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Raymond Ward wants to see solar panels draped over every balcony in the United States and doesn’t understand why that isn’t happening.
The technology couldn’t be easier to use — simply hang one or two panels over a railing and plug them into an outlet. The devices provide up to 800 watts, enough to charge a laptop or power a small fridge. They’re popular in Germany, where everyone from renters to climate activists to gadget enthusiasts hail them as a cheap and easy way to generate electricity. Germans had registered more than 780,000 of the devices with the country’s utility regulator as of December. They’ve installed millions more without telling the government.
Here in the U.S., though, there is no market for balcony solar. Ward, a Republican state representative in Utah who learned about the tech last year, wants that to change. The way he sees it, this is an obvious solution to surging power demand. “You look over there and say, ‘Well, that’s working,’” he said. “So what is it that stops us from having it here?”
His colleagues agree. Earlier this year, the Legislature unanimously passed a bill he sponsored to boost the tech, and Republican Gov. Spencer Cox signed it. HB 340 exempts portable solar devices from state regulations that require owners of rooftop solar arrays and other power-generating systems to sign an interconnection agreement with their local utility. These deals, and other “soft costs” like permits, can nearly double the price of going solar.
Utah’s law marks the nation’s first significant step to remove barriers to balcony solar — but bigger obstacles remain. Regulations and standards governing electrical devices haven’t kept pace with development of the technology, and it lacks essential approvals required for adoption — including compliance with the National Electrical Code and a product safety standard from Underwriters Laboratories. Nothing about the bill Ward wrote changes that: Utahans still can’t install balcony solar because none of the systems have been nationally certified.
These challenges will take time and effort to overcome, but they’re not insurmountable, advocates of the technology said. Even now, a team of entrepreneurs and research scientists, backed by federal funding, are creating these standards. Their work mirrors what happened in Germany nearly a decade ago, when clean energy advocates and companies began lobbying the country’s electrical certification body to amend safety regulations to legalize balcony solar.
In 2017, Verband der Elektrotechnik, or VDE, a German certification body that issues product and safety standards for electrical products, released the first guideline that allowed for balcony solar systems. While such systems existed before VDE took this step, the benchmark it established allowed manufacturers to sell them widely, creating a booming industry.
“Relentless individuals” were key to making that happen, said Christian Ofenheusle, the founder of EmpowerSource, a Berlin-based company that promotes balcony solar. Members of a German solar industry association spent years advocating for the technology and worked with VDE to carve a path toward standardizing balcony solar systems. The initial standard was followed by revised versions in 2018 and 2019 that further outlined technical requirements.
The regulatory structure has continued to evolve. Ofenheusle has worked with other advocates to amend grid safety standards, create simple online registration for plug-in devices, and enshrine renters’ right to balcony solar. Politicians supported such efforts because they see the tech easing the nation’s reliance on Russian natural gas. Cities like Berlin and Munich have provided millions of euros in subsidies to help households buy these systems, and the country is creating a safety standard for batteries that can store the energy for later use.
Meanwhile, the United States has yet to take the first step of creating a safety standard for the technology. U.S. electrical guidelines don’t account for the possibility of plugging a power-generating device into a household outlet. The nation also operates on a different system that precludes simply copying and pasting Germany’s rules. The U.S. grid, for example, operates at 120 volts, while that country’s grid operates at 230 volts.
Without proper standards, a balcony solar system could pose several hazards.
One concern is a phenomenon called breaker masking. Within a home, a single circuit can provide power to several outlets. Each circuit is equipped with a circuit breaker, a safety device within the electrical panel that shuts off power if that circuit is overloaded, which happens when too many appliances try to draw too much electricity at the same time. That prevents overheating or a fire. When a balcony solar device sends power into a circuit while other appliances are drawing power from the circuit, the breaker can’t detect that added power supply. If the circuit becomes overloaded — imagine turning on your TV while a space heater is running and you’re charging your laptop, all in the same room — the circuit breaker might fail to activate.
This was a concern in Germany, so it developed standards that limit balcony solar units to just 800 watts, about half the amount used by a hairdryer. That threshold is considered low enough that even in the country’s oldest homes, the wiring can withstand the heating that occurs in even the worst of worst-case scenarios, said Sebastian Müller, chair of the German Balcony Solar Association, a consumer education and advocacy group. As a result, Ofenheusle said there haven’t been any cases of breaker masking causing harm. In fact, with millions of the devices installed nationwide, Germany has yet to see any safety issues beyond a few cases where someone tampered with the devices to add a car battery or other unsuitable hardware, he said.
Another issue in the U.S. is the lack of a compatible safety device called a ground fault circuit interrupter, or a GFCI. They are typically built into outlets installed near water sources, like a sink, washing machine, or bathtub. They’re designed to minimize the risk of electric shock by cutting off power when, for example, a hairdryer falls into a sink. Yet there are no certified GFCI outlets in the U.S. designed for use with devices that consume power, like a blender, and those that generate it, like a balcony solar setup. Germany’s equivalent of a GFCI, called a residual current device, can detect bidirectional power flows, said Andreas Schmitz, a mechanical engineer and YouTuber in Germany who makes videos about balcony solar.
Some people have raised concerns about the shock risk of touching the metal prongs of a plug after unplugging a balcony solar device. German regulators accounted for that by requiring the microinverter — which converts currents from the panel into electricity fed into the home — shut down immediately in an outage or when it is suddenly unplugged. Most of them already have this feature, but any U.S. standard will likely need to formalize that requirement.
The lack of an Underwriters Laboratories, or UL, standard is perhaps the biggest obstacle to the adoption of balcony solar. The company certifies the safety of thousands of household electrical products; according to Iowa State University, “every light bulb, lamp, or outlet purchased in the U.S. usually has a UL symbol and says UL Listed.” This assures customers that the product follows nationally recognized guidelines and can be used without the risk of a fire or shock.
While some companies have sold plug-in solar devices in the U.S. without a UL listing, the company’s seal of approval typically is a prerequisite for selling products on the wider market. Consumers might be wary of using something that lacks its approval. Utah’s new balcony solar policy, for example, specifies that the law applies only to UL-listed products.
Achim Ginsberg-Klemmt, vice president of engineering at the plug-in solar startup GismoPower, has been working on creating such a standard for more than a year and a half. In 2023, the Department of Energy awarded his company a grant to work with UL to develop a standard.
GismoPower sells a mobile carport with a roof of solar panels and an integrated electric vehicle charger. Unlike rooftop solar, the system doesn’t need to be mounted in place but can be rolled onto a driveway and plugged in, generating electricity for the car, house, and the grid. “We’re basically taking rooftop solar to the next level” by making it portable and accessible for renters, Ginsberg-Klemmt said. The product is in use at pilot sites nationwide, though a lack of standardized rules for plug-in solar has forced the company to negotiate interconnection agreements with local utilities — a time-consuming and sometimes costly process.
GismoPower’s product avoids one of the biggest technical challenges with balcony solar by plugging into a dedicated 240-volt outlet, the kind typically used for dryers. Such an outlet serves a single appliance and uses a dedicated circuit, sidestepping the risk of overloading. But it runs headlong into the same obstacle of lacking a compatible UL standard. Ginsberg-Klemmt is working with researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, other entrepreneurs, and engineers at Underwriters Laboratories to develop such a standard, but it hasn’t been easy. “We have found so many roadblocks,” he said.
One major sticking point is that any standard must comply with the National Electrical Code, a set of guidelines for electrical wiring in buildings that does not allow for the installation of plug-in energy systems like balcony solar. The rules are issued by the National Fire Protection Association, a nonprofit trade association, and adopted on a state-by-state basis.
The code is updated every three years, with the next iteration due later this year for the 2026 edition. Ginsberg-Klemmt and his working group submitted recommendations for amending the code to allow plug-in solar — and every one of them was rejected in October.
Jeff Sargent, the National Fire Protection Association’s staff liaison to the National Electrical Code committee, said that this is the first time the organization had received public comments about plug-in solar systems. For now, it cannot consider amendments to allow their use until a compatible ground fault circuit interrupter exists, he said. Once that’s available, he said, the association can ensure that outdoor outlets can be safely used for balcony solar.
Electrical standards are constantly evolving, and it often takes more than one cycle of code changes to allow for new products, said Sargent. Ginsberg-Klemmt said his group will continue to pursue other avenues to amend the codes.
Until that happens, a UL standard for plug-in solar is unlikely to go anywhere. But interest in plug-in energy solutions isn’t going away, and decision-makers will have to adjust to that reality eventually, Ward said. It happened in Germany, where people across the political spectrum have embraced the technology. Ward believes the same thing will happen here. The way he sees it, “It’s just a good thing if you set up a system so people have a way to take care of as much of their own problems as they can.”
Illinois is going to need a whole lot more workers to realize its clean energy aspirations.
The state has some of the nation’s most ambitious climate laws, with a target of transitioning to 100% clean energy by 2050. In 2030 — just five years from now — it aims to achieve 40% renewable energy.
The shift away from fossil fuels could create more than 150,000 jobs in Illinois by mid-century, according to a 2022 study commissioned by ComEd, the state’s largest utility.
Since 2012, ComEd has offered a suite of what it calls “Academy” training programs that are helping to meet that need, preparing a diverse pool of more than 1,000 residents from in and around Chicago for entry-level positions in the construction, utility, and clean energy fields.
“We are delivering clean energy 24/7, 365 [days a year] — reliable power to 9 million people across Northern Illinois,” Laticia Holbert, senior workforce development manager for ComEd, told Canary Media. “And so it’s our duty to make sure that we are working with our communities to get a talent pipeline. We are proud of the legacy that we have done throughout our training programs, and we continue to expand.”
The goal of the programs is two-fold — not only to increase the size of the workforce but also to provide employment opportunities for members of environmental justice communities, who for decades have borne the brunt of adverse effects from fossil-fuel extraction. Training programs aimed at these groups, advocates point out, help to ensure that the clean energy transition does not perpetuate the injustices of the fossil-fuel economy.
“We are partnering with the community to make sure that we’re bringing in a diverse talent pipeline, by delivering targeted programs to ensure that more local residents are prepared for, I like to say, good-paying jobs [with] family-sustaining wages,” Holbert said. “We know that is really critical for our communities. We know, with the current climate [and] how clean energy is really revolutionizing, how we need to look at the demand for jobs.”
In mid-April, ComEd and a coalition of companies, labor organizations, and community groups celebrated 73 new graduates from two of the utility’s job training programs, Construct Infrastructure Academy and Craft Academy, at the University of Illinois Chicago Forum. U.S. Rep. Danny K. Davis (D) spoke at the event, as did the CEO of ComEd and representatives of the company United Scrap Metal and the nonprofit Chicago Urban League.
Britney Evans, a 2025 graduate of ComEd’s Construct program who spoke at the ceremony, said that the training she received sets her up to succeed in the trades.
“From the build day to the job shadows and coursework, the Construct program gave me the boost I needed to build my professional network, be challenged, and find new opportunities,” Evans said. “It really helped me understand the daily realities and benefits of the construction industry, and now my classmates and I will be able to break through all the glass ceilings and advance further in our lives and careers.”
Another of ComEd’s Academy training programs, which was not represented at the event, is the Power Up Academy, which provides participants the opportunity to earn design and engineering industry-required certifications for careers related to the clean energy sector. Launched in 2023 in partnership with the City Colleges of Chicago, the 14-week Power Up Academy program is designed to remove barriers to entry for local residents pursuing engineering-related careers. The program attained accreditation in 2024, enabling past and future participants to qualify for up to 13 credit hours toward future degree programs.
Each of ComEd’s three programs provides training at no charge to participants, along with a stipend during the program and ongoing career guidance and financial support after completion, Holbert said.
Approximately 70% of graduates across all of ComEd’s Academy programs land in entry-level positions with the utility or its more than 40 partner employers, taking on roles such as project coordinators, construction workers, lineworkers, design technicians, and underground locators, who help identify where infrastructure is buried.
Historically, more than 95% of program participants have been people of color, and 25% have been women. This year’s class of graduates is comprised of more than 90% people of color and nearly 20% women, according to ComEd.
Participants must be at least 18 years old, have earned either a high school diploma or GED certificate, demonstrate 10th-grade-level math and reading skills, and hold a valid driver’s license, Holbert said.
ComEd also requires potential students to complete an admissions interview along with a drug test and background check. However, individuals with past drug use or who were formerly incarcerated are not automatically disqualified. Consideration is made on a case-by-case basis, Holbert said.
“So, for returning citizens, we welcome them in the program,” Holbert said.
Of the 73 participants who graduated in April, 64 had taken part in the Construct Infrastructure Academy. During the 11-week program, participants learned basic construction skills and earned industry certifications such as a commercial driver’s license and Occupational Safety and Health Administration training. They also learned about heat pumps, induction stoves, and solar panels.
Participants also had the opportunity to shadow and learn from industry partners. For instance, in partnership with Habitat for Humanity of Chicago, this year’s Construct students helped build homes across Chicagoland’s South and Southwest Sides as part of their training curriculum. During a recent Habitat for Humanity Chicago Build Day, they tiled bathrooms, hung kitchen cabinets, added trim and molding, and painted walls. The project allowed participants to apply their newfound knowledge on safety techniques, handling basic hand tools, and working as a team.
Meanwhile, the nine Craft Academy graduates completed a physically demanding six-week training program that requires utility-pole climbing, a prerequisite experience for an apprenticeship to become an overhead lineworker. Overhead lineworkers play a critical role in maintaining and modernizing the power grid. That task is essential for meeting rising electricity demands as people purchase more EVs and electrify their homes and businesses. These graduates are now eligible for scholarships to the Dawson Technical Institute Overhead Electrical Line Worker program of the City Colleges of Chicago, which will enable them to pursue careers in the electric utility industry.
“We are honored to have joined forces with ComEd over the last 13 years in connecting members of our communities to training opportunities that can change the trajectory of their lives,” said Chicago Urban League CEO Karen Freeman-Wilson during the graduation ceremony. “The Construct and Craft programs represent a gateway to lucrative jobs that can provide the chance to build lasting careers and generational wealth.”
ComEd uses money from its own budget to run the training programs, Holbert said. No federal funds are involved.
“I don’t think [the present political climate] has any impact at all because we have to hire people to work on our grid, our system,” she said. “So we need talented people. That’s just what our mission is. So nothing’s changed about how we’re doing and what we’re doing.”
A clarification was made on May 1, 2025: This story originally stated that Construct students learn about installing heat pumps, induction stoves, and solar panels. The students learn about this equipment generally but are not trained in installation. The story also originally said that about 70% of graduates from ComEd’s training programs are employed by the utility and its partners. It has been updated to clarify that this figure is for ComEd’s Academy programs specifically, not all of its training programs.
It’s a tough time for electric trucking in the U.S. The Trump administration has cut off funding for heavy-duty vehicle charging and port infrastructure. Republicans in Congress are trying to rescind states’ authority to set clean vehicle mandates. And tariffs are throttling incoming cargoes to U.S. ports, hampering the business of trucking as a whole while likely also driving up the already-high price of battery-powered trucks.
But in Southern California, the transition away from diesel trucks, which emit a disproportionate share of the transportation sector’s planet-warming and health-harming emissions, is moving forward despite federal policy obstacles. Two big all-electric charging depots opened in April to serve clean trucks operating in the region, which is home to the busiest seaport complex in the country and is the epicenter of U.S. electric truck adoption.
The first, located in Rancho Dominguez, 12 miles north of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, is owned and operated by Terawatt Infrastructure, a startup with more than $1 billion in capital and that is working with a consortium of companies including Ikea, Maersk, Microsoft, and PepsiCo. With 7 megawatts of capacity at 20 fast-charging stalls, it can charge up to 125 trucks per day.
The second site is in Colton, a city about 60 miles east of Los Angeles in California’s Inland Empire, a region crowded with massive distribution warehouses. That site is owned and operated by Greenlane, a more than $650 million joint venture of Daimler Truck North America, utility NextEra Energy, and investment firm BlackRock Alternatives. It has 12 pull-through sites for trucks hauling trailers, which are equipped with 400-kilowatt dual-port chargers, along with 29 “bobtail” lanes — sites for trucks without attached trailers — equipped with 180-kW chargers. In total, it can support just over 10 megawatts of charging.
These facilities are the latest in a line of big truck-charging depots springing up across California, built by major firms like Amazon and PepsiCo, freight companies such as NFI Industries and Schneider National, logistics operators like Prologis, and startups including Forum Mobility, Voltera, and WattEV. This proliferation is in response to the state’s ambitious truck electrification goals, which include a target for completely zero-emissions fleets by 2045, and to the the hefty incentives it has put in place to accomplish that.
Terawatt’s and Greenlane’s newly opened electric truck stops represent a new class of charging site meant to serve the next phase in the Southern California electric truck charging evolution.
Early truck-charging sites were designed to serve shorter-range trucks that deliver goods from a central warehouse before returning to recharge overnight. But Terawatt’s and Greenlane’s new depots are meant to function more like a classic highway stop for battery-powered trucks looking to deliver goods hundreds of miles away.
The new stations will support more routes per day from Southern California’s crowded ports to its distribution warehouses further inland, said Emilia Sibley, lead of Terawatt’s heavy-duty business unit. Terawatt’s newly opened site, which serves the trucks of customers ranging from relatively small freight haulers like Hight Logistics to global corporates like PepsiCo, is “meant to be an enabler for on-the-go charging,” she said — a place to get a “top-off charge to get from the port to the Inland Empire multiple times per day, rather than once a day.”
This infrastructure will allow truck owners to “extend the range and economics of these heavy-duty assets,” she said. Owners and operators measure the value of trucks not just on up-front price and long-term operating cost, but on the revenue the vehicles generate over their useful life. Being able to run two trips per day instead of one could essentially double a truck’s value.
The same dynamic applies to electric trucks looking for a recharge at the end of delivery routes in the farther reaches of the Inland Empire, said Andrea Pratt, Greenlane’s vice president of government and utility relations. Unlike most truck-charging depots today, Greenlane’s Colton site is open to any electric truck, in the traditional “truck stop–type model,” she said. “We are publicly facing, and we will always have charging available for trucks to come up and charge ad hoc.”
These big new charging depots are also the launchpads for a broader eastward expansion of truck-charging capacity. Greenlane’s Colton site is the first of a string of electric truck stops being planned from Long Beach to the Mojave Desert cities of Barstow and Baker as part of its I-15 commercial EV charging corridor project. And Terawatt and its partners are planning several large-scale charging sites along the I-10 highway from California to Texas.
The routes and use cases open to electric trucks will further expand as the next generation of longer-range trucks from mainstream manufacturers and those from all-electric specialists like Tesla or Windrose Technology become available, Pratt said. Tesla said this week that full-scale production of its long-delayed Semi will begin in 2026.
“As battery technology increases and as prices come down, you’re really going to see a change in the market,” Pratt said.
Both Greenlane’s and Terawatt’s new charging depots also offer fancier versions of the typical truck stop amenities, such as a lounge area with food and drink for sale, restrooms, free Wi-Fi, and round-the-clock security and customer support. Those are important both for on-the-go truckers spending a half hour to an hour to top up their batteries for the next leg of their journey and for trucks reserving bobtail spots to recharge overnight.
“Sites like ours can really de-risk the zero-emissions vehicle journey,” Pratt said, particularly for the vast majority of U.S. trucking fleets that own 10 or fewer trucks. “You may be less likely to need to put down a lot of capital to electrify your property if there’s a Greenlane or a Terawatt or a Forum down the street — and there will be someone there if something’s gone wrong.”
This build-it-and-they-will-come approach to electric trucking comes with its fair share of financial risk — particularly in the shadow of the second Trump administration.
The administration has frozen or restricted billions of dollars in grant funding authorized by Congress in the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Those actions have left states and companies uncertain about whether they can rely on billions of federal dollars for building charging infrastructure on major transit corridors and for projects to invest in clean ports.
The Trump administration also plans to roll back federal transportation emissions regulations and has made clear it won’t support states’ efforts to put more stringent emissions mandates into effect. In January, California withdrew its plans to seek federal approval of its Advanced Clean Fleets mandate, which set statewide zero-emissions truck purchasing quotas on most large truck fleets.
Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress have introduced resolutions seeking to rescind federal waivers that allow California and 10 other states to impose Advanced Clean Trucks mandates, which require manufacturers to sell increasing numbers of zero-emissions trucks. That move comes despite findings from the Government Accountability Office and the Senate parliamentarian that Congress lacks the legal standing to take these actions.
Economic troubles are compounding the regulatory uncertainty. President Donald Trump’s crushingly high tariffs imposed on China have led to a major reduction in cargo being shipped to U.S. ports, including the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. That dropoff is almost certain to cause a slowdown in business for freight companies, making it less likely they will look to buy any new trucks — electric or diesel.
Those tariffs will also drive up the cost of lithium-ion batteries, most of which are made in China today. Battery costs are the biggest reason why electric trucks remain two to three times more expensive up front than diesel trucks in U.S. markets.
These headwinds further complicate the inherently uncertain economics of electric truck charging. Companies like Greenlane and Terawatt do have some levers to pull to secure demand for the charging infrastructure they’re building, however.
While Greenlane is opening its Colton chargers to all users, “that doesn’t mean we don’t have customers,” Pratt said. Last week’s ribbon-cutting featured one major anchor customer — Nevoya, a startup that’s renting office space at the site and is pledging to use it to charge up to 100 electric trucks it plans to bring onto Southern California roads.
Nevoya cofounder and Chief Commercial Officer John Verdon said the startup is working directly with “shipping customers looking to achieve sustainability goals.”
“We hire the drivers, acquire the trucks and trailers, and charge the trucks,” he said. “There are lanes where we are price-competitive with diesel — and in those markets we’re very aggressive.” But other markets are “quite candidly not price-competitive” due to challenges around charger availability and vehicle range and price.
It will take some careful planning to expand charging at the proper pace and scale to match the trucking industry’s demand for electrifying its fleet. “We’re building these things with a lot of intention and strategy behind it,” Pratt said, using such inputs as the telematics data from Daimler trucks to understand where route lengths and freight volumes allow electric trucks to compete, and how much charging is needed at which sites to support that.
“At the end of the day, for fleets, it’s all about dollars and cents and making the economics work,” she said. That puts pressure on states like California that want to keep growing the clean freight sector to keep up support, she said.
California has been a leader on incentives to expand electric trucks, she noted. The state’s Hybrid and Zero-Emission Truck and Bus Voucher Incentive Project offers lucrative financial support to defray the up-front cost of electric trucks, which cost less to fuel and maintain over their lifetimes than diesel-fueled trucks.
”These are really small margins that companies are running their trucks on,” Pratt said. “If we want a long-term viable market, we need carrots and sticks — and maybe more carrots than sticks in the beginning.”
Conversations about AI and the power grid tend to focus on the demands that the developing technology will place on the country’s aging energy infrastructure. But Josh Brumberger, CEO of Utilidata, has a vision for how AI can actually help the grid.
The Rhode Island-based grid technology company is working on what it calls “edge AI intelligence” — smart meters or grid control devices embedded with chipsets designed by leading AI chipmaker Nvidia. Those devices have the computational capacity to process massive amounts of data and make split-second decisions, enabling utilities to better manage increasingly complicated power grids.
On Tuesday, Utilidata announced $60.3 million in funding to expand production and deployment of this technology with a growing list of utility partners. The new round brings Utilidata’s total venture funding to $126.5 million and was led by Renown Capital Partners and joined by existing investor Keyframe Capital, as well as Nvidia and Quanta Services, a major utility grid, energy infrastructure, and data center engineering and services company.
“We want to make it as easy as possible for hardware manufacturers to embed AI and distributed intelligence into their devices,” Brumberger said. “There’s this concept that AI is going to be crucial as we go about developing our next-generation infrastructure — in this case, the power grid. We were kind of on the edges of those discussions a few years ago. Now we’re at the center.”
Utilidata and Nvidia began to jointly develop their technology in 2021. The next year, they launched a consortium of U.S. utilities, along with leading U.S. residential solar and battery installer Sunrun, to support its deployment.
Since then, the technology has been selected to play a role in several cutting-edge utility grid projects.
In 2023, Portland General Electric in Oregon landed a Department of Energy grant to deploy Utilidata and Nvidia’s“grid-edge computing platform” to support its long-running effort to integrate batteries, EVs, and community solar into its grid. Pennsylvania utility Duquesne Light won a similar DOE grant to use the devices to collect data to better assess and mitigate threats to the grid from climate change and extreme weather. And Consumers Energy in Michigan launched a project with Utilidata last year that uses the technology to determine the grid impacts of home EV charging.
The projects share some common features, Brumberger said. They involve collecting massive amounts of data, such as subsecond readings of the voltage and frequency of power flowing through utilities’ distribution grids. Those data must then be processed by integrated circuits running hefty mathematical calculations before grid operators can make use of it.
The in-the-field computers must also be reprogrammable to perform a shifting variety of tasks, rather than “hard-wired” for only a preset range of duties, he said. And those tasks may require autonomous decision-making, like coordinating utility and customer-controlled devices to respond to changing grid circumstances, which is possible only with technology capable of acting faster than traditional low-bandwidth wireless communications from central utility control rooms.
Utilidata, which got its start providing grid voltage control equipment to the utility industry, restructured its business in 2020 to focus on these kinds of “grid-edge” challenges. The goal was to develop new versions of long-standing utility technologies that simply don’t have the speed necessary for the modern grid.
Take the more than 100 million smart meters deployed across the U.S. since the mid-2000s. Those meters — essentially stripped-down, weatherproofed computers linked via wireless networks — are collecting energy billing data, alerting utilities to power outages, and enabling some basic grid control capabilities today.
But the chipsets in those earlier generations of advanced metering infrastructure — AMI 1.0, in utility parlance — were designed to do a preset list of tasks and to be cheap enough to be deployed in the millions. The underlying computing technology has gotten both cheaper and better since then.
Major smart-meter vendors such as Itron and Landis+Gyr have been boosting the capabilities of their latest “AMI 2.0” systems to carry out increasingly complex activities. Utilidata and Nvidia claim that their technology platform, dubbed “Karman,” exceeds the capabilities of its peers in the field, though their price point is likely higher too. (AMI vendors tend not to disclose per-unit prices, and cost and pricing vary widely depending on order volumes and vagaries of industry demand.)
Utilities take a long time to move from testing a technology to deploying it at large scale. Utilidata’s earliest pilot projects, launched in 2022, embedded Nvidia chips in devices that attach to existing meters. Last year, the company signed a deal with Aclara, a longtime smart meter manufacturer and subsidiary of electronics giant Hubbell, to develop an integrated smart meter using the Karman platform.
Utilidata and Nvidia’s projects with Portland General Electric, Duquesne Light, and other utility partners aren’t going to completely replace those utilities’ existing smart meters — at least, not right away. Instead, these initial projects are tied to strategic deployments at parts of the grid where the utilities are seeking more granular information, Brumberger said.
One major area of interest is in assessing the grid impacts of rooftop solar systems, backup batteries, EV chargers, and other so-called distributed energy resources, he said. A growing number of utilities are looking for ways to enlist these kinds of devices to reduce strains on their power grids — say, by instructing batteries to store solar power at midday to release it later when it’s more valuable to the grid, or by coordinating when EV charging happens to avoid overloading local grid infrastructure when everyone charges at once.
These virtual power plants (VPPs) or distributed energy resource management systems (DERMS) can sometimes be handled in a command-and-control fashion by utility grid operations centers communicating to in-field devices via hard-wired, cellular, or broadband internet. But more advanced tasks require complex computations of local grid conditions and real-time communications between multiple local devices — exactly what Karman was designed to handle, Brumberger said.
“How can you have a VPP that’s, from a capacity perspective, as big and as reliable as a gas-fired plant, without accelerating computing and AI? You’ve got so many disparate resources that have so much untapped value that we ultimately have to unlock,” he said.
Portland General Electric, which is planning to rely on distributed energy resources for a significant chunk of its future grid needs, sees technologies like Karman as a way to better understand the reliability of VPPs and DERMS, Ananth Sundaram, senior manager of integrated grid at Portland General Electric, told Canary Media in a 2023 interview.
“We can look at grid services, we can look at disaggregation of the power, and what customer behavior and customer signatures we can track,” he said. “That will not only provide us a solid platform for serving our clients, it also helps us harvest massive amounts of data we need to understand what exactly is happening on the grid edge.”
Utilidata is hoping that utilities and regulators will keep these future needs in mind when planning the next cycle of large-scale smart meter deployments. Brumberger noted that Quanta, a new investor in the latest funding round, is a key partner in many large-scale utility infrastructure and smart meter deployments.
Utilidata’s near-term deployments are also dependent on the Trump administration preserving the DOE grants supporting its first-of-a-kind utility projects. The administration has frozen and threatened to end federal climate and energy funding approved during the Biden administration, as well as to eliminate large swaths of the federal workforce, including DOE offices that manage these grant programs.
“We have not received any word that those projects are not happening,” Brumberger said about the grants. “If you sort of peel back the layers of our project, at its core, it’s next-generation AI infrastructure. That theme does seem central to this administration, when they talk about winning the AI race, about hardening our critical infrastructure.”
The latest round of funding will allow Utilidata to expand to new markets, both outside the U.S. and outside the utility grid, Brumberger said. In particular, it’s exploring the prospects for embedding its Nvidia-enabled distributed energy control devices within data centers themselves, enabling them to better understand and control power usage down to the server level, he said.
“We think of data centers as incredibly powerful microgrids,” he said — a perspective shared by data center developers adding generators, batteries, and energy management controls to their massive installations.
Utilidata and Nvidia’s computing platforms will also be collecting, analyzing, and “training” from the data they’re collecting, much like large language models (LLMs) “train” on massive amounts of human-generated text and images, Brumberger noted. The data might include things like differences between the grid voltage signals that accompany power disruptions caused by people turning things on and off in their homes and those caused by external impacts like tree branches hitting power lines.
“It’s no longer just a sensor, but a little hub of activity where you can train locally, so not every piece of information needs to leave the site,” he said. “The question is going to be, is this the kind of tech you need on 10% of your territory, on 50%, on 80%, or 100%?”
In several states, Republican lawmakers are taking the lead on an unexpected policy priority: encouraging more community solar.
This year, Republicans in Georgia, Iowa, Missouri, and Ohio have sponsored bills to spur the growth of this shared renewable energy resource in their states. Community solar installations, which are typically 1 to 5 megawatts, or up to 30 acres, allow households to reap the benefits of cheaper, clean power without putting panels on their own roofs. And customers who subscribe to these projects can save money on their electricity bills.
While the Georgia Homegrown Solar Act of 2025 will have to wait until next year to move forward now that the Peach State’s legislature is in recess, the proposed laws in Iowa (HF 404) and Ohio (HB 15 and SB 2) remain in play alongside the Missouri measure, which passed unanimously out of the House’s legislative rules committee today.
Twenty-five states have already adopted policies to enable community solar, according to an April report from the NC Clean Energy Technology Center. Nationwide, shared solar had its biggest growth spurt ever in 2024, rising 35% from 2023 to reach a cumulative 8.6 gigawatts of installed capacity, according to Wood Mackenzie. Now, the idea is gaining momentum among conservatives.
Not only are GOP lawmakers introducing and signing on to more community solar bills, but other local Republican stakeholders such as chambers of commerce, landowners, and conservative policy groups are also voicing their support, according to the national trade association Coalition for Community Solar Access. The libertarian group Americans for Prosperity is backing Iowa’s HF 404 — alongside Walmart. Last year, in Alaska, several GOP legislators voted for a community solar bill, and the state’s Republican governor signed it into law.
“We’re starting to see … this groundswell that’s happening,” said Matthew Hargarten, vice president of government and public affairs at the Coalition for Community Solar Access.
That Republicans are advocating for solar at the local level comes as something of a surprise given the federal government’s ongoing opposition to clean energy. On Capitol Hill, GOP lawmakers are weighing the repeal of federal tax credits for renewables, and the Trump administration has attempted to claw back billions of dollars Congress authorized for solar and other clean energy projects. At the same time, the executive branch claims its actions are “ensuring America’s future is marked by energy growth and abundance – not scarcity.”
So why is community solar finding fans among some local Republican lawmakers?
These projects brim with benefits, including ones that tap into the conservative principles of free markets and individual property rights, according to advocates.
Community solar policy can attract private investment from third-party developers of these projects, opening up competition in the energy-generation market, which is often dominated by monopoly utilities. All the recently introduced Republican-backed bills would create this competitive structure by allowing third-party-owned projects where they were previously barred, the Coalition for Community Solar Access pointed out.
Companies that own shared solar installations pay property taxes that help fund local schools and emergency services. And these projects provide energy close to where it’s being consumed, which can reduce the costs of building out grid infrastructure to deliver power to far-flung customers.
Plus, community solar can help farmers keep their agricultural land in production. Farmers and ranchers who need to let a few acres lie fallow to regenerate the soil can lease that plot to earn a passive, stable income for 20 or 30 years.
Some of those reasons explain why the American Legislative Exchange Council, the national conservative group known for packaging model legislation for policymakers, supports building community solar and combining it with agriculture, a practice known as agrivoltaics.
“[American Legislative Exchange Council] members have long abided by the fundamental principles of individual property rights and have worked to remove regulatory barriers that impede private landowners from utilizing the value of their property for energy projects, whether they are for solar, wind, fracking, biofuels, or other sources,” Jake Morabito, senior director of the group’s energy, environment, and agriculture task force, said in a statement to Canary Media.
Shared solar also boosts local economies. On average, 5 megawatts of community solar delivers $14 million in local economic activity and supports nearly 100 jobs, according to a nationwide review of economic impact reports released this month by the Coalition for Community Solar Access. At scale, the organization notes, that equates to $2.8 billion in local economic activity and more than 18,000 jobs (direct, indirect, and induced) per gigawatt of new installed capacity.
Plus, the energy bill savings offered by community solar have obvious appeal on both sides of the aisle. Developers often guarantee subscribers a 5% to 20% discount on the energy cost. For example, with a $100 investment, a subscriber could buy $120 worth of electricity.
Each of the state bills currently being considered is tailored to the state’s regulatory environment, but all allow customers to save on power bills.
“Ultimately, for me, it was giving Iowan consumers a choice,” said Iowa state Rep. Hans Wilz, a Republican, in a March interview on why he introduced a community solar bill. Not everyone can afford to put solar panels on their roof, he explained: “This is a way for all Iowans to be able to participate in a solar program.”
That’s a far cry from a common refrain that Lori Saine said she often heard from fellow Republicans during her tenures as a state representative and local official in Colorado: “‘You like China and Biden if you like solar panels.’”
As a commissioner in Weld County, Colorado, Saine helped update the jurisdiction’s code to allow community solar projects, and as a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council, she introduced the group’s model resolution supporting shared solar.
To be sure, even today community solar can be “a political buzz saw for some Republicans, especially if they’re in deep red districts,” which tend to be rural, Saine said. But once people “save some money on their energy bills, suddenly the tune changes really, really fast.”
As for whether the Republican-backed draft laws will pass, “it’s impossible to say,” said Hargarten, with the Coalition for Community Solar Access. Utilities consistently oppose such legislation, according to the group. Still, here’s one encouraging sign: A Montana shared-solar bill cleared both Republican-controlled chambers this month and now awaits the governor’s signature.
We’ll know soon enough the fate of some of these bills. Iowa lawmakers go home May 2, and Missouri legislators follow soon after on May 16. Ohio keeps legislating until Dec. 31.
The rising support for community solar among Republicans is “a kind of awakening,” Saine of Colorado said.
“It’s not a partisan issue if you’re generating an electron, and you’re doing it safer, more effectively, and cheaper, and then delivering that product to consumers who really, really need it — which is, by the way, everyone,” she noted. “That’s a win-win.”
An update was made on April 29, 2025: This story has been updated to reflect that Missouri’s community solar bill passed out of the House’s legislative rules committee on April 29.
A clarification was made on April 30, 2025: An earlier version of this story said that Georgia’s legislative session had ended and that the Georgia Homegrown Solar Act of 2025 is off the table. The story has been updated to clarify that the legislative session is in recess until next year, meaning the Georgia Homegrown Solar Act of 2025 will have to wait until then to move forward.
See more from Canary Media’s “Chart of the week” column.
President Donald Trump’s attacks on federal climate policy and his supply-chain-scrambling tariffs are taking a toll on the clean-energy manufacturing boom.
In the first three months of this year, firms have already abandoned plans to build nearly $8 billion worth of clean energy projects — mostly factories that would have produced everything from grid batteries to electric vehicles, per new data from E2. It’s a dramatic reversal from the Biden era: Between 2022 and 2024, a total of just $2.1 billion in investment was canceled.
The Inflation Reduction Act, signed by former President Joe Biden in August 2022, unleashed a torrent of new clean energy projects.
The manufacturing sector has seen a particularly notable uptick since the law went into effect.
Construction spending on manufacturing began to soar. Well over $100 billion worth of EV assembly facilities, solar-panel factories, battery recycling plants, and more have been announced since the passage of the law, which created tax incentives as well as grant and loan programs for domestic clean-energy manufacturing.
In total, those projects are expected to create over 109,000 permanent jobs nationwide; the U.S. currently has around 12.8 million workers in the manufacturing sector.
But now, under President Trump, the trend has started to go in reverse.
Construction spending on factories has plateaued. Firms are pausing and scaling down investment plans. Others are outright canceling projects due to Trump’s policies: Take Prysmian Group, for example, which earlier this year scrapped its plan to build a $300 million offshore wind cable manufacturing facility at the site of a retired coal plant in Somerset, Massachusetts. For the first time since E2 began tracking the data in 2022, canceled investments in cleantech manufacturing outweigh new investments, and it’s not particularly close.
There are still some new investments happening: $1.7 billion worth in March alone, per E2, including a $200 million Tesla grid-battery factory in Texas. Plus, the vast majority of announced projects have yet to be canceled, paused, or downsized.
But the going is not guaranteed to get any easier.
Trump’s tariffs are causing pain across the U.S. manufacturing sector in general. In an early April survey conducted by the Philadelphia Fed, manufacturers expected new orders to fall sharply over the next six months. And if congressional Republicans decide to rescind the Inflation Reduction Act’s manufacturing incentives, a move that’s on the table, the situation could grow even more dire.
The clean energy industry has had plenty to contend with since President Donald Trump resumed office: rapidly fluctuating tariffs, financial market chaos, and both rhetorical and practical attacks on Joe Biden’s policies to support decarbonization efforts.
Despite those headwinds, stalwart Tennessee-based solar developer Silicon Ranch closed a major equity investment this month, raising $500 million from Danish fund AIP Management. Notably, Silicon Ranch hadn’t even gone out for a fund raise, Chief Commercial Officer Matt Beasley said. But, after CEO Reagan Farr met AIP members by chance at a conference in New York last year, the conversation evolved, and soon Silicon Ranch leaders were flying to Copenhagen to close the deal.
The developer’s last fund raise was $600 million at the start of 2023, under entirely different macroeconomic circumstances: The economy was bouncing back from Covid, and Biden had recently signed the Inflation Reduction Act, unleashing hundreds of billions of dollars to bolster clean energy deployment. In contrast, Silicon Ranch’s most recent cash influx comes as the Republican-led Congress ponders whether to eliminate those same tax credits during this year’s budget-making process in Washington.
As an infrastructure investor, AIP has the leisure to look for returns over longer time horizons than, say, a venture capital firm. But Silicon Ranch is planning for growth even amid the Trump-era conditions: The company has already more or less tariff-proofed its operations and is working hard to meet power demand spurred by the same AI growth trend the Trump administration has championed.
The U.S. has been levying tariffs on Chinese solar panels since the Obama administration, when China’s industrial policies boosted manufacturing and helped push American solar manufacturers out of business. U.S. solar developers and installers have adapted to that reality, but lately, tariff policy is changing by the week if not the hour.
Trump announced radically higher tariffs on most of the world in early April. The so-called reciprocal tariffs were slated to hit the Southeast Asian countries that have become major sources of U.S. solar imports since earlier tariffs effectively blocked China. Days later, though, Trump backed down on his “Liberation Day” threat, at least temporarily. But a separate tariff proceeding at the Department of Commerce has just concluded and slaps tariffs up to 3,521% on solar panels from Cambodia, and less astronomical but still substantial rates on Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam.
“We’re pretty well insulated from the tariffs,” Beasley said. That’s because the company already reoriented its strategy to buying domestic equipment, in response to the supply chain disruption of the Covid era.
In April 2022, Silicon Ranch unveiled a master supply agreement with First Solar for 4 gigawatts of U.S.-made modules, and subsequently doubled down for another 2.2 gigawatts. That deal built on a longstanding relationship: Silicon Ranch was the first to install First Solar modules in the Southeast, Beasley noted.
The developer also signed a parallel agreement in May 2022 with Nextracker to buy 1.5 gigawatts of U.S.-made solar trackers — which tilt panels toward the sun throughout the day — and later added another 3 gigawatts. That deal anchored Nextracker’s decision to open a torque-tube manufacturing line in Memphis, Tennessee, localizing production of the key component in utility-scale solar trackers.
That domestic procurement strategy looked even better when Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022, instituting tax credits for each unit of the solar supply chain made in the U.S. Now the decision allows for peace of mind compared to navigating the constantly fluctuating import duties.
“With both First Solar and with Nextracker, our domestic supply agreements have got supply availability and price locked in for the next few years,” Beasley said.
Tariff-free supplies only help if there’s still a customer to sell to, but Silicon Ranch is finding plenty in that department, too. The firm installed 950 megawatts last year, ending 2024 with 3.6 gigawatts operating under company ownership; it also signed power purchase agreements for nearly 2 gigawatts of new production across five or six states, Beasley said.
The firm, launched by former Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen (D) as he was leaving office in 2011, has always thrived by making large-scale solar happen in regions where it hadn’t been widely adopted, like the Tennessee Valley and Georgia. Now solar developers are finding they don’t have to do much convincing because utilities need all the power they can get to keep pace with growing electricity demand.
Right in Silicon Ranch’s backyard, for example, the Tennessee Valley Authority projects that in the next 30 years it needs to double or triple the capacity it constructed over the past nine decades, the utility’s CEO, Jeff Lyash, has said.
“With load growth being what it is, not just here in the Southeast, but really across the country, there’s a need for kind of an all-of-the-above strategy, regardless of political ideology,” Beasley said. Often “all of the above” is code for preserving fossil fuels in a changing energy mix, but Beasley means that bringing new solar into the mix will help regions fuel economic growth.
“This massive load growth does mean that every electron is valued, but what we say is the most valuable electron is the one which comes to market first,” he explained. “Over the past decade, we’ve proven that solar is not only the lowest cost form of new generation, but it’s also the quickest to deploy.”
To that end, the company is actively constructing its first utility-scale projects in South Carolina, in a deal with utility Santee Cooper and the Central Electric cooperative to source clean power for a Google data center. Silicon Ranch is also building its first project in Louisiana to serve Microsoft.
With all that power demand, compounded by Trump’s pledge to make the U.S. the AI capital of the world, Silicon Ranch doesn’t anticipate its solar developments slowing down any time soon.
Electrowinning is a time-tested method for removing impurities from metals, and it’s able to run on clean electricity and at the same temperature as a fresh cup of coffee. Could it help clean up heavy industry by replacing the gigantic coal-fired blast furnaces used to purify iron, a key ingredient in steelmaking?
Sandeep Nijhawan, CEO and cofounder of electrolytic clean-iron technology startup Electra, thinks so. On Thursday, the Boulder, Colorado-based firm announced that it has raised $186 million from investors, including some major players in the trillion-dollar global iron and steel industry, to further test its proposition.
Thursday’s round was led by Capricorn Investment Group and Temasek Holdings, and included previous investors Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, and S2G Investments. It also included Rio Tinto, Roy Hill, and BHP’s venture capital arm, representing some of the world’s largest iron ore suppliers; leading steelmakers Nucor and Yamato Kogyo; and major iron and steel buyers organizations Interfer Edelstahl Group and Toyota Tsusho Corp., the trading arm of Toyota Group and supplier to Toyota Motor Corp.
“This broad, very sophisticated, strategic investor base gives us a vote of confidence that our solution can potentially be an integral part of the value chain,” Nijhawan said.
The new funding will finance Electra’s first demonstration-scale project, which aims to produce about 500 tonnes of high-purity iron annually when it opens next year — a droplet in the nearly 1.9 billion tonnes of steel produced globally in 2023. The company hopes to have a commercial-scale production site, of undisclosed size and capacity, operational in 2029, Nijhawan said.
Steelmaking accounts for 7% to 9% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and most of those emissions are tied to the process of purifying iron in blast furnaces that burn metallurgical coal at temperatures of around 1,600 degrees Celsius.
Cutting that carbon footprint requires shifting to electric arc furnaces that use electricity to melt a mix of steel scrap and purified iron into new steel. But to clean up the industry, the purified iron going into those furnaces must first be produced in ways that don’t choke the atmosphere.
“We are replacing how iron has been made for centuries,” Nijhawan said. “When you think about that transition, you think about a long-term view of how you create a stable business in that environment.”
Electra’s process is competing against a number of alternative methods for making lower-carbon iron. The most prevalent approach to date — and the one that’s gotten billions of dollars of investment — is direct reduction of iron via hydrogen.
Direct reduced iron is being deployed by the biggest green-steel projects in the world, such as the H2 Green Steel and Hybrit plants in Sweden. But early-stage efforts to build up capacity for hydrogen direct reduced iron in the U.S. have faltered in the face of high costs, lack of commitments from buyers, and more recently, the Trump administration’s U-turn on Biden-era policies supporting industrial decarbonization. The process also requires cost-effective production of carbon-free hydrogen, a challenging prospect in and of itself.
Boston Metal, a spinout of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, aims to decarbonize steelmaking with a very different method known as molten oxide electrolysis, which uses electricity to heat iron ore to blast-furnace temperatures. The startup plans to open its first demonstration plant in 2026. That process avoids carbon emissions but still requires super-high temperatures and hefty electricity inputs.
Electra’s approach, electrowinning, is already used to purify metals such as copper, nickel, and zinc. It works by dissolving iron ores into an aqueous acidic solution to separate iron ions from impurities in the ores, and then electrifying the solution to deposit pure iron onto metal plates.
Electra’s quest to purify iron via electrowinning has faced some key challenges. For example, the company had to figure out how to accelerate the dissolution of iron ore in the solution and how to maintain the purity of the ions collected through the electrowinning process, Quoc Pham, the company’s cofounder and chief technology officer, told Canary Media in 2023. A handful of research consortiums and corporations are pursuing electrowinning iron but using an alkaline rather than an acidic solution.
Electra has produced plates of pure iron in pilot tests. That’s just the first of many steps in proving it can cost-effectively scale up the technology to operate in high-throughput industrial settings using iron ores with a wide mix of chemical compositions, Nijhawan said.
But success on those fronts could unlock a lot of opportunities for Electra investors along the iron and steel value chain, he said — starting with the company’s longest-running strategic investor and top U.S. steelmaker Nucor.
Nucor exclusively uses electric arc furnaces, which require careful calibration of the mix of scrap steel and purified iron going into them to produce different grades of steel for diverse industrial sectors.
Those include the automotive manufacturing market, where advances in electric arc furnaces are overcoming longstanding beliefs that only blast-furnace steel can meet automakers’ quality standards, and where automakers like Hyundai are making multi-billion-dollar investments in the electric equipment.
“We’re seeing a shift in the automotive sector,” Noah Hanners, Nucor’s executive vice president for sheet products, said in a Thursday statement. “As we produce more [electric arc furnace] steel for the automotive market, our demand for sustainable feedstocks like Electra’s product will only continue to grow.”
Electra’s technology can also purify a wide range of iron ores, which could open up new markets for iron-mining giants like those investing in the startup’s latest round, Nijhawan noted. That’s particularly valuable for low-carbon steelmaking since hydrogen direct reduced iron can handle only a narrow range of impurities, which could limit its use to the available supplies of higher-quality ores.
Nijhawan highlighted another distinguishing feature of Electra’s approach — its modularity. A typical steel plant that uses a blast furnace or the direct reduced iron process costs billions of dollars, takes years to build, and involves coordinating the delivery of massive amounts of iron and fuel.
Electra’s electrolytic modules, by contrast, can be deployed at a variety of scales to match supply and demand dynamics in different markets. “One electrical array can go up to 50,000 tons, for example, and you can do that again and again,” he said. “It’s not like you have to go build a 2-million-ton plant to become economically viable.”
That optionality could ease concerns from investors wary of sinking billions of dollars into a single facility using a novel technology, he said. It also allows Electra to test its modules and improve performance and cost in succeeding generations.
Similar dynamics have helped propel solar panels and lithium-ion batteries to the cheapest and most easily deployable energy technology today, he noted. “It helps you to have the same repeat unit that you’re perfecting for quality, for defects — and to learn fast as a result.”
One sign read “Let the Wind Power Our Future.” Others displayed nothing more than the giant gold seal of America’s largest electrical workers union. These logos and slogans stood out among the 100 or so people crowded on top of the marble steps of the Nassau County Executive and Legislative Building in New York on Tuesday, as they called for the right to continue building offshore wind turbines near the Long Island coast.
That right had just been revoked.
On April 16, the Trump administration issued a stop-work order that paused the construction of Empire Wind 1. The 810-megawatt wind farm was two weeks into at-sea construction. It’s also the anchor project of an in-progress effort to build an offshore wind staging terminal in South Brooklyn, which has been celebrated as a major economic win for the local, mainly working-class community.
“It was time to demonstrate the diverse support for offshore wind,” said Adrienne Esposito, rally organizer and executive director of the nonprofit group Citizens Campaign for the Environment. She said the group includes retirees, union workers, young people in job training, a charter boat captain, and a whale expert.
They’re emblematic of the broad array of stakeholders who stand to lose from President Donald Trump’s ongoing war on offshore wind, which started with a pause on new permitting and has in recent weeks escalated to attacks on projects already underway. These projects are central to the climate goals of many East Coast states, the economic development plans of neighborhoods and towns, and public health concerns of those who have lived for decades in the shadow of dirtier, air-polluting industries.
Empire Wind 1 is a critical component of New York’s strategy to address climate change and achieve a 70% renewable energy share by 2030. It’s the largest energy infrastructure project the state has undertaken in the last 50 years, according to a top state official who lambasted the Trump administration’s stop-work order as doing “irrefutable harm.”
“This project underwent extensive and robust federal reviews … and is already under construction with strong support from the local Sunset Park community and more than 1,500 construction workers currently employed,” Doreen Harris, president of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, said in a statement last week.
Since early April, vessels had been laying rocks roughly 20 miles offshore from New York City in preparation for attaching 54 wind towers to the seafloor in May. The project was supposed to go online in 2027. All at-sea work is now halted.
The Trump administration’s order didn’t impact the massive terminal being built along a Brooklyn waterfront to support the installation. About 1,500 people have been constructing the 73-acre offshore wind hub since June. But local supporters now worry what the order means for all the green jobs promised by the Empire Wind project.
“Offshore wind, if done properly, gave us a real shot at creating economic opportunities for a neighborhood and region that has carried the weight of environmental racism for too long. It meant good jobs and local investment for our local residents,” Elizabeth Yeampierre wrote in a statement issued Tuesday, the same day as the rally. She is executive director of the grassroots nonprofit organization, UPROSE, and a longtime resident of Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood.
For the past decade, Yeampierre has led efforts in her community to advocate for redevelopment of Sunset Park’s industrialized waterfront, a stretch of which has sat vacant since the 1990s. At one point, city officials considered plans to rezone the area for apartments and retail shops. Yeampierre pushed officials instead towards plans to rebuild a “working” waterfront that would generate jobs and place Sunset Park residents at the center of the energy transition.
That vision, the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal, is becoming a reality. The offshore wind hub, once completed by the end of 2026 if it’s not interrupted, will be used for storing and assembling wind turbines. Equinor, the Norwegian energy giant building Empire Wind, was planning to use it as a staging ground for not just Empire Wind but for a sprawling array of already-approved wind projects being built across the Northeast and mid-Atlantic by various developers.
The previous administration gave some level of approval to nearly a dozen offshore wind farms. But only nine projects, including Empire Wind, managed to get all of their permits before Trump took office. Another one of those approved projects — Atlantic Shores in New Jersey — has already been shelved, thanks in part to the Trump administration’s decision to claw back a previously issued Clean Air Act permit.
A spokesman for Equinor told Canary Media, “We will not comment about the potential consequences until we know more.” He said the company is engaging directly with the Department of the Interior to “understand the questions” raised about its federal permits, which were issued in 2024.
Equinor signed its federal lease for Empire Wind during the first Trump administration in 2017. Its project took over eight years to go from proposal to full approval, though President Trump’s interior secretary, Doug Burgum, who oversees the core offshore wind permitting process, recently suggested in a post on X that “the Biden administration rushed through its approval without sufficient analysis.”
That leaves Sunset Park community members to wonder what’s next.
“Unfortunately, that door of what is beautifully possible and necessary is being shut on our knuckles,” wrote Yeampierre in response to Trump’s interference.
Offshore wind promises cleaner and more reliable energy for New York and the East Coast. But for residents of Sunset Park in particular, these projects — and the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal that relies on them — offer benefits beyond that.
What’s also at stake is a real shot to revive Sunset Park, a mainly working-class neighborhood of Asian, Latino, and immigrant communities. Equinor has already given $5 million in grants to help local community groups, like UPROSE, build education and job-training programs around a new wind-power economy.
Maintaining Sunset Park’s industrial character is key to keeping housing affordable in the area, Eddie Bautista, executive director of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, told Canary Media in 2022. Many envision Sunset Park as a place where people have job training and good salaries without the air pollution that spewed from the port during its 20th century heyday.
“We were building a whole industry … and the problem with shutting down the project is that it really sends a signal to the developers in the market — like, what certainty is there?” said Lara Skinner, executive director of the Climate Jobs Institute at Cornell University’s New York City campus.
She fears that developers like Equinor may pull out, not for lack of commitment, but for lack of certainty that Trump will honor the federal government’s permits and approvals. And if the offshore wind turbines don’t get installed, she said, the wind hub in Sunset Park is in jeopardy.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, has expressed similar fears about the stop-work order and vowed last week to “fight this every step of the way.”
Meanwhile, some local Republican officials are pleased. Speaking at a press conference last week, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman sided with the Trump administration’s view that Biden-era permitting was insufficient: “We think there [were] shortcuts. We think there was false information. And a lack of public input.”
Esposito, the organizer of Tuesday’s rally, said politics should not be part of the Empire Wind debate.
“Look, offshore wind is not a Republican issue and not a Democratic issue,” said Esposito, who noted the threats of a warming planet and rising seas. “At the end of the day, we all live on an island.”
As electric and gas bills rise across the country, a poll released today finds that an overwhelming majority of people in the U.S. are concerned about growing energy costs — and experiencing greater financial stress because of them.
In a nationwide survey of about 2,000 adults, conducted by the consumer education nonprofit PowerLines and the polling company Ipsos in late March, 73% of respondents reported feeling concerned about rising utility bills. Nearly two-thirds of surveyed billpayers said they have seen their gas and electric bills rise over the last year, and 63% reported feeling more stressed as a result of energy costs. The results held consistent across the political spectrum, with Republicans, Democrats, and Independents alike expressing similar levels of concern.
The findings arrive as the Trump administration’s continued attacks on clean energy — and its support for coal and other fossil fuels — threaten to raise utility bills even higher, according to energy experts.
“Bottom line is, American energy consumers are hurting and they’re stressed out,” Charles Hua, executive director of PowerLines, said of the survey’s findings.
Yet according to the poll, most Americans aren’t familiar with the state entities in charge of regulating energy utilities and setting those prices: public utility commissions. That’s a problem, said Hua, because a lack of public participation prevents consumer interests from being fully considered when state regulators receive and approve rate-hike requests from utilities.
In the survey, 60% of respondents said they aren’t familiar with the state or local authority that oversees gas and electric bills. Around 90% of people couldn’t name their public utility commission as the correct regulatory body.
Meanwhile, these relatively unknown regulators have approved ballooning utility cost increases in recent years. In 2022, state utility regulators collectively approved $4.4 billion in bill increases; in 2023, they approved $9.7 billion. In the first quarter of 2025 alone, gas and electric utilities requested or received rate hikes totalling about $20 billion. Residential electricity costs have grown by nearly 30% since 2021, while gas prices have risen by 40% since 2019, far outpacing inflation, according to a separate report released today by PowerLines.
The reasons behind these fast-rising rates vary by utility and state. Still, Hua singled out one driver of higher electricity rates in particular: utility spending on transmission lines and distribution systems — in other words, the poles, wires, and lines that deliver power to customers.
Utilities have spent increasing amounts of money to replace aging infrastructure and repair or harden the grid after storms, wildfires, and other disasters made more likely by climate change. State rules guarantee investor-owned utilities a rate of return on those investments, creating a financial incentive to overspend on grid infrastructure that some researchers have estimated costs consumers billions of dollars each year. Volatility in global gas markets has also contributed to rising gas bills.
The extent to which customers are suffering proves that the current regulatory system isn’t working, said Hua. “Eighty million Americans are struggling to pay their utility bills, and that issue is not only not going away, but it’s only going to get significantly worse in the coming years.”
Households that struggle to afford utilities often have no choice but to sacrifice needs like food, medicine, or basic physical comfort in order to pay their energy bills. Total utility bill debt in the U.S. has reached $17 billion, according to PowerLines, and power shutoffs due to nonpayment have risen across the country, posing potentially deadly health risks.
Four in five respondents to the poll said they felt powerless to control increasing utility costs. Around 60% — across all political affiliations — said they don’t think their state governments are sufficiently protecting consumers when regulating utilities.
For that to change, public utility commissions need to better engage the communities they serve, said Hua.
They could, for example, hold public meetings virtually or at night so that more people can attend, he said. Commissions could also allow consumers to comment on regulatory proceedings online or in person, and could provide intervenor compensation that covers the legal fees of advocates and stakeholders so that more groups can get involved in ratemaking cases. Hua added that states should invest in expanding the staff and capacity of public utility commissions and consumer advocacy offices, which are often vastly out-resourced by large investor-owned utilities.
Other consumer advocates have called for a range of reforms to rein in high rates, such as implementing performance-based ratemaking, which rewards utilities for reaching certain environmental or equity goals. States could also prohibit utilities from charging customers for trade association and lobbying fees, and lower the rate of return utilities can earn on infrastructure investments.
Electricity and gas bills may rise even more under the Trump administration’s energy policies. Several reports have found that repealing the clean energy tax credits under the Inflation Reduction Act, which some GOP lawmakers have promised to do, would significantly raise household energy costs, given that solar and wind are now far cheaper sources of electricity than coal, oil, and gas. President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs — now on pause for most countries except China — and recent executive orders to keep aging, unprofitable coal power plants running would make energy costs even more unaffordable.
The administration has also targeted a popular federal assistance program that helps more than 6 million U.S. households pay for their heating and cooling bills. Early this month, Trump officials laid off the entire staff running the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, and a budget proposal leaked last week eliminates the program altogether. States are still waiting on about $378 million in funding this year for utility bill assistance, and lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have called for program staff to be reinstated.
“At a time when so many families are struggling to make ends meet — and tariffs are poised to drive prices even higher — it’s unconscionable to rip away the help that Congress has already offered to people in need,” Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, told USA Today.
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