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A conversation with Stephanie Loucas, chief development officer for Renewable Properties
This week I got the chance to speak with Stephanie Loucas of Renewable Properties, one of the fantastic subject matter experts who joined me this week for a panel on local renewables conflicts at Intersolar. After revealing herself to me as someone in the development space who clearly cares about community engagement, I asked if I could bring her on the record to chat about her approach to getting buy-in on projects. She’s not someone who often works in utility scale – all her projects are under 10 megawatts – but the conflicts she deals with are the same.
Here’s an edited version of our chat outside the conference as we overlooked the San Diego bay:
I guess to start, what’s the approach you’d like to see the renewables development sector adopt when it comes to community engagement?
I would like to see developers collaborate a little bit more so messaging is similar and we can have more engagement sooner. I don’t think that some of this is some sort of secret sauce. We could be a little bit more together.
Okay, but what’s your approach?
Our approach is early and often, listen empathetically and try to answer the questions clearly and try to build trust.”
If there is no secret sauce, what’s the best way to build trust?
I think the best way to build trust is to listen, to address the issues, to understand what the community is really asking. I think it’s easy for a person to sit behind a computer and write a long letter or email with 25 concerns but actually talking to the person, which is something that I think the younger people in the industry – more junior folks – aren’t as accustomed to talking to people. They’re more used to communicating in written form.
You’re able to suss out what’s actually important by talking to them. They’ll hit their one-to-five most important topics, as opposed to the 25 things they’ll write in their letter.
What does ‘early and often’ look like for you?
Early is… as soon as you talk to the authority with jurisdiction, talk to them about who in the community is actually important. Who should we be talking to? Do you think we’ll have opposition? Do you think we’ll have supporters? And it’s getting the planning department’s perspective. Then you start from there, to build who you’re going to be talking to and when.
Okay. So what’s often then? Do you have to be there every day? Is it about having an office in the community?
I think it depends on the comments you get and what’s going on specifically in the community. Sometimes you have to be in it for a while to really root out what’s going on. It might feel like you’re starting to talk for a year, a certain amount of time before you submit your permit, but you don’t get to the root cause of what’s really bugging people until you’ve had more conversations and they’re trusting you’ll show back up. Answer those questions.
Let’s say you provided a report from a third party consultant addressing “X” and then they bring up “Y.” Then you address “Y” and they bring up another thing. It’s about listening and responding. That’s how you build trust.
So I’m often told I tell too many negative stories of conflict in this newsletter. Do you have any examples in your work where you really feel like you got community buy-in?
To be honest, one of the best is a recent case study. It’s a project coming online in New York where we were in the community for a long time, a lot of public meetings and there was a ton of opposition. Part of the opposition was confusing our project size. There was a huge project – a several hundred megawatt project – going on too. They kept using the same opposition talking points. And we said, we’re not that. We heard the community and talked them through it. We wanted to make sure they were evaluating the project for the appropriate level of impact it was having.
We had opposition and we overcame it in that town. And then really flipping the mayor, having him come around. We did a ribbon cutting ceremony. We made sure we had the right number of local people benefiting from a community solar program – we ended up with a 20% number [of local subscribers].
Does having local use of power – using power from the solar project near their backyard – help with getting buy in?
Absolutely. I think so. The electrons aren’t just in their viewpoint getting on the grid and they’re never knowing where they’re going.
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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.
Editor’s note: This article was updated after publication to clarify that the Riverside project may need to relocated or modified.
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.