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Its electric grid is very dirty.
It’s very hot in Arizona, but no one in charge seems to be very worried about the electricity.
The region’s major utilities — Arizona Public Service, Tucson Electric Company, and the Salt River Project — have all said they’re confident that the lights, and especially the air conditioning, will stay on, even as both temperatures and electricity usage break records. This is in stark contrast to a nearby state, Texas, where record heat has sparked anxiety about reliability and voluntary calls for conserving energy use.
Whether Arizona can transition to a less carbon-intensive grid while maintaining its famed reliability is a test not just for its residents, but also for Arizona’s stubborn rejection of energy deregulation. The state is blessed with abundant renewables potential (it's very, very sunny) and a massive carbon-free source of firm power in the country’s largest nuclear plant, the Palo Verde Generating Station. But it also has a market structure for electricity that typically sees lower renewable production.
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Reliability is quite literally a matter of life and death in Arizona. One paper estimated that the combination of a prolonged blackout (no power for five days) and a heat wave where temperatures were between 90 and 113 degrees (actually slightly cooler than recent temperatures) could result in about 13,000 deaths and more than half of the population needing to go to the emergency room. While this scenario was admittedly extreme, we do have a grim reminder of how dangerous high temperatures can be in Arizona: When people die of heat exposure, they’re often homeless.
Arizona's grid has held up well under this heat wave, though. According to Arizona Public Service, their customers set a record for consumer demand for electricity on Saturday with 8,191 megawatts. The previous record had only been in place for one day; it had been set on Friday. The utility, a subsidiary of Pinnacle West, has over one million customers and services much of the state, splitting the Phoenix area with the cooperative Salt River Project. A spokesperson for Arizona Public Service told me “we continue to have adequate supply and our system is stable," while a Salt River Project spokesperson said that its electricity demand set a record on Monday evening with 7,997 megawatts, after setting records last Friday and Saturday.
Yet Arizona does have one problem with its electricity grid: It's pretty dirty and thus contributing to the reason all those air conditioners need to work so hard. Natural gas remains the state’s biggest source of energy, representing just over 42 percent of its generation last year, and coal still outproduces solar, according to Energy Information Administration data. One bright spot in the grid is nuclear power, which produces just under 30 percent of the state's energy.
The reliability of Arizona’s grid might have less to do with the makeup of its energy grid, though, and more to do with the fact that the state has resisted deregulation, meaning that Arizonans are served by utilities which own or contract electricity generation and are overseen by a state body, the Arizona Corporation Commission. This means planning is a cooperative process between the state and the utilities, as opposed to one governed by a wholesale market for electricity.
Critics of deregulation have argued that market constructs for electricity lead to underinvestment in reliability (like winterization for natural gas, albeit not a huge concern in Arizona) and premature retirement of energy resources, like dispatchable power plants, that can be expensive to run. They’ve also been criticized for not bringing down prices in the way they were promised. While Arizona does have more expensive electricity than Texas, according to the Energy Information Administration, it’s substantially cheaper than California, New York, or New England.
Arizona has been assailed by both environmental groups and activists, who accuse the utilities of dragging their feet or outright obstructing renewables, especially solar, as well as by generation companies (especially those with solar subsidiaries) who wish to compete in a more deregulated market where customers can choose where their electric generation comes from.
Arizona’s major utilities have all committed to decarbonization timelines, ranging from aspirational goals of total decarbonization by 2050 to more detailed targets by 2035, even though state rules mandating decarbonization were shot down in 2022.
That will likely mean more development of solar — despite being very sunny, Arizona’s solar production lags North Carolina, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association — along with battery storage and the continued operation of the Palo Verde Generating Station, the utility-owned 4,000 megawatt nuclear power plant that serves customers in Arizona and three neighboring states, including California and Texas.
If Arizona adds large amounts of solar to the grid, which it's starting to do, it will need to deal with the famous duck curve, the phenomenon where the sun goes down and solar production plummets, but electricity demand stays stubbornly high as air conditioning and appliances are still in use. On Monday, demand peaked in the early evening and, in Phoenix, temperatures hovered at right around 100 degrees at 9 p.m. Arizona's utilities are aware of this issue; along with increased solar installation and investment, there has been increased deployment of battery storage, which can bank the sun’s energy for nighttime use.
Meanwhile Arizona’s combination of high reliability and avoiding deregulation has become something of a point of pride in the state, where some leaders and advocates see it charting a course between the Scylla of Texas and the Charybdis of California, its two wealthy and gargantuan neighbors. When the Wall Street Journal ran a long story entitled “America’s Power Grid Is Increasingly Unreliable” (it featured, of course, California and Texas), Arizona Public Service issued a statement from its chief executive entitled, “’Unreliable grid?’ Not here in Arizona.”
Keeping it that way is a matter of life and death.
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Solar and wind projects will take the most heat, but the document leaves open the possibility for damage to spread far and wide.
It’s still too soon to know just how damaging the Interior Department’s political review process for renewables permits will be. But my reporting shows there’s no scenario where the blast radius doesn’t hit dozens of projects at least — and it could take down countless more.
Last week, Interior released a memo that I was first to report would stymie permits for renewable energy projects on and off of federal lands by grinding to a halt everything from all rights-of-way decisions to wildlife permits and tribal consultations. At minimum, those actions will need to be vetted on a project-by-project basis by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and the office of the Interior deputy secretary — a new, still largely undefined process that could tie up final agency actions in red tape and delay.
For the past week, I’ve been chatting with renewables industry representatives and their supporters to get their initial reactions on what this latest blow from the Trump administration will do to their business. The people I spoke with who were involved in development and investment were fearful of being quoted, but the prevailing sense was of near-total uncertainty, including as to how other agencies may respond to such an action from a vital organ of the federal government’s environmental review process.
The order left open the possibility it could also be applied to any number of projects “related to” solar and wind — a potential trip-wire for plans sited entirely on private lands but requiring transmission across Bureau of Land Management property to connect to the grid. Heatmap Pro data shows 96 renewable energy projects that are less than 7 miles away from federal lands, making them more likely to need federal approval for transmission or road needs, and another 47 projects that are a similar distance away from critical wildlife habitat. In case you don’t want to do the math, that’s almost 150 projects that may hypothetically wind up caught in this permitting pause, on top of however many solar and wind projects that are already in its trap.
At least 35 solar projects and three wind projects — Salmon Falls Wind in Idaho and the Jackalope and Maestro projects in Wyoming — are under federal review, according to Interior’s public data. Advocates for renewable energy say these are the projects that will be the most crucial test cases to watch.
“Unfortunately they’ll be the guinea pigs,” said Mariel Lutz, a conservation policy analyst for the Center for American Progress, who today released a report outlining the scale of job losses that could occur in the wind sector under Trump. “The best way to figure out what this means is to have people and projects try or not try various things and see what happens.”
The data available is largely confined to projects under National Environmental Policy Act review, however. In my conversations with petrified developers this past week, it’s abundantly clear no one really knows just how far-reaching these delays may become. Only time will tell.
We’re looking at battles brewing in New York and Ohio, plus there’s a bit of good news in Virginia.
1. Idaho — The LS Power Lava Ridge wind farm is now facing a fresh assault, this time from Congress — and the Trump team now seems to want a nuclear plant there instead.
2. Suffolk County, New York — A massive fish market co-op in the Bronx is now joining the lawsuit to stop Equinor’s offshore Empire Wind project, providing anti-wind activists a powerful new ally in the public square.
3. Madison County, New York — Elsewhere in New York, a solar project upstate seems to be galvanizing opposition to the state’s permitting primacy law.
4. Fairfield County, Ohio — A trench war is now breaking out over National Grid Renewables’ Carnation Solar project, as opponents win a crucial victory at the county level.
5. El Paso County, Colorado — I don’t write about Colorado often, but this situation is an interesting one.
6. St. Joseph County, Indiana — Something interesting is playing out in this county that demonstrates how it can be quite complicated to navigate municipal and county-level permitting.
7. Albemarle County, Virginia — It’s rare I get to tell a positive story about Virginia, but today we have one: It is now easier to build a solar farm in the county home to Charlottesville, one of my personal favorite small cities in our country.
Getting local with Matthew Eisenson of Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.
This week’s conversation is with Matthew Eisenson at Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. Eisenson is a legal expert and pioneer in the field of renewable energy community engagement whose work on litigating in support of solar and wind actually contributed to my interest in diving headlong into this subject after we both were panelists at the Society of Environmental Journalists’ annual conference last year. His team at the Sabin Center recently released a report outlining updates to their national project tracker, which looks at various facility-level conflicts at the local level.
On the eve of that report’s release earlier this month, Eisenson talked to me about what he believes are the best practices that could get more renewable projects over the finish line in municipal permitting fights. Oh — and we talked about Ohio.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
So first of all, walk me through your report. How has the community conflict over renewable energy changed in the U.S. over the past year?
A few things I would highlight. In Ohio, we now have 26 out of 88 counties that have established restricted areas where wind or solar are prohibited. These restrictions are explicitly enabled by the state law, SB 52. I’d also highlight that while the majority of litigation in our database is state-level litigation and contested case administrative proceedings, there are certain types of projects — particularly offshore wind — that have an extremely high prevalence of federal litigation. A majority of federally permitted offshore wind projects have been subject to federal lawsuits. The plaintiffs in these lawsuits have never succeeded on the merits, but they keep filing them and they drive up costs.
In general, as a topline takeaway, [our] report shows more and more of the same.
You personally do quite a bit of legal work on solar and wind permitting battles in the state of Ohio, where as you noted counties are curtailing deployment left and right. What’s your bird’s eye view of the situation in the state right now?
So Ohio has for years had a state-level siting process. The Ohio Power Siting Board reviews all applications for large-scale energy generation facilities, 50 megawatts or larger. The Siting Board has a set of criteria they are required to apply when they are reviewing an application, but basically only one of them seems to matter in deciding whether a project is approved or denied: whether the project serves the public’s convenience and necessity.
We’re seeing that in the majority of proceedings for approvals of large-scale wind and solar projects, there will be groups that intervene in opposition to the project, and often these groups will argue that there is so much local opposition that the project cannot possibly serve the public interest.
The Power Siting Board has been rejecting that argument in important cases recently. The board is still putting substantial weight on whether local governments are supportive or not supportive of a project, but are not rejecting projects just because of a demonstration of local opposition.
Say you’re a developer and you start facing opposition. What is the right legal avenue? How should they do the calculus, so to speak, on how to navigate legal options?
There’s numerous things developers can do. They can work with the local government and community-based groups to work with the local government to craft host community agreements, community benefit agreements — voluntary but binding contracts with the local community where a developer provides benefits; in exchange, community-based groups would agree to support the project, or at least not to oppose it. These can be very helpful and particularly meaningful in places where a local government itself is not in charge of permitting decisions themselves. So in a state like Ohio, if a developer negotiates host benefit agreements with local township governments and then those governments don’t turn around to intervene against a project, those would be extremely helpful.
It’s also important for developers to do community outreach and build a base of local supporters, and get those supporters to turn out at public meetings. Historically opponents of projects are more motivated to show up at a local meeting than supporters, but it’s really not a good look for a project when you have 500 turn out against it and 10 turn out to support.
For years the opponents were very proactive. There would be a proposal for a project in one county in Kansas and a group of opponents in the neighboring county would propose a restrictive ordinance to block future projects — supporters weren’t thinking proactively in the long-term. I think a concentrated effort will produce meaningful results. But they’re behind.