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At least for the foreseeable future. But is the Manchin-Barrasso bill actually worth it?
So … is the permitting reform bill any good or not?
Earlier this year, Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and John Barrasso of Wyoming proposed a bill that would change federal environmental rules so as to spur a buildout of new energy infrastructure around the country.
Their proposal would have loosened rules for oil and gas drilling and exporting while changing federal law to encourage the construction of more clean energy.
These renewables-friendly changes included creating a new legal regime that would push utilities and grid operators to build significantly more long-distance power lines, triggering a nationwide boost to renewable resources. They would also have changed the regulations governing geothermal power generation, allowing new enhanced geothermal wells to play by the same federal rules that bind oil and gas.
The legislation was announced in July and then … nothing happened.
Now it seems likely to come back. Congress is eyeing its final agenda items for the year, and permitting reform is one of them. Representative Bruce Westerman, a Republican who chairs the House Committee on Natural Resources, is currently said to be revamping Manchin and Barrasso’s proposal to include reforms to the National Environmental Policy Act, a bedrock law that guides the process — but not the outcome — of virtually every major decision that the federal government makes and requires it to study the environmental impact of its policies.
We don’t know what those changes will look like yet, though they’ll have to come soon — the new Congress gets sworn in in just a few weeks. Which means lawmakers will have to get the proposed changes, process them, and decide whether to vote for them in a very short period of time — just a few days.
So during this liminal period, then, I wanted to take a moment to look at the other parts of the bill. Earlier this year, we got a sense of what the bill’s quantitative effects might be. They suggest that the legislation — at least in the initial version proposed by Manchin and Barrasso — could very well help cut U.S. emissions, or at least leave them flat. But after that? It starts to get complicated.
Republicans have long pushed for changes to the federal government’s permitting regime.
But in recent years, Democrats — who hope to prompt a national surge of clean energy construction — have come aboard too. The Biden administration, frustrated that some parts of the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law haven’t resulted in the large-scale projects they hoped for, has come to back permitting reform explicitly, although they have not endorsed Manchin and Barrasso’s bill.
“The president has been clear … that we believe permitting reform should pass on a bipartisan basis — and that we believe permitting needs to be optimized for building out a clean energy economy,” John Podesta, a White House senior advisor who is now the country’s top climate diplomat, said in a speech last year.
The White House’s support of bipartisan permitting reform is more than just posturing: Because of Senate math, any changes to the country’s permitting laws almost certainly must be bipartisan. Until a bare majority of Democratic senators exists to kill the legislative filibuster, it will take a vote of at least 60 senators — a so-called supermajority — to alter most pre-existing federal legislation.
So the question, then, is: Is this attempt at permitting reform worth passing? Is this package of fossil fuel concessions and clean energy incentives likely to reduce emissions more than it increases them?
I won’t try to answer that question comprehensively today, and we can’t even answer it fully until we know the scope of Westerman’s changes. But I do want to share an analysis from the center-left think tank Third Way and other researchers that suggests that the answer is “yes.”
This analysis, released in September, argues that Manchin and Barrasso’s bill would modestly increase emissions by encouraging more oil and gas drilling on federal lands. But that increase would likely be dwarfed by a large decrease in emissions prompted by building out the country’s electricity transmission grid.
More specifically, it finds that while the pro-fossil fuel provisions could raise global climate pollution by as much as 6.1 billion metric tons by 2050, the bill’s support for transmission could cut emissions by as much as 15.7 billion metric tons in that time (although the final number, as you’ll see, is a very high end estimate). That’s because, as I’ve written before, building the grid will allow for more renewable, geothermal, and other forms of zero-carbon electricity generation to get built. And the country can only reduce emissions by building more zero-carbon electricity.
Some of those emissions increases from oil and gas are now likely to occur whether or not the bill passes — the Trump administration will encourage fossil fuel extraction and export far beyond what a Harris administration would have done.
But even in a more conservative scenario, the transmission provisions would still cut emissions by 6.5 billion metric tons by 2050, Third Way’s synthesis says. That would mean — when compared to the pro-fossil policies — that the bill has a much more modest effect overall, cutting emissions by just over 400 million tons through 2050.
These aren’t the only numbers out there. An analysis by Jeremy Symons, the former vice president of public affairs at the Environmental Defense Fund, argues that the bill’s loosening of some Biden-era restrictions on liquified natural gas export terminals will result in a tremendous LNG boom. He asserts that the bill’s LNG provisions could increase global emissions by 8.5 to 11 gigatons; his analysis, however, draws heavily from a controversial, initially erroneous, and now updated study from the Cornell ecologist Robert Howarth that contends American natural gas is far worse for the climate than coal.
Third Way did not include Symons’ study in its analysis. Instead, it cites a different study led by the Princeton professor Jesse Jenkins (with whom I cohost Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast) that uses natural-gas emissions estimates more in line with the broader scholarly literature. That modeling study indicates that the LNG provisions in the Manchin-Barrasso bill could increase emissions by as much as 3.3 gigatons — or decrease them by 2.4 gigatons.
I’m not going to get more into the LNG question in this story. And it’s somewhat less important than it was earlier this year because Trump administration is likely to approve as many LNG export terminals as it can. (That doesn’t mean those terminals will get built: Right now, a dozen LNG terminals have been approved but not built due to a lack of global demand for more LNG.) Instead, I want to dive into two specific provisions in the bill — on oil and gas leasing and transmission — that reveal the broader challenges of trying to speak concretely about this proposal.
By far the most climate-friendly provisions in EPRA concern its support of long-distance electricity transmission. As I’ve covered before, the lack of electricity transmission is now one of the biggest barriers to building new wind, solar, and other clean energy in the United States; the construction of new wind farms, in particular, seems to be slowing down because of a lack of available power lines to carry their electrons.
Manchin and Barrasso’s proposal aims to build more transmission largely by granting new powers to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the independent agency that oversees the country’s power grids. EPRA would, for instance, allow FERC to step in and approve transmission lines that are “in the national interest” if a state has not acted on a given project within a year. The law also clarifies who should pay for a new power line, encoding the idea that customers who benefit from a line should pay for it. And it lets FERC approve payments from developers to the communities where new transmission infrastructure gets built, potentially smoothing approvals at the local level.
The bill also instructs FERC to write a rule that will require each part of the country to build a minimal amount of power lines that allow regions to exchange power with their neighbors. This measure — meant to spur new “interregional” transmission infrastructure — aims to knit the national grid more closely together and lower power costs on average.
How much would these policies reduce national emissions? The truth is, that’s extremely difficult to model. “There’s nothing in the EPRA that says, Thou shalt build this much transmission,” Charles Teplin, a grid expert at the think tank RMI, told me.
Instead, the bill aims to kick off a process that will result in more transmission getting built. That transmission should — in theory — bring more renewables online. But what will the size of that buildout be, and how many emissions will those renewables displace?
Answering these questions requires, again, estimating the uncertain. To come up with a reasonable, conservative figure to represent the amount of regional transmission that might get built under the new FERC process, they looked at what happened when a similar process was overseen by the Midwest’s grid. Then they rounded down that figure significantly.
Teplin and his colleagues also assumed that some big power lines that have already been proposed nationwide — roughly 15 gigawatts, to be exact — will get completed faster because of these new laws, so their analysis starts to bring them online by 2029. One only need look at the nearly two-decade saga of SunZia, a large power line that crosses New Mexico and Arizona, to see how long it can take to finish those projects today.
Under those assumptions, the law should more than double the rate of America’s transmission buildout, Teplin and his team estimated. Right now, the country builds perhaps 1 gigawatt of new transmission lines every year; under their assumptions, that would leap to 2 to 4 gigawatts a year.
So how many emissions would these new lines avoid? Using a report published by Grid Strategies, a power sector consulting firm that advocates for more transmission, Teplin and his colleagues estimate that each “gigawatt-mile” of new transmission will let operators add about 32 gigawatts of solar and wind to the grid each year. (This suggests that, most of the time, the lines would run at about 30% of capacity.)
Finally, the team assumed that electricity from these new renewable projects will replace power from natural gas plants. That, too, is an approximation: Some of those new wind and solar farms will drive out coal plants; others might replace non-emitting resources like nuclear or hydroelectric dams; but in general they will reduce gas burning.
When you put all those figures together, RMI’s analysis suggests that the legislation could build roughly twice as much new clean energy generation by 2050 as exists in all fossil-fuel power plants today. These new resources would help avoid about 6.5 gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions by the middle of the century.
That may seem like a big number — but Third Way was actually able to reach an even larger estimate. Teplin and his team didn’t try to differentiate, for instance, between the effects of a recent FERC order, which requires utilities to build more transmission within regions, and the proposed Manchin-Barrasso bill, which shores up the legality of that FERC order and would also induce utilities to build more power lines between regions. Some legal experts argue that the recent FERC order will be on shaky ground if the Manchin-Barrasso bill doesn’t pass; others say it’s stable enough as-is.
If you assume that courts will kill the FERC order unless Congress acts, then that should raise your estimate of what Manchin-Barrasso might do. That’s essentially what Third Way did — by giving the bill more credit for the resulting regional transmission buildout, they say that its carbon upside could be as large as 15.7 gigatons over the next 25 years. I’m not sure I would be that aggressive, but I think the transmission provisions would likely initiate a big buildout of renewables.
The Manchin-Barrasso bill contains a number of provisions that aim to increase the leasing of federal land for oil and gas drilling. One set requires that the Interior Department must offer a minimum amount of acres every year for oil and gas leasing. It also says that the land offered must be land that oil and gas companies actually want to lease.
This would address one of Republicans’ biggest objections to how the Biden administration has handled oil and gas extraction on federally owned land. As part of the Inflation Reduction Act, Manchin required that the government offer a minimum amount of oil and gas acreage for every acre of public land it leased to wind and solar developers. But Republicans have accused the Biden administration of getting around this rule by, in essence, offering useless or otherwise undesirable land.
(This concession, I should add, is now essentially moot until 2029, as the Trump administration will hasten to nominate the parcels that oil and gas companies are most excited to drill on. But it could bind a future Democratic administration, requiring them to offer good parcels for oil and gas leasing at the same time that they offer federal land for renewable development.)
The bill would also change some of the rules around the drilling allowed on the borders of federally owned land. Under the Manchin-Barrasso bill, companies could drill a vertical well on privately owned land, then extend it horizontally underground into federal land to extract oil or gas.
These provisions, too, are difficult to model. Much like the transmission proposal, they won’t lead to a guaranteed amount of drilling (although they will essentially produce a minimum amount of fossil fuel leasing). Nor will they substantially change the drilling that happens under Donald Trump or a future Republican president because any fossil fuel-loving administration is already free to go much further than these provisions would require them to.
To estimate the emissions impact of these provisions, the think tank Resources for the Future first tried to draw some error bars around their analysis. As a worst-case scenario, analysts modeled what would happen if the onshore drilling that happened during the Trump administration occurred every year from 2025 to 2050. Under this “Trump forever” scenario, emissions increase about 2.1 gigatons from 2025 to 2050. Under a less dire scenario, they would increase by about 0.6 gigatons during the same period.
These estimates almost certainly exceed what EPRA would actually do, Kevin Rennert, the director of RFF’s federal climate policy initiative, told me.
“None of the provisions would require the levels of leasing that we’re analyzing in the high-leasing scenario,” he said. “It’s clear [that the model is] a high upper bound on what EPRA itself would drive.” The provisions in the Manchin-Barrasso bill, in other words, are aimed much more at putting a floor under a future Democratic administration than they are raising a ceiling for a future Republican administration.
(Over all these discussions hangs a curious question about drilling for oil and gas on public land: How important is it, really? But that’s a question for another time.)
How you feel about this reform effort ultimately depends on how you feel about gambling. Is it worth hamstringing a future Democratic president’s ability to hem in oil production in exchange for unleashing a wave of new transmission under the Trump administration? How much do you weigh building more renewables versus selling more fossil fuels to the world?
Trump’s victory last month also changes the calculus. His administration will increase onshore oil and gas leasing regardless of whether this bill passes or not. He will stop the Energy Department’s effort to slow down the construction of LNG terminals and approve a new wave of projects. All of the bill’s support for fossil fuels, in other words, would be moot — Trump will do that stuff anyway. So the question becomes whether the bill’s support for new transmission infrastructure 1) actually builds new power lines, and 2) provides a useful tailwind for renewables and clean energy during what would otherwise be a difficult four years.
You can go in almost endless loops through the politics here. Given Trump’s antipathy toward renewables, why should we expect his administration to allow a transmission buildout in the first place, regardless of what Congress says? In which case, maybe the bill isn’t worth it. But on the other hand, maybe it is — since Trump’s going to do everything he can to juice fossil fuels and fight renewables, why not pass the bill and give power system regulators in blue and purple states an extra tool to juice clean energy construction? And hey, given Trump’s friendliness toward the AI boom, maybe he’ll wind up having to build more transmission just to service data centers.
We can’t make that political call quite yet. Until we know exactly how Westerman’s addition to the legislation would change NEPA, it’s hard to say where lawmakers should come down. But what’s clear is that this may be Congress’s last chance to deal with permitting reform for a while. Next year, the Republican majority is likely to be focused on tax cuts, and it’s not even clear that the reconciliation process would allow for changing permitting law. “We’re pretty pessimistic that you could include anything on permitting or transmission or any of these other things in the reconciliation process,” Devin Hartman, a policy director at the center-right think tank the R Street Institute, told Heatmap this week.
So this is it for permitting reform — it’s now or never for this set of changes. In a year full of surprises for climate and environmental law, we may yet get one more.
Jael Holzman contributed reporting.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the magnitude of emissions reductions from the Manchin-Barrasso bill found in Third Way’s analysis.
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Here at Heatmap, we write a lot about decarbonization — that is, the process of transitioning the global economy away from fossil fuels and toward long-term sustainable technologies for generating energy. What we don’t usually write about is what those technologies actually do. Sure, solar panels convert energy from the sun into electricity — but how, exactly? Why do wind turbines have to be that tall? What’s the difference between carbon capture, carbon offsets, and carbon removal, and why does it matter?
So today, we’re bringing you Climate 101, a primer on some of the key technologies of the energy transition. In this series, we’ll cover everything from what makes silicon a perfect material for solar panels (and computer chips), to what’s going on inside a lithium-ion battery, to the difference between advanced and enhanced geothermal.
There’s something here for everyone, whether you’re already an industry expert or merely climate curious. For instance, did you know that contemporary 17th century readers might have understood Don Quixote’s famous “tilting at windmills” to be an expression of NIMYBism? I sure didn’t! But I do now that I’ve read Jeva Lange’s 101 guide to wind energy.
That said, I’d like to extend an especial welcome to those who’ve come here feeling lost in the climate conversation and looking for a way to make sense of it. All of us at Heatmap have been there at some point or another, and we know how confusing — even scary — it can be. The constant drumbeat of news about heatwaves and floods and net-zero this and parts per million that is a lot to take in. We hope this information will help you start to see the bigger picture — because the sooner you do, the sooner you can join the transition, yourself.
Without further ado, here’s your Climate 101 syllabus:
Once you feel ready to go deeper, here are some more Heatmap stories to check out:
The basics on the world’s fastest-growing source of renewable energy.
Solar power is already the backbone of the energy transition. But while the basic technology has been around for decades, in more recent years, installations have proceeded at a record pace. In the United States, solar capacity has grown at an average annual rate of 28% over the past decade. Over a longer timeline, the growth is even more extraordinary — from an stalled capacity base of under 1 gigawatt with virtually no utility-scale solar in 2010, to over 60 gigawatts of utility-scale solar in 2020, and almost 175 gigawatts today. Solar is the fastest-growing source of renewable energy in both the U.S. and the world.
There are some drawbacks to solar, of course. The sun, famously, does not always shine, nor does it illuminate all places on Earth to an equal extent. Placing solar where it’s sunniest can sometimes mean more expense and complexity to connect to the grid. But combined with batteries — especially as energy storage systems develop beyond the four hours of storage offered by existing lithium-ion technology — solar power could be the core of a decarbonized grid.
Solar power can be thought of as a kind of cousin of the semiconductors that power all digital technology. As Princeton energy systems professor and Heatmap contributor Jesse Jenkins has explained, certain materials allow for electrons to flow more easily between molecules, carrying an electrical charge. On one end of the spectrum are your classic conductors, like copper, which are used in transmission lines; on the other end are insulators, like rubber, which limit electrical charges.
In between on that spectrum are semiconductors, which require some amount of energy to be used as a conductor. In the computing context these are used to make transistors, and in the energy context they’re used to make — you guessed it — solar panels.
In a solar panel, the semiconductor material absorbs heat and light from the sun, allowing electrons to flow. The best materials for solar panels, explained Jenkins, have just the right properties so that when they absorb light, all of that energy is used to get the electrons flowing and not turned into wasteful heat. Silicon fits the bill.
When you layer silicon with other materials, you can force the electrons to flow in a single direction consistently; add on a conductive material to siphon off those subatomic particles, and voilà, you’ve got direct current. Combine a bunch of these layers, and you’ve got a photovoltaic panel.
Globally, solar generation capacity stood at over 2,100 terawatt-hours in 2024, according to Our World in Data and the Energy Institute, growing by more than a quarter from the previous year. A huge portion of that growth has been in China, which has almost half of the world’s total installed solar capacity. Installations there have grown at around 40% per year in the past decade.
Solar is still a relatively small share of total electricity generation, however, let alone all energy usage, which includes sectors like transportation and industry. Solar is the sixth largest producer of electricity in the world, behind coal, gas, hydropower, nuclear power, and wind. It’s the fourth largest non-carbon-emitting generation source and the third largest renewable power source, after wind and hydropower.
Solar has taken off in the United States, too, where utility-scale installations make up almost 4% of all electricity generated.
While that doesn’t seem like much, overall growth in generation has been tremendous. In 2024, solar hit just over 300 terawatt-hours of generation in the U.S., compared to about 240 terawatt-hours in 2023 and just under 30 in 2014.
Looking forward, there’s even more solar installation planned. Developers plan to add some 63 gigawatts of capacity to the grid this year, following an additional 30 gigawatts in 2024, making up just over half of the total planned capacity additions, according to Energy information Administration.
Solar is cheap compared to other energy sources, and especially other renewable sources. The world has a lot of practice dealing with silicon at industrial scale, and China especially has rapidly advanced manufacturing processes for photovoltaic cells. Once the solar panel is manufactured, it’s relatively simple to install compared to a wind turbine. And compared to a gas- or coal-fired power plant, the fuel is free.
From 1975 to 2022, solar module costs fell from over $100 per watt to below $0.50, according to Our World In Data. From 2012 to 2022 alone, costs fell by about 90%, and have fallen by “around 20% every time the global cumulative capacity doubles,” writes OWID analyst Hannah Ritchie. Much of the decline in cost has been attributed to “Wright’s Law,” which says that unit costs fall as production increases.
While construction costs have flat-lined or slightly increased recently due to supply chain issues and overall inflation, the overall trend is one of cost declines, with solar construction costs declining from around $3,700 per kilowatt-hour in 2013, to around $1,600 in 2023.
There are solar panels at extreme latitudes — Alaska, for instance, has seen solar growth in the past few years. But there are obvious challenges with the low amount of sunlight for large stretches of the year. At higher latitudes, irradiance, a measure of how much power is transmitted from the sun to a specific area, is lower (although that also varies based on climate and elevation). Then there are also more day-to-day issues, such as the effect of snow and ice on panels, which can cause issues in turning sunlight into power (they literally block the panel from the sun). High latitudes can see wild swings in solar generation: In Tromso, in northern Norway, solar generation in summer months can be three times as high as the annual average, with a stretch of literally zero production in December and January.
While many Nordic countries have been leaders in decarbonizing their electricity grids, they tend not to rely on solar in that project. In Sweden, nuclear and hydropower are its largest non-carbon-emitting fuel sources for electricity; in Norway, electricity comes almost exclusively from hydropower.
There has been some kind of policy support for solar power since 1978, when the Energy Tax Act provided tax credits for solar power investment. Since then, the investment tax credit has been the workhorse of American solar policy. The tax credit as it was first established was worth 10% of the system’s upfront cost “for business energy property and equipment using energy resources other than oil or natural gas,” according to the Congressional Research Service.
But above that baseline consistency has been a fair amount of higher-level turmoil, especially recently. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 kicked up the value of that credit to 30% through 2007; Congress kept extending that timeline, with the ITC eventually scheduled to come down to 10% for utility-scale and zero for residential projects by 2024.
Then came the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which re-instituted the 30% investment tax credit, with bonuses for domestic manufacturing and installing solar in designated “energy communities,” which were supposed to be areas traditionally economically dependent on fossil fuels. The tax then transitioned into a “technology neutral” investment tax credit that applied across non-carbon-emitting energy sources, including solar, beginning in 2024.
This year, Congress overhauled the tax incentives for solar (and wind) yet again. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed in July, solar projects have to start construction by July 2026, or complete construction by the end of 2027 to qualify for the tax credit. The Internal Revenue Service later tightened up its definition of what it means for a project to start construction, emphasizing continuing actual physical construction activities as opposed to upfront expenditures, which could imperil future solar development.
At the same time, the Trump administration is applying a vise to renewables projects on public lands and for which the federal government plays a role in permitting. Renewable industry trade groups have said that the highest levels of the Department of Interior are obstructing permitting for solar projects on public lands, which are now subject to a much closer level of review than non-renewable energy projects.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Researchers attributed the falling cost of solar this century to “scale economies.” Much of this scale has been achieved in China, which dominates the market for solar panel production, especially for export, even though much of the technology was developed in the United States.
At this point, however, the cost of an actual solar system is increasingly made up of “soft costs” like labor and permitting, at least in the United States. According to data from the National Renewables Energy Laboratory, a utility-scale system costs $1.20 per watt, of which soft costs make up a third, $0.40. Ten years ago, a utility-scale system cost $2.90 per watt, of which soft costs was $1.20, or less than half.
Beyond working to make existing technology even cheaper, there are other materials-based advances that promise higher efficiency for solar panels.
The most prominent is “perovskite,” the name for a group of compounds with similar structures that absorb certain frequencies of light particularly well and, when stacked with silicon, can enable more output for a given amount of solar radiation. Perovskite cells have seen measured efficiencies upwards of 34% when combined with silicon, whereas typical solar cells top out around 20%.
The issue with perovskite is that it’s not particularly durable, partially due to weaker chemical bonds within the layers of the cell. It’s also more expensive than existing solar, although much of that comes down inefficient manufacturing processes. If those problems can be solved, perovskite could promise more output for the same level of soft costs as silicon-based solar panels.
The country’s largest source of renewable energy has a long history.
Was Don Quixote a NIMBY?
Miguel de Cervantes’ hero admittedly wasn’t tilting at turbines in 1605, but for some of his contemporary readers in 17th-century Spain, windmills for grinding wheat into flour were viewed as a “dangerous new technology,” author Simon Winchester writes in his forthcoming book, The Breath of the Gods: The History and Future of the Wind. One interpretation of Cervantes’ novel might be that Quixote was “actually doing battle with progress.”
Nearly four and a half centuries later, harnessing the energy of the wind remains controversial, even if the breeze is one of humankind’s longest-utilized resources. While wind is the largest source of renewable electricity generation in the United States today, high construction costs and local opposition have more recently stymied the industry’s continued expansion. The new presidential administration — suspicious of wind’s reliability and place in the American energy mix — has also been doing its very best to stunt any future growth in the sector.
Whether you’re catching up on Trump’s latest regulatory moves, you have your own concerns about the safety of the technology, or this is your first time even thinking about this energy resource, here is the blow-by-blow — sorry! — on wind power in the U.S.
At their most basic conceptual level, wind turbines work by converting kinetic energy — the energy of an object in motion; in this case, air particles — into electrical energy that can be used to power homes, buildings, factories, and data centers.
Like hydroelectric dams, turbines do this by first converting kinetic energy into mechanical energy. The wind turns the turbine blades, which spin a rotor that is connected to a generator. Inside the generator are magnets that rotate around coils of copper wire, creating a magnetic field that pushes and pulls the electrons within the copper. Voilà — and with gratitude to Michael Faraday — now you have an electrical current that can be distributed to the grid.
Turbines typically require an average wind speed of about 9 miles per hour to generate electricity, which is why they are constructed in deserts, mountain passes, on top of hills, or in shallow coastal waters offshore, where there is less in the way to obstruct the flow of wind. Higher elevations are also windier, so utility-scale wind turbines are frequently around 330 feet tall (though the largest turbines tower 600 feet or higher).
It depends on the size of the turbine and also the wind speed. The average capacity of a new land-based wind turbine in the U.S. was 3.4 megawatts in 2023 — but that’s the “nameplate capacity,” or what the turbine would generate if it ran at optimal capacity around the clock.
U.S. Department of Energy
In the U.S., the average capacity factor (i.e. the actual energy output) for a turbine is more like 42%, or close to two-fifths of its theoretical maximum output. The general rule of thumb is that one commercial turbine in the U.S. can power nearly 1,000 homes per month. In 2023, the latest year of data available, land-based and offshore wind turbines in the U.S. generated 425,235 gigawatt-hours of electricity, or enough to power 39 million American homes per year.
A common criticism of wind power is that it “stops working” if the wind isn’t blowing. While it’s true that wind is an intermittent resource, grid operators are used to coping with this. A renewables-heavy grid should combine different energy sources and utilize offline backup generators to prevent service interruptions during doldrums. Battery storage can also help handle fluctuations in demand and increase reliability.
At the same time, wind power is indeed dependent on, well, the wind. In 2023, for example, U.S. wind power generation dropped below 2022 levels due to lower-than-average wind speeds in parts of the Midwest. When you see a turbine that isn’t spinning, though, it isn’t necessarily because there isn’t enough wind. Turbines also have a “cut out” point at which they stop turning if it gets too windy, which protects the structural integrity of the blades and prevents Twisters-like mishaps, as well as keeps the rotor from over-spinning, which could strain or break the turbine’s internal rotating components used to generate electricity.
Though Americans have used wind power in various forms since the late 1800s, the oil crisis of the 1970s brought new interest, development, and investment in wind energy. “The American industry really got going after the suggestion from the Finns, the Swedes, the Danes,” who’d already been making advances in the technology, albeit on single-turbine scales, Winchester, the author of the forthcoming history of wind power, The Breath of the Gods, told me.
In the early 1970s, the Department of Energy issued a grant to William Heronemus, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, to explore the potential of wind energy. Heronemus became “really enthusiastic and built wind generators on the campus,” helping to modernize turbines into the more familiar construction we see widely today, Winchester said.
Some of Heronemus’ former students helped build the world’s first multi-turbine wind farm in New Hampshire in 1981. Though the blades of that farm interfered with nearby television reception — they had to be paused during prime time — the technology “seemed to everyone to make sense,” Winchester said. The Energy Policy Act of 1992, which introduced production tax credits for renewables, spurred further development through the end of the millennium.
Heronemus, a former Naval architect, had dreamed in the 1970s of building a flotilla of floating turbines mounted on “wind ships” that were powered by converting seawater into hydrogen fuel. Early experiments in offshore wind by the Energy Research and Development Administration, the progenitor of the Department of Energy, weren’t promising due to the technological limitations of the era — even commercial onshore wind was still in its infancy, and Heronemus’ plans looked like science-fiction.
In 1991, though, the Danes — ever the leaders in wind energy — successfully constructed the Vindeby Offshore Wind Farm, complete with 11 turbines and a total installed capacity of 5 megawatts. The Blyth offshore wind farm in northern Wales soon followed, with the United States finally constructing its first grid-connected offshore wind turbines off of Maine in 2013. The Block Island wind farm, with a capacity of 30 megawatts, is frequently cited as the first true offshore wind farm in the U.S., and began operating off the coast of Rhode Island in 2016.
Though offshore wind taps into higher and more consistent wind speeds off the ocean — and, as a result, is generally considered more efficient than onshore wind — building turbines at sea comes with its own set of challenges. Due to increased installation costs and the greater wear-and-tear of enduring saltwater and storms at sea, offshore wind is generally calculated to be about twice as expensive as onshore wind. “It’s unclear if offshore wind will ever be as cheap as onshore — even the most optimistic projections documented by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory have offshore wind more expensive than the current price of onshore in 2035,” according to Brian Potter in his newsletter, Construction Physics, though he notes that “past projections have underestimated the future cost reductions of wind turbines.”
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In the decade from 2014 to 2023, total wind capacity in the U.S. doubled. Onshore and offshore wind power is now responsible for over 10% of utility-scale electricity generation in the U.S., and has been the highest-producing renewable energy source in the nation since 2019. (Hydropower, the next highest-producing renewable energy source, is responsible for about 5.7% of the energy mix, by comparison.) In six states — Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, South Dakota, and North Dakota — onshore wind makes up more than a third of the current electricity mix, Climate Central reports.
Offshore wind has been slower to grow in the U.S. Even during the Biden administration, when the government targeted developing 30 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030, the industry faced financing challenges, transmission and integration obstacles, and limits in access to a skilled workforce, per a 2024 paper in Energy Research & Social Science. That same year, the Department of Energy reported that the nation had a total of 80,523 megawatts for offshore wind in operation and in the pipeline, which, under ideal conditions, could power 26 million homes. Many of those offshore projects and plans now face an uncertain future under the Trump administration.
Though we’re far removed from the 1880s, when suspicious Scots dismissed wind energy pioneer James Blyth’s home turbine as “the devil’s work,” there are still plenty of persistent concerns about the safety of wind power to people and animals.
Some worry about onshore wind turbines’ effects on people, including the perceived dangers of electromagnetic fields, shadow flicker from the turning blades, and sleep disturbance or stress. Per a 2014 systematic review of 60 peer-reviewed studies on wind turbines and human health by the National Institutes of Health, while there was “evidence to suggest that wind turbines can be a source of annoyance to some people, there was no evidence demonstrating a direct causal link between living in proximity to wind turbines and more serious physiological health effects.” The topic has since been extensively studied, with no reputable research concluding that turbines have poor health impacts on those who live near them.
Last year, the blade of a turbine at Vineyard Wind 1 broke and fell into the water, causing the temporary closure of beaches in Nantucket to protect people from the fiberglass debris. While no one was ultimately injured, GE Vernova, which owns Vineyard Wind, agreed earlier this year to settle with the town for $10.5 million to compensate for the tourism and business losses that resulted from the failure. Thankfully, as my colleague Jael Holzman has written, “major errors like blade failures are incredibly rare.”
There are also concerns about the dangers of wind turbines to some wildlife. Turbines do kill birds, including endangered golden eagles, which has led to opposition from environmental and local activist groups. But context is also important: The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has found that wind farms “represent just 0.03% of all human-related bird deaths in the U.S.” (Illegal shootings, for example, are the greatest cause of golden eagle deaths.) The continued use of fossil fuels and the ecological impacts of climate change also pose a far graver threat to birds than wind farms do. Still, there is room for discussion and improvement: The California Department of Fish and Wildlife issued a call earlier this year for proposals to help protect golden eagles from turbine collisions in its major wind resource areas.
Perhaps the strongest objection to offshore wind has come from concern for whales. Though there has been an ongoing “unusual mortality event” for whales off the East Coast dating back to 2016 — about the same time the burgeoning offshore wind industry took off in the United States — the two have been falsely correlated (especially by groups with ties to the fossil fuel industry). A recent government impact report ordered by Republicans even found that “NOAA Fisheries does not anticipate any death or serious injury to whales from offshore wind-related actions and has not recorded marine mammal deaths from offshore wind activities.” Still, that hasn’t stopped Republican leaders — including the president — from claiming offshore wind is making whales “a little batty.”
Polling by Heatmap has found that potential harm to wildlife is a top concern of both Democrats and Republicans when it comes to the deployment of renewable energy. Although there has been “no evidence to date that the offshore wind build-out off the Atlantic coast has harmed a single whale … studies have shown that activities related to offshore wind could harm a whale, which appears to be enough to override the benefits for some people,” my colleague Jael has explained. A number of environmental groups are attempting to prevent offshore and land-based wind development on conservationist grounds, to varying degrees of success. Despite these reservations, though, our polling has found that Americans on the coast largely support offshore wind development.
Aesthetic concerns are another reason wind faces opposition. The proposed Lava Ridge wind farm in Idaho, which was Heatmap’s most imperiled renewable energy project last year, faced intense opposition, ostensibly due to the visibility of the turbines from the Minidoka National Historic Site, the site of a Japanese internment camp. Coastal homeowners have raised the same complaint about offshore wind that would be visible from the beach, like the Skipjack offshore wind project, which would be situated off the coast of Maryland.
Not good. As one of President Trump’s first acts in office, he issued an executive order that the government “shall not issue new or renewed approvals, rights of way, permits, leases, or loans for onshore or offshore wind projects” until the completion of a “comprehensive assessment” of the industry’s impacts on the economy and the environment. Eight months later, federal agencies were still not processing applications for onshore wind projects.
Offshore wind is in even more trouble because such projects are sited entirely in federal waters. As of late July, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management had rescinded all designated wind energy areas — a decision that applies to some 3.5 million acres of federal waters, including the Central Atlantic, California, and Oregon. The Department of the Interior has also made moves to end what it calls the “special treatment for unreliable energy sources, such as wind,” including by “evaluating whether to stop onshore wind development on some federal lands and halting future offshore wind lease sales.” The Interior Department will also look into how “constructing and operating wind turbines might affect migratory bird populations.”
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, meanwhile, put strict restrictions on tax credits available to wind developers. Per Cleanview, the bill jeopardizes some 114 gigawatts of wind energy projects, while the Center for American Progress writes that “more than 17,000 jobs are connected to offshore wind power projects that are already canceled, on hold, or at risk from the Trump administration’s attacks on wind power.”
The year 2024 marked a record for new wind power capacity, with 117 gigawatts of wind energy installed globally. China in particular has taken a keen interest in constructing new wind farms, installing 26 gigawatts worth, or about 5,300 turbines, between January and May of last year alone.
Still, there are significant obstacles to the buildout of wind energy even outside of the United States, including competition from solar, which is now the cheapest and most widely deployed renewable energy resource in the world. High initial construction costs, deepened by inflation and supply-chain issues, have also stymied wind development.
There are an estimated 424 terawatts worth of wind energy available on the planet, and current wind turbines tap into just half a percent of that. According to Columbia Business School’s accounting, if maximized, wind has the potential to “abate 10% to 20% of CO2 emissions by 2050, through the clean electrification of power, heat, and road transport.”
Wind is also a heavy player in the Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Scenario, which aims for
7,100 terawatt hours of wind electricity generation worldwide by the end of the decade, per the International Energy Agency. But current annual growth would need to increase annual capacity additions from about 115 gigawatts in 2023 to 340 gigawatts in 2030. “Far greater policy and private-sector efforts are needed to achieve this level of capacity growth,” IEA notes, “with the most important areas for improvement being facilitating permitting for onshore wind and cost reductions for offshore wind.”
Wind turbines continue to become more efficient and more economical. Many of the advances have come in the form of bigger turbines, with the average height of a hub for a land-based turbine increasing 83% since the late 1990s. The world’s most powerful offshore turbine, Vestas’ V236-15.0 megawatt prototype, is, not coincidentally, also the world’s tallest, at 919 feet.
Advanced manufacturing techniques, such as the use of carbon fiber composites in rotor blades and 3D printed materials, could also lead to increases in efficiency. In a 2024 report, NREL anticipated that such innovations could potentially “unlock 80% more economically viable wind energy capacity within the contiguous United States.”
Floating offshore wind farms are another area of active innovation. Unlike the fixed-foundation turbines mainly used offshore today, floating turbines could be installed in deep waters and allow for development on trickier coastlines like off of Oregon and Washington state. Though there are no floating offshore wind farms in the United States yet, there are an estimated 266 gigawatts of floating turbine capacity in the pipeline globally.