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A conversation with Scott Strazik about NIMBYs, the Inflation Reduction Act, and manufacturing problems.
Last week at Greentown Labs’ startup summit in Boston I interviewed Scott Strazik, CEO of GE Vernova, the energy equipment manufacturing arm of General Electric formerly known as GE Renewables and GE Power.
GE Vernova has been at the forefront of a tech and public relations crisis in the offshore wind sector after one of the blades it constructed for the Vineyard Wind farm collapsed into the Atlantic Ocean. Last week, the company reported it found more issues with blades and recorded $700 million in financial losses from offshore wind contracts largely tied to blade issues.
So naturally, I asked him about this – and NIMBYs, and the Inflation Reduction Act, and also about what gives him hope for the future. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
These days there’s a lot of folks out there who a few years ago were more optimistic than they are today given all kinds of industry trends, policy trends … how would you characterize the pace of the transition right now? Is it speeding up or slowing down?
I actually go into the room today more optimistic than I would’ve been two years ago. I think at the end of the day what we need to think about is, in the electric power system, we need growth to be able to innovate. We’re about to get the most growth that we’ve had – the most load growth in the U.S. – in multiple decades. That actually is an opportunity for us to transform how things work. It’s a lot harder to do that in a flat demand environment, and for the first time in a long time we don’t have that anymore.
So I find it quite interesting when you have conversations about oh my gosh, the hyperscalers need a ton of electricity for data centers, what is this going to do to the energy transition? Hyperscalers, as an example, are amazing customers who care immensely about sustainability. They do need electrons tomorrow but those are electrons they’re committed to decarbonizing over time. So I like our chances now more than I would’ve two years ago.
How has your experience in wind informed your approach to emerging technologies generally?
Well I think in a lot of these cases, this is an all-of-the-above energy technology opportunity for us. We’re going to need a lot of different technologies to solve our challenges and then the real question becomes how do we develop products that can industrialize at scale. And that is really at the heart of the challenge for the wind industry today.
The reality is there’s an incredible amount of innovation with wind. A lot of accelerated larger products. And as they got larger and larger, they got harder and harder to make, and the harder and harder they are to make, the bigger the industry’s quality challenges. And at the end of the day, if we produce products that ultimately don’t work, it doesn’t electrify and decarbonize the world.
When I think about what we do in places like [a startup summit], the technology is the start but it’s also simultaneously saying, is this something we can make at scale?
Do you think we’re not going to be able to manufacture wind at scale?
No, I think we’re definitely going to be able to do it. But I think the industry has gone through such an incredible amount of growth fairly quickly with different product variants that the industry struggled in that regard. The availability of the global install base of wind turbines from an industry perspective has gone down as the growth has gone up. And that’s a bad equation. We need the availability of the product to be working at the same static pace as we plan more and more wind turbines. Do I think we can do that? I think we can. But something I reference a lot is the risk of developing products and businesses on PowerPoint economics versus actual engineering and manufacturing discipline to make sure we can do things right the first time.
I write a newsletter for Heatmap about conflicts in the energy transition – local, state, federal – and I’ve covered conflicts over wind projects, solar projects, battery storage. A trend I’ve seen, especially within first-moving space, is one involving opposition. Because people aren’t familiar with these technologies, it’s easier to scaremonger or get people opposed. I’m wondering, how do you think companies like yourself are doing at handling community engagement and communities’ reception to emerging technologies?
I think what’s critical here is that we all are a catalyst to a conversation. I think the challenge we have sometimes with the energy transition is we actually let the conversation go on for too long.
I actually think the debate is crucial. The debate within communities where there are trades being made – for example, for space or resources — are critical. But the adult conversation is how we converge. Ultimately you need to govern those conversations, make decisions, and go. And today I don’t know if that adult conversation happens fast enough.
For anyone here involved in deployment, are we in a place where people aren’t willing to go? I know at least in some parts of this country, that’s certainly the case. I write about NIMBYs all the time.
Well I think – and again, we need people to be heard, we need communities to be heard – projects do take longer to get done today. That’s a dynamic when you think about industrializing products at scale, a lot of products within the electric power system need to be connected to the zero-carbon power sources that we’re creating. That connection does require new transmission lines to get the electrons to where they’re ultimately needed. That is a long, drawn-out process today in the U.S. It’s longer in our U.S. markets than it is in Europe, it’s longer than it is in Asia. That doesn’t mean the conversation shouldn’t happen, because if a transmission line goes through a community that ultimately isn’t benefiting from that transmission line, we’ve got to solve that problem. But the country needs the transmission lines, because without it we’re not going to decarbonize the electric power system.
In my mind this is less about whether we’re having the debates. It’s more about how do we have them quicker and then make decisions and go.
Given the timetables for developing a transmission line or developing a wind farm, those can be decadal timetables. Next year we’re looking at Congress potentially writing a new tax bill. How bankable is the Inflation Reduction Act in a decadal investment landscape?
Two thoughts on that.
First, it can’t take decades to build a transmission line or a wind farm. I can tell you, as one of the biggest players in the space, it sure as heck doesn’t take that long to physically build them. It takes that long because the conversation takes too long before we push go. That’s the challenge. We can do this much quicker, we just have to do it.
Now, on the Inflation Reduction Act – and there are many elements of the Inflation Reduction Act – I’m certain that with the next administration, regardless of who is in it, they’ll scrutinize all the decisions the last administration made. That’s the beauty of our government. All that said, when it comes to most elements of the Inflation Reduction Act that are tied to creating jobs, manufacturing growth, U.S. competitiveness, energy security – it’s becoming very, very clear that building out and really transforming the electric power system in the U.S. supports all of those priorities. Those are things that both sides of the aisle support.
When I look at the things we’re investing in — and we’re investing heavily into expanding U.S. factories to grow the wind industry, to grow further into serving the transmission and switchgear market — we’re not hesitating one bit because of the bankability risk of our democracy. We think both sides of the aisle are going to support things that are aligned with competitiveness, innovation, jobs, and U.S. national security. And that’s what we’re investing in every day.
So, what gives you hope? You’re certainly brimming with it.
We’re in this every day. We added 29 gigawatts of new power globally last year. Forty-four percent of it was in developing countries. That new 29 gigawatts of power we added to the grid was about 25% cleaner than what the grid is in totality and we see a very clear pathway to add a lot more gigawatts every year, and for it to be even cleaner than what we delivered this year or last year. We know how to do this.
I come into rooms like this and listen to the last 20 minutes of [startup] presentations and I say to myself, okay, we’ve got a lot of young companies that are working on really important stuff. Do they know exactly how to industrialize their product yet at the level that it can make an impact? Maybe not. Do they have the customer reach they’re going to need to accelerate the commercial momentum? Probably not in all cases. Guess what: Those are things Vernova can help with. That’s why we like hanging out in a room like this. There’s a lot of companies that operate in this building every day in which that art of the possible is exciting. There’s a lot of other buildings in the country, in the world, where it’s hard to not have a kick in our step. So this is there for the taking.
I’d rather go at it with that mindset than with the alternative because if I go at it with the alternative, I’ll definitely let down my kids. I’ve got a 12 and 10 year old. They already believe that this is their generation’s greatest challenge. So are we going to take it on with optimism and go after it, or the alternative? And I do think that’s an important point I want to hit on is, something I shared with my broad leadership team: I do think at times, as it relates to energy innovation with climate change and the energy transition, we can lean into conversations with pessimism. And I don’t think that helps our industry.
If I do a compare-contrast with the tech industry on the West Coast, where I’m spending a lot more time now, they’re a lot more optimistic about things they have no idea how to actually make a reality. But the optimism is there. And that optimism can sometimes be half the battle. So are we going to scare everybody? Or are we going to frame up what we know how to do, be honest about what we don’t know how to do, and go after it?
I’ll tell you, any time an oil rig fails, no one is having a conversation about the technology. Is this a public perception problem and a media problem with trade-off denial? Is there some sort of double standard going on in the energy transition space versus fossil fuel space?
I don’t think that is the case. I think we want to hold to the standard the media and the communities are expecting of us. There [are] no trade-offs for safety and quality. And when things don’t work, whether it be a solar farm, a wind turbine, a transformer goes down, I’m not crying in my beer over those communities pushing on whether the industry is good enough.
I think a similar thing happens in the fossil fuel industry when things don’t work, but I don’t want a different bar. I don’t think this is about having a different set of expectations for what we need to deliver. We talk every day about the fact that if this industry is going to thrive, it needs to start every single day with safety and quality at the forefront of what we do. Delivery comes next and that’s where I talk about industrializing things at scale. We don’t really have time for hobbies. These things need to be built at scale. And then the economics need to ultimately work because if the economics don’t work and we push this price to everyone with just exponentially higher electricity prices, that’s not going to work either.
But you can’t start with the economics. You can’t start with whether you can make it at scale. First it has to be safe and it has to be high quality. And I actually think communities, the media, investors holding that bar to every element of the renewables industry is a step in the right direction.
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And more on the week’s biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects.
1. Jackson County, Kansas – A judge has rejected a Hail Mary lawsuit to kill a single solar farm over it benefiting from the Inflation Reduction Act, siding with arguments from a somewhat unexpected source — the Trump administration’s Justice Department — which argued that projects qualifying for tax credits do not require federal environmental reviews.
2. Portage County, Wisconsin – The largest solar project in the Badger State is now one step closer to construction after settling with environmentalists concerned about impacts to the Greater Prairie Chicken, an imperiled bird species beloved in wildlife conservation circles.
3. Imperial County, California – The board of directors for the agriculture-saturated Imperial Irrigation District in southern California has approved a resolution opposing solar projects on farmland.
4. New England – Offshore wind opponents are starting to win big in state negotiations with developers, as officials once committed to the energy sources delay final decisions on maintaining contracts.
5. Barren County, Kentucky – Remember the National Park fighting the solar farm? We may see a resolution to that conflict later this month.
6. Washington County, Arkansas – It seems that RES’ efforts to build a wind farm here are leading the county to face calls for a blanket moratorium.
7. Westchester County, New York – Yet another resort town in New York may be saying “no” to battery storage over fire risks.
Solar and wind projects are getting swept up in the blowback to data center construction, presenting a risk to renewable energy companies who are hoping to ride the rise of AI in an otherwise difficult moment for the industry.
The American data center boom is going to demand an enormous amount of electricity and renewables developers believe much of it will come from solar and wind. But while these types of energy generation may be more easily constructed than, say, a fossil power plant, it doesn’t necessarily mean a connection to a data center will make a renewable project more popular. Not to mention data centers in rural areas face complaints that overlap with prominent arguments against solar and wind – like noise and impacts to water and farmland – which is leading to unfavorable outcomes for renewable energy developers more broadly when a community turns against a data center.
“This is something that we’re just starting to see,” said Matthew Eisenson, a senior fellow with the Renewable Energy Legal Defense Initiative at the Columbia University Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “It’s one thing for environmentalists to support wind and solar projects if the idea is that those projects will eventually replace coal power plants. But it’s another thing if those projects are purely being built to meet incremental demand from data centers.”
We’ve started to see evidence of this backlash in certain resort towns fearful of a new tech industry presence and the conflicts over transmission lines in Maryland. But it is most prominent in Virginia, ground zero for American hyperscaler data centers. As we’ve previously discussed in The Fight, rural Virginia is increasingly one of the hardest places to get approval for a solar farm in the U.S., and while there are many reasons the industry is facing issues there, a significant one is the state’s data center boom.
I spent weeks digging into the example of Mecklenburg County, where the local Board of Supervisors in May indefinitely banned new solar projects and is rejecting those that were in the middle of permitting when the decision came down. It’s also the site of a growing data center footprint. Microsoft, which already had a base of operations in the county’s town of Boydton, is in the process of building a giant data center hub with three buildings and an enormous amount of energy demand. It’s this sudden buildup of tech industry infrastructure that is by all appearances driving a backlash to renewable energy in the county, a place that already had a pre-existing high opposition risk in the Heatmap Pro database.
It’s not just data centers causing the ban in Mecklenburg, but it’s worth paying attention to how the fight over Big Tech and solar has overlapped in the county, where Sierra Club’s Virginia Chapter has worked locally to fight data center growth with a grassroots citizens group, Friends of the Meherrin River, that was a key supporter of the solar moratorium, too.
In a conversation with me this week, Tim Cywinski, communications director for the state’s Sierra Club chapter, told me municipal leaders like those in Mecklenburg are starting to group together renewables and data centers because, simply put, rural communities enter into conversations with these outsider business segments with a heavy dose of skepticism. This distrust can then be compounded when errors are made, such as when one utility-scale solar farm – Geenex’s Grasshopper project – apparently polluted a nearby creek after soil erosion issues during construction, a problem project operator Dominion Energy later acknowledged and has continued to be a pain point for renewables developers in the county.
“I don’t think the planning that has been presented to rural America has been adequate enough,” the Richmond-based advocate said. “Has solar kind of messed up in a lot of areas in rural America? Yeah, and that’s given those communities an excuse to roll them in with a lot of other bad stuff.”
Cywinski – who describes himself as “not your typical environmentalist” – says the data center space has done a worse job at community engagement than renewables developers in Virginia, and that the opposition against data center projects in places like Chesapeake and Fauquier is more intense, widespread, and popular than the opposition to renewables he’s seeing play out across the Commonwealth.
But, he added, he doesn’t believe the fight against data centers is “mutually exclusive” from conflicts over solar. “I’m not going to tout the gospel of solar while I’m trying to fight a data center for these people because it’s about listening to them, hearing their concerns, and then not telling them what to say but trying to help them elevate their perspective and their concerns,” Cywinski said.
As someone who spends a lot of time speaking with communities resisting solar and trying to best understand their concerns, I agree with Cywinksi: the conflict over data centers speaks to the heart of the rural vs. renewables divide, and it offers a warning shot to anyone thinking AI will help make solar and wind more popular.
Today’s conversation is with Chris Moyer of Echo Communications, a D.C.-based communications firm that focuses on defending zero- and low-carbon energy and federal investments in climate action. Moyer, a veteran communications adviser who previously worked on Capitol Hill, has some hot takes as of late about how he believes industry and political leaders have in his view failed to properly rebut attacks on solar and wind energy, in addition to the Inflation Reduction Act. On Tuesday he sent an email blast out to his listserv – which I am on – that boldly declared: “The Wind Industry’s Strategy is Failing.”
Of course after getting that email, it shouldn’t surprise readers of The Fight to hear I had to understand what he meant by that, and share it with all of you. So here goes. The following conversation has been abridged and lightly edited for clarity.
What are you referencing when you say, ‘the wind industry’s strategy is failing’?
Anyone in the climate space, in the clean energy space, the worst thing you can do is go silent and pretend that this is just going to go away. Even if it’s the president and the administration delivering the attacks, I think there’s an important strategy that’s been lacking in the wind and other sectors that I don’t think has been effective. There was a recent E&E News story that noted a couple of wind developers when asked for comment just say, “No comment.” This to me misses a really big opportunity to not get in a fight with people but talk about the benefits of wind.
Not taking advantage of milestones like ground breaking or construction starting is a missed opportunity to drive public opinion. If you lose support in public opinion, you’re going to lose support from public officials, because they largely follow public opinion.
And there’s no way that’s going to change if you don’t take the opportunities to talk about the benefits that wind can provide, in terms of good-paying local jobs or supplying more electrons to the grid. By almost any measure the strategy employed so far has not really worked.
Okay, but what is the wind industry strategy that isn’t working? What are they doing to rebut attacks on the technology, on property values, on the environment?
We’re not hearing them. We’re not hearing those arguments.
You can’t let criticisms go unanswered.It would better serve the industry and these companies to push back against criticisms. It’s not like you can’t anticipate what they are. And what do you have to lose? You’re in the worst position of any energy sector in this political moment. It would be nice to see some fight and sharp campaign skills and strategic effort in terms of communication. And there’s no strategic value from what I can tell in [being silent].
I understand not wanting to pick a fight with folks who hold your fate in their hands, but there’s a way to thread a needle that isn’t antagonizing anybody but also making sure the facts have been heard. And that’s been missing.
You’d specifically said the industry should stop ‘being paralyzed in fear and start going on offense.’ What does that look like to you?
Taking every opportunity to get your message out there. The lowest hanging fruit is when a reporter comes and asks you, What do you think about this criticism? You should definitely reply. It’s lifting up third-party voices that are benefiting from a specific project, talking about the economic impacts more broadly, talking about the benefits to the grid.
There’s a whole number of tools in the toolbox to put to use but the toolboxes remain shut thus far. Targeted paid media, elevating the different voices and communities that are going to resonate with different legislators, and certainly the facts are helpful. Also having materials prepared, like validators and frequently asked questions and answers.
You’re trying to win. You’re trying to get your project to be successful and deliver jobs and tax revenue. And I think it would be wise for companies to look at the playbooks of electoral campaigns, because there’s lots of tools that campaigns use.
How do renewable energy developers get around the problem of partisanship? How do you get outta that through a campaign approach?
These projects are decided locally. It’s deciding who the decision-makers are and not just letting opponents who are getting talking points through right-wing media show up and reiterate these talking points. Oftentimes, there’s no one on the pro side even showing up at all, and it makes it really easy for city councils to oppose projects. They’re losing by forfeit. We can’t keep doing that.