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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

Virginians Are Getting an Electricity Price Doubly-Whammy

Rates were up 17% year over year in June, according to the latest Electricity Price Hub update, with another increase on the way.

Matthew Zeitlin •
07/10/2026
Virginia and power lines.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

With higher temperatures come higher electricity bills. Whether through higher seasonal charges or greater usage, Americans across the country were paying more for electricity in June.

In Virginia, the epicenter of the data center boom, the typical household electricity bill was $192 in June, up from $172 in June of last year, according to the latest data from the Heatmap and MIT’s Electricity Price Hub. Rates, meanwhile, were about 18 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared to just over 15 cents in June of last year, a 12% hike. Rates were also up from the end of last year, when they were about 15.5 cents.

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Sparks

Fervo Is Drilling Wells Deeper, Faster, and Hotter

The enhanced geothermal company just announced a new 19,448-foot well.

Matthew Zeitlin •
07/09/2026
A Fervo installation.
Heatmap Illustration/Fervo, Getty Images

Enhanced geothermal company Fervo has drilled another well.

This one is 19,448 feet deep, the company announced Thursday, and includes a 7,500-foot span laterally across the sub-surface. The well — called Sawtooth 7, part of Phase II of its flagship Cape Station project in Milford, Utah — took 21 days to drill, the company said. That matches the time required to drill the wells in Phase I, though the new one is nearly 35% deeper than those, on average, with a 50% greater lateral extension.

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Sparks

Trump Concedes a Battle in His War Against Wind Energy

The administration filed to dismiss an appeal of a December ruling that overturned its wind permitting freeze.

Emily Pontecorvo •
06/12/2026
Trump Concedes a Battle in His War Against Wind Energy
Illustration by Simon Abranowicz

Trump’s Department of Justice is giving up on defending the president’s wind permitting moratorium.

The DOJ filed a motion on Wednesday to dismiss its appeal of a federal court’s December decision vacating the order to halt wind energy approvals. The plaintiffs in the case — New York and 16 other states, as well as the Alliance for Clean Energy New York, a trade group — did not oppose the motion. The case will not be officially dismissed, however, until the First Circuit Court of Appeals approves the request, which typically happens quickly when both parties support the dismissal.

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