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Just one turbine can charge hundreds of cell phones.
It’s a good thing most of us aren’t accountable for every single silly thing we’ve ever said, but most of us are not vice presidential running mates, either. Back in 2022, when J.D. Vance was still just a “New York Times bestselling author” and not yet a “junior senator from Ohio,” much less “second-in-line to a former president who will turn 80 in office if he’s reelected,” he made a climate oopsie that — now that it’s recirculating — deserves to be addressed.
If Democrats “care so much about climate change,” Vance argued during an Ohio Republican senator candidate forum during that year, “and they think climate change is caused by carbon emissions, then why is their solution to scream about it at the top of their lungs, send a bunch of our jobs to China, and then manufacture these ridiculous ugly windmills all over Ohio farms that don’t produce enough electricity to run a cell phone?”
Vance is hardly the first person to get confused about intermittent energy sources such as wind; his new would-be boss, former President Donald Trump, likes to claim that wind turbines can’t even power a single household’s television. The fallacy stems from the idea that the power will “go out” if the wind isn’t blowing — which, in theory, would be true in any case where power demand outpaces supply. But grids are regulated with levels of redundancy specifically designed to prevent those sorts of outages, Kyri Baker, an assistant professor of engineering at the University of Colorado, previously explained to me. There are also, of course, batteries.
Still, for the sake of argument: If the wind is blowing, could a turbine “produce enough electricity to run a cell phone”? Even running at 42% capacity — typical for turbines circa when Vance was speaking — the average turbine in the U.S. generates roughly 1,170 kilowatt-hours of electricity in 60 minutes, according to the United States Geological Survey. Charging your phone twice daily for 365 days amounts to less than 3.7 kilowatt-hours per year. In other words, about the time it takes to watch an episode of Bridgerton, a single wind turbine can generate enough electricity to charge 316 phones each day twice over. So Vance is way off here.
Are the windmills “ridiculous” and “ugly”? That’s more subjective, but they’re certainly not being built “all over Ohio farms.” Wind makes up less than 2% of the electricity generated in Ohio, and despite the Buckeye State being one of the birthplaces of wind power, it only has about 419 windmills online, placing it 24th out of all the states. Strict laws in Ohio enacted in 2014 have all but halted new wind turbines from being built.
Vance is an oil and gas guy, so maybe his ignorance of wind power can be politely overlooked this one time. But going forward, when campaigning and potentially working at a national level, it’ll be important for him to get his facts straight. Wind is the largest source of renewable electricity in the United States. It’s charging a lot of cell phones.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the number of cell phones a single wind turbine could charge twice each day for a year. It is 316, not 244.
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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.
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.