Conservative Activists Join a New Assault on Vineyard Wind

1. Nantucket County, Massachusetts – The fight over Vineyard Wind is back with a vengeance. But can an aggrieved vacation town team up with conservative legal activists to take down an operating offshore wind project?

• The offshore wind project, which is under construction and currently provides power to Massachusetts, was threatened this week when Nantucket signaled it may sue Vineyard Wind over a laundry list of demands related to the facility and last year’s blade breakage. Then less than 24 hours later, the Texas Public Policy Foundation – a conservative legal advocacy group – filed a petition to the Interior Department requesting it not only reconsider previous permits issued for Vineyard Wind but also halt operations at the site.
• It’s hard to ignore the timing here: before this flurry of activity, the Interior Department released a new secretarial order that laid out many ways it would potentially go after wind facilities. One method would be potentially settling lawsuits filed against both offshore and onshore wind projects in favor of plaintiffs.
• We are still waiting to see if Interior will take up the Vineyard Wind petition. But this activity suggests that opponents of offshore wind feel increasingly emboldened by the anti-renewables direction that Trump has taken in recent weeks, and we may soon find out if their aspirations for killing operating projects are well-founded.

2. Henry County, Virginia – A fresh fiasco around a solar farm is renewing animus against solar projects in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

• Virginia regulators fined Energix’s Sunny Rock project $120,000 for alleged failures to properly contain erosion and water runoff at the project site. A photograph released by the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality resembles an anti-renewables fantasy, showing the project operating atop mangled and erupted soil.
• This fine demonstrates why rural Virginians are increasingly skeptical of the stewardship solar developers bring to the land, as this is reportedly the fourth time in as many years Energix has been fined by the state of Virginia for environmental issues at its solar farms.

3. Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana – Solar developer Aypa is now suing this parish on the grounds it allegedly used zoning rules in an unfair and biased manner against one of its projects.

• The parish rejected Aypa’s Cajun Crescent solar project last year but the developer says it was motivated by political pressure, not legitimate health or environmental concerns. The lawsuit was filed against the parish’s policy jury, an equivalent of a commission or board of supervisors.
• I’m watching this litigation closely because it is notable and risky any time a renewables company sues over a rejection, as I’ve previously written.

4. Outagamie County, Wisconsin – If at first you don’t kill the solar farm, try and go after the substation.

• The residents of rural Maple Creek, a largely agriculture-based community west of Green Bay with the highest possible risk rating in Heatmap Pro, are now trying to get the neighboring small city of New London to reject an electrical substation for a yet-to-be-named Avangrid solar megaproject. That’s because there appears to be a groundswell of opposition to the project but, per one local report, the project will produce enough electricity to qualify for a state-based permitting and zoning process that circumvents local land use restrictions.
• Like with transmission, I’ve previously detailed how substations are a new zone for conflict in renewables development. This tactic doesn’t surprise me, but it’s fascinating to see it organically crop up elsewhere.

5. La Paz County, Arizona – Republicans in Congress are helping at least one area open up for more solar development.

• Last week, the House of Representatives passed a bill that instructed the Interior to convey acres for the expansion of a solar energy facility in this desert county represented by conservative Paul Gosar. The legislation was not only introduced by Gosar and two other of the state’s rightwing representatives, Andy Biggs and David Schweikert, but these GOP members then teamed up with the state’s two Democratic senators, Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego, to try and get the bill across the finish line. Now all it needs is passage through the Senate and a signature from President Trump, though support from far-right legislators in the House will certainly help.
• La Paz County has a relatively high opposition risk score in the Heatmap Pro database – 74 – but much of that appears to stem from how a vast quantity of its desert acreage is protected land. As we explained in a previous edition, one of the few places Republicans seem eager to put solar farms is in the isolated desert, far away from towns.

6. Idaho – The federal government will officially re-do its review of the LS Energy Lava Ridge wind farm.

• The Interior secretarial order I discussed above also ordered the Bureau of Land Management to review the record of decision for Lava Ridge and produce recommendations “on the need for a new, comprehensive analysis.”
• Why does this matter if Lava Ridge is already blocked by a Trump executive order? If I could hazard a guess, I’d say this would be a potential framework for undoing permits for other previously-approved wind farms. But that doesn’t sound like something this administration would do, does it?

7. Monterey County, California – The EPA is finally getting more involved in the Moss Landing battery plant cleanup, after the agency declared this week it approved a new comprehensive remediation plan under CERCLA, a law that also governs the Superfund program.

• EPA disclosed it entered into a new agreement with Vistra, operator of Moss Landing, to oversee removal of batteries at the site. EPA will also bill Vistra for the work involved.
• There’s no question that the eyes of the battery storage sector will stay on this cleanup as the risk of re-ignition pervades the site. And trouble continues to dog Moss Landing: last month, when Vistra tried to restart Tesla batteries in an area separate from what ignited, malfunctions led to the attempt getting scrapped.
• Meanwhile Moss Landing’s shadow continues to follow other battery storage projects in California. In neighboring Santa Cruz County, activists from the group Never Again Moss Landing – who I profiled earlier this year – are working with concerned locals to try and stop three separate storage projects from coming online.