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The administration seems to be pursuing a “some of the above” strategy with little to no internal logic.

The Department of Energy justified terminating hundreds of congressionally-mandated grants issued by the Biden administration for clean energy projects last week (including for a backup battery at a children’s hospital) by arguing that they were bad investments for the American people.
“Following a thorough, individualized financial review, DOE determined that these projects did not adequately advance the nation’s energy needs, were not economically viable, and would not provide a positive return on investment of taxpayer dollars,” the agency’s press release said.
It’s puzzling, then, that the Trump administration is pouring vast government resources into saving aging coal plants and expediting advanced nuclear projects — two sources of energy that are famously financial black holes.
The Energy Department announced it would invest $625 million to “reinvigorate and expand America’s coal industry” in late September. Earlier this year, the agency also made $900 million available to “unlock commercial deployment of American-made small modular reactors.”
It’s hard to imagine what economic yardsticks would warrant funding to keep coal plants open. The cost of operating a coal plant in the U.S. has increased by nearly 30% since 2021 — faster than inflation — according to research by Energy Innovation. Driving that increase is the cost of coal itself, as well as the fact that the nation’s coal plants are simply getting very old and more expensive to maintain. “You can put all the money you want into a clunker, but at the end of the day, it’s really old, and it’s just going to keep getting more expensive over time, even if you have a short term fix,” Michelle Solomon, a program manager at Energy Innovation who authored the research, told me.
Keeping these plants online — even if they only operate some of the time— inevitably raises electricity bills. That’s because in many of the country’s electricity markets, the cost of power on any given day is determined by the most expensive plant running. On a hot summer day when everyone’s air conditioners are working hard and the grid operator has to tell a coal plant to switch on to meet demand, every electron delivered in the region will suddenly cost the same as coal, even if it was generated essentially for free by the sun or wind.
The Trump administration has also based its support for coal plants on the idea that they are needed for reliability. In theory, coal generation should be available around the clock. But in reality, the plants aren’t necessarily up to the task — and not just because they’re old. Sandy Creek in Texas, which began operating in 2013 and is the newest coal plant in the country, experienced a major failure this past April and is now expected to stay offline until 2027, according to the region’s grid operator. In a report last year, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation warned that outage rates for coal plants are increasing. This is in part due to wear and tear from the way these plants cycle on and off to accommodate renewable energy sources, the report said, but it’s also due to reduced maintenance as plant operators plan to retire the facilities.
“You can do the deferred maintenance. It might keep the plant operating for a bit longer, but at the end of the day, it’s still not going to be the most efficient source of energy, or the cheapest source of energy,” Solomon said.
The contradictions snowball from there. On September 30, the DOE opened a $525 million funding opportunity for coal plants titled “Restoring Reliability: Coal Recommissioning and Modernization,” inviting coal-fired power plants that are scheduled for retirement before 2032 or in rural areas to apply for grants that will help keep them open. The grant paperwork states that grid capacity challenges “are especially acute in regions with constrained transmission and sustained load growth.” Two days later, however, as part of the agency’s mass termination of grants, it canceled more than $1.3 billion in awards from the Grid Deployment Office to upgrade and install new transmission lines to ease those constraints.
The new funding opportunity may ultimately just shuffle awards around from one coal plant to another, or put previously-awarded projects through the time-and-money-intensive process of reapplying for the same funding under a new name. Up to $350 million of the total will go to as many as five coal plants, with initial funding to restart closed plants or to modernize old ones, and later phases designated for carbon capture, utilization, and storage retrofits. The agency said it will use “unobligated” money from three programs that were part of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act: the Carbon Capture Demonstration Projects Program, the Carbon Capture Large-Scale Pilot Projects, and the Energy Improvements in Rural or Remote Areas Program.
In a seeming act of cognitive dissonance, however, the agency has canceled awards for two coal-fired power plants that the Biden administration made under those same programs. One, a $6.5 million grant to Navajo Transitional Energy Company, a tribal-owned entity that owns a stake in New Mexico’s Four Corners Generating Station, would have funded a study to determine whether adding carbon capture and storage to the plant was economically viable. The other, a $50 million grant to TDA Research that would have helped the company validate its CCS technology at Dry Fork Station, a coal plant in Wyoming, was terminated in May.
Two more may be out the window. A new internal agency list of grants labeled “terminate” that circulated this week included an $8 million grant for the utility Duke Energy to evaluate the feasibility of capturing carbon from its Edwardsport plant in Indiana, and $350 million for Project Tundra, a carbon capture demonstration project at the Milton R. Young Station in North Dakota.
“It’s not internally consistent,” Jack Andreason Cavanaugh, a global fellow at the Columbia University’s Carbon Management Research Initiative, told me. “You’re canceling coal grants, but then you’re giving $630 million to keep them open. You’re also investing a ton of time and money into nuclear — which is great, to be clear — but these small modular reactors haven’t been deployed in the United States, and part of the reason is that they’re currently not economically viable.”
The closest any company has come thus far to deploying a small modular reactor in the U.S. is NuScale, a company that planned to build its first-of-a-kind reactors in Idaho and had secured agreements to sell the power to a group of public utilities in Utah. But between 2015, when it was first proposed, and late 2023, when it died, the project’s budget tripled from $3 billion to more than $9 billion, while its scale was reduced from 600 megawatts to 462 megawatts. Not all of that was inevitable — costs rose dramatically in the final few years due to inflation. The reason NuScale ultimately pulled out of the project is that the cost of electricity it generated was going to be too high for the market to bear.
It’s unclear how heavily the DOE will weigh project financials in the application process for the $900 million for nuclear reactors. In its funding announcement, it specified that the awards would be made “solely based on technical merit.” The agency’s official solicitation paperwork, however, names “financial viability” as one of the key review criteria. Regardless, the Trump administration appears to recognize the value in funding first-of-a-kind, risky technologies when it comes to nuclear, but is not applying the same standards to direct air capture or hydrogen plants.
I asked the Department of Energy to share the criteria it used in the project review process to determine economic viability. In response, spokesperson Ben Dietderich encouraged me to read Wright’s memorandum describing the review process from May. The memo outlines what types of documentation the agency will evaluate to reach a decision, but not the criteria for making that decision.
Solomon agreed that advanced nuclear might one day meet the grid’s growing power needs, but not anytime soon. “Hopefully in the long term, this technology does become a part of our electricity system. But certainly relying on it in the short term has real risks to electricity costs,” she said. “And also reliability, in the sense that the projects might not materialize.”
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The state formerly led by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum does not have a history of rejecting wind farms – which makes some recent difficulties especially noteworthy.
A wind farm in North Dakota – the former home of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum – is becoming a bellwether for the future of the sector in one of the most popular states for wind development.
At issue is Allete’s Longspur project, which would see 45 turbines span hundreds of acres in Morton County, west of Bismarck, the rural state’s most populous city.
Sited amid two already operating wind farms, the project will feed power not only to North Dakotans but also to Minnesotans, who, in the view of Allete, lack the style of open plains perfect for wind farms found in the Dakotas. Allete subsidiary Minnesota Power announced Longspur in August and is aiming to build and operate it by 2027, in time to qualify for clean electricity tax benefits under a hastened phase-out of the Inflation Reduction Act.
On paper, this sounds achievable. North Dakota is one of the nation’s largest producers of wind-generated power and not uncoincidentally boasts some of cheapest electricity in the country at a time when energy prices have become a potent political issue. Wind project rejections have happened, but they’ve been rare.
Yet last week, zoning officials in Morton County bucked the state’s wind-friendly reputation and voted to reject Longspur after more than an hour of testimony from rural residents who said they’d had enough wind development – and that officials should finish the job Donald Trump and Doug Burgum started.
Across the board, people who spoke were neighbors of existing wind projects and, if built, Longspur. It wasn’t that they didn’t want any wind turbines – or “windmills,” as they called them, echoing Trump’s nomenclature. But they didn’t want more of them. After hearing from the residents, zoning commission chair Jesse Kist came out against the project and suggested the county may have had enough wind development for now.
“I look at the area on this map and it is plum full of wind turbines, at this point,” Kist said, referencing a map where the project would be situated. “And we have a room full of people and we heard only from landowners, homeowners in opposition. Nobody in favor.”
This was a first for the county, zoning staff said, as public comment periods weren’t previously even considered necessary for a wind project. Opposition had never shown up like this before. This wasn’t lost on Andy Zachmeier, a county commissioner who also sits on the zoning panel, who confessed during the hearing that the county was approaching the point of overcrowding. “Sooner or later, when is too many enough?” he asked.
Zachmeier was ultimately one of the two officials on the commission to vote against rejecting Longspur. He told me he was looking to Burgum for a signal.
“The Green New Deal – I don’t have to like it but it’s there,” he said. “Governor Burgum is now our interior secretary. There’s been no press conferences by him telling the president to change the Green New Deal.” Zachmeier said it was not the county’s place to stop the project, but rather that it was up to the state government, a body Burgum once led. “That’s probably going to have to be a legislative question. There’s been nothing brought forward where the county can say, We’ve been inundated and we’ve had enough,” he told me.
The county commission oversees the zoning body, and on Wednesday, Zachmeier and his colleagues voted to deny Longspur’s rejection and requested that zoning officials reconsider whether the denial was a good idea, or even legally possible. Unlike at the hearing last week, landowners whose property includes the wind project area called for it to proceed, pointing to the monetary benefits its construction would provide them.
“We appreciate the strong support demonstrated by landowners at the recent Commission meeting,” Allete’s corporate communications director Amy Rutledge told me in an email. “This region of North Dakota combines exceptional wind resources, reliable electric transmission infrastructure, and a strong tradition of coexisting seamlessly with farming and ranching activities.”
I personally doubt that will be the end of Longspur’s problems before the zoning board, and I suspect this county will eventually restrict or even ban future wind projects. Morton County’s profile for renewables development is difficult, to say the least; Heatmap Pro’s modeling gives the county an opposition risk score of 92 because it’s a relatively affluent agricultural community with a proclivity for cultural conservatism – precisely the kind of bent that can be easily swayed by rhetoric from Trump and his appointees.
Morton County also has a proclivity for targeting advanced tech-focused industrial development. Not only have county officials instituted a moratorium on direct air capture facilities, they’ve also banned future data center and cryptocurrency mining projects.
Neighboring counties have also restricted some forms of wind energy infrastructure. McClean County to the north, for example, has instituted a mandatory wind turbine setback from the Missouri River, and Stark County to the west has a 2,000-foot property setback from homes and public buildings.
In other words, so goes Burgum, may go North Dakota? I suppose we’ll find out.
And more of the week’s top news about renewable energy conflicts.
1. Staten Island, New York – New York’s largest battery project, Swiftsure, is dead after fervent opposition from locals in what would’ve been its host community, Staten Island.
2. Barren County, Kentucky – Do you remember Wood Duck, the solar farm being fought by the National Park Service? Geenex, the solar developer, claims the Park Service has actually given it the all-clear.
3. Near Moss Landing, California – Two different communities near the now-infamous Moss Landing battery site are pressing for more restrictions on storage projects.
4. Navajo County, Arizona – If good news is what you’re seeking, this Arizona county just approved a large solar project, indicating this state still has sunny prospects for utility-scale development depending on where you go.
5. Gillespie County, Texas – Meanwhile out in Texas, this county is getting aggressive in its attempts to kill a battery storage project.
6. Clinton County, Iowa – This county just extended its moratorium on wind development until at least the end of the year as it drafts a restrictive ordinance.
A chat with with Johanna Bozuwa of the Climate and Community Institute.
This week’s conversation is with Johanna Bozuwa, executive director of the Climate and Community Institute, a progressive think tank that handles energy issues. This week, the Institute released a report calling for a “public option” to solve the offshore wind industry’s woes – literally. As in, the group believes an ombudsman agency akin to the Tennessee Valley Authority that takes equity stakes or at least partial ownership of offshore wind projects would mitigate investment risk, should a future Democratic president open the oceans back up for wind farms.
While I certainly found the idea novel and interesting, I had some questions about how a public office standing up wind farms would function, and how to get federal support for such an effort post-Trump. So I phoned up Johanna, who cowrote the document, to talk about it.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
How did we get here? What’s the impetus for this specific idea – an authority to handle building out offshore wind?
As you have covered very closely, [the Trump administration is] stymying huge manufacturing opportunities for union workers, and obviously putting [decarbonization] way off course. Even though it’s an odd time to talk about a federally-focused offshore wind agenda, I think because the administration is scaring off investment in this sector, increasingly our only option in a more amenable administration may be to just do it ourselves.
From my perspective, we can’t just abdicate this critical decarb sector. It’s so close to coastal population centers, so close to where people live in high-density urban areas that need electricity. So we need to be preparing for how we make up for this massive amount of lost time. We’re also trying to break through some of the longer term coordination problems the offshore wind sector has run into.
Your report outlines past examples of authorities like the Tennessee Valley Authority – help me understand what this would look like for offshore wind.
There are definitely examples of what we’re discussing here, and we evoke the moonshot as one of these examples where the government got behind a major technological jump and used industrial policy to make that happen — doing some of the planning, investing in companies directly via equity stakes, developing its own public enterprises or departments within the government to drive towards a common goal.
Then, of course, there was the rural electrification administration and the TVA development. The federal government has used more of its planning muscle to drive toward a critical goal, and from our perspective, a critical goal is decarbonizing the electricity sector. Yet at the same time, we’re seeing massive electricity cost spikes, so we’re trying to ponder how an authority like this could actually do that.
There are three areas where we’d imagine this authority to be involved. The first is actual development of offshore wind projects – a stable baseline for offshore wind by always being the bidder of last resort, actively bidding on projects along the coast. This also creates a baseline for the supply chain generally.
We also see an opportunity here in offshore transmission grids, because I’m sure you’re well aware how mired those grids have become. There are opportunities for increased planning around the grid to ensure a higher level of coordination. And by having a federal authority, it will lower the cost to other offshore wind developers.
The third piece is the supply chain manufacturing — more so a coordination role, sure, but also an opportunity for the federal government to leverage its large-scale procurement power. It would help provide security for a lot of the components in this moment of uncertainty.
On one hand, the benefit of the public option is a birch rod for the private sector. If the public entity is providing things at lower cost and with potentially higher commitments to higher wages, with more people wanting to work for the public entity, it can bring the entirety of the industry up because they’d have to compete with the agency.
On the other hand, I think there’s pieces of this that actually draw down costs, like the transmission and supply chain pieces.
What do you say to the percentage of the public that is opposed to offshore wind development?
I think there has been a very effective disinformation campaign. We also see a benefit in planning because we can limit overbuild and be strategic about where it’s deployed to limit permitting snags and other turmoil.
Okay, but the big question hovering over this is how it gets done. You’re going to need to convince the public to create this authority. And this is such an ambitious idea. How do you reckon with that?
Because so much has been lost during this administration, in terms of public planning and the DOGE cuts, there will be this need on a grand scale to supercharge and re-double efforts in a wide range of areas. My feeling is that we have to build toward a political appetite.
We have to think about big, ambitious solutions like this. Is this actually an opportunity to lower costs, not just decarb? Are there ways to think about that to build an enduring political coalition?
We’re seeing the Trump administration use some of these policy levers much more stridently than former Democratic presidents have used — like with equity stakes. We could do that kind of thing, too.
The truth is we have three years to build the political opportunities and coalition to do this.