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Meghan Wood, CEO of Raya Power, thinks solar and batteries should be as easy to install as a typical household appliance, durable enough to provide backup power for critical devices during storms and heat waves, and sophisticated enough to help lower everyday energy bills.
“Solar can give you a return on investment; it can give you resilience — and I want that to be as normal as getting Wi-Fi,” Wood said.
The Raya Power unit that Wood and cofounder Nicole Gonzalez designed is meant to hit all those marks. Think of it as a portable alternative to rooftop solar, one that looks a bit like an external cellar door from the space age.
The white triangular boxes are topped with 1.35 to 1.8 kilowatts of solar panels and contain 2.5 to 5 kilowatt-hours of battery storage. That blended solar and battery power can be fed into appliances using typical 120-volt or 240-volt plugs, or wired directly to air conditioning systems — all without touching broader household wiring and triggering the need for electrical permits.
In essence, Wood said, it’s a backyard solar “all-in-one box — a hybrid inverter, battery, communications, and electronics.” It even comes with enough ballast to keep it solidly on the ground in Category 3 storms. And unlike rooftop solar systems that can take days or weeks to install, permit, and interconnect under utility supervision, a Raya Power installation takes about two hours, “and then you’re running dedicated appliances.”
Rooftop solar and battery systems are great for those who can afford them, she said. But they’re out of reach for low-income households and people who rent their homes, like Wood does — an early inspiration for her research into alternative solar-battery combos.
Meanwhile, do-it-yourself balcony solar systems, which are popular in Germany, aren’t yet compatible with current U.S. electrical codes and standards, and that bars them from being plugged into household power sockets — at least for now.
Wood and Gonzalez, who met at a wedding during graduate studies at Stanford University, thought they could design a product that married the best of both those worlds. Gonzalez, who has Puerto Rican roots and was working on the NASA Mars Rover project when Hurricane Maria hit in 2017, wanted something her family could have used to keep their lights on and communications up and running after the storm devastated the island’s electrical grid.
And Wood, a Stanford Impact Founder fellow at the university’s Doerr School of Sustainability, wanted a system that could avoid the “soft” costs of labor, permitting, and interconnection, which constitute about two-thirds of the total price tag of a typical U.S. rooftop solar and backup battery installation.
“That was the whole goal from the start: How do we eliminate the soft costs?” Wood said. “What can you do that avoids any type of permitting, and then go from there?”
Now, with $1 million in pre-seed funding, Wood and Gonzalez are ready to put the technology into the field. Over the coming months, the startup will deploy its first 20 or so units at homes in Puerto Rico and California.
Those units will draw from the grid to power the air conditioners, refrigerators, and other devices they’re connected to when that’s the cheapest option, Wood explained. When the sun is shining, they’ll switch to using solar power for those appliances. But they’ll never push power back to the utility grid, which obviates the need to win utility interconnection approvals.
As for the battery, it’s there for when the power goes out, which is still a common problem in Puerto Rico, Wood said. But it’s also available to store up solar power for use later in the day to offset peak time-of-use rates in California. Raya Power’s software will control the mix of grid, solar, and battery power.
The startup’s first systems are being installed in partnership with philanthropic organizations looking for solar-battery options for low-income communities. That includes the Environmental Defense Fund, which has spent the past few years helping the island of Culebra, Puerto Rico, move toward 100% carbon-free power.
That project has put rooftop solar-battery systems on some commercial buildings and homes, said Dan Whittle, who leads the Environmental Defense Fund’s work in the Caribbean. “But without subsidies, public or private, it’s just too expensive to cover 100 percent of low-income homes,” he said.
“Lo and behold, we ran into Nicole and Meghan. They’ve sort of found the missing piece,” he said. Their unit “doesn’t provide as much backup power as the conventional systems, but it’s significantly lower cost. And it provides what Culebrans want most, which is peace of mind — resilience.”
The Environmental Defense Fund has won backing from private donors to install eight Raya Power systems in Culebra as a proof of concept. “If it works — and I believe it will work — then a lot of lower-income people might have access to it without subsidies, perhaps with a low-interest loan,” Whittle said.
Wood conceded that Raya Power’s pricing has to come down to make the product a good fit for its target customers. Right now, the startup’s systems can be preordered for $6,790 up front, which is competitive with a similarly sized rooftop solar and battery system, she said. Customers can also finance systems for $125 per month at a 6.5% annual percentage rate with a $500 down payment.
To be clear, diesel-fueled backup generators have lower upfront costs for backup power. But they pollute the air, make a racket, and need regular refueling, which isn’t easy during widespread power outages or in the wake of severe storms, particularly on an island like Culebra, Wood said. And setting up generators to power an entire home requires installation of a transfer switch and separate circuit breakers, which can be a costly project.
Portable batteries from companies like Jackery and EcoFlow are another affordable choice, and can power air conditioners or refrigerators for hours at a time. Many now can be purchased with foldout solar panels that recharge the units, though slowly. But as with generators, these systems are primarily meant for emergencies, not as always-on tools for storing solar power and reducing home energy costs.
Raya Power’s systems, by contrast, can lower monthly utility bills by using solar-charged battery power to replace costly on-peak grid power for air conditioning, refrigeration, and other connected loads, Wood said. The company estimates that customers of Puerto Rico utility Luma Energy could save about $50 per month and that customers of California utility Pacific Gas & Electric could save about $80 per month.
That’s roughly equivalent to the savings from a rooftop solar and battery system of the same size, according to Wood. But unlike rooftop solar, a Raya Power system can go with someone when they move or be sold to someone else.
That portability also makes for simpler financing, given that Raya Power systems could be repossessed if the owner can’t make the payments. “You’re not buying a construction project that’s never leaving your home,” Wood said.
These are important factors in markets where many households lack credit ratings that would qualify them for traditional rooftop solar loans or power purchase agreements, Wood added. “We’re getting a lot of excitement from solar installers in Puerto Rico,” where a lot of potential customers “can’t do a rooftop solar system because they lack an adequate FICO score,” she said.
Raya Power is exploring lower-cost financing mechanisms such as loans offered by Puerto Rico’s “cooperativas,” community-owned lending institutions that have played a central role in the island’s solar and battery renaissance in the wake of Hurricane Maria. “They have flexible terms and rates in the 4% to 7% range,” Wood said. Community development financial institutions and green banks could play similar roles in California and other early markets, she added.
For its first round of deployments, Raya Power will use professional installers but is developing a “roadmap … to get it to a do-it-yourself system,” Wood said.
In Puerto Rico, it’s enlisting local installers coming out of the training centers run by the nonprofit Grid Alternatives. Of the 161 trainees that have graduated from the program in the past two years, 41% are women, said Gabriel Pacheco, Grid Alternatives’ regional manager for Puerto Rico.
“Some of the women that have taken our course connected with Raya, and they’ve secured mostly part-time or contract jobs to set up the pilot” in Culebra, he said. “That’s an awesome initiative on their end.”
Raya Power’s system “might not fulfill all the energy needs of a family.” But it’s great for “providing backup power without the cost of permitting [or] a constraint on time,” Pacheco said. “Having systems like those Raya is developing that you can plug and play, and take with you to wherever you live, anywhere you have space — it addresses the needs of what I think is a big segment of the population.”
An update and a clarification were made on Dec. 12, 2025: Members of Raya Power co-founder Nicole Gonzalez’s family live in Puerto Rico, but Gonzalez was not born in Puerto Rico and her parents do not live there.
Hot rocks might be the next big thing in energy.
Global investment in geothermal energy is growing quickly — and it’s expected to keep climbing in the years to come, per new data from research firm Rystad Energy.
At the start of the 2020s, less than $2 billion flowed each year toward projects that harness the Earth’s natural underground heat to either produce electricity or directly warm buildings. By 2030, that figure could hit nearly $9 billion, Rystad predicts.
Geothermal systems have been around for decades in places where the Earth’s warmth sits close to the planet’s surface — think regions with lots of hot springs, for example. But decarbonization goals and rising power demand are fueling renewed enthusiasm for the always-available clean energy source, and emerging technologies mean companies can tap into it in areas with more challenging terrain.
Geothermal heating is most popular in Europe, where there’s growing interest in using the energy source for thermal networks that can warm up multiple buildings. Iceland, which has long leveraged its volcanic geology to keep homes toasty, is the famous example here.
When it comes to electricity, geothermal makes up less than 1% of the world’s supply. The U.S. is the global leader in terms of geothermal power capacity, with much of it located in California’s steamy Geysers region. It’s no surprise, then, that America is among the countries investing the most in the energy source, topping the chart this year and last.
Rystad doesn’t expect the U.S. to be No. 1 for much longer, predicting that volcano-laden Indonesia will steal the top spot for investment starting in 2027. Even so, geothermal could have a bright future in the U.S. It’s something of a unicorn: a clean energy source that has broad support among both Democrats and Republicans.
Six years ago, it seemed like the Midwest was well on its way to building the first offshore wind farm in the Great Lakes. Then the project withered on the vine — and a civil lawsuit puts the blame on utility FirstEnergy’s bribery scheme in Ohio.
That corruption scandal is best known for leading to the 2019 passage of House Bill 6, a law that gutted the state’s clean energy standards and forced consumers to pay nearly half a billion dollars in subsidies for uneconomical coal plants.
But the bribes also led to a regulatory decision that effectively killed the Icebreaker wind farm proposed off Cleveland’s shore, claims the lawsuit filed in July by Lake Erie Energy Development Corp. — the nonprofit that spent more than a decade trying to launch the clean energy project.
The group, known as LEEDCo, zeroes in on FirstEnergy’s bribes to Sam Randazzo, who formerly headed both the state’s Power Siting Board and Public Utilities Commission. LEEDCo argues that those payments led to a 2020 ruling that imposed unworkable restrictions on when the Icebreaker project’s turbines could operate. By the time the restrictions were revoked, funding for Icebreaker had collapsed. The nonprofit is suing FirstEnergy for monetary damages that could top $10 million.
Icebreaker “represented a generational opportunity for the region,” said Jay Kelley, managing partner at Elk & Elk and one of the lawyers representing LEEDCo. “It would have positioned Cleveland as a national leader in offshore wind, created a new advanced-manufacturing supply chain, supported jobs, and strengthened the region’s climate-resilience and economic-development goals.”
The Icebreaker demonstration project called for six turbines to be built approximately 8 miles northwest of Cleveland. Although relatively small, its roughly 20 megawatts of clean electricity would have been enough to power thousands of homes. Just as important to LEEDCo was proving that offshore wind generation was feasible in the freshwater lake. If so, proponents in the public and private sectors hoped to leverage the region’s strengths in engineering, steelmaking, maritime, and other fields to help the sector take off.
“The big dream was to build an industry here,” recalled Lorry Wagner, who served as LEEDCo’s first executive director until he retired in late 2019.
By that time, the organization had spent millions of dollars on offshore wind studies, and it had lined up the developer Fred. Olsen Renewables to build Icebreaker once approvals came through. In 2018, the project cleared the federal government’s environmental review process. LEEDCo was also deep into discussions with several Ohio agencies and had applied for a permit from the Ohio Power Siting Board.
By May 2019, LEEDCo had agreed to various permit conditions supported by the Power Siting Board’s staff, two environmental groups, a trade association, and a carpenters’ union. After a hearing that autumn on the fairness of that settlement, the project’s only remaining hurdle was to get the board’s final approval.
When that ruling finally came in May 2020, the board, led by Randazzo, imposed a whole new condition: Every night from March through December of each year, Icebreaker’s turbines would have to “feather,” or shut down.
“When it came out, everybody was shocked,” Wagner said.
LEEDCo appealed to the Power Siting Board to remove the restrictions. A bipartisan group of 32 lawmakers urged Randazzo to reverse the ruling. Republican Gov. Mike DeWine’s office fielded similar complaints. The board finally removed the “poison pill” provision in October 2020, although Randazzo remained highly critical of Icebreaker.
By then, however, Fred. Olsen had withdrawn from the project. According to LEEDCo, that loss of both funding and technical expertise meant it could no longer meet its obligations for a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy. When the Ohio Supreme Court later upheld the permit without the “poison pill” in 2022, LEEDCo still didn’t have new funding. On Dec. 8, 2023, LEEDCo said it was freezing Icebreaker.
Just a few days before LEEDCo paused Icebreaker, the federal government indicted Randazzo on criminal bribery, fraud, and conspiracy charges related to HB 6 and other matters. He also faced criminal charges from the state of Ohio and the prospect of losing his law license.
FirstEnergy admitted in 2021 that it paid $4.3 million to one of Randazzo’s companies shortly before Gov. DeWine nominated him to lead the Public Utilities Commission. According to that federal court filing, the payment was in return for Randazzo taking official action on HB 6, along with “other specific FirstEnergy Corp. legislative and regulatory priorities, as requested and as opportunities arose.”
LEEDCo claims that stopping the Icebreaker project fell into the general category of other opportunities in which Randazzo furthered FirstEnergy’s interests. The nonprofit alleges in its filings that FirstEnergy thought competition from the Icebreaker project would cost its subsidiaries more than $5 million in lost revenue per year.
LEEDCo wants the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas to make FirstEnergy pay monetary damages to make up for the alleged wrongdoings: interference in LEEDCo’s contracts and business relations, along with corruption and conspiracy in violation of Ohio law.
“Pursuing relief is not only justified — it is necessary to make LEEDCo whole for the years of investment, planning, and opportunity lost,” Kelley said, adding that when wrongful conduct delays or derails a project like this, it doesn’t just hurt one company. “It holds back an entire region’s ability to compete and innovate.”
FirstEnergy asked the court to dismiss the case in August, arguing that LEEDCo’s allegations are based on insufficient evidence and that too much time has passed since the alleged wrongdoing. FirstEnergy spokesperson Jennifer Young said the company has no further comment beyond its case filings.
LEEDCo filed its brief against the motion to dismiss in October. Judge Cassandra Collier-Williams has scheduled the next case conference for late January.
If the case moves ahead to pretrial fact-finding, called discovery, LEEDCo will gain access to various FirstEnergy documents, and the nonprofit’s lawyers will be able to question people under oath. But LEEDCo may need to make its case without testimony from some key witnesses.
Randazzo died in April 2024, so he can’t testify about his arrangements with FirstEnergy or any documents concerning Icebreaker. Randazzo forwarded at least one Icebreaker-related document to himself, using an email connected to one of his companies that received money from FirstEnergy.
The Fifth Amendment would likely protect former FirstEnergy executives Chuck Jones and Michael Dowling from making statements that could be used as evidence against them in criminal cases. FirstEnergy’s lawyers identified Jones and Dowling as people who paid the bribes in the HB 6 scandal. The two men still face charges in state and federal court.
Icebreaker, for its part, has changed hands.
Maryland-based developer Mighty Waves Energy, which is not part of the lawsuit against FirstEnergy, acquired the remaining permit rights for the project last year and is working on meeting the Power Siting Board’s preconstruction conditions. But even if it can do that and get enough people to agree to buy the project’s power, Mighty Waves may well face headwinds, including high interest rates and the Trump administration’s persistent attacks on renewable energy.
David Stevenson stood in a circle of friends and colleagues in an Orlando, Florida, hotel lobby. Everyone but him wore a lapel pin that read “I ♥ Fossil Fuels.”
“You want one?” asked a conference attendee, offering me the pin with a smirk. “It can be a souvenir.”
Stevenson, with a soft wave, gestured to the man to leave me alone. I was the only credentialed member of a legacy news organization attending this gathering, covering it for South Carolina’s largest newspaper, The Post and Courier, where I worked at the time. One organizer of the meeting, the Heartland Institute’s 2023 International Conference on Climate Change, blamed the media’s “constant lies” for the ban on some members of the press.
But Stevenson, then a policy director for the conservative think tank the Caesar Rodney Institute, had personally advocated for me to cover the event. He favored transparency and had no problem talking to me for hours about his primary political cause: making sure no offshore wind farms were ever built in U.S. waters.
The conference drew luminaries from the world of climate skepticism, from Alex Epstein, author of “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels,” to Judith Curry and Ross McKitrick, a cherry-picking duo of marginal researchers more recently known for authoring a controversial 141-page government report downplaying the effects of human-caused climate change for the Trump administration. Rep. Lauren Boebert gave a keynote speech, mocking Democrats’ climate concerns. She held court next to the hotel pool that night, smoking a cigar with leaders from major conservative think tanks underneath palm fronds swaying in the breeze.
Stevenson saw himself as an outlier there. He leaned over during one session to tell me, cheekily, that he might be the “only person here who believes in climate change.”
And yet, despite that belief, Stevenson has dedicated the better part of a decade to obstructing a source of clean energy that can help replace the fossil fuels that are baking the planet. In fact, that’s why he was at the Heartland Institute’s conference: to rail against offshore wind farms.
The following day, Stevenson laid out his case in an expansive and mostly empty ballroom. It’s too expensive, he argued from a lectern, and the United States was not effectively assessing its environmental impact. He suggested a plan to get the public to care about this issue: putting whales front and center.
Stevenson stopped short of blaming wind companies for the spate of whale carcasses that had washed up on New Jersey and New York beaches just weeks prior. He agreed with the scientific evidence that “vessel strikes” — not wind development — were the biggest threat in that region. Still, the potential for harm to whales could be a powerful tool in federal court, he speculated, as well as in the court of public opinion.
At the time, Biden officials were approving new offshore wind projects at “breakneck speed.” Republican opposition was somewhat scant; GOP lawmakers in deep-red South Carolina had just put forth a pro–offshore wind bill. However, nuclear power — the energy sector Stevenson wanted to see advance — appeared to be on the downswing, with many U.S. facilities having recently shuttered.
We parted ways after two days together at the conference, and I ultimately decided not to write a story about Stevenson. He seemed like little more than a gadfly to an increasingly powerful, multibillion-dollar offshore wind industry. I didn’t think much of it when he told me at the time that the industry would “crumble” before it even reached South Carolina.
I should have believed him; Stevenson was right.
The once high-flying offshore wind industry has been brought to its knees this year by President Donald Trump. In just the past few months, the Trump administration halted a nearly finished wind farm, clawed back $679 million in offshore wind grants, and moved to cancel permits for three other massive wind farms. Multiple fully permitted projects have been shelved. New development in the U.S. seems impossible.
The stakes are high, particularly for the Northeast, where offshore wind was meant to not only slash emissions but also lower power bills, shore up grid reliability, and revitalize down-on-their-luck port towns with well-paying jobs. Strangling the sector for four years will be a devastating blow to these hopes.
Trump himself has a deep disdain for offshore wind, sparked by his failure to block a project from being built within view of his Scotland golf course a decade ago. But there is perhaps no other single person more responsible for watering the seeds of offshore wind opposition than Stevenson.
A January 2025 study by a Brown University research group placed Stevenson at the center of the network of activists and political operators driving America’s anti–offshore wind movement. The data showed he had an outsize influence in galvanizing lawsuits and public protests against wind farms. The analysis also tied Stevenson to a larger web of “dark money” networks that are financially backed by the fossil-fuel industry.
“The Brown study actually was fairly accurate about writing down all the people involved. … I was probably the common denominator for those groups,” Stevenson told me earlier this year.
Stevenson doesn’t fit into the neat box of being a climate denier. He doesn’t think we should continue burning fossil fuels forever. Instead, he’s someone who seeks to block certain solutions that address climate change, for reasons of his own — namely, “affordable and reliable” energy sources like nuclear and solar are better options, in his view. But scholars I spoke to about this discordance weren’t surprised at all.
“Outright climate denying seems to be decreasing,” said Alaina Kinol, a PhD candidate at Northeastern University who studies resistance to climate policy. “What we’re seeing more is obstruction … and tactics that delay action.”
Stevenson, now 75, describes himself as “a lifelong conservationist.”
In the driveway of his Lewes, Delaware, home sits the hybrid vehicle he often drives to a nearby beach. Solar panels glint atop the roof, which Stevenson custom-designed in 2013 to be at the “optimum angle” to soak up the sun. A framed newspaper article about one of his cross-country bike rides hangs on the wall of his home office, nestled alongside photos of his seven children and 19 grandchildren.
His career has intersected with clean energy — and even wind — at various points.
While working for DuPont in the 1980s, Stevenson helped the chemical giant develop the long-lasting coatings used to make first-generation solar panels and wind turbine blades. In 1999, after leaving the company, he started his own construction business and acquired certifications in energy efficiency and home weatherization. He said he eventually co-founded the Delaware Green Building Council to promote this kind of work.
But despite Stevenson’s environmentally minded career and interests, he’s built a reputation as someone dedicated to preventing, rather than enabling, renewable energy.
After selling his construction business to one of his sons, Stevenson became interested in shaping state policies. A self-described libertarian, he found a home around 2010 at the Caesar Rodney Institute, a Delaware affiliate of the State Policy Network, which the Brown University researchers call “the nation’s most prominent network of conservative state-level think tanks.”
According to the D.C.-based research firm Energy Policy Institute, CRI is among a half dozen “front groups” backed by fossil-fuel interests that regularly attack renewable energy in their local regions.
For a few years, Stevenson worked on a variety of issues at CRI, from data centers and solid-state fuel cells to pipeline infrastructure and Delaware’s carbon-emissions fee. His initial brush with offshore wind came in 2010, when he sent a measured letter to the Obama administration regarding Bluewater Wind, the first proposed wind farm off the coast of Delaware. He voiced opposition to wind tax credits but acknowledged “one of the benefits of windmills” is how quickly they can be built.
It wasn’t until 2017 that he focused deeply on offshore wind, and by then his stance on the energy source was more firmly negative.
Plans for Skipjack Wind Farm — a 966-megawatt Danish-led project slated for waters off Maryland’s coastline with onshore stations in Delaware — were advancing quickly. They took Stevenson by surprise. “My initial response was just the high cost,” he recalled, though he also worried about the turbines ruining the “pristine view.”
The project was led by Ørsted, the world’s largest developer of offshore wind, which had bought the lease from the developers of Bluewater Wind. Stevenson said he tried to enlist help to fight the company, turning to Washington connections he’d forged during his time serving on Trump’s first transition team for the Environmental Protection Agency.
“I knew a lot of people; we had a lot of conversations,” Stevenson recalled. “They told me that I was nuts for taking on offshore wind.”
At the time, Trump officials were actively backing the sector. Former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke described himself as “very bullish on offshore wind” and executed key lease auctions put forth by the Obama administration — first near North Carolina, then near Massachusetts. Anti-wind policies wouldn’t emerge until the latter half of Trump 1.0, when Zinke’s successor, David Bernhardt, began slow-walking federal permits for offshore projects.
Stevenson received little response from his Washington connections. Undeterred, he simply led an anti-wind campaign on his own.
He attended town hall meetings and submitted public comments. He and fellow residents of local coastal communities organized against the wind project under the name Save Our Beach View, mailing over 35,000 letters and posting constantly to Facebook.
The messages contained several misleading statements. Independent journalist Michael Thomas reported that the letters, for example, “falsely claimed that the project could cause coastal residents’ property values to drop by between 20% and 30%; power costs could rise by 400%; key industries like tourism could see their revenues fall by 50%.”
Nevertheless, Stevenson’s efforts delayed the permitting process for an onshore substation, which in turn delayed wind turbine construction off the Delmarva coast from a planned 2022 start date to 2026 at the earliest. In January of this year, days after Trump took office for his second term, Ørsted moved to refinance the project, likely kicking it even further down the road.
Ultimately, Stevenson said, he “won the battle.”
In 2019, emboldened by his win against Skipjack Wind, Stevenson started searching on social media platforms and in news articles for the names of other residents across the Northeast who were resisting offshore wind farms. He reached out to some of them by phone — “just cold-called them,” he said with a laugh.
He found that there were plenty of individuals, as well as some small groups, protesting with little experience. For example, a handful of activists known as Protect Our Coast NJ didn’t know how to establish themselves as a nonprofit entity. Stevenson said he helped them do it.
Stevenson also started to organize monthly calls among activists from different states. His reach slowly grew from Massachusetts down to North Carolina, with the idea of spreading the tactics he honed in Delaware to other states. What Stevenson would bring them — as the Brown University researchers put it — was “political power.” Filings show that Stevenson’s employer, the Caesar Rodney Institute, also accepted donations from the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers in both 2019 and 2020.
His network of grassroots activists evolved into the American Coalition for Ocean Protection, which made its public debut in 2021 with a press conference in front of the Massachusetts Statehouse. Four other State Policy Network think tanks had also joined by then.
There, wearing a blue sport coat and flanked by maps of planned wind farms, Stevenson announced that the Caesar Rodney Institute had set up a $75,000 legal fund to support residents along the east coast who wanted to sue to halt offshore wind development. He publicly set a goal of raising $500,000 for the campaign.
Stevenson would later admit that while the coalition’s fundraising “did pretty well,” it never reached anywhere close to his financial goal. No matter. It was the coalition’s relentless messaging and coordination, not so much the money, that would become its greatest weapon.
In January 2023, right-wing media took an interest in whales. There had been a slew of marine mammal deaths along the east coast of the U.S. in prior weeks — and conservative media put the blame on seismic surveys for the future offshore wind developments ramping up along the New Jersey coast. Fox News host Jesse Watters interviewed a leader of Protect Our Coasts NJ, a founding coalition member that Stevenson had helped become a nonprofit.
This wasn’t the first time the media had amplified baseless speculation about wind power killing whales. The Daily Caller, a conservative news site, had run a similar story in 2017. But in early 2023, the claims were getting attention from Fox, local news, and even the Associated Press.
Stevenson was in near disbelief when he heard Tucker Carlson, then a commentator on Fox News, mention offshore wind and whales in multiple segments.
Still, even then, Stevenson refused to repeat blatantly false claims about the sector’s impact on whales. He posted statements on CRI’s website that the exact harm to the critically endangered North Atlantic right whales by wind development was still “unknown” and told me that his official position was to “wait and see” what federal scientists find after investigating the recently washed-up whale carcasses.
I asked at the time if he thought the explosion of attention on whales and wind power would peter out. He replied that it would, adding that eventually all these newcomers would oppose wind farms because of “the economics.”
But if Stevenson didn’t personally amplify the message, he didn’t swear it off. Nor did he discourage the groups he collaborated with from peddling it. In fact, he nearly won an award for elevating the issue: In June 2023, his campaign against offshore wind was a finalist for the Best Issue Campaign award presented at State Policy Network’s annual meeting. (The nomination highlighted that the campaign prompted a U.S. General Accountability Office report into the matter. That analysis, released earlier this year, found no evidence that the wind industry harms whales.)
Over time, the whale issue metastasized, coming to define political debate over offshore wind farms.
Eventually, Stevenson himself embraced some of its more conspiratorial claims. In a statement posted to the Cesar Rodney Institute website in summer 2024, he wrote: “We have patiently waited for indisputable evidence that offshore wind is killing whales despite federal agencies repeatedly stating that no such evidence exists. It does now.”
The “evidence” was two documents posted online, neither of which had been peer-reviewed. One report, by the consultant Robert Rand, looked at the acoustic output of wind vessels in the U.S. — during both seabed surveys and pile-driving activities — and claimed that the underwater noise levels were much higher than federal scientists had estimated and could result in hearing loss and “harassment” of whales. The second report, by a retired computer science professor, used correlation alone to link the timing of New Jersey whale deaths to local wind farm survey work.
Douglas Nowacek, a professor at Duke University leading a multiyear investigation of wind farm impacts on wildlife, discredited these conclusions.
As it stands, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “there is no scientific evidence that noise resulting from offshore wind site characterization surveys could potentially cause whale deaths. There are no known links between large whale deaths and ongoing offshore wind activities.”
In fact, government data overwhelmingly links whales’ deaths to other causes. For nearly a decade, agencies have carefully documented humpbacks in the North Atlantic washing ashore at an increasing rate. The species is not endangered, but in 2016, its plummeting population warranted a government-assigned designation: an “unusual mortality event.”
In this ongoing phenomena, 40% of the dead humpback whales autopsied by experts revealed injuries that only vessels or fishing gear could inflict. The rest, according to government data, were too decomposed to determine the cause of death. Scientists generally agree that climate change, which is driving up ocean temperatures and pushing whale prey farther north, could also be playing a role in the die-off. The whales are expending more energy than ever just to catch a meal. Some juveniles have washed up emaciated.
I asked Stevenson, soon after Trump’s second inauguration, if he still trusted NOAA’s ability to objectively assess the impact of turbine development on whales, and he was clear: “No.”
Trump wasted no time coming after offshore wind when he took office in January 2025. On day one, he issued an anti-wind executive order that paused all permitting activity and derided the installations as “big” and “ugly” to an indoor stadium full of supporters.
For Stevenson and a dozen others in his influential cohort, the executive order was a good step — but it wasn’t enough to simply block new projects from advancing. In February, they petitioned Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to issue stop-work orders to the installations already being built, alleging that the projects posed a risk to whales. This piggybacked off legal complaints guided by Stevenson and coalition members against Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, South Fork Wind, and Vineyard Wind 1.
And it wasn’t long before the Trump administration tried to give the Stevenson-led coalition what it wanted. All five of the offshore wind projects under construction in America either have been delayed by recent stop-work orders or are reportedly under threat of receiving one.
Some in the coalition opposed such moves, recognizing that stopping projects already underway would raise energy costs. Steve Haner, a senior fellow at the Virginia-based conservative think tank Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy, refused to endorse Stevenson’s petition to pause the five projects under construction — objecting especially to halting America’s largest project, a 2.5-gigawatt wind farm being built off the Virginia coast.
Under a hypothetical cancellation, according to Haner, “the ratepayers are on the hook” for the billions in sunk costs.
Empire Wind, one of the two projects ordered to pause this year, has since resumed construction — but only after the developer, Norwegian energy firm Equinor, launched a monthlong lobbying blitz. According to Norway’s largest newspaper, the company mobilized “500 phone calls and meetings” — an effort employees dubbed “Operation Gandalf” — which helped secure a reversal from Trump.
Still, Stevenson pushed for more wins, advocating for a complete overhaul of the Interior Department’s approval process for wind. In May, he penned another letter with some coalition members to Burgum requesting those changes.
At the time Trump was reelected, BloombergNEF expected 39 gigawatts of offshore wind generating capacity to come online in America by 2035. The research group hedged that number to 21.5 gigawatts if Trump managed to repeal wind tax credits during his term.
Today, with tax credits already sent to an early grave and no new permits issued, that prediction has fallen off a cliff. BNEF downgraded its projection two months ago to just 6 gigawatts. In other words, Trump’s assault has been so effective that it’s likely no new offshore wind farms will be built in America for the next decade — save for the five already under construction.
Opponents of the sector have won the war on wind in the near term.
“They are clearly feeling emboldened by Donald Trump,” said J. Timmons Roberts, a professor of environmental studies and sociology at Brown University who led the study that placed Stevenson at the heart of America’s anti-wind movement.
It’s not just Trump: Over the past year, more Republicans have grown verbally hostile to offshore wind. Burgum has played up reliability concerns, which lack evidence, and raised alarm bells about the impact to tourism and fishing, while peddling false claims that climate change predictions were overblown. This fall, the defeated Republican candidate for New Jersey governor, Jack Ciattarelli, made banishing wind farms a core agenda item, selling anti-wind tote bags and koozies on his campaign website.
Under Trump, government officials are rolling out more eyebrow-raising narratives — ones that go beyond whales — for halting wind projects. Some defy science and logic, like Burgum’s claims that New England’s Revolution Wind, the other project paused by Trump, makes the U.S. vulnerable to underwater drone attacks. (A federal judge has since lifted the stop work order.)
Kinol, the Northeastern University researcher, says these kinds of narratives fit under the umbrella of “climate obstruction.” The term, she said, describes “the intentional use of misleading, misinforming, or misdirecting narratives to slow or prevent climate action.”
The concept has been around since the 1990s, when scholars first investigated the American Petroleum Institute’s downplaying of climate change. But as the debate about climate change — and what to do about it — evolved, so did the opposition. Kinol said talking points that preach wind farms as bad news for whales or national security are “a known and studied strategy.”
“This is an example of ‘downside emphasis.’ … A wind farm opponent emphasizes the downsides of renewable energy,” said Kinol. “The reason why it’s a well-known tactic of obstruction is because the same emphasis on protecting species is not present for the same groups when they’re talking about fossil-fuel build-out.”
These kinds of arguments are “disingenuous,” said Kinol, ultimately in service of a phenomena she and her colleagues call “climate delay.”
Stevenson is one example of what is now a clear trend: The denial of climate change is being steadily replaced by attacks on solutions to address it. This twist is detailed in a new book written and edited by Roberts and three colleagues titled “Climate Obstruction: A Global Assessment.” The book came out in early fall — just in time for its authors to witness their ideas play out in real life with a decade-long delay of U.S. offshore wind farm development now becoming reality.
Nowadays, Stevenson seems to have mixed emotions about his achievements. On two of our most recent phone calls, his tenor had changed.
“Well, I think it was the right move,” he said in early fall, referring to the Trump administration’s stop-work order pausing the building of Revolution Wind, which was still in effect when we spoke. “But it is not something I’m going to dance around the table happy about, because there are people that get hurt by this, that are losing their jobs.”
All his efforts have “paid off,” he said. America’s elevated reliance on cheap natural gas — which, when burned, releases fewer carbon emissions than coal — was “better policy” for now. He views gas as an essential bridge fuel until nuclear, geothermal, and solar can be built. But he expressed some “disappointment” that Trump has increasingly gone after solar and wants to now expand coal production.
Republican moderates in Washington have expressed similar sentiments. Meanwhile, utility bills, which Stevenson called his “primary motivation” for his anti-wind work, have skyrocketed in the Northeast and are projected to only climb higher if Trump’s policies continue to strangle the offshore wind sector.
Stevenson has increasingly drifted from the direction that other coalition members are taking. Protect Our Coast NJ — which first fanned the flames of misleading claims about whales — has embarked on a different disinformation campaign: spreading the false idea that offshore wind cables cause cancer. Embracing outlandish claims — whether it’s whale-killing “windmills” or cancer-causing cables — is a broader trend among Republicans who buy into conspiracy theories with their party’s rise to power.
Conspiratorial sentiments are plaguing other clean energy sectors, too, from exaggerated claims of bird-killing onshore turbines to markedly false statements about toxic solar panels. Anti-renewables talking points circulate online, penetrate town hall meetings, and are taken up by groups pushing back against renewables now more than ever. A June study released by Columbia University identified 498 contested wind and solar projects across 49 states in 2024, marking a 32% jump in opposed projects, compared to just one year prior.
“You want a healthy amount of skepticism in a democracy. … You don’t want 100% believers,” said Dietram Scheufele, a social scientist at the University of Madison–Wisconsin who studies public perspectives on science and technology. But he warned that skepticism in the U.S. is “on steroids,” pushing people from the middle into polarized political camps and toward conspiratorial thinking.
Stevenson, for his part, is stepping away from his work in the anti–offshore wind movement, and seemed relieved to be doing so.
On our most recent call, in late November, Stevenson told me that he had resigned from CRI and that his anti–offshore wind coalition was, for all practical purposes, disbanded. (He remains a named plaintiff in four lawsuits opposing wind development.)
He’d rather be “solving the nuclear waste problem,” Stevenson told me. The energy source has long had a toxic-byproduct issue, not to mention cost overruns, which, to be sure, eclipse any expense associated with offshore wind over the long run. The Trump administration is looking to revive America’s nuclear industry — and that’s where Stevenson wants to build his legacy.
Even this work advocating for nuclear power could be seen as a form of “climate delay,” according to a popular research framework used by Kinol and Roberts. Nuclear plants put forth today can take a decade or more to start providing power; many of the proposed offshore wind projects that Stevenson’s coalition targeted would have come online well before then.
Stevenson also told me on the phone that he is starting a new position. Soon, he’ll become the director for energy and environmental policy at the Michigan-based Mackinac Center for Public Policy. This think tank, like CRI, is part of the State Policy Network. Exxon Mobil and the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation are among the center’s funders.
I congratulated Stevenson on his new job. He thanked me. His tone warmed as he reminded me that we’d probably had a dozen phone calls over the years.
I said it was quite possible that his legacy would be as the man who helped crush a renewable energy sector that could have done much to address the planet’s biggest problem. I asked Stevenson what he thought about that view — that readers might see it that way.
“I don’t care if people hate me or not,” he said. “I’m doing what I think is right.”
The startup Fervo Energy just raised another $462 million to build America’s next generation of geothermal power plants.
On Wednesday, the Houston-based company said it closed a Series E funding round led by a new investor, B Capital, a global venture capital firm started by Facebook cofounder Eduardo Saverin. With the latest announcement, Fervo says it’s raised about $1.5 billion overall since 2017 as it develops what could become the world’s largest “enhanced geothermal system” in Utah.
“Fervo is setting the pace for the next era of clean, affordable, and reliable power in the U.S.,” Jeff Johnson, general partner at B Capital, said in a news release.
The Series E funding comes as Fervo reportedly prepares to become a publicly traded company, which would let it raise even more capital for its ambitious projects. When asked about a potential IPO, Fervo said only that the company is “focused on executing our development plan” in an email to Canary Media. “We have a lot of capital needs going forward to fuel our planned growth and will be tapping a lot of different opportunities to make that happen.”
Fervo is part of a burgeoning movement in the U.S. and globally to unleash geothermal energy in many more places.
The carbon-free energy from deep underground is available around the clock, but it represents only about 0.4% of total U.S. electricity generation — largely because the existing technology is constrained by geography. Today’s geothermal plants rely on naturally occurring reservoirs of hot water and steam to spin their turbines and generate power, which are available in a limited number of places.
Fervo’s approach involves creating its own reservoirs by fracturing hot rocks and pumping them full of water. The company uses the same horizontal drilling techniques and fiber-optic sensing tools as the oil and gas industry in an effort to reach deeper wells and hotter sources than is possible with conventional geothermal technology.
Its flagship development, Cape Station, is well underway in Beaver County, Utah. The project’s initial 100-megawatt installation is on track to start delivering power to the grid in October 2026, which will make it the first commercial-scale enhanced geothermal project to hit such a milestone worldwide, according to Fervo. An additional 400 MW is slated to come online in 2028.
“It’s very exciting to see at this point in time, because of the tangible progress that has been made,” Sarah Jewett, Fervo’s senior vice president of strategy, told Canary Media. “It’s really looking like a power project out there” in Utah, she added, noting that an electrical substation and three power facilities now sit alongside the drilling equipment and well pads. About 350 people currently work at the site.
Fervo has already completed a pilot project in Humboldt County, Nevada. The 3.5-MW facility went online in November 2023 and supplies power directly to the Las Vegas-based utility NV Energy. Google, which backed the project, also joined the Series E as one of Fervo’s new investors.
The financing announced this week will enable the startup to continue building Cape Station and to start development on other project sites where Fervo is conducting rock and soil analyses, Jewett said. One of the new projects will be in Nevada, where Fervo is working with NV Energy and Google to develop 115 MW of geothermal energy that will power the tech giant’s data centers. But the startup isn’t ready to disclose more details on the other locations.
Jewett said the fact that Fervo’s Series E was oversubscribed — meaning the firm raised more funding than it initially sought — is a reflection of the robust U.S. market for clean energy that’s available 24/7, not only for powering data centers but also for new domestic factories and electrified vehicles and buildings.
“There is just massive demand for the type of electricity that we’re providing,” she said.
At the start of next year, companies that make and buy energy-intensive commodities like steel and aluminum will enter the era of CBAM — the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism.
CBAM is a first-in-the-world policy by the European Union that charges fees on imports based on how much planet-warming pollution was produced in their manufacturing. On Jan. 1, 2026, the carbon tariff will officially take effect, raising costs for European businesses that source products from dirty facilities abroad.
The policy is part of the EU’s broader effort to drive the decarbonization of heavy industries in the 27-member bloc as well as globally. It’s already having a ripple effect, with other countries considering adopting their own carbon-pricing schemes and international firms investing in cleaner technologies to make their exports more enticing to Europe.
Here’s what to know as the landmark policy goes into effect.
In 2005, the EU launched the Emissions Trading System, the first scheme in the world to limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and industrial facilities. The ETS caps the total amount of carbon pollution that each operator is allowed to spew. The companies can then buy allowances that give them the right to generate 1 metric ton of CO2-equivalent. The idea is that making it costlier to pollute will incentivize businesses to clean up their operations.
Until now, however, the ETS has given what experts call a “free pass” to producers of certain trade-exposed commodities. Manufacturers argued that raising the costs of producing goods in Europe would make their industries less competitive on the global market. It could also push key customers, including European automakers, to import cheaper materials from countries without stringent climate policies — a phenomenon known as “carbon leakage.”
As the EU phases out these free passes, CBAM is designed to plug such a leak.
“It doesn’t make sense that you basically ask your own producers to produce in a certain way, to be as clean as possible, or else ask them to pay a price, and then let others — competitors from outside Europe — bring in their products and then compete unfairly,” Mohammed Chahim, the European Parliament’s lead negotiator on the carbon border fee, said on the Energy Policy Now podcast earlier this year.
The EU officially finalized CBAM’s rules in May 2023. Later that year, a “transitional phase” began for importers of goods from six carbon-intensive sectors: aluminum, cement, electricity, fertilizers, hydrogen, and iron and steel. Companies had to begin filing quarterly reports listing the direct and indirect carbon emissions of those products.
On Dec. 31, that phase will end, kicking off the “definitive period.”
Starting next month, in addition to tracking emissions, importers will pay a fee on covered products like steel rods, metal wiring, and ammonia. Initially, the fee will be a small percentage of the average quarterly price of CO2 allowances under the ETS — though participants could pay less, or nothing at all, if the exporting country has a similar carbon-pricing scheme in place. Over eight years, the CBAM tariff will gradually increase to represent 100% of the weekly average allowance price.
At the same time, the EU will wind down the special treatment it’s given to trade-exposed industries under the regional cap-and-trade scheme, requiring European manufacturers to gradually pay more for their facilities’ emissions.
The free allowances were “always viewed as a bit of a black mark on Europe’s decarbonization ambitions,” said Trevor Sutton, who leads the program on trade and the clean energy transition at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. European regulators have billed CBAM as a “necessary component” to meeting the region’s climate goals — a way to curb industrial emissions without endangering its economy, he added.
To start, the rules will only apply to importers that bring in more than 50 metric tons of goods every year. According to the EU, this threshold excludes roughly 90% of importers, who are mainly small and medium-sized businesses, but still captures around 99% of emissions from CBAM-covered goods, since large manufacturers represent the bulk of industrial imports.
CBAM has dominated global discussions on climate policy and trade in recent years. But the regulation itself is surprisingly narrow in scope. Targeted products only make up 3% of EU imports from countries outside the bloc. And the carbon footprint of those goods collectively represents about 0.31% of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2022, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Still, “it’s a topic that inspires intense emotions,” Sutton said.
Critics, including Europe’s trade partners in the Global South, have argued that the carbon tariff amounts to protectionism — an excuse to shut out foreign competition — and “green imperialism,” since Europe is unilaterally making decisions that affect producers abroad. Mozambique, for instance, sends 97% of its aluminum exports to the EU, leaving it especially exposed.
Manufacturers within the EU have also pushed back against CBAM and the related decline in free CO2 allowances, claiming that the measures put companies at a competitive disadvantage in global markets and will inflate costs for producers. Last week, the head of French aluminum producer Constellium urged Europe’s regulators to “eradicate” CBAM altogether. Importers and their suppliers have also expressed frustration at the onerous and confusing requirements involved with tracing and reporting emissions, Sutton said.
Even so, some of the EU’s key trading partners are responding to CBAM’s signals. Since the measure passed, countries like Brazil and Turkey have introduced domestic carbon-pricing policies. The United Kingdom is set to implement its own Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism starting in 2027. China, for its part, has started shipping steel made using hydrogen to Italy — a move experts say could set the stage for increasing Chinese green-steel exports.
Sutton said that CBAM “has helped drive a conversation and elevated the salience of carbon pricing” in other countries, while also setting “a foundation for decarbonization of European industry.”
Since spring of last year, North Carolina’s largest utility has been testing whether household batteries can help the electric grid in times of need — and now the company wants to roll out the plan to businesses, local governments, and nonprofits, too.
Duke Energy has already paid hundreds of North Carolinians to let it tap power from their home storage systems when electricity demand is highest. It’s Duke’s first foray into running a “virtual power plant,” in which the company manages electricity produced and stored by consumers, much as it would control generation from its own facilities.
In September, the utility proposed a similar model for its nonresidential customers, asserting that the scheme will save money by shrinking the need for new power plants and expensive upgrades to the grid. The recognition signals a way forward for distributed renewable energy and storage as state and national politicians back away from the clean energy transition.
The initiative now needs approval from the five-member North Carolina Utilities Commission, where the virtual-power-plant model has faced some skepticism. But the apparent merits of Duke’s plan, which has broad backing, may be too enticing for commissioners to ignore — especially when the state is grappling with rising rates and voracious demand from data centers and other heavy electricity users.
“In an era of massive load growth, something that should lower costs to customers while helping meet peak demand — to me, it’s an absolute no-brainer,” said Ethan Blumenthal, regulatory counsel for the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association, an advocacy group. “I’m hopeful that [regulators] see it the same way.”
Duke’s trial residential battery incentives grew out of a compromise with rooftop solar installers. Like many investor-owned utilities around the country, the company sought to lower bill credits for the electrons that solar owners add to the grid. When the solar industry and clean energy advocates fought back, the scheme dubbed PowerPair was born.
The test program provides rebates of up to $9,000 for a battery paired with rooftop photovoltaic panels. It’s capped at roughly 6,000 participants, or however many it takes to reach a limit of 60 megawatts of solar. Half of the households agree to let Duke access their batteries 30 to 36 times each year, earning an extra $37 per month on average; the other half enroll in electric rates that discourage use when demand peaks.
The incentives have been crucial for rooftop solar installers, who’ve faced a torrent of policy and macroeconomic headwinds this year, and they’ve proved vital for customers who couldn’t otherwise afford the up-front costs of installing cheap, clean energy.
But the PowerPair enrollees already make up 30 megawatts in one of Duke’s two North Carolina utility territories and could hit their limit in the central part of the state early next year, leaving both consumers and the rooftop solar industry anxious about what’s next.
Duke’s latest proposal for nonresidential customers — which, unlike the PowerPair test, would be permanent — is one answer.
The proposed program is similar to PowerPair in that it’s born of compromise: Last summer, the state-sanctioned customer advocate, clean energy companies, and others agreed to drop their objections to Duke’s carbon-reduction plan under several conditions, including that the utility develop incentives for battery storage for commercial and industrial customers. The Utilities Commission later blessed the deal.
“This was pursuant to the settlement in last year’s carbon plan,” said Blumenthal, “so it’s been a long time coming.”
While many industry and nonprofit insiders refer to the scheme as “Commercial PowerPair,” its official title is the Non-Residential Storage Demand Response Program.
That name reflects the incentives’ focus on storage, with solar as only a minor factor: Duke wants to offer businesses, local governments, and nonprofits $120 per kilowatt of battery capacity installed on its own and just $30 more if it’s paired with photovoltaics.
The maximum up-front inducement of $150 per storage kilowatt is much less than the $360 per kilowatt offered under PowerPair. But more significant for nonresidential customers could be monthly bill credits: about $250 for a 100-kilowatt battery that could be tapped 36 times a year, plus extra if the battery is actually discharged.
Unlike households participating in PowerPair, which must install solar and storage at the same time to get rebates, nonresidential customers can also get the incentives for adding a battery to pair with existing solar arrays.
“That could be very important for municipalities around North Carolina that have already installed a very significant amount of solar, but very little of that is paired with battery storage,” said Blumenthal.
Duke has high hopes for the program, projecting some 500 customers to enroll. Five years in, the resulting 26 megawatts of battery storage would help it avoid building nearly 28 megawatts of new power plants to meet peak demand, saving over $13.6 million. That’s significantly more than the cost of providing and administering the incentives, which Duke places at nearly $11.8 million.
“The Program provides a source of cost-effective capacity that the Company’s system operators can use at their discretion in situations to deliver economic benefits for all customers,” Duke said in its September filing to regulators. “Importantly, the Company received positive feedback from its customers … when sharing the details of the Program.”
Indeed, the proposal has been met with support not just from the Sustainable Energy Association and other clean energy groups but also organizations like the North Carolina Justice Center, which advocates for low-income households. It earned praise from local governments represented by the Southeast Sustainability Directors Network and conditional support from the state-sanctioned customer advocate, known as Public Staff, too.
The good vibes continued last week, when Duke responded positively to detailed suggestions from these parties on how to improve the program. That included a request from Public Staff that the company raise the per-customer limit on battery capacity to align with the maximum amount of solar that a business or other nonresidential consumer can connect to the grid, which is currently 5 megawatts.
“Larger batteries sited at larger customer sites can help provide more significant system benefits and can reduce the need for incremental utility-owned energy storage installed at all ratepayers’ expense,” the agency told regulators in its November comments. It recommends a cap tied to a customer’s peak demand; for example, a business that consumes more energy at once should get incentives for a bigger battery. Duke agreed in its Dec. 5 comments, calling that limit “reasonable.”
Still, questions remain about how to make the incentives most impactful.
Public Staff, for instance, believes Duke should increase its monthly payment to customers for keeping their batteries charged and ready to deploy. This “capacity credit” is now set at $3.50 per kilowatt but effectively reduced to $2.48, because the utility assumes that a percentage of users won’t properly maintain their systems, based on its experience with households. The company calls that a “capability factor,” but the agency dubs it “collective punishment” for all customers and says it should be eliminated or recalibrated for “more sophisticated” nonresidential participants.
Raleigh, North Carolina–based 8MSolar, a member of the Sustainable Energy Association, is among the many installers that have been eagerly anticipating Duke’s proposal.
The program on its own likely won’t “move the needle unless the incentives get bumped up,” said Bryce Bruncati, the company’s director of sales. However, the scheme could tip the scales for large customers when stacked on top of two federal tax opportunities: a 30% incentive available through the end of 2027 and a deduction tied to the depreciation value of the system — up to 100% thanks to the Republican budget law passed this summer.
“The combined three could really have a big impact for small- to medium-sized commercial projects,” Bruncati said. The Duke program would represent “a little bit of icing on the cake.”
Whatever their size and design, the fate of the incentives rests entirely with the Utilities Commission, now that the final round of comments from Duke and other stakeholders is in. There’s no timeline for a decision.
At least one commissioner, Tommy Tucker, has voiced skepticism about leveraging customer-owned equipment to serve the grid at large. “I’m not a big fan of the [demand-side management] or virtual power plants because you’re dependent upon somebody else,” the former Republican state senator said at a recent hearing, albeit one not connected to the Duke program.
Still, Blumenthal waxes optimistic. After all, Tucker and three other current members of the commission are among those who ruled last year that Duke should present the new incentive program.
“They seem to recognize there is value to distributed batteries being added to the grid,” Blumenthal said. “The fact that [the proposal] is cost-effective is key because the idea is, the more of it you do, the more savings there are.”
Two corrections were made on Dec. 10, 2025: This story originally misstated the number of times a year that Duke can tap a PowerPair participant’s battery; it is 30 to 36 times a year, not 18. The story also originally misstated the enrollment Duke expects for the nonresidential program; the utility expects 26 megawatts of batteries, not 26,000 customer participants.
ITHACA, N.Y. — A faded-red wellhead emerged in the middle of a pockmarked parking lot, its metal bolts and pipes illuminated only by the headlights of Wayne Bezner Kerr’s electric car. He stepped out of the vehicle into the dark, frigid evening to open the fence enclosing the equipment, which is just down the road from Cornell University’s snow-speckled campus in upstate New York.
We were there, shivering outside in mid-November, to talk about heat.
Bezner Kerr is the program manager of Cornell’s Earth Source Heat, an ambitious project to directly warm the sprawling campus with geothermal energy pulled from deep underground. The wellhead was the tip of the iceberg — the visible part of a nearly 10,000-foot-long borehole that slices vertically through layers of rock to reach sufficiently toasty temperatures. Cornell is using data from the site to develop a system that will replace the school’s fossil-gas-based heating network, potentially by 2035.
“We can’t decarbonize without solving the heat problem,” Bezner Kerr repeated like a refrain during my visit to Ithaca.
The Ivy League university is trying to accomplish something that’s never been done in an area with rocky geology like upstate New York’s. Most existing geothermal projects are built near the boundaries of major tectonic plates, where the Earth’s warmth wells up toward the surface. Iceland, for example, is filled with naturally heated reservoirs that circulate by pipe to keep virtually every home in the country cozy. And in Kenya and New Zealand, geothermal aquifers supply the heat used in industrial processes, including for pasteurizing milk and making toilet paper.
Bezner Kerr and I, however, stood atop a multilayered cake of mudstone, limestone, sandstone, and other rocks — seemingly everything but water. To access the heat radiating beneath our feet, his team will need to create artificial reservoirs more than 2 miles into the earth.
America’s geothermal industry has made significant strides in recent years to generate clean energy in less obvious locations, and it’s done so by adapting tools and techniques from oil and gas drilling. One leading startup, Fervo Energy, is developing “enhanced geothermal systems” in Utah and Nevada to produce clean electricity around the clock. The approach involves fracking impermeable rocks, then pumping them full of water so that the rocks heat the liquid, which eventually produces steam to drive electric turbines.
Earth Source Heat plans to use similar methods to drill a handful of super-deep wells and create fractures near or within the crystalline basement rock, where temperatures are consistently around 180 degrees Fahrenheit, no matter the weather above. The project is also unique in that, among next-generation systems, it’s focused only on heating buildings — not supplying electricity — for the nearly 30,000 students and faculty. That’s because heat represents the biggest source of Cornell’s energy use, and its largest obstacle to reducing planet-warming emissions.
On the chilliest days, the campus can use up to 104 megawatts of thermal energy, which is more than triple its peak use of electrical energy during the year.
Such a ratio poses a big conundrum for not only large institutions like Cornell but also any cold-climate cities that burn fossil fuels to keep warm, as well as manufacturing plants that require lots of steam and hot water for steps as varied as fermenting beer, making oat milk, and sterilizing equipment.
Right now, one of the most immediate ways to cut emissions from thermal energy use is to replace gas-fired boilers and the like with heat pumps and other electrified technologies. But that can substantially increase a city’s or factory’s electricity use. In an ideal world, all the new power demand would be satisfied by renewable energy projects and served by a modern and efficient grid, helping limit the costs and logistical headaches of ditching fossil fuels.
In reality, though, the U.S. electricity system is straining to keep up with the emergence of data centers, new factories, and electrified buildings and vehicles. Utilities are pushing plans to build new gas-fired power plants and proposing higher electricity rates to cover the costs. New York, for its part, is failing to meet its own goals for installing gigawatts of new renewables and energy storage projects by 2030, in part because of barriers to permitting projects in the state. New York’s independent grid operator recently warned of “profound reliability challenges” in coming years as rapidly growing demand threatens to outpace supply.
Geothermal heating could provide a way to curb thermal-energy emissions without burdening the electric system even more, said Drew Nelson, vice president of programs, policy, and strategy with Project InnerSpace, a nonprofit that advocates for geothermal energy use.
“Electrification is great, but that’s a whole lot of new electrons that need to be brought onto the grid, and a whole lot of new transmission and distribution upgrades that need to be made,” Nelson said by phone. “For applications like industrial heat, or building heating and cooling, geothermal almost becomes a ‘Swiss Army knife,’ in that it can help reduce demand.” Using geothermal energy directly is also far more efficient than converting it to electricity, since a lot of energy gets lost in the process of generating electrons.
Still, deep, direct-use geothermal systems like the one Cornell is developing are relatively novel, and many manufacturers and city planners are either unfamiliar with the solution or unwilling to be early adopters.
Sarah Carson, the director of Cornell’s Campus Sustainability Office, explained that Earth Source Heat is intended to reduce technology risks and costs for other major heat users that might benefit from geothermal, including the region’s dairy producers and breweries. We spoke inside her office, which is attached to the 30-megawatt gas-fired cogeneration plant that currently provides both electricity and heating for the campus.
“We’re working really hard to build a ‘living lab’ approach into the ethos of how we approach things,” she said. “Can we not only take care of our own [carbon] footprint but also help develop and demonstrate solutions that could scale out?”
Earlier on that overcast day, Bezner Kerr and I drove to the shores of Cayuga Lake.
Winds whipped up the grayish-blue waters, which form one of the 11 long, skinny Finger Lakes that glaciers etched into the Earth millions of years ago. Cayuga Lake is, in a way, the inverse of a heated geothermal reservoir. Cornell uses the chilly lake to cool the water that circulates across campus, replacing the need for industrial chillers that use lots of refrigerants and electricity.
Inside the Lake Source Cooling facility, giant blue pipes intersect through pieces of equipment called heat exchangers. Since heat naturally flows from hotter objects to colder ones, the lake water acts like a magnet, pulling heat out of the campus-water loop. The lake-water loop then moves the heat down to the cold bottom of Cayuga, and the cycle repeats. Bezner Kerr said Earth Source Heat will do the same but in reverse, flowing hot water up to the surface and returning the cooled-off water underground, where the earth can continuously reheat it.
Initially, he said, the new geothermal system will connect to an existing underground hot-water loop that heats East Campus, including two energy-intensive research buildings. This first stage is expected to cost over $100 million and could be completed in the next few years. Depending on how Earth Source Heat performs, the university might expand the system to warm around 150 large buildings on the main campus.
The university’s approach is far more intensive than the geothermal systems that cities and high-rise buildings are increasingly deploying across the country. An underground thermal network in Framingham, Massachusetts, consists of 90 holes drilled about 650 feet deep that heat 36 homes and commercial buildings; it also uses electric heat pumps to boost the temperatures coming out of the ground. Cornell’s home city of Ithaca has proposed piloting its own thermal network to heat and cool buildings on a city block.
Jefferson Tester, a Cornell professor and the principal scientist for Earth Source Heat, said these shallower geothermal systems aren’t as practical for heating the 15-million-square-foot campus.
For one, the university would need to drill north of 10,000 smaller wells to adequately warm all its buildings, instead of the five very deep wells it has planned. And digging deeper into the ground will allow Cornell to use the heat straight away, without adding heat pumps.
Tester joined Cornell in 2009 to help launch Earth Source Heat, which is part of the university’s larger plan to achieve a carbon-neutral campus in Ithaca by 2035. For over a decade, faculty and engineers gathered data and developed models to get a better sense of the region’s geology, heat resources, and potential for drilling-related earthquakes, often in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy.
But to fully grasp the subsurface’s conditions, they needed to drill. “And once you understand the geology well enough … you could go anywhere in this region” to harness geothermal energy, Tester said.
In 2022, the university drilled that first 10,000-foot-long hole, which is called the Cornell University Borehole Observatory, in the parking lot. “It was the same level of intensity as an oil-and-gas exploration rig,” Bezner Kerr recalled. “It was oil-and-gas workers drilling a well that produces knowledge instead of producing hydrocarbons.” Cornell received about $7 million from the Energy Department for the project, which cost around $14 million to deploy.
Now the team is ready to drill again, though the timing of the next phase is up in the air amid funding uncertainty.
Earth Source Heat wants to reopen the borehole, deepen it, and use fiber-optic cables and other tools to study how the rock responds to stress and high-pressure injections of water — data that will inform the design of the final system. In 2024, during the Biden administration, Cornell applied for over $10 million from the Energy Department for the project, with plans to line up drilling equipment this year. But the Trump administration hasn’t yet responded to the request.
If the team can finish the second phase of its borehole observatory, the next step will be to drill a demonstration well pair — two vertical spines with horizontal legs, and fractured rocks in between — to begin heating part of East Campus.
The drilling delays come as Cornell faces growing criticism from climate activists both on and off campus, who argue that the university isn’t reducing its emissions nearly fast enough to help limit global temperature rise. Cornell on Fire, a climate-justice group, has raised concerns that Cornell is using Earth Source Heat as a “delay tactic to avoid undertaking necessary actions now on other critical fronts.” The group says Cornell should immediately provide more adequate funding for the geothermal project and be more transparent about its timeline for implementing the system.
Meanwhile, Carson said her office is feeling pressure from climate advocates to start replacing the current gas-fueled heating network with electrified technologies like heat pumps and electric boilers. But she and her colleagues believe that swiftly boosting Cornell’s electricity demand would require increasing gas-fired power generation off campus, reducing the school’s CO2 footprint on paper without lowering emissions overall. Even so, Carson’s team is evaluating a range of potential solutions, including heat-storing batteries and shallower geothermal networks, in case Earth Source Heat doesn’t work as well as hoped.
These tensions highlight the tricky reality of developing big and novel clean-energy projects. A well-designed, smartly managed geothermal system could help decarbonize heat for buildings and factories over the course of many decades. But finding the right locations and best ways to install those networks takes careful planning, patience, and significant upfront investment. That can be tough to stomach, both for project investors antsy to see financial returns and for citizens eager to dump polluting fossil fuels today.
“We’ve got to be thinking about a long-term, multigenerational commitment” for tackling climate change, Tester said. “And that is really hard for people.”
To Bezner Kerr, it doesn’t seem like larger discussions on decarbonization fully acknowledge just how big of a challenge heat represents — and what it would mean to electrify all the country’s heating needs. We were speaking then in his office, where a grayish chunk of Potsdam sandstone retrieved from deep below sat in a white plastic bucket next to his desk.
“It’s like there’s this huge train coming down the tracks,” he said. “And nobody realizes we’re about to get flattened by this thing if we do it wrong.”
A correction was made on Dec. 10, 2025: This story originally misstated Cornell on Fire’s position on the Earth Source Heat project; this piece has been updated to more accurately reflect the group’s stance.
In the waning days of Governor Phil Murphy’s tenure, New Jersey officials unveiled an updated Energy Master Plan that calls for 100% clean electricity by 2035 and steep reductions in climate pollution by midcentury. Since 2019, the state has used the first version of the plan as the backbone of its climate strategy, promising reliable, affordable, and clean power.
The blueprint lands at a moment when delivering on all three goals is increasingly in doubt.
While the second Trump administration rolls back federal clean-energy support, PJM Interconnection, the regional grid operator that serves New Jersey and a dozen other states, struggles to manage surging electricity demand from artificial intelligence data centers.
“The Energy Master Plan is a statutorily required report to chart out New Jersey’s energy future,” said Eric Miller, who leads the Governor’s Office of Climate Action and the Green Economy. While not binding, it is the state’s official roadmap to attain its climate goals.
Miller’s office and the state Board of Public Utilities developed the plan with public input and help from outside consultants.
Under the plan, New Jersey is betting heavily on utility-scale solar and battery storage. State modeling envisions total solar capacity climbing to about 22 gigawatts by 2050, which is four times today’s roughly 5 gigawatts of installed solar. On paper, it would be enough to supply nearly all the state’s current households over a year. To get there, the plan assumes adding about 750 megawatts of new solar each year from 2026, roughly double the pace of solar construction in 2024.
The plan’s release follows a governor’s race in which energy costs dominated, and voters chose U.S. Rep. Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat who campaigned on preserving Murphy-era climate targets, over Jack Ciattarelli, a Republican who argued for a slower transition.
“Voters sent a clear message that clean energy is the most cost-effective path forward and the smartest long-term investment,” said Ed Potosnak, head of the New Jersey League of Conservation Voters and a local council member in Franklin Township.
The plan lands as New Jersey enters what Miller calls the “load-growth era.”
For roughly two decades, electricity demand in PJM’s footprint, which stretches from New Jersey to Illinois, was flat or falling as aging power plants retired and efficiency improved. That trend has flipped because of data centers.
“What we saw in 2024 into ’25, and I think what we’re going to see for the next 15 years, is a scenario where demand on the electric grid is growing,” Miller said.
For years, New Jersey spent billions subsidizing hundreds of thousands of electric vehicles and thousands of buildings to electrify. Now, Miller said, “some of the techniques for greenhouse gas reductions are going to have to kind of meet the moment,” by taking a more proactive role in engaging with PJM or by filling in the dearth in clean energy incentives caused by the Trump administration.
The recent PJM capacity auctions have added billions of dollars in costs for customers across the region. This showed up as a 20% jump in summer electricity bills in New Jersey this year, which became a hot campaign issue during its recent gubernatorial race.
“The wholesale price of electricity is determined by PJM and federal policy, and then also the price of natural gas,” said Frank Felder, an energy economist who has advised regulators. “New Jersey can’t do much about that.”
Participating in a fast-track rulemaking process that PJM initiated to address data center–driven demand, outgoing governor Murphy joined other governors in proposing that data center developers bring their own power generators in exchange for quicker permit processing.
PJM seeks to decide which proposals to pursue this month and file them with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission by the end of the year.
Layered on top of PJM’s turmoil are decisions coming from Washington.
Experts repeatedly pointed to President Donald Trump’s second-term moves to strip away clean-energy tax incentives from the Inflation Reduction Act and to impose new tariffs on imported solar panels and wind equipment. They say those steps have raised costs and driven off developers.
Potosnak called it “Trump’s clean energy ban” and said the administration’s opposition to offshore wind “derailed the best chance we had to get massive amounts of offshore wind going that would have begun lowering our utility rates this year.” Several major Atlantic projects, including those planned off New Jersey’s coast, have been canceled or delayed.
Offshore wind “was a big piece of trying to get to 100% clean electricity by 2035,” Felder said. With new contracts unlikely for several years, he warned that New Jersey could be “back at basically square one” by the end of the decade.
Even so, Felder and others urged caution against writing off renewables entirely. Robert Mieth, a Rutgers University researcher who studies power systems, noted that offshore wind is well established in Europe and that, with or without U.S. manufacturing, “there will be access to competitive and affordable renewable technology from other countries.”
In the meantime, state officials point to progress in areas they can influence more directly.
Miller noted that New Jersey has gone from roughly 20,000 plug-in vehicles in 2018 to about 270,000 today, after lawmakers set clear targets and funded incentives and chargers.
The state’s “nation-leading solar program,” he said, is “primarily state-incentivized, primarily state-funded,” and it can keep expanding — albeit more slowly now — even as federal tax credits expire.
“The cheapest energy is the energy you don’t have to make,” Potosnak said, citing efficiency programs, rooftop and warehouse solar, and batteries on parking lots that “drive down utility costs for families and businesses” while cutting pollution.
For all its detail, the Energy Master Plan is not binding.
“The Energy Master Plan does not have the force of law,” Miller said. It has been “very informative,” he added, but “it is not a legal requirement that we follow it exactly.”
Gov.-elect Sherrill will determine how closely New Jersey hews to the map. Neither she nor her opponent had any role in shaping the modeling, Miller said, and the plan was not written with a particular “political future” in mind. Instead, Miller said, the Murphy administration hopes the incoming governor will treat it as “a very useful modeling exercise” or a guide.
Advocates are already trying to lock some of those targets into a statute. Potosnak’s group is backing a lame-duck bill that would incorporate the state’s 2035 goal of 100% clean energy — currently in place from a 2023 Murphy executive order — into state law.
If it passes, he said, it would give residents and environmental groups the right to sue if future administrations fall short and send a signal to investors that New Jersey’s direction will not change with every election.
The New York Power Authority approved a plan Tuesday to nearly double the state-owned utility’s goal for solar, wind, and energy storage projects to 5.5 gigawatts. The new investments would boost clean power in the state as the private market fails to deploy renewable energy fast enough to meet New York’s lofty decarbonization goals.
In a unanimous decision, the board of trustees voted to greenlight the utility’s new strategic plan for renewables. Though the 5.5 GW figure is an increase over the utility’s initial plan, released this January, it also represents a reduction from the 7 GW draft plan NYPA unveiled over the summer.
The utility blamed the slimmer target on private renewable-energy developers pulling out of 16 joint ventures. Activists, however, accused NYPA of dropping projects to boost plans for new fossil-fuel infrastructure recently approved by Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat.
The 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act requires New York to generate 70% of its power from renewables by 2030 and the rest of its electricity from zero-carbon sources by 2040. It’s one of the most ambitious decarbonization goals in the country, but the state is lagging behind on meeting its legally mandated benchmarks in virtually every category of clean power except for distributed energy sources that include rooftop solar.
Today, natural-gas-fired power stations provide about half New York’s electricity. Aging hydroelectric stations, backed up by additional dams in Canada, provide nearly one-quarter of the state’s power, closely followed by nuclear reactors from plants upstate. Solar and wind each account for only a single-digit share of the state’s power mix, below the U.S.-wide share and far below that of California, Texas, and other states.
NYPA, the second-largest state-owned utility after the federal Tennessee Valley Authority, is increasingly being called on to help close that gap.
Two years ago, Hochul approved measures to give NYPA a mandate to invest directly in clean energy projects — an authority modeled closely on a piece of legislation called the Build Public Renewables Act.
This January, NYPA unveiled a plan to build out more than 3 GW of wind, solar, and batteries using its expanded remit. In July, it released a draft plan that more than doubled that target to 7 GW
But NYPA, required by law to take majority stakes in the developments it backs, elected to own just 51% of these projects. So when developers backed out of the 16 joint ventures, due largely to the rollback of federal tax credits for wind and solar projects and a lack of available transmission capacity, NYPA said it was forced to move forward with fewer projects.
In a statement cautioning that the strategic plan “is an iterative document that will be continually re-assessed and updated,” NYPA’s chief executive Justin Driscoll called the latest proposal “a strong portfolio of refined project opportunities that builds on the energy capacity outlined in the inaugural plan.”
“Despite strong headwinds threatening the viability of renewables projects throughout the nation, NYPA continues to leverage its expertise and reputational strength to develop projects that will bolster the energy diversity of New York’s electric grid,” Driscoll said. “This updated plan is only a snapshot of our ongoing efforts, and NYPA will continue to assess the state’s addressable renewables market to identify new projects that can be added into future plans.”
While the state’s climate law sets deadlines for New York to up the share of renewables in its power mix, NYPA is not beholden to completing the full 5.5 GW by a specific date. The plan, though scheduled for an update only every two years, could be revised as early as next year as new projects become viable or existing ones go under.
The finalized plan drew sharp criticism from Public Power New York, a left-wing group that campaigned for the Build Public Renewables Act. Rather than cut back, the group said, NYPA should expand its target to 15 GW of solar, wind, and batteries. The organization helped marshal more than 10,000 public comments supporting the higher-end goal.
In an interview, Public Power New York’s co-chair Michael Paulson accused Hochul of deliberately dampening the state’s renewables potential to bolster the controversial Williams Companies gas pipeline into New York City, a project The New York Times reported would benefit clients of the law firm that employs the governor’s husband, William Hochul.
“This is unfortunately part of a pattern,” Paulson said. “Instead of using the tools to build a more affordable and better future, Hochul is pushing toxic fossil-fuel projects to enrich her utility donors and potentially even enrich her own family.”
In an email, Hochul’s office called the claims “both disingenuous and ludicrous.”
“NYPA’s plan represents a realistic strategy, as required by law, to build out a portfolio of new renewables,” Ken Lovett, a spokesperson for the governor, told Canary Media. “Under Governor Hochul’s leadership, New York continues to be a national clean energy leader. In the face of federal and economic roadblocks, and warnings of energy shortages downstate as soon as next summer, the Governor’s all-of-the-above energy agenda is designed to keep the lights on and costs down.”
In a June press release, Public Power New York also slammed Hochul and NYPA’s plan to build at least 1 GW of new nuclear power upstate by the time New York’s climate law requires a fully decarbonized system in 2040, calling the effort a distraction from wind and solar.
While Paulson acknowledged the real bottleneck the transmission system poses, he criticized the governor for not doing more to approve new power lines and said her administration should support more distributed solar and batteries in the region facing the state’s worst electricity shortages: New York City and its surrounding suburbs.
Paul Williams, the founder and executive director of the Center for Public Enterprise, a think tank that favors expanded state capacity, agreed New York lawmakers need to do more to make building transmission lines — a challenge everywhere in the U.S. — easier.
“What this strategic plan makes clear is that while NYPA was planning on more renewables projects, there are interconnection barriers that are keeping them from moving forward faster,” Williams said. “The question for those of us who want to see NYPA succeed and build more public renewables is, What can we do to help NYPA overcome interconnection barriers? The faster we can help solve that bottleneck, the faster we can build these projects.”
An update and a clarification were made on December 9, 2025: A statement from Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office was added to this piece, and the story has been changed to make clear that NYPA is required by law to take a majority stake in the projects it backs
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