Fighting NIMBYism with Cash and State Overrides
And more of the week’s top news about renewable energy fights.
1. Jefferson County, New York – Two solar projects have been stymied by a new moratorium in the small rural town of Lyme in upstate New York.
- Lyme passed the solar moratorium earlier this week in response to AES’ Riverside and Bay Breeze solar projects and it’ll remain in place at least through October. Riverside had been approved already by state regulators, circumventing local concerns, but may reportedly still need to be relocated or modified due to the moratorium.
- Notably, opposition in the New York town has been fomented by a small chapter of Citizens for Responsible Solar, the anti-solar umbrella organization we wrote about in our profile of Virginia renewables fights last month.
2. Sussex County, Delaware – The Delaware legislature is intervening after Sussex County rejected the substation for the offshore MarWin wind project.
- The state Senate passed a bill this week that would take the power away from counties to reject substations for renewable energy projects above 250 megawatts. It passed quite easily, suggesting that it may sail through the House unless something significant changes.
- It’s worth saying that the MarWin project is not a done deal given the Trump administration’s antagonism towards offshore wind.
3. Clark County, Indiana – A BrightNight solar farm is struggling to get buy-in within the southern region of Indiana despite large 650-foot buffer zones.
- Concerns about the project include environmental impacts, noise, and visuals. Media reports are profoundly negative, with activists fighting the projects pushing for a county-wide moratorium and arguing utility-scale solar will degrade the county’s sociocultural fabric.
- A vote on the BrightNight project is scheduled for next week. I’m personally interested to see where this one shakes out, as Clark County simultaneously has a very high support (75) and opposition risk score (96) according to Heatmap Pro.
4. Tuscola County, Michigan – We’re about to see an interesting test of Michigan’s new permitting primacy law.
- Ranger Power’s Birch Valley solar project is having trouble getting support from the board of trustees in its host town of Arbela in northeast Michigan.
- But locals are grousing because the project is likely to be approved anyway under a law allowing state regulators to override towns like Arbela. We previously explained to you that this law is being challenged by townships and counties opposed to new solar and wind projects.
5. Marion County, Illinois – It might not work every time, but if you pay a county enough money, it might let you get a wind farm built.
- At least that’s what is going on in this rural southern Illinois county where local opposition – organized on Facebook, per usual – has cropped up to try and stop a wind farm from being constructed by Cordelio Power and Tenaska. They are still in the process of finding landowners for the project, per reporting on the ground.
- The project appears to be moving on through in spite of uncertain siting specifics because they’re pledging $400,000 annually to the county for them to essentially use as they see fit, which isn’t a bad bargain.
- It’s the first example I’ve found where payments can really move the needle, and suggests to me that perhaps economic hardships in the U.S. may magnify the benefits of in-kind payments from renewables developers. The harder things get, the more likely cash can help.
6. Renville County Minnesota – An administrative law judge has cleared the way for Ranger Power’s Gopher State solar project in southwest Minnesota.
- Renville County is continuing to object to the solar project on the grounds that it believes the decommissioning bond should be much higher than proposed by Ranger Power, who has offered to pay for an independent analysis of the risk that costs for closure could balloon in the future.
- The project will still need to be approved by the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission, where county officials will likely make their last stand.
7. Knox County, Nebraska – I have learned this county is now completely banning new wind and solar projects from getting permits.
- In a decision reached yesterday by the county Board of Supervisors, the county has explicitly banned any new commercial wind or solar projects. Minutes from the meeting are not yet public, but the approved resolution declaring the blanket moratorium was provided to me by the county clerk’s office, which also said this effectively means the county will no longer grant permits to developers.
- How did this happen? Well, as we’ve told you, Knox has been fighting with National Grid Renewables over the North Fork wind project for a while now, and when the county lost litigation over rejecting the project it appears to have decided to escalate to blocking all new renewables.
- Roughly half of the counties in Nebraska feature some kind of law restricting the development of renewables, according to Heatmap Pro’s database.
8. Fresno County, California – The Golden State has approved its first large-scale solar facility using the permitting overhaul it passed in 2022, bypassing local opposition to the project. But it’s also prompting a new BESS backlash.
- Intersect Power’s Darden Energy Project would not only include more than 1,000 megawatts of solar power but what California regulators say would be the largest battery energy storage system in the world. It was approved by the California Energy Commission on Wednesday through the state’s new opt-in certification program, which allows developers to circumvent local moratoria, ordinances, and permitting fights.
- The conflict over Darden, according to local media reports, stemmed from frustrations with BESS safety in light of battery fires including the Moss Landing disaster. Fresno County is directly to the east of Monterey, where the massive battery fire occurred.
- As the CEC advanced its streamlined approval, Fresno County today released new rules that battery storage facilities will need to abide by, requiring all BESS developers to pay the county money for “fire prevention.”
Editor’s note: This article was updated after publication to clarify that the Riverside project may need to relocated or modified.
