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Sparks

It’s Groundhog Day for New York’s Offshore Wind Industry

Equinor and Orsted and Eversource won the new, more expensive contracts.

Matthew Zeitlin •
02/29/2024
Wind turbines.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

New York’s offshore wind industry is back, or at least back in contract. Two offshore wind projects, Empire Wind 1 and Sunrise Wind, were awarded, respectively, to developers Equinor and the partnership of Orsted and Eversource. These two projects, which would amount to 1,700 megawatts of capacity in total (enough to power about a million homes, according to Governor Kathy Hochul’s office), had first been bid out in 2019 and then rebid when these same developers were unable to renegotiate their contracts to deal with rising material and interest rate costs.

Last year was an annus horribilis for the offshore wind industry, with projects cancelled up and down the East Coast and billions of dollars of losses for offshore wind developers. The delayed and cancelled projects have called into question the viability of the Biden administration’s ambitious goal of installing 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030.

This year, however, has seen some signs of recovery. For years, the U.S. offshore wind industry was a bunch of plans and a few dozen megawatts of capacity from wind farms off the coasts of Rhode Island and Virginia. Then came Vineyard Wind 1, off the coast of Massachusetts, which started delivering power early this year, shortly after another New York project, South Fork Wind, started up in December of last year.

But merely (re-)awarding the contracts does not ensure that steel goes into the water, let alone that electrons flow into homes. Sunrise Wind will likely be completed in 2026, according to Orsted. Before that the Danish company has to hammer out the details of a new contract, and only then finally decide whether to go through with the thing or not; that’s expected to happen sometime in the second quarter of this year, with federal permitting finished in the summer. Empire Wind 1 has a similar timeline.

According to the governor’s office, utility customers will feel these contracts to the tune of an extra $2 a month. When the projects were first bid out in 2019, the expected impact on utility bills was just $0.73.

Green
Matthew Zeitlin profile image

Matthew Zeitlin

Matthew is a correspondent at Heatmap. Previously he was an economics reporter at Grid, where he covered macroeconomics and energy, and a business reporter at BuzzFeed News, where he covered finance. He has written for The New York Times, the Guardian, Barron's, and New York Magazine.

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Sparks

What Happens to a Landfill in a Hurricane?

The trash mostly stays put, but the methane is another story.

Katie Brigham •
10/10/2024
A hurricane and a landfill.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

In the coming days and weeks, as Floridians and others in storm-ravaged communities clean up from Hurricane Milton, trucks will carry all manner of storm-related detritus — chunks of buildings, fences, furniture, even cars — to the same place all their other waste goes: the local landfill. But what about the landfill itself? Does this gigantic trash pile take to the air and scatter Dorito bags and car parts alike around the surrounding region?

No, thankfully. As Richard Meyers, the director of land management services at the Solid Waste Authority of Palm Beach County, assured me, all landfill waste is covered with soil on “at least a weekly basis,” and certainly right before a hurricane, preventing the waste from being kicked up. “Aerodynamically, [the storm is] rolling over that covered waste. It’s not able to blow six inches of cover soil from the top of the waste.”

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Sparks

How Climate Change Is Supercharging Hurricane Milton

And made Helene so much worse, according to new reports from Climate Central and World Weather Attribution.

Jeva Lange •
10/09/2024
Helene destruction.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Contrary to recent rumor, the U.S. government cannot direct major hurricanes like Helene and Milton toward red states. According to two new rapid attribution studies by World Weather Attribution and Climate Central, however, human actors almost certainly made the storms a lot worse through the burning of fossil fuels.

A storm like Hurricane Helene, which has killed at least 227 people so far and caused close to $50 billion in estimated property losses across the southeast, is about two-and-a-half times more likely in the region today compared to what would be expected in a “cooler pre-industrial climate,” WWA found. That means Helene, the kind of storm one would expect to see once every 130 years on average, is now expected to develop at a rate of about once every 53 years. Additionally, WWA researchers determined that extreme rainfall from Helene was 70% more likely and 10% heavier in the Appalachians and about 40% more likely in the southern Appalachian region, where many of the deaths occurred, due to climate change.

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Sparks

JD Vance on Climate Change: ‘Let’s Just Say That’s True’

“For the sake of argument.”

Charu Sinha •
10/02/2024
JD Vance.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

We didn’t have to wait long for climate to come up during tonight’s vice presidential debate between VP hopefuls Republican JD Vance and Democrat Tim Walz — the night’s second question was about the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene and fueled by warmer air and waters due to climate pollution.

Vance started off his answer innocuously enough, extending his thoughts and prayers to those affected by the hurricane and then proceeding to some campaign boilerplate. “I think it’s important for us, first of all, to say Donald Trump and I support clean air and clean water,” Vance said up top, echoing Trump’s claim that he wants “absolutely immaculate clean water and … absolutely clean air,” from the presidential debate back in June. (It’s worth noting, of course, that his policy choices tell a different story.)

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