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States are playing Whack-a-Mole against restrictive local laws.

Why don’t we build things?
Yale Law School professor David Schleicher, who studies local government and land use, has been trying to answer this question for years. While Schleicher typically writes about housing, his latest work — an essay literally called “Why Can’t We Build?” for the New York University Journal of Law and Liberty — is useful for thinking about why we don't have as much green energy infrastructure as we need. “Despite a generation of low interest rates and innovation in many non-physical realms,” he writes, “there are few physical monuments that we will pass to future generations — where are today’s Brooklyn Bridges or Hoover Dams?”
There are certainly explanations for this lack of infrastructural boldness. But more importantly, what are the reasons for it?
The explanations are often local restrictions on growth. When it comes to housing, that might mean zoning regulations that limit what kind of structures can be built where or fees that are sometimes charged to multifamily units. For renewable energy, developers of wind and solar might find themselves coming up against noise restrictions, rules that essentially require minimum amounts of land for installations, or even outright bans on certain types of generation.
But that doesn’t explain why these rules exist — the reasons why infrastructure doesn’t get built. As for these, he told me, most of them come down to the structural factors of local politics. “Statewide majorities have policy preferences” that often support development, Schleicher said. But local a body of government institutions that have been built up since the 1970s “have limited the capacity of those stated statewide preferences to be reflected in policy in many places.”
When it comes to zoning, Schleicher told me, proponents of reform “make arguments at the local level, but they’re very simply turning to the state level because the issue is larger than any individual jurisdiction.” The same goes for renewable energy.
If you ask people across an entire state if they want more housing or renewable energy, they will likely say yes. But local elections — which typically have comparatively low participation and are more likely to be decided on national party lines than on local policy issues — rarely reflect this political reality. With a lack of direct checks from the electorate, interest and advocacy groups have outsize weight on local policymaking.
Local governments have a variety of structures meant to discourage growth and systematically prioritize the views of those with the time and inclination to show up to local meetings — not just those who show up to vote every two or four years. Decisionmaking on individual projects may be dominated by homeowners or local environmental groups that don’t want to see any building or change in the built environment.
Statewide policymaking, on the other hand, “can bring different interest groups to the fore,” Schleicher told me, including labor and large employers. When Michigan, for instance, passed a suite of clean energy bills in 2023 with support from labor, it allowed the state to take over permitting for large clean energy projects if the applicable local rules are too restrictive.
California, too, has passed a series of laws centralizing renewable energy permitting and limiting the appeals that advocacy groups can make to block projects, which Governor Gavin Newsom has already put to work. Earlier this year, he essentially fast-tracked a 400 megawatt solar project in Riverside County by giving opponents just nine months to petition against its approval.
In all likelihood, however, Michigan will have to pass more new laws and regulations to speed up renewable development in any meaningful way. “Realistically, one of the other things that the zoning story has taught us that may be relevant for clean energy is that it's almost never does one law do the trick,” Schleicher told me. When states have tried to boost housing production, he pointed out, it has often required several rounds of legislation to get a meaningful boost in production as local opponents of new housing adapt to new laws.
California, again, provides a helpful example. The state is in the midst of a massive building boom in so-called accessory dwelling units, a.k.a. “granny flats” or ADUs. Housing advocates in the state credit this not just to a set of bills passed in 2016 preempting certain local regulations including setbacks, some parking requirements, and fees for utility connections that discouraged their construction, but also to 11 more bills passed by 2022, methodically clearing out local restrictions on building, renting, and selling ADUs.
And this was just the latest chapter in the effort to encourage the building of ADUs — the first bill trying to get around local bans in California passed in 1982. Forty years later, however, there were still only 1,000 permitted ADUs in the whole state. As of 2022, the state had registered 82,000 ADUs, a fifth of all housing produced in the state that year, according to CA YIMBY, a housing advocacy group.
"The first couple times statewide ADU bills were passed, local governments would come up with other ways to stop things," Schleicher said.
Something similar has and likely will continue to happen as states try to wrest siting for renewables projects from local governments. In New York, a 1972 law the governing the siting of power plants has gone through many different iterations. This law, known as Article 10, was changed in 2010 to apply to smaller generators and therefore include renewables projects. Article 10 created a “siting board” that could permit renewables projects under a fast-track process that exempted them from environmental impact statements required by the State Environmental Quality Review Act. The Board would even be allowed to waive “unreasonably burdensome” local laws restricting renewables development.
But the new process did little to speed permitting. What was intended to be a one- to two-year process instead turned “more lengthy and challenging than originally anticipated,” according to Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers Lawrence Susskind and Anushree Chaudari. By 2018, Columbia University professor Michael Gerrard and then Arnold & Porter partner Edward McTiernan wrote, a single project had been approved under the new system.
New York passed a new law in 2020, which included fixed timelines for review. The new process, while relatively new, has managed to get some local rules on renewable siting thrown out as “unreasonably burdensome,” and opponents to wind and solar projects have lost out in front of the new siting board.
As New York state struggles to meet its ambitious goals for decarbonization, it will likely need to reform land use and permitting regulations again, and again, and again, along with every other state.
“Remember that you’re in a long fight instead of a short one,” Schleicher told me. “One of the most important things is to be able to pass successive bills because local opponents to statewide efforts are going to adapt and change and respond.”
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Much of California’s biggest county is now off limits to energy storage.
Residents of a tiny unincorporated community outside of Los Angeles have trounced a giant battery project in court — and in the process seem to have blocked energy storage projects in more than half of L.A. County, the biggest county in California.
A band of frustrated homeowners and businesses have for years aggressively fought a Hecate battery storage project proposed in Acton, California, a rural unincorporated community of about 7,000 residents, miles east of the L.A. metro area. As I wrote in my first feature for The Fight over a year ago, this effort was largely motivated by concerns about Acton as a high wildfire risk area. Residents worried that in the event of a large fire, a major battery installation would make an already difficult emergency response situation more dangerous. Acton leaders expressly opposed the project in deliberations before L.A. County planning officials, arguing that BESS facilities in general were not allowed under the existing zoning code in unincorporated areas.
On the other side, county officials maintained that the code was silent on battery storage as such, but said that in their view, these projects were comparable to distribution infrastructure from a land use perspective, and therefore would be allowable under the code.
Last week, the residents of Acton won, getting the courts to toss out the county’s 2021 memorandum allowing battery storage facilities in unincorporated areas – which make up more than 65% of L.A. County.
Judge Curtis Kin wrote in his October 14 ruling that “such expansive use of the interpretation runs contrary to the Zoning Code itself,” and that the “exclusion” of permission for battery storage in the code means it isn’t allowed, plain and simple.
“Consequently, respondents and real parties’ reliance on the existence of other interpretive memos and guidance by the [Planning] Director is beside the point,” Kin stated. “There is no dispute the Director has the authority to issue memos and interpretations for Zoning code provisions subject to interpretation, but, as discussed above, such authority cannot be used in such a way as to violate the provisions of the Zoning Code.”
The court also declared the Hecate project approval void and ordered the company to seek permits under the California Environmental Quality Act if it still wants to build. This will halt the project’s development for the foreseeable future. Alene Taber, the attorney representing Acton residents, told me she has received no indication from Hecate’s legal team about whether they will appeal the ruling.
Hecate declined to comment on the outcome.
Taber’s perspective is unique as a self-described “rural rights” attorney who largely represents unincorporated communities with various legal disputes. She told me this ruling demonstrates a serious risk regulators face in moving too fast for a host community, especially given rising opposition to battery storage in California. Since the Moss Landing fire, opposition to storage projects has escalated rapidly across the state – despite profound tech differences between more modern designs proposed today and the antiquated system that burned up in that incident.
I asked Taber if she thought California enacting a new law last week to beef up battery fire safety oversight could stem the tide of concerns about battery storage. In response, she railed against a separate statute giving energy companies – including battery developers – the ability to work around town ordinances and moratoria targeting their industry.
“Even though the county didn’t consider the community input — which it should’ve — the county process at least still allowed for communities to appeal the project. And they’re also at least supposed to consider what the local zoning code said,” Taber told me. “Local communities are now sidelined all together. They’re saying they don’t care what the concerns are. Where’s the consideration for how these projects are now being sited in high fire zones?”
I was unable to reach Los Angeles County officials before press time for The Fight, but it’s worth noting that, amid the battle over Hecate’s approval, L.A. County planning officials began preparing to update their renewable energy ordinance to include battery storage development regulation – an indication they may need new methods to site and build more battery storage. There’s no timeline for when those changes will take place.
And more of the week’s top news about renewable energy conflicts.
1. Benton County, Washington – A state permitting board has overridden Governor Bob Ferguson to limit the size of what would’ve been Washington’s largest wind project over concerns about hawks.
2. Adams County, Colorado – This is a new one: Solar project opponents here are making calls to residents impersonating the developer to collect payments.
3. Lander County, Nevada – Trump’s move to kill the Esmeralda 7 solar mega-project has prompted incredible backlash in Congress, as almost all of Nevada’s congressional delegation claims that not a single renewables project in the U.S. has gotten a federal permit since July.
A conversation with David Gahl of SI2
This week I spoke with David Gahl, executive director of the Solar and Storage Industries Institute, or SI2, which is the Solar Energy Industries Association’s independent industry research arm. Usually I’d chat with Gahl about the many different studies and social science efforts they undertake to try and better understand siting conflicts in the U.S.. But SI2 reached out first this time, hoping to talk about how all of that work could be undermined by the Trump administration’s grant funding cuts tied to the government shutdown. (The Energy Department did not immediately get back to me with a request for comment for this story, citing the shutdown.)
The following conversation was edited lightly for clarity.
So what SI2 funding could be cut because of the federal shutdown, and what has it been put toward?
On October 1, the Energy Department put out a list of about $7.5 billion in grants they were terminating. Approximately a week later, another larger list of grants that were slated for termination found its way into the press. There’s an outstanding question about what this other list floating around means, and only DOE can verify the document’s accuracy, but we have two projects that were on that bigger list.
The first was $2.5 million supporting research into how power companies engage communities. We were coming up with a list of community engagement innovations — the idea was to actually test, through rigorous social science research at project sites, which of these innovations produces the best outcomes. We were going to have empirical data that said, If you approach communities in this way you’re more likely to get support, and if you approach communities this other way you wouldn’t.
The second was $3 million to bring diverse stakeholders together to talk about siting and permitting reform, best practices, guidance to make development smoother. The concept there was to bring traditionally warring parties to come up with a framework and tools to help the siting process. If you can get people together to come up with best practices, you can typically move things faster.
This was an “uncommon dialogue” – there was “uncommon dialogue” before on hydropower resources – and this was related to large-scale solar facilities and conservation. It’s not location-specific, more bringing the groups together to talk about a higher level set of issues, not specific projects. Keep in mind, this is relatively small potatoes.
What was the status of that work?
It started earlier in the year and it’s been rolling along. There’s been a lot of progress made so far. People have developed work plans and are working through the issues.
If the funding is canceled, there’s also opportunity for private money to potentially step in, but it puts both initiatives in a precarious place. But to the broader point, the administration has talked about how it wants energy “abundance” and more electrons on the grid to meet growing demand. And these projects funded by the department are addressing key problems to putting electrons onto the grid. Cancellation of these grants is just a complete reversal of what they’re talking about in other forums.
How so? Help me understand how this work actually trickles down to individual project decisions.
One of the challenges with siting any kind of large-scale energy project is getting community buy-in and ensuring the permitting process moves smoothly, that parties aren’t going to be litigating against each other. So if you can come up with ways to make sure the communities feel heard and are designed according to what communities want, you can probably avoid some litigation down the road.
Do you have any indication this government supports the work you’re describing?
What they’ve made clear is they want more electrons to come onto the grid to support data centers and the advancement of artificial intelligence. Canceling grants like these … I mean, we’re talking about potentially canceling projects that make it harder to meet the goal of putting more electricity onto the grid.