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Twenty-five years ago, computers were on the verge of destroying America’s energy system.
Or, at least, that’s what lots of smart people seemed to think.
In a 1999 Forbes article, a pair of conservative lawyers, Peter Huber and Mark Mills, warned that personal computers and the internet were about to overwhelm the fragile U.S. grid.
Information technology already devoured 8% to 13% of total U.S. power demand, Huber and Mills claimed, and that share would only rise over time. “It’s now reasonable to project,” they wrote, “that half of the electric grid will be powering the digital-Internet economy within the next decade.” (Emphasis mine.)
Over the next 18 months, investment banks including JP Morgan and Credit Suisse repeated the Forbes estimate of internet-driven power demand, advising their customers to pile into utilities and other electricity-adjacent stocks. Although it was unrelated, California’s simultaneous blackout crisis deepened the sense of panic. For a moment, experts were convinced: Data centers and computers would drain the country’s energy resources.
They could not have been more wrong. In fact, Huber and Mills had drastically mismeasured the amount of electricity used by PCs and the internet. Computing ate up perhaps 3% of total U.S. electricity in 1999, not the roughly 10% they had claimed. And instead of staring down a period of explosive growth, the U.S. electric grid was in reality facing a long stagnation. Over the next two decades, America’s electricity demand did not grow rapidly — or even, really, at all. Instead, it flatlined for the first time since World War II. The 2000s and 2010s were the first decades without “load growth,” the utility industry’s jargon for rising power demand, since perhaps the discovery of electricity itself.
Now that lull is ending — and a new wave of tech-driven concerns has overtaken the electricity industry. According to its supporters and critics alike, generative artificial intelligence like ChatGPT is about to devour huge amounts of electricity, enough to threaten the grid itself. “We still don’t appreciate the energy needs of this technology,” Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has said, arguing that the world needs a clean energy breakthrough to meet AI’s voracious energy needs. (He is investing in nuclear fusion and fission companies to meet this demand.) The Washington Post captured the zeitgeist with a recent story: America, it said, “is running out of power.”
But … is it actually? There is no question that America’s electricity demand is rising once again and that load growth, long in abeyance, has finally returned to the grid: The boom in new factories and the ongoing adoption of electric vehicles will see to that. And you shouldn’t bet against the continued growth of data centers, which have increased in size and number since the 1990s. But there is surprisingly little evidence that AI, specifically, is driving surging electricity demand. And there are big risks — for utility customers and for the planet — by treating AI-driven electricity demand as an emergency.
There is, to be clear, no shortage of predictions that AI will cause electricity demand to rise. According to a recent Reuters report, nine of the country’s 10 largest utilities are now citing the “surge” in power demand from data centers when arguing to regulators that they should build more power. Morgan Stanley projects that power use from data centers “is expected to triple globally this year,” according to the same report. The International Energy Agency more modestly — but still shockingly — suggests that electricity use from data centers, AI, and cryptocurrency could double by 2026.
These concerns have also come from environmentalists. A recent report from the Climate Action Against Disinformation Commission, a left-wing alliance of groups including Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, warned that AI will require “massive amounts of energy and water” and called for aggressive regulation.
That report focused on the risks of an AI-addled social media public sphere, which progressives fear will be filled with climate-change-denying propaganda by AI-powered bots. But in an interview, Michael Khoo, an author of the report and a researcher at Friends of the Earth, told me that studying AI made him much more frightened about its energy use.
AI is such an power-suck that it “is causing America to run out of energy,” Khoo said. “I think that’s going to be much more disruptive than the disinformation conversation in the mid-term.” He sketched a scenario where Altman and Mark Zuckerberg can outbid ordinary households for electrons as AI proliferates across the economy. “I can see people going without power,” he said, “and there being massive social unrest.”
These predictions aren’t happening in a vacuum. At the same time that investment bankers and environmentalists have fretted over a potential electricity shortage, utilities across the South have proposed a de facto solution: a massive buildout of new natural-gas power plants.
Citing the return of load growth, utilities across the South are trying to go around normal regulatory channels and build a slew of new natural-gas-burning power plants. Across at least six states, utilities have already won — or are trying to win — permission from local governments to fast-track more than 10,000 megawatts of new gas-fired power plants so that they can meet the surge in demand.
These requests have popped up across the region, pushed by vertically integrated monopoly power companies. Georgia Power won a tentative agreement to build 1,400 new megawatts of gas capacity, Canary reported. In the Carolinas, Duke Energy has asked to build 9,000 megawatts of new gas capacity, triple what it previously requested. The Tennessee Valley Authority has plans to add 6,600 megawatts of new capacity to its grid.
This buildout is big enough to endanger the country’s climate targets. Although these utilities are also building new renewable and battery farms, and shutting down coal plants, the planned surge in carbon emissions from natural gas plants would erase the reductions from those changes, according to a Southern Environmental Law Center analysis. Duke Energy has already said that it will not meet its 2030 climate goal in order to conduct the gas expansion.
In the popular press, AI’s voracious energy demand is sometimes said to be a major driver of this planned gas boom. But evidence for that proposition is slim, and the utilities have said only that data center expansion is one of several reasons for the boom. The Southeast’s population is growing, and the region is experiencing a manufacturing renaissance, due in part to the new car, battery, and solar panel factories subsidized by Biden’s climate law. Utilities in the South also face a particular challenge coping with the coldest winter mornings because so many homes and offices use inefficient and power-hungry space heaters.
Indeed, it’s hard to talk about the drivers of load growth with any specificity — and it’s hard to know whether load growth will actually happen in all corners of the South.
Utilities compete against each other to secure big-name customers — much like local governments compete with sweetheart tax deals — so when a utility asks regulators to build more capacity, it doesn’t reveal where potentialpower demand is coming from. (In other words, it doesn’t reveal who it believes will eventually buy that power.) A company might float plans to build the same data center or factory in multiple states to shop around for the best rates, which means the same underlying gigawatts of demand may be appearing in several different utilities’ resource plans at the same time. In other words, utilities are unlikely to actually see all of the demand they’re now projecting.
Even if we did know exactly how many gigawatts of new demand each utility would see, it’s almost impossible to say how much of it is coming from AI. Utilities don’t say how much of their future projected power demand will come from planned factories versus data centers. Nor do they say what each data center does and whether it trains AI (or mines Bitcoin, which remains a far bigger energy suck).
The risk of focusing on AI, specifically, as a driver of load growth is that because it’s a hot new technology — one with national security implications, no less — it can rhetorically justify expensive emergency action that is actually not necessary at all. Utilities may very well need to build more power capacity in the years to come. But does that need constitute an emergency? Does it justify seeking special permission from their statehouses or regulators to build more gas, instead of going through the regular planning process? Is it worth accelerating approvals for new gas plants? Probably not. The real danger, in other words, is not that we’ll run out of power. It’s that we’ll build too much of the wrong kind.
At the same time, we might have been led astray by overly dire predictions of AI’s energy use. Jonathan Koomey, a researcher who studies how the internet and data centers use energy (and the namesake of Koomey’s Law) told me that many estimates of Nvidia’s most important AI chips assume that their energy use is the same as their advertised “rated” power. In reality, Nvidia chips probably use half of that amount, he said, because chipmakers engineer their chips to withstand more electricity than is necessary for safety reasons.
And this is just the current generation of chips: Nvidia’s next generation of AI-training chips, called “Blackwell,” use 25 times less energy to do the same amount of computation as the previous generation of chips.
Koomey helped defuse the last panic over energy use by showing that the estimates Huber and Mills relied on were wildly incorrect. Estimates now suggest that the internet used less than 1% of total U.S. electricity by the late 1990s, not 13% as they claimed. Those percentages stayedroughly the same through 2008, he later found, even as data centers grew and computers proliferated across the economy. That’s the same year, remember, that Huber and Mills predicted that the internet would consume half of American energy.
These bad predictions were extremely convenient. Mills was a scientific advisor to the Greening Earth Society, a fossil-fuel-industry-funded group that alleged carbon dioxide pollution would actually improve the global environment. He aimed to show that climate and environmental policy would conflict with the continued growth of the internet.
“Many electricity policy proposals are on a collision course with demand forces,” Mills said in a Greening Earth press release at the time. “While many environmentalists want to substantially reduce coal use in making electricity, there is no chance of meeting future economically-driven and Internet-accelerated electric demand without retaining and expanding the coal component.” Hence the headline of the Forbes piece: “The PCs are coming — Dig more coal.”
What makes today’s AI-induced fear frenzy different from 1999 is that the alarmed projections are not just coming from businesses and banks like Morgan Stanley, but from environmentalists like Friends of the Earth. Yet neither their estimates of near-term, AI-driven power shortages — nor the analysis from Morgan Stanley that U.S. data-center use could soon triple within a year — make sense given what we know about data centers, Koomey said. It is not logistically possible to triple data centers’ electricity use in one year. “There just aren’t enough people to build data centers, and it takes longer than a year to build a new data center anyway,” he said. “There aren’t enough generators, there aren’t enough transformers — the backlog for some equipment is 24 months. It’s a supply chain constraint.”
Look around and you might notice that we have many more servers and computers today than we did in 1999 — not to mention smartphones and tablets, which didn’t even exist then — and yet computing doesn’t devour half of American energy. It doesn’t even get close. Today, computers use 1% to 4% of total U.S. power demand, depending on which estimate you trust. That’s about the same share of total U.S. electricity demand that they used in the late 1990s and mid-2000s.
It may well be that AI devours more energy in years to come, but utilities probably do not need to deal with it by building more gas. They could install more batteries, build new power lines, or even pay some customers to reduce their electricity usage during certain peak events, such as cold winter storms.
There are some places where AI-driven energy demand could be a problem — Koomey cited Ireland and Loudon County, Virginia, as two epicenters. But even there, building more natural gas is not the sole way to cope with load growth.
“The problem with this debate is everybody is kind of right,” Daniel Tait, who researches Southern utilities for the Energy and Policy Institute, a consumer watchdog, told me. “Yes, AI will increase load a little bit, but probably not as much as you think. Yes, load is growing, but maybe not as much as you say. Yes, we do need to build stuff, but maybe not the stuff that you want.”
There are real risks if AI’s energy demands get overstated and utilities go on a gas-driven bender. The first is for the planet: Utilities might overbuild gas plants now, run them even though they’re non-economic, and blow through their climate goals.
“Utilities — especially the vertically integrated monopoles in the South — have every incentive to overstate load growth, and they have a pattern of having done that consistently,” Gudrun Thompson, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, told me. In 2017, the Rocky Mountain Institute, an energy think tank, found in 2017 that utilities systematically overestimated their peak demand when compiling forecasts. This makes sense: Utilities would rather build too much capacity than wind up with too little, especially when they can pass along the associated costs to rate-payers.
But the second risk is that utilities could burn through the public’s willingness to pay for grid upgrades. Over the next few years, utilities should make dozens of updates to their systems. They have to build new renewables, new batteries, and new clean 24/7 power, such as nuclear or geothermal. They will have to link their grids to their neighbors’ by building new transmission lines. All of that will be expensive, and it could require the kind of investment that raises electricity rates. But the public and politicians can accept only so many rate hikes before they rebel, and there’s a risk that utilities spend through that fuzzy budget on unnecessary and wasteful projects now, not on the projects that they’ll need in the future.
There is no question that AI will use more electricity in the years to come. But so will EVs, new factories, and other sources of demand. America is on track to use more electricity. If that becomes a crisis, it will be one of our own making.
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On the IEA’s latest report, flooding in LA, and Bill Gates’ bad news
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms tomorrow could spawn tornadoes in Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Alabama • A massive wildfire on a biodiverse island in the Indian Ocean has been burning for nearly a month, threatening wildlife • Tropical Cyclone Zelia has made landfall in Western Australia with winds up to 180mph.
Bill Gates’ climate tech advocacy organization has told its partners that it will slash its grantmaking budget this year, dealing a blow to climate-focused policy and advocacy groups that relied on the Microsoft founder, Heatmap’s Katie Brigham has learned. Breakthrough Energy, the umbrella organization for Gates’ various climate-focused programs, alerted many nonprofit grantees earlier this month that it would not be renewing its support for them. This pullback will not affect Breakthrough’s $3.5 billion climate-focused venture capital arm, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which funds an extensive portfolio of climate tech companies. Breakthrough’s fellowship program, which provides early-stage climate tech leaders with funding and assistance, will also remain intact, a spokesperson confirmed. They would not comment on whether this change will lead to layoffs at Breakthrough Energy.
“Breakthrough Energy made up a relatively small share — perhaps 1% — of climate philanthropy worldwide,” Brigham writes. “But what has made Breakthrough Energy distinctive is its support for policy and advocacy groups that promote a wide range of technological solutions, including nuclear energy and direct air capture, to fight climate change.”
Anti-wind activists have joined with well-connected figures in conservative legal and energy circles to privately lobby the Trump administration to undo permitting decisions by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, according to documents obtained by Heatmap’s Jael Holzman. Representatives of conservative think tanks and legal nonprofits — including the Caesar Rodney Institute, the Heartland Institute and Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, or CFACT — sent a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum dated February 11 requesting that the Trump administration “immediately revoke” letters from NOAA to 11 offshore wind projects authorizing “incidental takes,” a term of regulatory art referencing accidental and permissible deaths under federal endangered species and mammal protection laws. The letter also requested “an immediate cession of construction” at four offshore wind projects with federal approvals that have begun construction: Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia offshore wind project, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners’ Vineyard Wind 1, and Ørsted’s Revolution Wind and Sunrise Wind projects.
“This letter represents a new stage of Trump’s war on offshore wind,” Holzman writes. “Yes, he has frozen leasing, along with most permitting activity and even public meetings related to pending projects. But the president's executive order targeting offshore wind opened the door to rescinding leases and previous permits. Doing so would produce new, costly legal battles for developers and for publicly-regulated utilities, ratepayers. Over the past few weeks, offshore wind developers with projects that got their permits under Biden have sought to reassure investors that at least they’ll be fine. If this new request is heeded, that calm will subside.”
Heavy downpours triggered flooding and debris flows across Los Angeles County yesterday. A portion of the Pacific Coast Highway, one of the most iconic roadways in America, is closed indefinitely due to mudslides near Malibu, an area devastated in last month’s fires. Duke’s Malibu, a famous oceanfront restaurant along the PCH, was inundated. The worst of the rain has passed now and many flood alerts have been canceled, but the cleanup has just begun.
Rain flows down a street outside a burned home.Mario Tama/Getty Images
Global electricity use is set to rise by 4% annually through 2027, “the equivalent of adding an amount greater than Japan’s annual electricity consumption every year,” according to the International Energy Agency’s new Electricity 2025 report. Here are some key points:
IEA
JPMorgan Chase clients have apparently been demanding more guidance about the climate crisis. As a result, the bank launched a new climate report authored by its global head of climate advisory, Sarah Kapnick, an atmospheric and oceanic scientist who was previously chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The report seeks to build what Kapnick is calling “climate intuition” – the ability to use science to assess and make strategic investment decisions about the shifting climate. “Success in the New Climate Era hinges on our ability to integrate climate considerations into daily decision-making,” Kapnick writes. “Those who adapt will lead, while others risk falling behind.” Here’s a snippet from the report, to give you a sense of the tone and takeaways:
“Adhering to temperatures below 1.5C will require emissions reductions. Depending on your definition of 1.5C, they may require historic annual reductions and potentially carbon removal. Conversely, if you have a technical or financial view that carbon dioxide removal will not scale, you should assume there is a difficult path to 1.5C (i.e. emissions reductions to zero depending on your definition in 6, 15, or 30+ years). If that is the case, you need to plan for the physical manifestations of climate change and social responses that will ensue if your investment horizons are longer.”
Greenhouse gas leaks from supermarket refrigerators are estimated to create as much pollution each year as burning more than 30 million tons of coal.
Grantees told Heatmap they were informed that Bill Gates’ climate funding organization would not renew its support.
Bill Gates’ climate tech advocacy organization has told its partners that it will slash its grantmaking budget this year, dealing a blow to climate-focused policy and advocacy groups that relied on the Microsoft founder, Heatmap has learned.
Breakthrough Energy, the umbrella organization for Gates’ various climate-focused programs, alerted many nonprofit grantees earlier this month that it would not be renewing its support for them. This pullback will not affect Breakthrough’s $3.5 billion climate-focused venture capital arm, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which funds an extensive portfolio of climate tech companies. Breakthrough’s fellowship program, which provides early-stage climate tech leaders with funding and assistance, will also remain intact, a spokesperson confirmed. They would not comment on whether this change will lead to layoffs at Breakthrough Energy.
“Bill Gates and Breakthrough Energy remain as committed as ever to using our voice and resources to advocate for the energy innovations needed to address climate change,” the Breakthrough spokesperson told me in a written statement. “We continue to believe that innovation in energy is essential for achieving global climate goals and securing a prosperous, sustainable world for future generations.”
Gates founded Breakthrough Energy in 2015 to help develop and deploy technologies that would help the world reach net-zero emissions by 2050. The organization made more than $96 million in grants in 2023, the most recent year for which data is available.
Among its beneficiaries was the Breakthrough Institute, a California-based think tank that promotes technological solutions to climate change. (Despite having a similar name, it is not affiliatedwith Breakthrough Energy.) Last week, a representative from Breakthrough Energy told the institute’s executive director, Ted Nordhaus, that its funding would not be renewed. The Breakthrough Institute had previously received a two-year grant of about $1.2 million per year, which wrapped up this month.
“What we were told is that they are ceasing all of their climate grantmaking — zeroed out immediately after the USAID shutdown because Bill wants to refocus all of his grantmaking efforts on global health,” Nordhaus told me on Monday, referring to the Trump administration’s efforts to defund the United States Agency for International Development. “But it’s very clear that this wasn’t brought on solely by USAID. I had heard from several people that there was a big reassessment going on for a couple of months.”
The Breakthrough spokesperson disputed this characterization, and denied that cutbacks were due to the USAID shutdown or a shift in funding from climate to global health initiatives. The spokesperson also told me that some grantmaking budget remains, though they would not reveal how much.
As for Breakthrough Institute, the funding cut will primarily impact its agricultural program, which received about 90% of its budget from Breakthrough Energy. Nordhaus is trying to figure out how to keep that program afloat, while the institute’s other three areas of policy focus — energy and climate, nuclear innovation, and energy and development — remain largely unaffected.
Multiple other organizations confirmed to Heatmap that they also will not receive future grants from Breakthrough Energy. A representative for the American Center for Life Cycle Assessment, a trade organization for sustainability professionals, told me that Breakthrough had recently informed the group that it would not renew a $400,000 grant, which is set to wrap up this May. (ACLCA’s spokesperson also noted that the grant had not come with any indication that it would be renewed.) Another former grantee told me that while their organization is currently wrapping up a grant with Breakthrough and does not have anything in the works with them for this year, they expected that future funding would be impacted, though they did not explain why.
Breakthrough Energy made up a relatively small share — perhaps 1% — of climate philanthropy worldwide. Foundations and individuals around the world gave a total of $9 billion to $15 billion to climate causes in 2023, according to an analysis from the Climateworks Foundation.
But what has made Breakthrough Energy distinctive is its support for policy and advocacy groups that promote a wide range of technological solutions, including nuclear energy and direct air capture, to fight climate change.
“Their presence will be missed,” said the CEO of another climate nonprofit who was notified by Breakthrough that its funding would not be renewed. Breakthrough Energy “was one of the few funders supporting pragmatic research and advocacy work that pushed at neglected areas such as the need for zero-carbon firm power and accelerated energy innovation,” they added.
"Even if it’s a drop in the bucket, it still makes a difference,” another former grantee with a particularly large budget told me. This organization recently sent Breakthrough an inquiry about partnering up again and is waiting to hear back. “But for small organizations, it’s make it or break it.”
Speculation abounds as to the rationale behind Breakthrough’s funding cuts. “I have heard that one of the reasons that Bill decided to stop funding climate was that he concluded that there was so much money in climate that his money really wasn’t that important,” Nordhaus told me. But that is not true when it comes to agriculture, he said, which comprises about 12% of global emissions. ”There’s very little money for advocating for agriculture innovation to address the climate impacts of the ag sector,” Nordhaus told me.
Gates, who privately donated to a nonprofit affiliated with the Harris campaign in 2024 but did not endorse the Democrat, dined with Trump and Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, for more than three hours at Mar-a-Lago around New Year’s Day, he told Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Emma Tucker. He said that Trump was interested in the possibility of eradicating polio or developing an HIV vaccine. “I felt like he was energized and looking forward to helping to drive innovation,” he told her, days before the inauguration.
Since then, Trump’s war on USAID has frozen funding to a polio eradication program and shut down the phase 1 clinical trial of an HIV vaccine in South Africa, Kenya, and Uganda.
The Trump administration is now being lobbied to nix offshore wind projects already under construction.
Anti-wind activists have joined with well-connected figures in conservative legal and energy circles to privately lobby the Trump administration to undo permitting decisions by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, according to documents obtained by Heatmap.
Representatives of conservative think tanks and legal nonprofits — including the Caesar Rodney Institute, the Heartland Institute and Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, or CFACT — sent a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum dated February 11 requesting that the Trump administration “immediately revoke” letters from NOAA to 11 offshore wind projects authorizing “incidental takes,” a term of regulatory art referencing accidental and permissible deaths under federal endangered species and mammal protection laws. The letter lays out a number of perceived issues with how those approvals have historically been issued for offshore wind companies and claims the government has improperly analyzed the cumulative effects of adding offshore wind to the ocean’s existing industrialization. NOAA oversees marine species protection.
The letter also requested “an immediate cession of construction” at four offshore wind projects with federal approvals that have begun construction: Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia offshore wind project, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners’ Vineyard Wind 1, and Ørsted’s Revolution Wind and Sunrise Wind projects.
“It is with a sense of real urgency we write you today,” the letter states, referencing Trump’s executive order targeting the offshore wind industry to ask that he go further. “[E]leven projects have already received approvals with four of those under construction. Leasing and permitting will be reviewed for these approved projects but may take time.”
I obtained the letter from Paul Kamenar, a longtime attorney in conservative legal circles currently with the D.C.-based National Legal and Policy Center, who told me the letter had been sent to the department this week. Kamenar is one of multiple attorneys involved in a lawsuit filed last year by Heartland and CFACT challenging permits for Dominion’s Coastal Virginia project over alleged potential impacts to the endangered North Atlantic right whale. We reported earlier this week that the government signaled in proceedings for that case it will review approvals for Coastal Virginia, the first indication that previous permits issued for offshore wind could be vulnerable to the Trump effect.
Kamenar described the request to Burgum as “a coalition letter,” and told me that “the new secretary there is sympathetic” to their complaints about offshore wind permits. “We’re hoping that this letter will basically reverse the letter[s] of authorizations, or have the agency go back,” Kamenar said, adding a message for Dominion and other developers implicated by the letter: “Just because the company has the approval doesn’t mean it’s all systems go.”
The Interior Department does not directly oversee NOAA – that’s the Commerce Department. But it does control the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which ultimately regulates all offshore wind development and issues final approvals.
Interior did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the letter.
Some signees of the document are part of a constellation of influential figures in the anti-renewables movement whose voices have been magnified in the new administration.
One of the letter’s two lead signatories is David Stevenson, director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy at the Caesar Rodney Institute, an organization involved in legal battles against offshore wind projects under development in the Mid-Atlantic. The Institute says on its website it is a member of the State Policy Network, a broad constellation of think tanks, legal advocacy groups, and nonprofits.
Multiple activists who signed onto the letter work with the Save Right Whales Coalition, a network of local organizations and activists. Coalition members have appeared with Republican lawmakers at field hearings and rallies over the past few years attacking offshore wind. They became especially influential in GOP politics after being featured in a film by outspoken renewables critic and famous liberal-turned-conservative Michael Shellenberger, who is himself involved in the Coalition. His film, Thrown to the Wind, blew up in right-wing media circles because it claimed to correlate whale deaths with offshore wind development.
When asked if the Coalition was formally involved in this request of the administration, Lisa Linowes, a co-founder of the Coalition, replied in an email: “The Coalition was not a signer of the request.”
One cosigner sure to turn heads: John Droz, a pioneer in the anti-wind activist movement who for years has given talks and offered roadmaps on how best to stop renewables projects.
The letter also includes an endorsement from Mandy Davis, who was involved with the draft anti-wind executive order we told you was sent to the Trump transition team before inauguration. CFACT also co-signed that draft order when it was transmitted to the transition team, according to correspondence reviewed by Heatmap.
Most of the signatories to the letter list their locations. Many of the individuals unrelated to bigger organizations list their locations as in Delaware or Maryland. Only a few signatories on the letter have locations in other states dealing with offshore wind projects.
On its face, this letter represents a new stage of Trump’s war on offshore wind.
Yes, he has frozen leasing, along with most permitting activity and even public meetings related to pending projects. But the president's executive order targeting offshore wind opened the door to rescinding leases and previous permits. Doing so would produce new, costly legal battles for developers and for publicly-regulated utilities, ratepayers. Over the past few weeks, offshore wind developers with projects that got their permits under Biden have sought to reassure investors that at least they’ll be fine.
If this new request is heeded, that calm will subside.
Beyond that, reversing these authorizations could represent a scandal for scientific integrity at NOAA – or at least NOAA’s Fisheries division, the National Marine Fisheries Service. Heeding the letter’s requests would mean revisiting the findings of career scientists for what developers may argue are purely political reasons, or at minimum arbitrary ones.
This wouldn’t be the first time something like this has happened under Trump. In 2020, I used public records to prove that plans by career NOAA Fisheries employees to protect endangered whales from oil and gas exploration in the Atlantic were watered down after a political review. At the time, Democratic Representative Jared Huffman — now the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee — told me that my reporting was evidence of potential scientific integrity issues at NOAA and represented “blatant scientific and environmental malpractice at the highest order.”
It’s worth emphasizing how much this mattered, not just for science but literally in court, as the decision to allow more seismic testing for oil under Trump was challenged at the time on the grounds that it was made arbitrarily.
Peter Corkeron, a former NOAA scientist with expertise researching the North Atlantic right whale, reviewed the letter to Burgum and told me in an email that essentially, the anti-offshore wind movement is exploiting similar arguments made by conservationists about issues with the federal government’s protection of the species to target this sector. The federal regulator has for many years faced the ire of conservation activists, who’ve said it does not go far enough to protect endangered species from more longstanding threats like fishing and vessel strikes.
If NOAA were to bow to this request, Corkeron wrote, he would interpret that as the agency’s failure to fully protect the species in good faith instead becoming “suborned by the hydrocarbon exploitation industry as a way of eliminating a competing form of energy production that should, in time, prove more beneficial for whales than what we’re currently doing.”
“The point on cumulative impacts is, on face value, fair,” he said. “The problem is its lack of context. Cumulative impacts on North Atlantic right whales from offshore wind are possible. However, in the context of the cumulative impacts of the shipping (vessel strike kills, noise pollution), and fishing (death, maiming, failure to breed) industries, they’ll be insignificant. Because NOAA has never clearly set out to address ways to offset other impacts while developing the offshore wind industry, these additive impacts place a burden on this new industry in ways that existing, and more damaging, industries don’t have to address.”
CFACT responded to a request for comment by sending me a press release with the letter attached that was not publicly available, and did not respond to the climate criticisms by press time. David Stevenson of the Caesar Rodney Institute sent me a statement criticizing offshore wind energy and questioning its ability to “lower global emissions.”
“The goal is to pause construction until everything is reviewed,” Stevenson said. When asked if there was an outcome where a review led to projects being built, he said no, calling offshore wind an “environmental wrecking ball.”
Well, we’ll soon find out what the real wrecking ball is.