A New York Town Bans Both Renewable Energy And Data Centers

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.