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A conversation with Rebecca Barel and Dan Cassata of Columbia
This week’s Q&A is a change of pace. I was contacted by two student researchers – Rebecca Barel and Dan Cassata – requesting to interview me for some policy and social science research they’ve been up to at Columbia University sponsored by the policy organization Clean Tomorrow.
Then it hit me like a ton of bricks: Wouldn’t it be neat if I interviewed academics engaging in this research about their experience doing this work in such a hostile political environment?
So I asked Rebecca and Dan if our conversation could wind up being a bit of a dialogue, instead of something one-sided. Much to my satisfaction, they agreed – and I wound up getting a lot more hopeful by the end of our talk than I was when it started.
Anywho, the following chat has been edited for clarity. Let’s take it away?
Tell me about your research project, first and foremost.
Dan: The project writ large, the central idea of it is there’s this suite of either policy or non-policy mechanisms we can use to take benefits that accrue from a renewables project and deliver them to a local community, as opposed to let’s say an extractive model. The project is trying to understand what that suite of tools look like and to what extent any of those tools have an influence on public opinion. You’ve done a lot of reporting on community backlash, community opposition. We’re trying to understand how much of this opposition is coming from this view: benefits aren’t coming to us, so why should we support this?
It feels like we can actually add value here. Sometimes when you do grad school research, you’re just putting stuff on paper to get a degree and not doing anything meaningful.
I wanted to talk about this with you because I love conversations with those who, like myself, are obsessed with this niche issue. Can you tell me more about the experience of researching conflicts in renewable energy development right now, amid the war on climate action and renewable energy generally? How does it feel to be doing this research at this time?
Rebecca: I can take that – I mean, in California specifically, one of the mechanisms was that the offshore wind leases are required to have community benefit agreements and a labor agreement. I had an interview with someone who’d written about this topic yesterday who said, quick question – where do you see this going? What’s happening now that Trump is so anti-offshore wind? And I said, That’s what I was going to ask you. Most of my research is at this point coming from Heatmap, because most of the mainstream news outlets aren’t concerned with these issues. They’re bogged down with the visa situations, and being at Columbia is an interesting experience right now.
Dan: Rebecca touched on this but to be more explicit – it is entirely up to the state governments. We’re not looking at the federal policies. That’s not to say there aren’t uncertainties that come with that, and federal incentives obviously matter. Whether or not a project is going to pencil depends on federal incentives. But focusing on the state level has created more of a lane where our work can still feel relevant and be completely overturned and what not.
I’d ask you, Jael – are they more or less confident about opposing projects now that Trump’s in office?
Maybe. There’s certainly some degree of emboldened opposition. I see that as a journalist and I wonder what place there is for the research you’re doing – I wonder how it will be used.
Dan: The dimensions on which some of this is happening is separate from the politics, and that’s a note of optimism from me I guess. You can structure things and it might not be as uniform and widespread as you would like but there are places where you can work and be effective.
Rebecca: I’d add the renewable energy debate, there’s a broader question of what will win out in America over the next few years. Money in pocket or charismatic propaganda that motivates how people vote and what people choose to back. I think we’re at a crux in that right now because of the tariffs but in Texas, generally, if you were to put the people in that area into a box – they might have MAGA hats but at the end of the day, they’re about the money in their pocket. That’s how we ordinarily think of American voters.
I feel like money in my pocket might win, but it’s going to take a while.
How much interest in your work have you seen from the private sector or public officials?
Dan: We’ve spoken to public commissioners at the county level. I had a call right before this conversation with someone from a state-level public service commission. Everyone gets back to us. I do think the private sector has been less engaged. I don’t know if that’s less of an interest though – I read it as the private sector not tending to talk about their work with folks like us very often. There’s not that much in it for them.
Dan: I’d like to ask you this Jael – does it feel like community engagement is a meaningful thing?
This edition of the newsletter will begin with a company accusing a township of soliciting a bribe after years of moving goalposts and redlines. I’m not that optimistic.
Where do you see policy being a solution in this circumstance?
Dan: Let’s take as a given that community benefit agreements work. The research – and what we’ve found – is that that’s not really a given. But they can work. And there are states like New York and California that have legislation that heavily incentivizes developers to go through this process of community engagement to qualify for tax credits or get permits. The reason that we are doing this research is because if you were able to have a case that this is really effective at improving projects and the speed of getting buy-in – we’d argue in our [eventual] report that this type of legislation should become more widespread.
If the conclusion is these things don’t seem to be impactful, then that’s where it justifies the case to look at this other suite of mechanisms that might be more helpful. For projects of a certain size, in New York for example, you can circumvent local zoning regulations and go through a state approval process.
The last thing I’ll ask: what gives you hope at this moment?
Dan: There’s obviously a lot of things that are going poorly right now when it comes to policy at the federal level on the energy transition. But I just think the ship has sailed – the boat might take longer to get there but the ship has left the port, and renewables are cost competitive if not cheaper than fossil energy.
Rebecca: There are people trying to do bad things and bad faith actors in power, but there are a lot of people trying really hard to make things better, and as long as there are people trying – there is a chance. It might take longer, and we might be slowed down, but for me what brings me hope is that every conversation I have with someone smart and capable and actively doing something to improve the environment, we’re not done yet.
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The Trump administration appears to be advancing solar projects through the permitting process now.
After a temporary halt to permitting for solar projects, the Bureau of Land Management told me a few weeks ago that it had lifted the pause, but I had told you I would wait for confirmation to see whether projects could actually move through government permitting. On Friday, the Bureau of Land Management publicly confirmed that federal solar permitting can happen again, formally approving the Leeward Renewable’s Elisabeth solar project in Yuma County, Arizona – what appears to be the first utility-scale solar facility on federal acreage approved by the Trump administration.
The Elisabeth project is located in a remote part of southwestern Arizona in the Agua Caliente Solar Energy Zone, an area designated for solar energy leasing that has existed for more than a decade, and is adjacent to other large solar projects that have been previously approved according to BLM.
On the same day, BLM released a draft environmental review of a separate solar project in Arizona that the agency segregated land for late last year at the same time as Elisabeth: the Avantus’ Pinyon solar-plus-storage project, which is open for public comment through late May. Tucked on page 37 of that draft document was a list of other solar projects in the nearby vicinity on federal lands that have yet to enter the federal permitting process under the National Environmental Policy Act, which BLM dubbed as “reasonably foreseeable” impacts to the cumulative environment.
The fact BLM is willing to admit other solar projects could advance later on is significant after the sputtering seen in the earliest days of the Trump administration. We’d seen hints of progress seeping through updates to BLM webpages. In mid April, we reported the agency quietly updated the timetable for the Esmerelda 7 mega-solar project in Nevada to say the agency would issue a final decision on the project this summer. I took a peek through the BLM data and found other examples of the same thing, including the Bonanza solar farm, which is now expected to receive its final environmental impact statement in June according to the project website.
BLM has also moved forward with transmission lines on federal lands that would go to solar projects off federal lands, indicating a level of agnosticism about connecting solar farms to the grid if the energy is generated on private property.
It’s still not clear whether solar permits will be a steady trickle for the foreseeable future or if this form of renewable energy could benefit from the Trump administration’s desires to maximize energy generation. Take all of this with a grain of salt because at any moment, a news cycle or disgruntled legislator could steal the president’s ear and make him angry at solar power.
But in times as chaotic as these for U.S. renewables developers, we’ll take this ray of sunshine.
And more of the week’s top news in renewable energy conflicts.
1. Hampden County, Massachusetts – Disgruntled residents in the small city of Westfield have won their fight against a Jupiter Power battery storage project.
2. Staten Island, New York – Speaking of people booing battery storage, the battle over BESS on Staten Island is potentially turning into major litigation.
3. Montgomery County, Maryland – County planners have approved a small solar farm on agricultural lands in the small D.C. exurb of Rockville surprising even the project’s developer Chaberton Energy.
4. Mecklenburg County, Virginia – A 90-acre RWE solar project has been rejected for the second time by county officials despite the developer slimming down the project size in response to local complaints.
5. Licking County, Ohio – The Ohio Supreme Court is allowing Open Road Renewables’ utility-scale Harvey Solar project to proceed over objections from angry neighbors.
6. Adams County, Illinois – It’s not all sunshine and roses in the Midwest though, as even a relatively tiny solar farm is struggling to get approval in rural Illinois.
7. Pierce County, Wisconsin – An AES utility-scale solar farm is getting significant pushback from surrounding residents over farmland impacts.
8. Dickinson County, Iowa – Invenergy has removed some turbines from its Red Rock Wind Energy Center in a bid to try and overcome a vocal contingent of opposition in the county.
9. Cedar County, Iowa – Elsewhere in the Hawkeye State, an Iowa farmer is suing Nordex claiming that a wind turbine fire damaged his wheat crop.
10. Lincoln County, Oklahoma – A battery storage facility proposed by Black Mountain is the subject of an investigative news article about opposition to BESS in Oklahoma.
11. Santa Barbara County, California – The backlash to the Moss Landing battery fire has now led the central coast city of Santa Maria to ban new battery storage facilities.
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.