You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
It’s power companies vs. ... convenience stores?
The convenience store lobby is very, very interested in electric vehicle charging.
In state after state, they have clashed with utilities over who gets to install electric chargers — and who pays for it. The reason is that the convenience store industry is also the gas station industry. They sell 80 percent of America’s gas — and they want to sell power as well, if not for what they claim is unfair conduct by America’s utilities.
A group that the convenience store lobby helped found is fighting the utility Xcel Energy in Colorado over its proposal to install its own EV chargers. They have successfully campaigned against a proposed rate hike in Minnesota that would have helped fund Xcel’s plan to install around 730 EV chargers and supported legislative pushes in Oklahoma, Texas, and Georgia that limited utilities’ ability to charge their customers for EV charging investments through the regulated electricity rates.
The federal government is throwing billions of dollars at the electric vehicle industry, including charging, while the regulations that surround who is able to build chargers and with what money are largely fought state-by-state.
So why is the gas station industry so interested in what utilities want to do with EV charging?
It’s essentially a clash of business models. Utilities are almost completely unique in how they’re set up as legal monopolies. Government regulators only allow utilities to take profits based on the scale of the investments they make. “Utilities profit by deploying capital,” Ari Peskoe, Director of the Electricity Law Initiative at the Harvard Law School, told me. “That’s the basic business model.”
Get one great climate story in your inbox every day:
When utilities make investments in things like transmission lines, they can recover the cost of them — and profit — by charging all of their customers in their electric bills. And “if it’s a big market, they may want to completely control and dominate that market,” Peskoe explained. So when utilities have proposed using ratepayer money to fund electric vehicle chargers, it reliably kicks up opposition from potential competitors who see it as an unfair advantage and an existential threat to their own businesses.
Gas stations and convenience stores, on the other hand, have a business model where the sale of gas itself — and, eventually, electricity — is a low-margin business with fierce price competition where profits are largely made on sales of snacks and drinks. Customers drive in for the pump, but profits are made at the cash register.
The industry claims that the stations with the best locations, customer service, and amenities won’t be willing to make the large upfront investments for charging if a utility could set up shop next door and actually profit purely from setting up the charger, and thus be able to undercut them on price. They also fear, Peskoe said, that the necessary services a utility has to provide to non-utility chargers may be degraded or disfavored compared to the utilities’ own chargers.
“The only way we’re going to get the buildout of an adequate number of locations to service those drivers is if the private sector has a reason to invest and that reason is potential to make profit,” said Doug Kantor, the general counsel of the National Association of Convenience Stores.
The dispute between the two industries is yet another example of how public policy firmly shifting in support of decarbonization and electrification at the federal level and in many states has transformed how businesses respond to climate change.
While there is still industry-led opposition to decarbonization, many companies, even those directly tied to fossil fuels, are trying to position themselves to profit from the massive transformation underway in how Americans get around. The result, at least in the case of utilities and convenience stores, is a state-by-state battle royale.
The utilities argue that there’s no way to electrify American transportation without their involvement and that rate decisions like the one in Minnesota will ultimately make it hard to massively expand the nation’s charging network, hurting decarbonization goals. Xcel spokesperson Lacey Nygrad said in email, “We know EVs are the future of transportation, and we will help our customers and communities make the transition, but we also need constructive outcomes in rate reviews to help drive the state forward.”
Xcel attorneys argued a similar point in a letter to the Public Utilities Commission when it withdrew its plan to install 730 chargers. “[T]he Commission made several decisions that, if allowed to go into effect, will limit the Company’s ability to continue to lead the clean energy transition for our customers.”
The convenience stores have been able to win over some major figures in the push for electrification, touting a NACS-funded report by the influential public policy consulting firm Grid Strategies LLC — frequently quoted in the media as an advocate for large investments in transmission infrastructure typically favored by green groups and decarbonization advocates — which concludes that “Only independent owners should be allowed to own and operate EV chargers across the interstate highway system and in our local communities."
The convenience store lobby is trying to take advantage of the ambiguous place that utilities play in the energy system. As regulated monopolies, utilities are often unpopular with the general public. They have been accused of dragging their feet on the transition to non-carbon energy and even outright obstruction of so-called “behind-the-meter” resources like rooftop solar. It also means they will be around, in some form or other, essentially indefinitely and will likely be shouldering much of the massive investments needed for a decarbonized and electrified power system.
The utilities industry has argued for its role in the EV charging space, saying what’s required is an “all-hands-on-deck approach,” in the words of Kellen Schefter, an official at the Edison Electric Institute, the trade association for investor-owned utilities. “No one is preventing private-sector stakeholders from investing in EV charging today, and the idea that some stakeholders are trying to prevent electric companies from building EV charging infrastructure is senseless.”
No matter who gets to build chargers – and how they’re funded — the utility industry will inevitably be deeply involved, not least with the transmission and distribution infrastructure necessary to bring power to electric vehicles.
“Utilities do have an indispensable role to play in EV charging,” Matthew Goetz, Associate Director of the Mitigation Program at the Georgetown Climate Center, told me. “A primary role for utilities is the broad system planning and the grid infrastructure investments, both in the distribution grid and investments in transmission infrastructure.”
In the end, the utilities and the convenience stores will have to learn to work together.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
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.