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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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The agency provided a list to the Sierra Club, which in turn provided the list to Heatmap.
Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency remain closed-lipped about which grants they’ve canceled. Earlier this week, however, the office provided a written list to the Sierra Club in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, which begins to shed light on some of the agency’s actions.
The document shows 49 individual grants that were either “canceled” or prevented from being awarded from January 20 through March 7, which is the day the public information office conducted its search in response to the FOIA request. The grants’ total cumulative value is more than $230 million, although some $30 million appears to have already been paid out to recipients.
The numbers don’t quite line up with what the agency has said publicly. The EPA published three press releases between Trump’s inauguration and March 7, announcing that it had canceled a total of 42 grants and “saved” Americans roughly $227 million. In its first such announcement on February 14, the agency said it was canceling a $50 million grant to the Climate Justice Alliance, but the only grant to that organization on the FOIA spreadsheet is listed at $12 million. To make matters more confusing, there are only $185 million worth of EPA grant cuts listed on the Department of Government Efficiency’s website from the same time period. (Zeldin later announced more than 400 additional grant terminations on March 10.)
Nonetheless, the document gives a clearer picture of which grants Administrator Lee Zeldin has targeted. Nearly half of the canceled grants are related to environmental justice initiatives, which is not surprising, given the Trump administration’s directives to root out these types of programs. But nearly as many were funding research into lower-carbon construction materials and better product labeling to prevent greenwashing.
Here’s the full list of grants, by program:
A few more details and observations from this list:
In the original FOIA request, Sierra Club had asked for a lot more information, including communications between EPA and the grant recipients, and explanations for why the grants — which in many cases involved binding contracts between the government and recipients — were being terminated. In its response, EPA said it was still working on the rest of the request and expected to issue a complete response by April 12.
Defenders of the Inflation Reduction Act have hit on what they hope will be a persuasive argument for why it should stay.
With the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and its tax credits for building and producing clean energy hanging in the balance, the law’s supporters have increasingly turned to dollars-and-cents arguments in favor of its preservation. Since the election, industry and research groups have put out a handful of reports making the broad argument that in addition to higher greenhouse gas emissions, taking away these tax credits would mean higher electricity bills.
The American Clean Power Association put out a report in December, authored by the consulting firm ICF, arguing that “energy tax credits will drive $1.9 trillion in growth, creating 13.7 million jobs and delivering 4x return on investment.”
The Solar Energy Industries Association followed that up last month with a letter citing an analysis by Aurora Energy Research, which found that undoing the tax credits for wind, solar, and storage would reduce clean energy deployment by 237 gigawatts through 2040 and cost nearly 100,000 jobs, all while raising bills by hundreds of dollars in Texas and New York. (Other groups, including the conservative environmental group ConservAmerica and the Clean Energy Buyers Association have commissioned similar research and come up with similar results.)
And just this week, Energy Innovation, a clean energy research group that had previously published widely cited research arguing that clean energy deployment was not linked to the run-up in retail electricity prices, published a report that found repealing the Inflation Reduction Act would “increase cumulative household energy costs by $32 billion” over the next decade, among other economic impacts.
The tax credits “make clean energy even more economic than it already is, particularly for developers,” explained Energy Innovation senior director Robbie Orvis. “When you add more of those technologies, you bring down the electricity cost significantly,” he said.
Historically, the price of fossil fuels like natural gas and coal have set the wholesale price for electricity. With renewables, however, the operating costs associated with procuring those fuels go away. The fewer of those you have, “the lower the price drops,” Orvis said. Without the tax credits to support the growth and deployment of renewables, the analysis found that annual energy costs per U.S. household would go up some $48 annually by 2030, and $68 by 2035.
These arguments come at a time when retail electricity prices in much of the country have grown substantially. Since December 2019, average retail electricity prices have risen from about $0.13 per kilowatt-hour to almost $0.18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Massachusetts and California, rates are over $0.30 a kilowatt-hour, according to the Energy Information Administration. As Energy Innovation researchers have pointed out, states with higher renewable penetration sometimes have higher rates, including California, but often do not, as in South Dakota, where 77% of its electricity comes from renewables.
Retail electricity prices are not solely determined by fuel costs Distribution costs for maintaining the whole electrical system are also a factor. In California, for example,it’s these costs that have driven a spike in rates, as utilities have had to harden their grids against wildfires. Across the whole country, utilities have had to ramp up capital investment in grid equipment as it’s aged, driving up distribution costs, a 2024 Energy Innovation report argued.
A similar analysis by Aurora Energy Research (the one cited by SEIA) that just looked at investment and production tax credits for wind, solar, and batteries found that if they were removed, electricity bills would increase hundreds of dollars per year on average, and by as much as $40 per month in New York and $29 per month in Texas.
One reason the bill impact could be so high, Aurora’s Martin Anderson told me, is that states with aggressive goals for decarbonizing the electricity sector would still have to procure clean energy in a world where its deployment would have gotten more expensive. New York is targetinga target for getting 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, while Minnesota has a goal for its utilities to sell 55% clean electricity by 2035 and could see its average cost increase by $22 a month. Some of these states may have to resort to purchasing renewable energy certificates to make up the difference as new generation projects in the state become less attractive.
Bills in Texas, on the other hand, would likely go up because wind and solar investment would slow down, meaning that Texans’ large-scale energy consumption would be increasingly met with fossil fuels (Texas has a Renewable Portfolio Standard that it has long since surpassed).
This emphasis from industry and advocacy groups on the dollars and cents of clean energy policy is hardly new — when the House of Representatives passed the (doomed) Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill in 2009, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told the House, “Remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.”
More recently, when Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich and Tim Kaine hosted a press conference to press their case for preserving the Inflation Reduction Act, the email that landed in reporters’ inboxes read “Heinrich, Kaine Host Press Conference on Trump’s War on Affordable, American-Made Energy.”
“Trump’s war on the Inflation Reduction Act will kill American jobs, raise costs on families, weaken our economic competitiveness, and erode American global energy dominance,” Heinrich told me in an emailed statement. “Trump should end his destructive crusade on affordable energy and start putting the interests of working people first.”
That the impacts and benefits of the IRA are spread between blue and red states speaks to the political calculation of clean energy proponents, hoping that a bill that subsidized solar panels in Texas, battery factories in Georgia, and battery storage in Southern California could bring about a bipartisan alliance to keep it alive. While Congressional Republicans will be scouring the budget for every last dollar to help fund an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a group of House Republicans have gone on the record in defense of the IRA’s tax credits.
“There's been so much research on the emissions impact of the IRA over the past few years, but there's been comparatively less research on the economic benefits and the household energy benefits,” Orvis said. “And I think that one thing that's become evident in the last year or so is that household energy costs — inflation, fossil fuel prices — those do seem to be more top of mind for Americans.”
Opinion modeling from Heatmap Pro shows that lower utility bills is the number one perceived benefit of renewables in much of the country. The only counties where it isn’t the number one perceived benefit are known for being extremely wealthy, extremely crunchy, or both: Boulder and Denver in Colorado; Multnomah (a.k.a. Portland) in Oregon; Arlington in Virginia; and Chittenden in Vermont.
On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.