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Judge Ends Pentagon Wind Freeze, RWE Exits US Offshore

Allen covers a judge lifting the Pentagon’s wind freeze, RWE’s $1.22B US offshore exit, and TotalEnergies buying Shell’s European renewables.

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Good Monday everyone.

You know … there is an old saying. When one door closes … another one opens. Well this week in wind energy … a whole lot of doors were swinging.

Let us start in Washington. For months … the Pentagon had quietly stopped reviewing wind energy project applications. More than a hundred and fifty onshore wind projects … stuck in limbo. The Defense Department claimed that drones in Ukraine had changed the game. Wind turbines … they said … could blind radar to incoming threats. So they hit the brakes.

But on Thursday … a federal judge said … not so fast. Judge Karin Immergut … a Trump appointee no less … issued a preliminary injunction. Resume the reviews … she ordered. Follow the law Congress wrote. The law gives the Pentagon seventy-five days for a preliminary review. As of late July … not a single one had been completed since the halt began in May. When government lawyers were asked to name one project they had reviewed … they could not name a single one. The judge told them plainly. If you want to change the rules … go ask Congress.

Now … while one arm of the government was being told to do its job … another arm was writing checks. German energy giant RWE … handed back its American offshore wind leases. New York. California. Louisiana. In return … the U.S. Department of the Interior cut RWE a check for one-point-two-two billion dollars. RWE is the fifth developer to walk away from American offshore wind under this administration. The company had spent more than a billion dollars on those leases. Years of planning. Investment. Partnership with federal agencies. But RWE said there is simply no path forward to permit these projects … for the foreseeable future.

So where does the $1.22B go? Nine hundred million dollars into Louisiana LNG. Three hundred million into natural gas turbine reservations. Fifteen gas peaking projects across the country. A company that came to America to build wind farms … is now building gas plants instead.

But here is the thing about RWE. They are not leaving the wind business. They are leaving American offshore wind. Globally … RWE operates eighteen offshore wind farms. Four more under construction. And nearly seven gigawatts secured in the United Kingdom’s latest auction. America said no. The rest of the world said … come on in.

And speaking of Europe … TotalEnergies … the French oil major … just bought Shell’s entire onshore renewables business in Europe. Four gigawatts of solar and wind. Five hundred megawatts already running or under construction in Italy and the Netherlands. Three-and-a-half gigawatts more in the pipeline across Italy … the United Kingdom … and Spain. And in the same breath … TotalEnergies sold a fifty percent stake in a one-point-two gigawatt European portfolio to KKR … for an enterprise value of one-point-eight billion euros. Build it. Sell half. Keep operating it. That is the model.

Now let us fly east … to India. GE Vernova just landed a hundred-and-sixty-three megawatt wind order from American developer Enfinity Global. Forty-three turbines. Three-point-eight megawatts each. Headed for the Fatehgarh wind farm in Rajasthan. Deliveries start late this year. And those turbines will be built at GE Vernova’s factory in Pune … which can turn out fifteen hundred megawatts a year. India is pushing for five hundred gigawatts of renewable energy.

Meanwhile … up in Denmark … a Danish wind tower maker named Welcon is raising its voice. Swedish utility Vattenfall just won two offshore wind tenders in Denmark. But when asked whether they would use European-made turbines … Vattenfall would not say.

Welcon’s chief executive Jens Risvig Pedersen said … and I quote …

“It would be completely absurd not to buy European products for the two new Danish offshore wind farms. That would simply shut down the European industry.”

The Danish trade union Dansk Metal agreed. Chinese turbines … they said … should not be financed with Danish taxpayer money. Vattenfall says it has not decided yet. But the debate is on.

And finally … a milestone that happened so quietly … nobody noticed. The world just crossed three terawatts of installed solar power. It took ten years to build the first terawatt. Less than three years for the second. And not even two more years for the third. Seventy-four countries now have at least one gigawatt of solar installed. That is up from forty-two in twenty-twenty. BloombergNEF expects nine terawatts by twenty thirty-six.

But here is the catch. Without batteries … solar hits a ceiling. Places like Australia and California already have so much solar that electricity prices go negative during the day. You heard that right. They pay people to use power. The answer is battery storage. But batteries are not able to keep up with the pace of solar.

Now … if you step back from all of this … something interesting emerges. Nobody in these stories is arguing about whether wind works. Not the judge in Oregon. Not RWE. Not even the Pentagon. The debate has moved on. The question is no longer … can you build a wind farm. The question is … who gets to decide where one goes.

Think about that. A federal judge did not rule that wind turbines are safe or good or necessary. She ruled that the government cannot ignore its own laws. The science was not on trial. The process was.

RWE did not surrender its leases because offshore wind failed. It surrendered them because one government made permitting impossible … while eighteen other wind farms in its global portfolio kept spinning.

And TotalEnergies did not buy four gigawatts of European renewables out of charity. It bought them because Shell … an oil company … decided those assets no longer fit its strategy. One oil major’s exit is another’s entrance. The assets did not lose value. They changed hands.

That is the story underneath all these headlines. Wind energy has crossed a threshold that most industries never reach. It is no longer competing on technology. It is competing on governance. The turbines work. The economics work. The engineering works. What varies … country by country … is whether the rules of the road are clear enough for capital to show up.

And capital … as we saw this week … will always find the door that is open.

That is the state of the wind industry for the 10th of August … twenty twenty-six. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy podcast tomorrow.

Judge Ends Pentagon Wind Freeze, RWE Exits US Offshore

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