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Orsted came out with some not-great earnings.
The Danish energy developer Orsted delivered a withering verdict on its experiment trying to build wind farms in the United States: Bad. It’s lost a ton of money, the company said Wednesday, so it’s going to do less of that going forward, and take on way less risk.
That Orsted had struggled in the U.S. offshore wind market was no secret — late last year, it cancelled two projects in New Jersey — but its earnings report put some grim figures on it.
The company said that it had 9.6 billion Danish kroner worth of fees (about $1.4 billion) related to one New Jersey project, Ocean Wind 1, and had booked $4 billion of losses, most of which were due to Ocean Wind 1’s cancellation. Overall, it reported a loss of almost $3 billion in 2023, entirely due to the fees and impairments it reported. Otherwise, the company would have had a more than $2 billion profit.
The company’s offshore wind misadventure won’t just weigh on its balance sheet or stock price. Investors, including the Danish government, will miss out on the company’s dividend for three years, through 2025. And the company’s chairman, Thomas Thune Andersen, said he would step down next month.
All this also meant that the company expects to have far less installed renewable capacity developed by the end of the decade than it had previously targeted, down to 35 to 28 gigawatts from the 50 GW it had projected as recently as last year. (It has just under 16 GW at the moment.) The company will cut its planned investment by more than half, according to Morningstar analyst Tancrede Fulop.
Orsted and other wind developers have blamed a combination of supply chain issues, high interest rates, and inflexibility in the contracts signed with state governments for the failures, delays, and cancellations of projects up and down the East Coast last year. In New York, Orsted and other developers failed to get their contracts adjusted to account for higher costs, and so were forced to cancel and, in some cases, re-bid.
The company said in a presentation to investors that it was “now focused predominantly on the Northeast,” essentially throwing in the towel on anywhere south of New York, having withdrawn from the New Jersey project and declaring that its Maryland project, Skipjack, will continue development “with minimal spend.”
The trouble wasn’t just in the United States, though — Orsted also said it was pulling out of Norway, Spain, and Portugal, while it was “deprioritising development in other markets including Japan.” It does, however, seem committed to maintaining some presence here, having submitted a new bid for Sunrise Wind, a planned wind farm off the east coast of Long Island.
In a call with analysts, the company’s chief executive Mads Nipper said that Orsted will spend far less money on projects before making the final approval to go forward with construction. The company also said that it will “pursue offtake opportunities where attractive with low pre-FID commitments and inflation protection” — in other words, bid for projects with low upfront costs and someone else around to absorb rising costs.
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We’ll give you one guess as to what’s behind the huge spike.
Georgia is going to need a lot more electricity than it once thought. Again.
In a filing last week with the state’s utility regulator, Georgia Power disclosed that its projected load growth for the next decade from “economic development projects” has gone up by over 12,000 megawatts, to 36,500 megawatts. Just for 2028 to 2029, the pipeline has more than tripled, from 6,000 megawatts to 19,990 megawatts, destined for so-called “large load” projects like new data centers and factories.
To give you an idea of just how much power Georgia businesses will demand over the next decade, the two new recently booted up nuclear reactors at Vogtle each have a capacity of around 1,000 megawatts. Of the listed projects that may come online, five will require 1,000 megawatts or more.
The culprit is largely data centers. About 3,330 megawatts’ worth of data centers have broken ground in Georgia, and just over 4,100 megawatts are pending construction, vastly outstripping commitments made by industrial customers.
“New load growth, led predominately by data centers, could triple [Georgia Power’s] size, in ten years. This is the second industrial revolution, led by artificial intelligence,” Simon Mahan, the executive director of the Southern Renewable Energy Association, wrote on X.
Georgia Power is used to upgrading load forecasts. The company had to update its three-year planning process (known as an integrated resource plan, or IRP) in October of 2023, just a year after releasing its previous three-year plan, as its five-year load growth projections had grown from 400 megawatts to 6,660 megawatts, a 17-fold increase. Regulators approved the new plan in April of this year, which included adding turbines to an existing gas-fired plant, pushing out the retirement of a coal-fired plant, and more battery storage.
The latest update, Georgia Power said in the filing, “should provide further certainty that Georgia Power’s load forecast is materializing and that the constructive outcome of the 2023 IRP Update is supportive of economic growth in Georgia.”
The signs marking projects funded by the current president’s infrastructure programs are all over the country.
Maybe you’ve seen them, the white or deep cerulean signs, often backdropped by an empty lot, roadblock, or excavation. The text on them reads PROJECT FUNDED BY President Joe Biden’s Infrastructure Law, or maybe President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act, or President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan. They identify Superfund cleanup sites in Montana, road repairs in Acadia National Park in Maine, bridge replacements in Wisconsin, and almost anything else that received a cut of the $1.5 trillion from the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.
Officially, the signs exist to “advance the goals of accountability and transparency of Federal spending,” although unofficially, they were likely part of a push by the administration to promote Bidenomics, an effort that began in 2023. The signs follow strict design rules (that deep cerulean is specifically hex code #164484) and prescribed wording (Cincinnati officials got dinged for breaking the rules to add Kamala Harris’ name to signs ahead of the election), although whether to post them is technically at the discretion of local partners. But all federal agencies — including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Transit Authority, which of each received millions in funding — were ordered by the Office of Management and Budget to post the signs “in an easily visible location that can be directly linked to the work taking place and must be maintained in good condition throughout the construction period.”
This has caused some irritation on the right, as you might imagine. Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas lodged a grievance with the Office of Special Counsel alleging Biden had violated the Hatch Act by using taxpayer dollars to pay for “nothing more than campaign yard signs.” Republican Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa gave her monthly “squeal award” to Biden in June for lack of transparency over how much the signs have cost and demanded disclosure from the OMB. (Signs erected to credit President Obama’s construction projects cost an estimated $300 million adjusted for inflation, though the Biden administration, likely aiming to skirt a similar scandal, specifies that the “signs should not be produced or displayed if doing so results in unreasonable cost, expense, or recipient burden.” Ernst’s office did not reply to a request from Heatmap about whether or not she ever got the numbers she was seeking from the OMB, and the White House never returned a request from Heatmap to supply the same.)
Democrats aren’t the only politicians who sign their names to their big accomplishments, however. Donald Trump took credit for COVID-19 stimulus checks, and George W. Bush’s Internal Revenue Service sent mailers to let the American people know who they could thank for their income tax refunds. But suppose America were to elect a president who happened to be especially petty and vindictive? In that case — this is, of course, hypothetical — would it be possible for the incoming president to order the removal of signs touting his predecessor’s achievements?
I ran the question by a Department of Transportation spokesperson, who told me such things are simply not done. “There has never been a request to remove project signs from the U.S. Department of Transportation, and we hope to see signage remain in communities for the lifecycle of BIL-funded projects,” the DOT spokesperson said.
Their answer implies that while such a thing would be unprecedented, it is also theoretically possible.
It’s unclear how many such signs there are, although the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law has funded more than 66,000 projects, all of which are at least eligible for a sign. Whatever the exact number is, it’d be a big and expensive hassle to remove them all. Given that much of the IRA and BIL funding has already been allocated, as well, it seems like such a demand ought to be very low on an incoming president of the United States’ list of priorities.
At least, one would think.
The Trump administration is hoping to kill the $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicle buyers, according to a Reuters report citing two anonymous sources within the Trump transition team.
That aspiration isn’t totally unexpected — President-elect Donald Trump flirted with ending the EV tax credit throughout the campaign. But it’s nonetheless our first post-election sense of how the Trump administration plans to pursue the Republican tax package that is expected to be the centerpiece of its legislating agenda.
If the EV tax credit is repealed, it would deal a significant setback to the American auto industry’s attempts to make the transition to electric vehicles. General Motors, Ford, and other legacy automakers have invested billions of dollars to build EV factories and battery plants in order to prepare for an electric future. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, the automaking industry’s trade group, has privately lobbied lawmakers to keep all of the Biden administration’s subsidies for EV production.
GM and Ford aren’t doing this just for the climate. They’re trying to compete with European and East Asian automakers that are transitioning to EVs — and will continue to transition, regardless of policy changes within the United States. BYD, the Chinese company that exclusively makes EVs, is on track this year to sell more cars globally than Ford. That’s the entire Ford line-up, not just EVs. China has reached its commanding position in the EV industry partly by offering EV consumers and companies more than $200 billion in subsidies, according to an analysis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The rollback would also be a setback for Tesla and Rivian, the two highest-profile American EV-only companies. Yet according to the same Reuters report, Tesla supports the plan to repeal the tax credit. Elon Musk has asserted in interviews that because Tesla has more experience building EVs than any other company, it would suffer least from the subsidy’s disappearance. (As the country’s No. 1 EV seller, Tesla has also likely benefited from EV tax credits — in their current and pre-Biden forms — more than any other company.) Repeal is part of Musk’s hypothesized plan to turn Tesla into a de facto monopoly, controlling the entire American EV industry.
Rivian shares have fallen 11% today, while Tesla’s are down just 5%. Ford and GM are trading flat.
The new GOP majorities in Congress hope to extend their 2017 package of tax cuts, which mostly benefit wealthy Americans. One way to pay for those tax cuts could be to repeal the tax incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s landmark climate law. The news today, then, is mostly a sign that the battle lines are being drawn in the auto industry: Much of the auto industry wants to keep the full slate of EV subsidies. Tesla wants to take them down.