Back
Each time a hurricane batters Florida, the country’s second-largest market for solar energy, broken panels pile up in landfills.
OnePlanet Solar Recycling has a plan to tackle that problem. The Jacksonville, Florida-based startup, led by a former steel executive who worked on the industry’s efforts to reuse scrap, just raised $7 million to start developing a first-of-its-kind solar recycling plant. The facility would break down busted panels and turn the waste stream into a new domestic source of metals such as copper and aluminum at a moment when tariffs are set to hike the price of imported materials.
The company plans to build its $90 million facility, dubbed the River City project, in Green Cove Springs — just south of Jacksonville, Florida’s most populous city. In 2027, OnePlanet aims to complete the first of three phases of construction on the plant and open the debut disassembly line capable of deconstructing 2 million solar modules per year. The firm set a deadline to triple capacity to 6 million panels by 2030.
At peak output, the company expects the facility to be among the largest solar recycling plants in the nation.
OnePlanet’s ambitious plans rest on its unique solar recycling process. The company uses existing technologies but developed a proprietary workflow for divvying panels by shape, model, and physical integrity before crushing, grinding, and chemically treating the hardware to extract raw materials.
“We’re doing a lot of work before we actually feed the panels into the recycling line,” said André Pujadas, OnePlanet’s chief executive. “We batch panels together so we can run campaigns to extract different types of materials, thereby optimizing the process and optimizing production and efficiency.”
Employing artificial intelligence and state-of-the-art sensors, OnePlanet can recover not just the panels’ glass, plastic, and silicon but up to 97% of metal concentrates of aluminum and copper, Pujadas said.
“You can recover the glass and still leave a fairly large amount of impurities in the remaining elements that complicate any further separation process,” he said. “That increases costs for recycling; then you don’t have as pure a product.”
Pujadas previously worked at the steelmaker Nucor, which led the U.S. industry’s adoption of electric arc furnaces. The technology turns scrap metal into new steel using electricity, offering a lower-carbon alternative to fresh steel generated from iron ore in a coal-based blast furnace. That experience taught Pujadas about where costs can mount in a supply chain and how much value a firm can create by freeing feedstock from contaminants.
Compared to that of other recyclers, OnePlanet’s approach will save the company money on maintenance since the pre-disassembly separation process avoids unnecessary wear on the machines, he said, basing the claims on the success of the firm’s pilot plant in Jacksonville.
The financing round announced Tuesday will “be used for final engineering, environmental permits, master recycling agreements, and long–lead time items,” Pujadas said.
The funding “reflects our belief that solar module recycling is not only necessary — it is investable at scale, with durable tailwinds driven by regulation, economics, and resource security,” Ashlynn Horras, partner at the climate-focused venture firm Khasma Capital, said in a statement. Khasma Capital led OnePlanet’s recent seed round.
Among the biggest challenges for recycling is finding cheap methods to transport panels to the processing facility. Shipping busted equipment from Texas, Pujadas said, is more expensive than hauling in panels from Puerto Rico. The location near Jacksonville not only has access to a Class I railroad and a port, he said, but to a lot of local material from within the state itself.
OnePlanet is also getting some help from the Inflation Reduction Act. The company’s facility will be funded in part by a $14.5 million investment from the Department of Energy’s competitive 48C tax credit awarded last year.
Pujadas said “the jury is still out” on whether President Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress will revoke the program.
“At the end of the day, I’m happy for the vote of confidence from the Department of Energy that this project presented some level of viability and can have a positive effect on domestic value chains,” he said. “Whether or not 48C comes to fruition or not, it’s not going to prevent us from continuing with the River City project.”
While he said tariffs may negatively impact the broader economy, the trade levies are expected to raise the price of key raw materials like aluminum, copper, and silicon, for which OnePlanet can offer a new domestic source.
“There’s a lot of unknowns on the tariff side,” Pujadas said. “But overall if there’s upward pricing pressure, the aluminum we produce will go up, the silicon will go up, and the copper will go up.”
A correction was made on April 22, 2025: The final quote in this piece initially read “the aluminum we procure will go up,” when it should have read “the aluminum we produce will go up.”
The clean energy industry has had plenty to contend with since President Donald Trump resumed office: rapidly fluctuating tariffs, financial market chaos, and both rhetorical and practical attacks on Joe Biden’s policies to support decarbonization efforts.
Despite those headwinds, stalwart Tennessee-based solar developer Silicon Ranch closed a major equity investment this month, raising $500 million from Danish fund AIP Management. Notably, Silicon Ranch hadn’t even gone out for a fund raise, Chief Commercial Officer Matt Beasley said. But, after CEO Reagan Farr met AIP members by chance at a conference in New York last year, the conversation evolved, and soon Silicon Ranch leaders were flying to Copenhagen to close the deal.
The developer’s last fund raise was $600 million at the start of 2023, under entirely different macroeconomic circumstances: The economy was bouncing back from Covid, and Biden had recently signed the Inflation Reduction Act, unleashing hundreds of billions of dollars to bolster clean energy deployment. In contrast, Silicon Ranch’s most recent cash influx comes as the Republican-led Congress ponders whether to eliminate those same tax credits during this year’s budget-making process in Washington.
As an infrastructure investor, AIP has the leisure to look for returns over longer time horizons than, say, a venture capital firm. But Silicon Ranch is planning for growth even amid the Trump-era conditions: The company has already more or less tariff-proofed its operations and is working hard to meet power demand spurred by the same AI growth trend the Trump administration has championed.
The U.S. has been levying tariffs on Chinese solar panels since the Obama administration, when China’s industrial policies boosted manufacturing and helped push American solar manufacturers out of business. U.S. solar developers and installers have adapted to that reality, but lately, tariff policy is changing by the week if not the hour.
Trump announced radically higher tariffs on most of the world in early April. The so-called reciprocal tariffs were slated to hit the Southeast Asian countries that have become major sources of U.S. solar imports since earlier tariffs effectively blocked China. Days later, though, Trump backed down on his “Liberation Day” threat, at least temporarily. But a separate tariff proceeding at the Department of Commerce has just concluded and slaps tariffs up to 3,521% on solar panels from Cambodia, and less astronomical but still substantial rates on Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam.
“We’re pretty well insulated from the tariffs,” Beasley said. That’s because the company already reoriented its strategy to buying domestic equipment, in response to the supply chain disruption of the Covid era.
In April 2022, Silicon Ranch unveiled a master supply agreement with First Solar for 4 gigawatts of U.S.-made modules, and subsequently doubled down for another 2.2 gigawatts. That deal built on a longstanding relationship: Silicon Ranch was the first to install First Solar modules in the Southeast, Beasley noted.
The developer also signed a parallel agreement in May 2022 with Nextracker to buy 1.5 gigawatts of U.S.-made solar trackers — which tilt panels toward the sun throughout the day — and later added another 3 gigawatts. That deal anchored Nextracker’s decision to open a torque-tube manufacturing line in Memphis, Tennessee, localizing production of the key component in utility-scale solar trackers.
That domestic procurement strategy looked even better when Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022, instituting tax credits for each unit of the solar supply chain made in the U.S. Now the decision allows for peace of mind compared to navigating the constantly fluctuating import duties.
“With both First Solar and with Nextracker, our domestic supply agreements have got supply availability and price locked in for the next few years,” Beasley said.
Tariff-free supplies only help if there’s still a customer to sell to, but Silicon Ranch is finding plenty in that department, too. The firm installed 950 megawatts last year, ending 2024 with 3.6 gigawatts operating under company ownership; it also signed power purchase agreements for nearly 2 gigawatts of new production across five or six states, Beasley said.
The firm, launched by former Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen (D) as he was leaving office in 2011, has always thrived by making large-scale solar happen in regions where it hadn’t been widely adopted, like the Tennessee Valley and Georgia. Now solar developers are finding they don’t have to do much convincing because utilities need all the power they can get to keep pace with growing electricity demand.
Right in Silicon Ranch’s backyard, for example, the Tennessee Valley Authority projects that in the next 30 years it needs to double or triple the capacity it constructed over the past nine decades, the utility’s CEO, Jeff Lyash, has said.
“With load growth being what it is, not just here in the Southeast, but really across the country, there’s a need for kind of an all-of-the-above strategy, regardless of political ideology,” Beasley said. Often “all of the above” is code for preserving fossil fuels in a changing energy mix, but Beasley means that bringing new solar into the mix will help regions fuel economic growth.
“This massive load growth does mean that every electron is valued, but what we say is the most valuable electron is the one which comes to market first,” he explained. “Over the past decade, we’ve proven that solar is not only the lowest cost form of new generation, but it’s also the quickest to deploy.”
To that end, the company is actively constructing its first utility-scale projects in South Carolina, in a deal with utility Santee Cooper and the Central Electric cooperative to source clean power for a Google data center. Silicon Ranch is also building its first project in Louisiana to serve Microsoft.
With all that power demand, compounded by Trump’s pledge to make the U.S. the AI capital of the world, Silicon Ranch doesn’t anticipate its solar developments slowing down any time soon.
One sign read “Let the Wind Power Our Future.” Others displayed nothing more than the giant gold seal of America’s largest electrical workers union. These logos and slogans stood out among the 100 or so people crowded on top of the marble steps of the Nassau County Executive and Legislative Building in New York on Tuesday, as they called for the right to continue building offshore wind turbines near the Long Island coast.
That right had just been revoked.
On April 16, the Trump administration issued a stop-work order that paused the construction of Empire Wind 1. The 810-megawatt wind farm was two weeks into at-sea construction. It’s also the anchor project of an in-progress effort to build an offshore wind staging terminal in South Brooklyn, which has been celebrated as a major economic win for the local, mainly working-class community.
“It was time to demonstrate the diverse support for offshore wind,” said Adrienne Esposito, rally organizer and executive director of the nonprofit group Citizens Campaign for the Environment. She said the group includes retirees, union workers, young people in job training, a charter boat captain, and a whale expert.
They’re emblematic of the broad array of stakeholders who stand to lose from President Donald Trump’s ongoing war on offshore wind, which started with a pause on new permitting and has in recent weeks escalated to attacks on projects already underway. These projects are central to the climate goals of many East Coast states, the economic development plans of neighborhoods and towns, and public health concerns of those who have lived for decades in the shadow of dirtier, air-polluting industries.
Empire Wind 1 is a critical component of New York’s strategy to address climate change and achieve a 70% renewable energy share by 2030. It’s the largest energy infrastructure project the state has undertaken in the last 50 years, according to a top state official who lambasted the Trump administration’s stop-work order as doing “irrefutable harm.”
“This project underwent extensive and robust federal reviews … and is already under construction with strong support from the local Sunset Park community and more than 1,500 construction workers currently employed,” Doreen Harris, president of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, said in a statement last week.
Since early April, vessels had been laying rocks roughly 20 miles offshore from New York City in preparation for attaching 54 wind towers to the seafloor in May. The project was supposed to go online in 2027. All at-sea work is now halted.
The Trump administration’s order didn’t impact the massive terminal being built along a Brooklyn waterfront to support the installation. About 1,500 people have been constructing the 73-acre offshore wind hub since June. But local supporters now worry what the order means for all the green jobs promised by the Empire Wind project.
“Offshore wind, if done properly, gave us a real shot at creating economic opportunities for a neighborhood and region that has carried the weight of environmental racism for too long. It meant good jobs and local investment for our local residents,” Elizabeth Yeampierre wrote in a statement issued Tuesday, the same day as the rally. She is executive director of the grassroots nonprofit organization, UPROSE, and a longtime resident of Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood.
For the past decade, Yeampierre has led efforts in her community to advocate for redevelopment of Sunset Park’s industrialized waterfront, a stretch of which has sat vacant since the 1990s. At one point, city officials considered plans to rezone the area for apartments and retail shops. Yeampierre pushed officials instead towards plans to rebuild a “working” waterfront that would generate jobs and place Sunset Park residents at the center of the energy transition.
That vision, the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal, is becoming a reality. The offshore wind hub, once completed by the end of 2026 if it’s not interrupted, will be used for storing and assembling wind turbines. Equinor, the Norwegian energy giant building Empire Wind, was planning to use it as a staging ground for not just Empire Wind but for a sprawling array of already-approved wind projects being built across the Northeast and mid-Atlantic by various developers.
The previous administration gave some level of approval to nearly a dozen offshore wind farms. But only nine projects, including Empire Wind, managed to get all of their permits before Trump took office. Another one of those approved projects — Atlantic Shores in New Jersey — has already been shelved, thanks in part to the Trump administration’s decision to claw back a previously issued Clean Air Act permit.
A spokesman for Equinor told Canary Media, “We will not comment about the potential consequences until we know more.” He said the company is engaging directly with the Department of the Interior to “understand the questions” raised about its federal permits, which were issued in 2024.
Equinor signed its federal lease for Empire Wind during the first Trump administration in 2017. Its project took over eight years to go from proposal to full approval, though President Trump’s interior secretary, Doug Burgum, who oversees the core offshore wind permitting process, recently suggested in a post on X that “the Biden administration rushed through its approval without sufficient analysis.”
That leaves Sunset Park community members to wonder what’s next.
“Unfortunately, that door of what is beautifully possible and necessary is being shut on our knuckles,” wrote Yeampierre in response to Trump’s interference.
Offshore wind promises cleaner and more reliable energy for New York and the East Coast. But for residents of Sunset Park in particular, these projects — and the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal that relies on them — offer benefits beyond that.
What’s also at stake is a real shot to revive Sunset Park, a mainly working-class neighborhood of Asian, Latino, and immigrant communities. Equinor has already given $5 million in grants to help local community groups, like UPROSE, build education and job-training programs around a new wind-power economy.
Maintaining Sunset Park’s industrial character is key to keeping housing affordable in the area, Eddie Bautista, executive director of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, told Canary Media in 2022. Many envision Sunset Park as a place where people have job training and good salaries without the air pollution that spewed from the port during its 20th century heyday.
“We were building a whole industry … and the problem with shutting down the project is that it really sends a signal to the developers in the market — like, what certainty is there?” said Lara Skinner, executive director of the Climate Jobs Institute at Cornell University’s New York City campus.
She fears that developers like Equinor may pull out, not for lack of commitment, but for lack of certainty that Trump will honor the federal government’s permits and approvals. And if the offshore wind turbines don’t get installed, she said, the wind hub in Sunset Park is in jeopardy.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, has expressed similar fears about the stop-work order and vowed last week to “fight this every step of the way.”
Meanwhile, some local Republican officials are pleased. Speaking at a press conference last week, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman sided with the Trump administration’s view that Biden-era permitting was insufficient: “We think there [were] shortcuts. We think there was false information. And a lack of public input.”
Esposito, the organizer of Tuesday’s rally, said politics should not be part of the Empire Wind debate.
“Look, offshore wind is not a Republican issue and not a Democratic issue,” said Esposito, who noted the threats of a warming planet and rising seas. “At the end of the day, we all live on an island.”
See more from Canary Media’s “Chart of the week” column.
President Donald Trump’s attacks on federal climate policy and his supply-chain-scrambling tariffs are taking a toll on the clean-energy manufacturing boom.
In the first three months of this year, firms have already abandoned plans to build nearly $8 billion worth of clean energy projects — mostly factories that would have produced everything from grid batteries to electric vehicles, per new data from E2. It’s a dramatic reversal from the Biden era: Between 2022 and 2024, a total of just $2.1 billion in investment was canceled.
The Inflation Reduction Act, signed by former President Joe Biden in August 2022, unleashed a torrent of new clean energy projects.
The manufacturing sector has seen a particularly notable uptick since the law went into effect.
Construction spending on manufacturing began to soar. Well over $100 billion worth of EV assembly facilities, solar-panel factories, battery recycling plants, and more have been announced since the passage of the law, which created tax incentives as well as grant and loan programs for domestic clean-energy manufacturing.
In total, those projects are expected to create over 109,000 permanent jobs nationwide; the U.S. currently has around 12.8 million workers in the manufacturing sector.
But now, under President Trump, the trend has started to go in reverse.
Construction spending on factories has plateaued. Firms are pausing and scaling down investment plans. Others are outright canceling projects due to Trump’s policies: Take Prysmian Group, for example, which earlier this year scrapped its plan to build a $300 million offshore wind cable manufacturing facility at the site of a retired coal plant in Somerset, Massachusetts. For the first time since E2 began tracking the data in 2022, canceled investments in cleantech manufacturing outweigh new investments, and it’s not particularly close.
There are still some new investments happening: $1.7 billion worth in March alone, per E2, including a $200 million Tesla grid-battery factory in Texas. Plus, the vast majority of announced projects have yet to be canceled, paused, or downsized.
But the going is not guaranteed to get any easier.
Trump’s tariffs are causing pain across the U.S. manufacturing sector in general. In an early April survey conducted by the Philadelphia Fed, manufacturers expected new orders to fall sharply over the next six months. And if congressional Republicans decide to rescind the Inflation Reduction Act’s manufacturing incentives, a move that’s on the table, the situation could grow even more dire.
California, for all its talk of clean energy and climate leadership, has long depended on fossil gas to keep its lights on. A decade ago, gas provided around 60% of the state’s electricity production. But this long-running dominance may be coming to an end.
California’s solar systems, from rooftop panels to massive desert installations, generated nearly as much electricity as its gas plants last year, according to data pulled from think tank Ember’s U.S. Electricity Data Explorer. Gas’ market share has declined gradually since its 2012 high, while solar’s shot up steadily — last year, the two nearly intersected. This year could be the first time that solar takes the lead.
Solar far outpaces all other electricity sources in new power plant construction, not just in California but in Texas and the nation as a whole. But that metric is measured in megawatts of production capacity — it doesn’t tell us how much electricity solar panels actually make in the course of a year. Solar produces only when the sun shines, so it needs more megawatts of nameplate generating capacity to rival sources like gas or nuclear that can operate around the clock.
That’s why this chart is so striking: It displays actual electricity production in California throughout 2024. Solar really produced more than 30% of the state’s electricity, while gas fell closer to that percentage than it has ever been in the modern era.
This inflection point represents the culmination of yearslong trends. Gas surged to a record level in 2012, when the San Onofre nuclear plant ceased pumping out carbon-free baseload power. But new gas plant construction in the state has effectively stopped, and the rapidly expanding battery fleet is now competing for the most valuable peak hours. Gigawatts of batteries now cut into gas plants’ run-time, as can be seen on hot summer nights and mild shoulder months alike.
Over the last decade, it’s worth noting, generation from nuclear, wind, and geothermal has stayed flat, and hydropower fluctuated with the annual weather patterns. Those carbon-free sources all have their own passionate advocates and deeply researched reports from the Department of Energy on how they can break out of stasis and grow again. But solar is the only one of the bunch consistently increasing production year over year.
That’s not guaranteed to always be the case. The Republican-led Congress still could axe federal tax credits that currently support renewable installations for the next decade. California has also gotten in its own way, as when Gov. Gavin Newsom’s handpicked utility regulators chose to dismantle the prevailing rules for rooftop solar, greatly diminishing the pace of residential installations.
Nonetheless, if gas power production continues its downward plunge, California will eventually have to figure some things out. Specifically, it needs other tools to ensure on-demand power through the nights and weather patterns that dampen solar production.
State grid planners have ordered utilities to start procuring long-duration energy storage, a category of technologies promising to deliver steady clean power for far longer than lithium-ion batteries can manage at today’s price points. The state is also taking early steps to open up its coastline for offshore wind development; the deep Pacific seabed calls for floating turbines, a newer technology that has not yet been built in the U.S. Efforts to better connect the western grid could also make it easier to balance supply and demand across the region.
California, whose state economy would rank fifth among the world’s nations, is not a place that can change course in an instant. But this impending unseating of gas power by solar shows what can happen over a decade of dedicated policy, regulatory, and business efforts to push down carbon emissions and accelerate clean energy. It took time to get to this point, but now the results are undeniable.
The Chicago Teachers Union expects its new, hard-fought contract to help drive clean energy investments and train the next generation of clean energy workers, even as the Trump administration attacks such priorities.
The contract approved by 97% of union members this month represents the first time the union has bargained with school officials specifically around climate change and energy, said union Vice President Jackson Potter. The deal still needs to be approved by the Chicago Board of Education.
If approved, the contract will result in new programs that prepare students for clean energy jobs, developed in collaboration with local labor unions. It mandates that district officials work with the teachers union to seek funding for clean energy investments and update a climate action plan by 2026. And it calls for installing heat pumps and outfitting 30 schools with solar panels — if funding can be secured.
During almost a year of contentious negotiations, the more than 25,000-member union had also demanded paid climate-educator positions, an all-electric school bus fleet, and that all newly constructed schools be carbon-free. While those provisions did not end up in the final agreement, leaders say the four-year contract is a “transformative” victory that sets the stage for more ambitious demands next time.
“This contract is setting the floor of what we hope we can accomplish,” said Lauren Bianchi, who taught social studies at George Washington High School on the city’s South Side for six years before becoming green schools organizer for the union. “It shows we can win on climate, even despite Trump.”
The climate-related provisions are part of what the Chicago Teachers Union and an increasing number of unions nationwide refer to as “common good” demands, meant to benefit not only their members in the workplace but the entire community. In this and its 2019 contract, the Chicago union also won “common good” items such as protections for immigrant students and teachers, and affordable housing–related measures. The new contract also guarantees teachers academic freedom at a time when the federal government is trying to limit schools from teaching materials related to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
“Black history, Indigenous history, climate science — that’s protected instruction now,” said Potter.
Chicago Public Schools did not respond to emailed questions for this story, except to forward a press release that did not mention clean energy provisions.
The union crafted its proposals based on discussions with three environmental and community organizations, Bianchi said — the Southeast Environmental Task Force, People for Community Recovery, and ONE Northside.
The Southeast Environmental Task Force led the successful fight to ban new petcoke storage in Chicago, and the group’s co-executive director Olga Bautista is also vice president of the 21-member school board. People for Community Recovery was founded by Hazel Johnson, who is often known as “the mother of the environmental justice movement.” And ONE Northside emphasizes the link between clean energy and affordable housing.
Clean energy job training was a priority for all three of the organizations, Potter said.
Under the contract, the union and district officials will work with other labor unions to create pre-apprenticeship programs for students, which are crucial to entering the union-dominated building trades to install solar, do energy-efficiency overhauls, and electrify homes with heat pumps and other technology. The contract demands the district create one specific new clean energy jobs pathway program during each year of the four-year contract.
It also mandates renovating schools for energy efficiency and installing modern HVAC systems, and orders the school district to work with trade unions to create opportunities for Chicago Public Schools students and graduates to be hired for such work.
“The people in the community have identified jobs and economic justice as being essential for environmental justice,” said Bianchi. “I’ve mostly taught juniors and seniors; a lot expressed frustration that college is not their plan. They wish they could learn job skills to enter a trade.”
Installing solar could help the district meet its clean energy goals, which include sourcing 100% of its electricity from renewables by this year.
The district has invested more than $6 million in energy efficiency and efficient lighting since 2018, and cut its carbon dioxide emissions by more than 27,000 metric tons, school district spokesperson Evan Moore told Canary Media last fall as contract negotiations were proceeding.
The schools are eligible for subsidized solar panels under the state Illinois Shines program, and they can tap the federal 30% investment tax credit for solar arrays, with a new direct-pay option tailored to tax-exempt organizations like schools.
The union contract’s climate stance represents a “reversal of what’s happening at the federal level,” said Potter. “It’s decreasing dependency on fossil fuels, ensuring the district is moving toward more environmentally efficient practices.”
While the future of federal clean-energy tax credits is in doubt under the Trump administration, Illinois elected officials and advocates say the state’s clean energy transition will continue thanks to ambitious state laws — including a major new energy bill before the legislature.
“As [Chicago Public Schools] is facing many financial woes, we see solar and lowering energy costs as a way we can actually save money that we can then use to prevent layoffs and staff programs,” said Bianchi.
The contract also calls for upgraded windows and HVAC in all schools, as funding permits, which would boost energy efficiency, union leaders said. And it mandates more transparency from the district about the progress of building work orders, which Potter said will help the community track energy-efficiency investments. With school buildings that are 83 years old on average, such overhauls are crucial both to saving money on energy bills and keeping conditions adequate for learning. In 2012, the teachers union went on strike and ultimately won guarantees for air conditioning in all schools, where students and teachers had been sweltering in aging buildings without functioning AC.
Moore said the district is committed to another program that the teachers had demanded, though it did not end up in the contract: the creation of community resiliency centers at schools, where residents can stay warm or cool during extreme weather. Moore noted that Chicago Public Schools received a federal Renew America’s Schools grant in 2024 that will help prepare 20 schools for that role.
The district also received federal funds last year to purchase 50 electric buses under the Clean School Bus program. The city said it worked closely with the union on the application, and Potter added that contract provisions, including formation of a joint Green Schools and Climate Change Preparedness Committee, ensure the union can work with the district to seek additional funds for electric buses.
In recent years the teachers union was deeply involved in a successful fight to prevent a polluting metal shredder’s move from a wealthy North Side neighborhood to the low-income community where George Washington High School is located. The campaign, led in part by now–school board Vice President Bautista, resulted in an agreement between the state and federal government meant to prevent development of new polluting sources in environmental justice communities.
“We’re treated as the city’s dumping ground, but with the community’s organizing power, history, and legacy of resistance, ultimately the community won,” said George Washington High teacher Kevin Moore, who talks about environmental justice and climate change in his courses, including human geography.
The union demanded during bargaining that George Washington High and at least two other schools be replaced with new carbon-free buildings. The contract ultimately has no such promises but says any new school buildings should “aspire to be carbon-free.”
Other unions nationwide have also included climate provisions in their demands, including under the “common good” banner. The Los Angeles teachers union UTLA has for several years made climate justice a successful plank in its contract negotiations, building on its common good advocacy for racial justice and citing blistering heat and wildfire smoke that affect local schools.
In February 2020, 4,000 janitors who were members of Minneapolis’ SEIU Local 26 union held a one-day “climate strike” — joined by students and other community groups — demanding greener cleaning practices and action by banks and other companies to reduce emissions in corporate buildings. After walking off the job, the janitors succeeded in enshrining some climate-related measures in their contract.
“Helping both the larger community and our members to see the union as a vehicle to win on other issues is critical to the survival of organized labor,” wrote two SEIU Local 26 officials and a high school student in a joint essay in Labor Notes, highlighting that more than 40% of the union’s members reported that climate change has impacted their families.
The United Auto Workers union has supported Environmental Protection Agency vehicle emissions limits and the electric vehicle transition.
“A lot of people see this as a new thing we’re doing,” Bianchi said of the Chicago Teachers Union’s focus on energy and climate. “However, as a history teacher, I want to point out that health and safety is something that unions have always fought for. The farmworkers were fighting against toxic chemicals. Mineworkers were fighting for safety. This isn’t just an issue that intersects with our working conditions and the broader public good. It really is both.”
Californians face steep up-front costs if they want to install solar panels to produce clean power and batteries to back up their homes in outages. A new state program will cover those costs for low-income homeowners, but they still have to pay up to tens of thousands of dollars initially and then wait months for the rebate to come through.
Now a startup called Haven Energy is going to take on the task of filing that paperwork, giving homeowners something that sounds too good to be true: a solar and battery system with no out-of-pocket cost.
It’s the latest riff on the evolving market for virtual power plants, which aggregate thousands of small energy systems into a meaningful tool to meet the energy needs of utilities or competitive electricity markets. The grid needs more energy just about everywhere in the U.S., but large-scale infrastructure construction runs into persistent delays and challenges. Adding generation and storage capacity in homes is relatively quick, and with the right incentives, can add up to a substantial tool to meet the grid’s needs.
If Haven successfully implements those incentives, it thinks it will be able to install 10 megawatts of dispatchable battery capacity across thousands of homes in the next two years. The (non-paying) customers will benefit from bill savings and backup power; to qualify for the state-funded rebate, they just need to make their batteries discharge regularly when the grid is stressed, namely in the evening hours when solar production dips and demand surges.
Haven launched in 2023 to streamline the home battery purchase experience and has overseen installations at hundreds of homes in California. But after a couple of years, cofounder and CEO Vinnie Campo determined the company needed a new strategic approach.
“We thought if you were able to remove all the friction from the process, that you could dramatically increase the adoption,” he explained. “That’s only fractionally true. The reason most people don’t get a battery is that they’re incredibly expensive.”
At the same time, utilities have begun grappling with a sudden uptick in electricity demand to supply AI computing, industry, and electrification. Utilities increasingly recognize the value of fleets of aggregated batteries to help meet peak demand, Campo said, but they’re much more comfortable contracting for large assets than thousands of small ones.
Putting these threads together, Campo decided Haven should own the batteries it installs at customer homes, so it can control them to serve utilities’ grid needs, and pull together different revenue streams to lower the cost for consumers.
“We’re seeing from the utilities and the retail companies, they just want that fixed, firm capacity every day,” Campo said. “That’s part of the gap that we’re trying to play into.”
Now Haven can tap into a new tranche of state funds to make this a reality.
Batteries don’t generate power, but for arcane bureaucratic reasons California has long funded its desired battery expansion with the Self-Generation Incentive Program. This legacy program has shifted with the times, and its newest evolution opened up $280 million to pay for batteries (and optional paired solar panels) for low-income households.
Technically, those homeowners can apply for the funds themselves. But this is a rebate program, so they would have to front the cost — which can easily tally up to $30,000 or $40,000 — then wait to get paid back by SGIP, which can take three or four months, Campo said. That’s an obvious nonstarter for many households.
Haven, though, has raised a debt facility and studied up on the necessary details. It can fund the cost of installation and wait for the rebate without sweating. Then it’s on the hook to make sure the installed battery system meets the program requirements for lowering demand in the evenings over 10 years. (Haven routes the installations to local installers and partnered with an undisclosed software company to handle the distributed energy management system)
The customer, meanwhile, doesn’t have to pay Haven any money, but benefits from the backup power and from lowering their electricity demand during peak pricing hours. Customers who use the SGIP funds to pair solar with their batteries will further lower their energy bills by producing their own clean power. And after a decade, Haven will transfer ownership to the homeowners.
Haven has already signed up a few hundred households for this program; the new rebates for solar-battery systems will open up on May 20, when the state rolls out updates to its online system for processing them.
“The biggest objection we get is, people don’t think it’s real,” Campo said. “They’ve always been sold ‘free solar,’ right? And this is the first time it actually is free solar — it’s not ‘no money down,’ it’s no money ever.”
Customers could be forgiven for not believing this program is real, because up until now, it hasn’t been.
State legislators originally allocated $900 million for a new branch of the long-running SGIP bureaucracy back in the Budget Act of 2022. At that time, the state was revising its policies for rooftop solar compensation to encourage more battery adoption; a flagship, broadly accessible home battery rebate could bolster that market in its time of transition. Originally, 70% of that funding was for low-income households, and the rest was open to the general populace. Rather than raising the money by charging people’s utility bills, as SGIP had previously, the Legislature pulled the new funds from the state’s cap-and-trade revenue.
But instead of quickly establishing the rules and moving the money out the door, the California Public Utilities Commission oversaw a yearslong process of laborious updates to the SGIP handbook and the backend database.
“It’s taken forever to go live,” said Joshua Buswell-Charkow, deputy director at the California Solar and Storage Association, a trade group.
While that cumbersome process was underway, the Legislature pared down most of the allocation, leaving just $280 million for low-income households. Updating the necessary web infrastructure has proven time-consuming. The commission also allowed the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the state’s largest municipal utility, to delay launching the solar-battery rebate program for Angelenos until late December, because the utility wasn’t ready to administer it on time.
The funds still need to be claimed by June 30, 2026. As the money finally starts to flow, Buswell-Charkow is most concerned about the practicality of meeting the new requirement that state-funded batteries enroll in demand response.
SGIP-funded batteries already had cycling requirements, meaning they couldn’t just sit in backup mode and not provide more value to the grid, he noted.
Going forward, the batteries have to be enrolled in a “qualified demand response program.” But, so far, the commission has only qualified two types of programs: critical peak pricing rates, which are only available to Californians who buy power from the three big investor-owned utilities, and the capacity bidding program, which currently only serves commercial customers, according to the California Solar and Storage Association’s survey of the market.
Other demand response programs include home batteries, like the Demand-Side Grid Support and Emergency Load Reduction programs, but the commission hasn’t approved them for the SGIP requirement.
The commission did grant an exemption for customers of municipal utilities who don’t have access to any qualified demand response programs, Buswell-Charkow said. But the regulators denied an exemption to the millions of customers of community choice aggregators, locally organized power-purchasing organizations that similarly lack access to the small number of approved demand response programs. Haven has encouraged utility regulators to approve demand response programs for customers of community choice aggregators, so those millions of Californians can access the SGIP funds, too.
The demand response requirement “makes the program needlessly more complicated than it needs to be,” Buswell-Charkow said.
Given those layers of complexity, it’s hard to imagine homeowners wading into the morass themselves. Even local solar installers struggle with the administrative burden of meeting SGIP’s bureaucratic requirements, Buswell-Charkow noted. This could give companies like Haven an opening: If they get good at filing the necessary paperwork and executing on the dense program requirements, they can make money and give households free clean energy at the same time.
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.
The Environmental Protection Agency revoked an essential Clean Air Act permit last month from Atlantic Shores, an offshore wind development slated to be built off the New Jersey coast. One of the main justifications was President Donald Trump’s January executive order calling for a halt and reexamination of the fledgling offshore wind industry.
The move suggests the agency, which has historically played a relatively small role in wind development, may be joining Trump’s assault on a renewable sector that many blue states are counting on to slash their planet-warming emissions and shore up grid reliability.
Lee Zeldin, one of President Trump’s first allies in Congress, now heads the EPA. Anti-wind groups have speculated in emails with Canary Media that Zeldin is sympathetic to their cause. One group has already submitted a “copycat” petition in hopes of convincing the agency to yank the same type of permit from Vineyard Wind in Massachusetts, a project expected to come online this year.
Permits are now the golden tickets of offshore wind.
Depending on the location and size of the project, an offshore wind farm needs to secure between eight and 10 federal permits before the first turbine can be built.
If you don’t already have them, you’re effectively locked out of building a wind farm over the next several years given Trump’s directive to freeze new permitting. Only nine projects in the U.S. — including Atlantic Shores — had all the necessary permits in hand when Trump took office again in January. But as indicated by the case of Atlantic Shores, even having all the paperwork in order may not be enough to keep projects from being crippled by the Trump administration’s assault on wind.
Most of the necessary federal permits are examined and issued by the Interior Department. But only the EPA or one of its regional delegates can give out the Clean Air Act permits that are required to ensure wind companies minimize air pollution during construction and operation.
The EPA appeals board has a history of pulling these permits from energy or industrial projects when appropriate, according to the letter of the Clean Air Act. Presidential orders are not typically a meaningful factor.
“It’s not unprecedented,” said Stan Meiburg, a former acting deputy administrator of the EPA, referring to the use of a presidential order in this kind of agency decision. “But it still seems unusual that you would cite it that heavily in a case.”
The decision comes as Zeldin moves to dramatically reshape the agency.
He has floated plans to cut 65% of its budget, is reportedly considering slashing 10% of its workforce, and has aggressively attempted to claw back $20 billion of funds Congress had already approved for clean energy projects. In early March, he released an extensive plan that aims to eliminate dozens of bedrock environmental regulations. The goal, he said in the statement, is to reorient the EPA around making it “more affordable to purchase a car, heat homes, and operate a business.”
It’s a remarkable shift not only for the agency but for Zeldin himself, who began his political career as a moderate blue state Republican before morphing into what The New York Times described in a recent profile as the cabinet’s “MAGA warrior.” As a congressman, he supported offshore wind and other renewable projects in his home state of New York.
That transformation was on display in his confirmation hearing held in January.
“When asked about wind power, he spouted fossil fuel–funded talking points about harms to marine life,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, at a meeting of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works to vote on Zeldin’s confirmation.
The EPA’s appeals board — which has a decades-long track record of independence — could now theoretically become caught up in Zeldin’s crusade against clean energy, too, argued Meiburg.
In 1992, the Environmental Appeals Board was formed as “an impartial appellate tribunal” to resolve regulatory disputes. The four-judge panel is staffed by long-time EPA attorneys who are senior career officials — not political appointees. In the agency’s early years, disputes were settled by the administrator directly, but the workload became overwhelming. In the three decades that followed its establishment, the board evolved from an extension of the administrator’s office to an independent body untethered from politics. According to a 2017 EPA document, unless a case requires another agency to weigh in, the board’s decisions “cannot be appealed to the EPA Administrator.” In other words, the board has the final say.
“The value of the Environmental Appeals Board as an institution has derived from the fact that they are seen as independent,” said Meiburg, who now serves as executive director of Wake Forest University’s Andrew Sabin Family Center for Environment and Sustainability. “And they want to make sure to preserve that independence and integrity because that’s the basis of some of their credibility.”
Zeldin could reverse course, exerting more political pressure on the board or firing its judges.
“The Environmental Appeals Board is independent of all EPA components outside the immediate office of the Office of the Administrator,” said an EPA spokesperson via email. “It is an impartial appellate tribunal established by regulation to hear administrative appeals under the major environmental statutes that EPA administers.”
On March 14, Environmental Appeals Board Judge Mary Kay Lynch ruled to “remand,” as EPA calls it, a Clean Air Act permit issued last September to Atlantic Shores. Companies can appeal the board’s remand decisions in federal court but, according to Meiburg, most of those appeals fail. Overall, less than 1% of the board’s final decisions have been reversed.
EPA officials working in the Region 2 office in the Northeast had recommended in February a reexamination of the permit, in light of Trump’s anti-wind order and in response to a formal petition, filed in October, from a local anti-wind group called Save Long Beach Island. Along with other concerns, the group had raised questions about the impact on wildlife at a nearby refuge.
Atlantic Shores contested the decision, which moved the dispute to the EAB judges’ desk.
The project’s lawyers argued that Trump’s anti-wind order — the EAB’s main justification for pulling the permit — should not be retroactively applied to a permit that was issued in September, well before his election.
But Judge Lynch wrote in her motion that the board has “broad discretion” in pulling permits, handing a win to the EPA officials and another blow to Atlantic Shores. The judges offered no opinion on the actual merits of the original petition about nearby wildlife, according to Meiburg.
The revoked permit came after the project was already faltering in the face of rising costs from inflation and waning support from the state’s lame-duck governor. Shell, one of the project’s partners, pulled out in January.
“Atlantic Shores is disappointed by the EPA’s decision to pull back its fully executed permit as regulatory certainty is critical to deploying major energy projects,” Atlantic Shores spokesperson Terence Kelly wrote in a statement.
Lawyers working in the environmental field expressed similar concerns.
“My first reaction was disappointment — these are projects that had gone through extensive review by the agency. It seems to be invoking a tangential issue here,” said Kate Sinding Daly of the Conservation Law Foundation, a nonprofit that has brought numerous cases to the agency’s appeals board.
She explained that Atlantic Shores’ air permit application will now be reexamined. Most revoked Clean Air Act permits are eventually reissued, sometimes with modifications, but it’s unclear what will happen with Zeldin at the helm given Trump’s order to halt permitting activity.
Sinding Daly also raised concern about the “copycat” petition submitted last week by Nantucket-based group ACK for Whales to challenge Vineyard Wind’s Clean Air Act permit.
That petition argues that the EPA did not properly anticipate emissions from wind turbine malfunctions, such as the Vineyard Wind blade accident, which left the developer with almost a year of extra at-sea work and thus created extra emissions from the ships working on the project. The wind farm is slated to come online later this year, feeding renewable energy from near Nantucket Sound to the state’s energy grid.
“We’re hopeful that our petition to EPA will be carefully reviewed as we believe our concerns are valid,” said Amy DiSibio, a member of ACK for Whales, in an email.
Sinding Daly said the group’s petition addresses a more narrow provision in the law and pointed out that it’s been submitted years after the original air permit was issued, instead of just weeks, like with Atlantic Shores. She doubts that the Massachusetts petition will be successful. But when asked about potential “copycat” Clean Air Act petitions elsewhere, directed at other U.S. wind projects, she said she still considers them a “threat.”
Historically, she said, the agency has focused on protecting public health and the environment. But the remit is different now under Zeldin — and the EPA has just enough permitting authority over large infrastructure projects to slow down turbine installations in line with the Trump 2.0 mandate.
.svg)
