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And more from my conversation with Ray Long, president and CEO of the American Council on Renewable Energy
This week’s conversation is with Ray Long, president and CEO of the American Council on Renewable Energy, or ACORE. A representative of one of Washington’s most influential climate tech policy trade groups, Long is also a seasoned veteran of the energy sector across fossil and carbon-free power and now an industry thought leader based in Washington. I caught up with him at ACORE’s Grid Forum last week and asked him how companies are doing against NIMBYs.
Developers of gas infrastructure – are they spending more, less, or the same as renewable energy developers on community engagement? Who spends more on community engagement?
I just don’t know. I have no idea. It’s hard to gauge. And let’s talk about why – each company doesn’t disclose how much they spend on community engagement. You know, it’s not like you can go see who is registered to lobby in different areas, it’s not clear. I suppose you could go back after the fact and look at community benefit funds and those sorts of things that get put together but I’m just not sure if that’ll give you the snapshot that you’re looking for.
I’m curious if you feel if developers in renewable energy are spending enough of their capital on getting the consent of host communities.
Having worked for a renewable developer I can only speak from the perspective of the experience I had there. My sense is, across the industry, you’ve got different levels of companies that have different levels of sophistication and different levels of capabilities to do those things. And I’ll say this: even the sophisticated companies that are going in early, having the conversations and doing all the things that I would say would be a strategic way to getting it done… even they’re running into opposition. I don’t think it’s really any different than some of the fossil plants in my experience where there has been politicization.
Given the various degrees of sophistication and the various degrees of capacity, how would you score the renewable energy industry’s success rate at dealing with project opposition?
One of the places you can look at data is NEPA – the environmental impact statements. You know that NEPA impacts wind, solar, transmission, and fossil. Stanford [University] did this really interesting study where they looked back 10 years and they pulled all the environmental impact statements that had been submitted and then they graphed it, and they looked at it from the standpoint of which projects had been delayed, litigated, and ultimately canceled. Going in, if you go into Democratic offices and you talk to them in Washington, the impression a lot of us had was, I’d guess fossil projects would be the first. They’d be delayed the most, litigated the most, canceled the most. But it wasn’t. It was solar, wind… fossil’s fourth. That study was fascinating. That’s one of those things making the rounds now on the Hill as Democratic offices are considering the permitting and transmission bill.
But so many of these projects don’t require a NEPA review. How is the industry doing when it comes to dealing with the local county clerks?
I think it really depends on which technology, which company is going in. What’s their approach to it. It’s really hard to give a grade to the industry as a whole.
What would you say to a developer on best practices for community engagement in your view?
Number one, go into a community as soon as you think you have a project you’re going into. Start to talk to local people there about what their interests are and understand why. You’ve got to have a sense of curiosity, and develop an understanding of what people’s motivators are.
The second thing is hire local. Get some local people that you’re going to work with, who understand the community and can best advise you on it.
The third thing is, as you look to pull your project together and you think about your permitting structure, start to build in those things that the community cares about. Only then, when you have a line of sight on doing that, start the permitting process.
I certainly hope companies heed your advice.
Well if you look at the success record, companies that do that have a higher success record than those who don’t.
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And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy projects.
1. Lawrence County, Alabama – We now have a rare case of a large solar farm getting federal approval.
2. Virginia Beach, Virginia – It’s time to follow up on the Coastal Virginia offshore wind project.
3. Fairfield County, Ohio – The red shirts are beating the greens out in Ohio, and it isn’t looking pretty.
4. Allen County, Indiana – Sometimes a setback can really set someone back.
5. Adams County, Illinois – Hope you like boomerangs because this county has approved a solar project it previously denied.
6. Solano County, California – Yet another battery storage fight is breaking out in California. This time, it’s north of San Francisco.
A conversation with Elizabeth McCarthy of the Breakthrough Institute.
This week’s conversation is with Elizabeth McCarthy of the Breakthrough Institute. Elizabeth was one of several researchers involved in a comprehensive review of a decade of energy project litigation – between 2013 and 2022 – under the National Environment Policy Act. Notably, the review – which Breakthrough released a few weeks ago – found that a lot of energy projects get tied up in NEPA litigation. While she and her colleagues ultimately found fossil fuels are more vulnerable to this problem than renewables, the entire sector has a common enemy: difficulty of developing on federal lands because of NEPA. So I called her up this week to chat about what this research found.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
So why are you so fixated on NEPA?
Personally and institutionally, [Breakthrough is] curious about all regulatory policy – land use, environmental regulatory policy – and we see NEPA as the thing that connects them all. If we understand how that’s functioning at a high level, we can start to pull at the strings of other players. So, we wanted to understand the barrier that touches the most projects.
What aspects of zero-carbon energy generation are most affected by NEPA?
Anything with a federal nexus that doesn’t include tax credits. Solar and wind that is on federal land is subject to a NEPA review, and anything that is linear infrastructure – transmission often has to go through multiple NEPA reviews. We don’t see a ton of transmission being litigated over on our end, but we think that is a sign NEPA is such a known obstacle that no one even wants to touch a transmission line that’ll go through 14 years of review, so there’s this unknown graveyard of transmission that wasn’t even planned.
In your report, you noted there was a relatively small number of zero-carbon energy projects in your database of NEPA cases. Is solar and wind just being developed more frequently on private land, so there’s less of these sorts of conflicts?
Precisely. The states that are the most powered by wind or create the most wind energy are Texas and Iowa, and those are bypassing the national federal environmental review process [with private land], in addition to not having their own state requirements, so it’s easier to build projects.
What would you tell a solar or wind developer about your research?
This is confirming a lot of things they may have already instinctually known or believed to be true, which is that NEPA and filling out an environmental impact statement takes a really long time and is likely to be litigated over. If you’re a developer who can’t avoid putting your energy project on federal land, you may just want to avoid moving forward with it – the cost may outweigh whatever revenue you could get from that project because you can’t know how much money you’ll have to pour into it.
Huh. Sounds like everything is working well. I do think your work identifies a clear risk in developing on federal lands, which is baked into the marketplace now given the pause on permits for renewables on federal lands.
Yeah. And if you think about where the best places would be to put these technologies? It is on federal lands. The West is way more federal land than anywhere else in the county. Nevada is a great place to put solar — there’s a lot of sun. But we’re not going to put anything there if we can’t put anything there.
What’s the remedy?
We propose a set of policy suggestions. We think the judicial review process could be sped along or not be as burdensome. Our research most obviously points to shortening the statute of limitations under the Administrative Procedures Act from six years to six months, because a great deal of the projects we reviewed made it in that time, so you’d see more cases in good faith as opposed to someone waiting six years waiting to challenge it.
We also think engaging stakeholders much earlier in the process would help.
The Bureau of Land Management says it will be heavily scrutinizing transmission lines if they are expressly necessary to bring solar or wind energy to the power grid.
Since the beginning of July, I’ve been reporting out how the Trump administration has all but halted progress for solar and wind projects on federal lands through a series of orders issued by the Interior Department. But last week, I explained it was unclear whether transmission lines that connect to renewable energy projects would be subject to the permitting freeze. I also identified a major transmission line in Nevada – the north branch of NV Energy’s Greenlink project – as a crucial test case for the future of transmission siting in federal rights-of-way under Trump. Greenlink would cross a litany of federal solar leases and has been promoted as “essential to helping Nevada achieve its de-carbonization goals and increased renewable portfolio standard.”
Well, BLM has now told me Greenlink North will still proceed despite a delay made public shortly after permitting was frozen for renewables, and that the agency still expects to publish the record of decision for the line in September.
This is possible because, as BLM told me, transmission projects that bring solar and wind power to the grid will be subject to heightened scrutiny. In an exclusive statement, BLM press secretary Brian Hires told me via e-mail that a secretarial order choking out solar and wind permitting on federal lands will require “enhanced environmental review for transmission lines only when they are a part of, and necessary for, a wind or solar energy project.”
However, if a transmission project is not expressly tied to wind or solar or is not required for those projects to be constructed… apparently, then it can still get a federal green light. For instance in the case of Greenlink, the project itself is not explicitly tied to any single project, but is kind of like a transmission highway alongside many potential future solar projects. So a power line can get approved if it could one day connect to wind or solar, but the line’s purpose cannot solely be for a wind or solar project.
This is different than, say, lines tied explicitly to connecting a wind or solar project to an existing transmission network. Known as gen-tie lines, these will definitely face hardships with this federal government. This explains why, for example, BLM has yet to approve a gen-tie line for a wind project in Wyoming that would connect the Lucky Star wind project to the grid.
At the same time, it appears projects may be given a wider berth if a line has other reasons for existing, like improving resilience on the existing grid, or can be flexibly used by not just renewables but also fossil energy.
So, the lesson to me is that if you’re trying to build transmission infrastructure across federal property under this administration, you might want to be a little more … vague.