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A conversation with Geoff Cooper, head of the Renewable Fuels Association
Today’s conversation is with Geoff Cooper, head of the Renewable Fuels Association, the most powerful biofuels trade organization in D.C. And he’s not happy.
In Cooper’s view, the Biden administration left the IRA’s tax credit supporting lower-carbon jet fuel unfinished despite releasing guidance days before Trump entered office (here’s an explainer on that problem). Not to mention the chaos of Trump’s early days has, as Cooper put it, thrown the brakes on the American biofuels sector’s foray into aviation. Cooper and I have a history going back years, and almost a month into Trump 2.0, I thought it was time we had a chat about how solar and wind aren’t the only sectors left out in the cold right now.
The following conversation was lightly edited and abridged for clarity.
We’ve been telling our readers what’s happening in the renewable energy space under Trump. But what’s happening in the renewable fuels space?
I think what we’re seeing right now is lots of businesses hitting the pause button and waiting for more certainty, waiting for more clarity on where everything is headed. There is, of course, always uncertainty and unpredictability at the beginning of any new administration. But this one in particular there has been more than usual because we were sort of in the middle of getting rules finalized on some of those key tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act. We had good clarity, and I’d say understanding of where some of those programs were going, like 45Q, but on others like 45Z, literally, it was the last week of the Biden administration that we began to see the necessary pieces of that program we’d been waiting on, and what the administration put out was incomplete and unfinished, so now it falls to the Trump administration to decide whether and how to move forward with that. So all of that uncertainty and confusion and the timing of all of that has resulted in many companies in the renewable fuels space just calling a time out on any investment plans and strategies that they have been considering to lower carbon intensity. I think there’s a real hesitancy to dive head first into some of those investments right now when it just isn’t clear where the bottom is.
What do you mean by a pause on investment? Can you give some examples?
Under 45Z and under the initial modeling the Biden administration put out in early January, I’d say probably three-quarters of the ethanol industry is just barely on the outside of generating 45Z credit, so the carbon intensity of their ethanol is just above that threshold that would be required to generate that credit on the low end of that scale.
There are a number of technologies that producers could adopt to get them on the other side of that threshold into the position where they can begin claiming some value from 45Z — combined heat and power, installing wind or solar behind the meter at these facilities so they can enjoy the benefit of renewable electricity, using biogas in lieu of natural gas. These are all things most producers were considering, and had in some cases had deals ready to go and projects ready to go. But they’re on hold now because again, nobody’s quite sure what the future looks like for 45Z.
Are any companies saying this out loud, or is this mostly private board room chatter?
This is mostly internal conversations during board meetings and other meetings we’ve had as an association. But there have been public statements.
Is the uncertainty surrounding government funding also a factor here?
It has been. If you look at USDA — for example, the [Rural Energy for America Program] REAP program — funding was paused for that program. And it isn’t just for on-farm renewable projects. There’s some ethanol plants that had successfully applied and received commitments for REAP funding for projects they were doing and that’s been put on hold. More broadly, things have slowed down in terms of making investments and commitments to efficiency and lower carbon intensity in the industry as a result of just the broader freeze and slowdown on all of these programs at the federal level.
And again, you expect some of that is going to occur any time there’s a new administration and you go through a transition like this. But this one has been, I would say, particularly acute so far.
Do you believe that given his history supporting biofuel infrastructure in North Dakota as governor, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum will be more deferential to your members when it comes to permitting?
I should say the industry is confident that everything that’s paused right now — or, not everything, but a lot of the important programs that have been frozen or paused right now — will eventually be unstuck and the door will open back up. Certainly we see carbon capture and sequestration projects in that way, permitting for those projects. Obviously there’s a couple of carbon pipeline projects that we do expect will move forward, and the 45Q tax credit seems to be on firmer ground than 45Z at this moment. So we do expect that those things will move forward.
It’s just a matter of how long things are delayed and how long things are frozen as the new administration is reviewing things and formulating their own strategy and plans for how they want to move forward.
Do you have any idea how that’ll shake out?
I don’t think there is any indication of how it’ll shake out at this point.
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From Kansas to Brooklyn, the fire is turning battery skeptics into outright opponents.
The symbol of the American battery backlash can be found in the tiny town of Halstead, Kansas.
Angry residents protesting a large storage project proposed by Boston developer Concurrent LLC have begun brandishing flashy yard signs picturing the Moss Landing battery plant blaze, all while freaking out local officials with their intensity. The modern storage project bears little if any resemblance to the Moss Landing facility, which uses older technology,, but that hasn’t calmed down anxious locals or stopped news stations from replaying footage of the blaze in their coverage of the conflict.
The city of Halstead, under pressure from these locals, is now developing a battery storage zoning ordinance – and explicitly saying this will not mean a project “has been formally approved or can be built in the city.” The backlash is now so intense that Halstead’s mayor Dennis Travis has taken to fighting back against criticism on Facebook, writing in a series of posts about individuals in his community “trying to rule by MOB mentality, pushing out false information and intimidating” volunteers working for the city. “I’m exercising MY First Amendment Right and well, if you don’t like it you can kiss my grits,” he wrote. Other posts shared information on the financial benefits of building battery storage and facts to dispel worries about battery fires. “You might want to close your eyes and wish this technology away but that is not going to happen,” another post declared. “Isn’t it better to be able to regulate it in our community?”
What’s happening in Halstead is a sign of a slow-spreading public relations wildfire that’s nudging communities that were already skeptical of battery storage over the edge into outright opposition. We’re not seeing any evidence that communities are transforming from supportive to hostile – but we are seeing new areas that were predisposed to dislike battery storage grow more aggressive and aghast at the idea of new projects.
Heatmap Pro data actually tells the story quite neatly: Halstead is located in Harvey County, a high risk area for developers that already has a restrictive ordinance banning all large-scale solar and wind development. There’s nothing about battery storage on the books yet, but our own opinion poll modeling shows that individuals in this county are more likely to oppose battery storage than renewable energy.
We’re seeing this phenomenon play out elsewhere as well. Take Fannin County, Texas, where residents have begun brandishing the example of Moss Landing to rail against an Engie battery storage project, and our modeling similarly shows an intense hostility to battery projects. The same can be said about Brooklyn, New York, where anti-battery concerns are far higher in our polling forecasts – and opposition to battery storage on the ground is gaining steam.
And more on the week’s conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Carbon County, Wyoming – I have learned that the Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project.
2. Nantucket County, Massachusetts – Anti-offshore wind advocates are pushing the Trump administration to rescind air permits issued to Avangrid for New England Wind 1 and 2, the same approval that was ripped away from Atlantic Shores offshore wind farm last Friday.
3. Campbell County, Virginia – The HEP Solar utility-scale project in rural Virginia is being accused of creating a damaging amount of runoff, turning a nearby lake into a “mud pit.” (To see the story making the rounds on anti-renewables social media, watch this TV news segment.)
4. Marrow County, Ohio – A solar farm in Ohio got approvals for once! Congratulations to ESA Solar on this rare 23-acre conquest.
5. Madison County, Indiana – The Indiana Supreme Court has rejected an effort by Invenergy to void a restrictive county ordinance.
6. Davidson County, North Carolina – A fraught conflict is playing out over a Cypress Creek Renewables solar project in the town of Denton, which passed a solar moratorium that contradicts approval for the project issued by county officials in 2022.
7. Knox County, Nebraska – A federal judge has dismissed key aspects of a legal challenge North Fork Wind, a subsidiary of National Grid Renewables, filed against the county for enacting a restrictive wind ordinance that hinders development of their project.
8. Livingston Parish, Louisiana – This parish is extending a moratorium on new solar farm approvals for at least another year, claiming such action is necessary to comply with a request from the state.
9. Jefferson County, Texas – The city council in the heavily industrial city of Port Arthur, Texas, has approved a lease for constructing wind turbines in a lake.
10. Linn County, Oregon – What is supposed to be this county’s first large-scale solar farm is starting to face pushback over impacts to a wetlands area.Today’s sit-down is with Nikhil Kumar, a program director at GridLab and an expert in battery storage safety and regulation. Kumar’s folks reached out to me after learning I was writing about Moss Landing and wanted to give his honest and open perspective on how the disaster is impacting the future of storage development in the U.S. Let’s dive in!
The following is an abridged and edited version of our conversation.
So okay – walk me through your perspective on what happened with Moss Landing.
When this incident occurred, I’d already been to Moss Landing plenty of times. It caught me by surprise in the sense that it had reoccurred – the site had issues in the past.
A bit of context about my background – I joined GridLab relatively recently, but before that I spent 20 years in this industry, often working on the integrity and quality assurance of energy assets, anything from a natural gas power plant to nuclear to battery to a solar plant. I’m very familiar with safety regulation and standards for the energy industry, writ large.
Help me understand how things have improved since Moss Landing. Why is this facility considered by some to be an exception to the rule?
It’s definitely an outlier. Batteries are very modular by nature, you don’t need a lot of overall facility to put battery storage on the ground. From a construction standpoint, a wind or solar farm or even a gas plant is more complex to put together. But battery storage, that simplicity is a good thing.
That’s not the case with Moss Landing. If you look at the overall design of these sites, having battery packs in a building with a big hall is rare.
Pretty much every battery that’s been installed in the last two or three years, industry has already known about this [risk]. When the first [battery] fire occurred, they basically containerized everything – you want to containerize everything so you don’t have these thermal runaway events, where the entire battery batch catches fire. If you look at the record, in the last two or three years, I do not believe a single such design was implemented by anybody. People have learned from that experience already.
Are we seeing industry have to reckon with this anyway? I can’t help but wonder if you’ve witnessed these community fears. It does seem like when a fire happens, it creates problems for developers in other parts of the country. Are developers reckoning with a conflation from this event itself?
I think so. Developers that we’ve talked to are very well aware of reputational risk. They do not want people to have general concern with this technology because, if you look at how much battery is waiting to be connected to the grid, that’s pretty much it. There’s 12 times more capacity of batteries waiting to be connected to the grid than gas. That’s 12X.
We should wait for the city and I would really expect [Vistra] to release the root cause investigation of this fire. Experts have raised a number of these potential root causes. But we don’t know – was it the fire suppression system that failed? Was it something with the batteries?
We don’t know. I would hope that the details come out in a transparent way, so industry can make those changes, in terms of designs.
Is there anything in terms of national regulation governing this sector’s performance standards and safety standards, and do you think something like that should exist?
It should exist and it is happening. The NFPA [National Fire Prevention Association] is putting stuff out there. There might be some leaders in the way California’s introduced some new regulation to make sure there’s better documentation, safety preparedness.
There should be better regulation. There should be better rules. I don’t think developers are even against that.
OK, so NFPA. But what about the Trump administration? Should they get involved here?
I don’t think so. The OSHA standards apply to people who work on site — the regulatory frameworks are already there. I don’t think they need some special safety standard that’s new that applies to all these sites. The ingredients are already there.
It’s like coal power plants. There’s regulation on greenhouse gas emissions, but not all aspects of coal plants. I’m not sure if the Trump administration needs to get involved.
It sounds like you're saying the existing regulations are suitable in your view and what’s needed is for states and industry to step up?
I would think so. Just to give you an example, from an interconnection standpoint, there’s IEEE standards. From the battery level, there are UL standards. From the battery management system that also manages a lot of the ins and outs of how the battery operates —- a lot of those already have standards. To get insurance on a large battery site, they have to meet a lot of these guidelines already — nobody would insure a site otherwise. There’s a lot of financial risk. You don’t want batteries exploding because you didn’t meet any of these hundreds of guidelines that already exist and in many cases standards that exist.
So, I don’t know if something at the federal level changes anything.
My last question is, if you were giving advice to a developer, what would you say to them about making communities best aware of these tech advancements?
Before that, I am really hoping Vistra and all the agencies involved [with Moss Landing] have a transparent and accountable process of revealing what actually happened at this site. I think that’s really important.