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A conversation with Jason Marshall of Massachusetts’ Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs
This week’s conversation is about transmission. It may have been lost in the shuffle but earlier this week, the state of Massachusetts led a coalition of Northeast states in releasing a joint strategic action plan on transmission planning. We haven’t covered transmission fights too much yet in The Fight (that’ll change soon, stay tuned). So I wanted to learn more about how and why this plan came together, especially given how crucial wires will be to connecting renewables to the grid there. So I got on the horn with Jason Marshall, deputy secretary and special counsel for federal and regional energy affairs in Massachusetts’ Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs. We wound up chatting about how significant this plan is – and a little bit about folk music too.
The following transcript is a slightly abridged version for clarity.
To start – why does this strategic action plan exist?
The strategic action plan has actually been about two years in the making and it’s something that the Healy-Driscoll administration has actually led from our office, knowing there’s a gap in transmission planning.
How transmission planning works today is it focuses on facilities developed within a specific planning region but Massachusetts – and all states – don’t exist as energy islands and we should be collaborating more closely across all regions. We saw a gap in identifying needs in the system, where we were only looking at needs within our singular region, and not looking at whether there are more cost effective ways to solve a reliability issue by enhancing ties with neighbors. That was basically it. There’s not a routine process that exists right now to do interregional planning.
Help me understand how transmission planning helps mitigate conflicts in developing transmission?
Planning in general helps mitigate conflict. You’re being proactive and have transparent procedures developed and put in place for how the process works.
This goes back to what the gap is. Because we don’t have formalized rules to do transmission planning, to the extent there are interregional transmission lines that our state develops, it’s happening on an ad hoc basis. It’s a project-by-project type of a process.
What are the conflicts most crucial to manage in transmission siting?
So taking a step back, this strategic action plan is not focused on siting and permitting. Massachusetts passed a landmark law last year that significantly reformed the siting and permitting process in [the state]. But that being said, this goes back to one of your earlier questions: if you have formalized procedures in place, in a set of rules filed with regulators, that’s a way to make sure there’s an efficient process with transparency at the earliest possible stage.
Walk me through how the plan does that.
There’s several components. In our view, the plan is really anchored by a request for information we hope to issue as early as this summer inviting project developers to submit design concepts to this group of states involved in the effort. I don’t think anything like that has ever been done before. The other part of that [request] is work the states plan to do, inviting stakeholders and market participants, to participate in a discussion on cost allocation and how the states may divide the costs of any interregional project that might come to fruition through this process. These are two really important steps that create formality around this.
Briefly, on that point, and I think this is important: typically the way transmission planning is done, you come up with a set of rules and then you implement those rules. But because those rules don’t exist, this group of states is collaborative and doing this in reverse, using potential real projects as a catalyst to explore broader reforms.
The last question is just a broader one about transmission and the power mix. A pretty crucial aspect of Massachusetts’ expected renewable energy portfolio is supposed to be offshore wind. We’re dealing with hurdles in that space right now. How does that impact your transmission planning and the power grid?
If you look through the plan, what will come across is that the effort is broader than any one specific resource. That’s purposeful. This group of states recognizes the many benefits that transmission provides, from increasing access to markets for lower price energy to reliability and resiliency. And it can include connecting new resources, and it’s not specific to any resource type.
That being said, like all resources, offshore wind could potentially be enabled through the work we’re doing. A number of resources could potentially be facilitated through this work. One of the components of the plan is trying to standardize equipment design used for transmission which is a real technical issue but it has real consequences in terms of facilitating a network transmission grid, making sure the equipment is interoperable and we can talk to each other.
To conclude, a fun question: what was the last song you listened to?
The last song? It was “Automatic” by The Lumineers. I love the new album, they’re coming to Fenway Park in July and I’m taking my daughter to the show.
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And more of the week’s top news about renewable energy fights.
1. Jefferson County, New York – Two solar projects have been stymied by a new moratorium in the small rural town of Lyme in upstate New York.
2. Sussex County, Delaware – The Delaware legislature is intervening after Sussex County rejected the substation for the offshore MarWin wind project.
3. Clark County, Indiana – A BrightNight solar farm is struggling to get buy-in within the southern region of Indiana despite large 650-foot buffer zones.
4. Tuscola County, Michigan – We’re about to see an interesting test of Michigan’s new permitting primacy law.
5. Marion County, Illinois – It might not work every time, but if you pay a county enough money, it might let you get a wind farm built.
6. Renville County Minnesota – An administrative law judge has cleared the way for Ranger Power’s Gopher State solar project in southwest Minnesota.
7. Knox County, Nebraska – I have learned this county is now completely banning new wind and solar projects from getting permits.
8. Fresno County, California – The Golden State has approved its first large-scale solar facility using the permitting overhaul it passed in 2022, bypassing local opposition to the project. But it’s also prompting a new BESS backlash.
A conversation with Robb Jetty, CEO of REC Solar, about how the developer is navigating an uncertain environment.
This week I chatted with REC Solar CEO Robb Jetty, who reached out to me through his team after I asked for public thoughts from renewables developers about their uncertain futures given all the action in Congress around the Inflation Reduction Act. Jetty had a more optimistic tone than I’ve heard from other folks, partially because of the structure of his business – which is actually why I wanted to include his feelings in this week’s otherwise quite gloomy newsletter.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity. Shall we?
To start, how does it feel to be developing solar in this uncertain environment around the IRA?
There’s a lot of media out there that’s oftentimes trying to interpret something that’s incredibly complex and legalese to begin with, so it’s difficult to really know what the exact impacts are in the first place or what the macroeconomic impacts would be from the policy shifts that would happen from the legislation being discussed right now.
But I’ll be honest, the thing I reinforce the most right now with our team is that you cannot argue with solar being the lowest cost form of electrical generation in the United States and it’s the fastest source of power generation to be brought online. So there’s a reason why, regardless of what happens, our industry isn’t going to go away. We’ve dealt with all kinds of policy changes and I’ve been doing this since 2002. We’ve had lots of changes that have been disruptive to the industry.
You can argue some of the things that are being discussed are more disruptive. But there’s lots of things we’ve faced. Even the pandemic and the fallout on inflation and labor. We’ve navigated through hard times before.
What’s been the tangible impact to your business from this uncertainty?
I would say it has shifted our focus. We sell electricity to our customers that are both commercial customers, using that power behind the meter and on site for their own facilities, or we’re selling electricity to utilities, or virtually through the grid. Right now we’ve shifted some of our strategy toward the acquisition of operating assets instead of buying projects from other developers that could be more impacted by the uncertainty or have economics that are more sensitive to the timing and uncertainty that could come out of the policy. It’s had an impact on our business but, back to my earlier comment, the industry is so big at this point that we’re seeing lots of opportunity for us to provide value to an investor.
As a company that works in different forms of solar development – from small-scale utility to commercial to community solar – do you see any changes in terms of what projects are developed if what’s in the House bill becomes law?
I’m not seeing anything at the moment.
I think most of the activity I’ve been involved in is waiting for this to settle. The disruption is the volatile nature, the uncertainty. We need certainty. Any business needs certainty to plan and operate effectively. But I’m honestly not seeing anything that’s having that impact right now in terms of where investment is flowing, whether its utility scale to the smaller behind-the-meter commercial scale we support in certain markets.
We are seeing it in the residential side of the solar industry. Those are more concerning, because you only have a short amount of time to claim the [investment tax credit] ITC for a residential system.
Six months in, federal agencies are still refusing to grant crucial permits to wind developers.
Federal agencies are still refusing to process permit applications for onshore wind energy facilities nearly six months into the Trump administration, putting billions in energy infrastructure investments at risk.
On Trump’s first day in office, he issued two executive orders threatening the wind energy industry – one halting solar and wind approvals for 60 days and another commanding agencies to “not issue new or renewed approvals, rights of way, permits, leases or loans” for all wind projects until the completion of a new governmental review of the entire industry. As we were first to report, the solar pause was lifted in March and multiple solar projects have since been approved by the Bureau of Land Management. In addition, I learned in March that at least some transmission for wind farms sited on private lands may have a shot at getting federal permits, so it was unclear if some arms of the government might let wind projects proceed.
However, I have learned that the wind industry’s worst fears are indeed coming to pass. The Fish and Wildlife Service, which is responsible for approving any activity impacting endangered birds, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with greenlighting construction in federal wetlands, have simply stopped processing wind project permit applications after Trump’s orders – and the freeze appears immovable, unless something changes.
According to filings submitted to federal court Monday under penalty of perjury by Alliance for Clean Energy New York, at least three wind projects in the Empire State – Terra-Gen’s Prattsburgh Wind, Invenergy’s Canisteo Wind, and Apex’s Heritage Wind – have been unable to get the Army Corps or Fish and Wildlife Service to continue processing their permitting applications. In the filings, ACE NY states that land-based wind projects “cannot simply be put on a shelf for a few years until such time as the federal government may choose to resume permit review and issuance,” because “land leases expire, local permits and agreements expire, and as a result, the project must be terminated.”
While ACE NY’s filings discuss only these projects in New York, they describe the impacts as indicative of the national industry’s experience, and ACE NY’s executive director Marguerite Wells told me it is her understanding “that this is happening nationwide.”
“I can confirm that developers have conveyed to me that [the] Army Corps has stopped processing their applications specifically citing the wind ban,” Wells wrote in an email. “As I have understood it, the initial freeze covered both wind and solar projects, but the freeze was lifted for solar projects and not for wind projects.”
Lots of attention has been paid to Trump’s attacks on offshore wind, because those projects are sited entirely in federal waters. But while wind projects sited on private lands can hypothetically escape a federal review and keep sailing on through to operation, wind turbines are just so large in size that it’s hard to imagine that bird protection laws can’t apply to most of them. And that doesn’t account for wetlands, which seem to be now bedeviling multiple wind developers.
This means there’s an enormous economic risk in a six-month permitting pause, beyond impacts to future energy generation. The ACE NY filings state the impacts to New York alone represent more than $2 billion in capital investments, just in the land-based wind project pipeline, and there’s significant reason to believe other states are also experiencing similar risks. In a legal filing submitted by Democratic states challenging the executive order targeting wind, attorneys general listed at least three wind projects in Arizona – RWE’s Forged Ethic, AES’s West Camp, and Repsol’s Lava Run – as examples that may require approval from the federal government under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. As I’ve previously written, this is the same law that bird conservation advocates in Wyoming want Trump to use to reject wind proposals in their state, too.
The Fish and Wildlife Service and Army Corps of Engineers declined to comment after this story’s publication due to litigation on the matter. I also reached out to the developers involved in these projects to inquire about their commitments to these projects in light of the permitting pause. We’ll let you know if we hear back from them.