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A conservation with George Povall of All Our Energy
Today’s chat is with George Povall, director of the All Our Energy pro-offshore wind environmental group. Povall – who told me he was inspired to be an environmentalist by the film Avatar – has for more than a decade been a key organizer on the ground in the Long Island area for supporting offshore wind development. But these days he spends a lot more time fighting renewables disinformation, going so far as to travel the community trying to re-educate people about this technology in light of the loud activism against it.
After the news dropped that states are suing to undo the Trump executive order against offshore wind, I wanted to chat with Povell about what environmentalists should do to combat the anti-renewables movement and whether there’s still any path forward for the industry he’s spent nearly a decade working to build as an activist.
The following conversation transcript was lightly edited for clarity.
Okay so first of all, what made you become a pro-wind environmental activist?
This all goes back to maybe 15 years ago. I’ve always been environmentally minded. I’m 55 years old and not from the nonprofit sector. I like everybody else was living my normal life and maybe with some naivete thought that if things were good and economical and made sense and worked better than what we were doing in the past, we’d move on from that. But time kept creeping along and we went through the 1990s and 2000s and then I began to become more aware. I just thought people who knew more than I did would do something about this.
Surprisingly I look back and a movie that really motivated me to do what I’m doing is Avatar. They’re destroying the planet for the materials – exactly what we’re seeing now. We’re seeing it more than ever, with someone who is almost like a comic book villain now wanting to strip-mine the sea bed. I wonder what the anti-offshore wind people have to say about that.
It’s been surprising to me. We had always known there was going to be opposition to offshore wind, and disinformation coming. We had always tried to get out ahead of it but we were always unsuccessful in getting funding to deal with that.
Did the developers get ahead of it?
No. I think the developers got a lot of bad advice from the public relations firms they were using.
We kept telling them, please just tell the people what’s going on. I can see how they got into that position because people were asking questions about things that weren’t decided yet. But instead of saying they didn’t know and it wasn’t decided yet, they refused to admit they didn’t know something, even if that was the case. It engendered a lot of distrust in the communities that opponents were able to seize on quite easily.
I know from someone who has done campaigns of community organizing before, you just tell people what it is and what you know. It engenders trust. Unfortunately it didn’t go that way and I think a big part of that is they should’ve been more ready for people who were not willing to accept any answer as acceptable.
It feels to me like offshore wind has now become a wedge issue. A culture war issue. And they got people who frankly should’ve known better to listen to some of the least reliable people in the community throwing out claims that were ridiculous. And they overwhelmed a lot of people with half truths, misinformation. People couldn’t keep up.
What is the environmental movement actually doing now to address what is not just a policy problem but a cultural problem?
Well, that’s a great question and we have been trying to turn it around for a while. Though we have some resources, it is really hard to deprogram people. It’s very hard. I have spoken to people who came to me and said, I haven’t made up my mind. I am just looking for the right information. And when I gave it to them, they told me I was a “climate cult zealot.” That’s what everybody in the environmental movement is to them.
We need to really just bring in the people who support this stuff. It’s a basic concept but unfortunately we’ve never had the capacity to do that kind of thing. It’s something bigger organizations were doing, but they don’t have capacity for it now either. So it’s on us to just find the things that aren’t being done and do them. It’s about building coalitions.
It’s about starting from zero. Having offshore wind 101 information sessions and getting other organizations involved and getting their people educated. It can’t be a single process doing that. If the general public knew how a wind turbine works, if the average person on the street knew how it works, they’d laugh at people when they throw disinformation at them – but they don’t know it’s nonsense yet.
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A conversation with Mike Hall of Anza.
This week’s conversation is with Mike Hall, CEO of the solar and battery storage data company Anza. I rang him because, in my book, the more insights into the ways renewables companies are responding to the war on the Inflation Reduction Act, the better.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s jump in!
How much do we know about developers’ reactions to the anti-IRA bill that was passed out of the House last week?
So it’s only been a few days. What I can tell you is there’s a lot of surprise about what came out of the House. Industries mobilized in trying to improve the bill from here and I think a lot of the industry is hopeful because, for many reasons, the bill doesn’t seem to make sense for the country. Not just the renewable energy industry. There’s hope that the voices in Congress — House members and senators — who already understand the impact of this on the economy will in the coming weeks understand how bad this is.
I spoke to a tax attorney last week that her clients had been preparing for a worst case scenario like this and preparing contingency plans of some kind. Have you seen anything so far to indicate people have been preparing for a worst case scenario?
Yeah. There’s a subset of the market that has prepared and already executed plans.
In Q4 [of 2024] and Q1 [of this year] with a number of companies to procure material from projects in order to safe harbor those projects. What that means is, typically if you commence construction by a certain date, the date on which you commence construction is the date you lock in tax credit eligibility, and we worked with companies to help them meet that criteria. It hedged them on a number of fronts. I don’t think most of them thought we’d get what came out of the House but there were a lot of concerns about stepdowns for the credit.
After Trump was elected, there were also companies who wanted to hedge against tariffs so they bought equipment ahead of that, too. We were helping companies do deals the night before Liberation Day. There was a lot of activity.
We saw less after April 2nd because the trade landscape has been changing so quickly that it’s been hard for people to act but now we’re seeing people act again to try and hit that commencement milestone.
It’s not lost on me that there’s an irony here – the attempts to erode these credits might lead to a rush of projects moving faster, actually. Is that your sense?
There’s a slug of projects that would get accelerated and in fact just having this bill come out of the House is already going to accelerate a number of projects. But there’s limits to what you can do there. The bill also has a placed-in-service criteria and really problematic language with regard to the “foreign entity of concern” provisions.
Are you seeing any increase in opposition against solar projects? And is that the biggest hurdle you see to meeting that “placed-in-service” requirement?
What I have here is qualitative, not quantitative, but I was in the development business for 20 years, and what I have seen qualitatively is that it is increasingly harder to develop projects. Local opposition is one of the headwinds. Interconnection is another really big one and that’s the biggest concern I have with regards to the “placed-in-service” requirement. Most of these large projects, even if you overcome the NIMBY issues, and you get your permitting, and you do everything else you need to do, you get your permits and construction… In the end if you’re talking about projects at scale, there is a requirement that utilities do work. And there’s no requirement that utilities do that work on time [to meet that deadline]. This is a risk they need to manage.
And more of the week’s top news in renewable energy conflicts.
1. Columbia County, New York – A Hecate Energy solar project in upstate New York blessed by Governor Kathy Hochul is now getting local blowback.
2. Sussex County, Delaware – The battle between a Bethany Beach landowner and a major offshore wind project came to a head earlier this week after Delaware regulators decided to comply with a massive government records request.
3. Fayette County, Pennsylvania – A Bollinger Solar project in rural Pennsylvania that was approved last year now faces fresh local opposition.
4. Cleveland County, North Carolina – Brookcliff Solar has settled with a county that was legally challenging the developer over the validity of its permits, reaching what by all appearances is an amicable resolution.
5. Adams County, Illinois – The solar project in Quincy, Illinois, we told you about last week has been rejected by the city’s planning commission.
6. Pierce County, Wisconsin – AES’ Isabelle Creek solar project is facing new issues as the developer seeks to actually talk more to residents on the ground.
7. Austin County, Texas – We have a couple of fresh battery storage wars to report this week, including a danger alert in this rural Texas county west of Houston.
8. Esmeralda County, Nevada – The Trump administration this week approved the final proposed plan for NV Energy’s Greenlink North, a massive transmission line that will help the state expand its renewable energy capacity.
9. Merced County, California – The Moss Landing battery fire is having aftershocks in Merced County as residents seek to undo progress made on Longroad’s Zeta battery project south of Los Banos.
Anti-solar activists in agricultural areas get a powerful new ally.
The Trump administration is joining the war against solar projects on farmland, offering anti-solar activists on the ground a powerful ally against developers across the country.
In a report released last week, President Trump’s Agriculture Department took aim at solar and stated competition with “solar development on productive farmland” was creating a “considerable barrier” for farmers trying to acquire land. The USDA also stated it would disincentivize “the use of federal funding” for solar “through prioritization points and regulatory action,” which a spokesperson – Emily Cannon – later clarified in an email to me this week will include reconfiguring the agency’s Rural Energy for America loan and grant program. Cannon declined to give a time-table for the new regulation, stating that the agency “will have more information when the updates are ready to be published.”
“Farmland should be for agricultural production, not solar production,” Cannon wrote – a statement also made in the USDA report.
REAP is a program created in 2008 that exists to help fund renewable energy and sustainability projects at the level of individual farms and has been seen as a potential tool for not only building more solar but also more trust in agriculturally-focused communities. It’s without question that retooling REAP to actively disincentivize awardees from building solar on farmland could have a chilling effect, at least amongst those who receive money from the program or wish to in the future. This comes after Trump officials temporarily froze money promised to farmers, too.
As we’ve previously written in The Fight, agricultural interests can at times present as much a threat to the future of solar energy as any oil-funded dark money group, if not more so. Conflicts over solar production on farmland make up a large portion of the total projects I cover in The Fight every week, and it is one of the most frequently cited reasons for opposition against individual renewables projects. (Agricultural workforces are one of the most important signals for renewable energy opposition in Heatmap Pro’s modeling data as well.) I wrote shortly after Trump’s inauguration that I wondered when – not if – he would adopt this position.
It’s unclear what exactly led USDA to dive headlong into the “No Solar on Farmland” campaign, aside from its growing popularity in conservative political circles, but there is reason to believe farming interests may have played a role. USDA has stated the report was the product of discussions with farming groups and an industry roundtable. In addition, per lobbying disclosures, at least one agricultural group – the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau – advocated earlier this year for “congressional action and/or executive orders” to “balance renewable and conventional sources of energy” through “limit[ing] solar on productive farmland.” (The Pennsylvania Farm Bureau denied this in an email to me earlier this week.)
There’s also reason to believe some key stakeholders were caught off-guard or weren’t looped in on the matter.
American Farmland Trust has been trying to cultivate common ground between farmers, solar companies, and various agencies at all levels of government over the future of development. But when asked about this report, the nonprofit told me it couldn’t speak on the matter because it was still trying to suss out what was going on.
“AFT is meeting with the Trump administration to learn more about what they are planning in terms of policy and programs to implement this concept,” AFT media relations associate Michael Shulman told me.