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How a panther habitat became a battleground for the state’s environmental groups
About 27 miles inland from Florida’s southwestern coast sit three empty swaths of land among a sea of green. This undeveloped area represents both the future of Florida’s development and the culmination of a 20 year fight between the state’s environmentalists.
“What happens here will change the face of Collier County forever,” April Olson, a researcher at the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, told me.
Home to affluent Naples and its fast-growing population of retirees, the county recently approved plans for four new villages to be built in one of Florida’s last undeveloped areas, which is sandwiched between some of the state’s biggest and most important nature reserves. The region hasn’t enjoyed official protection, per se, but it has enjoyed a special status. But with almost half a million people having moved to Florida just last year, and more on the way, the county of 300,000 inhabitants and counting has decided to keep building.
Yet if this sounds like a typical story of developers versus environmentalists, it isn’t. Instead, it has become a unique point of tension among environmental groups in Florida. While one group believes it’s their responsibility to be a part of this conversation and help manage unavoidable development, the other side believes it’s their role to fight against it.
“I’m very surprised environmentalists are taking this pragmatic approach,” said Matthew Schwartz, executive director of the South Florida Wildlands Association. “This isn’t what environmentalists do.”
The result is a rift among the guardians of Florida’s wildlife.
The environmentalists all agree on what they’re trying to protect: the panthers. From a conservation perspective, the region has acted as a corridor for the state’s remaining endangered panthers, of which there are only 120-230 adults left in the wild, to travel.
The area is surrounded by protected nature reserves. To the north is a complex of wildlife, bird sanctuaries, and wetlands; to the northeast are two different wildlife management areas, and to the south is the Florida panther national wildlife refuge, another wildlife management area that is home to bears, a state forest, a state preserve, and a national preserve that ultimately extends into the Everglades.
“This area is a mosaic of habitat types that allows the panther to live,” said Schwartz. “What they are doing essentially fragmented those complexes from one another.”
But to understand how the area has become a battleground of environmentalist groups, you’ll first have to dive into the area’s weird regulatory history.
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The villages being constructed amid this remarkably untouched land are the most recent outcome of a partnership between developers, land owners, and environmental groups. Called the Rural Lands Stewardship Area (RLSA) program, this partnership changed zoning over 20 years ago to allow for more dense development in exchange for environmental protections.
“At the end of the day, the RLSA is a compromise,” said Meredith Budd, who worked on this project when she was a policy director at the Florida Wildlife Federation. (She is now the director of external affairs for the Live Wildly Foundation.)
The RLSA was born way back in 1999, when then-Florida Governor Jeb Bush put a moratorium on development in Collier County. He claimed that urban sprawl in Naples, the state’s fastest growing city at the time, had gotten out of hand and that everyone needed to figure out a better solution for development that preserved agricultural lands and protected the environment.
When the RLSA was first discussed and proposed in 2002, most environmentalist groups, including the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, were on board. The battle that has emerged among these groups has its roots in some imprecise wording from the original proposal that almost tripled the amount of land that developers could build on.
The total area was — and still is — about 198,000 acres. Just over half of the acreage is protected nature reserves, with the rest mostly agricultural land available for development. But there’s a catch. Prior to the RLSA, the zoning only allowed for a single house, called a “ranchette,” to be built every five acres on the developable land. While some of these solitary homes exist today on farms, the majority of the area is still uninhabited, therefore serving as a wildlife corridor as well as porous land to absorb heavy rainfall or storm surges.
That’s where the RLSA was supposed to come in. Published in 2002, it proposed to change the allotment, swapping denser housing for more protected land. It indicated that 16,805 acres of the 98,000 available could be built on if developers earned allowances by restoring other land, although what would count as restoration was a little hazy. The language around these numbers was also very vague, critically leaving room to increase the amount of credits able to be earned and, subsequently, the acres developed. It ultimately increased the amount of land up for development to 45,000 acres. Many of the conservancies didn’t realize this change until the five-year review in 2007.
“We were supportive of RLSA,” said Olson. “But we believe the goals are not being met. The public was promised that 16,000 acres would be developed and that 91% of the area would be preserved.”
But those working with the RLSA think what’s done is done. “There’s no point in going back and figuring out what happened,” said Budd. “The allowable footprint is over 40,000 acres. We have to move forward and figure out whether wildlife connections can be made.”
The intent of the 1999 moratorium was to curb development for the benefit of conservation. The RLSA is still attempting to do that, but it’s a voluntary program, and much of the power lies with the landowners.
But in the past few years, Florida’s real estate market has boomed and land use planning regulations have been weakened. This combination made landowners restless to start building, more able to do so, and more impatient when it comes to making concessions to conservationists. Pro-RLSA environmentalists say playing hardball in negotiations with developers just won’t fly anymore.
“These organizations trying to save habitat by killing these programs aren’t helping, they’re making it worse,” said Elizabeth Fleming, a representative at Defenders of Wildlife, which supports the RLSA.
The four new villages, which are cumulatively known as “The Town of Big Cypress,” are only the most recent developments in the RLSA. The first, called Ave Maria, began building in 2005 but construction paused for a while after the recession. Big Cypress is one of the first cohesive plans out of the RLSA to keep building since then, but six more are in development. Though not nearly finished yet, the website for the Town of Big Cypress promises to fulfill all the expectations of the American dream. “Families strolling along storefronts with ice cream cones in hand … on-street parking for easy access to the hair salon, dog groomer, dry cleaner, and local grocer,” the website says. It promises happiness, community, convenience — even good weather and “responsible growth.”.
Today, both sides agree that no development would be the best way forward. “In a perfect world, I would love to see no more of it developed,” said Budd. “If I was Queen, I would say you no longer have property rights.”
Bradley Cornell, policy associate at the Audubon Society of the Western Everglades, helped make the RLSA a reality. “I’d much rather build a wall at the Georgia line and tell everyone to go home,” he said. “But we’re expected to get another 15 million people in Florida over the next 50 years. All of these people are moving to Florida. Where in the hell are we going to put them without ruining Florida’s nature?”
Between July 2021 and 2022, 444,500 people moved to Florida, according to the Tampa Bay Economic Council. Despite the increase in hurricanes and flooding and the decrease in affordable insurance, Florida is more popular than it has ever been.
Those in favor of the RLSA say that development is going to happen with or without them, and the RLSA allows them a platform to negotiate. “This is the best compromise we could have gotten,” Cornell said.
The primary benefit of the RLSA is that it offers a chance at higher density living with a potentially smaller ecological footprint. The pro-RLSA group, for example, has kept some developments from further encroaching on panther habitat. These conservationists have negotiated underpasses and fencing in three different areas to allow panthers and wildlife to cross roads without getting hit. They have also gotten the county to require bear proof trash cans, lowering lights to avoid light pollution, and smoke easements, which require new tenants to sign off on necessary controlled burns to maintain the environment for the panther preserve. From the Town of Big Cypress alone, the RLSA crediting system requires the developers to permanently preserve 12,000 acres. In this case, they will be restoring the hydrology of a major wetland nearby, according to Cornell.
“We’re just trying to have a seat at the table and ensure that we can get the best conservation outcomes knowing that the landowners have the rights to this land and are permitted to do whatever they want,” said Fleming.
The pro-RLSAers also pushed for more protections than they got. For 10 years, they fought for a Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP) that would have legally bound the landowners to certain conservation requirements, according to Budd. But pushback from the anti-RLSA groups slowed the process so much that eventually it wasn’t worth the landowners’ time and it was withdrawn in August 2022. Those against the RLSA had many qualms with the HCP and don’t see its withdrawal as a loss.
The other arguments against the RLSA are plentiful.
The anti-RLSA group contends that any development will harm the panthers. “This project would be the nail in the coffin of the panthers,” said Olson.
This side of the debate also thinks that the zoning rules that predated the RLSA, which previously allowed for ranchettes every five acres, were highly unlikely to practically result in development. They argue that implementing the road infrastructure required for such scattered housing would be prohibitively expensive, suggesting that if the RLSA hadn’t been proposed, this area would have been left untouched.
“It’s highly unlikely that they would come in and build five-acre ranchettes,” said Olson. “They would need thousands of miles of new roads. One new 100 mile road was calculated to cost $111 million in 2015.”
Schwartz agreed. “This is completely unpopulated, undeveloped rural land,” he said. “People don’t want to buy a swath of rural land and move into undeveloped lands.”
But pro-RLSA environmentalists think that perspective is naive. “That’s a false argument,” says Fleming. “It’s based in no reality. People are moving here and that area is the least expensive if you want to be near Naples. I see no reason why that wouldn’t continue.”
Budd added that money is not a concern in this area. “Collier County is one of the highest wealth points in the state, if not the whole country,” she said. “So to say this would be too expensive is unreasonable.”
Another area in between Naples and the RLSA, called Golden Gate Boulevard, had the same one-in-five zoning restrictions as the RLSA and has been heavily developed in the last 10 years.
The RLSA plan also does not seem to be taking the changing climate into account. According to Olson, 96% of Collier County is susceptible to storm surge. The inland parts aren’t as vulnerable, but there is still a high threat and the area’s porosity would be lost with these developments. In addition, the RLSA will experience 109 days where the heat index is above 100 degrees Fahrenheit in 2023, and 138 in 2053, according to The Washington Post’s interactive map on heat waves.
County Commissioner Bill McDaniel said that climate change was not a concern in the process of developing The Town of Big Cypress. “There are no stipulations with regard to climate change because it’s such a nebulous discussion point,” he said.
Though the commissioner agreed that many climate-friendly technologies are comparable, if not less expensive to purchase and maintain, the RLSA does not require developers to install permeable concrete, heat pumps, special shade trees for temperature, or solar panels on the houses.
“We recommended numerous policies that would encourage more energy efficient homes and appliances, improve permeability of sidewalks, require complete street designs that all users can use, ease traffic congestion, increase Florida friendly plants that require less water, include stipulations for storm water runoff, etc.” said Olson. “They just ignored it. I have not once heard the County even discuss heat issues or climate issues.”
Budd said that the choice to build inland in itself is a climate-conscious decision. “When looking at this long term and the threats of climate change, the main threat is that people will be moving inland,” she said. “Where we put the development is the most important thing.”
One of the biggest landowners in the area, named for the county’s namesake, Collier Enterprises, echoed Budd’s sentiment in emailed responses. “The Town of Big Cypress is 19 miles from the coast, similar to Babcock Ranch, which did not sustain damage from the recent Hurricane Ian, having one of the largest reported storm surges ever recorded.” He added that most of the national buildings in the area provide options for energy efficiency and smart home technology
Though both sides have very different ideas of how to be involved in development, they are both aware that development is coming to Eastern Collier County and share the same ultimate desires for the region.
“We do know that the RLSA is going to grow,” said Olson. “We know that Collier County is going to grow. We just think it could be done more sustainably.”
Environmentalists everywhere are grappling with how to best save the last bastion of the lands and animals that sustain us. Depending on which side you take in the RLSA fight, it has become a question of cynicism versus hope or pragmatism versus pipe dreams.
Those against the RLSA are still championing its original goal: to preserve the environment and to curb excessive development. “The goal of the program wasn’t to allow each and every landowner to maximize their profit to the greatest extent,” said Nicole Johnson, Director of Governmental Relations at the Conservancy of Southwest Florida.
The other side has committed to pragmatism. “At the end of the day, the dollar speaks,” said Budd. “And unfortunately it speaks louder than the voices against the project.”
As regulations recede in Florida, the RLSA disagreement signals a philosophical choice environmentalists will increasingly have to make: If we can’t beat them, should we join them?
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Six months in, federal agencies are still refusing to grant crucial permits to wind developers.
Federal agencies are still refusing to process permit applications for onshore wind energy facilities nearly six months into the Trump administration, putting billions in energy infrastructure investments at risk.
On Trump’s first day in office, he issued two executive orders threatening the wind energy industry – one halting solar and wind approvals for 60 days and another commanding agencies to “not issue new or renewed approvals, rights of way, permits, leases or loans” for all wind projects until the completion of a new governmental review of the entire industry. As we were first to report, the solar pause was lifted in March and multiple solar projects have since been approved by the Bureau of Land Management. In addition, I learned in March that at least some transmission for wind farms sited on private lands may have a shot at getting federal permits, so it was unclear if some arms of the government might let wind projects proceed.
However, I have learned that the wind industry’s worst fears are indeed coming to pass. The Fish and Wildlife Service, which is responsible for approving any activity impacting endangered birds, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with greenlighting construction in federal wetlands, have simply stopped processing wind project permit applications after Trump’s orders – and the freeze appears immovable, unless something changes.
According to filings submitted to federal court Monday under penalty of perjury by Alliance for Clean Energy New York, at least three wind projects in the Empire State – Terra-Gen’s Prattsburgh Wind, Invenergy’s Canisteo Wind, and Apex’s Heritage Wind – have been unable to get the Army Corps or Fish and Wildlife Service to continue processing their permitting applications. In the filings, ACE NY states that land-based wind projects “cannot simply be put on a shelf for a few years until such time as the federal government may choose to resume permit review and issuance,” because “land leases expire, local permits and agreements expire, and as a result, the project must be terminated.”
While ACE NY’s filings discuss only these projects in New York, they describe the impacts as indicative of the national industry’s experience, and ACE NY’s executive director Marguerite Wells told me it is her understanding “that this is happening nationwide.”
“I can confirm that developers have conveyed to me that [the] Army Corps has stopped processing their applications specifically citing the wind ban,” Wells wrote in an email. “As I have understood it, the initial freeze covered both wind and solar projects, but the freeze was lifted for solar projects and not for wind projects.”
Lots of attention has been paid to Trump’s attacks on offshore wind, because those projects are sited entirely in federal waters. But while wind projects sited on private lands can hypothetically escape a federal review and keep sailing on through to operation, wind turbines are just so large in size that it’s hard to imagine that bird protection laws can’t apply to most of them. And that doesn’t account for wetlands, which seem to be now bedeviling multiple wind developers.
This means there’s an enormous economic risk in a six-month permitting pause, beyond impacts to future energy generation. The ACE NY filings state the impacts to New York alone represent more than $2 billion in capital investments, just in the land-based wind project pipeline, and there’s significant reason to believe other states are also experiencing similar risks. In a legal filing submitted by Democratic states challenging the executive order targeting wind, attorneys general listed at least three wind projects in Arizona – RWE’s Forged Ethic, AES’s West Camp, and Repsol’s Lava Run – as examples that may require approval from the federal government under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. As I’ve previously written, this is the same law that bird conservation advocates in Wyoming want Trump to use to reject wind proposals in their state, too.
The Fish and Wildlife Service and Army Corps of Engineers declined to comment after this story’s publication due to litigation on the matter. I also reached out to the developers involved in these projects to inquire about their commitments to these projects in light of the permitting pause. We’ll let you know if we hear back from them.
On power plant emissions, Fervo, and a UK nuclear plant
Current conditions: A week into Atlantic hurricane season, development in the basin looks “unfavorable through June” • Canadian wildfires have already burned more land than the annual average, at over 3.1 million hectares so far• Rescue efforts resumed Wednesday in the search for a school bus swept away by flash floods in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa.
EPA
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to announce on Wednesday the rollback of two major Biden-era power plant regulations, administration insiders told Bloomberg and Politico. The EPA will reportedly argue that the prior administration’s rules curbing carbon dioxide emissions at coal and gas plants were misplaced because the emissions “do not contribute significantly to dangerous pollution,” per The Guardian, despite research showing that the U.S. power sector has contributed 5% of all planet-warming pollution since 1990. The government will also reportedly argue that the carbon capture technology proposed by the prior administration to curb CO2 emissions at power plants is unproven and costly.
Similarly, the administration plans to soften limits on mercury emissions, which are released by burning coal, arguing that the Biden administration “improperly targeted coal-fire power plants” when it strengthened existing regulations in 2024. Per a document reviewed by The New York Times, the EPA’s proposal will “loosen emissions limits for toxic substances such as lead, nickel, and arsenic by 67%,” and for mercury at some coal power plants by as much as 70%. “Reversing these protections will take lives, drive up costs, and worsen the climate crisis,” Climate Action Campaign Director Margie Alt said in a statement. “Instead of protecting American families, [President] Trump and [EPA Administrator Lee] Zeldin are turning their backs on science and the public to side with big polluters.”
Fervo Energy announced Wednesday morning that it has secured $206 million in financing for its 400-megawatt Cape Station geothermal project in southwest Utah. The bulk of the new funding, $100 million, comes from the Breakthrough Energy Catalyst program.
Fervo’s announcement follows on the heels of the company’s Tuesday announcement that it had drilled its hottest and deepest well yet — at 15,000 feet and 500 degrees Fahrenheit — in just 16 days. As my colleague Katie Brigham reports, Fervo’s progress represents “an all too rare phenomenon: A first-of-a-kind clean energy project that has remained on track to hit its deadlines while securing the trust of institutional investors, who are often wary of betting on novel infrastructure projects.” Read her full report on the clean energy startup’s news here.
The United Kingdom said Tuesday that it will move forward with plans to construct a $19 billion nuclear power station in southwest England. Sizewell C, planned for coastal Suffolk, is expected to create 10,000 jobs and power 6 million homes, The New York Times reports. Sizewell would be only the second nuclear power plant to be built in the UK in over two decades; the country generates approximately 14% of its total electricity supply through nuclear energy. Critics, however, have pointed unfavorably to the other nuclear plant under construction in the UK, Hinkley Point C, which has experienced multiple delays and escalating costs throughout its development. “For those who have followed Sizewell’s progress over the years, there was a glaring omission in the announcement,” one columnist wrote for The Guardian. “What will consumers pay for Sizewell’s electricity? Will it still be substantially cheaper in real terms than the juice that will be generated at Hinkley Point C in Somerset?” The UK additionally announced this week that it has chosen Rolls-Royce as the “preferred bidder” to build the country’s first three small modular nuclear reactors.
The European Union on Tuesday proposed a ban on transactions with Nord Stream 1 and 2 as part of a new package of sanctions aimed at Russia, Bloomberg reports. “We want peace for Ukraine,” the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said at a news conference in Brussels. “Therefore, we are ramping up pressure on Russia, because strength is the only language that Russia will understand.” The package would also lower the price cap on Russian oil to $45 a barrel, down from $60 a barrel, von der Leyen said, as well as crack down on Moscow’s “shadow fleet” of vessels used to transport sanctioned products like crude oil. The EU’s 27 member states need to unanimously agree to the package for it to be adopted; their next meeting is on June 23.
The world’s oceans hit their second-highest temperature ever in May, according to the European Union’s Earth observation program Copernicus. The average sea surface temperature for the month was 20.79 degrees Celsius, just 0.14 degrees below May 2024’s record. Last year’s marine heat had been partly driven by El Niño in the Pacific, so the fact that the oceans remain warm in 2025 is alarming, Copernicus senior scientist Julien Nicolas told the Financial Times. “As sea surface temperatures rise, the ocean’s capacity to absorb carbon diminishes, potentially accelerating the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and intensifying future climate warming,” he said. In some areas around the UK and Ireland, the sea surface temperature is as high as 4 degrees Celsius above average.
Image: Todd Cravens/Unsplash
The Pacific Island nation of Tonga is poised to become the first country to recognize whales as legal persons — including by appointing them (human) representatives in court. “The time has come to recognize whales not merely as resources but as sentient beings with inherent rights,” Tongan Princess Angelika Lātūfuipeka Tukuʻaho said in comments delivered ahead of the U.N. Ocean Conference in Nice, France.
Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and the rest only have so much political capital to spend.
When Donald Trump first became a serious Presidential candidate in 2015, many big tech leaders sounded the alarm. When the U.S. threatened to exit the Paris Agreement for the first time, companies including Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook (now Meta) took out full page ads in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal urging Trump to stay in. He didn’t — and Elon Musk, in particular, was incensed.
But by the time specific climate legislation — namely the Inflation Reduction Act — was up for debate in 2022, these companies had largely clammed up. When Trump exited Paris once more, the response was markedly muted.
Now that the IRA’s tax credits face clear and present threats, this same story is playing out again. As the Senate makes its changes to the House’s proposed budget bill, tech giants such as Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon are keeping quiet, at least publicly, about their lobbying efforts. Most did not respond to my request for an interview or a statement clarifying their position, except to say they had “nothing to share on this topic,” as Microsoft did.
That’s not to say they have no opinion about the fate of clean energy tax credits. Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon have all voluntarily set ambitious net-zero emissions targets that they’re struggling to meet, largely due to booming data center electricity demand. They’re some of the biggest buyers of solar and wind energy, and are investing heavily in nuclear and geothermal. (On Wednesday morning, Pennsylvania’s Talen Energy announced an expanded power purchase agreement with Amazon, for nearly 2 gigawatts of power through 2042.) All of these energy sources are a whole lot more accessible with tax credits than without.
There’s little doubt the tech companies would prefer an abundant supply of cheap, clean energy. Exactly how much they’re willing to fight for it is the real question.
The answer may come down to priorities. “It’s hard to overstate how much this race for AI has just completely changed the business models and the way that these big tech companies are thinking about investment,” Jeff Navin, co-founder of the climate-focused government affairs firm Boundary Stone Partners, told me. “While they’re obviously going to be impacted by the price of energy, I think they’re even more interested and concerned about how quickly they can get energy built so that they can build these data centers.”
The tech industry has shown much more reluctance to stand up to Trump, period, this time around. As the president has moved from a political outsider to the central figure in the Republican party, hyperscalers have increasingly curried his favor as they advocate against actions that could pose an existential risk to their business — think tighter regulations on the tech sector or AI, or tariffs on key supplies made in Asia.
As Navin put it to me, “When you have a president who has very strong opinions on wind turbines and randomly throws companies’ names in tweets in the middle of the night, do you really want to stick your neck out and take on something that the president views as unpopular if you’ve got other business in front of him that could be more impactful for your bottom line?”
It is undeniably true that the AI-driven data center boom is pushing these companies to look for new sources of clean power. Last week Meta signed a major nuclear deal with Constellation Energy. Microsoft is also partnering with Constellation to reopen Three Mile Island, while Google and Amazon have both announced investments in companies developing small modular reactors. Meta, Google, and Microsoft are also investing in next-generation geothermal energy startups.
But while the companies are eager to tout these partnerships, Navin suspects most of their energy lobbying is now being directed towards efforts such as permitting reform and building out transmission infrastructure. Publicly available lobbying records confirm that these are indeed focus areas, as they’re critical to bringing data centers online quickly, regardless of how they’re powered and whether that power is subsidized. “They’re not going to stop construction on an energy project that has access to electricity just because that electricity is marginally more expensive,” Navin told me. “There’s just too much at stake.”
Tech companies have lobbied on numerous budget, tax, sustainability, and clean energy issues thus far this year. Amazon’s lobbying report is the only one to specifically call out efforts on “renewable energy tax credits,” while Meta cites “renewable energy policy” and Microsoft name-drops the IRA. But there’s no hard and fast standard for how companies describe the issues they’re lobbying on or what they’re looking to achieve. And perhaps most importantly, the reports don’t disclose how much money they allot to each issue, which would illuminate their priorities.
Lobbying can also happen indirectly, via industry groups such as the Clean Energy Buyers Association and the Data Center Coalition. Both have been vocal advocates for preserving the tax credits. The Wall Street Journal recently detailed a lobbying push by the latter — which counts Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Google among its most prominent members — that involved meetings with about 30 Republican senators and a letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune.
DCC didn’t respond to my request for an interview. But CEBA CEO Rich Powell told me, “If we take away these incentives right now, just as we’re getting the rust off the gears and getting back into growth mode for the electricity economy, we’re really concerned about price spikes.”
The leader of another industry group, Advanced Energy United, shared Powell’s concern that passing the bill would mean higher electricity prices. Taking away clean energy incentives would ”fundamentally undercut the financing structure for — let’s be frank — the vast majority of projects in the interconnection queue today,” Harry Godfrey, the managing director of AEU, told me.
Being part of an industry association is by no means a guarantee of political alignment on every issue. Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon are also members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — by far the largest lobbying group in the U.S. — which has a long history of opposing climate action and the IRA itself. Apple even left the Chamber in 2009 due to its climate policy stances.
But Powell and Godfrey implied that the tech giants' views are — or at least ought to be — in alignment with theirs. “Many of our members are lobbying independently. Many of them are lobbying alongside us. And then many of them are supporting CEBA to go and lobby on this,” Powell told me, though he wouldn’t reveal what actions any specific hyperscalers were taking.
Godfrey said that AEU’s positions are “certainly reflective of what large energy consumers, notably tech companies, have been working to pursue across a variety of technologies and with applicability to a couple of different types of credits.”
And yet hyperscalers may have already spent a good deal of their political capital fighting for a niche provision in the House’s version of the budget bill, which bans state-level AI regulation for a decade. That would make the AI boom infinitely easier for tech companies, who don’t want to deal with a patchwork of varying regulations, or really most regulations at all.
On top of everything else, big tech in particular is dealing with government-led anti-trust lawsuits, both at home and abroad. Google recently lost two major cases to the Department of Justice, related to its search and advertising business. A final decision is pending regarding the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust lawsuit against Meta, regarding the company’s acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp. Not to be outdone, Amazon will also be fighting an antitrust case brought by the FTC next year.
As these companies work to convince the public, politicians, and the courts that they’re not monopolistic rule-breakers, and that AI is a benevolent technology that the U.S. must develop before China, they certainly seem to be relinquishing the clean energy mantle they once sought to carry, at least rhetorically. We’ll know more once all these data centers come online. But if the present is any indication, speed, not green electrons, is the North Star.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect Amazon’s power purchase agreement with Talen Energy.