Trump Furious - America Just Built Its Biggest Clean Energy Project - 242 Turbines

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]If you're kind of intrigued by these kind of power projects, which I am, I'm very intrigued by them, I'll give you an a really interesting comparison between this biggest renewable energy project in the United States versus the biggest one in the UK, the Hinckley Point C nuclear power project. The prices of those two projects are vastly different. I mean, one of them costs 6 billion, the other one more than 30 billion. The largest clean energy generation project is actually being turned on in the United States. Vestus finished installing its wind turbines at Patton Energy's Sunzia, the largest clean energy project in the history of the United States last month.

[00:00:43]That wind farm has now been turned on, much to the sugarin or the fury or the anger of Donald Trump. No, I don't know if he's angry, but I'm guessing he probably is considering how much he hates wind farms. Sunzia wind began testing its turbines and is neared the start of commercial operations, which will begin in Q2 of 2026. On the 13th of April, CISO, California's grid, sent a transmission control agreement letter to the Federal Energy Regulation Commission about Sunzia. Once Sunzia wind is fully online, it will be able to generate enough electricity to power three million people, their electricity needs.

[00:01:24]That's probably about 1.2 million households in California and in Arizona.

[00:01:30]So, one single wind energy project will power 1.2 million homes, not just during the daytime. Now, Vestus has actually installed 242 V16 or V163 4.5 megawatt wind turbines at the 3.5 gawatt wind farm, which with 916 turbines in total, 916, is the largest onshore wind farm in the United States. It's actually built across New Mexico's counties of Torrance, Lincoln, and San Miguel. And the wind farm features 674 GE Vernova 3.6 154 turbines which were actually completed in February. It's got 10 substations as well. The largest clean energy project in the US comprises two different areas. The Sunzere wind and the Sunzere transmission. The ladder is a 550 m which is 885 km high voltage direct current transmission line connecting New Mexico and South Central Arizona. A big part of the cost of some renewable projects is the transmission lines that have to be built to connect the electricity to the people who need to use it. When this is complete, it will have capacity to transport 3,000 megawatts of clean energy to the CISO grid.

[00:02:57]Sunzia transmission will enable Sunzia wind to supply customers during the early evening hours when demand is high but renewable energy supply is low. So it makes sense, right? The wind this wind actually there's more wind actually blows a little a little more often during the nighttime than during the daytime which is perfect for uh all the solar farms that have been built in these areas in Arizona in California.

[00:03:22]And this obviously will supply a lot of power during those evening peaks between 5 to 10 p.m. and also during the night hours, but evening peaks and then also there's a bit of a mini morning peak sometimes between about 8 about 7:00 a.m. to 9 9:00 a.m. This will be perfect for that. But remember, there's also a lot of batteries that going to connect to this project that will enable a lot of that wind energy, a lot of it to be stored. So there's going to be many times during the day where the grid just won't be using all this power and they'll store a lot of that energy and they'd be able to use it when it's actually needed. So how much did it cost? Well, the entire project is expected to have cost around $8 billion.

[00:04:02]How does that compare to say the Hinckley nuclear reactor that was recently turned on in the UK? That project is estimated to have cost around $ 35 billion US. And interestingly, the power that this wind project puts out is actually almost the same as the Hinckley point C nuclear project, which cost far more. And that didn't include a very expensive and long transmission line.

[00:04:30]So, you can see even wind energy, which is obviously much more expensive than solar, is still far cheaper than nuclear power. What are your thoughts? Let me know in the comments section below.

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[00:05:37]Recently the Australian National University said that base load power is functionally extinct. Generally we say base load power is provided by things like nuclear power plants or coal power plants or gas. But that is drastically changing. Hello friends, welcome to the channel. I'm Sam Evans. You're watching the Electric Viking. Great to have you with us. If you haven't already subscribed to our newsletter, I'll put a link in the description below.

[00:06:08]Traditional utility grid management suggests that there are three types of load. So, what exactly is base load?

[00:06:15]Well, you've got base load, shoulder, and peak. Base load is underlying 247 energy demand. In other words, kind of a minimum demand that's always needed.

[00:06:27]Peak load is regular but short-lived periods of high demand and shoulder loads are what lie in between. Under this model, system planning is straightforward. For an electricity grid, you assign different types of energy generation to the different loads according to the price and qualitative characteristics of that grid. Now, grids are all different, completely different.

[00:06:52]But here in Australia, historically, coal supplies most base load demand since it is relatively cheap and very slow to ramp its output up or down.

[00:07:03]That's uh mostly a bad thing to be honest. We have to keep coal plants running. We can't just shut them off. In some countries, base load is met with nuclear since it is even less flexible than coal. But only two countries generate more than 50% of their energy from nuclear. So in most countries, nuclear is not the main source of power.

[00:07:25]In fact, in nearly every country, nuclear is not the main source of power.

[00:07:29]Now, why is it that nuclear power plants can't really be turned off or are very difficult to do? So, they can be turned off, but turning them off and on actually drastically shortens the lifespan of a nuclear power plant. So, this is avoided at all costs. With the roles of different generators clearly delineated, power planners jobs are much easier in this idealized system than today's grid. However, in a system or a grid with lots of solar and well, most countries now have entered this phase, prices fall dramatically at around midday. We call this the duck curve because solar has no fuel cost. Because much of Australian solar is on rooftops, we have 4 million households with rooftops. Grid demand also falls at the same time.