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Hotspots

Offshore Wind Is Off the Table in Oregon

And more of the week’s biggest conflicts in renewable energy development.

Map.
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1. Coos County, Oregon – We can confirm that opposition and waning industry interest have effectively killed the Beaver State’s first offshore wind lease sale.

  • Late Friday, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management postponed an Oct. 15 lease sale for floating offshore wind citing “insufficient bidder interest” from only one of five companies identified as qualified to participate.
  • And we’ve learned there won’t be a retry any time soon: BOEM spokesman John Romero confirmed in an email that the agency “does not have a timeline for determining a future opportunity for a potential lease sale in Oregon.”
  • Shortly before the cancellation, Gov. Tina Kotek called for the lease sale to be nixed and pulled out of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s task force on Oregon’s offshore wind development after a chorus of concerns from coastal towns and tribes were echoed by the state’s two senators, Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley. All these elected officials are Democrats, by the way.
  • Last week, Mainstream Renewable Power Inc. told Oregon Public Broadcasting they’d no longer bid. Four other companies were qualified to bid: Avangrid Renewables, BlueFloat Energy, OW North America Ventures, and South Coast Energy Waters, a company backed by the CEO of solar developer NewSun.

2. Atlantic County, New Jersey – Some good news for offshore wind as a counterbalance: the Atlantic Shores wind farm got its final federal approval from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management yesterday.

  • We expected this to happen, and we’ve previously explained that litigation will likely occur. But it’s still a major milestone. Even if Donald Trump wins, the project’s fate is now left for the courts to decide.
  • There’ll still be fights over the project. One of the potential host communities for the cables, Sea Girt, is seeing local opposition crop up and intervention from its congressman Chris Smith. But the matter has gotten safer for the developer.

3. Montgomery County, Alabama – In Alabama’s capital city of Montgomery, residents opposed to solar power are campaigning for Montgomery to enact a blanket ordinance banning permits and site development plans.

  • Their efforts have led the city council’s public works committee to study the matter. A study committee meeting on the proposal scheduled last week was derailed as Hurricane Helene began to make landfall without a new date.
  • Residents took to the Montgomery city council last night and again asked for the moratorium. Some council members seemed receptive to the concerns, but so far no dice for the activists.
  • Montgomery is home to several potential solar farms with promise for decarbonizing the Deep South, including projects being developed by Hecate Energy and Pinegate Renewables (not to be confused with Pine Gate Renewables, who we discuss below).

4. Litchfield County, Connecticut The small New England city of Torrington, Connecticut doesn’t want any more solar panels.

  • Torrington’s mayor Elinor Carbone wrote the state requesting they consider rejecting a proposed solar installation opposed by some residents in a neighboring condominium. Visuals and deforestation seem to be the big concerns.
  • This comes from a municipality that only recently accepted battery storage and follows in the long tradition of Connecticut residents going back and forth on NIMBY vibes. (A decade ago they had banned wind entirely.)
  • And Torrington’s solar projects overall seem to suffer from grumpy neighbors. See: this Verogy project dealing with complaints about overgrown grass.

Here’s what else we’re watching …

In Arizona, the city of Maricopa is opposing a roughly 1,100 acre solar farm proposed by Hidden Valley Ranch Partners.

In California, the city of San Marcos may soon formally oppose AES Corporation’s Seguro battery storage project.

In Illinois, officials in Clinton County have extended their wind moratorium through at least the end of this year.

In Kentucky, Lexington County’s planning commission has recommended against allowing large-scale solar farms.

In Michigan, the city of Detroit has filed eminent domain lawsuits to procure properties for community solar, a development backed by DTE.

In Minnesota, the city of Hugo is taking another stab at allowing some solar development after initially backing restrictions.

In Pennsylvania, Wilson Solar has offered to reduce the size of an 80 MW solar farm to assuage residents’ concerns. Jury’s still out on if it’ll work.

In Texas, a federal judge has halted work on Pine Gate Renewables’ Bandera solar farm amid a legal battle with landowners.

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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.
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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.
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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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