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