Interior cancels largest solar project in North America
78 comments
·October 14, 2025aauchter
two_handfuls
That's just canceling with extra steps. The journalists have it right in the article you link when they say:
> On Thursday, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) canceled an environmental review of the Esmeralda Seven Solar Project
cjensen
One of the consequences of being part of administration that lies constantly is that it is very difficult to trust they are telling the truth. Since this is based on the Interior Department saying something very different than the company, I'm disinclined to give the benefit of the doubt to the Interior.
paraboli
A tragedy. Killing this and Revolution Wind are some of the most consequential acts of the Trump administration. We are now unable to do large scale grid-connected energy projects and won't be able to take advantage of the incredible advances in efficiency renewables provide. With data centers causing the first increase in per-capita energy usage in decades there's a good chance we have an actual power crisis and the administration's other priorities like reshoring manufacturing become impossible.
alexose
Yep. It has massive ripple effects for manufacturing, especially as more industry transitions away from fossils for heat generation. Energy accounts for around 40% of the opex for steel manufacturing, for instance. Zero chance we build more steel mills if the cost of electricity continues to skyrocket.
The Chinese have the right approach: Bringing the cost-per-watt down using massive deployments of renewables and ultra high voltage transmission. We were already in the backseat, and now we're not even in the same car.
alltheseas
Grid scale solar, and wind bring the price of electricity up, and make business uncompetitive .
https://www.climatedepot.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/char...
rootusrootus
Can't help but notice the reliable pattern of right-wing naming conventions. German Democratic Republic, not at all democratic. Democratic People's Republic of Korea, again not even remotely democratic. Make America Great Again, not in fact trying to make America great. I get it, slogans work and are more important than the reality behind them. But it is depressing nonetheless, to imagine all the nice things and prosperity we could create if we actually did try.
breadwinner
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has bragged he had Jared Kushner "in his pocket." Oil-producing middle-eastern countries, having made significant contributions to Trump family's wealth, have enormous influence over him. If you were the ruler of an oil-producing country and have enormous influence over Trump, what would you have him do for your country?
If it was me, this is what I would have him do: Pull out of the Paris climate accord, cancel renewable energy projects, cancel EV tax credits. Trump has done all that.
In fact Trump went a step further:
Trump is using tariffs to pressure other countries to relax their pledges to fight climate change and instead burn more oil, gas and coal. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/climate/trump-internation...
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darksaints
Mohammed bin Salman and Trump are in each other's pockets. One of Trump's first acts in his first term was to approve the sale of military equipment to Saudi Arabia for the first time. At the time, MBS was the defense minister, and was not the Crown Prince. Almost all western open source intelligence on the matter will state that this act alone was what convinced King Salman to remove Muhammad bin Nayef as Crown Prince, and install MBS in his stead. The deal closed in May, and MBS was made Crown Prince in June. MBS literally owes his role as future King to Donald Trump. Trump would later brag about protecting "our guy" after the whole world condemned him and wanted to cut ties to Saudi Arabia for killing Khashoggi. When MBS did his now infamous 2017 purge of Saudi Billionaires, imprisoning them in a hotel and confiscating their wealth or securing their loyalty, he was likely doing it with CIA-sourced intel, hand delivered by Kushner [0] who had finally received the necessary security clearances which the Trump administration directly intervened in issuing [1].
In October 2022, literally a week after meeting Putin for the first time, Elon Musk started mirroring Russian propaganda [2], even though he had been a staunch supporter of Ukraine until that point. A week later, he would announce that he had secured funding to buy Twitter. Immediately, he reversed course on his "Free Speech Absolutism" and started pumping out right wing propaganda. Not long after, he would announce that he was leaving the democratic party, and not long after that, he would endorse Trump, and then not long after that, he would begin campaigning with trump and becoming his single largest donor and chief election meddler.
When Musk was forced to disclose his investors, the list [3] included:
* the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia
* several Saudi hedge funds, including those owned by billionaires that miraculously survived the 2017 purge with their wealth intact.
* several Silicon Valley VCs who had recently announced raising significant funding from Saudi Arabia, including one that had just hired the sons of sanctioned Russian Oligarchs in Putin's inner circle [4].
* several individuals with ties to Saudi Arabia or Russia.
* (unrelated but hilarious and unsurprising) P Diddy, who knew he was in future need of a presidential pardon.
TL;DR: Mohammed bin Salman owes his position as Crown Prince to Donald Trump, and Donald Trump owes his second term to Mohammed bin Salman.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/saudi-crown-prince-jared-kus...
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/437292-kushners-...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2022/10/04/1126714896/elon-musk-ukraine-...
[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/x-investors-helped-elon-musk-...
[4] https://www.aa.com.tr/en/science-technology/x-shareholders-l...
jauntywundrkind
Follow-up to this recent submission. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45553487
6.2GW is huge. What an incredible sad loss.
Meanwhile there is a beautiful article showing in photos China's recent 16.2GW solar install Talatan in the Qinghai Province. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/business/china-solar-tibe...
nextworddev
[flagged]
alexose
Okay, how much pollution was caused creating it? How does that compare to the expected lifecycle of other power plants?
feyman_r
can you attribute a source for this loss? Since its not talked about, can you share from a credible source?
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viraptor
How much? And do you mean relative to some other sources, or just in general?
Loggias
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zoklet-enjoyer
This doesn't surprise me. Doug Burgum is very friendly with oil companies.
legitster
> The Interior Department in a statement Friday afternoon said that the solar developers and BLM had “agreed to change their approach for the Esmeralda 7 Solar Project in Nevada. Instead of pursuing a programmatic level environmental analysis, the applicants will now have the option to submit individual project proposals to the BLM to more effectively analyze potential impacts.”
What does this even mean? Why the hell does it have to be so hard to get anything done in this country?
> “Friends of Nevada Wilderness is thrilled that this poorly sited project is dead,” said Shaaron Netherton, the group’s executive director. “In the push to get this particular project through, the BLM ignored the importance of this region’s cultural significance, biological significance and the fact that it is one of the most intact landscapes remaining in Nevada,” Netherton added.
I will also save some ire for these people. This is literally desert wasteland sitting alongside a freeway. It's hard to believe that someone spent time and money on this cause.
aeonfox
> This is literally desert wasteland sitting alongside a freeway
"Desert wasteland" teems with life, just maybe not the kind that most people care about. Land use is one of the sticking points of the energy transition, both for agriculture and biodiversity.
One of the only plusses to nuclear power is reduced land use, though it has it's own water use and waste issues. Much better alternatives are rooftop solar and residential batteries, and grid scale batteries located closer to where they are needed for industry, commerce, and high-density housing. It really kills the need for these large scale deployments and the costly transmission lines to service them.
igor47
We need both! rooftop solar alone is not going to solve our energy needs. If projects like this don't get built, the realistic alternative in the US these days is burning coal, which is both expensive and destructive to the ecology and to health.
aeonfox
About 3/4 of my rooftop solar goes back into the grid. A neighborhood grid-scale battery could sop that up while the market is cheap and dispatch it when the sun is down. Even if I had a battery, it would quickly saturate. Rooftop solar can deliver far more than most households can use. And let's not forget parking lots and commercial real estate. With enough incentive these places can become mini power plants of their own, and provide a nice little passive income for the land owner.
ericbarrett
> "Desert wasteland" teems with life, just maybe not the kind that most people care about.
As somebody who lives in the Southwest US, thank you. There are so many people on HN who think the desert is just Martian dunes to be paved over like a Civ tile.
Just in the hills around me there are 30 species of plant, century-old trees, snakes, lizards, horny toads, bobcats, coyotes, hare, quail, multitudes of ants, the incredible red velvet mite, roadrunners (yes they’re real), flies, wasps, native bumblebees, mice, god it goes on and on. And the soil is encrusted, literally, with countless microbiota. In fact a single vehicle smashing it can damage that crust for years.
I know we need renewables, and yes, the Southwest is a great place for solar. But there is real ecological damage to some of the most pristine places left in America involved in developing unused land.
I take no position on the development which is under discussion here, or whether the cancellation was fair. I haven’t researched it, and probably never will. I’m just sick of the “it’s just desert, who cares, paint it with solar/oil fields/asphalt” attitude that’s everywhere.
aeonfox
Hard agree. Some of my favorite birding spots are in grasslands and wetlands sitting next to highways. Places that would be overlooked by most people.
askvictor
The longer term view is that climate change is a risk to biodiversity.
mgerdts
Corn fields have already killed biodiversity. Get rid of the ethanol mandate, replace gas cars with electric, replace corn fields with solar fields with an understory of native plants. The electrified car fleet will use no fossil fuels and about a third of the generated electricity.
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2025/04/25/ethanol-corn-uses-far...
> U.S. corn growth for fuel – not food occupies 29.7 million acres. A study from Cornell University finds that corn grown for ethanol fuel requires 31 times as much land as solar per unit of energy.
> Moreover, the researchers found that if 46% of the land currently used to farm corn for ethanol was converted to solar, the projects would generate enough electricity for the United States to decarbonize its electricity system by its 2050 goal.
aeonfox
Taking any even longer term view, a much reduced human population could be a boon for biodiversity. Life will find a way, but billions of humans will die of hunger (and potentially wars over resources) in the meantime.
mayhemducks
I think Nuclear power definitely needs to be a big part of the energy mix - it just has so many benefits.
I think rooftop solar is also excellent, but only in theory. In practice, I feel like rooftop solar allows public utilities to abdicate their responsibility. It diminishes the affect of collective pressure on major energy producers to hold up their end of the bargain to invest in clean energy because it shifts costs to homeowners and effectively makes them a very weak competitor to big energy producers. A power grid full of smart systems and robust transmission lines is an amazing resource - but it is very capital intensive. How do we replace that with rooftop solar that many homeowners seek loans to install? How does that incentivize power companies, who are allowed to operate monopolies, to invest in clean energy infrastructure?
aeonfox
> How do we replace that with rooftop solar that many homeowners seek loans to install?
Australia has managed to do it. Installers are tripping over each other to put solar on roofs here.
> How does that incentivize power companies, who are allowed to operate monopolies, to invest in clean energy infrastructure?
Arbitrage. If every house has solar and battery, that's a huge load off the grid, but there's still apartments, businesses, and industry that need power, especially at night. Grid-scale batteries take the excess from households, and distribute to those that need power. There would still be need for grid-scale renewable generation, just hopefully not built on existing nature reserves.
colechristensen
Desert solar installations have been shown to increase biodiversity, particularly in places which have spreading deserts. The shading panels moderate the high and low daily temperatures increasing moisture retention and helping plant life take hold.
aeonfox
Remediation of desertified and degraded land makes total sense, but I think the objection here was that the land is already bio-diverse, just in a way that many people might overlook.
trhway
>Land use is one of the sticking points of the energy transition, both for agriculture and biodiversity.
it may be a plus for solar if it can be shown that the shadow from the panels is a good thing in those cases
There is also probably enough toxic/polluted wasteland around so that solar can be built there without taking "good" lands.
It may be that AI will happen to be the savior of this planet - by creating huge demand for energy it will allow the cheapest - i.e. renewables - to get into dominating market position, and may be Big Tech would even get into and productize the fusion.
aeonfox
> There is also probably enough toxic/polluted wasteland around so that solar can be built there without taking "good" lands.
Agreed.
I think solar installations would make more sense for remediation of desertified or polluted land instead of disrupting existing nature reserves.
dpe82
NIMBYs are everywhere.
potato3732842
>What does this even mean? Why the hell does it have to be so hard to get anything done in this country?
Because some engineering specialty lobbyist wants it to be that way to drive business to his clients, he cooks up some narrative about how more review will save the planet and HN takes it at face value.
You see this crap with every sort of permitting. Except perhaps in the rare cases it constrains the biggest entities (e.g. DuPont dumping crap in the river or whatever) all these BS processes and requirements do is raise the richness floor of who can play the game. The BigCos can pay for the pretexts to get the permission they need to keep doing whatever, free from the competition from everyone down-market who can't afford that.
dylan604
> all these BS processes and requirements do is raise the richness floor of who can play the game.
This is usually preceded by those that can afford to have played got to that point because they too did not follow any regulations when they started. They are only now willing to follow regulations because they can afford to knowing that it is a worthy expense to keep new competition from starting
hdseggbj
They also enrich the parasitic bureaucracy. Climate change is a scam. Not because it isn't changing, of course it's changing, but humans can't and won't change it back, nor should they bother trying.
What they should do, scientifically, is adapt, like all organisms.
The irony is those demanding we change our behavior to reverse climate change are the ones actually fighting to keep humans from changing by adapting to changing climatic conditions, and so they are the biggest threat to human survival as a species.
We're gonna burn every deep of oil. Petroleum use goes up every year, regardless.
qiqitori
Not talking about Trump here, as I very much doubt he cares about jack shit. Some conservationists are happy that the project was canceled. Sure, the best place to put solar is probably on top of existing structures, not in "one of the most intact landscapes remaining" in the area (if that is even true). But what if just roofs isn't realistic, or just not enough? Could they have chosen a better site from an ecological perspective? Did someone deliberately choose the site to pit one kind of environmentalist against another kind of environmentalist? When you try and think like a politician whose only objective is to "look good" to different camps at the same time, it doesn't seem that outlandish an idea. I'd just like to tell the conservationists that mining coal or oil isn't exactly great for the landscape and animals in the mine's area either, and burning it is bad for all kinds of ecosystems around the world.
api
If you look deeply into it, it would not surprise me to learn that some kind of natural gas industry group bankrolls these activists.
Of course maybe I’m overthinking it and assuming a conspiracy where stupidity is a simpler explanation. There were climate activists protesting wind farms in Germany.
zdragnar
People will protest literally any use of land at all. They imagine the current conditions are pristine perfection, "unspoiled", and see any human activity upon it as something to be opposed to.
hdseggbj
Solar companies fund the initiative, so it being funded or by whom is irrelevant. Everyone involved is motivated by self interest.
camillomiller
In the meantime, China has entered the chat…
anon291
Solar may be intermittent but tons of electrical usage can be made intermittent thus freeing capacity for non intermittent uses. I'm so tired of these arguments.
Trump claims to want to bring back manufacturing. Manufacturing is material inputs plus labor or automation. American labor is expensive. The only way to compete is automation.
Time and time again studies show that energy cost is the main determinant of factory output and manufacturing capacity. Cheap energy equals more stuff. That's basically it. Anyone who is canceling energy projects is not brining back manufacturing.
nradov
If we want to bring most types of manufacturing back then we need cheap, reliable base load power. It's often not economically feasible to shut a plant down and wait out a spike in electricity spot prices due to batch processing limits, thermal cycling, labor scheduling, and capital depreciation concerns. It's not a simple thing like turning off your home water heater for a few hours.
conradev
Yeah. Less energy, less industry. Energy policy is industrial policy.
adriand
The US is losing thousands of manufacturing jobs under Trump. Major manufacturers are booking huge tariff-related losses. What is propping up the US economy right now is the AI infrastructure buildout, but the energy needs for this sector are huge. It’s complete insanity to try and kill solar, which is the cheapest and by far the fastest way to bring new capacity onto the grid. Regular Americans who aren’t part of the AI boom are facing manufacturing job losses, more expensive goods and skyrocketing electricity prices.
nomel
> but tons of electrical usage can be made intermittent
I'm not familiar with large scale electrical. Do you have examples?
legitster
Aluminum refining from bauxite is a pretty classic example. It's very power intensive and will literally be done wherever and whenever they get the cheapest electricity.
Bitcoin mining is a more unfortunate one but also pretty typical.
ezfe
A good example: training AI models can be scheduled to occur when electricity is cheaper (aka solar power is active). That is just one example, but many things can happen throughout the day when power is cheaper.
phil21
The issue is capital expense.
Buying a bunch of expensive equipment and operating it 10 hours a day vs. 24 hours a day is usually not economical. The uses where this make sense are quite rare.
For example training AI models is often cited - but when you're buying $1B of GPUs to stuff in a datacenter that have a 3 year useful lifespan - you are effectively cutting your amortization schedule in half. It would require some really expensive energy to make that pencil out.
Energy storage of various types are probably the currently best bet, but those also have the same problem. Vehicle charging is a clear win, but also a low hanging fruit that is already well in play.
rz2k
In such a case, isn't the "3 year useful lifespan" almost entirely related to energy cost?
Why not put machines on 24 hour schedules for their first couple years, then cheap intermittent power for the next five?
don_neufeld
Example: EV charging is largely schedule based (mine charges overnight only - because rate plan), and can be made demand based pretty easily.
dghlsakjg
Many large industrial sites will cut deals with power companies for very cheap rates in exchange for not running during peak hours. Classic example is aluminum refining, and, depending on process, steel refining.
If you can do demand based pricing, you could even end up with new time arbitrage business models. A battery farm or hydro facility stores energy when rates are cheap and discharges when rates go up.
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lc9er
> Trump claims
It’s safe at this point to always assume the opposite of what he claims. Seems pretty clear he and his cohorts are going to cancel everything, funnel money into their pockets, then buy up everything for pennies on the dollar. Everyone in the US, and perhaps globally, will suffer while they create an ultra-corrupt New Gilded Age that makes the first one look like amateur hour.
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DFHippie
> Trump claims to want to bring back manufacturing.
Trump claims a lot of stuff. It's all gaslighting*.
* Speaking of things Trump would claim to be for. Electric lighting is effete foolishness that makes your testicles shrivel!
ClownsAbound
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“The BLM did not cancel the project. During routine discussions prior to the lapse in appropriations, the proponents and BLM agreed to change their approach for the Esmeralda 7 Solar Project in Nevada,” said an Interior spokesperson in an email Friday.
“Instead of pursuing a programmatic level environmental analysis, the applicants will now have the option to submit individual project proposals to the BLM to more effectively analyze potential impacts,” the email continued.
https://www.rgj.com/story/news/2025/10/13/trump-nv-solar-pro...