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Why an attorney for Dominion Voting Systems is now defending renewables companies.
A look at 2024’s most notorious conflicts in the energy transition.
A conversation with Devin Hartman of R Street
A conversation with Tim Brightbill of Wiley Rein LLP
And more of the week’s biggest news around renewable energy policy.
And more of the week’s news around renewable energy conflicts.
The governor is trying to get the Bureau of Land Management’s solar expansion plan canceled, Heatmap has learned.
Nevada, ground zero for solar development in the American West, is now seeing a different kind of renewables revolution – against development.
It might endanger the Biden administration’s crowning solar permitting achievement, and will mean developers in the Silver State will have to reckon with empowered opponents in the Trump 2.0 era.
The Bureau of Land Management’s Western solar plan would open more than 31 million acres available for utility-scale solar applications across almost a dozen states. About a third of that land would be in Nevada. Nevada is one of the top states in the U.S. for solar development and utility-scale construction spiked after passage of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Rural county governments are hopping mad over the effort. Many officials want to do what their friends in other states can do – pass moratoria and restrict development in line with local complaints. They’ve been passing their local rules. But there’s a big X factor: They have no authority over federal lands, and most of the state’s territory overall is under control of BLM.
This means their ordinances are relatively toothless, county officials say, not to mention they get less revenue from solar farms.
“There are impacts to residents, to county services, to how we deliver services from solar energy projects, that frankly aren’t being addressed,” said Vinson Guthreau, executive director of the Nevada Association of Counties, which has formally protested the BLM solar plan after backlash with members. “And there’s zero way to capture revenue from resources on federal land — we cannot collect taxes on federal land. We receive all of the impacts and none of the revenue to fund the impacts, frankly.”
Enter Nevada’s Republican Governor Joe Lombardo. In an Oct. 28 letter obtained by Heatmap, Lombardo stated “discouraging feedback” from local officials and state agencies led him to ask BLM to cancel its west-wide comprehensive solar plan. Among his complaints: many objections from local leaders and concerns raised by environmentalists about impacts on imperiled tortoises and sage grouse. (Yes, this means the GOP governor of Nevada is on the same side as the Center for Biological Diversity.)
“The vast tracts of land identified,” Lombardo wrote, “places enormous pressure on our rural counties, many of which rely on public lands for agriculture, grazing, mining, recreation, and community development, and threatens to overwhelm local land-use plans and disrupt the economic and social fabric of our communities.”
Opposition from Nevada means that if there’s a way to unravel the programmatic solar plan when Donald Trump takes office in January, there’ll be a will. That’s what happened with the Obama administration’s sage grouse habitat protection efforts. Other western states opposed Obama sage grouse protection plans, but Nevada – a key swing state – was a dissenting voice that really counted. Now ironically, instead of scrapping protections for sage grouse, the state is citing the bird to say local objections are being left out of the discourse.
“Everybody knows where the migration corridors are,” said Lander County land use planner Pam Harrington, who previously worked for conservation group Trout Unlimited. “We’re not unsupportive of [solar energy] in our county. We want to see growth. But we want to see smart growth.”
Personally, I think the mining and agriculture concerns here are scant compared to the very real tax issue. We see transmission lines or renewables projects face scrutiny when the power itself doesn’t go to the people directly impacted. The same could easily be true here with taxes. Notably, the hardrock mining industry – also blooming in Nevada – pays state royalties but no federal payments for the resources it collects in the state.
“The mining industry is super prominent and they have set the gold standard around community engagement,” Gurtheau said, adding he believes those companies are doing a much better job at engaging Nevada communities than renewables. “That’s what our [counties] are used to.”
It’s unclear if the BLM will formally implement the solar plan before Trump takes office. The final environmental review for BLM’s solar plan was released at the end of the summer, but the Bureau has not issued its official action formally opening acreage for development. The agency said it would do this “following resolution of any remaining issues identified” after releasing the final review.
BLM did not respond to a request for comment.
And what renewables can learn from it.
A sprawling multi-state carbon pipeline appears easier to permit and build than wind and solar farms in red states, despite comments the president-elect or his team may have said on the campaign trail. And the answer has to do with more than just the potential benefits for oil and gas.
The Summit Carbon Solutions CO2 pipeline network would criss-cross five states – Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, and the Dakotas – connecting dozens of ethanol “biorefinery” plants to carbon sequestration sites for storing CO2 captured while producing the agri-fuel. On paper Summit has its work cut out for it in ways not dissimilar to the troubles facing solar and wind. Land use issues, ecological concerns, the whole lot. And its work has become controversial amongst a myriad of opposition groups I often write about like rural farmers and, of course, conspiratorial NIMBYs – chief among them Vivek Ramaswamy and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., two members of the incoming Trump administration.
But Ramaswamy and RFK Jr.’s presence is providing cold comfort compared to the selection of North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum – a vocal supporter of the project – to be Interior Secretary.
“We’re screwed,” wrote Dawn Shepard, a North Dakotan opposed to the project, on Facebook after the selection was announced. “He will get all Carbon Capture projects approved. I thought Republicans and Trump, included, didn’t believe in climate change. Trump’s not keeping his word.”
It’s not exactly that simple, and its debatable whether Summit’ll actually help address climate change, but the premise is true: Trump’s election may just assure the pipeline’s completion, if all things go its way.
“Those appointments are definitely a big thumb on the scale of the pipeline going through,” said Mark Hefflinger of Bold Alliance, one of the activist networks fighting the pipeline project.
In my conversations with activists and the company, it doesn’t appear there’s any easy way for the Interior Department – which oversees all federal land use – to grease all of the skids for Summit, so to speak. But there are a number of factors in its favor now: the pipeline will still require Army Corps of Engineers permits for water body crossings and those tend to require environmental reviews that heavily involve Interior. At the same time, all sides expect the Interior Secretary and likely Energy Secretary Chris Wright (an oil magnate) to champion beneficial Inflation Reduction Act tax credits for carbon capture, sequestration, and utilization in tax talks early next year.
All the while, most state-level regulators have finished or are completing approvals of the pipeline, with the exception of South Dakota where Summit on Tuesday resubmitted its permitting application to the state’s Public Utilities Commission. While I’ve been told the company didn’t substantially adjust its routing in response to the failed ballot initiative, executives certainly did change plans to elide a repeat rejection from the commission after it said no to pipeline plans last year.
“Our efforts involved spending more than a year driving county roads, knocking on doors, and having meaningful, face-to-face conversations with landowners,” Sabrina Zenor, Summit’s director of stakeholder engagement and corporate communications, told me. “These conversations guided our approach.”
There’s a lot that could still go awry for Summit. They could lose legal battles in Iowa that send them back to the drawing board in a crucial hub for corn and ethanol and where public opinion may be souring on the developer. South Dakota could be its own ball of wax, given how passionate the opposition in the state is.
Trump’s comments on the matter have been vague, indicating he’s … well, being very Trump about this. “Well, you know, we’re working on that,” Trump said when asked about the pipeline at an Iowa primary event last year. “And you know, we had a plan to totally — it’s such a ridiculous situation, isn’t it? But we had a plan, and we would have instituted that plan, and it was all ready, but we will get it — if we win, that’s going to be taken care of. That will be one of the easy things we do.”
Ultimately it may be with many issues: whoever’s in the room last with Trump could decide the pipeline’s fate.
But regardless, developers of renewables and battery storage could take away a few lessons from the pipeline network.
Walt Bones, the former head of South Dakota’s Agriculture Department, is one of the landowners currently negotiating a financial agreement for land use with Summit. He’s a farmer, and like many farmers we write about here at The Fight, he doesn’t support building stuff on or near his land if there’s going to be an impact on his crop yields. He told me that he believes the opposition in the state is largely the product of a rush to build by an over-zealous company seeking the maximum benefit from federal tax credits. And they spooked people, producing widespread skepticism of the pipeline.
“Summit did not help themselves any,” he said.
Now of course, there’s lots of concerns about CO2 pipelines’ environmental impacts and the risk of them going, well, kablooey. But unlike how some farmers skeptically view agri-voltaics (e.g. dual use solar), the thought of a pipeline beneath the earth gives Bones – a former farm regulator – no qualms. And the reasoning is simple: He doesn’t believe the pipeline, which will be buried, will impact his farming at all. And ethanol – unlike solar or wind – will feed demand for more farming.
“Basically zero impact to our land. We’ll still be able to farm over it. We’ll still be able to graze over it with our cows,” he said. “I know what the value is … [it’ll] guarantee the future viability of corn.”
So where does this leave us? It’s likely Bones doesn’t represent every farmer. But maybe there’d be a benefit in renewable developers focusing on finding ever-more ways to create a fly-wheel where solar and wind energy generation creates more business for farmers. Clearly, the sheer footprint of a utility scale solar or wind project can be more impactful than a thin pipeline crossing a property.
And I guess they should also make more politically powerful friends in the Dakotas.
