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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.

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.

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Sparks

The Fed Has No Relief for Renewables Developers (or Trump)

The U.S. central bank left its interest rate target unchanged for the fifth time in a row.

Donald Trump and Jerome Powell.
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Interest rate relief isn’t coming anytime soon for renewables. As widely expected, the Federal Reserve chose to keep rates unchanged on Wednesday, despite intense pressure from President Trump and two Republican Fed governors to lower rates.

The Fed maintained the benchmark short term rate at a range of 4.25% to 4.5%. During the press conference that followed the rate announcement, Fed Chair Jerome Powell gave no indication that the board will lower rates at the Fed’s next meeting in September, either. That’s contrary to Trump’s claims to reporters after the meeting. “We have made no decisions about September,” Powell said. “We don’t do that in advance. We’ll be taking that information into consideration and all the other information we get as we make our decision.”

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Sparks

After Trump Phone Call, DOE Cancels $5 Billion for Grain Belt Express

The Department of Energy announced Wednesday that it was scrapping the loan guarantee.

A cut wire.
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The Department of Energy canceled a nearly $5 billion loan guarantee for the Grain Belt Express, a transmission project intended to connect wind power in Kansas with demand in Illinois that would eventually stretch all the way to Indiana.

“After a thorough review of the project’s financials, DOE found that the conditions necessary to issue the guarantee are unlikely to be met and it is not critical for the federal government to have a role in supporting this project. To ensure more responsible stewardship of taxpayer resources, DOE has terminated its conditional commitment,” the Department of Energy said in a statement Wednesday.

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Sparks

Meta’s Major AI Energy Buildout

CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed the company’s expanding ambitions in a Threads post on Monday.

Electrical outlets and a computer chip
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Meta is going big to power its ever-expanding artificial intelligence ambitions. It’s not just spending hundreds of millions of dollars luring engineers and executives from other top AI labs (including reportedly hundreds of millions of dollars for one engineer alone), but also investing hundreds of billions of dollars for data centers at the multi-gigawatt scale.

“Meta is on track to be the first lab to bring a 1GW+ supercluster online,” Meta founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote on the company’s Threads platform Monday, confirming a recent report by the semiconductor and artificial intelligence research service Semianalysis.

That first gigawatt-level project, Semianalysis wrote, will be a data center in New Albany, Ohio, called Prometheus, due to be online in 2026, Ashley Settle, a Meta spokesperson, confirmed to me. Ohio — and New Albany specifically — is the home of several large data center projects, including an existing Meta facility.

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