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The industry is being frozen out of Washington.

As a candidate for president, Donald Trump said he wanted to stop all offshore wind projects on Day One back in office. One month into his latest administration, renewables developers and climate advocates are privately very worried he’s much closer to pulling it off than they had ever thought possible.
Trump issued an executive order on January 20 halting new approvals for many wind projects, including all offshore wind. Since then, government officials have quickly and quietly given the industry the cold shoulder, all but halting permitting activity. Some agencies flat out told companies and lobbyists they wouldn’t talk to wind developers. Public meetings and webinars for new offshore wind projects have been canceled, including relatively benign informational sessions scheduled by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, a quasi-independent science and research entity underneath the Energy Department. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management told one developer, Ocean Winds, that it would not give the company an updated timetable for decisions on its proposed Bluepoint Wind project off the coasts of New York and New Jersey, defying a recent update to federal permitting law.
“I feel like we’re operating on a worst case scenario,” said Shayna Steingard, a senior policy specialist for offshore wind at the National Wildlife Federation. “This is kind of our worst fears.”
Offshore wind is incredibly vulnerable to the vicissitudes of federal agencies. It’s been that way since President George W. Bush Jr. enacted the Energy Policy Act of 2005, creating a process for developing wind in the Outer Continental Shelf. Not only must every offshore wind project go through the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, but they must also get Clean Water Act permits from the Army Corps of Engineers and a range of environmental permits from the Environmental Protection Agency and Fish and Wildlife Service. There are also less intuitively related agencies involved in the process, including the U.S. Coast Guard, which has butted heads with offshore wind developers even under friendlier administrations.
The Interior Department, which oversees the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, declined to comment for this story. So did the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, telling Heatmap that the scientific institution “is operating under strict guidance to refer all media queries involving the new administration” to the Energy Department’s main public affairs office, which did not respond to requests for comment.
But by all appearances, offshore wind has been frozen out of the U.S. entirely.
On earnings calls, companies already wrestling with higher project costs are starting to talk about U.S. offshore wind in especially grim terms. The tone reminds me of my past life reporting on minerals extraction projects threatened by political violence and military conflict.
After New Jersey all but abandoned its would-be first offshore wind project, Atlantic Shores, its project developers — Shell and EDF — wrote it off as a major financial loss. Luc Rémont, CEO of EDF, told analysts Friday that it was “realistic given the degree of uncertainty and the degree of threat” from Trump’s activities “to just depreciate” the assets, according to a translation of the call posted by the company. The CFO of Equinor — the developer behind Empire Wind, one of the few offshore wind proposals expected to start construction this year — told investors that “there is remaining uncertainty in” the project and openly weighed the “significant cancellation costs” against the benefits remaining to be gleaned from the Inflation Reduction Act, which are themselves potentially under threat in Congress. (Equinor told me in a statement that the project remains on track to begin construction this year.)
Top executives are ruling out any offshore wind development that might need federal permitting. Rasmus Errboe, the CEO of Ørsted, told analysts on its earnings update that the company was no longer committed to moving forward with any offshore assets in the U.S. except the Revolution and Sunrise wind projects, which received many of their permits under Biden. Projects that haven’t meaningfully started permitting yet are being mothballed — BP, for instance, told me that it withdrew state-level permitting applications for its Beacon Wind proposal in New York to work on “the project’s design and configuration.” Ocean Winds, the developer of Bluepoint Wind, did not respond to requests for comment about whether that project was still in the works after BOEM refused to update its permitting timeline.
In other pockets of the offshore wind space, there’s a clear disconnect between what companies are saying and the risk Trump poses to their immediate futures. Take Dominion Energy, the investor-owned utility behind the proposed Coastal Virginia Offshore wind farm, whose executives recently told analysts they thought their permits would be safe from political meddling. Mere hours earlier, I had reported that Trump’s Justice Department was working with anti-wind organizations to stretch out and delay litigation targeting the project.
Dominion responded to that news with a statement insisting the project would be “completed on-time in late 2026.” The company’s media team did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story, including a question about whether it expects to receive a Coast Guard authorization for power cable work that the Biden administration did not seem to complete before Trump entered office.
At the same time, as I first reported, conservative lawyers and wind critics are privately lobbying the Trump administration to re-examine whale interaction permits issued under Biden, a request that if granted would involve overturning government opinions by career marine biologists. “Just because the company has the approval doesn’t mean it’s all systems go,” Paul Kamenar, an attorney involved in the effort to rescind the permits, told me.
The request has prompted an outcry, including from The Washington Post editorial board and some free market groups. Renewables industry representatives have insisted that rescinding permits for offshore wind projects already under construction would drive up energy costs and make brown outs more likely in areas with rising demand on the grid. They also were quick to point out how many of the people requesting this reconsideration were climate deniers. “The groups involved in this effort have a well-documented history of spreading false claims about renewable energy,” American Clean Power spokesperson Jason Ryan told me.
The risk of an electricity price spike means there’s also a danger that Trump’s vise grip on offshore wind leads to a new generation of fossil-based infrastructure on the East Coast, and every plausible scenario in which the Northeast truly draws down carbon emissions goes down the drain.
My colleague Emily Pontecorvo has written about how the models used to project U.S. climate goals consistently show that the sector must provide a marginal but still significant percentage of future power. A big reason? Geography. The Northeast’s space constraints and high real estate prices mean it is politically perilous to get utility scale carbon-free power to the Northeast without building turbines in the sea, and state level climate goals become almost impossible to meet if projects can’t get through the permitting process before 2029. New York, for example, planned to use offshore wind to get 9 gigawatts of carbon-free power by 2035; Empire Wind — the only project currently in progress with a timeline that could help the state meet that goal — is nowhere near enough on its own.
The Trump administration has so far said little about what it wants to replace these projects with, although given its insistence that we’re in an energy emergency, one would hope the answer is … something. Thankfully, a hint came last week during a Fox Business segment on Trump’s war against offshore wind. Appearing on the show Varney & Co., Trump’s former DOE Secretary Dan Brouillette, who recently departed a brief stint as head of the utility trade group Edison Electric Institute, urged blue states with “environmental goals” to consider “alternative ways” to meet them — that is, natural gas pipelines.
“I wouldn’t be fooled by headlines that suggest that the collapse of the offshore wind industry means that we are somehow going to miss an environmental goal,” Brouilette said. “We could build natural gas pipelines into places like Boston and use natural gas instead of perhaps fuel oil or diesel to produce electricity. That would dramatically reduce the emissions profile of those states.” (Brouillette also spoke briefly about nuclear power but did not get into specifics.)
For the record, while gas-powered energy produces fewer carbon emissions than other fossil fuels, the math on atmospheric greenhouse gas clearly shows that natural gas is incompatible with any plausible scenario that slows, stalls or undoes global climate change and the damage it is causing the planet.
The multitude of ways offshore wind could die by a thousand cuts is why only a precious few people who work in the industry were willing to go on the record for this story. Speaking anonymously, some in the business admit they see this situation in autocratic terms and are afraid of giving the Trump team ideas. One person who’d been in offshore wind for a decade described the behavior of regulators as “systematically, across the board, undermining any credibility to enter into a legal agreement,” which they said “genuinely felt like the end of our nation.” Another told me the feeling in the industry is that “the fundamental rule of law seems to be in enough question to pose a finance risk.”
As is the rule with the Trump administration, some of this government behavior may wind up being ruled illegal. But when administration officials seem willing and able to go the added extralegal mile to accomplish their policy objectives, there’s hardly any comfort in a years-long legal battle. Not when money is the fuel that runs offshore wind, and a noxious combination of inflation and grassroots opposition was already making projects difficult to complete.
“These are definitely challenging times,” acknowledged Hillary Bright, executive director for D.C. offshore wind advocacy group Turn Forward, putting the stakes in stark terms. “I really hope the administration can find a place in their energy dominance agenda to support our multi-billion dollar projects creating American jobs that can light up millions of homes in the near future.”
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Fullmark Energy quietly shuttered Swiftsure, a planned 650-megawatt energy storage system on Staten Island.
The biggest battery project in New York has been canceled in a major victory for the nascent nationwide grassroots movement against energy storage development.
It’s still a mystery why exactly the developer of Staten Island’s Swiftsure project, Fullmark Energy (formerly known as Hecate), pulled the plug. We do know a few key details: First, Fullmark did not announce publicly that it was killing the project, instead quietly submitting a short, one-page withdrawal letter to the New York State Department of Public Service. That letter, which is publicly available, is dated August 18 of this year, meaning that the move formally occurred two months ago. Still, nobody in Staten Island seems to have known until late Friday afternoon when local publication SI Advance first reported the withdrawal.
Second, Swiftsure was going to be massive. It was the largest planned battery storage project in New York State, according to public records, with the ability to store upwards of 650 megawatts of electricity — enough to power more than half a million homes. That makes Swiftsure likely one of the largest battery projects in the country, with more capacity than any other energy storage project currently facing opposition in the U.S., according to our very own Heatmap Pro database. This is the second Fullmark project to totally flop in recent months. We reported last week that one of the company’s projects outside of Los Angeles had its permits voided in a court ruling that also blocked battery storage development in unincorporated areas outside the city.
Third, and potentially most significant for energy developers in New York City: Swiftsure’s death will almost certainly embolden the anti-storage activist movement.
Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee in next week’s New York mayoral election, was one of many local politicians who opposed Swiftsure and rallied with residents close to the proposed site in May. He’s part of a broader trend of Republican politicians becoming skeptical of battery storage sites near where people live and work, including in Democrat-ruled New York.
Putting batteries in the five boroughs has always been a challenge, but January’s Moss Landing battery fire in California created a PR frenzy in the city, as conservative figures seized on the online panic created by the blaze. Once-agnostic GOP members of Congress from New York City are now anti-battery storage in their backyards, including Anthony D’Esposito, Nicole Malliotakis and Mike Lawler. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Lee Zeldin — a former NYC congressman — is now weighing in against individual battery projects on Long Island and Staten Island.
Swiftsure was proposed in 2023 and permitted by the state last year. Fullmark was given a deadline of this spring to submit routine paperwork demonstrating how it would comply with conditions of the site’s permit, including how the battery storage project would be decommissioned. In August, the New York Department of Public Service gave Fullmark an extension until October 11.
Instead of meeting that October deadline, it seems Fullmark quietly withdrew its Swiftsure proposal.
It’s unclear how Democrat Zohran Mamdani or independent Andrew Cuomo would handle the rise of the anti-battery movement if either of them wins the November 4 mayoral election. That’s partially because energy policy and climate change have been non-issues in the campaign, saving small mentions of nuclear power, heat pumps, or gas prices in one-off debate answers or social media posts.
Sliwa, who has referred to Swiftsure as a “mini Chernobyl,” told me that he anticipates this victory will lead to more protests at more battery sites, no matter who wins the mayoral election. “The cancellation of this lithium-ion battery warehouse will reverberate throughout the boroughs,” GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa told me Monday. “It’ll be a rallying cry [because] it’s not a fait accompli that these facilities will be complete and operational.”
The Mamdani and Cuomo campaigns did not respond to requests for comment on Swiftsure’s cancellation.
On China’s rare earths, Bill Gates’ nuclear dream, and Texas renewables
Current conditions: Hurricane Melissa exploded in intensity over the warm Caribbean waters and has now strengthened into a major storm, potentially slamming into Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Jamaica as a Category 5 in the coming days • The Northeast is bracing for a potential nor’easter, which will be followed by a plunge in temperatures of as much as 15 degrees Fahrenheit lower than average • The northern Australian town of Julia Creek saw temperatures soar as high as 106 degrees.
Exxon Mobil filed a lawsuit against California late Friday on the grounds that two landmark new climate laws violate the oil giant’s free speech rights, The New York Times reported. The two laws would require thousands of large companies doing business in the state to calculate and report the greenhouse gas pollution created by the use of their products, so-called Scope 3 emissions. “The statutes compel Exxon Mobil to trumpet California’s preferred message even though Exxon Mobil believes the speech is misleading and misguided,” Exxon complained through its lawyers. California Governor Gavin Newsom’s office said the statutes “have already been upheld in court and we continue to have confidence in them.” He condemned the lawsuit, calling it “truly shocking that one of the biggest polluters on the planet would be opposed to transparency.”
China will delay introducing export controls on rare earths, an unnamed U.S. official told the Financial Times following two days of talks in Malaysia. For years, Beijing has been ratcheting up trade restrictions on the global supply of metals its industry dominates. But this month, China slapped the harshest controls yet on rare earths. In response, stocks in rare earth mining and refining companies soared. Despite what Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin called the “paradox of Trump’s critical mineral crusade” to mine even as he reduced demand from electric vehicle factories, “everybody wants to invest in critical minerals startups,” Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote. That — as frequent readers of this newsletter will recall — includes the federal government, which under the Trump administration has been taking equity stakes in major projects as part of deals for federal funding.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission rewarded Bill Gates’ next-generation reactor company, TerraPower, with its final environment impact statement last week. The next step in the construction permit process is a final safety evaluation that the company expects to receive by the end of this year. If everything goes according to plan, TerraPower could end up winning the race to build the nation’s first commercial reactor to use a coolant other than water, and do so at a former coal-fired plant in the country’s top coal-producing state. “The Natrium plant in Wyoming, Kemmerer Unit 1, is now the first advanced reactor technology to successfully complete an environmental impact statement for the NRC, bringing us another step closer to delivering America’s next nuclear power plant,” said TerraPower president and CEO Chris Levesque.
A judge gave New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s administration until February 6 to issue rules for its long-delayed cap-and-invest program, the Albany Times-Union reported. The government was supposed to issue the guidelines that would launch the program as early as 2024, but continuously pushed back the release. “Early outlines of New York’s cap and invest program indicate that regulators were considering a relatively low price ceiling on pollution, making it easier for companies to buy their way out of compliance with the cap,” Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote in January.

The Texas data center boom is being powered primarily with new wind, solar, and batteries, according to new analysis by the Energy Information Administration. Since 2021, electricity demand on the independent statewide grid operated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas has soared. Over the past year, wind, solar, and batteries have been supplying that rising demand. Utility-scale solar generated 45 terawatt-hours of electricity in the first nine months of 2025. That’s 50% more than the same period in 2024 and nearly four times more than the same period in 2021. Wind generation, meanwhile, totaled 87 terawatt-hours for the first nine months of this year, up 4% from last year and 36% since 2021. “Together,” the analysis stated, “wind and solar generation met 36% of ERCOT’s electricity demand in the first nine months of 2025.”
The question isn’t whether the flames will come — it’s when, and what it will take to recover.
In the two decades following the turn of the millennium, wildfires came within three miles of an estimated 21.8 million Americans’ homes. That number — which has no doubt grown substantially in the five years since — represents about 6% of the nation’s population, including the survivors of some of the deadliest and most destructive fires in the country’s history. But it also includes millions of stories that never made headlines.
For every Paradise, California, and Lahaina, Hawaii, there were also dozens of uneventful evacuations, in which regular people attempted to navigate the confusing jargon of government notices and warnings. Others lost their homes in fires that were too insignificant to meet the thresholds for federal aid. And there are countless others who have decided, after too many close calls, to move somewhere else.
By any metric, costly, catastrophic, and increasingly urban wildfires are on the rise. Nearly a third of the U.S. population, however, lives in a county with a high or very high risk of wildfire, including over 60% of the counties in the West. But the shape of the recovery from those disasters in the weeks and months that follow is often that of a maze, featuring heart-rending decisions and forced hands. Understanding wildfire recovery is critical, though, for when the next disaster follows — which is why we’ve set out to explore the topic in depth.
The most immediate concerns for many in the weeks following a wildfire are financial. Homeowners are still required to pay the mortgage on homes that are nothing more than piles of ash — one study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found that 90-day delinquencies rose 4% and prepayments rose 16% on properties that were damaged by wildfires. Because properties destroyed in fires often receive insurance settlements that are lower than the cost to fully replace their home, “households face strong incentives to apply insurance funds toward the mortgage balance instead of rebuilding, and the observed increase in prepayment represents a symptom of broader frictions in insurance markets that leave households with large financial losses in the aftermath of a natural disaster,” the researchers explain.
Indeed, many people who believed they had adequate insurance only discover after a fire that their coverage limits are lower than 75% of their home’s actual replacement costs, putting them in the category of the underinsured. Homeowners still grappling with the loss of their residence and possessions are also left to navigate reams of required paperwork to get their money, a project one fire victim likened to having a “part-time job.” It’s not uncommon for fire survivors to wait months or even years for payouts, or to find that necessary steps to rebuilding, such as asbestos testing and dead tree removals, aren’t covered. Just last week, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a new law requiring insurers to pay at least 60% of a homeowner’s personal property coverage on a total loss without a detailed inventory, up to $350,000. The original proposal called for a 100% payout, but faced intense insurance industry blowback .
Even if your home doesn’t burn to the ground, you might be affected by the aftermath of a nearby fire. In California, a fifth of homes in the highest-risk wildfire areas have lost insurance coverage since 2019, while premiums in those same regions have increased by 42%. Insurers’ jitters have overflowedspilled over into other Western states like Washington, where there are fewer at-risk properties than in California — 16% compared to 41% — but premiums have similarly doubled in some cases due to the perceived hazardrisks.
Some experts argue that people should be priced out of the wildland-urban interface and that managed retreat will help prevent future tragedies. But as I report in my story on fire victims who’ve decided not to rebuild, that’s easier said than done. There are only three states where insured homeowners have the legal right to replace a wildfire-destroyed home by buying a new property instead of rebuilding, meaning many survivors end up shackled to a property that is likely to burn again.
The financial maze, of course, is only one aspect of recovery — the physical and mental health repercussions can also reverberate for years. A study that followed survivors of Australia’s Black Saturday bush fires in 2009, which killed over 170 people, found that five years after the disaster, a fifth of survivors still suffered from “serious mental health challenges” like post-traumatic stress disorder. In Lahaina, two years after the fire, nearly half of the children aged 10 to 17 who survived are suspected of coping with PTSD.
Federal firefighting practices continue to focus on containing fires as quickly as possible, to the detriment of less showy but possibly more effective solutions such as prescribed burns and limits on development in fire-prone areas. Some of this is due to the long history of fire suppression in the West, but it persists due to ongoing political and public pressure. Still, you can find small and promising steps forward for forest management in places like Paradise, where the recreation and park district director has scraped together funds to begin to build a buffer between an ecosystem that is meant to burn and survivors of one of the worst fires in California’s history.
In the four pieces that follow, I’ve attempted to explore the challenges of wildfire recovery in the weeks and months after the disaster itself. In doing so, I’ve spoken to firefighters, victims, researchers, and many others to learn more about what can be done to make future recoveries easier and more effective.
The bottom line, though, is that there is no way to fully prevent wildfires. We have to learn to live alongside them, and that means recovering smarter, too. It’s not the kind of glamorous work that attracts TV cameras and headlines; often, the real work of recovery occurs in the many months after the fire is extinguished. But it also might just make the difference.