project Trump officials are referencing is likely NextEra’s Crowned Ridge wind farm, which has 87 turbines and has been operational since 2019. On Oct. 5 a NextEra project consultant submitted a litany of height clearance requests for a “repowering project” on behalf of Crowned Ridge Energy Center, LLC, according to the Federal Aviation Administration’s public database. The requests are for turbines in Grant County.
There is no Maine wind project with the name “Blue Sky/Hill,” as far as we can tell, but there is a project in Hancock County that was completed in 2012 called “Bull Hill” that consists of 19 turbines, and which also has pending applications for repowering in the FAA’s database.
Neither NextEra nor Bull Hill’s developer, TerraForm Power, responded to our requests for comment. The Pentagon also did not respond to questions about these projects or the additional ones it said it had advanced.
In addition, as of this story’s publication, all of the air clearance requests for these two projects are all listed as “pending” online.
If you’re wondering why operational wind farms might need air clearances for construction, all of the wind farms’ requests describe the projects as “repowering,” an industry term that applies to upgrading, modifying, altering or restarting pre-existing wind farms. A repowering can mean anything from fixing turbine blades to changing turbine height, or moving a turbine, or commissioning new turbines entirely. Crucially though it’s not really considered a “new wind farm” in the colloquial sense. As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin has explained, repowerings are seen by the energy sector as a simple pathway to the most juice for the squeeze from what has already been permitted and built.
On Tuesday, Punchbowl News reported that the White House was advancing three more wind projects in Illinois and Iowa. After this story ran, American Clean Power told members involved in the airspace litigation clarifying that all of the projects thus far are “repowerings” and that the two Illinois “projects” each were only individual wind turbines. None of the projects were new utility scale projects.
On Wednesday, just before this story went to press, Punchbowl News reported another two wind projects were advancing, calling it “more permitting goodwill from the White House.” We have not yet been able to confirm what these projects are or whether they are also repowering projects.
American Clean Power endorsed the bipartisan Senate permitting bill and called for its passage. The group provided a comment from Frank Macchiarola, their chief advocacy officer: “To date, the administration has moved forward only a handful of the total number of projects they agreed to approve. In order to pass BAAJA and bring down costs for Americans, the Administration needs to get serious about building clean power.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Ford reveals a promising tidbit about its upcoming electric pickup.
When the Ford Fathom debuts in 2027, much of the attention will focus on its size and its price. As it should: The all-electric mid-size truck is promised to start under $30,000, and the success or failure of that car at that price will tell us a lot about the future of Ford, as well as mainstream America’s true appetite for EVs.
While we wait for our first real look at the truck and the full list of its specifications, Ford just revealed a promising tidbit. The automaker has been working in the background to make it simpler and cheaper for Fathom drivers to use bidirectional charging: the ability for power to flow both ways so that EV drivers can use the energy stored in the vehicle battery to power secondary loads, to back up a home power supply during a blackout, or even to feed back onto the power grid.
Specifically, Ford announced on Tuesday that the Fathom will be the first EV from a U.S. automaker with a starting price below $30,000 that does not need a separate wall-mounted inverter — the piece needed to transform the DC power stored in the car’s battery to the AC power used in the house. Instead, engineers built one into the truck’s “e-box” module that houses much of its electronics. That on-board unit is good enough to supply more than 10 kW of AC power to a home, Ford says.
Bidirectional charging isn’t new to American EVs or to Ford. The F-150 Lightning EV got this feature when it debuted five years ago. The trouble is that this game-changing technology doesn’t come cheap: The Lightning — now discontinued, soon to be revived as an extended-range EV — was an expensive ride starting above $50,000. The electrical hardware needed to connect the truck to one’s home power supply added thousands of dollars on top of the truck’s price.
The same was true for other EV makers. Two years ago, when I interviewed EV pickup drivers after Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina, I found F-150 Lightning and Tesla Cybertruck owners alike who hadn’t forked over more money for the extra tech needed to hook directly into the home. They got themselves through the blackout the Macgyver way, plugging the refrigerator and other critical appliances right into the power outlets in the back of the truck.
Ford’s Fathom, though, comes closer to giving the best of bidirectional charging to the masses. In addition to installing an on-board inverter, Ford says it will make the Ford Home Power Station and Home Backup Panel — the hardware that drivers will need to connect to the house — cost at least 60% less than the brand’s first-generation tech. The Detroit giant also says it’s working with a consortium of utilities, including American Electric Power, BC Hydro, Consumers Energy, Exelon, and Pacific Gas and Electric Co., to iron out how Fathom owners across the country will connect to their homes and the grid.
As Ford notes in its release: “There are more than 3,000 utilities across the U.S. and Canada with largely unique interconnection processes. Interconnection processes were primarily written for rooftop solar and stationary battery storage, which are fixed assets. Bidirectional EVs bring new considerations since they are vehicles first, not stationary equipment.”
Indeed, cooperation between car companies and utilities is suddenly a pressing matter as more EVs hit the roads, and the grid. Rivian and other electric car makers are trying to make their vehicles play nice with the power grid as a way for their customers to save money and reduce grid strain by having EVs charge when demand is low and electricity is cheap. And at some point, electric cars will become a major cog in virtual power plants — the ability of the power grid to pull energy from sources like EVs, backup batteries, and homeowner solar in times of need.
That day is finally approaching. Although bidirectional charging is a striking bonus feature for EVs, something so much more interesting and sophisticated than what a fossil fuel car can accomplish, the tech has flown fairly under the radar in the U.S. One could blame not only the lagging pace of EV adoption here, but also the fact that Tesla, far and away the market leader, has been slow to get on board. Just this month, it finally said that Model Y and Model 3 vehicles, the two best-selling electric cars in America, would get bidirectional capability.
The Ford Fathom, then, may do more than revitalize the lagging fortunes of Ford, which lost billions upon billions in its first forays into electrification and started up a skunkworks team to design the new truck in a totally different way. Their creation might also show Americans the EV’s enormous role in the home, and the grid, of tomorrow.
