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A conversation with Peter Bonner, senior fellow for the Federation of American Scientists
This week’s Q&A is with Peter Bonner, senior fellow for the Federation of American Scientists. I reached out to Peter because this week, as I was breaking stories about chaos in renewables permitting, his organization released a report he helped author that details how technology and hiring challenges are real bottlenecks in the federal environmental review process. We talked about this report, which was the culmination of 18 months of research and involved detailed interviews with federal permitting staff.
The following interview was lightly edited for clarity.
Okay so walk me through why you did this report.
The reason for doing the report was to look at, why is permitting a bottleneck? What are some things that can improve the effectiveness and the efficiency of permitting to get permits done better and faster?
Depending on the type of permitting project and where the infrastructure is getting built, permitting could be very, very difficult, or it could go more easily. It depends on the number of stakeholders involved. It depends on the type of permitting project it is. But it also depends on each agency doing permitting somewhat differently, and leaning on different types of technology to enable them to do permitting better.
One agency may have one configuration of a permitting team and in another agency, that configuration of a permitting team may be quite different, sometimes independent of the type of permitting project they’re talking about. So there’s a need for greater consistency in how those teams are built, and also the skill and talent that goes into those teams and how they work with contractors to get the permits done.
In addition, each agency is leaning on their own types of technologies on case management and how to run the permitting project instead of there being consistency around the technologies they use as well.
What went into this report?
There were a couple pieces to it. One is a set of pretty extensive interviews with permitting program managers, hiring managers, and HR specialists who were bringing people into agencies to help with permitting functions and programs. We also did significant extensive research into the permitting process and what technologies permitting teams were using to document and guide their work in adherence to regulations. So a lot of it was primary research working directly with the agencies and the people who were on the ground doing the permitting.
How much of the backlog in permitting is Congress? Or is it just the executive branch?
Clarity in the laws and regulations that guide permitting – there’s still work there to be done. But our focus was less on laws and regulations and more around, how are permitting teams actually getting the work done? What talent do they need on those teams? What technologies can they use to support their work?
So you’re telling me a big issue might really be the government’s load bearing infrastructure, so to speak. Is it really just the back-end? The pipes?
A decent amount of it is the pipes and getting the right people in place.
The permitting workforce has been wanting for people and skillsets even before the increase in infrastructure spending over the past few years. You’re looking at a workforce that did not have enough people to do the job before this influx of projects came in.
It therefore depended on bringing in people and contracting people to do that work as well. And in the hiring process, we found significant delays in recruiting for permitting talent..
What we found was a lot of delays due to the bureaucracy around hiring that I think is well-documented in other places [in government]. Doing more, clear skills-based assessments up-front when you’re evaluating people for jobs so that highly qualified people then make it to the list that you can hire from. Making sure people get through the background check process properly. There’s lots of things that delay getting people on board faster and also reaching out and recruiting the right sorts of folks.
To what extent do you think your recommendations here on the pipes, so to speak, will have an audience with this administration? I’m particularly curious given all the headlines we’re seeing about staff reductions in the federal government.
It’s hard to project that and there’s a lot of clarity that needs still to come in terms of how this administration is viewing supporting permitting teams and the agencies to make sure that they can do their jobs better. The real answers to that are still to come.
I think there’s a lot of change going on in the permitting regulatory environment, the regulations. There’s also executive orders, legal decisions that have come down lately. We’re in a dynamic, changing situation.
My hope is that the administration would recognize that, take a look at the report we have and take a look at investing in the right people and the right technologies.
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The collateral damage from the Lava Ridge wind project might now include a proposed 285-mile transmission line initially approved by federal regulators in the 1990s.
The same movement that got Trump to kill the Lava Ridge wind farm Trump killed has appeared to derail a longstanding transmission project that’s supposed to connect sought-after areas for wind energy in Idaho to power-hungry places out West.
The Southwest Intertie Project-North, also known as SWIP-N, is a proposed 285-mile transmission line initially approved by federal regulators in the 1990s. If built, SWIP-N is supposed to feed power from the wind-swept plains of southern Idaho to the Southwest, while shooting electrons – at least some generated from solar power – back up north into Idaho from Nevada, Utah, and Arizona. In California, regulators have identified the line as crucial for getting cleaner wind energy into the state’s grid to meet climate goals.
But on Tuesday, SWIP-N suddenly faced a major setback: The three-person commission representing Jerome County, Idaho – directly in the path of the project – voted to revoke its special use permit, stating the company still lacked proper documentation to meet the terms and conditions of the approval. SWIP-N had the wind at its back as recently as last year, when LS Power expected it to connect to Lava Ridge and other wind farms that have been delayed by Trump’s federal permitting freeze on renewable energy. But now, the transmission line has stuttered along with this potential generation.
At a hearing Tuesday evening, county commissioners said Great Basin Transmission, a subsidiary of LS Power developing the line, would now suddenly need new input, including the blessing of the local highway district and potential feedback from the Federal Aviation Administration. Jerome County Commissioner Charles Howell explained to me Wednesday afternoon that there will still need to be formal steps remanding the permit, and the process will go back to local zoning officials. Great Basin Transmission will then at minimum need to get the sign-offs from local highway officials to satisfy his concerns, as well as those of the other commissioner who voted to rescind the permit, Ben Crouch.
The permit was many years old, and there are outstanding questions about what will happen next procedurally, including what Great Basin Transmission is actually able to do to fight this choice by the commissioners. At minimum, staff for the commission will write a formal decision explaining the reasoning and remand the permit. After that, it’ll be up to Great Basin Transmission to produce the documents that commissioners want. “Even our attorney and staff didn’t have those answers when we asked that after the vote,” Howell said, adding that he hopes the issues can be resolved. “I was on the county commission about when they decided where to site the towers, where to site the right-of-ways. That’s all been there a long time.”
This is the part where I bring up how Jerome County’s decision followed a months-long fight by aggrieved residents who opposed the SWIP-N line, including homeowners who say they didn’t know their properties were in the path of the project. There’s also a significant anti-wind undercurrent, as many who are fighting this transmission line previously fought LS Power’s Lava Ridge wind project, which was blocked by and executive order from President Donald Trump on his first day in office. Jerome County itself passed an ordinance in May requiring any renewable energy facility to get all federal, state, and local approvals before it would sign off on new projects.
Opposition to SWIP-N comes from a similar place as the “Stop Lava Ridge” campaign. Along with viewshed anxieties and property value impacts, SWIP-N, like Lava Ridge, would be within single-digit miles of the Minidoka National Historic Site, a former prison camp that held Japanese-Americans during World War II. In the eyes of its staunchest critics, constructing the wind farm would’ve completely damaged any impact of visiting the site by filling the surroundings of what is otherwise a serene, somber scene. Descendants of Minidoka detainees lobbied politicians at all levels to oppose Lava Ridge, a cause that was ultimately championed by Republican politicians in their fight against the project.
These same descendants of Japanese-American detainees have fought the transmission line, arguing that its construction would inevitably lead to new wind projects. “If approved, the SWIP-N line would enable LS Power and other renewable energy companies to build massive wind projects on federal land in and around Jerome County in future years,” wrote Dan Sakura, the son of a Minidoka prisoner, in a September 15 letter to the commission.
Sakura had been a leading voice in the fight against Lava Ridge. When I asked why he was weighing in on SWIP-N, he told me over text message, “The Lava Ridge wind project poisoned the well for renewable energy projects on federal land in Southern Idaho.”
LS Power did not respond to a request for comment.
It’s worth noting that efforts have already been made to avoid SWIP-N’s impacts to the Minidoka National Historic Site. In 2010, Congress required the Interior Secretary to re-do the review process for the transmission line, which at the time was proposed to go through the historic site. The route rejected by Jerome County would go around.
There is also no guarantee that wind energy will flock to southern Idaho any time soon. Yes, there’s a Trump permitting freeze, and federal wind energy tax credits are winding down. That’s almost certainly why the developers of small nuclear reactors have reportedly coveted the Lava Ridge site for future projects. But there’s also incredible hostility pent up against wind partially driven by the now-defunct LS Power project, for instance in Lincoln County, where officials now have an emergency moratorium banning wind energy while they develop a more permanent restrictive ordinance.
Howell made no bones about his own views on wind farms, telling me he prefers battery storage and nuclear power. “As I stand here in my backyard, if they put up windmills, that’s all I’m going to see for 40 miles,” he said
But Howell did confess to me that he thinks SWIP-N will ultimately be built – if the company is able to get these new sign-offs. What kind of energy flows through a transmission line cannot ultimately affect the decision on the special use permit because, he said, “there are rules.” On top of that, Idaho is going to ultimately need more power no matter what, and at the very least, the state will have to get electrons from elsewhere.
Howell’s “non-political” answer to the fate of SWIP-N, as he put it to me, is that “We live on power, so we gotta have more power.”
The week’s most important news around renewable project fights.
1. Western Nevada — The Esmeralda 7 solar mega-project may be no more.
2. Washoe County, Nevada – Elsewhere in Nevada, the Greenlink North transmission line has been delayed by at least another month.
3. Oconto County, Wisconsin – Solar farm town halls are now sometimes getting too scary for developers to show up at.
4. Apache County, Arizona – In brighter news, this county looks like it will give its first-ever conditional use permit for a large solar farm, EDF Renewables’ Juniper Spring project.
5. Putnam County, Indiana – After hearing about what happened here this week, I’m fearful for any solar developer trying to work in Indiana.
6. Tippecanoe County, Indiana – Two counties to the north of Putnam is a test case for the impacts a backlash on solar energy can have on data centers.
A conversation with Spencer Hanes of EnerVenue
Today’s conversation is with Spencer Hanes, vice president of international business development for long-duration battery firm EnerVenue and a veteran in clean energy infrastructure development. I reached out to Hanes for two reasons: One, I wanted to gab about solutions, for once, and also because he expressed an interest in discussing how data center companies are approaching the media-driven battery safety panic sweeping renewable energy development. EnerVenue doesn’t use lithium-ion batteries – it uses metal-hydrogen, which Hanes told me may have a much lower risk of thermal runaway (a.k.a. unstoppable fire).
I really appreciated our conversation because, well, it left me feeling like battery alternatives might become an easy way for folks to dodge the fire freakout permeating headlines and local government hearing rooms.
This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
From a developer’s perspective, if you’re working in utility-scale battery development, why ditch lithium-ion batteries?
My first battery project was at Duke Energy in 2010. It was a lead-acid battery project in Texas. It was the first time we’d incorporated batteries into a renewables project, and it was probably the biggest in the northern hemisphere. Now I don’t even think it is the biggest in Texas, but it was a big step forward.
What developers are finding is that lithium batteries don’t last as long as the developers would like them to. That means they’ve got a shelf life of 7,000 cycles, maybe 8,000 cycles, and it depends on how you use them – lithium ion batteries have to perform under the perfect environment or they can be damaged. Our batteries, on the other hand, are incredibly flexible, and we have a much more robust product that we think is safer and longer lasting than lithium – which has its place, but there are more and more safety issues around it. [There’s] virtually no risk of thermal runaway with our battery.
So I recently had a lithium-ion battery explode on me for the first time – it sparked up and fused to an electrical cable. It was very surprising, and as someone who writes about this stuff a lot, it still took me aback. As someone who is interacting with folks in data center development spaces, seeking battery storage for their operations, how are they digesting the anxieties around battery failures?
Well, the good news is that the data center developers are just trying to get electrons where they can find them. It's hard to find any sort of generation resource right now. Solar and batteries are just the easiest to find.
The safety piece is always going to be top of mind, though. They’re going to build redundancies into their battery projects, wall them off and containerize different batteries so if there’s a spark it doesn’t propagate.
Because data centers need electrons quickly right now, these companies are immune to the battery safety anxieties percolating in the public right now?
Yeah. They’ve been using them for a long time, they’re familiar with them. But the data centers and the big power users are sometimes stressing the lithium-ion batteries in ways they can no longer handle.
Do you feel like data center companies, big power users, do they get the inherent risks from a social license perspective and a siting perspective in using big lithium-ion batteries?
I think a lot of battery projects are being developed in containers because of fire issues, so if there is an issue it’s contained, and that’s a best practice right now.
What would be better is if there was a zero risk of thermal runaway. I think there’s a growing need for other technologies to come along that are safer and more utility-grade, able to serve multiple purposes. But the data center companies are very smart about how they’re developing, and they’re not going to do it in a way that creates problems for other parts of the data center.
Are there ways to avoid building out a lot of batteries? Maybe minimizing how many batteries are used on site, or how much infrastructure needs to be put on site to minimize fire risk?
I think unfortunately it's largely a case by case determination in where you are. I’m running across more and more engineering firms that aren’t comfortable with even the safest batteries being inside a building. Now, everyone wants them containerized because a thermal runaway event is a catastrophic risk no one wants to take.
EnerVenue has a product that fits that profile. There are many others that fit that profile, as well. We need many more options of technologies that can fit the bill. Lithium has a really important role in our society, doing well enough in phones and laptops, but we think we have a competitive offering for grid scale energy storage.
From your vantage point, do you see data center development as the growth area for storage in the U.S. right now?
A year ago I’d get a call once a quarter, and now I’m fielding calls every month. It's because there’s such a crunch on generation. If you put a battery with a data center … everybody wants to say the centers are operating 99.9% of the time, but they’re also not operating at 100% capacity all day, so if they can generate electricity and store it in a battery to use when rates are cheaper or when there’s a constraint on the grid, that’s a benefit to them.