Episode Details

Allen covers NextEra’s potential $400 billion buy of Dominion Energy, US developers racing the July tax credit deadline, Ming Yang scouting Spain for a factory, Turkey opening its first offshore wind tender, and Hornsea 3’s first foundation going in.

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Allen Hall 2025: Good morning, everyone. The world is racing at the minute, and let’s start with the biggest race of all. NextEra Energy, the largest utility in America by market value, is in talks to buy Dominion Energy of Virginia. The price? It’s about $76 a share, roughly $66 billion. With debt, the combined company would be valued at about $400 billion.

That would make it the largest power deal on record. A mostly stock transaction, at least that’s what’s being reported, and a deal could come as soon as this week. Pretty shocking. Now, why does this matter to wind? NextEra is [00:01:00] not just a utility. It is one of the largest renewable energy developers on the planet.

And Dominion sits on top of Northern Virginia’s data center alley, the biggest concentration of data centers in the country. Dominion expects its peak demand to double by the end of the twenty-thirties, American power consumption hit a second straight record in twenty-twenty-five, and it’s still climbing. So the company that builds more wind and solar than almost anyone wants to merge with the company that serves the hungriest grid in America. That is a race to the top. But down on the ground, developers are running a very different kind of race.

Wind projects under construction in the United States are up 60% since the start of twenty-twenty-five. Solar is up about 50%. Why the surge? Well, the clock is ticking. Tax credits for wind and solar were gutted in the one big beautiful bill. Projects must begin construction by July 4th [00:02:00] and prove they are building continuously to qualify.

Under the Inflation Reduction Act, those credits were supposed to phase out at the end of twenty-thirty-three. Now that deadline is just a couple of weeks away. Developers are pushing hard on projects that can make it and abandoning the ones that cannot. One solar executive put it plainly: “A lot of the projects are going to die on the vine.”

And that’s a real shame. Labor is short. Of course, electricians are in demand. Transformer lead times have stretched to 18 months because data centers are buying them too. Even permits are hard to get. Projects that touch federal land, of course, that once took a month to approve are now waiting up to a year.

So while NextEra races to buy the grid, developers are racing to build before the door shuts. Now, across the Atlantic,