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Calcasieu Pass 2 has cleared another federal hurdle, but it’s still stuck in limbo.

The Department of Energy may not be ready to say yes to more liquified natural gas export projects, but the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is. In a meeting on Thursday, FERC approved plans for a massive LNG terminal project in Louisiana by a 2-1 vote, with Allison Clements, an outgoing Democratic commissioner, as the lone dissenter.
The Calcasieu Pass 2, or CP2, project would install some 20 million metric tons of export capacity in a hurricane-battered coastal Louisiana community near the Texas border. You may have heard of it if you followed the drama in January around the Biden administration’s decision to pause approving new LNG export terminals, which will allow the DOE to reexamine how it assesses whether new energy projects are in the “public interest.” Republicans haven't stopped talking about it since, arguing that the pause chokes off a major American export and that it both was tantamount to a fossil fuel ban and that it undermined the administration's climate goals. Democrats — especially those running for reelection in swing states — have been lukewarm.
CP2 has enjoyed bipartisan political support within Louisiana but became a target for national and local environmental groups who want the Biden administration to do more to prevent the development of new fossil fuel resources. These groups argued that CP2 would both “lock in” substantial greenhouse gas emissions from the extraction and transport of natural gas (one former Environmental Protection Agency official called it a “carbon mega bomb”) and have deleterious environmental effects on an area that’s already heavily industrialized.
“Venture Global is a bad actor in the energy space and FERC is enabling them to start another disastrous project that puts polluters over people,” the Sierra Club’s Cathy Collentine said in a statement. “CP2 is an environmental justice, climate, and economic disaster waiting to happen, and with this decision, FERC has ignored the harm that will be caused by CP2 — and gas exports more broadly — and sided with the greedy fossil fuel industry.”
FERC evaluated CP2’s environmental impacts last year and concluded that they would be “less than significant,” but that the “visual resources” of the area would see “significant adverse effect” — in other words, it would be an ugly and permanent addition to the landscape.
But final approval has been delayed for months, much to the annoyance of the industry. FERC released its final environmental impact statement in July of last year, making the wait for approval one of “the longest to sit before the commission,” according to Bloomberg. The climate effect of LNG exports is a matter of some debate, with some researchers arguing that if LNG is replacing fuels with higher associated emissions, it can lead to lower overall global emissions over time.
LNG projects exist in a kind of regulatory Venn diagram. While FERC has jurisdiction over natural gas pipelines, natural gas exports to countries that don’t have free trade agreements with the U.S. — which make up the bulk of the natural gas market — requires DOE approval, and that’s still in limbo. “No major LNG terminal has ever reached a final investment decision or started construction without this critical export authorization,” the Sierra Club noted in its statement.
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Fullmark Energy quietly shuttered Swiftsure, a planned 650-megawatt energy storage system on Staten Island.
The biggest battery project in New York has been canceled in a major victory for the nascent nationwide grassroots movement against energy storage development.
It’s still a mystery why exactly the developer of Staten Island’s Swiftsure project, Fullmark Energy (formerly known as Hecate), pulled the plug. We do know a few key details: First, Fullmark did not announce publicly that it was killing the project, instead quietly submitting a short, one-page withdrawal letter to the New York State Department of Public Service. That letter, which is publicly available, is dated August 18 of this year, meaning that the move formally occurred two months ago. Still, nobody in Staten Island seems to have known until late Friday afternoon when local publication SI Advance first reported the withdrawal.
Second, Swiftsure was going to be massive. It was the largest planned battery storage project in New York State, according to public records, with the ability to store upwards of 650 megawatts of electricity — enough to power more than half a million homes. That makes Swiftsure likely one of the largest battery projects in the country, with more capacity than any other energy storage project currently facing opposition in the U.S., according to our very own Heatmap Pro database. This is the second Fullmark project to totally flop in recent months. We reported last week that one of the company’s projects outside of Los Angeles had its permits voided in a court ruling that also blocked battery storage development in unincorporated areas outside the city.
Third, and potentially most significant for energy developers in New York City: Swiftsure’s death will almost certainly embolden the anti-storage activist movement.
Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee in next week’s New York mayoral election, was one of many local politicians who opposed Swiftsure and rallied with residents close to the proposed site in May. He’s part of a broader trend of Republican politicians becoming skeptical of battery storage sites near where people live and work, including in Democrat-ruled New York.
Putting batteries in the five boroughs has always been a challenge, but January’s Moss Landing battery fire in California created a PR frenzy in the city, as conservative figures seized on the online panic created by the blaze. Once-agnostic GOP members of Congress from New York City are now anti-battery storage in their backyards, including Anthony D’Esposito, Nicole Malliotakis and Mike Lawler. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Lee Zeldin — a former NYC congressman — is now weighing in against individual battery projects on Long Island and Staten Island.
Swiftsure was proposed in 2023 and permitted by the state last year. Fullmark was given a deadline of this spring to submit routine paperwork demonstrating how it would comply with conditions of the site’s permit, including how the battery storage project would be decommissioned. In August, the New York Department of Public Service gave Fullmark an extension until October 11.
Instead of meeting that October deadline, it seems Fullmark quietly withdrew its Swiftsure proposal.
It’s unclear how Democrat Zohran Mamdani or independent Andrew Cuomo would handle the rise of the anti-battery movement if either of them wins the November 4 mayoral election. That’s partially because energy policy and climate change have been non-issues in the campaign, saving small mentions of nuclear power, heat pumps, or gas prices in one-off debate answers or social media posts.
Sliwa, who has referred to Swiftsure as a “mini Chernobyl,” told me that he anticipates this victory will lead to more protests at more battery sites, no matter who wins the mayoral election. “The cancellation of this lithium-ion battery warehouse will reverberate throughout the boroughs,” Sliwa told me Monday. “It’ll be a rallying cry [because] it’s not a fait accompli that these facilities will be complete and operational.”
The Mamdani and Cuomo campaigns did not respond to requests for comment on Swiftsure’s cancellation.
The lost federal grants represent about half the organization’s budget.
The Interstate Renewable Energy Council, a decades-old nonprofit that provides technical expertise to cities across the country building out renewable clean energy projects, issued a dramatic plea for private donations in order to stay afloat after it says federal funding was suddenly slashed by the Trump administration.
IREC’s executive director Chris Nichols said in an email to all of the organization’s supporters that it has “already been forced to lay off many of our high-performing staff members” after millions of federal dollars to three of its programs were eliminated in the Trump administration’s shutdown-related funding cuts last week. Nichols said the administration nixed the funding simply because the nonprofit’s corporation was registered in New York, and without regard for IREC’s work with countless cities and towns in Republican-led states. (Look no further than this map of local governments who receive the program’s zero-cost solar siting policy assistance to see just how politically diverse the recipients are.)
“Urgent: IREC Needs You Now,” begins Nichols’ email, which was also posted to the organization’s website in full. “I need to be blunt: IREC, our mission, and the clean energy progress we lead is under assault.”
In an interview this afternoon, Nichols told me the DOE funding added up to at least $8 million and was set to be doled out over multiple years. She said the organization laid off eight employees — roughly a third of the organization’s small staff of fewer than two-dozen people — because the money lost for this year represented about half of IREC’s budget. She said this came after the organization also lost more than $4 million in competitive grant funding for apprenticeship training from the Labor Department because the work “didn’t align with the administration’s priorities.”
Nichols said the renewable energy sector was losing the crucial “glue” that holds a lot of the energy transition together in the funding cuts. “I’m worried about the next generation,” she told me. “Electricity is going to be the new housing [shortage].”
IREC has been a leading resource for the entire solar and transmission industry since 1982, providing training assistance and independent analysis of the sector’s performance, and develops stuff like model interconnection standards and best practices for permitting energy storage deployment best practices. The organization boasts having worked on developing renewable energy and training local workforces in more than 35 states. In 2021, it absorbed another nonprofit, The Solar Foundation, which has put together the widely used annual Solar Jobs Census since 2010.
In other words, this isn’t something new facing a potentially fatal funding crisis — this is the sort of bedrock institutional know-how that will take a long time to rebuild should it disappear.
To be sure, IREC’s work has received some private financing — as demonstrated by its solar-centric sponsorships page — but it has also relied on funding from Energy Department grants, some of which were identified by congressional Democrats as included in DOE’s slash spree last week. In addition, IREC has previously received funding from the Labor Department and National Labs, the status of which is now unclear.
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.