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Renewables are really popular. That’s not the problem.
Renewables are popular, and most Americans don’t mind living near them. That’s the message of an interesting new poll from The Washington Post and the University of Maryland, which found that about 70% of Americans would be comfortable living near a wind or solar farm “in their community.” Now, Americans slightly prefer solar over wind, and there’s a partisan gap among the respondents — 79% of Democrats are comfortable living near a wind farm, while only 59% of Republicans are — but overall the message is clear: Americans as a whole don’t mind living near a new renewables project.
It’s great to see this poll, and it adds to a growing and now, I think, unimpeachable body of research that shows renewables remain broadly popular in the United States. In March, a Heatmap poll found that 72% and 76% of Americans, respectively, would welcome utility-scale wind and solar in their communities. We found that the only more popular form of electricity generation was rooftop solar (which can’t solve climate change by itself), backed by nearly 9 in 10 Americans:
In June, the Pew Research Center found similar majorities in its polling, although it also noted that the partisan gap over renewables was continuing to widen. Only 60% of Republicans favor building more wind power today, according to Pew, as compared to 80% in 2016. (Over the same period, Democrats have become modestly more supportive of expanding wind.)
These polls are important. They demonstrate that renewable advocates can draw on a broad base of public support — or, at least, indifference — when fighting for policy. But I worry that they send the wrong message to environmentalists who are wondering about how best to move forward in the fight against climate change. Both the Post and Heatmap polls ask almost identical questions: Would you welcome a wind or solar farm in your community? But neither poll clarifies exactly what “your community” means.
Luckily, a recent study examines the question more deeply. In 2021, a team of researchers asked 4,500 people in America, Germany, and Ireland whether they would accept a new solar, wind, or fossil-fuel plant near them. Unlike other studies, it got specific: Would you accept a solar farm less than a mile from where you live? How about one to five miles away? How about more than five miles?
The study found very big majorities in support of wind and solar: 89% and 92% of Americans would welcome a new wind or solar facility near them at all. But the closer that the project got to their house, the less they favored it. Only 17% of Americans would welcome wind turbines within a mile of their home. About half would approve of wind turbines within five miles. By comparison, about a third of Germans would welcome wind turbines within 0.6 miles of their home (that is, a kilometer), and two-thirds of Germans would within three miles.
In the study, solar was more popular than wind — 57% of Americans would welcome solar panels within five miles of their home — but, still, it didn’t see the kind of commanding majorities you’d expect from Heatmap and the Post’s polling. In fact, I think this study tells an entirely different story from those polls: that Americans are pretty skeptical of new renewable projects in their backyards. (The bright spot for climate advocates is that a much smaller ratio of Americans support the construction of a new natural gas plant within five miles of their homes.)
That 2021 study suggests that a small minority — and in some cases, an outright majority — might oppose a given renewable project depending on how close it is to a residential area. And as I’ve previously written, American laws today give even a small, well-resourced minority plenty of tools to block a project. They can hold up a project in lawsuits or bog it down in paperwork. And what’s more, once that small group starts campaigning against a project, the public’s broad but shallow support for, say, a general technology can crater. That’s what happened recently in New Jersey, where a once broadly pro-wind public has turned against four proposed offshore wind farms.
Is this the biggest problem for renewable advocates? I’m not sure: America will build plenty of new solar projects this year anyway. But it is a problem. And it should be clear by now that broad public opinion does not mean much for our land-use politics. The problem is not that the public opposes wind and solar; the problem is that a few dozen people can block or waylay a project no matter how the broader public feels. If that feels anti-democratic, then climate advocates need to do something about it.
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Tristan Abbey would come to Washington from a Texas think tank that argues peak oil is way off base.
Donald Trump’s pick to run the Energy Information Administration works for a think tank that denies the existence of an energy transition.
The Energy Information Administration is the nation’s primary energy fuel and power forecasting agency. Since its inception in 1977, EIA has become a go-to source of data for many U.S. businesses, analysts, and policymakers alike. The agency’s previous administrators have been relatively apolitical academics and industry experts, including under the first Trump administration, whose EIA administrator came to the role from a faculty position at Rice University. The office’s current acting administrator is Stephen Nalley, who was appointed deputy administrator by Trump in 2018 after serving in various other roles at the agency.
Last month, however, the president quietly nominated a new EIA administrator who may represent a new direction for the agency. Tristan Abbey is an energy consultant and a senior fellow with the National Center for Energy Analytics, a think tank founded last year by a conservative policy outfit, the Texas Public Policy Foundation. The group argues against the concept of “peak oil,” the notion that the world will one day hit a maximum level of oil demand as it transitions to other (presumably more climate-friendly) fuels.
“There has never been a more critical time for sober-minded, fact-based, emotion-free perspectives in energy domains,” the think tank proudly declares on its About webpage. “The U.S. and European governments, along with many U.S. states, are embarking on the biggest industrial spending program in history, all directed in the pursuit of an ‘energy transition’ with the goal to rapidly replace hydrocarbons that currently supply 80% of the world’s energy. Why are the stakes so high? ‘Transitions’ of such scale have never occurred. And energy is fundamental to everything in civilization.”
Abbey was previously director of energy and environment at the National Security Council from 2017 to 2019 under Trump 1.0, and was also chief economist for the GOP on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, boasting in a CV that his role included successfully repealing a federal oil export ban. Per that CV, he previously worked for Clarium Capital Management and Founders Fund, two hedge funds founded by GOP financier Peter Thiel. Abbey was also on the Trump 1.0 transition team, according to his LinkedIn.
Today, Abbey also works with the Energy Policy Research Foundation, a D.C. petroleum research organization, and recently stepped away from working at the Trump-affiliated America First Policy Institute, according to an ethics disclosure posted online.
Abbey’s work at the NCEA provides insight into the views he may bring to the top of EIA.
His biggest achievement at the think tank was authoring a report declaring that global gas demand will remain strong. “[T]he broad directional arrows are distinguishable: for the foreseeable future, the world will need far more electricity and more industrial energy, and a significant portion of that will require natural gas,” the report said. “The federal government never decided to become the world’s largest LNG exporter, but it did allow private companies to make that happen. The decision that it can make today is to preserve that achievement.”
On a webinar about the report, Abbey called on the U.S. to take steps to increase domestic natural gas consumption and find new ways to use LNG in various consumer products and industrial processes. “Is there something that is holding U.S. industry back from using more natural gas than it would otherwise?,” he asked.
The NCEA is a key player in a highly consequential but wonky debate in Washington about whether the U.S. should try and put thumb screws onto the International Energy Agency, a world power and fuel forecasting body overseen by the OECD, an international body to which the U.S. is the single largest contributor.
The IEA has previously predicted “peak oil” may occur before 2030 — one of many predictions that have led some Republicans in Washington to declare the IEA is no longer impartial and a “cheerleader” for renewable energy. These Republicans have been led by Senator John Barrasso, one of the lawmakers who will oversee Abbey’s nomination. Another fan of this view is Kathleen Sgamma, Trump’s pick to run the Bureau of Land Management, who cited the NCEA to call on U.S. policymakers to pressure the IEA into “meaningful reform” of its forecasting about the energy transition. The op-ed was first reported by E&E News’ Scott Waldman.
How does Abbey feel about the war on the IEA? We’ll find out at his confirmation hearing, which has yet to be scheduled. We’ve asked Republicans on the committee for an update on when that’ll happen and we will let you know once we find out. Given they’re still working through other more high-profile nominees, that’ll take a while.
Microsoft is canceling data center leases, according to a Wall Street analyst.
The artificial intelligence industry is experiencing another TD Cowen shock.
The whole spectrum of companies connected to artificial intelligence — the companies that design the chips, that supply the power, that make the generation equipment — shuddered Wednesday when the brokerage released another note from analysts pointing to evidence that Microsoft was giving up on its data center leases.
“Microsoft has both (1) walked away from +2GW of capacity in both the U.S. and Europe in the last six months that was in process to be leased, and (2) has both deferred and canceled existing data center leases in both the U.S. and Europe in the last month,” the analysts wrote.
Microsoft is one of the biggest players in the artificial intelligence industry, with its near-$14 billion investment in OpenAI and acommitment to spend $80 billion on data center capacity this year.
The company is pulling back, the TD Cowen analysts said, because it had decided not to support incremental increases in training workloads for OpenAI models. Shares in Nvidia, the chip designer that’s become one of the most valuable companies in the world on the back of optimism about artificial intelligence, are down 7% since market close Tuesday, while shares in the power companies Vistra and Constellation are down 9% and 7% respectively. GE Vernova, which makes turbines for gas-fired power plants, is down 9%.
Much of the power industry saw huge increases in their stock prices in 2024, as investors bet on increased demand for electricity from data centers, manufacturing, and electrification. But 2025 so far has been a year of mild expectations.
In February, Cowen analysts issued a similar note warning that Microsoft was pulling back on some of its data center leases. And in January, of course, many of the AI and energy stocks that had been soaring 2024dropped when the Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek released an open source model comparable in performance to the state of the art in the United States but that required far less computing power to train.
The Cowen analysts were hardly doomy about AI and data center construction, writing that Google and Meta may be “backfilling” the capacity left behind by Microsoft as they seek to expand their own data center footprints.
But the case for across the board optimism may be slightly dimming across the sector. CoreWeave, which buys Nvidia chips and operates data centers, has had to reduce the amount of money its seeking to raise in its planned initial public offering to $1.5 billion, from the over $4 billion it was looking to get from investors earlier in the IPO process, Bloomberg reported. Nvidia, an investor in CoreWeave and its most important supplier, will be “anchoring” the IPO, kicking in $250 million.
The tax agency reopened its online portal to allow dealerships to register sales retroactively.
As recently as last month, some electric vehicle buyers were running into roadblocks when they tried to claim the EV tax credit on their 2024 returns. Their claims were rejected, it turned out, because the dealership where they bought their EV never registered the sale with the Internal Revenue Service.
On Wednesday, the IRS instituted a fix: It reopened the online portal for dealerships to report these sales retroactively.
The confusion all started with a major change the IRS made to the EV tax credit program last year. Previously, all dealers had to do was give the buyer a “time of sale” report that they could submit to the IRS come tax season. But as of 2024, dealerships were expected to register every EV sale that was eligible for the tax credit through this new online portal. Not only that, they had to do so within three days of the sale. The portal would not allow entries dated more than three days post-sale.
The IRS and the National Automobile Dealers Association did outreach to educate dealerships about the changes, but many were apparently still unaware of the requirements — some never even made an online account. Customers were similarly ignorant of the intricacies of the process. Many received time of sale reports and thought they were all set. But in January, when they began trying to claim the credit on their taxes for the previous year, they were surprised to receive an error message saying that their EV was not registered with the IRS. Some tried to get their dealerships to register the sale retroactively, but the IRS portal didn’t allow for it.
President Trump has vowed to kill the EV tax credit, and Congress is just now beginning to hammer out the legislation that could execute his wishes. In light of that, and given the relative chaos at the IRS caused by Elon Musk’s “efficiency” department demanding access to private taxpayer information and laying off thousands of IRS employees, it was unclear whether the Treasury Department would do anything to help these unlucky EV buyers seeking their refunds. The Treasury did not respond to multiple inquiries from Heatmap in February.
The Dealers Association also never responded to multiple inquiries from Heatmap about the issue. But in a notice to dealerships this week, first reported by NPR, the trade group said the IRS planned to roll out an update to the portal on Wednesday to allow for sales made in 2024 to be submitted.
If any of this has made you nervous about getting an EV this year, remember that you have another, safer option for claiming the tax credit. Instead of claiming it on your taxes in 2026, you can transfer it to your dealer, who can take it off the sale price of the car on the spot. Just make sure they know about the online portal!