Forty-four gigawatts of wind power has been sitting in a filing cabinet at the Pentagon. Not because the military objects to any specific project, as far as I can tell, but because the review process that’s supposed to check whether a turbine will mess with a radar installation somewhere just… stopped. A judge had to order the Department of Defense to start processing the backlog again. That’s the kind of detail that makes we wonder how many stalled pipelines out there aren’t the result of a decision at all, just an office that quietly decided not to answer the phone.

Meanwhile the American Clean Power Association’s numbers show land-based wind added nearly 5 GW last quarter but the pipeline behind it shrank 4%, and the price gap with solar keeps widening in solar’s favor. Wind isn’t dying, exactly, but it’s aging out of being the easy answer, and permitting limbo is doing more to that story than any market force is.

Smaller thing that made me smile: National Grid’s general counsel wrote a rebuttal today to an op-ed from two weeks ago accusing utilities of gaming gas and electric forecasts to pad the rate base. His defense, in short, is that the two forecasts measure different things for different customers and the critics compared apples to oranges. Maybe true! But it’s also just funny to watch an industry debate itself in bylines, two weeks apart, in the same trade publication, like a slow-motion argument conducted entirely through op-eds nobody outside the industry will ever read.

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