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The conservationist group thinks it has the goods on the Bureau of Land Management’s new Western solar plan.
The Biden administration is trying to open a lot more Western territory to utility-scale solar. But they are facing a conservationist backlash that may be aided by the views of scientists within the federal government.
Yesterday, activists pushed back against the environmental review of the Bureau of Land Management’s new Western solar plan that would make more than 31 million acres available for utility-scale solar applications across 11 states. The BLM is trying to meet the next two decades of demand for renewable electricity while avoiding the kinds of environmental and social conflicts that stymie individual projects. But it appears key stakeholders filed protests against the environmental review, including counties that would host new solar farms and Republican politicians, as well as the whistleblower advocacy group PEER we wrote about last week.
Today, however, we’re going to focus on the protest filed by the Center for Biological Diversity, which submitted to BLM what amounted to the contours of a lawsuit.
The protest argued the environmental review of the plan not only failed to adequately protect the Mojave desert tortoise – a species protected as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act – but appeared to make “arbitrary” decisions to open potential tortoise habitat and travel areas. Per the protest, the review did so without clearly explaining how it took into account guidance from the Fish and Wildlife Service, the primary species protection agency.
Zooming in, scientists at the Service said in a power-point presentation dated April of this year (that CBD happily pointed out is available online) they supported excluding occupied tortoise habitat and translocation sites from the solar plan. Employees at the Service also gave CBD guidance documents they submitted over the past year to the Bureau that outlined “extensive criteria for exclusion” that activists say were not followed and weren’t reflected in the review documents previously released by the government.
Why does this matter? Well, it could determine whether the decisions relevant can hold up in court. CBD is using the word “arbitrary” because it’s a standard followed under the Administrative Procedures Act, which forces government officials to show their work and demonstrate they considered all available information submitted to them.
CBD’s Patrick Donnelly – who we spoke with at length in our first edition of The Fight – authored the protest filing. Donnelly told me the acreage relevant to the tortoises totals only about 200,000 acres of the almost 12 million that would be available for solar under the plan, so the grievance shouldn’t be a herculean endeavor to address.
“We’re trying to go into the protest process with an open mind, not cynically,” he told me, “and make this plan a lot less harmful.”
Still, if CBD escalates, the Bureau will have to show how it went from getting these recommendations to landing on the acreage it opened to solar. It could also shake the certainty of developers with applications within the solar plan area already dealing with tortoise protection advocates on the individual project level, like EDF Renewables’ Bonanza Solar project north of Las Vegas which has a draft environmental review in public comment.
Proving a government decision is arbitrary requires demonstrating the move was not “reasonable and justifiable,” Ankur Tohan, an attorney at K&L Gates, told me. Usually the bar for the government to prove itself is “relatively low,” and courts are “very deferential to an agency” as long as “the agency’s action took into account the relevant factors.” The problems arise for the government if “the internal analysis is contradictory,” Tohan said.
Personally I’m having trouble figuring out how the Service’s initial recommendations were internalized at BLM – though I am assuming they were handled in some way, as otherwise the Service would presumably stand in the way. BLM does acknowledge that “design features and project guidelines” were modified to “better avoid impacts to species where not excluded” and said developers “shall configure solar development projects to maintain existing desert tortoise habitat.”
I asked BLM to explain this, but they declined to answer questions on the matter. “The BLM has no comment at this time,” BLM press secretary Brian Hires said, citing the need to “review all protests.” So I guess we’ll have to wait and see!
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A war of attrition is now turning in opponents’ favor.
A solar developer’s defeat in Massachusetts last week reveals just how much stronger project opponents are on the battlefield after the de facto repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Last week, solar developer PureSky pulled five projects under development around the western Massachusetts town of Shutesbury. PureSky’s facilities had been in the works for years and would together represent what the developer has claimed would be one of the state’s largest solar projects thus far. In a statement, the company laid blame on “broader policy and regulatory headwinds,” including the state’s existing renewables incentives not keeping pace with rising costs and “federal policy updates,” which PureSky said were “making it harder to finance projects like those proposed near Shutesbury.”
But tucked in its press release was an admission from the company’s vice president of development Derek Moretz: this was also about the town, which had enacted a bylaw significantly restricting solar development that the company was until recently fighting vigorously in court.
“There are very few areas in the Commonwealth that are feasible to reach its clean energy goals,” Moretz stated. “We respect the Town’s conservation go als, but it is clear that systemic reforms are needed for Massachusetts to source its own energy.”
This stems from a story that probably sounds familiar: after proposing the projects, PureSky began reckoning with a burgeoning opposition campaign centered around nature conservation. Led by a fresh opposition group, Smart Solar Shutesbury, activists successfully pushed the town to drastically curtail development in 2023, pointing to the amount of forest acreage that would potentially be cleared in order to construct the projects. The town had previously not permitted facilities larger than 15 acres, but the fresh change went further, essentially banning battery storage and solar projects in most areas.
When this first happened, the state Attorney General’s office actually had PureSky’s back, challenging the legality of the bylaw that would block construction. And PureSky filed a lawsuit that was, until recently, ongoing with no signs of stopping. But last week, shortly after the Treasury Department unveiled its rules for implementing Trump’s new tax and spending law, which basically repealed the Inflation Reduction Act, PureSky settled with the town and dropped the lawsuit – and the projects went away along with the court fight.
What does this tell us? Well, things out in the country must be getting quite bleak for solar developers in areas with strident and locked-in opposition that could be costly to fight. Where before project developers might have been able to stomach the struggle, money talks – and the dollars are starting to tell executives to lay down their arms.
The picture gets worse on the macro level: On Monday, the Solar Energy Industries Association released a report declaring that federal policy changes brought about by phasing out federal tax incentives would put the U.S. at risk of losing upwards of 55 gigawatts of solar project development by 2030, representing a loss of more than 20 percent of the project pipeline.
But the trade group said most of that total – 44 gigawatts – was linked specifically to the Trump administration’s decision to halt federal permitting for renewable energy facilities, a decision that may impact generation out west but has little-to-know bearing on most large solar projects because those are almost always on private land.
Heatmap Pro can tell us how much is at stake here. To give you a sense of perspective, across the U.S., over 81 gigawatts worth of renewable energy projects are being contested right now, with non-Western states – the Northeast, South and Midwest – making up almost 60% of that potential capacity.
If historical trends hold, you’d expect a staggering 49% of those projects to be canceled. That would be on top of the totals SEIA suggests could be at risk from new Trump permitting policies.
I suspect the rate of cancellations in the face of project opposition will increase. And if this policy landscape is helping activists kill projects in blue states in desperate need of power, like Massachusetts, then the future may be more difficult to swallow than we can imagine at the moment.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewables.
1. Wells County, Indiana – One of the nation’s most at-risk solar projects may now be prompting a full on moratorium.
2. Clark County, Ohio – Another Ohio county has significantly restricted renewable energy development, this time with big political implications.
3. Daviess County, Kentucky – NextEra’s having some problems getting past this county’s setbacks.
4. Columbia County, Georgia – Sometimes the wealthy will just say no to a solar farm.
5. Ottawa County, Michigan – A proposed battery storage facility in the Mitten State looks like it is about to test the state’s new permitting primacy law.
A conversation with Jeff Seidman, a professor at Vassar College.
This week’s conversation is with Jeff Seidman, a professor at Vassar College and an avid Heatmap News reader. Last week Seidman claimed a personal victory: he successfully led an effort to overturn a moratorium on battery storage development in the town of Poughkeepsie in Hudson Valley, New York. After reading a thread about the effort he posted to BlueSky, I reached out to chat about what my readers might learn from his endeavors – and how they could replicate them, should they want to.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
So how did you decide to fight against a battery storage ban? What was your process here?
First of all, I’m not a professional in this area, but I’ve been learning about climate stuff for a long time. I date my education back to when Vox started and I read my first David Roberts column there. But I just happened to hear from someone I know that in the town of Poughkeepsie where I live that a developer made a proposal and local residents who live nearby were up in arms about it. And I heard the town was about to impose a moratorium – this was back in March 2024.
I actually personally know some of the town board members, and we have a Democratic majority who absolutely care about climate change but didn’t particularly know that battery power was important to the energy transition and decarbonizing the grid. So I organized five or six people to go to the town board meeting, wrote a letter, and in that initial board meeting we characterized the reason we were there as being about climate.
There were a lot more people on the other side. They were very angry. So we said do a short moratorium because every day we’re delaying this, peaker plants nearby are spewing SOx and NOx into the air. The status quo has a cost.
But then the other side, they were clearly triggered by the climate stuff and said renewables make the grid more expensive. We’d clearly pressed a button in the culture wars. And then we realized the mistake, because we lost that one.
When you were approaching getting this overturned, what considerations did you make?
After that initial meeting and seeing how those mentions of climate or even renewables had triggered a portion of the board, and the audience, I really course-corrected. I realized we had to make this all about local benefits. So that’s what I tried to do going forward.
Even for people who were climate concerned, it was really clear that what they perceived as a present risk in their neighborhood was way more salient than an abstract thing like contributing to the fight against climate change globally. So even for people potentially on your side, you have to make it about local benefits.
The other thing we did was we called a two-hour forum for the county supervisors and mayor’s association because we realized talking to them in a polarized environment was not a way to have a conversation. I spoke and so did Paul Rogers, a former New York Fire Department lieutenant who is now in fire safety consulting – he sounds like a firefighter and can speak with a credibility that I could never match in front of, for example, local fire chiefs. Winning them over was important. And we took more than an hour of questions.
Stage one was to convince them of why batteries were important. Stage two was to show that a large number of constituents were angry about the moratorium, but that Republicans were putting on a unified front against this – an issue to win votes. So there was a period where Democrats on the Poughkeepsie board were convinced but it was politically difficult for them.
But stage three became helping them do the right thing, even with the risk of there being a political cost.
What would you say to those in other parts of the country who want to do what you did?
If possible, get a zoning law in place before there is any developer with a specific proposal because all of the opposition to this project came from people directly next to the proposed project. Get in there before there’s a specific project site.
Even if you’re in a very blue city, don’t make it primarily about climate. Abstract climate loses to non-abstract perceived risk every time. Make it about local benefits.
To the extent you can, read and educate yourself about what good batteries provide to the grid. There’s a lot of local economic benefits there.
I am trying to put together some of the resources I used into a packet, a tool kit, so that people elsewhere can learn from it and draw from those resources.
Also, the more you know, the better. All those years of reading David Roberts and Heatmap gave me enough knowledge to actually answer questions here. It works especially when you have board members who may be sympathetic but need to be reassured.