GOLDEN CRESCENT AND 1000 ISLAND NEWS

  A natural gas well in Kansas is not the same as an offshore wind farm in Maine. Robinson Meyer • June 17, 2026   It happened again. The Trump administration has struck a deal with an offshore wind developer to cancel another round of projects. My colleague Emily Pontecorvo has the full story : The Chicago-based company Invenergy has accepted $765 million to give up four offshore wind leases off the coast of New York, California, and Maine. These deals might be legally suspect — Democratic state attorneys general sued to block them a few weeks ago — but the administration says more are coming. “The Department of Justice looks forward to continued cooperation from companies that are reevaluating their energy investments,” the official press release about today’s deal intones . I have to applaud the federal lawyer who chose the phrase “continued cooperation” here; it is suitably menacing while implying that developers who give in to the racket are somehow complicit. If you rea...

  June 14, 2026   CORTLANDT — A massive nuclear power plant sitting idle on the eastern bank of the Hudson River could be repowered, helping alleviate New York’s high energy costs and air pollution levels, both worsened by surging fossil fuel use.    But the stigma of reopening a controversial power source that environmentalists and other advocacy organizations fought for years to shut down has left the plant out of the ongoing discussions about reducing New York’s carbon emissions.   Gov. Kathy Hochul does not support reviving the plant, which closed four months before she ascended to the governor’s office, although she has said it was shuttered “without having a plan B in place .” Instead, the governor wants to build new reactors in the far reaches of upstate New York, far from New York City, where the power is needed most.   The two reactors at Indian Point are surrounded by more than four feet of reinforced concrete . Indian Point provided New York Cit...

  June 2, 2026    New York’s attorney general sued the Trump administration Tuesday over one of its deals to end an offshore wind project . Under a deal made public in March, French company TotalEnergies is getting $1 billion — essentially a refund of its leases for offshore wind projects off New York and North Carolina — if it invests the money in fossil fuel projects instead. State attorneys general from Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Vermont joined New York in challenging the cancellation of the lease off New York, the larger of the two projects and the bulk of the payout. They say it will harm their states’ economies, energy grids and climate goals. “This administration cooked up a sham deal to pay a foreign energy company hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to abandon offshore wind and invest in oil and gas instead,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement. “We are fighting back to stop this illegal agreement ...

  Last August, the Internal Revenue Service issued strict new rules for solar and wind developers hoping to tap the federal tax credits known as 45Y, for the production of carbon-free electricity, and 48E, for investment in green generating assets. For years, the U.S. government had required companies to invest 5% of the total cost of the project by a certain deadline to qualify for the rebates. But last summer, the Trump administration eliminated the 5% threshold and instead mandated that projects over 1.5 megawatts in capacity show evidence that physical construction has begun to be eligible for the writeoffs. In all, the new rules “could have been so much worse,” Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote at the time. But requiring construction to start narrowed the scope of how many turbines and panels could be built before the two tax credits are phased out this July 4. With less than a month to go before the credits go away, a federal court has intervened to restore the original 5% ru...

  Note: You can’t understand energy and power systems if you don’t understand power density. As I explained in the article below, published on August 20, 2023, here on Substack , power density is the most important and least understood metric in physics. I’m reposting it because it is just as relevant today as it was in 2023. It’s also heartening to see that the Trump Administration has adopted power density as a key metric for determining its approach to energy policy. Last summer, Interior Secretary Doug Burghum issued an order that underscored the importance of density and noted that an offshore wind project requires 5,500 times more area to produce the same amount of electricity as a modern nuclear plant . Before going further, I must give credit where credit is due. Jesse Ausubel’s landmark 2007 essay, “ Renewable and Nuclear Heresies ,” changed the course of my career. In the very first sentence of the abstract, Ausubel boldly declares, “Renewables are not green.” His essay...