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Hotspots

A New York Town Bans Both Renewable Energy And Data Centers

And more on this week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.

The United States.
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1. Chautauqua, New York – More rural New York towns are banning renewable energy.

  • Chautauqua, a vacation town in southern New York, has now reportedly issued a one-year moratorium on wind projects – though it’s not entirely obvious whether a wind project is in active development within its boundaries, and town officials have confessed none are being planned as of now.
  • Apparently, per local press, this temporary ban is tied to a broader effort to update the town’s overall land use plan to “manage renewable energy and other emerging high-impact uses” – and will lead to an ordinance that restricts data centers as well as solar and wind projects.
  • I anticipate this strategy where towns update land use plans to target data centers and renewables at the same time will be a lasting trend.

2. Virginia Beach, Virginia – Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia offshore wind project will learn its fate under the Trump administration by this fall, after a federal judge ruled that the Justice Department must come to a decision on how it’ll handle a court challenge against its permits by September.

  • I previously explained that it looked like the organizations challenging Coastal Virginia would potentially be working with the Trump administration to potentially undo approvals for this project, and potentially others, through legal settlements with groups that sued the government in federal court.
  • For months, the deliberations over this lawsuit have stayed private, and both the groups and the federal attorneys have kicked deadlines for a decision down the road. However, the judge presiding over the case this week ruled that the Justice Department must decide how it wishes to proceed by some time in September.

3. Bedford County, Pennsylvania – Arena Renewables is trying to thread a needle through development in one of the riskiest Pennsylvania counties for development, with an agriculture-fueled opposition risk score of 89.

  • Per a local media report this week, Arena representatives were pilloried at a local town hall this week by residents who were skeptical that an unnamed project currently under development on private land would actually benefit them, and local firefighters seem to fret the risk of the solar farm.

4. Knox County, Ohio – The Ohio Power Siting Board has given the green light to Open Road Renewables’ much-watched Frasier Solar project.

  • As we previously reported, the Frasier project was so polarizing locally that it turned a county commissioner race into a referendum on future solar projects.
  • However, after a year of hearings, those complaints failed to win out over the backing of state regulators, the state Chamber of Commerce, and local landowners whose properties would be home to the project. The reasoning? OPSB said in its opinion that the opposition was not unanimous and so there was still room for public benefit from the solar project.

5. Clay County, Missouri – We’ll find out next week if rural Missouri can still take it easy on a large solar project.

  • Next week, Solis Renewables will be presenting its conditional use zoning application for Gateway Trails Solar, a 20-megawatt project that needs approval from the Clay County Planning and Zoning Commission.
  • The local concerns being raised are to be expected: fire worries, property value fears, and a lingering feeling that federal tax credits might get wiped away, making it harder to finance construction.
  • Notably, however, local environmental and climate advocates have made more of an effort at showing up to local planning meetings than I’m used to seeing with projects in red states, and this hearing next week will be an interesting test for solar in Missouri.

6. Clark County, Nevada – President Trump’s Bureau of Land Management has pushed back the permitting process for EDF Renewables’ Bonanza solar project by at least two months and possibly longer .

  • BLM was supposed to complete the environmental review for Bonanza by June 5. But I’ve learned from an update quietly posted to a federal permitting dashboard that BLM has failed to meet that deadline. The dashboard now says the project will be fully permitted by January of next year.
  • I reached out to EDF to try and get an answer here on when they expected the environmental review to be completed. EDF replied with a screenshot of a different federal webpage that stated a new completion date for the environmental review: July 25. So I guess we’ll… see what happens?

7. Klickitat County, Washington – Washington State has now formally overridden local opposition to Cypress Creek’s Carriger solar project after teeing up the decision in May.

  • The newly-issued recommendations approved this week by the state Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council mean that now the project is all but assured to go through, unless litigation against this decision somehow crops up.
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Hotspots

Judge, Siding With Trump, Saves Solar From NEPA

And more on the week’s biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects.

The United States.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

1. Jackson County, Kansas – A judge has rejected a Hail Mary lawsuit to kill a single solar farm over it benefiting from the Inflation Reduction Act, siding with arguments from a somewhat unexpected source — the Trump administration’s Justice Department — which argued that projects qualifying for tax credits do not require federal environmental reviews.

  • We previously reported that this lawsuit filed by frustrated Kansans targeted implementation of the IRA when it first was filed in February. That was true then, but afterwards an amended complaint was filed that focused entirely on the solar farm at the heart of the case: NextEra’s Jeffrey Solar. The case focuses now on whether Jeffrey benefiting from IRA credits means it should’ve gotten reviewed under the National Environmental Policy Act.
  • Perhaps surprisingly to some, the Trump Justice Department argued against these NEPA reviews – a posture that jibes with the administration’s approach to streamlining the overall environmental analysis process but works in favor of companies using IRA credits.
  • In a ruling that came down on Tuesday, District Judge Holly Teeter ruled the landowners lacked standing to sue because “there is a mismatch between their environmental concerns tied to construction of the Jeffrey Solar Project and the tax credits and regulations,” and they did not “plausibly allege the substantial federal control and responsibility necessary to trigger NEPA review.”
  • “Plaintiffs’ claims, arguments, and requested relief have been difficult to analyze,” Teeter wrote in her opinion. “They are trying to use the procedural requirements of NEPA as a roadblock because they do not like what Congress has chosen to incentivize and what regulations Jackson County is considering. But those challenges must be made to the legislative branch, not to the judiciary.”

2. Portage County, Wisconsin – The largest solar project in the Badger State is now one step closer to construction after settling with environmentalists concerned about impacts to the Greater Prairie Chicken, an imperiled bird species beloved in wildlife conservation circles.

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Spotlight

Renewables Swept Up in Data Center Backlash

Just look at Virginia.

A data center.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Solar and wind projects are getting swept up in the blowback to data center construction, presenting a risk to renewable energy companies who are hoping to ride the rise of AI in an otherwise difficult moment for the industry.

The American data center boom is going to demand an enormous amount of electricity and renewables developers believe much of it will come from solar and wind. But while these types of energy generation may be more easily constructed than, say, a fossil power plant, it doesn’t necessarily mean a connection to a data center will make a renewable project more popular. Not to mention data centers in rural areas face complaints that overlap with prominent arguments against solar and wind – like noise and impacts to water and farmland – which is leading to unfavorable outcomes for renewable energy developers more broadly when a community turns against a data center.

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Q&A

How the Wind Industry Can Fight Back

A conversation with Chris Moyer of Echo Communications

The Q&A subject.
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Today’s conversation is with Chris Moyer of Echo Communications, a D.C.-based communications firm that focuses on defending zero- and low-carbon energy and federal investments in climate action. Moyer, a veteran communications adviser who previously worked on Capitol Hill, has some hot takes as of late about how he believes industry and political leaders have in his view failed to properly rebut attacks on solar and wind energy, in addition to the Inflation Reduction Act. On Tuesday he sent an email blast out to his listserv – which I am on – that boldly declared: “The Wind Industry’s Strategy is Failing.”

Of course after getting that email, it shouldn’t surprise readers of The Fight to hear I had to understand what he meant by that, and share it with all of you. So here goes. The following conversation has been abridged and lightly edited for clarity.

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