Trump officials cancel major solar project in latest hit to renewable energy | Esmeralda 7 would have been one of biggest solar power projects and produced enough energy to power 2m homes

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/10/trump-officials-drop-major-solar-power-project-in-another-renewable-energy-attack

by silence7

9 comments

  2. Check out r/vegaslocals to see how concerned many of my neighbors are about the cost of electricity down here, especially during the summer months when we are running our ACs. I can tell you that both Republicans and Democrats want low electric bills, and canceling this project doesn’t seem to serve anyone in Southern Nevada well. Very frustrating, especially given the comment “We will not approve wind or farmer destroying Solar.” A ton of the land in Southern Nevada is not suitable for farming.

  3. Once again, I’d like to ask where my “both sides are the same” friends are at. They have been oddly absent since the election…

  5. I am a huge proponent that we need to educate more people about climate change, that it’s an existential threat, and that we don’t have time to be messing around. But I’ve also come to realize that around me there are people who agree with me, people who I can sway with climate change talk, and an enormous number of people who the threat just doesn’t resonate with. It’s too long of a tail, I guess. They can’t wrap their heads around it. Many of them are this way because they’re struggling so much in the HERE and NOW that they can’t afford to be fearful of things on the horizon.

    I think the best thing that people who understand this stuff who talk to folks who don’t, journalists, policy wonks, LinkedInfluencers, cleantech CEOs…. everyone can do about these reliable, sturdy, affordable energy projects being shut down is ask, “So where else is the power going to come from?” This plant was going to produce enough power for 2 million homes (or approximately 50-100 data centers), where will we get that power now?

    Good ole American natural gas plants? 5-8 year wait time on getting the components to build it, plus pipeline infrastructure takes years to approve. Nope. (Also more expensive on average than utility scale storage+solar)

    Coal? This big promised rebirth of coal? The SAVE COAL, MINE BABY MINE federal government just had to cancel coal lease auctions in WY and MT because the single bid they received from the Navajo Transitional Energy Company was FRACTIONS of pennies on the dollar of what the mine was valued at. It would’ve been a huge loss on paper for the Federal government. So that industry is dead dead. (Also, in some cases as much as 3x as expensive per MWh than utility-scale storage+solar)

    Nuclear? See you in 15 years. [https://thirdact.org/georgia/2024/06/09/plant-vogtle-the-true-cost-of-nuclear-power-in-the-u-s/](https://thirdact.org/georgia/2024/06/09/plant-vogtle-the-true-cost-of-nuclear-power-in-the-u-s/) (At best 2x as expensive as utility scale storage+solar)

    What’s the plan as these billionaires build their data centers? I’ll tell you. Supply gets tight, prices go up (talking 2-3x your current electricity bill), and tech companies offer to pay cash-strapped utilities a significantly higher rate to ensure their data centers don’t turn off when there’s not enough to go around. So here you are, rid of the terror of these solar farms, in the dark, paying for data centers that you can’t use because you need to conserve your phone battery.

  7. Imagine literally declaring an “energy emergency” and then shutting down new energy projects?

    I feel like this should be a lawsuit to stop his “emergency.”

    He shouldn’t be able to claim special emergency powers based on energy, while actively saying “we don’t need this new energy, shut it down.”

  8. “2M homes” is funny because almost all the new energy infrastructure in the US is just powering AI data centers for Meta, Oracle, Tesla, Microsoft, Google.

    There are only 1.3M homes in Nevada.

    They’ll always use homes as the metric because we can understand the scale. They’re canceling this but approving GW-scale natural gas plants all over the country. We’re just cooked.

  9. The propaganda machine by Mr Zuckerberg, Chinese government and Mr Musk as well as Google are big part of this. The algorithms may even have evolved beyond the intent of the owners in the effort to get clicks and user data to crunch for their AIs.
    When the energy becomes scarce will the data centers or private homes be cut off?
    They managed to re-program the mind of a great part of the once great American people and turned them to worker bees of the hive.

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