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The Trump administration is threatening to force U.S. grid operators and utilities to keep money-losing coal-fired power plants running, no matter how dirty and expensive their power is.
Its stated reason? To shore up the reliability of the U.S. power grid.
It’s the latest salvo in a long-running battle over the country’s increasingly brittle grid — one that pits those in favor of hanging on to fossil fuels, and particularly coal, against those who put their faith in a future powered by cleaner and cheaper alternatives.
That battle is entering a critical phase as the grid faces challenges on multiple fronts.
Ever more intense summer heat waves and winter cold snaps driven by climate change are already straining the grid. An unprecedented boom in electricity demand, spurred by AI data centers and a resurgent manufacturing sector, threatens to push the grid even closer to its limit. Meanwhile, aging and unprofitable coal power plants have been closing at a rapid clip — and grid backlogs are preventing new solar, wind, batteries, and even fossil-gas plants from being built fast enough to replace them.
If these imbalances persist, more than half of North America faces significant risk of energy shortages over the next five to 10 years, according to a 2024 report from the North American Electric Reliability Corp., which oversees the nation’s electric system. Utilities and regional grid operators are sounding the same alarm. Many say they need to build more fossil gas–fired power plants and keep costly coal plants open to deal with what is evolving into a genuine crisis.
But energy experts insist that there’s no single, simple solution to this high-stakes challenge. Maintaining reliability will certainly require retaining some otherwise unprofitable fossil-fueled power plants. But it also requires pressing utilities and regional grid operators to rapidly bring solar, wind, and batteries online — and enlisting electricity users to shift power use to reduce costly peaks in demand.
This multifaceted approach would bolster the grid without sacrificing cost and climate concerns. Flocking back to coal and ratcheting up gas, meanwhile, would cost consumers more, increase climate and air pollution, and ultimately result in a less diversified and therefore more fragile grid than one balanced by renewables.
In the longer term, the U.S. must break barriers to building far more high-voltage power lines to connect clean energy across regions and share power when extreme weather strikes, experts say. It also needs to support the economics for “clean firm” technologies like advanced nuclear and enhanced geothermal power, or long-duration energy storage systems that can fill the gaps when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.
“Reliability is actually a characteristic of the entire electricity system, and individual resources contribute to reliability as part of a balanced portfolio,” Sara Baldwin, senior electrification director at think tank Energy Innovation, said during a March webinar introducing the group’s February report on the complexities of keeping the grid running in a time of energy transition.
“So whenever you hear someone talking about the reliability of a single resource, that should raise a flag that is not necessarily grounded in full truth,” she said.
Baldwin’s “single resource” comment nods to a common refrain from the Trump administration and congressional Republicans that today’s grid reliability problems have a simple solution: Keep burning coal.
Last week, President Donald Trump issued an executive order that authorizes the Department of Energy to prevent uneconomical coal plants from closing, even if they’re violating federal and state carbon and environmental mandates and imposing higher power costs on customers. This would be the most aggressive federal intervention in modern history into the authority of states to regulate utilities, and of regional grid operators to manage competitive energy markets.
Many Republicans in Congress have long insisted that grid reliability problems are primarily caused by climate and clean-energy policies put in place by states and the Biden administration. They argue that regulations, not economics, are forcing coal plants into “premature” retirement and that cleaner alternatives can’t be relied on to fill the gap left by those retirements.
During two grid-reliability hearings last month in the U.S. House of Representatives, Republicans leveraged this framing in questions for utility executives, grid operators, and energy experts. “Too many electric-generating facilities have been retired in recent years,” said Rep. Bob Latta, an Ohio Republican who chairs the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee that held the hearings.
Under questioning, most representatives of the U.S. grid operators, which are responsible for managing the systems that deliver electricity to about two-thirds of U.S. customers, concurred with Republicans that the shuttering of coal power plants presents a major reliability challenge.
But Rep. Frank Pallone, a New Jersey Democrat and ranking member on the energy subcommittee, pushed back on Republicans’ framing. Instead of trying to keep coal plants open, he said, utilities, grid operators, and regulators must clear bottlenecks preventing new clean energy and energy storage from taking over the role that fossil fuels have previously played.
Grid operators are “saying they need every new electricity generator they can get to come online in the next five years,” Pallone said. “If Republicans are really interested in unleashing American energy, they should work with us to clear interconnection queues and let resources get on the grid as quickly as possible.”
Instead, Republicans are considering repealing the clean-energy tax credits created by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, Pallone said in his opening statement. That would undercut the economics of not just solar, wind, and battery projects but of many other forms of carbon-free generation and storage, including geothermal power, advanced nuclear power, and long-duration energy storage.
“Repealing billions of dollars in technology-neutral funding for all types of new energy is not the way you address the increasing need for energy,” he said.
Pallone’s comments underscore two of the biggest problems facing the U.S. grid.
The first is that coal simply cannot compete economically against alternatives. Coal has dwindled to providing only about 15% of U.S. electricity supply, as both fossil gas and renewables fall in cost. Last year, solar, wind, and batteries alone made up more than 90% of the 56 gigawatts of power capacity built in the U.S., and they are expected to lead new additions in 2025, too.
The second problem is that many U.S. utilities and grid operators have been unable to move fast enough to embrace the advantages of cheap, clean energy. As Energy Innovation’s February report highlights, “outdated views on grid reliability are colliding with slow-moving institutions,” which has confounded the potential for solar, wind, and batteries to fill the reliability gaps left by shuttered coal plants.
Much of the reluctance from certain grid operators stems from the fact that solar and wind ebb and flow with the weather, whereas fossil-fueled power plants can be turned on and off on command.
“Renewable generators play an important role, and we want them to come onto the grid, but they are not a one-for-one substitute for the fossil-fuel generators that we are replacing,” said Manu Asthana, president and CEO of PJM Interconnection, which manages the transmission grid delivering electricity to about 65 million people from the mid-Atlantic coast to the Great Lakes.
But daytime solar production and nighttime wind generation can still provide a large and predictable amount of the power needed during hot summer afternoons and evenings and cold winter mornings, when demand for electricity spikes and reliability issues loom, said Wilson Ricks, a researcher and energy-modeling expert at Princeton University’s ZERO Lab.
Meanwhile, lithium-ion batteries are becoming a more cost-effective way to store clean power for use when the grid needs it, he said. Utility-scale batteries deployed in California and Texas are storing gigawatts of solar power to cover peak grid demands during sunset and evening hours, for example.
Taken together, “the technologies that are currently experiencing widespread commercial adoption — wind, solar, lithium-ion batteries — can actually go a long way towards ensuring that system-wide resource accuracy,” Ricks said during last month’s webinar.
Real-world experience bears this out, said Ric O’Connell, founding executive director of GridLab, a think tank that contributed to the Energy Innovation reliability report. The standout example is Texas, which is adding wind, solar, and batteries faster than any other state.
The transmission grid operated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas “has been running at 85% carbon-free for the last several weeks in the spring,” O’Connell said during the webinar. That clean power has helped cover the absence of fossil-fueled plants that were shut down for seasonal maintenance, he noted.
Similarly, Southwest Power Pool, which manages a grid stretching from the Dakotas to Oklahoma, has hit 90% wind power during some hours of the year and has seen nearly half of annual power needs supplied by carbon-free energy in recent years, he said.
Last year, on California’s solar- and battery-rich grid, grid operator CAISO clocked 100 days in a row with 100% carbon-free electricity for at least a part of each day. Gigawatts of battery capacity also improved the state’s summer grid reliability by shifting solar power into the evenings.
That’s a big change from the summers of 2020 and 2022, when the California grid faced serious emergencies, CAISO CEO Elliot Mainzer told Congress during last month’s hearings.
“A reliable grid relies on a portfolio of resources with different attributes and complementary characteristics,” he said. Pairing batteries with solar “has helped to increase reliability in recent years.”
By contrast, O’Connell said, PJM’s grid “is in the single digits for wind and solar. PJM has tons of gas, tons of coal, tons of nuclear — and they say, ‘We need even more to meet growing load.’ I’m like, ‘No, we need to add wind and solar and batteries to meet that growing load.’”
PJM’s grid is a microcosm of this problematic dynamic.
The region expects to lose about 40 gigawatts of generation, more than 20% of its capacity, by 2030. But critics say its bigger challenge is its inability to interconnect new resources to replace what it’s losing.
For years, PJM delayed interconnection reforms conducted by other grid operators. It has also failed until recently to undertake the kind of regional grid expansion plans that have been done by grid operators in Texas, California, and the Midwest, which have enabled them to bring much more clean energy online.
Critics say PJM’s failure to institute these reforms and forward-looking plans has played an outsized role in its struggle to replace retiring power plants and in the spiking cost of securing new generation resources. Multiple studies find PJM could have avoided billions of dollars of costs and significantly eased its reliability concerns if it had connected even a fraction of those pent-up clean energy and battery projects over the past decade.
Instead, state regulators and grid operators have been forced to use costly emergency mechanisms to keep power plants from closing. In Maryland, for example, PJM has used its “reliability must-run” authority to pay the owners of coal- and oil-fired power plants to postpone their retirements until at least 2028 to prevent the threat of regional grid instability or outages, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars in the coming years.
The high price tag of these emergency stay-open measures highlights the economic burden of poor planning around power plant retirements, O’Connell said.
Those costs are bound to rise if the Trump administration forces coal power plants to stay open under emergency orders — or even demands that utilities reopen closed coal plants, as Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has said the Trump administration may seek to do.
These poor economics are why backers of renewables are frustrated with those who insist that clean-energy policies are to blame for coal plants closing and thus for grid reliability challenges.
“People are retiring coal plants because they’re uneconomic,” O’Connell said.
Karen Palmer, a senior fellow and director of the electric power program at think tank Resources for the Future, agreed that coal retirements are “not the fault of environmental regulation. The market prices just aren’t there.”
Nor are fossil-fueled power plants as reliable as they’re often made out to be, particularly during weather extremes when the grid needs them the most. Summer heat waves reduce the efficiency of gas-fired power plants and can lead to equipment failures.
And major wintertime grid emergencies of the past several years, such as the Texas grid collapse in February 2021 and rolling outages in the Southeast in December 2022, have been linked to cold-related failures not only at coal and gas-fired power plants but across the wells and pipelines that deliver gas to generate power.
No one technology is immune to weather stresses and disruptions. Subzero temperatures can freeze up wind turbines and sap battery capacity, and scorching temperatures reduce solar-panel output and dampen battery performance. But this reinforces the importance of a portfolio approach to solving reliability challenges, Baldwin said.
None of this is to downplay the complexity that grid operators face — particularly at a time when demand for electricity is growing at a pace not seen in decades.
The Midcontinent Independent System Operator, which manages a grid serving 15 U.S. states from Louisiana to North Dakota, warned last year that its latest expectations for new power demand from data centers and manufacturing facilities put it at increased risk of reliability challenges if generating capacity doesn’t increase at the same rate.
In New York, state grid operator NYISO has identified a “very concerning decline in statewide resource margins” by 2034 unless it can expand clean-energy deployments, which lag behind state targets. NYISO has already delayed the closure of some gas-fired “peaker” power plants in New York City, which lies at the southern end of a grid bottleneck that constrains how much clean power from upstate New York and Canada can reach the city, NYISO CEO Richard Dewey said at the March 25 congressional hearing.
ISO New England, which manages the grid across six New England states, is struggling during winter cold snaps to meet simultaneous demand for gas for heating and for generating power, CEO and President Gordon van Welie said at the hearing. New England is also relying on Canadian hydropower in the near term and offshore wind farms in the longer term, he said — both sources threatened by Trump administration policies.
And while grid operators at last month’s hearing concurred with Republicans that losing existing generation is one reliability threat, they also agreed that losing federal clean-energy tax credits is another. Rep. Diana DeGette, a Democrat from Colorado, asked PJM’s Asthana if losing Inflation Reduction Act funding would “help or hurt our ability to stabilize the grid and to increase production.”
“In the near term, the interconnection queue is full of a lot of renewable projects, many of whom are, I’m sure, counting on the IRA,” Asthana replied. Repealing those tax credits “would make it less likely for them to come — and we do need them to come.”
“Anybody disagree with that on this panel?” DeGette asked the other grid operators. “No? They’re all shaking their heads no.”
An anticipated data-center boom is driving utility plans for massive natural gas investments in southeastern Wisconsin, raising objections from customer and climate advocates.
Critics say they’ve seen big development plans fail to pan out before, and they don’t want to be stuck paying for overbuilt fossil-fuel generation based on increasingly uncertain growth projections.
Wisconsin Electric Power Co. (WEPCO) says it needs to build new gas generation to power a planned $3.3 billion Microsoft data center near Mount Pleasant. The project is on the site of the failed Foxconn LCD screen factory, a proposed megaproject that President Donald Trump promised during his first term would become “the eighth wonder of the world” but that never materialized as planned.
“There’s a lot of healthy skepticism because of the Foxconn project never reaching anywhere near the scale that was being touted,” said Tom Content, executive director of the Citizens Utility Board. “People are asking, ‘Is this real this time?’”
Microsoft has already paused construction on the data center as it reevaluates the scope and how “recent changes in technology” may affect the project. A Chinese artificial-intelligence company in January announced a major breakthrough that it claims allows it to offer AI services with far less computing power, upending global assumptions about the industry’s electricity demand.
Microsoft is also proposing a data center in nearby Kenosha, and a developer called Cloverleaf Infrastructure is proposing one in nearby Port Washington. But the specifics of these data centers and their energy demand are not confirmed, hence critics say the utility hasn’t demonstrated that demand will increase enough to justify the roughly $2 billion in natural gas investments proposed by We Energies (WEPCO’s trade name). Critics also note that an influx of natural gas power seems to contradict Microsoft’s own climate goals of being carbon-negative by 2030.
“We Energies says they want to be ready for other potential customers but has provided no proof of who those customers are or what they want in terms of their energy sourcing,” said Gloria Randall-Hewitt, a resident who spoke at a March 25 hearing held by the Wisconsin Public Service Commission. These projects “carry huge price tags in terms of pollution, detrimental health outcomes, and rate increases for customers. They are asking us to just trust them.”
We Energies is looking to build a new five-turbine, 1,100-megawatt gas plant in Oak Creek on the same site as two large coal plants, one of which is closing this year. We Energies also plans to build a 128-MW gas plant in Paris, Wisconsin, 25 miles south of Oak Creek. The utility proposes serving the plants with a new liquefied natural gas storage terminal at the Oak Creek plant site, by Lake Michigan’s shore, and with a new 33-mile pipeline.
The Oak Creek gas plant would go online in 2027 or 2028, the utility says, and cost around $1.3 billion. The Paris plant, made up of seven reciprocating internal combustion engines, could go online next year, at a cost of roughly $300 million. WEPCO needs the storage terminal, which will cost about $520 million, to make sure the plants and residential customers have enough gas, as well as to meet requirements established by the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, which manages the region’s grid, utility spokesperson Brendan Conway said by email. The new pipeline would cost about $210 million.
The three-member Public Service Commission will decide whether to grant the utility the right to recoup those costs — and a profit — from ratepayers. After overwhelming turnout at the public hearing on Oak Creek, the commission extended the public comment period for the proposed plant through April 7. That was also the deadline for comments on the storage terminal, and the commission completed a comment period for the Paris proposal earlier this winter.
In an April 1 filing before the commission, We Energies said it forecasts 1,800 MW of increased demand in the next five years, and even if only 450 MW of that demand materializes, building the gas plants is the most cost effective way to meet it. Conway said the Oak Creek gas plant would save ratepayers $413 million compared to other alternatives.
But advocates don’t believe that and hope the commission orders the utility to consider other options and do more study.
“We understand there needs to be increased energy production to meet that load, but we want to make sure it’s the most cost-competitive suite of options, not just defaulting back to natural gas as a baseline,” said Emma Heins, principal at Advanced Energy United, an industry association representing transmission, generation, and transportation-related companies.
The Citizens Utility Board, Advanced Energy United, and other experts say the situation highlights Wisconsin’s lack of an integrated resource plan. Most states require utilities to undergo these comprehensive planning processes to meet predicted energy demand, but Wisconsin utilities simply bring proposals to regulators on a case-by-case basis. Advocates say centralized planning would avoid unnecessary generation investments and facilitate more investment in renewables.
“There’s a larger governance issue” in how decisions around energy infrastructure are made, said Courtney Brady, deputy director for the Midwest region at Evergreen Action, a nonprofit policy advocacy group. “That speaks to the fact that without an integrated resource plan in Wisconsin, you’re going to be more subject to these big proposals that could end up being costly unused infrastructure. I don’t think WEPCO has done their job in understanding the alternatives that exist, partly because they are not required by law to do so.”
We Energies currently gets only 5% of its energy from renewables, with 28% from coal and 37% from natural gas. Its investment in renewables lags behind other Wisconsin utilities like Xcel Energy, which generates half its energy carbon-free, and Madison Gas and Electric, which plans to be carbon neutral by 2050 and supplies the city of Madison with 24% renewable energy.
Conway said We Energies is investing over $9 billion in new renewable energy by 2029 and will eliminate coal-fired power by 2032. He said demand-response programs and renewables would still not be enough to meet the expected new demand.
“Now more than ever — it is critical for us to have quick-start gas plants available and running when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine,” he said by email.
Heins noted that WEPCO was “one of the last utilities in the country to build a large-scale coal plant.” In 2011, it spent $2.3 billion on a new coal plant at the Oak Creek site; the utility now plans to convert that plant to natural gas “in the coming years,” Conway said. Around the same time it built that coal plant, WEPCO invested close to $1 billion in pollution controls for another Oak Creek coal plant that is closing this year, leaving ratepayers with $645 million in stranded costs, as noted in an analysis by think tank RMI.
“This utility has a history of being behind the times on technologies,” Heins said. “Our sentiment is a lot of energy options are being left on the table, technologies that can be implemented much faster than a natural gas plant.”
RMI’s analysis notes that under the utility’s proposal, customers will on average pay an extra $78 a year to finance the Oak Creek gas plant, but that amount could climb to $136 a year if fuel and equipment cost increases considered possible by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory come to pass. RMI and other experts note that U.S. plans to build more LNG terminals to facilitate exports also mean that gas prices will likely rise and become more volatile, to the detriment of U.S. ratepayers.
Conway noted that WEPCO filed a March 31 request with the Public Service Commission to approve a rate structure where data centers would pay for generation infrastructure planned to meet their needs. Content said the proposal is a step in the right direction but lamented that the gas projects could be approved long before there is any certainty about the new rate plan.
Residents testifying at the Oak Creek public hearing also expressed fears about the health impacts of new gas generation, especially since they have already spent years suffering air pollution from the nearby coal plants.
The closure of those coal plants is a victory for public health and the environment — one that would be undermined by the construction of unnecessary, polluting gas plants, said Abby Novinska-Lois, executive director of Healthy Climate Wisconsin, an advocacy group led by medical professionals
“This isn’t a transition,” she said. “This is a brand new health threat to the area that isn’t necessary when we have energy efficiency and clean energy alternatives that can also meet the demand.”
For the first time, fossil fuels accounted for less than half of U.S. electricity production across an entire month as clean power generation surged in March.
Last month, fossil gas and coal made up just over 49% of power generation, while solar, wind, hydropower, biofuels and other renewables, and nuclear met 51% of demand, new data from think tank Ember shows.
The data point is a striking example of how far the U.S. energy transition has come in recent years.
A decade ago, the U.S. got nearly two-thirds of its power from fossil fuels. But after years of building mostly solar, wind, and batteries, the country has started to close that gap. Just last month solar and wind generation jumped by 37% and 12% respectively, compared to March 2024. Meanwhile, fossil-fuel generation fell by 2.5%.
It’s worth noting that this happened at the start of the spring “shoulder season,” which runs from March to May in the U.S. and is a sort of stars-aligning time for clean energy performance.
There are a few reasons why. Milder temperatures mean people use less energy to heat and cool their homes, so power demand tends to contract. That has historically made shoulder seasons — the fall version runs from September to November — a good time to take fossil-fuel and nuclear power plants offline for maintenance. Meanwhile, wind production peaks in the spring, and solar production comes more alive with the longer days of stronger sun. Last month, solar and wind alone met over 24% of overall U.S. power demand.
But still: The shoulder seasons are always a stars-aligning time for clean energy. They were last year and the year before that and the one before that, too. Yet in the U.S., clean energy has never before beaten out fossil fuels for a whole month, no matter the season. That’s what makes this a significant moment.
It’s also notable given the current political hostility toward clean energy in the U.S. — and the federal government’s re-embrace of fossil fuels.
President Donald Trump wants to halt all wind turbine construction. Congressional Republicans are considering cutting Inflation Reduction Act tax credits that incentivize clean energy projects. Trump’s aggressive tariffs on China, which remain in place even after he paused “reciprocal” levies on every other country, could drastically slow the battery storage boom. And the president just this week signed a clutch of executive orders aimed at boosting coal, a highly polluting energy source that also happens to be in structural decline because it cannot compete with fossil gas or renewables on cost.
Even in spite of those headwinds, renewables continue to soar to new heights, underscoring the fact that clean energy is no longer a marginal part of the U.S. power system — but a cornerstone that is here to stay.
After eight years of planning and amid the Trump administration’s all-out assault on the sector, an offshore wind project outside of New York City quietly began at-sea construction this month.
Developer Equinor issued no press releases, held no ceremonies, and failed to respond to multiple inquiries about the construction milestone for its Empire Wind 1 project. Instead, a Listserv catering to boat captains and local residents posted a March 24 notice that “rock installation” around the turbines’ underwater bases would begin in April. Multiple insiders told Canary Media that work is now underway on those bases, which will minimize erosion around the first-ever wind turbines to connect to New York City’s power grid.
The lack of fanfare around an 810-megawatt wind farm effectively breaking ground less than 20 miles from America’s largest city speaks to the seismic shifts in messaging by renewable energy companies under Trump 2.0. While some firms are testing new lobbying strategies, others are choosing silence.
“There’s a bit of hesitancy to be out in front,” said Hillary Bright, executive director of Turn Forward, a nonprofit that advocates for U.S. offshore-wind businesses and sector growth. “It’s about not wanting to stick their heads up and drawing more attention, potentially, from the administration, which is already giving quite a bit of attention to offshore wind.”
President Donald Trump, more accurately, has put a bullseye on the industry’s back.
The president has called wind power “garbage,” “horrendous,” and “bullshit.” On the campaign trail, he made “windmills” a frequent focus of stump speeches and social media tirades. In the weeks leading up to his inauguration, Trump said “no new windmills” would be built in the U.S. during his presidency. Days later he reposted a video on Truth Social that contained misleading information about the scale of environmental damage from last year’s wind turbine failure at the Vineyard Wind project in Massachusetts.
Trump then issued an executive order on Inauguration Day that effectively froze all offshore wind permitting and leasing pending a federal review. Seemingly safe from the president’s pause at the time were nine projects, including Empire Wind 1, that already had their federal permits in hand. Since then, at least one of those permitted projects — the 2.8-gigawatt Atlantic Shores project off the New Jersey coast — has fallen apart. Others, like Dominion Energy’s 2.6-gigawatt Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, have pressed on.
With rock installation underway, Empire Wind has taken the first step toward erecting the project’s 54 turbines. On Monday, Equinor sent out another construction “update” email, this time about round-the-clock “[remotely operated vehicle] and dive operations” in the lease area this April, meaning underwater robots and human divers are also at work.
Both at-sea construction notices went out to subscribers of a public Listserv and have since been posted to the project’s “Community Updates” webpage. But Equinor, a Norwegian energy giant, did not update Empire Wind’s homepage to tout the news. Its Facebook page is now deactivated. The project’s X account made its most recent post in November. Equinor has not issued a single press release about Empire Wind 1 since Trump took office.
Empire Wind 1 is slated to finish construction by 2027, and when it does it will power 500,000 New York homes, according to the project’s website. It will also play an integral role in helping the state achieve its legislatively mandated target of 70% renewable energy by 2030.
But Bright said she isn’t surprised that the company is avoiding the spotlight right now.
An army of conservative think tanks are lobbying for a stop-work order on all U.S. offshore wind under construction, citing debunked claims that wind farms harm whales.
Empire Wind’s quiet kickoff this month caught the attention of U.S. Rep. Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican and longtime offshore wind opponent. In late March he penned a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in response to the “alarming development” of the project’s at-sea work and advised Burgum to “block construction” of Empire Wind using “everything in your power.” Smith cited the president’s anti-wind memorandum alongside other claims, which lacked specifics, that Empire Wind could “blind” military radar or break apart during hurricanes.
Smith also claimed in his letter to Burgum that something similar to last year’s cargo ship collision with the Francis Scott Key Bridge could happen to one of Empire Wind’s turbines, writing “such a situation is more likely than many may think.” The fatal bridge collision occurred inside one of the Port of Baltimore’s designated shipping channels. While Empire Wind’s lease area is sandwiched between two shipping lanes, early concerns about ship collisions in the New York Bight were dismissed after years of independent studies, government research, and computer simulations.
There’s no indication that the Interior Department has intervened in Empire Wind’s scheduled construction — yet.
In fact, agency officials are likely in close contact with Empire Wind’s developers, as is typical with all construction in federal waters. If Empire Wind 1 can avoid weather delays and political interference, the first steel monopile — the subsea part of a wind tower — could be driven into the seafloor as early as May. Undersea cable laying is scheduled for June, according to sources familiar with the project.
Plus, with rising energy demands and some of these multi-billion-dollar wind projects nearly complete, some Republicans see abandonment as a risky move.
While the start of offshore work is a symbolic milestone, Empire Wind’s onshore construction is also ramping up.
Empire Wind’s Monday update email said the roof of the project’s South Brooklyn Marine Terminal facility is nearing completion. According to the notice, excavation is underway at the spot where a future Brooklyn-based substation will connect wind-generated electricity to the city’s grid.
Research to monitor ecosystem impacts from this massive project is also progressing.
In late March, Duke University professor Doug Nowacek told Canary Media that he and his team of researchers were still planning to tag whales in the project’s lease area during the last week of April. The tagging is meant to take place just before pile-driving into the seafloor begins in early May, he explained.
“This is a unique opportunity to gather data on whale movements in the area both before and after a wind project is built,” said Nowacek, whose multi-year research on the effects of wind projects on marine animals is funded by a Department of Energy grant. As of late March, Nowacek said that research was going forward despite headwinds in Washington.
Meanwhile, as the weather warms, marking the start of a new construction season, “things are moving forward” for the four other U.S. offshore wind projects that are underway, said Bright of Turn Forward.
In addition to Empire Wind, the other commercial-scale projects actively under construction are Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, Massachusetts’ Vineyard Wind 1, New York’s Sunrise Wind, and Revolution Wind, which is shared between Rhode Island and Connecticut.
The steady progress of some wind projects under Trump’s anti-wind order is noteworthy but not entirely unexpected.
Presidential executive orders are not “self-executing,” according to Mark Squillace, a law professor at the University of Colorado Law School. Squillace said they are akin to a memo penned to another leader, which in this case is the Secretary of the Interior.
Before entering Trump’s orbit, Secretary Burgum was a friend to wind energy as governor of North Dakota, a state that gets more than one-third of its power from onshore wind. He indicated at his Senate confirmation hearing in January that he would allow fully permitted offshore wind projects “to continue” even under political pressure to halt them.
Since his confirmation, Burgum has made negative comments about offshore wind — calling it “expensive” and “unreliable” on the social media site X — but he’s not yet moved to pull the plug on large-scale energy projects in the middle of construction. Burgum is also operating against the backdrop of an unprecedented surge in power demand, in large part from data centers. Construction of new gas plants can’t keep up; the U.S. needs all the power it can get.
In countries like the U.K., offshore wind is already increasing grid reliability while delivering affordable energy.
In fact, while Equinor keeps its head down in America, the company is celebrating ongoing successes in Britain’s offshore wind sector, which the U.K. government calls “the backbone” of its clean power system. Equinor already runs three of Britain’s operational offshore projects and is one of four developers currently building Dogger Bank, the 277-turbine North Sea project that will soon surpass Orsted’s Hornsea 2 as the world’s largest wind farm.
Base Power, the Texas startup designing and installing very large home batteries for close to free, just pulled in an additional $200 million to fund its growth.
Silicon Valley heavyweight Andreessen Horowitz co-led the Series B with Addition, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Valor Equity Partners. They were joined by previous investors including Thrive Capital, Altimeter, Terrain, and Trust Ventures.
“It will fuel the next phase of growth,” Base Power co-founder and CEO Zach Dell told Canary Media. Besides ramping up installations in the company’s home market of Texas, that growth will include breaking ground on a domestic factory to manufacture home battery systems and busting out of Texas to sell in other states.
The sizable investment delivers a major vote of confidence in Base Power’s approach to a market that’s been tough for American companies to crack in a scalable way: connected, distributed energy. Base Power equips households with batteries for backup during outages, as long as they agree to buy power from the company and let it dispatch the batteries into Texas’ competitive energy markets managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT. When all the pieces come together, this model gives homeowners cheaper, more reliable power while making the overall electricity system more cost-effective and stable, not to mention cleaner.
It’s a beloved concept in clean energy circles, promising to decarbonize the grid while skipping the delays and expenses associated with upgrading the macro electricity system. But the distributed-energy vision for batteries hasn’t minted many standout successes for venture investors.
Each of the 50 states regulates the power sector differently. In some states, like Texas, companies can aggregate small-scale batteries and earn money by bidding them into power markets; other states require such activities to run through a monopoly utility, which may or may not be interested in disrupting its own business. Base Power will need to adapt its strategy to grow steadily nationwide, but the company is already testing a new structure for working with legacy utilities.
It’s a turbulent time for cleantech investment generally, but Base Power raised its new financing from a group of VCs that aren’t primarily focused on climate or clean energy as a vertical. Dell and co. made that happen by showing rapid customer adoption.
“Often you see projections change, and they’ve been very consistent about doing what they say they’re going to do,” said Willem Van Lancker, partner at early-stage investment firm Terrain. Terrain made its first investment in Base Power’s seed round and is one of several previous investors who doubled down in the latest round. “The people that have been along for the journey since the beginning have witnessed the execution,” he added.
Base Power incorporated in June 2023 and launched its commercial product in May 2024. Since then, Dell said, the staff has grown to 100 people serving thousands of customers and earning millions of dollars in revenue. In-house teams are installing 20 home battery systems per day, which added up to 10 megawatt-hours installed just last month, a number Dell expects to exceed in April.
A typical customer gets either 25 or 50 kilowatt-hours of storage installed for just a few hundred dollars up-front and a minimum three-year commitment to buy retail power from Base. Those are significantly bigger batteries than the norm for residential storage.
Between the large battery design and the rapid pace of customer-driven installations, this decentralized battery fleet is starting to add up. Indeed, Dell expects to hit 100 megawatt-hours installed by mid-summer, equivalent to one of the larger utility-scale batteries operating in ERCOT. (Some go up to a few hundred megawatt-hours.)
But even in regulation-light Texas, grid-scale batteries take several years to develop, permit, and install, whereas efficient home batteries can reach customers in a matter of weeks. By this summer, Dell said Base Power will be installing more megawatt-hours per month in ERCOT than any other developer of large or small batteries, though he did not share a specific target rate.
This is, admittedly, a tricky metric to standardize across scales of battery project. For comparison, utility-scale developer esVolta is bringing 980 megawatt-hours online this year in Texas across three projects. But factoring in time spent on permits, land acquisition, and interconnection queues lowers the effective rate of megawatt-hours added per month of effort on those projects.
Just a few years ago, $200 million would have been a record size for an equity round in the stationary-energy-storage sector. In 2019, for instance, unorthodox Energy Vault, which proposed storing power by stacking blocks with towering six-armed cranes, pulled in $110 million for its Series B, the largest such investment in a grid-storage venture at the time.
Others have surpassed that since then, like Form Energy’s $450 million Series E for a novel iron-based battery. But those investments went to large-scale storage technology plays, not small-scale, aggregated storage models, which typically draw more modest sums from wonky climatetech specialists.
Dell declined to dwell too much on the robust quantity of new cash in hand.
“Fundraising is the ability to keep executing,” Dell said. “The things we should celebrate are customers and revenue and products.”
Base Power will use some of its new funds to accelerate development of its own battery factory in Texas, Dell noted. The company is now searching for a site, with a focus on the Austin area, and could break ground by the end of the year.
Currently, Base Power uses contract manufacturers to turn its residential battery designs into a physical product; some but not all of the system is assembled in China.
That makes Base Power’s supply chain vulnerable to President Donald Trump’s barrage of new tariffs, which raise the cost of imports from longstanding trading partners and geopolitical adversaries alike. The storage industry is still figuring out the damage from these tariffs; even domestic battery-cell production depends on imports for precursor materials, but some critical minerals are exempt from the latest tariffs.
Dell said that the push for domestic manufacturing was always part of the plan, though, given Base Power’s commitment to “compounding cost advantage through vertical integration.”
“Doing it ourselves we can take more cost out of the system,” Dell explained. He envisions the factory producing thousands of units per week.
Then there’s the matter of geographical expansion.
“They can build a very, very large business just inside Texas,” Van Lancker said. “That being said, the plans will allow them to expand outside of Texas.”
Base Power will need to work with utilities to operate in areas that lack the retail choice and open competitive markets that Texas enjoys. Where appropriate, Base will partner with regulated utilities and sell them “capacity as a service.” In other words, Base Power would install its batteries in homes, but instead of playing the markets itself with that capacity, the startup can hand the keys to a utility to help meet growing demand for power at peak hours, or other grid needs.
The startup rolled out this model in March with Bandera Electric Cooperative, a 29,000-member utility in Texas Hill Country. (A fraction of Texans still get their power from vertically integrated cooperative or municipal utilities.) Bandera Electric offers its customer-owners this backup power for a monthly subscription with no up-front cost; the cooperative dispatches the batteries based on its own strategy — and pays Base Power for that ability.
This story was originally published by Stateline.
WATER VALLEY, Texas — On a recent day when the wind gusted close to 40 miles per hour, 82-year-old George Neill was making repairs on his ranch, oblivious to the nearby cluster of wind turbines churning the sky behind him.
“After about a year, you never know the things are here,” said Neill, who leases part of his West Texas property to an East Coast–based renewable energy company that placed three wind turbines on it four years ago.
Hundreds of other wind turbines stretch across this landscape, instantly visible to motorists traveling to nearby San Angelo and other towns. The turbines aren’t the only renewable energy producers amid the mesas: From a distance, a glistening array of solar panels resembles a small lake.
Texas is famous for producing oil and gas, but renewable energy has become deeply embedded in the state’s culture and economy. Texas led the nation in generating electricity from wind power and utility-scale solar power in 2023, and wind and solar energy projects contribute tax revenue to local governments and struggling school districts. Texas landowners are expected to receive nearly $30 billion in lease payments under current and expected projects, according to an industry study.
But in recent years, Texas has loosened its political embrace of alternative energy. For the second legislative session in a row, many Texas lawmakers are trying to derail or curb future renewable energy projects.
The shift is rooted in a number of factors, including the second Trump administration’s antipathy toward renewables and an aggressive recommitment to fossil fuels in Texas energy policy. There is lingering concern over the reliability of the state’s electrical grid, after all types of power sources failed during a devastating 2021 winter storm. Some people object to the aesthetics of wind and solar farms, or note that turbines and panels can harm some wildlife.
Texas is not alone. Once focused on stopping individual projects at the local level, renewable energy opponents have been making inroads in other state legislatures, too. They have received backing from the oil and gas industry. And they’ve been galvanized by the 2022 passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest-ever attempt to speed the transition to clean energy.
In neighboring Oklahoma, for example, hundreds of people rallied at the state Capitol in January to urge Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt to issue an executive order halting new wind and solar projects. Like Texas, Oklahoma is a major oil and natural gas producer, but it generated 45% of its total in-state electricity from renewable resources in 2023.
Stitt, a strong supporter of renewable energy, is highly unlikely to issue such an order. But he will leave office in two years, and several Republicans discussed as possible successors appeared at the rally. One of them, Attorney General Gentner Drummond, last month on social media criticized what he called “the green energy scam” and urged Stitt and state lawmakers to tighten wind farm rules during the current session.
In Arizona, the House earlier this year approved a bill that would bar wind farm projects within a dozen miles of any property zoned for residential use — a restriction that would apply to about 90% of the land in the state, according to an analysis by the Arizona Republic.
In Ohio, a 2021 law allowing county commissioners to create restricted areas where utility-scale solar and wind projects can’t be built has had a huge impact, as 26 Ohio counties have banned renewable energy projects. This year, GOP lawmakers have introduced legislation that would end all state solar subsidies.
And in Missouri, Republican legislators are pushing a bill that would raise taxes on farmers who lease their land for wind or solar energy projects.
The expanding opposition to renewables isn’t unexpected, said Joshua Rhodes, a research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin who studies the power grid. He noted that wind, solar, and battery storage have rapidly become the “cheapest way to put more energy on the grid.”
“They’re victims of their own success,” he told Stateline. “They are relatively new players to the market, so there’s going to be pushback from incumbents.”
At the center of the current debate in Texas is state Sen. Lois Kolkhorst, a Republican committee chair who has resurrected a 2023 bill that would require new utility-scale solar and wind projects to get permits from the state’s Public Utility Commission, regulations that aren’t imposed on projects for natural gas and other energy sources. The bill also calls for set-back requirements and cleanup funds.
Kolkhorst, in a statement to Stateline, called the legislation “a common-sense approach to the encroachment of wind and solar facilities being scattered across our great state with no consideration or safeguards for landowners or the environment.”
At an hourslong Senate committee hearing recently where opponents of Kolkhorst’s bill outnumbered supporters, farmers, ranchers, and small-town Texans sometimes found themselves on opposite sides, either arguing that sprawling wind farms and solar arrays are a lasting source of economic vitality or a threat to a beloved way of life.
“The land isn’t just a piece of property to us,” said Laurie Dihle, who lives on 154 acres in Franklin County with her husband. “It’s our home, our sanctuary, and a big part of who we are. When we look out across the road, we see rolling green pastures and trees. Now we’re facing the possibility of that view and so much more being replaced by a sprawling solar farm.”
Environmentalists and industry representatives view Kolkhorst’s bill as a roadblock in the march toward green energy. Luke Metzger, executive director of Environment Texas, said the bill would open the door to “a really arbitrary discriminatory permitting regime,” requiring wind and solar developers to get permits that other energy producers do not have to have.
Describing herself as a “lifelong wildlife conservationist,” Kolkhorst said she introduced the bipartisan bill with nine other senators in an effort that “looks past the billions in wind and solar subsidies to instead focus on the total impact of these projects on our land, people, and wildlife.”
But oil and gas projects also can harm wildlife, and scientists note that the emissions released by fossil fuels worsen climate change disasters.
Insiders following the legislation, including Metzger, identify one of the bill’s major supporters as Kolkhorst donor Dan Friedkin, a billionaire Houston businessman.
Friedkin, chairman emeritus of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission, is owner and CEO of The Friedkin Group, a consortium of businesses and investments that includes Gulf States Toyota. Gulf States is one of the world’s largest distributors of Toyota vehicles and parts, with exclusive rights to sell Toyotas in Texas and four other states. Gulf States Toyota Inc. State PAC made four donations totaling $42,500 to Kolkhorst from October 2020 to October 2024, according to the Texas Ethics Commission.
Friedkin is a stunt pilot and outdoorsman with a ranch in South Texas. Neither he nor his lobbyist, Laird Doran, senior vice president for public and legal affairs at The Friedkin Group, returned phone calls from Stateline.
Texas lawmakers have filed dozens of wind- and solar-related bills this session, including measures aimed at restricting the placement of battery-storage facilities, curbing tax breaks and subsidies for renewable companies, and limiting the amount of electricity solar and wind projects contribute to the state’s power grid.
Republican state Sen. Phil King, for example, is pushing a bill that would mandate that 50% of all new electricity must come from natural gas, nuclear, or battery storage. King said solar and wind power should be part of the state’s energy mix, but he claims they aren’t reliable enough to serve as the foundation.
State Rep. Don McLaughlin, a Republican, has introduced legislation mandating a study of the economic impact of wind and solar projects on local communities, as well as noise and health effects, threats to wildlife, and the challenges of disassembling worn-out systems. Sweetwater, Texas, has thousands of composite blades piled up in “a windmill graveyard.”
But many rural GOP lawmakers whose districts long ago sprouted oil rigs and pumpjacks are now strong supporters of wind and solar power.
“It’s nonstop windmills on both side of the road for 70 miles,” said state Rep. John Smithee of Amarillo, describing a typical drive from his hometown in the Texas Panhandle to the Capitol in Austin. “Almost all of those [constituents] have benefited.”
State Rep. Drew Darby, whose northwest Texas district includes San Angelo and Water Valley, an unincorporated community of around 300, said revenue from wind power has resulted in countywide improvements and lease payments to property owners.
“It’s been a positive impact on rural effectiveness,” said Darby. “Landowners … are receiving nice payments for leasing the property.”
In Water Valley, taxes from the increased revenue paved the way for a tax-free bond election that enabled the town’s K-12 school to add an upscale weight room, a technical educational facility, and a “cafetorium” that serves as a dining room and performance hall. The school building had previously been so small that students had to eat in shifts.
The wind farm is expected to generate $123 million in local taxes over the 30-year life of the project, as well as more than $100 million in payments to landowners.
Neill, the West Texas rancher, said he takes the wind turbines in stride as he roams across his 1,700-acre spread.
He’s not at liberty to reveal the amount of his payments. He’s not getting rich, he said, but the money “makes a difference when you’re trying run a ranch.”
A first-of-its-kind pilot to electrify homes on Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard is set to finish construction in the coming weeks — and it could offer a blueprint for decarbonizing low- and moderate-income households in Massachusetts and beyond.
The Cape and Vineyard Electrification Offering is designed to be a turnkey program that makes it financially feasible and logistically approachable for households of all income levels to adopt solar panels, heat pumps, and batteries, and to realize the amplified benefits of using the resources together. These technologies slash emissions, reduce utility bills, and increase a home’s resilience during power outages, but are often only adopted by wealthier households due to their upfront cost.
“We are going to be advancing this as a model that should be emulated by other states across the country that are trying to achieve decarbonization goals,” said Todd Olinsky-Paul, senior project director for the Clean Energy Group, a nonprofit that produced a new report about the program.
In total, the program is providing free or heavily subsidized solar panels and heat pumps to 55 participating households, 12 of which also received batteries at no cost. Work should be completed on the final participating home this month.
“This is the first and only instance where solar and battery storage are being presented in combination with electrification and traditional efficiency,” Olinsky-Paul said. “Instead of having several siloed programs, it’s all being presented to the customer in a package, which makes everything work together better.”
It’s a strategy that program planners hope can help address the disproportionate energy burden felt by lower-income residents of the region, where households making less than one-third of the area median income spent an average of 27% of their income on energy as of 2023, according to data from the U.S. Department of Energy. (The updated figure is unavailable because the federal tool that provided this data is no longer live.)
The initiative is a project of the Cape Light Compact, a unique regional organization that negotiates electric supply prices and administers energy-efficiency programming for the 21 towns on Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard. The compact first proposed the pilot in 2018, but regulators rejected the idea. The organization submitted a revised version in 2020 and 2021, but it wasn’t until 2023 that the state finally gave the program the green light.
An energy-efficiency contractor partners with each program participant to assess their home, then coordinates the necessary work, including any preparations that need to be completed before solar panels, heat pumps, or batteries can be put in. The batteries installed through the program are enrolled in ConnectedSolutions, a state program that pays battery owners who send power to the grid when needed. Because the pilot footed the bill for the batteries, these payments will go to the Cape Light Compact, rather than residents, to help defray the cost of the program.
Bringing the program to life was not always a smooth process. The original proposal called for 100 homes to participate in the pilot, but the final number fell well short of that target. Some homeowners who originally expressed interest were put off by the requirement to remove all fossil-fuel systems from their homes, particularly if they had recently invested in new gas or propane heating, said Stephen McCloskey, an analyst with the Cape Light Compact and the program manager for the pilot.
In some cases, homeowners balked at up-front costs. Moderate-income households that did not live in deed-restricted affordable housing had to pay 20% of the cost for heat pumps and any cost over $15,000 for solar panels. If a roof was too shady for solar, homeowners were responsible for removing trees and branches.
“At the end of the day, each customer and their decision-making process is different,” McCloskey said.
The original plan called for installing batteries in 25 participants’ homes, but unexpected limitations lowered that number, McCloskey said. Houses without basements, for example, couldn’t receive batteries. In some cases, the combined capacity of solar panels and a battery would have exceeded the local utility’s threshold for connecting a system to the grid.
The compact also had not fully accounted for the array of barriers that needed to be addressed before weatherization could be done. Some homes had mold or needed electrical upgrades. Others required roof work before solar panels could be installed.
These challenges are not dealbreakers but lessons learned for utilities or organizations that attempt to emulate the program in the future, McCloskey said. And Olinsky-Paul sees great potential for similar plans to be pursued nationwide. Nearly half of U.S. states have adopted 100% clean energy targets, he said, and distributed-energy programs like the Cape and Vineyard’s can make those goals more achievable by reducing the cost and strain electrification can create for the grid.
“If you’re going to do decarbonization, you have to do electrification,” Olinsky-Paul said. “And so there is going to be a huge need for some way of doing this without inadvertently causing massive new fossil-fuel use” to generate more power.
The Cape Light Compact intends to release a full report on the deployment of the pilot in August, but feedback so far has been very positive from participants who appreciate the turnkey approach to comprehensive electrification, McCloskey said.
“There are definitely things that whoever is facilitating that program would need to look at, to game plan for,” he said. “But this is a great model.”
Congressional Republicans are taking aim at the Inflation Reduction Act as they seek to slash federal spending.If they choose to repeal the law’s clean-energy tax credits entirely, it could cause energy bills around the country to rise significantly over the next five years, according to a new report by the Rhodium Group, an independent research organization. A repeal would affect some states more than others, with the deep-red state of Texas projected to get hit the hardest.
Rhodium’s report is not the only one to find that bills would rise with the repeal of key IRA tax credits. Research firm Energy Innovation conducted an analysis of several recent studies on the topic and found that repeal would cost households a total of $6 billion per year by 2030. By 2040, costs would balloon to $25 billion annually.
It’s not just households that would feel the pain. Industrial customers as a whole would spend between $8 billion and $14 billion more for energy each year if Inflation Reduction Act incentives are repealed.
Utility bills are already climbing across much of the country. Service shutoffs are on the rise. The Trump administration just eliminated the entire staff of a program that helps low-income households pay for heating and cooling.
Cutting IRA incentives that encourage the construction of solar, wind, and batteries would exacerbate these problems even as the Trump administration touts its commitment to affordable energy. That’s because clean energy is now the cheapest form of energy, and it’s only getting less expensive. There’s a reason that 93% of the power plants developers plan to build this year are carbon-free.
Congressional Republicans are divided on the issue of IRA tax credits, making it unclear exactly how things will play out. But it’s widely expected that the law will be modified to some extent.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has said the approach will be “somewhere between a scalpel and a sledgehammer.” But attacking the law may be too appealing for GOP lawmakers to pass up; it’s an opportunity to cut federal spending, please Trump, and win culture-war points against clean energy all at once.
Still, there is growing support for the IRA among some of the Republican representatives whose constituents benefit most from the law. We’ll know soon if that’s enough to save key parts of it — and avoid spiking utility bills further.
On Wednesday, President Trump unveiled a suite of new tariffs that target pretty much every country and territory in the world — including some where nobody even lives. The full extent of the tariffs’ reach remains unclear, but wind developers, solar manufacturers, tech companies, automakers, and even fossil-fuel producers are already sweating.
The wind industry, already suffering under the Trump administration, is likely to face further setbacks. Wind turbines rely on components from around the world, even if they’re usually assembled in the U.S. The same is true for solar panels and batteries. Endri Lico, an analyst at Wood Mackenzie, told The New York Times that a 25% tariff on imports could raise the cost of building onshore wind turbines by 10% and renewable energy overall by 7% — and many of Trump’s tariffs exceed that 25% threshold.
Higher clean energy costs will pose a big challenge for tech companies looking to expand energy-hungry data centers to power AI, Semafor reports. Renewables are the cheapest, quickest way to add new power to the grid, especially amid yearslong waits for new gas turbines.
The EV industry is also at risk. Most auto factories being built in the U.S. are focused on EVs and batteries, but they still rely on foreign metals and materials. Manufacturers and dealers fear sticker prices on cars could rise as much as $10,000 under the tariffs, Politico reports, exacerbating one of the biggest deterrents to EV adoption: high up-front costs.
The White House exempted imports of oil, gas, and refined products from the tariffs, alleviating fears for refiners that rely on crude oil imports. But oil prices still plunged Thursday morning, as investors worry the tariffs will slow economic growth and lower fuel demand around the world.
The potential slump in overall economic activity could result in one climate upside: a drop in emissions. “In the short-term, any decline is likely to have a positive impact on emissions reduction,” writes finance professor Rakesh Gupta in The Conversation. “We saw this effect during the COVID-19 pandemic, when global production and trade fell.”
But longer-term progress on U.S. clean energy manufacturing and deployment will likely stall if the announced tariffs hold, with implications that go far beyond decarbonization. Here’s how Vanessa Sciarra, vice president of trade and international competitiveness for American Clean Power, put it in a Thursday statement:
“The policy whiplash from these tariffs will ultimately undermine the ability to realize a domestic supply chain and will constrain efforts to deliver energy security and reliability for Americans.”
Illinois pushes for stronger vehicle emissions rules, despite House threats
Illinois advocates are pushing their state to embrace California’s nation-leading vehicle emissions standards, Canary Media’s Kari Lydersen reports — even as President Trump and House Republicans threaten to eliminate the rules.
Sixteen states and D.C. have adopted California’s zero-emission vehicle rules, and 10 have followed its Advanced Clean Trucks regulations. But to be enforceable, those rules needed a waiver from the U.S. EPA. President Trump has called for “terminating” those waivers. On Thursday, House Republicans introduced legislation that would roll the waivers back, even though the nation’s top legislative auditor ruled that they aren’t subject to congressional review.
Crushing the rules would be a setback not only for efforts to decarbonize transportation but to clean up local air quality, too. Illinois advocates said a key reason they’re pushing these rules is to rid places like Joliet and Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood of the air pollution caused by diesel trucking.
Offshore wind’s future keeps getting murkier
It was another bad week for offshore wind. Contract negotiations for the SouthCoast Wind project, planned for off Massachusetts’ coast, were delayed for a third time. And the developer of Maine’s first offshore wind array paused the floating project, citing industry uncertainty.
More setbacks could be on the way. Last month, the U.S. EPA revoked a permit for the Atlantic Shores development off the New Jersey coast — essentially delaying the project for years given the Trump administration’s pause on new offshore wind permitting. Wind opponents could take advantage of the Republican-run EPA to get more projects canceled, with some anti-wind groups telling Canary Media’s Clare Fieseler that agency head Lee Zeldin may be sympathetic to their cause.
Tesla’s sales slump: Chinese EV giant BYD’s sales grew 60% in the first quarter as it makes inroads beyond its home country, while Tesla’s global deliveries fell 13% over the same period amid consumer backlash against Elon Musk. (CNN, New York Times)
Home energy assistance gutted: The Trump administration fires the entire staff in charge of administering the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which provides roughly $4 billion annually to help families cover home heating and cooling costs. (Latitude Media)
Cleaning up landfills: In the absence of federal action on curbing landfill methane emissions — the U.S.’s third-largest source of methane pollution — Colorado, Michigan, and other states are stepping up with their own plans. (Canary Media)
Grading the grid: The American Society of Civil Engineers grades the U.S. electric grid a D+, down from the C- it got in 2021, amid a shortage of transformers, increase in severe weather, and lack of transmission capacity. (Utility Dive)
Congress’ rare climate win: The U.S. House overwhelmingly passes a bipartisan bill that would juice development and deployment of clean building materials — a rare win for emissions reduction efforts in Republican-held Congress. (Canary Media)
EV factories falter: More EV and battery factories were canceled in the first quarter of 2025 than were in the past two years combined, according to new data from Atlas Public Policy. (Washington Post)
Reduce, reuse … reconsider? Battery recycling company Li-Cycle, which last year received a $475 million federal loan to build a factory in New York, announces it could go out of business and doesn’t have enough money to meet the requirements to access the loan. (E&E News)
DOGE cuts catch on: Republican-led states look to mirror the federal Department of Government Efficiency’s approach to funding cuts, including by slashing regulators that oversee the oil and gas industry. (E&E News)
Landfills are a major problem for the climate: They’re the United States’ third-largest source of methane, a greenhouse gas that traps 80 times as much heat as carbon dioxide in the short term. Last year, the federal government was poised to start reining in these emissions: In July, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it would release new regulations to better detect and prevent methane leaks from landfills.
The Trump administration, which has announced its intention to cut the EPA’s budget by 65% or more, seems unlikely to follow through on these plans or any other policy limiting landfill emissions.
But in the absence of federal leadership, states like Michigan, Oregon, Colorado, and California are moving forward with their own plans. Regulatory efforts are underway among these climate leaders to implement stricter rules for landfill operators and require the use of novel technology, like drones and satellites that monitor leaks.
“These state regulations could be hugely impactful,” said Elizabeth Schroeder, the senior communications strategist at Industrious Labs, a nonprofit working to transform heavy industry. They not only have the potential to make a real dent on greenhouse gas emissions, Schroeder said, but could also set a national example for other states looking to curtail methane pollution.
Currently, the EPA requires landfill operators to cover trash to minimize odor, disease risk, and fire — a practice that also minimizes methane leaks. This usually looks like a layer of dirt or ash, followed by tarps. Operators of large landfills must also install extraction systems, networks of pipes that collect methane and other gases from inside the landfill. The extraction systems then pump these emissions to burn off at flares or, increasingly, to biogas energy projects. However, landfills are dynamic systems — over time, as waste breaks down and shifts, cover develops holes and pipes crack.
Maintenance is often imperfect. An analysis by the Environmental Defense Fund found that between 2021 and 2023, more than one-third of landfills had at least one violation of EPA standards. Operators of landfills that exceed a specific emissions threshold are supposed to conduct quarterly “walking” surveys for leaks. But experts say that these surveys are infrequent and often miss large portions of the landfill.
States have an opportunity to step up those standards — not only by lowering emissions limits but by improving the maintenance and monitoring of landfills, said Tom Frankiewicz, the waste-sector methane expert at climate-focused think tank RMI. “While we would love to see all this done comprehensively in one national-level regulation, it’s states that are taking the lead on deployment of advanced technology and setting new best practices for landfills.”
In 2010, California became the first state to develop standards for landfills that were stricter than federal rules. Those included a lower emissions threshold at which landfills had to install gas collection systems and a requirement that operators enclose flares so that the methane burns more efficiently. Other states, including Oregon and Washington, followed suit and in some respects even surpassed California, said Katherine Blauvelt, the circular-economy director for Industrious Labs. But despite this early progress, landfills in these states and elsewhere continue to spew methane and undermine climate goals.
Now, though, Colorado has taken the lead on a new generation of landfill emissions regulations. The state is developing what some experts are calling a first-of-a-kind program for monitoring and responding to methane leaks from landfills. As part of the initiative, Colorado plans to implement remote-sensing technologies, including fly-overs and satellites, to detect methane leaks, which operators would then be required to address.
“Colorado would be the first state to incorporate that into a rule where, instead of relying on voluntary follow-up, there would actually be requirements around mitigating emissions that are detected,” said Ellie Garland, a senior associate focusing on methane policy at RMI. A draft rule will be publicly available in April, with a final vote expected in August.
In addition, Colorado’s Department of Public Health and Environment is considering additional requirements for landfills that include stricter rules for the maintenance of cover and a lower threshold at which landfills are required to report and control emissions, Garland said. Currently only 15 of the state’s about 50 active landfills do this, although Colorado began requiring 35 more landfills to begin reporting emissions starting on March 31, said Clay Clarke, the manager of the climate change program at the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. Not all landfills are required to control emissions. That’s because smaller landfills don’t generate enough gas to collect and flare. Under proposed regulations, many of these landfills would need to pipe gas to biofilters — a system that uses microorganisms to digest methane.
Meanwhile, the California Air Resources Board is working to update its landfill emissions regulations. Under CARB’s anticipated timeline, these will take effect in 2027. Last December, the agency held a workshop to discuss potential new rules. Those included a lower safe limit for methane emissions, limits on how long operators can turn off their gas collection systems for landfill maintenance, and stricter rules for collecting gas at closed landfills. Under current regulations, landfill operators must collect gas for only 15 years after a landfill closes even though the area can continue to leak methane for 30 years or more. The agency is also considering regulations that would require some operators to install automated well-tuning technology that monitors and adjusts the gas-extraction system in real time.
One of the most promising new regulations CARB is considering is a “super-emitter” program for landfills, Blauvelt said. The EPA defines a super-emitter event as a plume of methane leaking at a rate of more than 100 kilograms per hour. In 2019, NASA scientists estimated that these highly concentrated leaks account for one-third of California’s methane emissions.
Between 2020 and 2023, CARB partnered with the University of Arizona and the nonprofit Carbon Mapper to track down super-emitter events by flying over landfills in planes equipped with sensors that can detect methane plumes. If Carbon Mapper identified a leak, it notified CARB, which would get in touch with the landfill owner. However, operators weren’t required to take action. Later analyses found that operators fixed about half of the reported leaks.
Updated rules could require landfill operators to swiftly respond to methane plumes. The program would be similar to the super-emitter program already in place for California’s oil and gas industry. That program requires operators to follow up with on-the-ground monitoring within five days of learning about a leak, come up with a repair plan 72 hours later, and fix the leak within two to 14 calendar days, depending on its severity.
The state is also looking into other remote-sensing technologies, like drones and on-the-ground infrared monitors, which would provide a more continuous and finer-resolution picture of methane emissions.
California emits the second largest share of greenhouse gases in the U.S. A recent Industrious Labs analysis found that if the state were to adopt these stricter regulations, it could reduce its landfill emissions 22% by 2030 and 64% by the end of the century.
Other states are renewing their efforts, too. In Oregon, newly proposed Senate Bill 726 would require landfill operators to deploy commercially available drones and advanced monitoring technologies (including satellite and airflight) to detect methane plumes across landfills.
Meanwhile, in Michigan, a climate bill passed in 2023 contains elements that could lead to landfills adopting better monitoring and detection. Senate Bill 271, which aims to accelerate the state’s transition to clean energy, identifies landfill biogas as a potential low-carbon fuel. “While the inclusion of recovered landfill gas as a clean energy source has come under scrutiny, there is a major silver lining,” Blauvelt wrote in an email. “Vital” language in the bill mandates that landfill operators collecting biogas use “best practices for methane gas collection and control,” as determined by Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy.
The department has yet to lay out what those “best practices” are, but better landfill cover, automated well-tuning technology, and advanced monitoring technology are all on the table, Blauvelt said.
“Given that Michigan is among the top ten states for methane emission from landfills, the potential to dramatically reduce methane and other harmful co-pollutants is enormous,” Blauvelt wrote in an email.
A 2024 analysis by Industrious Labs projected that if every state were to adopt these best practices, it could lead to a 56% drop in landfill methane emissions by 2050. Experts hope that as these climate leaders adopt stricter rules, more states will step up. In 2010, California showed that this ripple effect is possible, Blauvelt said. “The great news about this is, the solutions are known. The technology is sitting on the shelf.”
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