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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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And more of the week’s biggest conflicts in renewable energy development.
1. Coos County, Oregon – We can confirm that opposition and waning industry interest have effectively killed the Beaver State’s first offshore wind lease sale.
2. Atlantic County, New Jersey – Some good news for offshore wind as a counterbalance: the Atlantic Shores wind farm got its final federal approval from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management yesterday.
3. Montgomery County, Alabama – In Alabama’s capital city of Montgomery, residents opposed to solar power are campaigning for Montgomery to enact a blanket ordinance banning permits and site development plans.
4. Litchfield County, Connecticut –The small New England city of Torrington, Connecticut doesn’t want any more solar panels.
Here’s what else we’re watching …
In Arizona, the city of Maricopa is opposing a roughly 1,100 acre solar farm proposed by Hidden Valley Ranch Partners.
In California, the city of San Marcos may soon formally oppose AES Corporation’s Seguro battery storage project.
In Illinois, officials in Clinton County have extended their wind moratorium through at least the end of this year.
In Kentucky, Lexington County’s planning commission has recommended against allowing large-scale solar farms.
In Michigan, the city of Detroit has filed eminent domain lawsuits to procure properties for community solar, a development backed by DTE.
In Minnesota, the city of Hugo is taking another stab at allowing some solar development after initially backing restrictions.
In Pennsylvania, Wilson Solar has offered to reduce the size of an 80 MW solar farm to assuage residents’ concerns. Jury’s still out on if it’ll work.
In Texas, a federal judge has halted work on Pine Gate Renewables’ Bandera solar farm amid a legal battle with landowners.
1. Seasons change, tariffs stay the same – The Biden administration is putting a duty on solar cells from four South Asian countries believed to be pass-throughs for Chinese imports: Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam.
2. New money for new nuclear – The Energy Department yesterday finalized over $2.8 billion in loans and grants to restart the Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan.
3. California is so silly sometimes – A judge has temporarily halted a California rule that would’ve stopped some solar developers in the state from building battery storage.
A conversation with Kajsa Hendrickson, Carbon180’s director of policy
This week I spoke with Kajsa Hendrickson, director of policy at Carbon180, about why they’re eager to talk about the social concerns involved in direct air capture (DAC) and how conflicts over carbon pipelines are hurting DAC projects too. We talk a lot about renewables here on The Fight but DAC is a crucial part of decarbonization and it has a host of conflicts that’ll be familiar to our readers.
The following is an abridged version of our conversation. Let’s get started…
How do the conflicts over DAC compare to fights against solar and wind farms?
“There are a lot of overlaps in the conflicts that can exist between DAC and more traditional energy systems. That is the reality. The difference is, so much of DAC is being funded by the federal government so we want to see those higher standards come into play about where communities should be engaged, what engagement should entail.”
“Plus, DAC is fundamentally a public good. The goal of it is to do something that is benefiting all of us writ large and that’s why it can’t follow traditional extractive models coming out of even some of the solar industry.”
What do you mean by solar being extractive?
“The approach to communities tends to be, cool, his project is coming in, there’s going to be some jobs, here’s how it’s going. And there might be a community benefits process there.
“What we’d like to see with DAC, whether it’s funded by DOE or not, is ideally communities get a choice as to whether or not a project comes to them. Communities get some form of prior engagement in determining whether or not they’d like to host a DAC site.”
How does the conflict over the Summit Carbon Solutions CO2 pipeline impact local support for other forms of carbon management, especially DAC?
“Infrastructure around CO2 is going to be a pain point. We at Carbon180 don’t really advocate for or support CCS. That being said, how the pipelines are being deployed, how developers engage with communities on CCS, is going to very much influence DAC. We fundamentally see DAC as serving a public good and CCS not necessary, but that doesn’t change the fact they’re likely going to have shared infrastructure and that the two of them are often going to be paired together.”
“I can’t speak to any of the particular specific details on the Summit pipeline other than that we have been hearing concerns about that, and concerns about what that means for the CO2 landscape as a whole. Just like any other burgeoning industry, negative handling of any particular project is going to look bad for the rest of them. I’d love to see developers proactively engage communities effectively, focusing on their rights, to allow CO2 storage.”
So there’s a blast radius from Summit’s controversy?
“Very much so. DAC and CCS often get conflated. Well informed organizations still refer to them interchangeably. Regardless of whether we like it or not, pipelines are going to be an extremely big expense for DAC, something that doesn’t have as much of an immediate [thing] it’s selling – it’s already facing an uphill financial battle.”
Some in the environmental justice activism space are against DAC. What would you say to an activist who is a no on DAC?
“It’s funny because I actually have several friends who work in environmental justice and I have this conversation with them.”
“What I would say is that we’re a boat in the middle of the ocean. We have holes in the middle of the boat that are the carbon coming into the air. And first thing, foremost, we’ve got to plug the holes. You don’t prioritize bailing out the water before closing the holes. That’s why decarbonization and DAC have to go hand in hand, it can’t be one or the other.”
“I understand where the criticisms come from. Is DAC a false climate solution? Is this something that’s going to allow us to continue to perpetuate fossil fuels?”
“As we are decarbonizing, by the time we get decarbonized, we won’t be able to just scale up DAC at that point. We have to scale up now so by the time we get decarbonized we’re able to get those legacy emissions.”