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Since July 4, the federal government has escalated its assault on wind development to previously unimaginable heights.
The Trump administration is widening its efforts to restrict wind power, proposing new nationwide land use restrictions and laying what some say is the groundwork for targeting wind facilities under construction or even operation.
Since Trump re-entered the White House, his administration has halted wind energy leasing, stopped approving wind projects on federal land or in federal waters, and blocked wind developers from getting permits for interactions with protected birds, putting operators that harm a bald eagle or endangered hawk at risk of steep federal fines or jail time.
For the most part, however, projects either under construction or already operating have been spared. With a handful of exceptions — the Lava Ridge wind farm in Idaho, the Atlantic Shores development off the coast of New Jersey and the Empire Wind project in the New York Bight — most projects with advanced timelines appeared to be safe.
But that was then. In the past week, a series of Trump administration actions has presented fresh threats to wind developers seeking everyday sign-offs for things that have never before presented a potential problem. Renewables developers and their supporters say the rush of actions is intended to further curtail investment in wind after Congress earlier this summer drastically curtailed tax breaks for wind and solar.
“I don’t think they even care if it’ll stand judicial review,” Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, executive director of the Western Environmental Law Center, told me. “It’s just going to chill anyone with limited capital from going to [an] agency.”
First up: The Transportation Department last Tuesday declared that it would now call for a national 1.2-mile property setback — that is, a mandatory distance requirement — for all wind facilities near railroads and highways.
When it announced the move, the DOT claimed it had “recently discovered” that the Biden administration had “overruled a safety recommendation for dozens of wind energy projects” related to radio frequencies near transportation corridors, suggesting the federal government would soon be stepping in to rectify the purported situation. To try and support this claim, the agency released a pair of Biden-era letters from a DOT spectrum policy office related to Prairie Heritage, a Pattern Energy wind project in Illinois, one recommending action due to radio issues and a subsequent analysis that no longer raised concerns.
Citing these, the DOT stated that political officials had overruled the concerns of safety experts and called on Congress to investigate. It also suggested that “33 projects have been uncovered where the original safety recommendation was rescinded.” DOT couldn’t be reached for comment in time for publication. Pattern Energy declined to comment.
Buried in this announcement was another reveal: DOT said that it would instruct the Federal Aviation Administration to “thoroughly evaluate proposed wind turbines to ensure they do not pose a danger to aviation” — a signal that a once-routine FAA height clearance required for almost every wind turbine could now become a hurdle for the entire sector.
At the same time, the Department of the Interior unveiled a twin set of secretarial orders that went beyond even its edict of just the week before, requiring that all permits for wind and solar go through high-level political screening.
First, also on Tuesday, the department released a mega-order claiming the Biden administration “chose to misapply” the law in approving offshore wind projects and calling on nearly every branch of the agency to review “any regulations, guidance, policies, and practices” related to a host of actions that occur before and after a project receives its final record of decision, including right-of-way authorizations, land use plan amendments and revisions, and environmental and wildlife permit and analyses. Among its many directives, the order instructed Interior staff to prepare a report on fully-approved offshore wind projects that may have impacts on “military readiness.” It also directed the agency’s top lawyer to review all “pending litigation” against a wind or solar project approval and identify cases where the agency could withdraw or rescind it.
Then came Friday. As I scooped for Heatmap, Interior will no longer permit a wind project on federal land if it would produce less energy per acre than a coal, gas, or nuclear facility at the same site. This happens to be a metric where wind typically performs worse than its more conventional counterparts; that being the case, this order could amount to a targeted and de facto ban on wind on federal property.
Taken in sum, it’s difficult not to read this series of orders as a message to the entire wind industry: Avoid the federal government at all costs, if you can help it.
What does the future of wind development look like in the U.S. if you have to work around the feds at every turn? “It’s a good question,” John Hensley, senior vice president for markets and policy analysis at the American Clean Power Association, told me this afternoon. The challenge is that “as we see more and more of these crop up, it becomes more and more difficult to move these projects forward — and, somewhat equally important, it becomes difficult to find the financing to develop these projects.”
“If the financing community is unwilling to take on that risk then the money dries up and these projects have a lower likelihood of happening,” Hensley said, adding: “We haven’t reached the threshold where all activity has ground to a stop, but it certainly has pushed companies to re-evaluate their portfolios and think about where they do have this regulatory risk, and it pushes the financing community to do the same. It’s just putting more barriers in place to move these projects forward.”
Anti-wind activists, meanwhile, see these orders as a map to the anti-renewables Holy Grail: forcibly decommissioning projects that are already in service.
On the same day as the mega-order, the coastal vacation town of Nantucket, Massachusetts, threatened legal action against Vineyard Wind, the offshore wind project that experienced a construction catastrophe during the middle of last year’s high tourist season, sending part of a turbine blade and shards of fiberglass into the waters just offshore. The facility is still partially under construction, but is already sending electrons to the grid. Less than 24 hours later, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative legal group tied to other lawsuits against offshore wind projects, filed a petition to the Interior Department requesting that it reconsider prior permits for Vineyard Wind and halt operations.
David Stevenson, a former Trump adviser who now works with the offshore wind opponent Caesar Rodney Institute, told me he thinks the Interior order laid out a pathway to reconsider approvals. “Many of us who have been plaintiffs in various lawsuits have suggested to the Secretary of the Interior that there are flaws, and the flaws are spelled out in the lawsuits to the permit process.”
Nick Krakoff, a senior attorney with the pro-climate action Conservation Law Foundation, had an identical view to Stevenson’s. “I’m certainly not aware of this ever being done before,” he told me, noting that the Biden administration paused new oil and gas leases but didn’t do a “systematic review” of a sector to find “ways to potentially undo prior permitting decisions.”
Democrats in Congress have finally started speaking up about this. Last week four Democrats — led by Martin Heinrich, the top Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee — sent a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum arguing that the secretarial orders would delay any decision related to renewable energy in general, “no matter how routine.” A Democratic staffer on the committee, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the letter, told me privately that “fear is where this is headed.”
“They’re just building a record that will ultimately allow them to not approve future projects, and potentially deny projects that have already been approved,” the staffer said. ”They have all these new hoops they have to go through, and if they’re saying these things aren’t in the public interest, it’s not hard to see where they are going.”
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A review of Heatmap Pro data reveals a troubling new trend in data center development.
Data centers are being built in places that restrict renewable energy. There are significant implications for our future energy grid – but it’s unclear if this behavior will lead to tech companies eschewing renewables or finding novel ways to still meet their clean energy commitments.
In the previous edition of The Fight, I began chronicling the data center boom and a nascent backlash to it by talking about Google and what would’ve been its second data center in southern Indianapolis, if the city had not rejected it last Monday. As I learned about Google’s practices in Indiana, I focused on the company’s first project – a $2 billion facility in Fort Wayne, because it is being built in a county where officials have instituted a cumbersome restrictive ordinance on large-scale solar energy. The county commission recently voted to make the ordinance more restrictive, unanimously agreeing to institute a 1,000-foot setback to take effect in early November, pending final approval from the county’s planning commission.
As it turns out, the Fort Wayne data center is not an exception: Approximately 44% of all data centers proposed in Indiana are in counties that have restricted or banned new renewable energy projects. This is according to a review of Heatmap Pro data in which we cross-referenced the county bans and ordinances we track against a list of proposed data centers prepared by an Indiana energy advocacy group, Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana.
This doesn’t necessarily mean the power going to these data centers is consistently fossil. Data centers can take years to construct and often rely on power fed to them from a distributed regional energy grid. But this does mean it would be exceptionally costly for any of these projects to build renewable generation on site, as a rising number of projects choose to do – not to mention that on a macro level, data centers may increasingly run up against the same cultural dynamics that are leading to solar and wind project denials. (See: this local news article about the Fort Wayne data center campus).
Chrissy Moy, a Google spokesperson, told me the Fort Wayne facility will get its power off of the PJM grid, and sent me links to solar projects and hydroelectric facilities in other states on the PJM it has power purchase agreements with. I’d note the company claims it “already matches” all of its global annual electricity demand with “renewable energy purchases.” What this means is that if Google can’t generate renewable energy for a data center directly, it will try to procure renewable energy at the same time from the same grid, even if it can’t literally use that clean power at that data center. And if that's not possible, it will search farther afield or at different times. (Google is one of the more aggressive big tech companies in this regard, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo details.) Google has also boasted that it will provide an undisclosed amount of excess clean electricity through rights transfers to Indiana Michigan Power when the tech company’s load is low and demand on the broader grid is peaking, as part of Google’s broader commitment to grid flexibility.
I reached out to Tom Wilson, an energy systems technical executive at the Electric Power Research Institute, an industry-focused organization that studies modern power and works with tech companies on flexible data center energy use, including Google. Wilson told me that in Indiana, many of the siting decisions for data centers were made before counties enacted moratoria against renewable energy and that tech companies may not always be knowingly siting projects in places where significant solar or wind generation would be impractical or even impossible. (We would just note that Fort Wayne, Indiana, has an opposition risk score of 84 in Heatmap Pro, meaning it would have been a very risky place to build a renewable energy project even without that restrictive ordinance.) It also indicates some areas may be laying down renewables restrictions after seeing data center development, which is in line with a potential land use techlash.
Wilson told me that two thirds of data centers rely on power from the existing energy grid whereas surveys indicate about a third choose to have at least some electricity generation on site. In at least the latter case, land use constraints and permitting problems really can be a hurdle for building renewable energy close to where data is processed. This is a problem exacerbated when centers are developed near population centers, which Wilson said is frequently the case because companies want to reduce “latency” for customers. In other words, they want to “reduce the time it takes to get answers to people” via artificial intelligence or other data products.
“The primary challenges are the size of the data center and the amount of space it takes to build renewables,” he said. “They are moving from 20 megawatt or 40 megawatt data centers to 100, 200, 300 megawatt data centers. It’s really hard to locate that much renewable [energy] right near a population center. So that requires transmission, and unfortunately right now in the U.S. and in many other countries, transmission takes a significant amount of time to build.”
The majority of data centers are served by regional power grids, Wilson told me. Companies like Google, Meta, and others continue to invest in renewable energy procurement while building facilities in areas that have restricted new solar or wind power infrastructure. In some cases, companies may feel they’re forced to seek these places out because the land is just plain cheap and has existing fiber optic cable networks.
At the same time, there are large data centers getting energy generated on site, and how they each approach their energy sources varies. It’s also not always consistent.
For instance, Meta’s new Prometheus supercluster complex in New Albany, Ohio — potentially the world’s first 1 gigawatt data center — will reportedly have a significant amount of new gas power generation constructed at the facility, even though the company also struck a deal with Invenergy over the summer to procure at least 400 megawatts of solar from two projects in Ohio that already have their permits. One is in Clinton County and was fully permitted but resulted in a years-long fight before the Ohio Power Siting Board and included conservative media backlash. The other is in Franklin County and got its permits in 2021, before a recent wave of opposition against solar projects. Prometheus itself will be sited on the Licking County side of New Albany, where solar has been extremely difficult to build, even though most of this Columbus suburb is in solar-supporting Franklin.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s xAI data center notoriously relies on a polluting gas plant in Memphis, Tennessee. The surrounding Shelby County had a solar moratorium until mere months ago that residents want to bring back. An affiliate company of xAI used for the project’s real estate is subleasing land near the data center for a solar farm, but it is unclear right now if it’ll power the data center.
In the end, it really does seem like data centers are being sited in places with renewable energy restrictions. What the data center developers plan to do about it — if anything — is still an open question.
Current conditions: After walloping Bermuda with winds of up to 100 miles per hour, Hurricane Imelda is veering northeast away from the United States • While downgraded from a hurricane, Humberto is set to soak Ireland and the United Kingdom as Storm Amy in the coming days and bring winds of up to 90 miles per hour • Typhoon Matmo is strengthening as it hits the Philippines and barrels toward China.
The Department of Energy is canceling two regional hydrogen hubs in California and the Pacific Northwest as part of a broader rescinding of 321 grants worth $7.5 billion for projects nationwide. Going after the hydrogen hubs, which the oil and gas industry lobbied to keep open after President Donald Trump came back to office, “leaves the agency’s intentions for the remaining five hubs scattered throughout the Midwest, Midatlantic, Appalachia, the Great Plains, and Texas unclear,” Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote yesterday.
The list of canceled projects that Emily got her hands on “does seem to confirm that blue state grants were the hardest hit,” she wrote. But, she found, “many would actually have benefitted Republican strongholds,” including a $20 million grant for a manufacturing plant in Texas that was slated to create 200 jobs.
Tesla’s global deliveries rose 7% in the third quarter, hitting a new record as Americans rushed to buy electric vehicles before the federal tax credit expired on September 30. The automaker delivered 497,099 vehicles in the three months leading up to that date, up from 462,890 in the same period last year, according to the Financial Times. That was well above analyst forecasts of 444,000.
That may do little to turn around the headwinds blasting the EV giant. While the company benefited from buyers scrambling to tap the federal EV tax credit, Tesla sank to its lowest-ever share of the electric vehicle market in August as drivers flocked to offerings from other automakers. It’s not just a problem in the U.S. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote last month, “Thanks to CEO Elon Musk’s association with right wing politics in the U.S. and abroad, and to fierce competition from Chinese EV leader BYD, Tesla’s sales have fallen dramatically in Europe. Globally, BYD overtook Tesla in sales last year.”
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Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch. Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the British Conservatives, has vowed to repeal the United Kingdom’s landmark climate law if her party, colloquially known as the Tories, wins the next election. Eliminating the Climate Change Act, passed almost unanimously under a Tory government in 2008, would dismantle controls on greenhouse gas emissions and remove what The Guardian described as “the cornerstone of green and energy policy for successive governments” for the past 17 years.
The move rankled past Tory leaders. Former Prime Minister Theresa May condemned the campaign pledge as a “catastrophic mistake.” Calling it a “retrograde” step, she said that “while consensus is being tested, the science remains the same.” Alok Sharma, the former Tory minister who led the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in 2021, told The Guardian in a separate article that a repeal risked “many tens of billions of pounds of private sector investment and accompanying jobs.”
Sea ice in Antarctica reached its third-smallest winter peak extent since satellite records began 47 years ago, according to a new analysis by Carbon Brief. Provisional data from the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center showed Antarctic sea ice reaching a winter maximum of just under 6.9 million square miles as of September 17. That’s nearly 350,000 square miles below the average between 1981 and 2010, the historical baseline against which recent changes in sea ice extent are compared. The “lengthening trend of lower Antarctic sea ice poses real concerns regarding stability and melting of the ice sheet,” one expert told the publication.
The finding comes as a “groundbreaking” study the European Geosciences Union published Thursday in the journal Earth System Dynamics found that Antarctic sea ice has emerged as a key predictor of accelerated ocean warming. Using Earth system models and satellite images from 1980 to 2020, the researchers found higher sea ice extent enhances cloud cover, which has a cooling effect overall by reducing incoming solar radiation. As a result, ongoing sea ice loss is linked to larger reductions in clouds, stronger surface warming, and even more ocean heat uptake, accelerating the cycle.
Duke Energy plans to meet surging demand for electricity by increasing its natural gas and battery capacity, keeping coal plants open for up to four years longer than previously estimated, and evaluating new sites for nuclear reactors. The 100-page biennial proposal published this week dials back plans for more renewables such as wind and solar. It also pushed back the earliest start date for a new reactor to 2037, declined to commit to either small modular reactors or large traditional units, and said the utility still needs extra protections against cost overruns before embarking on construction.
In the meantime, the added years of coal burning “will result in millions of tons in additional greenhouse gases over the next decade when combined with other proposed changes to the utility’s fuel mix,” Inside Climate News reported. In a statement to Axios, North Carolina Governor Josh Stein, a Democrat, called on the state’s utilities commission to “require significant changes” and condemned Duke for “retreating from the state’s clean energy future.”
New research by a team of scientists from the U.K. and New Zealand has found that new analytical methods could bolster conservation breeding programs by offering a better understanding of why eggs don’t hatch. The researchers used fluorescent dyes to discover that nearly 66% of 174 unhatched eggs examined in the study had been fertilized, whereas previous methods suggested that only 5.2% had been fertilized. “There are many different factors that contribute to breeding success,” Gary Ward, a co-author from the London-based ZSL Institute of Zoology, said in a statement, “and the more understanding we can have into why an egg might not hatch, the more we can refine our care for these birds and the better chance of recovery we can give them.”
And more on the week’s most important fights around renewable energy projects.
1. Ocean County, New Jersey – A Trump administration official said in a legal filing that the government is preparing to conduct a rulemaking that could restrict future offshore wind development and codify a view that could tie the hands of future presidential administrations.
2. Prince William County, Virginia – The large liberal city of Manassas rejected a battery project over fire fears, indicating that post-Moss Landing, anxieties continue to pervade in communities across the country.
3. Oklahoma County, Oklahoma – The Sooner state legislature on Monday held a joint committee meeting on solar and wind setbacks featuring prominent anti-wind advocates.
4. Tippacanoe County, Indiana – The developers of a large-scale solar project are suing the county over being rejected.
5. Dane County, Wisconsin – The Wisconsin Public Service Commission approved Invenergy’s Badger Hollow wind project – the state’s first new fully-permitted wind energy project in more than a decade.