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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.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

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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Spotlight

Data Centers Collide with Local Restrictions on Renewables

A review of Heatmap Pro data reveals a troubling new trend in data center development.

A data center and a backyard.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Data centers are being built in places that restrict renewable energy. There are significant implications for our future energy grid – but it’s unclear if this behavior will lead to tech companies eschewing renewables or finding novel ways to still meet their clean energy commitments.

In the previous edition of The Fight, I began chronicling the data center boom and a nascent backlash to it by talking about Google and what would’ve been its second data center in southern Indianapolis, if the city had not rejected it last Monday. As I learned about Google’s practices in Indiana, I focused on the company’s first project – a $2 billion facility in Fort Wayne, because it is being built in a county where officials have instituted a cumbersome restrictive ordinance on large-scale solar energy. The county commission recently voted to make the ordinance more restrictive, unanimously agreeing to institute a 1,000-foot setback to take effect in early November, pending final approval from the county’s planning commission.

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Hotspots

Feds Preparing Rule Likely Restricting Offshore Wind, Court Filing Says

And more on the week’s most important fights around renewable energy projects.

The United States.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

1. Ocean County, New Jersey – A Trump administration official said in a legal filing that the government is preparing to conduct a rulemaking that could restrict future offshore wind development and codify a view that could tie the hands of future presidential administrations.

  • In a court filing last Friday, Matthew Giacona – Trump’s principal deputy director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management – laid out the federal government’s thoughts about re-doing the entire review process that went into approving the Atlantic Shores project. The filing was related to the agency’s effort to stay a lawsuit brought by anti-wind advocates that officials say is unnecessary because, well … Atlantic Shores is already kind of dead.
  • But the Giacona declaration went beyond this specific project. He laid out how in the Trump administration’s view, the Biden administration improperly weighed the impacts of the offshore wind industry when considering the government’s responsibilities for governing use of the Outer Continental Shelf, which is the range of oceanfront off the coastline that qualifies as U.S. waters. Giacona cited an Interior Department legal memo issued earlier this year that revoked Biden officials’ understanding of those legal responsibilities and, instead, put forward an interpretation of the agency’s role that results in a higher bar for approving offshore wind projects.
  • Per Giacona, not only will BOEM be reviewing past approvals under this new legal opinion, but it will also try and take some sort of action changing its responsibilities under federal regulation for approving projects in the Outer Continental Shelf. Enshrining this sort of legal interpretation into BOEM’s regulations would in theory have lasting implications for the agency even after the Trump 2.0 comes to a close.
  • “BOEM is currently beginning preparations for a rulemaking that will amend that provision of the regulations, consistent with M-37086 [the legal opinion],” Giacona stated. He did not elaborate on the timetable for this regulatory effort in the filing.

2. Prince William County, Virginia – The large liberal city of Manassas rejected a battery project over fire fears, indicating that post-Moss Landing, anxieties continue to pervade in communities across the country.

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Q&A

What Rural Republicans Say About Renewables

A conversation with Courtney Brady of Evergreen Action.

Courtney Brady.
Heatmap Illustration

This week I chatted with Courtney Brady, Midwest region deputy director for climate advocacy group Evergreen Action. Brady recently helped put together a report on rural support for renewables development, for which Evergreen Action partnered with the Private Property Rights Institute, a right-leaning advocacy group. Together, these two organizations conducted a series of interviews with self-identifying conservatives in Pennsylvania and Michigan focused on how and why GOP-leaning communities may be hesitant, reluctant, or outright hostile to solar or wind power.

What they found, Brady told me, was that politics mattered a lot less than an individual’s information diet. The conversation was incredibly informative, so I felt like it was worth sharing with all of you.

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