The 7 Biggest Energy Stories of 2024

And my 10 most-popular articles this year on Substack.

Dec 31, 2024

EV maker Canoo, which trades under the ticker GOEV, wins the stock price chart of the year award. In January, the company’s stock was trading for more than $100 per share. It closed on Monday at about $1.38 per share.

From Donald Trump’s decisive victory over Kamala Harris to the “blade liberation event” on an offshore wind project near Nantucket, 2024 was an epic year in energy. Here, in no particular order, are seven of this year’s top energy and power stories. I’ve also included a list of the 10 most popular articles I published here on Substack.

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Osage Wind Project Ordered Removed by December 1, 2025

On December 18, the Osage tribe won a decisive decision in the longest-running legal battle over wind energy in American history. As I reported on December 20, a federal court judge in Tulsa ruled that the Italian company, Enel, must remove all 84 wind turbines it built in Osage County by December 1, 2025. The decision is a massive win for the tribe, which has been fighting Enel in court since 2011, and for Native American sovereignty. It’s also a colossal black eye for Big Wind. But don’t expect the Osage’s victory to be covered by legacy media. Despite the importance of the ruling, the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, and Bloomberg, have not published a single article on the decision. No wonder Americans’ trust in mass media is at record lows, with a recent Gallup poll finding that when it comes to trust and confidence in mass media to report news “fully, accurately, and fairly,” 36% of people replied “none at all.”

Renewable Rejections Hit 760

The land use conflicts over alt-energy projects continue. In 2024, there were at least 117 rejections or restrictions of solar energy in the US. As seen in the Renewable Rejection Database, there were twice as many rejections or restrictions of solar as wind projects. The reason is simple: as public opposition has increased, fewer wind projects are being proposed and built.

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Trump Won The White House (Or Rather, Harris Lost)

I’m still stunned that Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris by such a decisive margin. The result is a clear repudiation of the Democratic Party’s agenda on several issues, including energy and climate. It’s also true that Harris was an awful candidate. The most shocking results came from the Rio Grande Valley, which is heavily Latino. As seen above, the four South Texas counties all have poverty rates of 24% or more. In Starr County, in 2016, Trump lost to Hillary Clinton by 60 points. This year, Trump beat Harris in Starr County by 16 points. That’s a turnaround of 76 points in eight years! For the nearly 40 years I’ve lived in Texas, Democrats have been claiming the state is turning blue. They’ve been wrong that whole time, but they’ve been consistent. Get ready for Trump and his appointees to dismantle a ton of Biden’s energy and climate policies, including his plans to “disembowel” offshore wind.

Offshore Wind Doesn’t “Make Sense”

Trump may not need to disembowel offshore wind. Economics is doing the job for him. Earlier this month, GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik told Bloomberg that “the economics of this industry don’t make sense.” Indeed, the wind-related portion of Strazik’s company is facing tough times. In July, a “blade liberation event” occurred at a wind project being built offshore Nantucket that uses GEV’s turbines. In addition, AEP sued GEV for failing to honor warranties on faulty wind turbines the utility is using in Oklahoma. Last month, in New York, TotalEnergies, halted its plans for an offshore wind project due to the re-election of Donald Trump. In California, Equinor announced it was “pausing” its plan to build a wind project off the coast of Morro Bay following Trump’s victory. In Denmark, an auction for offshore wind projects didn’t get a single bidder. In China, two blades on what is reportedly the world’s largest wind turbine fell off earlier this month. In addition, Equinor recently canceled wind energy projects in Vietnam, Spain, and Portugal.

“Green” Hydrogen Doesn’t Make Sense, Either

This is the year the hydrogen hype collided with reality. An article in Bloomberg earlier this month had the correct headline: “Green Hydrogen Gets Humbled.” It said a “raft” of projects to produce green hydrogen “a fuel billed as critical to reaching net zero, have been abandoned this year as expectations for tumbling costs failed to materialize.” None of that should be surprising. In May, in “The H Stands For Hype,” I explained that green hydrogen is, in the famous words of analyst Steve Brick, a “thermodynamic obscenity.” It was an obscenity then, it’s an obscenity now, and it will be an obscenity in the future.

Nuclear Power Gets Traction

It was a huge year for the nuclear energy sector in the US and around the world. In April, Vogtle Unit 4 in Georgia began commercial operation. Add in the many announcements by Big Tech companies, including Amazon and Microsoft, about using nuclear energy, and it’s clear that the sentiment about nuclear has changed. The challenge now is getting reactors approved and built.

Why is this man smirking? Canoo CEO Tony Aquila. Credit: Wikipedia.

Hertz Takes A Bath On EVs, Canoo CEO Flies High

Few companies bought the EV hype more than Hertz. The rental car giant bet big on EVs and now it’s paying the price. In the third quarter, the company took a $1 billion non-cash asset impairment charge due to the plummeting value of the EVs it purchased. Here’s how InsideEVs described the situation, Hertz’s “grand experiment” with EVs went “horribly wrong. It’s now become a giant clearance sale, where everything must go... Hertz estimates that EV depreciation across its fleet is up 89%, amounting to a staggering $537 per car, per month.” (Emphasis added.) Hertz is now holding a fire sale (pun intended) on its EVs. Of course, Hertz’s EV woes are only part of the broader EV market slowdown. Due to a lack of consumer enthusiasm, GM, Ford, and numerous other automakers are delaying their EV rollouts.

There’s more to write about the EV debacle, but perhaps the most disgusting example of the EV hype and meltdown can be seen by looking at Canoo, an EV startup that located some manufacturing capacity in Oklahoma after it got $115 million in incentives. At the start of 2024, shares in Canoo — traded publicly under the ticker GOEV — were selling for more than $100. Today, Canoo’s shares are trading for about $1.38. In the third quarter, Canoo reported negative cash flow (EBITDA) of $37.7 million. The company reported a net loss of $112 million for the first nine months of 2024 and just $16 million in cash on hand.

Canoo’s business may be teetering on the edge of insolvency, but the company’s CEO, Tony Aquila, has been flying high. TechCrunch reported that over the past three years, Aquila racked up some $3 million in expenses while flying around the country in private jets. In 2023, Canoo spent $1.7 million reimbursing Aquila’s company for his private jet travel, an amount “that’s double the amount of revenue” Canoo generated last year. Over the past two weeks, Canoo said it is “idling” its plants in Oklahoma. It has also furloughed dozens of employees. This week, the company announced it will auction off engineering and manufacturing equipment from its Oklahoma plants via webcast on January 24. A news report on the plan to dispose of the equipment included this concluding paragraph: “While apologizing for the timing of the announcement, the company led by Tony Aquila wrote, ‘Please take this time to have a restful and enjoyable holiday season with your family.’”

Not coming to a road near you: The Canoo LDV190.

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My 10 Most Popular Substack Articles of 2024

This has been an excellent year on Substack. My subscriber numbers nearly doubled, and my posts were viewed 2.1 million times. Over the last 90 days, my articles were read in all 50 states and 139 countries. Here are the 10 most popular articles of the year.