Reading List 1/25/25
Trump’s executive orders, OpenAI’s Stargate datacenter, Red Sea shipping updates, activating nuclear plants, deactivating nuclear weapons, and more.
Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at Trump’s executive orders, OpenAI’s Stargate datacenter, Red Sea shipping updates, activating nuclear plants, deactivating nuclear weapons, and more. Roughly two thirds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.
Housekeeping note: in this week’s essay, Why Is Homeowners Insurance Getting So Expensive?, there was a significant error in the analysis. In some of the Insurance Information Institute tables, the position of "wind and hail" and "water" is flipped, so some of the values got put in the wrong columns when I copied the data into a spreadsheet. When calculating expected losses, this overestimated the contribution of water damage and underestimated the contribution of wind and hail damage.
This has been corrected on the website. Water damage is still responsible for a large chunk of the increase in expected losses (around a third), but now wind and hail damage is responsible for the largest portion (around half).
This is still somewhat confusing, since loss ratios are down in most wind and hail-prone states, but it's now confusing in a different way.
Trump executive orders
Following Trump’s inauguration on Monday he released a flurry of executive orders and other presidential actions. Here’s a quick overview of the ones related to building and infrastructure:
Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential — This order prioritizes developing oil and gas resources in Alaska, and undoes a lot of Biden’s restrictions on developing them. From Perplexity:
Alaska LNG Project: The order mandates prioritization of permitting and infrastructure for the Alaska LNG Project, a massive $39 billion initiative to export natural gas from Alaska's North Slope. This aligns with Trump's earlier support for the project and seeks to accelerate its progress by removing regulatory barriers imposed during Biden's term.
Oil and Gas Leases: It restores leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) that were canceled under Biden and calls for further leasing in this area.
National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A): The order reverses Biden-era restrictions on drilling in NPR-A, reopening vast tracts of land for oil and gas development.
Other Resource Development: It lifts restrictions on mining, logging, and road construction across federal lands in Alaska, including projects like the Ambler Access Road and King Cove Road.
Temporary Withdrawal of All Areas on the Outer Continental Shelf from Offshore Wind Leasing and Review of the Federal Government’s Leasing and Permitting Practices for Wind Projects — This order halts offshore wind leases, and also jeopardizes onshore wind development (which is typically done on private land but still often requires federal permits). From the New York Times:
The order, which Mr. Trump signed in the Oval Office on Monday night, would halt all leasing of federal lands and waters for new wind farms pending a fresh government review of the industry. It also directs federal agencies to stop issuing permits for all wind farms anywhere in the country for the time being, a move that could disrupt projects on private land, which sometimes need federal wildlife or other environmental permits.
While the order does not call for a freeze on wind projects that are already under construction, Mr. Trump directed the U.S. Attorney General and secretary of the interior to explore the possibility of “terminating or amending” any leases that have already been issued. That means projects that have already received federal approvals could face new hurdles.
Taken together, the moves could prove crippling for the U.S. wind industry, which provides 10 percent of the nation’s electricity and is a major source of power in Republican-led states like Iowa, Oklahoma and Texas. The wind industry currently has nearly 40 gigawatts worth of projects — enough to power tens of millions of homes — under development in the Atlantic Ocean and in states like Wyoming, Montana and North Dakota.
Declaring a National Energy Emergency — This order allows the use of emergency authorities to waive certain requirements and expedite approvals for energy projects (though this notably excludes wind, solar, and batteries). From a Matthew Zeitlin interview on NPR:
I think the best way to understand what Trump's doing here is he's directing kind of the whole of his government, the the agencies, you know, energy energy department, interior department, the environmental regulators, to kind of come up with ways that they can accelerate the build out of largely fossil fuel energy and energy sources and energy processing. So that's pipelines, refineries, new oil and gas projects, and stuff like that. He's really trying to try to put the whole weight of government behind this kind of energy expansion based on fossil fuels.
Unleashing American Energy — This order, in service of promoting the development of US energy, repeals a large number of Biden-era executive orders devoted to things like mandating 50% EV sales by 2030, establishing a climate change support office, and requiring more protective flood siting requirements for federal projects. But the largest change is the repeal of the Carter-era executive order which authorized the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) to make regulations related to NEPA. Thomas Hochman on Green Tape provides more detail:
Since Carter's EO, CEQ's regulations have defined how every federal agency conducts environmental reviews, from which projects require an EIS versus an EA, to how agencies must consider cumulative impacts, to the specific required format of NEPA documents. These weren’t suggestions or guidance — they were binding rules that agencies had to follow, creating requirements far beyond NEPA's basic statutory mandate. Environmental groups have used these regulatory requirements as hooks for litigation, challenging projects based on technical non-compliance with CEQ's regulations.
Without those binding regulations in place, agencies are free to adopt much narrower definitions of terms like "significance" and “major federal action,” trim back their alternatives analyses, and treat factors like environmental justice or greenhouse gas emissions as optional rather than mandatory considerations. What’s more, obstructionists can no longer use CEQ regulations as the basis for litigation. All of this could serve to make the NEPA review process significantly less burdensome.
Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture — This isn’t an executive order, but a memo which directs the General Services Administration to come up with recommendations “to advance the policy that Federal public buildings should be visually identifiable as civic buildings and respect regional, traditional, and classical architectural heritage in order to uplift and beautify public spaces and ennoble the United States and our system of self-government.”
Putting People Over Fish: Stopping Radical Environmentalism to Provide Water to Southern California — This is another memo that orders the Secretaries of Commerce and the Interior to “Immediately restart the work from my first Administration by the National Marine Fisheries Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Reclamation, and other agencies to route more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to other parts of the state for use by the people there who desperately need a reliable water supply.” This is regarding a plan from Trump’s first term to reroute water from Northern California, which was then reversed by Biden. From KRCR:
The order instructs federal officials to resume efforts from Trump's first term to reroute water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to other parts of California, including the federal Central Valley Project.
The regulations have sparked debate among federal officials, environmentalists, farm groups, and scientists due to concerns about the endangered delta smelt, a fish species on the brink of extinction.
Northstate Congressman Doug LaMalfa (R-CA 1st District) praised the executive order but expressed skepticism about the effectiveness of previous water conservation efforts for the delta smelt.
And while this isn’t an executive order, apparently solar leasing on federal lands has also been paused.
Prior to the solar announcement, I considered this a fairly mixed bag. The NEPA reforms have the potential to be transformative, though a great deal will depend on how they’re implemented and I expect a lot of short-term difficulties due to the uncertainty the changes create. Emphasizing energy development is good, but there was also a lot of pointless obstruction of technologies like wind.
But pausing solar permitting is a huge step in the wrong direction if you’re concerned about energy abundance, given that solar is the overwhelming majority of planned generation capacity, it’s rapidly becoming the cheapest source of electricity, and it’s powering the AI buildout Trump is championing. It signals prioritizing silly culture war issues over American prosperity.
Nuclear restarts
VC Summer is a nuclear plant in South Carolina that currently has one operational reactor. Two more reactors began construction in 2013, but were abandoned partway through construction (after spending about $9 billion) when costs spiraled upward. Now, due to rising electricity demand, there’s interest in completing them. From the Wall Street Journal:
Santee Cooper announced Wednesday it is seeking proposals for buyers to complete the project at South Carolina’s sprawling V.C. Summer Nuclear Station, confirming an earlier report from The Wall Street Journal.
The utility is working with bankers at Centerview Partners, which will accept proposals until May 5.
Santee Cooper will likely look to tap a consortium that could include a construction firm, a tech company that will use the power and an additional partner for capital, according to people familiar with the matter. It is also looking for another power company partner because it doesn’t plan to own or operate the units once they are up and running.
This is just the latest in a series of proposed nuclear reactor restarts. Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania is planned to be restarted, as is Palisades in Michigan. Duane Arnold in Iowa might also restart. Altogether 13 nuclear reactors were shut down in the last decade, but only a few of them are viable candidates for restarting:
…only a handful of retired nuclear plants have a realistic chance of being revived, analysts say — perhaps as few as three. All the others are either damaged or being dismantled, piece by piece.
“We’re not convinced there are a lot of viable candidates,” said Timothy Fox, an analyst at ClearView Energy Partners.
Work is already underway to restart a mothballed reactor in Michigan by late next year. Owners of two other plants, in Iowa and Pennsylvania, are considering following suit. All are responding to a rapid rise in electricity demand — from data centers, electric cars and new factories — that may be just getting started.
After that very short list, it’s hard to see how most recently retired US plants could be reopened. Some were closed because of damage, such as San Onofre in California or Crystal River, in Florida. Others are already being dismantled, including Vermont Yankee and Indian Point, near New York City.
Even if a facility is intact, not all owners have done the costly maintenance needed to keep it in good enough shape to justify bringing it back. Any reopening is likely to be expensive.
The US Energy Department has conditionally approved $1.5 billion to help restart Michigan’s Palisades nuclear plant, and the state has committed another $300 million.
Data center energy consumption
One of the major drivers of electricity demand is, of course, data centers. This DOE report analyzes current and future US data center electricity use. Data centers went from 1.9% of electricity consumption in 2018 to 4.4% in 2023, and that’s estimated to rise further to between 6.7% and 12% in 2028.
Stargate
On the subject of data centers, OpenAI is constructing a $500 billion (!) “Stargate” data center. This project was first announced in March of last year as a $100 billion project, and has apparently grown since then. From SemiAnalysis:
The Stargate Joint Venture is a new company intended to invest $500B in AI infrastructure over the next four years with $100B being deployed immediately. This is the first big AI initiative announced by the second Trump administration with more likely to come due to the significant relaxing of regulations.
The equity founders in Stargate are SoftBank, Oracle, MGX, and OpenAI, with the former three companies contributing capital initially. SoftBank and OpenAI are the lead partners, with SoftBank having financial responsibility and OAI leading operations including almost all cluster management software.
The project includes the buildout of 20 data centers, 10 of which are already underway in Abilene, Texas with each roughly 500k square feet.
The first phase of the project is being built at the Lancium Clean Campus near Abilene, a 1.2GW datacenter campus. You can see the location on Google Maps here, though the satellite imagery hasn't been updated to show construction. SmokeAwayyy shares some more imagery here, and Sam Altman shares a flyover here.
Snow loads
Buildings are designed to support a variety of different loadings, including wind, earthquakes, and snow, and the magnitude of the design loads will depend on where the building is located. A building in Miami will be designed to withstand much stronger winds than one in Cheyenne, Wyoming, but the Cheyenne building will be designed to withstand much heavier snow loads.
Earlier this week there was a snowstorm across the southeast, which dumped record-breaking amounts of snow on buildings that in many cases probably weren’t designed to withstand it. The result was a few building collapses. The Civic Center in Mobile, Alabama collapsed, though it was a building already scheduled for demolition. From WKRG:
MOBILE, Ala. (WKRG) – What was left of the Mobile Civic Center collapsed Wednesday morning due to the weight of the snow that fell Tuesday, officials said.
According to city officials, the dome collapsed just after 11 a.m. and no injuries were reported.
Officials said the dome fell “just the way it was intended to collapse,” meaning none of the mosaic tiles inside the center were damaged.
A building in Waycross Georgia also collapsed:
The weight of snow partially collapsed a Waycross building, causing thousands of dollars in damage as a rare winter storm moved across the area Tuesday night into Wednesday morning…
Owners Chris and Michelle Taylor have been in business for 38 years but had just moved to the building off Knight Avenue this past year.
The couple told First Coast News they got to the building around 3 a.m. Wednesday to check on a leak, and witnessed the front of the building collapse.
They are now estimating they will have to pay several hundred thousand dollars to fix the damage.