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We read the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook so you don’t have to.
When former President Donald Trump exited the Oval Office in January 2021, he left behind a record of environmental rollbacks unrivaled in modern U.S. history. Over his 1,461 days as commander-in-chief, Trump replaced, eliminated, or otherwise dismantled more than 100 environmental rules — at least — from repealing the Clean Air Act to allowing coal plants to dump toxic wastewater into lakes and rivers to declaring open season on endangered gray wolves.
President Joe Biden then rolled back most of the rollbacks, largely before their full impacts could be felt, which is why some experts say the most significant climate consequence of Trump’s presidency was actually the loss of four years that could have moved the green transition forward.
Had all Trump’s policies gone into effect, the nonpartisan Rhodium Group estimated at the end of 2020, they would have added an additional 1.8 gigatons of CO2-equivalent to the atmosphere by 2035 — more than the annual energy emissions of Germany, Britain, and Canada combined. But even though we never felt the full brunt of them, the medical journal The Lancet estimated that the policies undertaken during his presidency were responsible for 22,000 deaths in 2019 alone due to sharp increases in things like asthma, heart disease, and lung cancer.
Now Trump is once again the presumed Republican nominee and currently leads Biden in general election polls. Were he to win, he has a ready roadmap for building on his dubious environmental legacy: Project 2025, a 920-page document developed by the right wing think tank The Heritage Foundation.
Project 2025 isn’t just a climate plan, or course — it’s a comprehensive proposal, covering everything from immigration to abortion, education, pornography, and child labor. Though billed as a “presidential transition project,” its wishlist includes numerous actions that would require Republican control of both chambers of Congress (admittedly possible, though currently looking like a longshot) to enact. Undaunted, the document sets its sights on the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s landmark climate legislation, which — since the U.S. is the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter — is all but necessary to keep the planet off the path to 1.5 degrees Celcius.
Here is how, precisely, Project 2025 aims to gut the IRA, shrink environmental protections, and slow forward momentum on climate change.
“‘Cheap grace’ aptly describes the Left’s love affair with environmental extremism. Those who suffer most from the policies environmentalism would have us enact are the aged, poor, and vulnerable. It is not a political cause, but a pseudo-religion meant to baptize liberals’ ruthless pursuit of absolute power in the holy water of environmental virtue … They would stand human affairs on their head, regarding human activity itself as fundamentally a threat to be sacrificed to the god of nature.”
Republicans have cannily turned “climate” into another culture war buzzword. As with Critical Race Theory before it, this rhetoric strategy divorces the climate movement from what it actually is — a disparate and diverse constellation of ideas for how to move forward in the face of the reality of human-driven global warming — and flattens it into a boogeyman that voters can easily dismiss. Rather than allow for honest debate over the upsides and drawbacks of LNG or of preserving ecosystems versus quickly building out renewables, the effect is to shut down any and all conversation before it can even start.
Project 2025 both outlines and embodies this strategy. In the foreword, Heritage Foundation president Kevin D. Roberts bafflingly characterizes climate as a “pseudo-religion”; elsewhere in the document, “climate extremism” is often lumped alongside “abortion, gender radicalism … and other woke ideas.”
For good measure, the Project 2025 playbook also uses religious metaphors to code any concern about the environment as being morally wrong or even evil. Republicans have already picked up on this cue: “We should not be bending the knee to this new religion … We are flogging ourselves and losing our modern way of life bowing to this new god of climate,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis argued during a Republican presidential debate last year.
“The National Labs have been too focused on climate change and renewable technologies. American science dominance is critical to U.S. national security and economic strength.”
As part of the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration channeled $1.5 billion to the Department of Energy’s national laboratories for “innovative research in clean technologies” and “advancing U.S. energy security.” This has been essential for “de-risking” the otherwise prohibitively expensive technological advancements necessary for reaching net zero.
Project 2025, naturally, wants none of that: “The three National Labs run by DOE’s [National Nuclear Security Administration] should continue to focus on national security issues,” Bernard McNamee, the former commissioner of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission under Trump, writes in the document’s chapter on revamping the department. Additionally, the “ill-advised attempt to expand the National Science Foundation’s mission from supporting university research to supporting an all-encompassing technology transition” (a mischaracterization) should be reconsidered, and “there should be a review to measure, prioritize, and consolidate DOE programs based on a range of beneficial factors, including degree of relationship to national security.” (While addressing the nation’s climate goals is an NSF priority, it is not done at the expense of supporting university research. Also, the current director of the NSF is a Trump appointee).
The Trump administration was memorably hostile toward science, and there are no signs he’ll change his heart during a second term; he’s already vowed to revive “Schedule F,” which reclassifies many government researchers and scientists as at-will employees, making them easier to “clean out” if they “frustrate his policies.”
Still, it does appear that the Heritage Foundation sees some usefulness for scientists: “The next administration should fund the design, development, and deployment of new nuclear warheads, including the production of plutonium pits in quantity,” Project 2025 says.
“The next conservative Administration should rescind all climate policies from its foreign aid programs (specifically USAID’s Climate Strategy 2022–2030 ); shut down the agency’s offices, programs, and directives designed to advance the Paris Climate Agreement; and narrowly limit funding to traditional climate mitigation efforts.”
The United States is the single greatest historical contributor to climate change, but Project 2025 has little sympathy for nations that might be suffering as a result. “The [Biden] administration has incorporated its radical climate policy into every USAID initiative,” Max Primorac, a Heritage Foundation research fellow, complains in the document. “It has joined or funded international partnerships dedicated to advancing the aims of the Paris Climate Agreement and has supported the idea of giving trillions of dollars more in aid transfers for ‘climate reparations.’”
Notably, Biden has not promised climate reparations — despite Trump and other Republicans’ frequent claims to the contrary. And while climate change is “a top driver of humanitarian need and human suffering, particularly for the poorest countries,” according to the United Nations, the former president slashed $200 million from environmental initiatives in his 2019 budget, including investments to help nations move away from heavy carbon-emitting industries.
“Taxpayer dollars should not be used to subsidize preferred businesses and energy resources, thereby distorting the market and undermining energy reliability.”
Among the programs and offices Project 2025 wants to eliminate (or at least substantially reduce) funding for are: the Climate Hub Office; the Clean Energy Corps, the Office of Domestic Climate Policy; the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy; the Grid Deployment Office; the Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Carbon; the Conservation Reserve Program; the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations; the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights; “the activities of EPA advisory bodies”; the Office of State and Community Energy Programs; ARPA-E; the DOE Loan Program Office; the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management; “grant programs for things like energy storage and the testing of grid-enhancing technologies”; “carbon capture utilization and storage programs”; the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program; the Bureau of Energy Resources; the Office of Emergency Management; the National Flood Insurance Program; and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (more on that below).
“Support repeal of massive spending bills like the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act, which established new programs and are providing hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to renewable energy developers, their investors, and special interests, and support the rescinding of all funds not already spent by these programs.”
Project 2025 opposes green subsidies across the board. It’s especially twitchy about programs aimed at helping “the private sector deploy and market clean energy and decarbonizing resources” — because, supposedly, the “government should not be picking winners and losers.”
Still, while it’s uncertain how much damage a Republican president could do to the Inflation Reduction Act without the help of a conservative-controlled Congress, Project 2025 makes clear there are lots of places conservatives can chip away, including going after “subsidies of electric vehicles,” “subsidies for transit expansion,” and subsidies renewables like wind and solar. Additionally, the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy “is a conduit for taxpayer dollars to fund progressive policies, including decarbonizing the economy and renewable resources.” That won’t do: “Eliminate EERE,” it says, or otherwise defund it.
“While individual investors may prefer to invest in ‘green’ companies, ‘woke’ companies, or companies with greater board diversity, and may even be willing to sacrifice some financial gains to do so, the question relevant to [the Department of Labor] is whether, and under what conditions, fiduciaries should be permitted to follow this path as well.”
If we’re being honest, though, isn’t the whole “ESG is evil” thing kind of last year?
“The new Administration’s review will permit a fresh look at past monument decrees and new ones by President Biden. Furthermore, the new Administration must vigorously defend the downward adjustments it makes to permit a ruling on a President’s authority to reduce the size of national monuments by the U.S. Supreme Court.”
President Trump was responsible for the most significant reduction in protected land in U.S. history. When he took office, Biden reinstated the protections — mainly in Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. Project 2025 prioritizes rolling back the rollback of the rollback, but making it stick by taking the case to the conservative-controlled Supreme Court.
The former acting Bureau of Land Management director under Trump, William Perry Pendley, writes in the section on reforming the Department of the Interior that Biden is “abusing National Environmental Policy Act processes, the Antiquities Act, and bureaucratic procedures to advance a radical climate agenda,” and directs an incoming Republican president to “seek repeal of the Antiquities Act.” Republicans and Democrats alike have used the Antiquities Act over the decades to protect scenic and culturally significant places, including the Grand Canyon, Zion, and Olympic National Parks. Any Supreme Court ruling could effectively curb the ability of future presidents to protect scenic and culturally important parts of the country.
“NOAA consists of six main offices ... Together, these form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”
Thomas F. Gilman, writing on reforms for the Department of Commerce, gets right to the point: “Break up NOAA.” The agency’s “emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable,” he claims, adding, that “its current organization corrupts its useful functions.”
In practice, that would mean the National Weather Service should “fully commercialize its forecasting operations,” since “Americans rely on weather forecasts and warnings provided by … private companies such as AccuWeather,” Gilman writes. It’s a notable shoutout: Barry Lee Myers, the former CEO of AccuWeather, was briefly a Trump nominee to, uh, run NOAA.
Gilman has ideas for the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, too, writing that it “provides theoretical science” and is “the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism,” and should therefore be “disbanded.” Data from the National Hurricane Center is further ordered to be “presented neutrally, without adjustments intended to support any one side in the climate debate.”
Echoing the Trump administration’s hostility toward the sciences, he goes on to allege that “scientific agencies like NOAA are vulnerable to obstructionism … if political appointees are not wholly in sync with administration policy” — never mind that disagreement is one of the most essential parts of scientific research and progress.
But don’t worry: Project 2025 also calls for an elevation of … “the Office of Space Commerce.” Phew.
Republicans are going to make dishwasher cycle times a culture war or die trying.
Project 2025 dictates that “Congress should reform the Natural Gas Act” to “eliminate political and climate-change interference in DOE approvals of liquefied natural gas exports.” Currently, the DOE must decide if it is in the “public interest” to allow LNG exports to non-free trade agreement countries — the only part of the permitting process that could even potentially consider the export terminal’s impacts on frontline communities or their effect on climate change more largely
How? By narrowing the Natural Gas Act to only consider “whether there is a need for the natural gas” and the “impacts of the actual pipeline itself, not indirect upstream and downstream effects.”
The next Republican president should “immediately” reopen the Arctic to drilling, expand the controversial Willow drilling project, max out offshore oil and natural gas lease sales, and restart coal leasing in Wyoming and Montana, the authors write.
Mandy Gunasekara, Trump’s former Environmental Protection Agency chief of staff, details almost gleefully how the agency’s regulatory powers will be dismantled, from preventing downwind states from “over-controlling” their upwind neighbors to loosening car emission standards and beyond.
Since 1968, California has been allowed to set stricter vehicle emission limits than the federal government thanks to a Clean Air Act waiver; other states are welcome but not required to opt in. As president, Trump revoked California’s right to include greenhouse gases in its emissions considerations and barred other states from adopting its criteria. That seems like it’s back on the table — and could be headed to a consequential decision in the Supreme Court.
Project 2025 proposes a fleet-wide average of 35 miles per gallon, far below current benchmarks of 49 miles per gallon by 2026 and 58 miles per gallon by 2032.
There is no question that the management of wild horses and burros is a big problem for the Western United States. But Project 2025 waves off strategies like “expanded adoptions” and “more effective use of fertility controls” as “not enough,” writing that “Congress must enact laws permitting the BLM to dispose humanely of these animals.”
Project 2025 aims not only to gut the Endangered Species Act, but also to “direct the Fish and Wildlife Service to end its abuse of Section 10( j) of the ESA,” which is being used to reintroduce grizzly bears in Washington state and wolves in Colorado.
Project 2025 says that “the Department of Energy should end the Biden Administration’s unprovoked war on fossil fuels, restore America’s energy independence, oppose eyesore windmills built at taxpayer expense, and respect the right of Americans to buy and drive cars of their own choosing, rather than trying to force them into electric vehicles and eventually out of the driver’s seat altogether in favor of self-driving robots.” But as far as roadmaps go, that doesn’t look much like a way forward — it looks like holding back the inevitable. If that’s the case, then self-driving robots start to look good.
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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.”
Scott Eisen/Getty Images
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.