Gas Lines Skipped, Gas Wells Leaking

Floating offshore wind works. Demonstration and small projects in Europe, Asia and one US site in Maine are producing power, and several platform designs have been tested at sea. Larger projects of 10 or more turbines are behind early projections, though. A wind trade association recently warned that "the commercialisation window cannot be assumed to remain open indefinitely." Nathaniel Eisen's report for Inside Climate News follows the technology from a University of Maine lab to its present difficulties. Its main argument is that international collaboration built the industry and is what keeps it alive now.

What a floating turbine is and why it's hard

Picture a buoyant triangular steel or concrete platform about the size of a baseball field. On top sits a turbine taller than the London Eye (about 135 metres). Mooring lines tie it to the seabed and cables carry its power to the grid. The advantage over fixed-bottom turbines is location. Floating platforms can go far from shore, where winds are stronger and few people live. Where the seabed drops off steeply near the coast, as it does off California, floating has been seen as the only offshore option.

Maine's path

Habib Dagher heads the University of Maine's Advanced Structures and Composites Center. He traces Maine's effort to the 2008 energy crisis, when heating fuel passed $4 a gallon. (Today it is above $6.) The governor asked his lab what to do. Dagher visited one of Norway's earliest floating demonstration turbines and set up a program to design platforms suited to the deep Gulf of Maine and to local supply chains. In 2010 nearly 60% of Maine voters approved a bond to fund the research.

The result is now in the water off Castine: a concrete platform shaped like a plus sign. It is a quarter-scale model of the center's latest design and carries a 108-foot turbine. Cadets from the Maine Maritime Academy towed it into place in May 2025. Chief engineer Anthony Viselli calls Maine a "Goldilocks" site, with moderate water depths, a strong wind resource and waves that "aren't that bad." He says a full-scale version could withstand waves of about 60 feet.

The model also serves as a test bed for others. Dublin Offshore, an Irish mooring company, is testing a shock-absorbing mooring device on it after winning a competition for UK firms that the center co-sponsored. The center has also published the specifications and software parameters for its alternative steel platform. Emma Edwards, a floating-wind researcher at Oxford University, called that "incredibly instrumental" for outside research.

Building consent alongside the hardware

In 2021 Maine set up the Offshore Wind Research Consortium. It brings together state and tribal governments, fishing groups, environmental groups and developers, who jointly decide which questions about effects on fisheries and coastal communities to fund research on. Co-chair Alison Bates of Colby College says choosing priorities together has built "a shared understanding," and other jurisdictions have asked her how it works. The consortium paid for Maine fishing representatives to visit an operating five-turbine floating project east of Aberdeen in Scotland. Scottish fishers turned out to share many of their questions about the long-term effects of floating structures and cables. The other co-chair, groundfisherman Terry Alexander, remains skeptical of offshore wind. He still values the consortium's work collecting baseline data, so that changes after turbines go in can actually be measured.

The cost gap

• double that of fixed-bottom wind
• up to three times that of a combined-cycle gas plant
• roughly equal to new nuclear

These figures come from Lazard and Department of Energy data. Those other technologies are mature, so floating wind has more room to get cheaper. The supporting infrastructure is also costly. Ports for floating wind need large staging areas right next to deep water, and WindShot studies priced new or upgraded ports at more than $1 billion each. Ports, supply chains and transmission lines all have to exist before a big project can go ahead.

Policy reversal

Inflation and policy shifts had already delayed auctions and permits in Europe and Asia. Some blame overambitious early targets. US policy then turned. Last December the Trump administration tried to halt five fixed-bottom offshore wind projects that were under construction, citing unspecified national security concerns. Courts rejected every attempt, but developers still lost millions of dollars a day. The administration has effectively stopped new offshore leasing. It has also bought back existing leases, some suited to floating wind, including from Invenergy, which held leases off California and Maine. In several of these deals the lessees agreed to reinvest the money in gas plants and export terminals in other regions. California, Maine and at least seven other states have sued to void the agreements. The administration also cancelled grants for wind ports in California and in Salem, Massachusetts. Sholler says financiers and developers now see the US as a "politically risky" market, and it is unclear whether they will return.

What continues

Edwards says some US researchers have struggled to keep collaborating, for lack of funding or because they can't be seen publicly doing the work. Work continues elsewhere:

The article does not answer the central question: whether costs can fall far enough without commercial-scale projects to drive them down, and where those first large projects will be built.

The problem: pipes paid for by everyone, used by no one

PG&E said it couldn't wait. That week it dug up her yard and installed a new pipe. She paid nothing directly. The work, which in PG&E's territory typically costs $20,000 to $30,000 plus interest and operations and maintenance costs, is recovered from all gas customers over the life of the infrastructure. This is how regulated utilities normally finance capital projects. A few years later the pipe sits unused. "Now, I have no gas in my house," Borgeson said. "But the customers all around me are paying for that pipeline for the next 50 years."

The general issue is that utilities replace service lines on safety and age schedules without checking whether the household plans to keep using gas. Each replacement adds decades of cost to the gas system at a time when state policy, including California's goal of a carbon-neutral economy by 2045, points toward using less gas.

How the law works

The central rule is that the incentive must be smaller than the cost of replacing the line. The utility avoids a capital expense that every gas customer would otherwise repay, spends a smaller amount on the incentive, and the difference becomes a saving shared across all gas customers.

The compromise that passed

The utilities' objection

San Diego Gas and Electric and SoCalGas opposed the bill on cost-shift grounds. A gas network's costs are largely fixed, so as customers leave, the people who remain carry a larger share. Kiki Velez, who leads NRDC's work on an equitable gas transition, accepts that this is a real problem the state must deal with across the transition. She argues it doesn't apply to this law, which "is instead about trying to encourage people to leave at the exact time when they are saving money for everyone else by leaving." In other words, the departure is timed to cancel a new cost rather than leave an existing one behind. The article doesn't measure how much fixed cost remains with other customers when a household leaves.

Precedents and imitators

What happens next, and what's unresolved

Several details are still open:

• Notice. It isn't settled how far ahead households will hear about the option. "The worst case is you don't hear about [the incentive] until the last minute," Borgeson said. RMI recommends one to five years, at the point when the utility schedules the replacement. That would give households time to plan a project costing thousands of dollars.
• Uptake. The article reports no participation data from New York, so it's unclear what share of eligible households accept the offer.
• Scale. At 1% of customers, the cap limits how much of the $7-billion-a-year replacement pipeline the program can touch.
• Incentive adequacy. Fully electrifying a home can cost more than the incentive. The article doesn't say what households pay out of pocket, or whether electric bills afterward help or hurt them.

The law is a test of a narrow idea: when a pipe would otherwise be replaced, paying the household to leave gas can cost less than the pipe. How much it saves will depend on the rules the regulator writes and how many households accept the offer.

How a forgotten well ended up beside starter homes

J.D. Collins drilled the well in 1955 into the Austin Chalk, the formation that also supplied the limestone for the Alamo. At the time the site was rural land on the edge of San Antonio. The well changed hands several times, from Rainer Energy to Arben Oil to Black Jack Services, and its output dwindled. Black Jack plugged it in 2006. That same year Toyota opened a plant on the city's South Side, and development spread toward the Medina River.

Nobody thought about the well again until 2019, when construction began on the subdivision. Developers found gas leaking at the site, and in April 2019 RRC inspectors confirmed that methane and hydrogen sulfide were coming out of the ground. By then Black Jack was in delinquent status with the commission, so the state paid for the replug. A staffer wrote afterward that the fix "seemed to have worked this time around."

It hadn't. Here is the sequence after the original 2006 plug:

• 2019: first state replug
• January 2022: another replug. A welder found a flammable methane leak during the job and refused to keep working
• August 2022: another replug
• May 2023: the fifth plugging overall
• November 2024: the sixth. Drilling vibrations shook nearby houses, and one resident says her foundation cracked

Meanwhile, homes filled in around the lot. The developers left the well's parcel empty, and the homeowners association now owns it. In 2025 the RRC put up a permanent black metal fence with a sign reading "CAUTION flammable gas." On New Year's Eve 2026, a resident says, a firework briefly set the well on fire.

Why plugging hasn't worked

What the monitoring shows

Krystal Solis lives downwind, less than 60 feet from the well. She has had headaches since 2024 and has seen liquid bubble up after rain and stain the pavement orange. She and her neighbor Amanda Pacheco didn't know about the soil methane until reporters told them. "I just want to know if it's dangerous," Solis said.

A wider problem with weak rules

The subdivision has at least three more plugged wells, and reporters found no surface markers at any of them. The RRC's own GIS map, its online map of well locations, puts this well 110 feet northeast of where it actually is, according to oilfield surveyor Jackie Portsmouth of G-Forensic. Since Texas oil drilling began in the 1800s, hundreds of thousands of wells have been drilled in the state. Many were abandoned without plugs or plugged to standards weaker than today's.

The article lists similar incidents elsewhere. In 2021, hydrogen sulfide from a legacy well caused an explosion in Wheatley, Ontario, that injured 20 people. In 2007, a house under construction in Trinidad, Colorado, blew up over an abandoned gas well. In October 2025, homes in Newport Beach, California, were evacuated because of methane from a 1920s-era well. And this year, a plugged well failed at a Baptist church in Grandfalls, Texas, flooding the property with toxic wastewater. Adam Peltz of the Environmental Defense Fund says plugged-well failures "seem to be rare," but "we also don't know how often it happens." Nobody tracks them systematically.

The legal gaps are concrete:

Scott argues that neither the oil industry nor the real estate industry has any reason to disclose old wells. Julie Range of Commission Shift, a group that watches the RRC, wants disclosure requirements and building setbacks. The developers and the builders, D.R. Horton and LGI Homes, did not respond to requests for comment.

Still unanswered

The article leaves several things open. It doesn't say how big or how concentrated the soil plumes are, whether any gas has been measured inside homes, what the new plugging method will be, or how much the effort will cost on top of the $1 million already spent. Regulators have also never given residents a clear answer on whether it is safe to stay.

How the seat math works

Until last year all five PSC seats were held by Republicans. As energy affordability became a national political issue in 2025, Democrats won two of them. One of those new commissioners, Peter Hubbard, has to run again this year because of a scheduling quirk. Another Democrat, Shelia Edwards, is running for an open seat. Democrats need both races. Hubbard winning only holds the current 2–3 split, and Edwards winning as well makes it 3–2 in their favour.

What's at stake on the grid

Georgia expects a wave of new grid investment, driven largely by AI data centers. The article sketches two paths for Georgia Power.

• Build gas for every announced data center. At one realistic extreme, the utility adds up every data center that tech companies say they want to build in the state, then builds enough gas turbines to cover all of it.
• A more critical commission. Regulators could question those demand projections and push for a bigger share of solar paired with batteries.

The article argues for the second path. Gas turbines keep getting more expensive and their delivery dates keep slipping, it says, while solar plus storage is cheap and fairly quick to build. Because sunlight costs nothing, solar would also shield customers from rising gas plant costs and lock in stable prices. That is the article's case, and it gives no cost-per-megawatt-hour figures or delivery timelines to back the comparison. The supply crunch for gas turbines is widely reported across the industry, though.

The record SEIA is running against

SEIA's case against the current majority rests on three points from its record.

Why a quarter-million dollars might matter

$250,000 is small next to the $77.6 million spent on Georgia's US Senate race. Utility commission races, though, draw little money or attention, so a few hundred thousand dollars can make a dent. With so few voters aware these races exist, ads that simply announce the election can shift the result.

For SEIA, the spending is a strategy test. It is the group's largest election investment since the 2025 budget law, which cut federal tax credits for renewable energy despite heavy industry lobbying. Over the past 20 years solar has grown from a sideshow in the power sector into a driving force. But it has never built a political operation that can match long-established fossil fuel lobbies.

Her stated approach is to concentrate the money. "If you've got one or two million, you need to spend that money really wisely," she said. The group looked for places where politicians were blocking clean energy, then narrowed the list to races with tight margins and affordable levels of spending. Those were the races where a limited budget could "move the needle the furthest."

A different strategy from other clean energy money

A separate group of clean energy investors and entrepreneurs has taken a more aggressive line through the Invest in Tomorrow Coalition PAC. It targets politicians who led the push against clean energy policy in last year's federal budget fight. In this year's primaries all five of its targets lost, and a pro-renewables Republican it backed won. For the general election it has named a new slate of targets and committed $15 million to negative ads against them.

SEIA has stayed out of that effort. CEO Tim Pawlenty has said the group is "in the business of making more friends, not more enemies." The Georgia race shows what SEIA does instead: put small amounts of money into low-profile races where the payoff for clean energy could be large.

What's left open

The article doesn't report polling or vote margins for either race, so there is no way to judge how close they are. It also doesn't say whether a Democratic majority could revisit the 10-gigawatt approval already granted, or would only shape future plans. There is no estimate of what a solar-heavy alternative would cost ratepayers either. If Democrats win, Bosh says SEIA will point to the result as proof that small, targeted spending works. "Our goal is to raise a lot more in the future," she said.

The solar deal

Some rough math, which is mine and not Heatmap's: $1.2 billion for 700 MW comes to about $1.7 million per megawatt, or roughly $1.7 per watt. Buying farms that are nearly finished means paying for construction that someone else has already done and risked. Permits, grid connection approvals and building are largely complete. In return, the buyer avoids the stages where projects most often slip or die.

Heatmap's point is that taking money to exit offshore wind did not mean TotalEnergies was leaving U.S. renewables. The piece doesn't explain the reasoning. It doesn't say whether the solar farms have long-term power purchase contracts, who sold them, or whether storage is included. A plausible reading, though the article doesn't confirm it, is that onshore solar in Texas and Ohio faces far less federal political risk than wind projects that need federal seabed leases.

Oil: diesel deal outweighed by attacks on Saudi Arabia

At an industry summit in Riyadh, executives from Western oil majors pulled out at the last minute after missiles struck the city's airport. Saudi Aramco's CEO Amin Nasser said no country could protect all the supply routes off Saudi Arabia's coasts by itself: "No nation, even one as capable and confident as ours, can safeguard them alone."

Nuclear: Korea wants a piece of Westinghouse

Many Koreans see the settlement as unfair. KEPCO's CEO, Kim Dong-cheol, told the newspaper Business Korea that reports of a $2 billion payment to Westinghouse for every plant were a misunderstanding. "It is true that $2 billion is the ceiling, but it does not mean we will pay all of it," he said. He also said KEPCO is considering buying an equity stake of 5% to 10% in Westinghouse. Kaufman reports that every U.S. source he asked dismissed that possibility.

Lithium: EnergyX lands a large offtake deal

Britain cuts heat pump support

The British government plans to cut hundreds of millions from its program to replace boilers in England and Wales. The program provides £9,000, nearly $12,000, toward switching to a heat pump. The Financial Times reports the cut has drawn a backlash against the ruling Labour Party. It is part of Prime Minister Andy Burnham's plan to trim £2 billion from the budget to pay for more military spending. The review began in June under his predecessor, Keir Starmer. Starmer singled out the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, which had just received a 16% annual budget increase to pay for the Sizewell C nuclear plant, carbon capture infrastructure and home insulation.

The timing contrasts with calls elsewhere to speed up heat pumps. Heating prices are high this winter because fossil fuel supply is tight, and Berkeley professor Daniel Aldana Cohen has argued the U.S. needs a "wartime mobilization" on heat pump production.

Kicker

Ford stopped making its all-electric F-150 Lightning pickup last year. Bloomberg reports that used Lightnings now sell for 50% to 60% of their original sticker price, a level one expert called "a sweet spot," and that the truck has become one of the most sought-after used EVs.