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Policy Watch

Washington Goes Wild, Wyoming Pipelines Win

And more of the week’s top policy news around renewable energy.

Burgum and Musk
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Catching Up With the Trumps – You’d be forgiven if you’ve been confused by the news firehose that has been the early days of Trump 2.0. Here’s a quick breakdown of what matters most for developers…

  • DOE Secretary Chris Wright last night issued his first order decrying net-zero but supporting nuclear and hydropower energy generation. Unlike Trumpian comms, Wright’s order did not decry wind or solar energy.
  • Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued his own flurry of orders earlier this week that open doors to lots more public lands going to resource extraction. Given the situation at BOEM and what we’re hearing is happening at the Fish and Wildlife Service, the jury’s still out on whether his entry into Interior will ease any permitting hardships for renewable energy.
  • At the EPA, crucial funding for renewables and other decarb projects remains on ice. Oh, and they’ve gutted the environmental justice office. It is unclear how any of this will impact permitting, though.
  • The next shoe we’re waiting to drop? Changes to IRA tax guidance from the Treasury Department, which has begun to pull back from promoting ESG in the investor community.
  • For these reasons, I believe it is worth it for anyone in the developer space to be watching how Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency interact with agencies overall, from any reductions in permitting staff size to changes in Treasury’s payment systems, which govern subsidies.

We’re Watching Wyoming – Business groups successfully killed an effort in Wyoming to inhibit eminent domain powers in the name of stopping CO2 pipelines.

  • Republican lawmakers had introduced legislation undercutting state regulations laying the groundwork for CO2 pipeline construction, targeting Governor Mark Godron’s support for an “all of the above” approach to energy that has room for decarb strategies preferred by the oil and gas sector.
  • But the bills have floundered amidst opposition from mining as well as coal interests who say they’ve invested too much in CO2 capture to turn back now, according to the news outlet WyoFile.
  • This is the most optimistic case study I can possibly point to that laws like the Inflation Reduction Act could stick around in a fully GOP federal government. Industry’s invested quite a bit. Guess we’ll see soon if Washington is like Wyoming.
  • Republican lawmakers had introduced legislation undercutting state regulations laying the groundwork for CO2 pipeline construction, targeting Governor Mark Godron’s support for an “all of the above” approach to energy that has room for decarb strategies preferred by the oil and gas sector.
  • But the bills have floundered amidst opposition from mining as well as coal interests who say they’ve invested too much in CO2 capture to turn back now, according to the news outlet WyoFile.
  • This is the most optimistic case study I can possibly point to that laws like the Inflation Reduction Act could stick around in a fully GOP federal government. Industry’s invested quite a bit. Guess we’ll see soon if Washington is like Wyoming.

Oh, and local control legislation in Virginia we’ve told you about has failed to advance in the Senate.


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Q&A

The Renewable Energy Investor Optimistic About the Future

A conversation with Mary King, a vice president handling venture strategy at Aligned Capital

The Q&A subject.
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Today’s conversation is with Mary King, a vice president handling venture strategy at Aligned Capital, which has invested in developers like Summit Ridge and Brightnight. I reached out to Mary as a part of the broader range of conversations I’ve had with industry professionals since it has become clear Republicans in Congress will be taking a chainsaw to the Inflation Reduction Act. I wanted to ask her about investment philosophies in this trying time and how the landscape for putting capital into renewable energy has shifted. But Mary’s quite open with her view: these technologies aren’t going anywhere.

The following conversation has been lightly edited and abridged for clarity.

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Hotspots

Democratic Climate Hawk Fights Battery Storage Project

And more news around renewable energy conflicts.

The United States.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

1. Nantucket County, Massachusetts – The SouthCoast offshore wind project will be forced to abandon its existing power purchase agreements with Massachusetts and Rhode Island if the Trump administration’s wind permitting freeze continues, according to court filings submitted last week.

  • SouthCoast is a crucial example of a systemic dilemma I reported on months back: Wind projects the Biden administration said it fully permitted will likely still be delayed by a blanket permitting freeze because wind energy requires such large infrastructure that projects need regular green lights from the federal government for new activities.
  • In case you missed it, the anti-wind permitting freeze has been a continued issue for SouthCoast and has led to scrapped negotiations on future power deals with Massachusetts.

2. Tippacanoe County, Indiana – This county has now passed a full solar moratorium but is looking at grandfathering one large utility-scale project: RWE and Geenex’s Rainbow Trout solar farm.

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Spotlight

The Trump Solar Farm Slowdown

Permitting delays and missed deadlines are bedeviling solar developers and activist groups alike. What’s going on?

Donald Trump and solar panels.
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It’s no longer possible to say the Trump administration is moving solar projects along as one of the nation’s largest solar farms is being quietly delayed and even observers fighting the project aren’t sure why.

Months ago, it looked like Trump was going to start greenlighting large-scale solar with an emphasis out West. Agency spokespeople told me Trump’s 60-day pause on permitting solar projects had been lifted and then the Bureau of Land Management formally approved its first utility-scale project under this administration, Leeward Renewable Energy’s Elisabeth solar project in Arizona, and BLM also unveiled other solar projects it “reasonably” expected would be developed in the area surrounding Elisabeth.

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