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How can we make better use of the areas environmental destruction has left behind?
There are some things money can’t buy, and it seems a clean power grid is one of them. Despite authorizing billions of dollars to subsidize renewable energy development through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Biden administration remains off track to reach its target of 100% clean electricity by 2035. Even after a banner year in which domestic investment hit $303 billion and the US added 32.3 gigawatts of new clean electricity capacity, the country is still building renewable energy at only half the rate that is needed.
Among the barriers holding up clean energy deployment, local opposition looms large. As developers seek out new sites on which to build wind and solar, they are repeatedly finding themselves at odds with neighbors who object to their projects on aesthetic, economic, or political grounds. Whether through formal laws or protracted permitting processes, these objections have begun to have a noticeable effect on the pace of renewable energy adoption. In a recent survey by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, wind and solar developers reported seeing roughly a third of their siting applications canceled over the five years prior, with two of the most common reasons being “community opposition” and “local ordinances or zoning.”
But what if the solution to this impasse has been hiding in plain sight — or more accurately, behind a chain link fence?
The U.S. has around 270 million acres of so-called “marginal land,” a designation that includes retired mines, closed landfills, former industrial facilities, brownfield sites, and depleted or unproductive farmland. That’s around twice the land area that would be required for a renewables-and-nuclear-only power grid, the most land-intensive net-zero scenario modeled by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. These neglected properties are more than just an eyesore for neighbors — they also represent wasted prospects for economic development, and in many cases pose a contamination risk to the local environment. To law professors Alexandra Klass and Hannah Wiseman, however, they are an opportunity in disguise.
In their new paper, forthcoming in the Minnesota Law Review, Klass and Wiseman (of the University of Michigan and Penn State, respectively) propose directing the bulk of new clean energy development to these marginal lands. It’s a concept they call “repurposed energy,” and it offers a way to, in one fell swoop, avert local objections, reclaim unproductive land, and create new opportunities for economically dislocated communities.
It’s not a new concept — since 2008, the Environmental Protection Agency’s RE-Powering America’s Land Initiative has offered funding to developers looking to build renewable energy on potentially contaminated land.
What the new paper proposes, however, is a greater convergence of public benefits on this specific subset of projects, which Klass views as a down payment on societal acceptance. “If you can come up with a project that’s going to have community support, that means you can actually build it,” she told me. “And that’s worth paying a little extra money up front.”
Consider some of the most common objections to renewable energy siting: that it ruins the view, disrupts habitats, or occupies valuable farmland. Each would seem to carry less weight when applied to, say, an abandoned mine instead of a pristine coastline. Throw in low purchase prices, pre-existing transmission lines at retired coal or gas power plants, and the chance to direct jobs and revenue to low-income communities (where contaminated properties are disproportionately located), and you’ve got, in theory, an attractive site for a solar or wind farm.
In spite of these upsides, practical examples of repurposed energy remain few and far between. Only 0.7% of the renewable energy capacity installed in the United States since 1997 has been on reclaimed land, according to EPA data. That’s because, faced with the possibility of extravagant cleanup costs and liability for prior contamination, most developers prefer to take their chances with a greenfield.
Klass and Wiseman propose a set of policy changes that could, they hope, spur a renewable energy renaissance on marginal lands. First, there are some existing incentives for repurposed energy they propose expanding. Certain state funding programs – like Massachusetts’ SMART Program – and streamlined permitting processes – like New York’s Build-Ready Program – could offer a template for other states seeking to accelerate redevelopment of their own brownfields. Layering more such benefits on top of federal funding opportunities like the IRA’s Energy Infrastructure and Reinvestment Program, they contend, could help stimulate broader interest from developers.
Second, they offer a set of new, more ambitious reforms to entice clean energy companies onto marginal lands. Among them:
Klass sees the paper as a timely contribution at a critical juncture for the renewable energy industry. “We’re at an important moment in time where there’s a lot of federal funding available,” she told me. “But we are not on track to build the amount of clean energy we need to meet our targets.” By focusing support on repurposed energy, she thinks policymakers may be able to erode some of the sociopolitical barriers holding back the industry.
There is evidence to support this belief. A 2021 study found that objections to wind farms tended to fade when the infrastructure was sited in areas with fewer lakes, hills, or other features of aesthetic or recreational value, suggesting that plants sited on already-disturbed land might indeed arouse less opposition. “You start with these types of projects that we hope will engender less community opposition and provide more community benefits,” Klass said. “Maybe you scale it up later, maybe you don’t. But it allows a pathway through some of this local opposition.”
It’s a view that resonates in the industry, although that doesn’t make this kind of development easy. Jonathan Mancini is the senior vice president of solar project development at Ameresco, which has built solar on around 20 landfills across the United States. He told me that sites with soil contamination are capped with an impermeable barrier to prevent the hazardous material from spreading, and building a solar farm on top requires using bespoke racking systems that won’t penetrate that cap. On top of that, would-be developers have to employ third-party engineers to monitor the cap’s integrity and undergo additional reviews by state regulators to ensure that the weight of the solar system will not damage it. “Currently, the permitting timeline for such projects takes up to three years to complete,” he told me.
Dedicated state support in places like Massachusetts, Illinois, and Maryland has helped Ameresco alleviate some of the costs. “Utility programs or state administered programs do incentivize the use of these types of projects,” Mancini said. But he noted that more support would be helpful to overcome the barriers repurposed energy projects face. “Additional policy measures at the local and/or state level would make these projects move faster through permitting and approval.”
Michael Gerrard, the founder of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and one of the country’s foremost environmental lawyers, thinks the idea could accelerate clean energy deployment. “Local opposition is one of the most important impediments [to renewable energy],” he pointed out to me. By undercutting aesthetic and land use concerns, repurposed energy could “have a very positive impact finding ways to reduce that,” he said.
Gerrard also noted, however, that local opposition is not the only barrier to renewable energy development. In addition to more stringent permitting requirements, “transmission, interest rates, supply chains, local content restrictions, workforce shortages — all of those are impediments,” he said. Repurposed energy is no magic bullet, he added, but it doesn’t have to be. “We need a lot of magic buckshot,” he said, “and this article proposes quite a few pellets.”
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A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.
Long Islanders, meanwhile, are showing up in support of offshore wind, and more in this week’s edition of The Fight.
Local renewables restrictions are on the rise in the Hawkeye State – and it might have something to do with carbon pipelines.
Iowa’s known as a renewables growth area, producing more wind energy than any other state and offering ample acreage for utility-scale solar development. This has happened despite the fact that Iowa, like Ohio, is home to many large agricultural facilities – a trait that has often fomented conflict over specific projects. Iowa has defied this logic in part because the state was very early to renewables, enacting a state portfolio standard in 1983, signed into law by a Republican governor.
But something else is now on the rise: Counties are passing anti-renewables moratoria and ordinances restricting solar and wind energy development. We analyzed Heatmap Pro data on local laws and found a rise in local restrictions starting in 2021, leading to nearly 20 of the state’s 99 counties – about one fifth – having some form of restrictive ordinance on solar, wind or battery storage.
What is sparking this hostility? Some of it might be counties following the partisan trend, as renewable energy has struggled in hyper-conservative spots in the U.S. But it may also have to do with an outsized focus on land use rights and energy development that emerged from the conflict over carbon pipelines, which has intensified opposition to any usage of eminent domain for energy development.
The central node of this tension is the Summit Carbon Solutions CO2 pipeline. As we explained in a previous edition of The Fight, the carbon transportation network would cross five states, and has galvanized rural opposition against it. Last November, I predicted the Summit pipeline would have an easier time under Trump because of his circle’s support for oil and gas, as well as the placement of former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum as interior secretary, as Burgum was a major Summit supporter.
Admittedly, this prediction has turned out to be incorrect – but it had nothing to do with Trump. Instead, Summit is now stalled because grassroots opposition to the pipeline quickly mobilized to pressure regulators in states the pipeline is proposed to traverse. They’re aiming to deny the company permits and lobbying state legislatures to pass bills banning the use of eminent domain for carbon pipelines. One of those states is South Dakota, where the governor last month signed an eminent domain ban for CO2 pipelines. On Thursday, South Dakota regulators denied key permits for the pipeline for the third time in a row.
Another place where the Summit opposition is working furiously: Iowa, where opposition to the CO2 pipeline network is so intense that it became an issue in the 2020 presidential primary. Regulators in the state have been more willing to greenlight permits for the project, but grassroots activists have pressured many counties into some form of opposition.
The same counties with CO2 pipeline moratoria have enacted bans or land use restrictions on developing various forms of renewables, too. Like Kossuth County, which passed a resolution decrying the use of eminent domain to construct the Summit pipeline – and then three months later enacted a moratorium on utility-scale solar.
I asked Jessica Manzour, a conservation program associate with Sierra Club fighting the Summit pipeline, about this phenomenon earlier this week. She told me that some counties are opposing CO2 pipelines and then suddenly tacking on or pivoting to renewables next. In other cases, counties with a burgeoning opposition to renewables take up the pipeline cause, too. In either case, this general frustration with energy companies developing large plots of land is kicking up dust in places that previously may have had a much lower opposition risk.
“We painted a roadmap with this Summit fight,” said Jess Manzour, a campaigner with Sierra Club involved in organizing opposition to the pipeline at the grassroots level, who said zealous anti-renewables activists and officials are in some cases lumping these items together under a broad umbrella. ”I don’t know if it’s the people pushing for these ordinances, rather than people taking advantage of the situation.”