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A conversation with Colorado's junior senator on the 2024 election, permitting reform, and what might happen with the IRA.
This week we’re talking to Senator John Hickenlooper of Colorado who joined me yesterday at Heatmap’s Election Post-Game event in Washington, D.C., for a spirited chat about the 2024 election, permitting, and support for renewable energy in a Trump 2.0 era. We also talked about beer and The Fray, but we’ll spare you those details. The following is an abridged version of our conversation.
So you’ve said in your time in the Senate there needs to be a “business plan” for climate change. What’s the business plan now that Trump is going to be president again?
I said from the moment I got to Washington that I could not understand how we got so far down the road without any kind of plan. No one has mapped it out – and at this point it has to change – but there’s no sense of a plan.
Right now we have to look at the possibility of dramatic rollbacks from a lot of legislation that got passed in 2023. The Inflation Reduction Act, the largest financial commitment to addressing climate change in the history of the world. I think the CHIPS and Science Act has a lot of stuff in it that over time is going to have dramatic benefits in terms of addressing climate. Rolling back those efforts for the simple purpose of giving another tax break to the publicly traded stocks of America doesn’t seem constructive.
One thing that’ll make that difficult is many of the people who worked so hard to elect Donald Trump are receiving those benefits and those jobs. A lot of those tax credits are being spent in red states.
Faced with that rollback, which I think is really an interruption and which slows down the momentum – you want to disrupt the business plan, you want to throw a wrench in the gears, one way to do that is to create unpredictability. That anything agreed to [isn’t] going to stay the same for more than two years.
I’ve heard the argument a lot before, the past few years, that a lot of the money being spent is going to red states. Why was that not an election winning argument in these states?
My impression is people basically felt that the elites – Democrats and Republican elites – are looking down on them. They’re being judged by a woke culture. They’re being bossed around. Well over 2/3rds of the people who start business aren’t doing it to make a lot of money. They’re doing it because they can’t stand having a boss. They’re doing it because they want to be in control of their lives, their job, their work, their hours, their mission. And we Democrats did a piss poor disappointing job of communicating that way.
There’s a whole bunch of reasons why this happened like it did. Hearing the war stories the past couple of days, the kinds of ads that were used as a way of taking down Democrats were pretty outrageous.
What’s to come with permitting reform?
I think we’re seeing an alignment of self interest around permitting reform. Most of the large environmental organizations recognize that if we’re going to successfully address climate change, we’ve got to get transmission lines – you can’t spend 20 years permitting transmission lines. We’ve got to go faster. The time, sense of urgency we have, is not really sufficient. The same thing is true about critical minerals. We’re going to need so much of them and we haven’t really identified where they’re going to come from.
The bill that’s sitting there right now, I think we can get that passed. I’m not saying we’re going to. But I’m saying we have a very good chance of Republicans and Democrats lining up and saying, alright I don’t like a lot of this, but we need it.
So you think the first place people are going to go is the Manchin-Barrasso bill?
Yeah I think in the short-term I think that’s where they’re going to give their best shot.
Both sides have certain parts of that bill they are really unhappy with, and they modified certain parts of it, so [we’ll] come back from recess and everyone’ll [be] taking a fresh look at it and say well I still don’t like this but it’s not as bad as it was before.
There’s some worry in some corners of climate advocacy spaces that they’ll have less of an ear from members of Congress in light of the election results. In listening to more progressive environmentalists who’ve been critical of the bill, is listening to them a politically smart idea? Practically smart idea?
I don’t think it’s a smart idea politically or practically because I do feel this sense of urgency that we’ve got to go now.
With the Barrasso-Manchin bill, we’re still going to have to do all this work. We’re just going to do it in six months or a year or two years down the road and it takes us further and further away from dealing with the issue. The costs are asymptotic.
What climate gains will be made this Congress aside from permitting reform?
I think this great transition’s going to continue. It might slow down a little bit.
There is genuine factual basis that this transition makes sense on so many levels. Politically, it’s not something you want to talk about. But we as a country have to move in that direction. Maybe talk a little less, do a little more? I heard that advice in the musical Hamilton – talk less, smile more. We have to do the opposite, do more and smile less.
What do you mean by the transition being something you don’t want to talk about?
As you’re describing the cost of waiting for people, they can get into the nits and gnats where they can go back to who they represent and say hey, there’s a problem. The same thing happens when we talk about it. Try to talk about the issues in the broadest, most fundamental ways, because that’s the hardest way for it to be attacked. Just having the broad statement is going to be more effective with a large group of people.
So I asked if progress will be made on climate in Congress besides permitting and you didn’t say yes…
No, I’ll say yes. The great thing about the Inflation Reduction Act is that it put a lot of things in play. Carbon capture, there’s a bunch of research projects and a couple of implementations in red states where they are making great progress in terms of how they can get carbon out of the air in an increasingly cost-effective way. I haven’t seen it make any kind of economic sense, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t going to get there. Hydrogen is a huge thing. Looking at some of the new nuclear reactors, where they’re looking at types of fusion reactors, small and large. Climate change is not going to allow us to go and pick out our favorite treats.
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From Kansas to Brooklyn, the fire is turning battery skeptics into outright opponents.
The symbol of the American battery backlash can be found in the tiny town of Halstead, Kansas.
Angry residents protesting a large storage project proposed by Boston developer Concurrent LLC have begun brandishing flashy yard signs picturing the Moss Landing battery plant blaze, all while freaking out local officials with their intensity. The modern storage project bears little if any resemblance to the Moss Landing facility, which uses older technology,, but that hasn’t calmed down anxious locals or stopped news stations from replaying footage of the blaze in their coverage of the conflict.
The city of Halstead, under pressure from these locals, is now developing a battery storage zoning ordinance – and explicitly saying this will not mean a project “has been formally approved or can be built in the city.” The backlash is now so intense that Halstead’s mayor Dennis Travis has taken to fighting back against criticism on Facebook, writing in a series of posts about individuals in his community “trying to rule by MOB mentality, pushing out false information and intimidating” volunteers working for the city. “I’m exercising MY First Amendment Right and well, if you don’t like it you can kiss my grits,” he wrote. Other posts shared information on the financial benefits of building battery storage and facts to dispel worries about battery fires. “You might want to close your eyes and wish this technology away but that is not going to happen,” another post declared. “Isn’t it better to be able to regulate it in our community?”
What’s happening in Halstead is a sign of a slow-spreading public relations wildfire that’s nudging communities that were already skeptical of battery storage over the edge into outright opposition. We’re not seeing any evidence that communities are transforming from supportive to hostile – but we are seeing new areas that were predisposed to dislike battery storage grow more aggressive and aghast at the idea of new projects.
Heatmap Pro data actually tells the story quite neatly: Halstead is located in Harvey County, a high risk area for developers that already has a restrictive ordinance banning all large-scale solar and wind development. There’s nothing about battery storage on the books yet, but our own opinion poll modeling shows that individuals in this county are more likely to oppose battery storage than renewable energy.
We’re seeing this phenomenon play out elsewhere as well. Take Fannin County, Texas, where residents have begun brandishing the example of Moss Landing to rail against an Engie battery storage project, and our modeling similarly shows an intense hostility to battery projects. The same can be said about Brooklyn, New York, where anti-battery concerns are far higher in our polling forecasts – and opposition to battery storage on the ground is gaining steam.
And more on the week’s conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Carbon County, Wyoming – I have learned that the Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project.
2. Nantucket County, Massachusetts – Anti-offshore wind advocates are pushing the Trump administration to rescind air permits issued to Avangrid for New England Wind 1 and 2, the same approval that was ripped away from Atlantic Shores offshore wind farm last Friday.
3. Campbell County, Virginia – The HEP Solar utility-scale project in rural Virginia is being accused of creating a damaging amount of runoff, turning a nearby lake into a “mud pit.” (To see the story making the rounds on anti-renewables social media, watch this TV news segment.)
4. Marrow County, Ohio – A solar farm in Ohio got approvals for once! Congratulations to ESA Solar on this rare 23-acre conquest.
5. Madison County, Indiana – The Indiana Supreme Court has rejected an effort by Invenergy to void a restrictive county ordinance.
6. Davidson County, North Carolina – A fraught conflict is playing out over a Cypress Creek Renewables solar project in the town of Denton, which passed a solar moratorium that contradicts approval for the project issued by county officials in 2022.
7. Knox County, Nebraska – A federal judge has dismissed key aspects of a legal challenge North Fork Wind, a subsidiary of National Grid Renewables, filed against the county for enacting a restrictive wind ordinance that hinders development of their project.
8. Livingston Parish, Louisiana – This parish is extending a moratorium on new solar farm approvals for at least another year, claiming such action is necessary to comply with a request from the state.
9. Jefferson County, Texas – The city council in the heavily industrial city of Port Arthur, Texas, has approved a lease for constructing wind turbines in a lake.
10. Linn County, Oregon – What is supposed to be this county’s first large-scale solar farm is starting to face pushback over impacts to a wetlands area.Today’s sit-down is with Nikhil Kumar, a program director at GridLab and an expert in battery storage safety and regulation. Kumar’s folks reached out to me after learning I was writing about Moss Landing and wanted to give his honest and open perspective on how the disaster is impacting the future of storage development in the U.S. Let’s dive in!
The following is an abridged and edited version of our conversation.
So okay – walk me through your perspective on what happened with Moss Landing.
When this incident occurred, I’d already been to Moss Landing plenty of times. It caught me by surprise in the sense that it had reoccurred – the site had issues in the past.
A bit of context about my background – I joined GridLab relatively recently, but before that I spent 20 years in this industry, often working on the integrity and quality assurance of energy assets, anything from a natural gas power plant to nuclear to battery to a solar plant. I’m very familiar with safety regulation and standards for the energy industry, writ large.
Help me understand how things have improved since Moss Landing. Why is this facility considered by some to be an exception to the rule?
It’s definitely an outlier. Batteries are very modular by nature, you don’t need a lot of overall facility to put battery storage on the ground. From a construction standpoint, a wind or solar farm or even a gas plant is more complex to put together. But battery storage, that simplicity is a good thing.
That’s not the case with Moss Landing. If you look at the overall design of these sites, having battery packs in a building with a big hall is rare.
Pretty much every battery that’s been installed in the last two or three years, industry has already known about this [risk]. When the first [battery] fire occurred, they basically containerized everything – you want to containerize everything so you don’t have these thermal runaway events, where the entire battery batch catches fire. If you look at the record, in the last two or three years, I do not believe a single such design was implemented by anybody. People have learned from that experience already.
Are we seeing industry have to reckon with this anyway? I can’t help but wonder if you’ve witnessed these community fears. It does seem like when a fire happens, it creates problems for developers in other parts of the country. Are developers reckoning with a conflation from this event itself?
I think so. Developers that we’ve talked to are very well aware of reputational risk. They do not want people to have general concern with this technology because, if you look at how much battery is waiting to be connected to the grid, that’s pretty much it. There’s 12 times more capacity of batteries waiting to be connected to the grid than gas. That’s 12X.
We should wait for the city and I would really expect [Vistra] to release the root cause investigation of this fire. Experts have raised a number of these potential root causes. But we don’t know – was it the fire suppression system that failed? Was it something with the batteries?
We don’t know. I would hope that the details come out in a transparent way, so industry can make those changes, in terms of designs.
Is there anything in terms of national regulation governing this sector’s performance standards and safety standards, and do you think something like that should exist?
It should exist and it is happening. The NFPA [National Fire Prevention Association] is putting stuff out there. There might be some leaders in the way California’s introduced some new regulation to make sure there’s better documentation, safety preparedness.
There should be better regulation. There should be better rules. I don’t think developers are even against that.
OK, so NFPA. But what about the Trump administration? Should they get involved here?
I don’t think so. The OSHA standards apply to people who work on site — the regulatory frameworks are already there. I don’t think they need some special safety standard that’s new that applies to all these sites. The ingredients are already there.
It’s like coal power plants. There’s regulation on greenhouse gas emissions, but not all aspects of coal plants. I’m not sure if the Trump administration needs to get involved.
It sounds like you're saying the existing regulations are suitable in your view and what’s needed is for states and industry to step up?
I would think so. Just to give you an example, from an interconnection standpoint, there’s IEEE standards. From the battery level, there are UL standards. From the battery management system that also manages a lot of the ins and outs of how the battery operates —- a lot of those already have standards. To get insurance on a large battery site, they have to meet a lot of these guidelines already — nobody would insure a site otherwise. There’s a lot of financial risk. You don’t want batteries exploding because you didn’t meet any of these hundreds of guidelines that already exist and in many cases standards that exist.
So, I don’t know if something at the federal level changes anything.
My last question is, if you were giving advice to a developer, what would you say to them about making communities best aware of these tech advancements?
Before that, I am really hoping Vistra and all the agencies involved [with Moss Landing] have a transparent and accountable process of revealing what actually happened at this site. I think that’s really important.