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It’s boom times in carbon management.
There’s a lot of money in carbon management. Like, a lot. Investment in the full suite of technologies designed to capture, store, and transport carbon has skyrocketed this year, according to data from Rhodium Group and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Clean Investment Monitor.
Overall investment in clean energy technology — which includes manufacturing of batteries, vehicles, and solar panels, clean energy generation, and retail products like heat pumps — was $284 billion in the last year, with $76 billion in the second quarter of this year alone, a record figure.
The fastest growth came from “emerging climate technologies,” which includes carbon management, which had $3 billion in investment in the second quarter — more than the $1.7 billion invested in wind generation. Compare that to the same time last year, when wind investment stood at $2.6 billion and carbon management investment was just under half a billion dollars. (Solar generation, meanwhile, had $9.3 billion in investment in the second quarter of this year, while storage saw $5.4 billion poured in.)
What changed?
Basically, wind — and its tax incentives — are hardly new to the U.S. economy, and while the Inflation Reduction Act expanded and extended those tax incentives, it was building on an existing policy. And in that post-IRA period up to today (almost exactly two years from the day the law was signed), wind, which requires long construction periods and substantial upfront spending, has been hampered by high interest rates. That’s true for solar, too, although to a lesser extent, explained Trevor Houser, a parter at the Rhodium Group, as wind projects take more time to build and so rely more on borrowed money.
With carbon management, on the other hand, the IRA was a complete gamechanger, hugely boosting the 45Q tax credit for carbon sequestered underground to as much as $85 per metric ton for capturing emissions where they happen, and then to as high $180 per metric ton for direct air capture.
“The majority of the growth that we’re seeing right now is due to that incentive,” Houser told me, as the tax credits have opened up the field to something beyond just using carbon for literal oil drilling.
Jack Andreasen, who runs carbon management policy at Breakthrough Energy, told me basically the same thing. “The boom in carbon management is driven nearly entirely by the support made available in the [Bipartisan Infrastructure Law] and IRA,” he said.
That scale of investment will be necessary to build out any reasonably sized carbon management sector, Andreasen told me. Building out new industrial and generation facilities equipped with carbon capture will be extremely capital-intensive, as will retrofitting existing facilities.
“That is the brilliance and importance of the federal funding — there is money for new builds and for retrofits. And both of these will be key in our net-zero future,” Andreasen said.
But while carbon management does have a fair amount of bipartisan political support, as with any large project, the necessary infrastructure — industrial facilities and especially pipelines — can attract local opposition. The nearly 700-mile-long planned Summit pipeline, which is supposed to link dozens of ethanol plants to a carbon sequestration site in North Dakota, has been strenuously opposed by environmental groups and landowners in Iowa, uniting progressives with a group of Republican lawmakers against the state’s powerbrokers and much of its agribusinesses interests.
“Carbon management does face similar siting and permitting barriers, particularly around pipelines,” to renewables like wind, Houser told me. And while that could potentially slow down development, “it’s starting from a lower base — you can get pretty rapid growth if you’re starting from zero.”
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It would have delivered a gargantuan 6.2 gigawatts of power.
The Bureau of Land Management says the largest solar project in Nevada has been canceled amidst the Trump administration’s federal permitting freeze.
Esmeralda 7 was supposed to produce a gargantuan 6.2 gigawatts of power – equal to nearly all the power supplied to southern Nevada by the state’s primary public utility. It would do so with a sprawling web of solar panels and batteries across the western Nevada desert. Backed by NextEra Energy, Invenergy, ConnectGen and other renewables developers, the project was moving forward at a relatively smooth pace under the Biden administration, albeit with significant concerns raised by environmentalists about its impacts on wildlife and fauna. And Esmeralda 7 even received a rare procedural win in the early days of the Trump administration when the Bureau of Land Management released the draft environmental impact statement for the project.
When Esmeralda 7’s environmental review was released, BLM said the record of decision would arrive in July. But that never happened. Instead, Donald Trump issued an executive order directing the Departments of the Treasury and the Interior to review their treatment of wind and solar, part of a deal with conservative hardliners in Congress to pass his tax megabill — the same bill that also effectively repealed the Inflation Reduction Act’s renewable electricity tax credits. This led to a series of subsequent orders by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum that effectively froze all federal permitting decisions for solar energy.
Flash forward to today, when BLM quietly updated its website for Esmeralda 7 permitting to explicitly say the project’s status is “cancelled.” Normally when the agency says this, it means developers pulled the plug.
I’ve reached out to some of the companies behind Esmeralda 7. A NextEra spokesperson provided me a statement from the company after this story’s publication saying it is “in the early stage of development” with its portion of the Esmeralda 7 mega-project, and the company is “committed to pursuing our project’s comprehensive environmental analysis by working closely with the Bureau of Land Management.”
This article was updated after publication to include a statement from NextEra.
A judge has lifted the administration’s stop-work order against Revolution Wind.
A federal court has lifted the Trump administration’s order to halt construction on the Revolution Wind farm off the coast of New England. The decision marks the renewables industry’s first major legal victory against a federal war on offshore wind.
The Interior Department ordered Orsted — the Danish company developing Revolution Wind — to halt construction of Revolution Wind on August 22, asserting in a one-page letter that it was “seeking to address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States and prevention of interference with reasonable uses of the exclusive economic zone, the high seas, and the territorial seas.”
In a two-page ruling issued Monday, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth found that Orsted would presumably win its legal challenge against the stop work order, and that the company is “likely to suffer irreparable harm in the absence of an injunction,” which led him to lift the dictate from the Trump administration.
Orsted previously claimed in legal filings that delays from the stop work order could put the entire project in jeopardy by pushing its timeline beyond the terms of existing power purchase agreements, and that the company installing cable for the project only had a few months left to work on Revolution Wind before it had to move onto other client obligations through mid-2028. The company has also argued that the Trump administration is deliberately mischaracterizing discussions between the federal government and the company that took place before the project was fully approved.
It’s still unclear at this moment whether the Trump administration will appeal the decision. We’re still waiting on the outcome of a separate legal challenge brought by Democrat-controlled states against Trump’s anti-wind Day One executive order.
A new letter sent Friday asks for reams of documentation on developers’ compliance with the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act.
The Fish and Wildlife Service is sending letters to wind developers across the U.S. asking for volumes of records about eagle deaths, indicating an imminent crackdown on wind farms in the name of bird protection laws.
The Service on Friday sent developers a request for records related to their permits under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, which compels companies to obtain permission for “incidental take,” i.e. the documented disturbance of eagle species protected under the statute, whether said disturbance happens by accident or by happenstance due to the migration of the species. Developers who received the letter — a copy of which was reviewed by Heatmap — must provide a laundry list of documents to the Service within 30 days, including “information collected on each dead or injured eagle discovered.” The Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
These letters represent the rapid execution of an announcement made just a week ago by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who released a memo directing department staff to increase enforcement of the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act “to ensure that our national bird is not sacrificed for unreliable wind facilities.” The memo stated that all permitted wind facilities would receive records requests related to the eagle law by August 11 — so, based on what we’ve now seen and confirmed, they’re definitely doing that.
There’s cause for wind developers, renewables advocates, and climate activists to be alarmed here given the expanding horizon of enforcement of wildlife statutes, which have become a weapon for the administration against zero-carbon energy generation.
The August 4 memo directed the Service to refer “violations” of the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act to the agency solicitor’s office, with potential further referral to the Justice Department for criminal or civil charges. Violating this particular law can result in a fine of at least $100,000 per infraction, a year in prison, or both, and penalties increase if a company, organization, or individual breaks the law more than once. It’s worth noting at this point that according to FWS’s data, oil pits historically kill far more birds per year than wind turbines.
In a statement to Heatmap News, the American Clean Power Association defended the existing federal framework around protecting eagles from wind turbines, noted the nation’s bald eagle population has risen significantly overall in the past two decades, and claimed golden eagle populations are “stable, at the same time wind energy has been growing.”
“This is clear evidence that strong protections and reasonable permitting rules work. Wind and eagles are successfully co-existing,” ACP spokesperson Jason Ryan said.