In October Trump canceled the largest solar project in the United States. Known as Esmeralda 7, the project planned in the Nevada desert would have produced enough energy to power nearly two million homes.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/10/trump-interior-depa...
It is misleading to characterize forcing them to undergo the standard environmental review process as "canceling". This solar project was given a special waiver to skip expensive environmental reviews that everyone else is required to go through because of close political ties to the Biden administration. If these environmental reviews are too onerous then maybe we should eliminate them.
Clearly, no one believes these environmental reviews serve a real purpose. Both Democrats and Republicans will allow you to skip them for a sufficiently large bribe. Which suggests the true purpose of such reviews.
Did you make this up? HN user base wasn’t going to change that fast in a year. And given that HN was left-leaning before Trump, I’d say it to be neutral at most now.
Nobody can predict the future, but there are several possibilities, including impeachment and death in office. The man really doesn't look very good, I don't expect him to last out his term.
Not only that, but the president can only do what Congress allows him to do. Look for a blue wave next year.
I have seen no indication that any of those 3 wouldn't. And in general the GOP is pretty virulently against wind power, take the false stories about them causing whale strandings or the Texas winter power outage. Its true no one has had quite the sustained, obsessive, demented hatred that Trump has ("windmills cause cancer"). But would you be willing to bet $Bs on them being any better?
It doesn't matter. You won't invest billions into new plants if they can be cancelled on a whim.
And mind you, the previous cancellation was contested through the courts, and it was found to be illegal. So now the administration did essentially the same, but without citing any reasons (they are "classified").
If this stands, then it is really a death blow to the US industry. It undermines the main pillar of capitalism: protection of property rights.
They aren’t leaving until someone forces them to do so. They aren’t going to accept any election results that they don’t like they have already proven that.
oh look, lying about national security concerns again. It's funny that the only thing this administration does is destroy things, lie, and make our lives measurably worse.
It sounds like “national security” is the legal justification they’re using to do an end-run around Congress, just like the justifications they’ve used to implement tariffs and which underpin a bunch of their EOs.
It's about time a US administration is brave enough to tackle real national security concerns: windmill cancer, completing the White House ballroom, and Antifa! /s
"Radar interference risk" is the cited reasoning. It took them the entire year to use anything other than a conspiracy theory to justify shutting these down.
I hadn't considered it but even if it is a pretense at least the reason actually makes sense? Ship-borne drones have become a significant issue and you could pretty easily screen them with offshore wind farms.
It’s unfortunate many people are able to see through this to the blatant corruption. Energy independence and national security is renewable energy. All sorts of diverse energy sources are good. But we don’t like that.
I don't even know if this is corruption. The Trump admin has definitely been engaged in a lot of graft, but this appears to just be "fuck you libs" for the sake of it. They know that liberals like renewable energy and they'd rather hurt liberals even if it hurts themselves too.
You know who looks at the economics of wind turbines? Companies that build wind turbines. The fact that these farms were all under construction means they pencil out just fine.. there's such bizarre strains of concern trolling on clean energy topics.
You say economics instead of emotion, but your last sentence is emotion.
If capex is your concern, explain the purpose of canceling an almost-complete farm.
If energy breakevens are your concern, explain how this breakevens compares against, e.g. oil liquids.
I live near both wind turbines and oil/gas fracking sites in Colorado. The wind turbines are far less obtrusive. Fracking sites produce a lot of noise and they try to hide them with these giant walls that look like a post-apocalyptic fort. On top of that, because they don't disclose their fracking fluids you always kind of have ground water contamination near your home on the back of your mind.
I'm not even against fracking but the alternatives to wind and solar are more a public nuisance to live around.
I love to look at the economics. The payback periods don’t look terrible. More importantly the market should decide what is good or not. I am all for removing subsidies but let the market decide the best path forward.
I live near one (no-USA) and honestly it doesn't bother me. It's a small price to pay to avoid ever-decreasing foreign-sourced oil/gas and insanely over-budget/over-schedule nuclear.
I do not understand why people think it’s exciting to drop into the comments and pointlessly lie to defend their favorite dictator. We know and you know that you didn’t think wind farms were ugly until it became necessary to defend Trump’s obsession; what do you hope to gain by pretending otherwise?
No one cared about the looks of wind turbines until they built some near Trump's golf course in Scotland. He hates them, and by pure and total chance, his base/cult now does too.
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