The Top Five Renewable Energy Fights of the Year

Alright, friends. It’s time for a special edition of The Fight’s Hotspots, where we walk you through what we believe were the five most important project conflicts of the year. We decided this list based on the notoriety of the fight within the renewables sector as well as whether our reporting found it to be significant for the entire industry. And we included the opposition scores for these projects based on our internal Heatmap Pro data to help you better understand whether these fights were flukes or quite predictable.

We hope this helps you all in this, errhmm, trying time for developers right now.

1. Lava Ridge’s bad year – Magic Valley, Idaho (36 opposition score)

• LS Energy’s Lava Ridge wind project might wind up the textbook example of how not to build a wind farm. The developer had initially botched getting consent from those most passionate about a nearby historic World War II internment camp for Japanese Americans, so despite its site in a gust-heavy rural landscape and a state ordinarily friendly to wind power, the project remains in hot water.
  
• We previously told you how Idaho Sen. Jim Risch of Idaho warned of a potential executive order targeting Lava Ridge’s permit approvals.
  
• However, a new wrinkle: the federal government completed its permitting for Lava Ridge and formally approved the project. It also appears from media reports that at least some activists’ concerns have been tempered by buffers the federal government placed on future wind development near the historic site.
  
• Is… this victory? Unfortunately, plenty could still happen here. If a party were to sue, a future Trump administration would easily have the right to negotiate a settlement over that challenge and say it needs more analysis. I wouldn’t consider this project safe yet.

2. Oregon opts out of offshore wind – Coos County, Oregon (50 opposition score)

• All of the sudden, over the course of an unusually warm September week, Oregon’s Democratic political leaders abandoned the development of floating offshore wind following an opposition campaign tied to local consternation and tribal heritage.
  
• As we explained at the time, this led to the federal government canceling what would’ve been Oregon’s first lease sale for floating offshore wind. Now there’s essentially no chance of a lease sale for at least another four years, because Trump promised to halt all offshore wind development.
  
• What does this mean? For starters, Democrats can turn into opponents of renewables too, overruling potential benefits for the climate or reliability, when pieces of their fractious coalitions turn sour over the perceived harms they see in development. (See also: the Piedmont transmission line in Maryland).

3. Oak Run and angry voltaics – Madison County, Ohio (96 opposition score)

• Savion’s Oak Run was supposed to be the model for how to build solar in harmony with a farming community. By co-locating solar panel siting and some crop production, it was supposed to show that solar can be in the same place as farmland without harming even a scintilla of the food supply.
  
• It didn’t go that way. Instead, Oak Run this year cemented itself as a poster child for conflict in renewables-hostile Ohio. We’ve explained a legal challenge over the project will decide the fate of all other renewables systems in the state.
  
• The farmland dilemma itself is a bit of a misinformation problem. A USDA study released in September found that only up to roughly a fifth of farmland used for solar between 2012 and 2020 was taken out of production once panels were uninstalled.
  
• And Oak Run’s issues itself may have ties to conspiracies, as the project’s loose connection to tech billionaire Bill Gates has become a bit of a rallying cry for local opponents.

4. bp’s Kentucky heartaches – Elizabethtown, Kentucky (63 opposition score)

• Quite a bit has been written about the anti-renewables group Citizens for Responsible Solar. But it’s still hard not to marvel at just how easily they win in places in Kentucky, where a small but mighty group of residents have mobilized against oil giant bp in the city of Elizabethtown to all but kill a 128 megawatt solar farm.
  
• We told you a month ago that we thought CRS would win against bp despite a clear plan to use private land and local donations to finally get shovels and steel into the ground – because it doesn’t take that many people to convince a city that popular will is on the side of the opposition.
  
• Well, it turns out we were right. CRS is now celebrating that it got Elizabethtown to deny bp’s request for annexation to use the private land, after a large group showed up to the preceding city council meeting.
  
• Elizabethtown’s denial has not previously been reported by the media, which is a big reason why Telesto Solar is on our list – it is our best indication yet that massive utility-scale solar projects might be getting snuffed out without the broader public knowing.

5. Battery fire fears beat blackouts – Katy, Texas (54 opposition score)

• No story sent a chill down my spine this year like what happened in Katy, a small city outside of Houston, where fears fomented after a battery storage fire near San Diego, California, led to such a strong anti-battery fervor that it killed a 500 megawatt project in a blackout prone area.
  
• Why? At the vote to reject the project, Katy City Councilor Gina Hicks, voted against constructing the battery project even though she thought it would lead to blackouts. Popular will had won out so profoundly she felt as a “public servant” she had to vote no.
• “I feel like this is a mob vote,” she said at the October council vote. “Just know that we as a community chose this and I will represent what the community wants versus what I feel is personally best for this decision.”
  
• I chose Katy over the San Diego fight because it demonstrated how quickly a kernel of truth — rare but possible battery fires — can ricochet across social media and prompt action in other parts of the country.