The Fight

Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Spotlight

It’s Getting Harder to Build a Solar Farm In America’s Sunniest State

A renewables fight in Arizona turns ugly.

Arizona solar farm.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Autumn Johnson told me some days it feels like she’s shouting into a void.

Johnson is the executive director for the Arizona branch of the Solar Energy Industries Association, the nation’s pre-eminent solar power trade group. Lately, she told me, she’s seeing an increasing number of communities go after potential solar farms, many of them places with little or no previous solar development. There’s so many she’s had to start “tracking them on a spreadsheet,” she tells me, then proceeding to rattle off the names of counties and towns like battles in a war. Heatmap Pro data reveals how restricted Arizona is today, with six out of the state’s 15 counties showing a restrictive ordinance on solar and/or wind energy.

One of those battles: Chino Valley, a small town in northern Arizona. For two years, Johnson and others in the solar industry worked to try and massage the town into enacting restrictions on solar that wouldn’t all but ban the industry. But a town council meeting in mid-March turned ugly, as a debate over the restrictions ultimately devolved to heckling and hollering. “I’m surprised they didn’t throw things,” she recalled to me over the phone.

Playing back tape of that meeting, I watched as anyone who even spoke up in favor of solar was booed. When Johnson got up to speak and say SEIA recommended a smaller setback than drafted – 150 feet – audience members loudly laughed at her. Ultimately she was interrupted so many times that her time to speak expired before she finished her comments.

She asked the Chino Valley town council: “Could I finish my thought since I had to stop several times?” BOO! The audience wasn’t having it. And neither was the town council, who declined to let her continue.

After another hour-plus of testimony, the town council was swayed: Chino Valley dropped the regulation their staff spent years on and instead instructed them to draft a complete ban on all solar – as well as battery storage and wind farms.

If enacted, this regulation would all but doom Draconis, a large-scale utility solar farm proposed by bp in Chino Valley. A bp representative briefly testified at the town council meeting to say members of the public who’d previously spoken had mischaracterized the water usage required for the solar farm, but was booed off the microphone. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Johnson told me Arizonans in many pockets of the state are starting to turn on solar for two major reasons. One: There’s a partisan affiliation with renewables and climate change due to the Inflation Reduction Act and Joe Biden’s involvement in crafting the law. The other motivation? “Part of it is old school NIMBYism,” Johnson told me. “We’re acting like this is a new thing but NIMBYism is not new. Everybody wants electricity but nobody wants the infrastructure that is necessary to facilitate their use of electricity.”

She added: “The way things are moving, the number of cities and counties that have restrictions is going to be more and more.” While some communities may be accepting utility-scale development now, she is concerned they’ll hit a “saturation point where people start to build up some kind of resentment about the quantity of projects.”

“It’s domino-y,” Johnson confessed.

I’m no Arizonan. But to me, what’s happening in Arizona is essentially one big redux of an infamous prank TV segment from the show “Who Is America?” in which actor Sasha Baron Cohen plays a coastal liberal stereotype posing as an economic development entrepreneur.

Cohen’s character visits Kingman, Arizona, a town northwest of Chino Valley. In that prank, Cohen walked Kingman residents through a presentation about a promising new source of tax revenue and local employment, only to reveal… he’s talking about building a mosque in Kingman funded by the Clinton Foundation.

Kingman is in Mohave County, which happened to be the first county Johnson mentioned when we spoke. Mohave – represented in Congress by far-right Republican Paul Gosar – is one of the sunniest parts of the country, smack dab in the Mohave Desert. It’s also one of the counties with a restrictive ordinance that routinely rejects solar farms, despite a willingness among local officials to approve new fossil energy. Why? Well, in the view of some folks out there, you might as well be building a Hillary Clinton-branded mosque. Not to mention Mohave has quite a few telltale signs of being tough to develop, according to Heatmap Pro – it’s an extremely white county with an economy heavily dependent on tourism and agriculture, making land use and property value pronounced day-to-day concerns.

Stan Barnes, a lobbyist in Arizona who represents large-scale solar developers, told me that for “so long, renewable energy has been tightly embraced – even bearhugged – by the center-left side of the political spectrum.” Barnes said this fact alone has made it much harder to build in rural areas of Arizona that voted heavily for Donald Trump. “The center-right side of the political spectrum feels like it needs to resist.”

Developers are finding ways around this sticky wicket, Barnes said, but it requires being “wise” and “a certain degree of authenticity on the ground with local officials.” He noted the Palo Verde energy hub, a federally-designated energy and transmission project area in a mostly remote area that expands off of an existing power plant. Barnes also mentioned Mohave, where utility-scale solar is not banned outright but restricted to light industrial areas, as a place where development is still possible.

“There likely will not be that kind of development in Chino Valley and that’s the way it’s going to be in some jurisdictions," he said. “In other jurisdictions there’s going to be thoughtful ordinances that accommodate a variety of interests.”

This article is exclusively
for Heatmap Plus subscribers.

Go deeper inside the politics, projects, and personalities
shaping the energy transition.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Hotspots

Congressman Asks Trump to Shut Down the Empire Wind Project

And more of the week’s top renewable energy fights.

Map of renewable energy fights.
Heatmap Illustration

1. Long Island, New York We begin today with a crucial stand-off for the future of energy off the coast of New York City: Rep. Chris Smith – one of the loudest anti-wind voices in Congress – is asking the Trump administration to shut down active work on the Empire Wind project.

  • Few in Congress have frustrated offshore wind developers more than Smith, a New Jersey Republican who used legislative maneuvers to get a Government Accountability Office study greenlit about the impacts of offshore wind on whale species.
  • In a letter Friday, which has not been previously reported, Smith requested the project be forcibly paused until the Trump administration can complete its purported government-wide review of the wind industry.
  • Smith also asked a host of additional mitigation requirements be placed on Empire Wind before it can proceed, including new specific requirements on impacts to air travel. The letter claims – without specifics – that the project could impact radar interference “in the shadow of three major airports.”
  • “Empire Wind cannot safely proceed until much needed further review [can] be done to protect the public and our eastern seaboard. I ask that you do everything in your power to halt Equinor’s underhanded rush to begin piledriving and block construction until the critical assessment can be completed,” Smith wrote.
  • I’ve asked Equinor to comment on this letter, as a stop-work order would be a massive escalation in the war on offshore wind. Alyse Sharpe, a public affairs specialist with the Interior Department, told me in an email the agency does "not comment on congressional correspondence" but said it "takes all correspondence from Congress seriously and reviews each matter" and should there be "any updates on this topic, we will provide further information at the appropriate time."

2. Gulf of Maine – American floating offshore wind is now taking one more step backwards, as Mitsubishi pulls out of the test arrays it was working on under Biden with researchers at the University of Maine.

Keep reading...Show less
Q&A

How Should Regulators Grapple With Moss Landing?

A conversation with Dustin Mulvaney, professor of environmental studies at San Jose State University

Dustin Mulvaney
Heatmap Illustration

Today’s conversation is with Dustin Mulvaney, an environmental studies professor at San Jose State University. Mulvaney is a social scientist who spent much of his time before January 2025 advocating for more considerate and humane renewable energy development. Then Moss Landing happened. Mulvaney – who was there at Moss Landing the first day – is now obsessed with the myriad safety concerns laden in large-scale utility battery storage and what plans were in place to deal with the fire. His reasoning? A failure to grapple with safety concerns could undermine public trust in battery storage and make a transition away from fossil fuels more difficult.

The following is an abridged version of our conversation, which was the interview that first prompted me to investigate the mystery of the health concerns surrounding the fire.

Keep reading...Show less
Q&A

What the 1990s Can Tell Us About the IRA’s Chances

A conversation with Frank Maisano of Bracewell

Frank Maisano
Heatmap Illustration

Today’s Q&A is with Frank Maisano, one of the most sought-after energy lobbyists in Washington. Maisano, a Beltway veteran who has worked in Congress as well, has a long history with me that goes back to the earliest days of my environmental reporting career. So when I helped author a story for Heatmap this week about the budget risks to the Inflation Reduction Act, he reached out and asked if he could give me his take: that our reporting missed the mark.

Naturally, I asked if I could publish the whole thing in my newsletter, because what good is a lobbyist’s words if they aren’t written down? The following is an abridged version of our conversation, lightly edited for clarity.

Keep reading...Show less