TV News LIES

Europe’s biggest offshore wind developer is taking the Trump administration to court over its decision to suspend work on a $5bn project on the north-east US coast.

Denmark’s Ørsted filed a legal challenge on Thursday against the White House’s decision 10 days ago to suspend the lease for its Revolution Wind site as part of a sweeping move halting all construction of offshore wind.

The attempted injunction is the latest in a series of legal volleys between the renewables industry and Donald Trump, whose administration has sought to block major offshore wind projects from moving ahead since his re-election.

Trump, a vocal supporter of the fossil fuel industry, opposes renewable energy, and wind in particular, saying he finds turbines ugly, costly and inefficient.

On 22 December, officials from the Department of the Interior suspended the leases for five large offshore wind projects that are under construction in US waters over unspecified “national security risks”.

A statement from Ørsted and its partner in the Revolution project, Skyborn Renewables, described the move as a violation of applicable law.

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The U.S. Department of Energy issued an emergency order late Tuesday to keep an aging Colorado coal plant open, just one day before it was slated to close. 

The plant — Unit 1, part of Craig Station, in Moffat County — is now required to keep running until March 30, 2026. The order can also be extended. 

The move drew a furious response from the governor’s office and environmental groups, who contest whether an emergency even exists that would require the plant to stay open.

Governor Polis said the order would lead to a huge spike in costs to repair the plant, which may be borne by customers of Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, a cooperative operating the plant to deliver electricity to rural communities in Nebraska, New Mexico, Wyoming and Colorado.

“This order will pass tens of millions in costs to Colorado ratepayers, in order to keep a coal plant open that is broken and not needed,” Polis said in a statement. 

“Ludicrously, the coal plant isn’t even operational right now, meaning repairs — to the tune of millions of dollars — just to get it running, all on the backs of rural Colorado ratepayers!”

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The Trump administration has said it is immediately pausing all leases for offshore wind farms already under construction, in the heaviest blow yet to an industry that the administration has relentlessly targeted throughout the year.

Trump’s Department of the Interior said that it was halting the building of five wind projects due to “national security risks”. The department said it would work with the US Department of Defense to mitigate the risk of the wind turbine towers creating radar interference called “clutter” that could in some way hamper the US military.

“The prime duty of the United States government is to protect the American people,” said Doug Burgum, secretary of the interior. “Today’s action addresses emerging national security risks, including the rapid evolution of the relevant adversary technologies, and the vulnerabilities created by large-scale offshore wind projects with proximity near our east coast population centers.”

The halt will affect the Vineyard Wind 1 project off the coast of Massachusetts, Sunrise Wind and Empire Wind in New York, Revolution Wind off Rhode Island and Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind in Virginia.

All of the projects were reviewed and approved under Joe Biden’s administration, which found there were no undue national security concerns raised by the developments. Democrats have pointed to two assessments by the Pentagon of Revolution Wind that found the project “would not have adverse impacts to DoD missions in the area”.

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The fossil fuel industry funded some of the world’s most foundational climate science as early as 1954, newly unearthed documents have shown, including the early research of Charles Keeling, famous for the so-called “Keeling curve” that has charted the upward march of the Earth’s carbon dioxide levels.

A coalition of oil and car manufacturing interests provided $13,814 (about $158,000 in today’s money) in December 1954 to fund Keeling’s earliest work in measuring CO2 levels across the western US, the documents reveal.

Keeling would go on to establish the continuous measurement of global CO2 at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. This “Keeling curve” has tracked the steady increase of the atmospheric carbon that drives the climate crisis and has been hailed as one of the most important scientific works of modern times.

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Solar power shines bright in California, and wholesale energy prices prove it. Last winter and early spring’s dependence on solar drove wholesale energy prices to negative prices, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Solar power in the California Independent System Operator accounted for nearly 40% of net grid power for three hours on March 11, 2017, the administration reports —a major first.

These figures don’t translate for the consumer into retail prices, which are based on averages. But the move will likely cause energy companies to pay more attention to green energy options.

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