The Man Who Killed Offshore Wind, Ford's Pivot Away From EVs, and Jet Engine-Powered GPUs

Here are some trends that I'm following

This is the 7th edition of a new format I’m trying out on the Distilled newsletter. As I explained in the first edition, my plan is to share stories, charts, and interesting stuff I find while doing research for my longer stories.

Here’s what’s in today’s newsletter:

• A new tool to explore clean energy and data center projects

• The man who killed offshore wind in America

• Battery prices fell again in 2025 according to a new analysis.

• A new paper shows that clean energy technology costs don’t change in the way that most forecasters assume—and sometimes technologies get more expensive the more you make them.

• Ford is pivoting out of the EV business and into… data centers.

• A supersonic plane startup is getting in on the data center boom too by turning its jet engines into gas turbines to run OpenAI’s GPUs.

A new tool to explore clean energy and data center projects

This week, my company Cleanview launched a free tool that lets you explore thousands of operating and planned solar, wind, battery, and data center projects in every state across the US.

Here are a few examples of what you can find using the tool:

• An interactive map of every planned data center in the US

• The largest operating and planned solar projects in each state

• Data showing how many battery storage projects have been built in each state

Give it a try and let me know what you think.

The man who killed offshore wind in America

3 years ago, I heard a story about a man, David Stevenson, who sent a letter to 35,000 residents on the coast of New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland telling them that a planned offshore wind farm would destroy their property values (which was false).

One weekend, he paid a pilot thousands of dollars to fly an aerial banner over the beach telling people the wind turbines would destroy their beautiful views. He ran Facebook ads, wrote op-eds in newspapers, and did everything he could to tell people that Skipjack Wind would ruin life as they knew it.

Virtually all of this claims were false.

I love trawling through public documents so I started following the paper trail to learn more about this man. I learned that his nonprofit was funded by the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers and part of a network of groups started by the Koch Brothers.

I tried to get in touch with him but he never answered my calls. So after a few weeks of reporting and research, I published my story in this newsletter.

The Man Trying to Kill America's Offshore Wind Industry

Immediately it blew up and went viral, racking up millions of views. A group of researchers at Brown University wrote a paper inspired by it. I still get calls and emails about it to this day.

This week, Canary Media published a story by Clare Fieseler profiling this man. It’s a beautifully written, rich, human story.

Clare told me that after reading my story she called David and he picked up. Over the next few years, she had a series of conversations with him to understand his motivations.

Reading the story this morning, I couldn’t help but feel sad.

What started as a 35,000 person snail mail campaign soon blossomed into one of the most damaging disinformation campaigns in the country. Fox News ran many segments with the lies that David initially spread. Donald Trump soon took up many of his talking points. Now many blue-collar communities that were banking on offshore wind to revive their coastal economies are seeing infrastructure projects and federal funding cancelled.

David wasn’t the only person responsible for the collapse of the offshore wind industry in America. But he was one of the most influential.

I highly recommend reading Clare’s story.