Nevada’s Lost Sunlight: What Esmeralda 7 Tells Us About America’s Energy Future – CleanTechnica

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When the Bureau of Land Management quietly changed a single line on its website this month, almost nobody noticed. There was no press conference, no formal announcement, no congressional testimony. Yet with that edit, one of the largest clean energy projects in the world ceased to exist. Esmeralda 7, a proposed 6.2 GW solar and battery installation in the Nevada desert, simply vanished from the list of active reviews. Its cancellation is more than a bureaucratic footnote. It is a marker of how the United States, under the Trump administration, is running away from the cheapest energy in human history.

Esmeralda 7 was designed to cover an enormous swath of public land, an area roughly the size of Las Vegas, and to supply enough electricity to power millions of homes. Its developers included major names like NextEra, Invenergy, and Arevia, who were prepared to invest billions. The project had advanced through a draft Environmental Impact Statement and was awaiting final approval. Its Record of Decision had been expected in early 2025, which would have unlocked the rights to build. That was before Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and his team replaced the system that had guided renewable development on federal land for a decade with a new set of rules that raised barriers, limited acreage, and inserted multiple new layers of political review. The policy shift was not random. It was deliberate.

The official explanation is procedural. The Interior Department says the “programmatic review” was withdrawn so that developers could resubmit individual projects. But that polite phrasing hides the substance of the decision. Esmeralda 7’s scale and efficiency depended on the shared environmental studies, pooled grid interconnection, and joint permitting process that the Bureau had developed. Once those were cancelled, the economics collapsed. Each subproject would now need its own full review, new biological studies, and new mitigation plans. A project that made sense together no longer made sense apart. The likelihood is that the majority of developers will simply walk away, a common occurrence in Trump’s America, where anti-business federal actions are daily occurrences. In regulatory terms, the BLM withdrawal is death by fragmentation.

This was not an isolated act. Across the Interior Department, a new policy regime has taken hold. Renewable projects on public land now face a “capacity density” test, which rates them with a nonsensical megawatts per acre measure and penalizes the natural spatial footprint of solar and wind. As always, land leasing costs are baked into the cost of energy, and energy density is irrelevant as a metric outside of that. Every new project must now pass through Secretary-level signoff instead of delegated approval. The fees on right-of-way leases have been raised. In effect, the government has decided that large clean energy projects are less desirable uses of public land than oil and gas extraction, which are exempt from most of the same scrutiny. In the name of fairness, the administration has created a tilted playing field.

The consequences will be felt first in Nevada. NV Energy, the state’s main utility, projects that data center electricity consumption will rise 373% by 2030, lifting the system’s peak load from 9 GW to 11 GW. Esmeralda 7 alone could have covered that growth, stabilizing prices and giving Nevada room to attract more industries that depend on affordable power. Instead, the state will meet its new demand the old way, with gas-fired generation, imports, and higher bills. The irony is difficult to miss. The administration’s speeches celebrate “energy abundance,” yet its policies create artificial scarcity.

To be clear, it will be very difficult for Nevada to build new gas generation. The manufacturers of gas turbines haven’t invested in new factory capacity because they know it’s a dying market, and can’t and won’t scale manufacturing rapidly. As a result, turbines have years long waiting lists. Deep-pocketed internet giants and Tesla can leap to the front of the queue by throwing money hand over fist at the manufacturers for behind-the-meter turbines, but normal developers and utilities don’t have that luxury. Deep-pocketed firms can also leap to the front of the queue for transformers, which are also in short supply, in part due to the rapid electrification of the world, and in part due to Trump’s tariffs cutting off inexpensive, high-quality transformers from China, increasing the cost of transformers from everywhere else, and increasing the cost of aluminum and steel for domestically manufactured transformers.

The underlying economics have not changed. Utility-scale solar and onshore wind remain the lowest-cost sources of new electricity in the United States. In strong solar regions, utility-scale projects typically deliver power in the $30 to $45 per MWh range, while onshore wind in the best resource areas often falls between $25 and $40 per MWh. Both are well below the cost of new coal or natural gas generation. Battery storage costs continue to fall, even with Trump’s tariffs raising its costs, and when paired with renewables, they deliver firm, dispatchable power cheaper than building new fossil generation. These are not climate arguments. They are cost arguments. Any policymaker focused on keeping consumer prices low should be racing to build more projects like Esmeralda 7, not canceling them.

To understand what is being lost, it helps to look abroad. Many countries have already embraced the “programmatic, multi-developer” model that Esmeralda 7 was designed to follow. In Egypt, the Benban Solar Park concentrated more than forty developers on a single site with shared substations, roads, and grid connections. The result was 1.8 GW of clean power, built quickly and financed efficiently through a standardized set of contracts. In India, the Solar Park Scheme follows a similar logic. Government agencies pre-clear land, environmental studies, and transmission, then allocate parcels to developers through transparent auctions. The Bhadla and Pavagada parks together exceed 4 GW and are delivering some of the lowest solar prices in the world.

Dubai took the idea further with its Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park. Each phase of the park is bid out competitively, with the grid and infrastructure already in place. Phase 7 includes 1,600 MW of solar and 1,000 MW of storage. Australia’s Renewable Energy Zones apply the same principle to entire regions. The state builds transmission first, then developers fill in the capacity with solar, wind, and large batteries. In all these cases, the pattern is clear. When governments coordinate infrastructure and permitting, developers compete on efficiency, not on who can survive the slowest approval process.

I’ve experienced this personally. Earlier this year when Tennet, the Netherland’s transmission system operator, engaged me to assist them with 2050 full country energy scenario planning to enable their Target Grid planning initiative, it included a field trip to a multi-developer wind, solar and battery storage facility beside the sea in one of their reclaimed, below sea level polders. It was a gigawatt-scale facility with offshore turbines outside the dike, 7.5 MW onshore turbines, fields of solar panels, multiple substations, emerging battery storage and a single grid connection. Programmatic development is the leading practice globally.

The United States once led in this kind of thinking. The Obama administration’s 2012 Solar PEIS (Western Solar Plan) established Solar Energy Zones on BLM public lands across six southwestern states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah. The goal was to perform the environmental review at the regional level, clearing the way for multiple projects to follow quickly. Esmeralda 7 was the logical descendant of that framework. Under the current administration, the same mechanism is being dismantled. The regulatory clock has been reset to zero. Each project must start again, alone.

If the Western Solar Plan had evolved into something like India’s park model or Australia’s Renewable Energy Zones, the results would have been extraordinary. Shared substations, pooled grid upgrades, and pre-cleared environmental baselines could have delivered dozens of gigawatts of solar and battery power across the West. The cost of electricity in the region would have dropped. Emissions would have fallen sharply. Data centers, manufacturing, and electrified transport would have benefited from the cheaper, cleaner supply. Instead, America is re-learning the cost of fragmentation: higher soft costs, longer build times, and more risk.

Behind the new policy is a deeper question about who benefits from abundance. Fossil fuel abundance benefits producers. Electrical abundance benefits everyone. When the government tightens renewable permitting while expanding oil and gas leasing, it is not pursuing balance. It is protecting incumbents. Cheap clean energy erodes fossil market share. Every delayed solar park is a year of extra revenue for the gas industry. The rhetoric of “energy independence” masks a return to rent-seeking.

Meanwhile, competitors are not waiting. China added more than 200 GW of solar capacity in 2024 alone. India remains on track for 500 GW of renewables by 2030. Europe, scarred by its recent energy crisis, has streamlined renewable permitting and built interconnections at record speed. These economies are betting on electricity as the foundation of industrial competitiveness. The United States, by contrast, is reintroducing bottlenecks that others have already removed. In global terms, it is choosing higher costs and slower growth.

The economic consequences are straightforward. Every gigawatt of renewable capacity delayed means more gas burned, more price volatility, and more emissions. Nevada’s electricity prices will rise as utilities build or import fossil generation to fill the gap. Nationally, manufacturers and data center operators will face higher power costs, reducing competitiveness. Investors will price in regulatory risk and shift capital abroad. The nation that once pioneered large-scale renewable development is teaching itself to be cautious about the cheapest power it can produce.

The Esmeralda 7 site remains unchanged. The empty and unused desert still receives the same sunlight. The grid still needs new capacity. What has vanished is the political will to turn that sunlight into electricity. Programmatic, multi-developer models have proven their worth on four continents. They are not theory. They are construction blueprints. Yet in the United States, the government is unbuilding the very frameworks that would allow them to succeed.

Energy abundance is not a slogan. It is a decision. When a government makes it harder to build the lowest-cost energy on earth, it is not protecting taxpayers or balancing interests. It is choosing scarcity. The silence around Esmeralda 7’s cancellation says as much as any official statement could. The world is moving toward cheap, abundant clean power. The United States is running in the opposite direction.