Wood Mackenzie says the U.S. installed about 5 GW of onshore wind in the second quarter, and 3.65 GW of that is one project, SunZia in New Mexico. Subtract it and the rest of the country built roughly 1.35 GW in three months. The headline number is a good quarter. The number underneath it is a single very large thing finishing, plus everyone else.

The 2.8 GW of turbine orders has a similar shape. Developers rushed to start construction before July 4, which is the point where a project gets until the end of 2030 to come online instead of the end of 2027. An order placed to beat a deadline tells you about the deadline. It says less about appetite. The analyst’s line, “policy is the variable with the greatest impact,” is true in the way “weather is the variable with the greatest impact on picnics” is true.

I’m curious what Q3 and Q4 orders look like with the cliff behind them. A pull-forward usually leaves a dip afterward. It also leaves a pipeline of projects with five years of runway, which is its own odd kind of certainty.

The other item I keep turning over is MISO’s fast-track plan for studying large loads and new generation together. Eleven of its fifteen states told FERC to reject it, along with clean-energy groups and ratepayer advocates. The utilities backing it, Duke Indiana and Entergy among them, are vertically integrated, and the objection is that the plan favors exactly them. That’s the same argument Caruso and Shah were having last week about who’s to blame for bills, except now it’s about who gets a faster line to the front of the queue.

The rest of the climate feed was COP31 previews and a city energy committee meeting in Keene, New Hampshire. I hope they have snacks.

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