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If even only a few of these ideas are enacted, it would be a harbinger of doom for wind energy in America.
Major groups in the anti-offshore wind movement are going big, submitting a lengthy policy wish list to the Trump transition team, according to documents obtained and first reported by Heatmap News.
Key organizations in the movement against offshore wind submitted a draft executive order “on the suspension of offshore wind development” to the transition team. According to the draft, not only are activists asking for a pause on new permits for offshore wind but also for a stop-work order on all projects currently under construction. They’re also asking for the Health and Human Services Department to become a weapon against the growth of renewable energy, requesting studies into the health and environmental effects of wind turbines and transmission cables.
If the Trump team follows through on even some of the ideas in the draft executive order, it would be a huge win for a nascent anti-renewables uprising in America. It would also be a harbinger of pain to come for wind energy in America under Trump. At the very least, it shows activists believe the next president has many powers at his disposal to make offshore wind developers’ lives miserable.
Mandy Davis, president of REACT Alliance, told Heatmap it had submitted the draft executive order to the transition team, and that REACT was the primary group behind the document. Davis is also head of the National Offshore-Wind Opposition Alliance, a new country-wide coalition of local groups opposed to offshore wind.
Davis said the draft order demonstrates the myriad ways she thinks the incoming administration can curtail wind development beyond a pause on new permits. “Our role is going to be determined to a great degree by what our new administration is doing,” she told Heatmap. “We also have to be really, really cognizant of the fact that even though the federal government is going to put major monkey wrenches in the works … it’s going to take a while.”
We’re still watching and waiting to see if Trump follows through with his promise to stop offshore wind in its tracks on Day 1. New Jersey Republican congressman Jeff Van Drew said in a statement Monday that Trump’s team is working with his office to draft an order that “halt[s] offshore wind turbine activities” on the East Coast and the “proposed order” is “expected to be finalized within the first few months of the administration.”
It is worth noting that Van Drew is one of the anti-offshore wind’s favorite allies in Congress. But it is unclear to what extent – if any – that the activists’ draft executive order obtained by Heatmap is winding up in the product Van Drew and his staff are working on with the Trump team. Representatives for Van Drew’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the draft executive order.
It’s hard to fathom the extent of damage even a work stoppage order would have on the American offshore wind industry. Roughly 5.8 gigawatts of electricity capacity are under construction offshore and more than 8 gigawatts of projects have been fully permitted but haven’t begun construction, according to data shared with Heatmap News that was compiled by Christian Roselund, a policy analyst seasoned in the renewables industry. At least 10 gigawatts of additional capacity is currently in the federal review process and would be stymied by a halt at the permitting level. Taken together, the proposals in the draft could take millions of homes’ worth of carbon-free electricity off the table indefinitely.
A source within the offshore wind industry who requested anonymity to speak candidly said, if enacted, the proposals in the draft executive order would “lay off thousands of Americans” and potentially lead to work stoppages in other links in the industry’s supply chain, like shipyards in Louisiana and steel plants in the Midwest.
Jason Ryan, a spokesperson from American Clean Power, provided Heatmap a statement after initial publication of this story: “Executive orders restricting offshore wind energy undermine U.S. national security and job growth. Energy dominance requires a true ‘all of the above energy’ approach that unleashes our nation’s diverse resources to meet surging demand.”
What’s in the draft order?
In addition to pausing permits, the draft executive order calls on the incoming administration to:
According to emails and other documents reviewed by Heatmap, the draft executive order also involved the work of Lisa Quattrocki Knight, president of the Rhode Island anti-offshore wind organization Green Oceans and a board member of the National Offshore-Wind Opposition Alliance.
Along with the draft executive order, Heatmap obtained other documents with Green Oceans’ letterhead addressed to the incoming administration, calling on it to “justify removing all permitted wind farm projects off the eastern coast of the U.S.” under multiple potential legal authorities including the National Emergencies Act, the Defense Production Act, and Federal Power Act.
Knight did not respond to requests for an interview. A spokesperson for Green Oceans contacted by Heatmap confirmed the organization played a role in crafting the draft executive order and provided a statement that the “draft Executive Order was developed as part of our broader efforts to provide science-based, actionable recommendations to decision-makers, regardless of political affiliation.”
“We believe that meaningful environmental progress requires bipartisan cooperation, and we remain committed to working with all leaders who share our vision of a sustainable future,” the statement read.
The documents also show the draft was endorsed by key groups fighting offshore wind in the New Jersey and New York region, including Protect Our Coast Long Island and Save the East Coast, as well as local opposition groups based on the West Coast and in New England. Many of these organizations will be participating in a national day of protest this Saturday.
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And more on the week’s most important battles around renewable energy.
1. Indianapolis, Indiana – The Sooner state’s top energy official suggested energy developers should sue towns and county regulators over anti-renewable moratoria and restrictive ordinances, according to audio posted online by local politics blog Indy Politics.
2. Laramie County, Wyoming – It’s getting harder to win a permit for a wind project in Wyoming, despite it being home to some of the largest such projects in the country.
3. Ada County, Idaho – Like Wyoming, Idaho is seeing its most populated county locking up land from being available for renewables development.
4. Fairfield County, Ohio – Activists are plotting another appeal to overturn the Ohio Power Siting Board’s decision on a solar farm.
5. Franklin County, Virginia – Constitution Solar is struggling to assuage local residents’ complaints about a proposed project in this county despite doing, well, it appears anything to make them happy.
6. Sumter County, South Carolina – One solar developer is trying for a Hail Mary with South Carolina regulators to circumvent a painful local rejection.
A conversation with Barbara Kates-Garnick, former undersecretary of energy for the state of Massachusetts
This week’s conversation is with Barbara Kates-Garnick, a professor of practice at The Fletcher School at Tufts University, who before academia served as undersecretary of energy for the state of Massachusetts. I reached out to Kates-Garnick after I reported on the circumstances surrounding a major solar project cancellation in the Western Massachusetts town of Shutesbury, which I believe was indicative of the weakening hand developers have in conflicts with activists on the ground. I sought to best understand how folks enmeshed in the state’s decarbonization goals felt about what was happening to local renewables development in light of the de facto repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean electricity tax credit.
Of course, like anyone in Massachusetts, Kates-Garnick was blunt about the situation: it’s quite bad.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
So to start, how do you feel about the state’s odds of meeting its climate goals?
My own assumption is that it was going to be tough before all of the federal changes to meet those goals. They were highly ambitious and I really support the ambition, but now it’s going to be really, really difficult to meet the clean energy goals. It’s not that we shouldn't work hard to meet them but we have to understand that in this current state of affairs, the obstacles are going to be much greater. But when you take offshore wind off the table, the challenge becomes even more enormous.
Why is offshore wind necessary to meet the state’s climate targets?
It’s because it is a large resource that would be coming into the grid over a period of time. The significance is in the megawatts, the size and scale. It was particularly important and we’re land constrained in New England. And all of the sudden you’re taking such a large opportunity in generation off the table.
We can do energy efficiency and we can do solar but as you know from the Shutesbury situation, land is at a premium. Location – you can’t site onshore wind here. We tried really hard under former Governor Deval Patrick and that hit a lot of obstacles. So offshore wind is critical to meeting those goals.
Help me understand the conflicts over this land constraint – is Shutesbury an aberration or a bit of a tale of the tape of the problems here?
The Shutesbury situation reflects how we’re not a large geographical area. We’re not Texas. We can put solar on roofs but you need larger solar installations. We’ve encouraged the solar industry as much as possible. But the area is limited. Wind off the coast provided an alternative that was realistic and not a science experiment.
How much of this problem is state permitting? It feels like there is some land in a space like Massachusetts but people don’t want to use it for this.
Any time you try to put energy infrastructure into New England – whether it's a gas pipeline or a solar installation – there’s a lot of local environmental and permitting regulations that can really hold up a project. One of the good things Massachusetts has done is we made energy permitting easier and went through a permitting reform. We have an Energy Facility Siting Council.
There’s still ways local interests can hold up projects. I think that’s just a fact of life in New England.
So that’s why offshore wind is so important to New England.
It becomes more challenging. From a resource perspective, we are at the end of the fossil fuel pipeline. The middle Atlantic has more gas pipelines coming into it than we do in New England. Offshore wind represented a great opportunity for us.
With respect to the state permitting, it is possible to now overcome some local regulations in state permitting in ways that weren’t possible before. We did address permitting reform in Massachusetts. The Energy Facility Siting Council has played a great, important role in having that happen and [towns] can be overruled to a certain extent.
Well, but it sounds like what you’re saying is that the conflicts will still exist because land is at a premium?
Yeah. And local control will always play a role in that.
The Commonwealth signed permitting reform into law in 2024 and in that there were comprehensive reforms to the process for clean energy infrastructure. This has improved siting. But again that doesn’t always ensure a project will be permitted and you can easily find ways to hold them up.
What gives you hope for the future? Where’s the light at the end of the tunnel for you?
I think that by facilitating permitting reform and also participation – local participation – as early as possible in the stages of projects… I think this is where the key lies. You can pass regulations but a lot of it has to do with doing the work ahead of time on your project and satisfying the local community so you don’t have a bigger fight on your hands.
Here come Chip Roy and Lee Zeldin.
National Republican political leaders are beginning to intervene in local battles over battery storage, taking the side of activists against developers. It’s a worrisome trend for an industry that, until recently, was escaping the culture clashes once reserved only for solar and wind energy.
In late July, Texas Congressman Chip Roy sent a letter to energy storage developer Peregrine Energy voicing concerns about a 145 megawatt battery project proposed in rural Gillespie County, an area one hour north of San Antonio that sits in his district. Roy, an influential conservative firebrand running to be state attorney general, asked the company more than a dozen questions about the project, from its fire preparation plans to whether it may have ties to Chinese material suppliers, and stated that his office heard “frustrations and concerns” about the project from “hundreds of constituents – including state and local elected officials.”
“Gillespie County is subject to extreme drought, wildfires, and flash flooding events,” Roy wrote. “Naturally, residents are concerned about the environmental risks a battery storage facility poses to one of [the] most vulnerable areas in Texas, among other things.”
Peregrine told me in an email that the company then sought to assuage the congressman’s concerns, speaking with his staff over the phone. But Roy remained unmoved, now fully backing the local opposition to the project. “My office has met with representatives from Peregrine Energy, and while we appreciate the dialogue, we believe that this project warrants scrutiny,” Roy said in a statement provided by his staff when reached for comment. “We look forward to remaining engaged with Peregrine Energy and continuing to represent the people of Harper who feel strongly that this battery facility poses more harm than good.”
Republican interventions like these may feel out of the ordinary to many in the energy sector. Historically, conservative politicians like Roy often vote against writing new regulations governing the environment and public safety, and Texas has often been a bastion for that kind of policymaking. Not to mention Texas is a major hub for battery storage development, second only to California in total capacity installed onto the grid. The Lone Star state’s strained grid means there is no shortage of demand for excess back-up power.
Unfortunately for battery storage developers, national Republicans are now increasingly open to attacking individual battery storage projects in the same way they’ve sometimes fought solar and wind farms, especially when activists on the ground feel they’ve lost the fight with municipal and state regulators.
Last year, we launched The Fight with a story about the unincorporated town of Acton, California, where a battery project was approved by county officials in an area with high risk of experiencing wildfire. Local opponents of the facility, feeling that county and state courts would not fairly adjudicate their concerns, lobbied their elected representative in Congress – then-Rep. Mike Garcia – to do something, anything in response to the situation. And while Garcia was stymied from halting that individual battery project, he then tried to block the Energy Department from streamlining federal permits for the entire battery storage system sector. (The rulemaking was completed before the start of the Trump 2.0 administration. Garcia lost re-election last year.)
At the time, this was the first full-fledged example I could find of a Republican in Congress really picking up the mantle of the “BESS bomb” panic around large-scale battery facilities potentially posing an unacceptable risk to surrounding host communities. Sure, there’d been scares around lithium-ion batteries in e-bikes, for example. But battery storage in general? The sector has enjoyed bipartisan support at the national level, and definitely still does to some extent given that GOP lawmakers declined to pare back the industry’s Inflation Reduction Act credits in their recently-passed tax megabill.
But now there’s a very clear battery fire “butterfly effect” occurring in which local rage fails to get the attention of government officials focused on energy capacity so activists will just go to whatever ears are most sympathetic to them. This is resulting in percolating Republican ire against battery storage, point blank.
Indeed, Heatmap Pro’s August poll of 3,741 registered voters found that there are now three times as many strong opponents of battery storage facilities among Republicans than strong supporters.
Less than a month after Roy’s letter to Peregrine, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin personally visited his native Long Island, New York, to voice his support for those campaigning against a Key Capture Energy battery project in Hauppauge, a hamlet within the town of Islip. The EPA has no role in whether the project is built or not. But the endorsement – coupled with a New York Post op-ed declaring “battery sites are too risky for New York” – came right before a 12-month battery moratorium Islip had enacted was set to expire.
This week Islip extended the moratorium, indefinitely stopping the battery project. Next week, the New York City Council’s committee on fire and emergency management will be holding a public hearing to specifically address the local fears about storage projects.
As for Roy and Peregrine Energy, it’s unclear how the Texas Republican could stop the facility on his own. It has the permits necessary to build and Texas doesn’t have the kind of stringent environmental regulation that creates opportunities to stall construction.
But the lawmaker’s existing political clout in Washington and motivation to win the Republican primary nomination in a heated statewide contest make him a dangerous enemy for any company to have, especially energy developers linked in some way to the transition. As Garcia showed a year ago and Zeldin demonstrated over the summer, someone with a national platform and a megaphone could do a lot of damage to a single project, or worse. We’ve yet to truly see what will come from the flapping of this butterfly’s wings.