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Hotspots

A Midwestern Shot/Chaser for Renewables

The week’s most important conflicts around the energy transition.

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1. Madison County, Ohio – All eyes are now on the Ohio Supreme Court, after opponents of the nation’s largest agri-voltaics project – Savion’s Oak Run solar farm – yesterday formally appealed a key approval from the state Power Siting Board.

  • We’ve previously explored how the fight over Oak Run is a flashpoint for solar on farmland. But perhaps even more important: it could decide the threshold for rejecting renewables in Ohio towns and counties that don’t want more projects.
  • Matt Eisenson at Columbia’s Sabin Center for Climate Law represents landowners intervening in support of the project. The big legal question in this appeal, he said, “is the extent to which public opinion and opposition by local government officials can be viewed as a proxy for the public interest.”
  • “[A]s a matter of law, one of the criteria for approval by the Ohio Power Siting Board is whether a project will serve the public interest, convenience, and necessity,” he explained in an email last night. “Can the Siting Board conclude, on the basis of local opposition alone, that a project does not serve the public interest?”
  • Eisenson said other legal challenges against other solar projects – Lightsource bp’s Birch Solar and Vesper Energy’s Kingwood Solar – could also decide this question. But crucially, Oak Run is the lone project of the three that was approved by the siting board.

2. Nassau County, New York – RWE and National Grid submitted the nation’s biggest offshore wind proposal to date to be built in the New York Bight with interconnection points in Brooklyn and Long Island …

  • …and days later, the member of Congress representing the Long Island connection point – Republican Rep. Anthony D’Esposito – came out against offshore wind.
  • Ironically, D’Esposito is the top Republican on the congressional offshore wind caucus.
  • “I was just asked the other day, why don’t you support offshore wind and certain battery storage?” D’Esposito said at a debate last week. “I don’t really see how building offshore wind farms and giant battery storage facilities is going to stop flooding in low-lying areas.”
  • If D’Esposito wins re-election, I expect him to become a Chris Smith-like figure in New York and take up the cause opposing offshore wind projects. It won’t matter for legislation – but as we’ve shown with other project fights, field hearings and oversight letters can be harmful to an individual project’s public perception.

3. Swift County, Minnesota – Rarely do we talk pro-renewables decisions here in The Fight’s Hotspots… but that changes today thanks to a rural Minnesota county rejecting a moratorium.

  • County commissioners blocked a moratorium, proposed by a petition signed by over 400 locals, for the second time last week, according to local media outlet West Central Tribune. If enacted, per the Tribune, it would bar Apex Clean Energy from constructing at least one utility scale solar farm in the western part of the county that could generate up to 400 megawatts in carbon-free power.
  • The commissioners have instead delegated the moratorium conversation to a renewable energy-focused committee with no clear timetable to conclude its work.

4. Fayette County, Pennsylvania – Another spot to watch for an anti-solar and wind ordinance is this county where developers are vying to stop restrictive property setback requirements.

  • If adopted, solar projects would have to be built in areas zoned for light or heavy industry and get special permits. They’d also have to be 300-600 feet from property lines and 1,200 feet from state roads.
  • Commissioners told the public and would-be solar developer Prospect 14 last week at a hearing it would study the legal and technical details of the subject and vote on the proposal at a later, unspecified date.
  • I’m not optimistic this county will side with the developers. The county zoning commission just rejected a Susquehanna Solar project because it was proposed too close to a school. The county also swung hard for Donald Trump in 2016, which Heatmap Pro’s data finds to be a flashing danger sign for developers.

5. Carroll County, Maryland – Developers have released the route for the Piedmont Reliability Project, a transmission proposal that will connect to a nuclear plant in Pennsylvania and will criss-cross Maryland. Some of the power will feed to data centers in Northern Virginia.

  • You can see a map of the transmission line route here. The line is necessary to avoid blackouts from coal plant retirements, which is partially why we included it on Heatmap’s list of 10 at-risk projects in the energy transition. (I would note state officials have stated this project is not a part of their climate goals, likely because some of the energy will feed data centers.)
  • Piedmont’s biggest hurdles are the same rural Maryland counties opposed to solar and wind on farmland. Residents are in outcry mode.
  • Public meetings on the proposal will be Nov. 12 in Baltimore County, Nov. 13 in Carroll County, and Nov. 14 in Frederick County. Dear reader, should I go to one?

Here’s what else we’ve been watching…

In Idaho, regulators approved a solar project on state endowment land – and of course, some Republican politicians are grousing about it.

In Kentucky, only three people showed up to oppose NextEra’s Weirs Creek solar project.

In Maine, state regulators were rejected by federal officials after a request for money to fund a proposed offshore wind construction site on Sears Island.

In Michigan, towns are sounding like they’re going to sue over a local control law intended to speed up renewables deployment.

In Virginia, county regulators are battling one another over a 2,200 acre solar farm proposed by AES Corporation in Isle of Wight county.

In New York, the upstate village of Wilson has enacted a battery storage moratorium.

Also in New York, Attentive Energy pulled out of the fifth offshore wind solicitation.

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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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