A Hawk Headache for Washington’s Biggest Wind Farm

1. Benton County, Washington – A state permitting board has overridden Governor Bob Ferguson to limit the size of what would’ve been Washington’s largest wind project over concerns about hawks.

• In a unanimous decision targeting Horse Heaven Wind Farm, the Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council determined that no turbines could be built within two miles of any potential nests for ferruginous hawks, a bird species considered endangered by the state. It’s unclear how many turbines at Horse Heaven will be impacted but reports indicate at least roughly 40 turbines – approximately 20% of a project with a 72,000-acre development area.
  
• Concerns about bird deaths and nest disruptions have been a primary point of contention against Horse Heaven specifically, cited by the local Yakama Nation as well as raised by homeowners concerned about viewsheds. As we told you last year, these project opponents as well as Benton County are contesting the project’s previous state approval in court. In July, that battle escalated to the Washington Supreme Court, where a decision is pending on whether to let the challenge proceed to trial.

2. Adams County, Colorado – This is a new one: Solar project opponents here are making calls to residents impersonating the developer to collect payments.

• Silicon Ranch is developing a 150-megawatt solar facility in this rural county west of Denver – and now reporting scammers to the FBI after unknown individuals began mass calling residents in Byers, a town miles south of the project. The calls apparently reference payments and potential future contracted work in the community while claiming to be with the company.
  
• “We’ve been informed that individuals are falsely claiming to represent Silicon Ranch in Adams County,” said the county sheriff’s office in a Facebook post alerting the public. “These imposters are attempting to collect personal information and request payments related to the SR Byers solar energy project.
  
• There’s a serious PR problem for utility-scale solar if scammers are pretending to be developers. While solar “scams” around rooftop home solar are nothing new, any company trying to do land deals for larger projects could face difficulties in bridging a trust gap, especially in areas like Adams County that are at risk of opposition according to Heatmap Pro.

3. Lander County, Nevada – Trump’s move to kill the Esmeralda 7 solar mega-project has prompted incredible backlash in Congress, as almost all of Nevada’s congressional delegation claims that not a single renewables project in the U.S. has gotten a federal permit since July.

• I was first to report that earlier this month the Bureau of Land Management abruptly ended the programmatic environmental review for Esmeralda 7, listing the endeavor as “canceled” on their website. BLM has claimed this doesn’t mean the project is canceled per se because each individual component of the mega-project can proceed separately. But at least one developer – NextEra – told me they now consider their project there to be “early stage” (meaning they have to start permitting all over).
  
• In a letter this week, Nevada Senator Catherine Cortez Masto joined with the state’s other Democratic senator and three Democratic representatives to lambast the Interior Department’s federal permitting freeze memo that led to the mega-project’s cancellation.
• “The memo provides no guidance or practical instructions to agency staff on how to implement this new permitting process. To our knowledge, not a single solar or wind project in any state has received approval under the new guidance,” the letter reads.
  
• Notably the only Nevada lawmaker in Congress not to sign on was Republican Representative Mark Amodei, who is otherwise considered somewhat friendly to renewable energy. He represents the northern half of the state, which is mostly small towns and open desert sought after for solar. This includes Lander County where the BLM field office in charge of the Esmeralda 7 review is located.