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Spotlight

The CBD’s Tortoise Threat

The conservationist group thinks it has the goods on the Bureau of Land Management’s new Western solar plan.

Tortoise

The Biden administration is trying to open a lot more Western territory to utility-scale solar. But they are facing a conservationist backlash that may be aided by the views of scientists within the federal government.

Yesterday, activists pushed back against the environmental review of the Bureau of Land Management’s new Western solar plan that would make more than 31 million acres available for utility-scale solar applications across 11 states. The BLM is trying to meet the next two decades of demand for renewable electricity while avoiding the kinds of environmental and social conflicts that stymie individual projects. But it appears key stakeholders filed protests against the environmental review, including counties that would host new solar farms and Republican politicians, as well as the whistleblower advocacy group PEER we wrote about last week.

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Hotspots

Offshore Wind Is Off the Table in Oregon

And more of the week’s biggest conflicts in renewable energy development.

Map.

1. Coos County, Oregon – We can confirm that opposition and waning industry interest have effectively killed the Beaver State’s first offshore wind lease sale.

  • Late Friday, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management postponed an Oct. 15 lease sale for floating offshore wind citing “insufficient bidder interest” from only one of five companies identified as qualified to participate.
  • And we’ve learned there won’t be a retry any time soon: BOEM spokesman John Romero confirmed in an email that the agency “does not have a timeline for determining a future opportunity for a potential lease sale in Oregon.”
  • Shortly before the cancellation, Gov. Tina Kotek called for the lease sale to be nixed and pulled out of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s task force on Oregon’s offshore wind development after a chorus of concerns from coastal towns and tribes were echoed by the state’s two senators, Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley. All these elected officials are Democrats, by the way.
  • Last week, Mainstream Renewable Power Inc. told Oregon Public Broadcasting they’d no longer bid. Four other companies were qualified to bid: Avangrid Renewables, BlueFloat Energy, OW North America Ventures, and South Coast Energy Waters, a company backed by the CEO of solar developer NewSun.

2. Atlantic County, New Jersey – Some good news for offshore wind as a counterbalance: the Atlantic Shores wind farm got its final federal approval from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management yesterday.

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Policy Watch

Tariffs Hit Solar Cells

And more of the week’s biggest news in clean energy policy.

Solar Panels

1. Seasons change, tariffs stay the same – The Biden administration is putting a duty on solar cells from four South Asian countries believed to be pass-throughs for Chinese imports: Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam.

  • The tariffs range wildly from less than 1% to almost 300%. Impacted companies include Jintek, Hanwha Q Cells (a.k.a. Qcells), JinkoSolar, and Trina Solar.
  • What this’ll mean: developers wrestling with pricier imported cells from some of the most popular sources.
  • These tariffs resulted from an anti-dumping case filed by an alliance of U.S. solar manufacturers including First Solar, Convalt Energy, REC Silicon, and, ironically, also Qcells.

2. New money for new nuclear – The Energy Department yesterday finalized over $2.8 billion in loans and grants to restart the Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan.

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Q&A

How Carbon Pipeline Fights Hurt Direct Air Capture

A conversation with Kajsa Hendrickson, Carbon180’s director of policy

How Carbon Pipeline Fights Hurt Direct Air Capture

This week I spoke with Kajsa Hendrickson, director of policy at Carbon180, about why they’re eager to talk about the social concerns involved in direct air capture (DAC) and how conflicts over carbon pipelines are hurting DAC projects too. We talk a lot about renewables here on The Fight but DAC is a crucial part of decarbonization and it has a host of conflicts that’ll be familiar to our readers.

The following is an abridged version of our conversation. Let’s get started…

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