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That’s according to a new Heatmap poll. So what gives?
Here’s a shocker: Americans aren’t exactly unified in their takes on the energy transition. In a new Heatmap poll conducted by Embold Research, about a third of the more than 2,000 adults surveyed agreed that “renewable energy offers many significant benefits, with few downsides,” while about half that number said renewables have “many significant downsides, with few benefits.” Go figure.
Dig beneath the surface, however, and some fascinating fault lines begin to emerge. Often, these divides cut across class, gender, and even party affiliation.
Take the public’s opinion on batteries, for instance. Of all the possible sources of zero-carbon power we asked people about, battery storage scored the lowest, with just 23% saying they strongly supported adding them to the energy mix in their state. By comparison, 51% said they strongly supported rooftop solar, and 36% said they strongly supported nuclear, typically a controversial energy source. Only coal and “methane gas” scored lower (although when we called it “natural gas,” it polled much higher).
What’s the problem with batteries? One possibility is that even though utility-scale battery storage system fires are rare — the Electric Power Research Institute database of battery-related “failure events” lists just 15 last year, though one was a multi-day fire in a storage system in Idaho — people may group them together with far more common lithium-ion battery fires with scooters and e-bikes.
“Lithium ion battery fires are rarities when considered in the context of widespread deployment,” Lakshmi Srinivasan and Stephanie Shaw, who both work on battery storage policy and research at EPRI, co-signed in an email. “There are also important differences between grid-scale storage and electric micro-mobility devices like bikes and scooters” — namely that grid-scale batters are subject to regulations and testing requirements that your e-bike’s battery is not, which reduces the risk of fires.
As with any major piece of energy infrastructure, the prospect of grid-scale batteries can also spark the public’s generic aversion to new construction and the sight of industrial equipment. California — which leads the country in battery storage procurement and deployment — has not been free from local backlash to utility-scale battery storage projects. A long-planned project in San Diego County has faced persistent opposition from nearby residents, even after it was scaled down by 20%, while a project north of San Francisco was rejected entirely due to concerns about safety.
Besides the fire and visual concerns, many people don’t understand that battery storage projects fall under the category of clean energy, especially in California where they're most prevalent. When asked to identify which types of power generation they considered “clean,” only 19% picked out battery storage, compared to 78% for solar — which is increasingly co-located with battery storage — 76% for wind, and even 37% for natural gas. The only forms of power that ranked below battery storage were, again, “methane gas” and coal.
While solar and wind — which battery systems can support — are well known to just about everyone, widespread deployment of battery storage is still fairly new. While Heatmap’s survey showed relatively high disapproval for battery storage, it also was the third most “not sure” energy source behind hydrogen and geothermal, two technologies that have yet to reach mass adoption in the U.S. “All new technologies are a bit of a black box until education is provided,” the two EPRI researchers said.
That education might also include how people might benefit. “Storage is a key driver of grid resilience and reliability,” Srinivasan and Shaw explained. That means fewer service interruptions for any reason, and particularly during severe weather, when back-up energy may be necessary to keep food cold and shelters warm. “All that said,” they added, “another important benefit of storage is that it supports extensive use of renewables technologies, so the most use can be made of those as well as making the electricity grid cleaner for everyone.”
It’s true that not all battery storage systems necessarily lead to lower carbon emissions. And yet batteries are absolutely essential to a decarbonized electric grid — and to keeping grids with high levels of weather-dependent resources like wind and solar stable. It's no coincidence that two states with large amounts of renewable power on the grid, California and Texas, are also leaders in battery storage deployment.
“While many members of the public prioritize implementing renewable energy, NIMBY concerns can be strong in some instances, often based on misinformation,” Srinivasan and Shaw told me. “Support for renewable technologies is often dependent on the tangible local benefits of the facility, rather than broader decarbonization impacts.”
The Heatmap poll of 2,094 American adults was conducted by Embold Research via online responses from April 5 to 11, 2024. The survey included interviews with Americans in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 2.3 percentage points.
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And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state.
2. Logan County, Ohio – Staff for the Ohio Power Siting Board have recommended it reject Open Road Renewables’ Grange Solar agrivoltaics project.
3. Bandera County, Texas – On a slightly brighter note for solar, it appears that Pine Gate Renewables’ Rio Lago solar project might just be safe from county restrictions.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, Armoracia Solar is struggling to get necessary permits from Madison County.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington is getting into a public spat with East Kentucky Power Cooperative over solar.
In Michigan, Livingston County is now backing the legal challenge to Michigan’s state permitting primacy law.
On the week’s top news around renewable energy policy.
1. IRA funding freeze update – Money is starting to get out the door, finally: the EPA unfroze most of its climate grant funding it had paused after Trump entered office.
2. Scalpel vs. sledgehammer – House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled Republicans in Congress may take a broader approach to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act than previously expected in tax talks.
3. Endangerment in danger – The EPA is reportedly urging the White House to back reversing its 2009 “endangerment” finding on air pollutants and climate change, a linchpin in the agency’s overall CO2 and climate regulatory scheme.
A conversation with Stephanie Loucas, chief development officer for Renewable Properties
This week I got the chance to speak with Stephanie Loucas of Renewable Properties, one of the fantastic subject matter experts who joined me this week for a panel on local renewables conflicts at Intersolar. After revealing herself to me as someone in the development space who clearly cares about community engagement, I asked if I could bring her on the record to chat about her approach to getting buy-in on projects. She’s not someone who often works in utility scale – all her projects are under 10 megawatts – but the conflicts she deals with are the same.
Here’s an edited version of our chat outside the conference as we overlooked the San Diego bay:
I guess to start, what’s the approach you’d like to see the renewables development sector adopt when it comes to community engagement?
I would like to see developers collaborate a little bit more so messaging is similar and we can have more engagement sooner. I don’t think that some of this is some sort of secret sauce. We could be a little bit more together.
Okay, but what’s your approach?
Our approach is early and often, listen empathetically and try to answer the questions clearly and try to build trust.”
If there is no secret sauce, what’s the best way to build trust?
I think the best way to build trust is to listen, to address the issues, to understand what the community is really asking. I think it’s easy for a person to sit behind a computer and write a long letter or email with 25 concerns but actually talking to the person, which is something that I think the younger people in the industry – more junior folks – aren’t as accustomed to talking to people. They’re more used to communicating in written form.
You’re able to suss out what’s actually important by talking to them. They’ll hit their one-to-five most important topics, as opposed to the 25 things they’ll write in their letter.
What does ‘early and often’ look like for you?
Early is… as soon as you talk to the authority with jurisdiction, talk to them about who in the community is actually important. Who should we be talking to? Do you think we’ll have opposition? Do you think we’ll have supporters? And it’s getting the planning department’s perspective. Then you start from there, to build who you’re going to be talking to and when.
Okay. So what’s often then? Do you have to be there every day? Is it about having an office in the community?
I think it depends on the comments you get and what’s going on specifically in the community. Sometimes you have to be in it for a while to really root out what’s going on. It might feel like you’re starting to talk for a year, a certain amount of time before you submit your permit, but you don’t get to the root cause of what’s really bugging people until you’ve had more conversations and they’re trusting you’ll show back up. Answer those questions.
Let’s say you provided a report from a third party consultant addressing “X” and then they bring up “Y.” Then you address “Y” and they bring up another thing. It’s about listening and responding. That’s how you build trust.
So I’m often told I tell too many negative stories of conflict in this newsletter. Do you have any examples in your work where you really feel like you got community buy-in?
To be honest, one of the best is a recent case study. It’s a project coming online in New York where we were in the community for a long time, a lot of public meetings and there was a ton of opposition. Part of the opposition was confusing our project size. There was a huge project – a several hundred megawatt project – going on too. They kept using the same opposition talking points. And we said, we’re not that. We heard the community and talked them through it. We wanted to make sure they were evaluating the project for the appropriate level of impact it was having.
We had opposition and we overcame it in that town. And then really flipping the mayor, having him come around. We did a ribbon cutting ceremony. We made sure we had the right number of local people benefiting from a community solar program – we ended up with a 20% number [of local subscribers].
Does having local use of power – using power from the solar project near their backyard – help with getting buy in?
Absolutely. I think so. The electrons aren’t just in their viewpoint getting on the grid and they’re never knowing where they’re going.