Hi there,
Coming to you this week from the Energy Transition Summit in Bilbao, but I’ve got a take on a big story from the US for you -- the permitting bill at the center of some controversy. Read on for our breakdown and this week's key numbers.
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One battle after another
The Trump administration quietly missed the final deadline to appeal the court rulings that let five US East Coast offshore wind projects keep building. Several are already producing power -- Vineyard Wind has been generating since early 2024, Dominion’s CVOW delivered first electricity in Q1 2026, Revolution Wind came online in March -- and together they should hit their full nameplate capacity of ~5.8GW. But the political deal that saved these projects came at a price -- it was leverage in a fight over permitting reform.
What happened
Five offshore wind projects (Vineyard Wind, Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, Revolution Wind, Sunrise Wind, and Empire Wind) have peppered energy headlines since December, when Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued stop-work orders on all five, citing classified national security. All five developers sued. All five won preliminary injunctions by early February. Burgum vowed to appeal, then quietly let the deadline lapse last week.
It was a battle in the administration's broader war on offshore wind (freezing new leases, repealing tax credits, paying TotalEnergies ~$928m to surrender leases and redirect funds to LNG and Gulf oil). But Burgum backed-off because of a different energy priority: permitting. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) told the administration that an appeal would kill the bipartisan permitting reform deal in the Senate, the broader companion to the SPEED Act, which passed the House in December.
So permitting reform matters more than stopping wind. Here's what's in the bill:
Targets cutting permitting timelines from a decade to a few years or less. Major transmission lines currently take 10+ years to site, permit, and build. The SPEED Act caps NEPA reviews at two years, and the Senate package aims to compress the full timeline further.
Gives FERC real backstop siting authority for interstate transmission. FERC technically has this power already -- Congress granted it in 2005 and expanded it in 2021 -- but it's never been used. Court decisions gutted it, DOE hasn't finalized the required corridor designations, and FERC hasn't received a single application. The bill would broaden FERC's authority to cover any qualifying interstate line without requiring a corridor designation -- moving power lines closer to the same footing FERC already has for gas pipelines under the Natural Gas Act.
Ends the single-state veto on multi-state transmission. Right now, a single state can effectively block an interstate transmission project by denying or sitting on a permit. The bill lets developers petition FERC for a construction permit if a state fails to act within one year -- or if the state denies the application outright.
Mandates enforceable interregional transmission planning. Current FERC rules require some coordination between regions, but few interregional projects have been built. The bill would force RTOs to develop joint interregional plans with binding cost allocation, so the bill for a multi-state line gets split based on who actually benefits.
Requires planners to consider reconductoring and advanced conductors before building new rights-of-way -- maximizing existing infrastructure before breaking ground on new corridors.
That's the trade Burgum made. A bill that could unlock hundreds of gigawatts of generation -- gas, solar, wind, nuclear, storage -- currently stuck behind the interconnection queue and transmission bottleneck. It’s also intended to speed-up and make federal lands more readily accessible to oil & gas drilling and mining, especially for critical minerals.
Mark’s take
What’s the Burgum version of TACO -- is it BACO?
Kidding. It’s probably not a chicken-out at all. But it’s a pretty revealing move.
In the Trump Administration there seems to be only one true opponent to wind power, and it’s not Doug Burgum. During his tenure as North Dakota governor from 2016 and 2023, wind power more than doubled in his state. And even further, in 2021 he pushed for North Dakota to become carbon neutral by 2030, pursuing an all-of-the-above strategy. So at his core he doesn’t appear to be the fossil-first warrior we’re seeing – that’s just this current political incarnation.
If I’m speculating, Burgum would have let the offshore wind projects go forward. Appeals are expensive, the president’s distracted with other things. But lose the battle, win the war. Deliver the broadest permitting overhaul in decades to a boss who wants energy dominance, especially when both power demand and sticker shock are rising.
The SPEED Act seems like a welcome change. NEPA is genuinely in need of an overhaul - the scope has expanded massively, timelines have inflated from months to years, and it's become a weapon of litigation more than a tool of environmental review. There is bipartisan disdain for what it's become.
But reform doesn't mean wind is back on. This spate of offshore projects may get unstuck, but it probably won't go further than that. Same for solar. While the SPEED Act opens the fast lane for baseload power, geothermal, and mining, Burgum still holds personal veto power over nearly 70 steps in the wind and solar approval process.
Last week we wrote about how we're in a state of energy hoarding - how it's the new gold rush, where the goal is to grab the power before someone else does. The Burgum trade gets more miners in the game, quite literally, but it doesn't go far enough to open claims to all who want to be part of the rush.
The administration is all about picking winners. But every pick comes with a trade.
Meter reading (10 April - 16 April)
A quick read on the numbers shaping the market. The capex, the contracts, the regs, all anchored in the so-what.
2.8GW // Bloom Energy's expanded fuel cell deal with Oracle, the largest behind-the-meter power agreement in data center history. The deal includes a $400m equity warrant that turns Oracle from customer into supply-chain investor, part of its sprawling, interconnected power strategy funded by $100bn+ in debt and $50bn in FY2026 capex alone. Oracle is buying nuclear for the 2030s, utility-scale grid power plus BESS for the mid-term, and Bloom natural gas fuel cells for right now, another piece of the bubble, er, puzzle.
3 // Dominion's non-lithium LDES pilots that are off track. The utility picked the three big US non-lithium vendors -- Enervenue, Eos, and Form – for projects in 2023 that are now canceled (Enervenue) or delayed (Eos and Form). Dominion has been trying to get ahead of a pending Virginia law that calls for 4.5GW of long-duration storage by 2045, but with costs running $8,000–10,000/kW and delivery timelines uncertain, it's struggling to find a technology it can rely on. It is replacing the canceled pilot with 8-hour lithium-ion.
1.75GW // Fervo Energy's new turbine supply deal with Turboden, the largest equipment commitment in next-gen geothermal history. Fervo locked in a three-year binding agreement for nearly three dozen 50MW organic Rankine cycle units from the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries subsidiary, a massive step up from its prior 150MW deal for Utah's Cape Station. Combined with Cape Station's 4.3GW of site potential and an $800m domestic pipe supply deal with Vallourec, Fervo is systematically building out a geothermal supply chain that doesn't exist yet.
15GW // PJM's proposed one-time reliability backstop procurement, a stopgap sitting outside its traditional capacity markets. PJM is staring down a potential 50–60GW capacity shortfall over the next decade, driven largely by rapid large-load growth, and existing market structures aren't clearing new supply fast enough. The backstop would procure roughly 15GW of new capacity in a single shot. But the catch is who can actually participate, because the pool is likely limited to developers already far along in PJM's interconnection queue.
3MW // Minimum threshold for Georgia Power's new "bring your own clean energy" program. The Georgia PSC approved a customer-identified resource program that lets data centers and other large loads find and pay for their own solar, storage, and clean energy projects on Georgia Power's grid. It's a meaningful shift in a vertically integrated state where the utility has historically controlled all generation procurement. But the program is energy-only (no capacity credits) meaning CIR projects won't reduce customers' demand charges or necessarily offset Georgia Power's planned ~10GW buildout, roughly 60% of which is gas. The next IRP will show how regulators will respond, if expansion will be able to happen, and if ratepayers are on the hook.
Explore more Signals on Sightline here.
On the docket
The policies, rulings, and company moves worth watching.
The FY27 budget's energy play. The administration is repurposing Biden-era IIJA funding toward $3.5bn for "rapid deployment of firm baseload power" and $1.2bn for AI infrastructure, including seven supercomputers. The budget also funds domestic critical mineral production and processing pilot-scale demos, stacking bets on energy supply chain self-sufficiency — generation, minerals, and compute in one package. Meanwhile, a $1.5 trillion defense topline includes the largest shipbuilding order since FDR (123 vessels across two budgets), an industrial base play that will compete for the same skilled labor, steel, and supply chain capacity that grid buildout needs.
Nine utilities asking FERC to kill competitive transmission bidding across 18 states. A coalition including Entergy, Xcel, ITC Holdings, Ameren, and others filed at FERC to suspend competitive solicitations in MISO and SPP, arguing Order 1000 adds 16–20 months to timelines and load growth can't wait. Independent developers and consumer advocates fired back immediately. Billions in MISO's Long-Range Transmission Plan are at stake, and FERC's decision sets the template for whether the US builds transmission through competition or incumbent rights of first refusal.
Virginia's new grid utilization law. A pending law will require the state's two major vertically integrated utilities to hand over detailed distribution grid data to regulators, like peak-to-capacity ratios, distribution losses, constrained circuit analysis, and peak performance evaluations. It would kick off studies on if non-wires alternatives like storage and distributed generation can squeeze more out of existing infrastructure.
California’s deadline for VPPs to count as real capacity. SB-913 would force the CPUC, CEC, and CAISO to build a pathway by June 30, 2027 for aggregated DERs (rooftop solar, batteries, smart thermostats, EVs) to earn full resource adequacy credit. And California's DR participation in RA has actually declined even as distributed resources have multiplied.
New & upcoming at Sightline Climate
The latest research, features, and data drops on the Sightline Climate platform.
After our last data center analysis (which was featured in Bloomberg and Axios) clients asked: which projects are actually going to get built? A new report begins to answer that.
We built a derisked pipeline for data centers and scored 710 projects on status, powering plan, developer track record, scale, supply contracts, and offtake.
We found that 2026 will be a record year for data centers, even at a 40% success rate.
Events
Where the market is meeting, and where to find us
📅 Innovation Zero World Congress // London, 28-29 April, 2026 // The UK's leading low-carbon innovation congress, convening 7,500+ senior stakeholders, 300+ speakers, and 300+ solution providers Iigcc to accelerate the transition to a net-zero economy. Let us know if you'll be in town to join our team on site.
📅 SF Climate Week // San Francisco, CA, 18-26 April, 2026 // California's premier climate solutions summit, a decentralized gathering with 700+ events across the Bay Area. We’ll be hosting some events, so let us know if you’ll be in town to join our team on site.
📅 Boston Climate Week // Boston, MA, 3-10 May, 2026 // Boston's inaugural climate action week, expecting 10,000+ attendees across 100+ events, featuring academic and research-driven climate solutions from New England's innovation ecosystem. Let us know if you'll be in town to join our team on site.
Attending an event? Connect with our team.
Interested in diving deeper? Talk to our team and leverage the tactical intelligence that hundreds of energy and investment decision-makers like Southern Company, Tokyo Gas, Jefferies, Galvanize, B Capital, and others use to stay ahead in the energy transition.
