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A renewables fight in Arizona turns ugly.
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.”
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Today’s conversation is with Chris Moyer of Echo Communications, a D.C.-based communications firm that focuses on defending zero- and low-carbon energy and federal investments in climate action. Moyer, a veteran communications adviser who previously worked on Capitol Hill, has some hot takes as of late about how he believes industry and political leaders have in his view failed to properly rebut attacks on solar and wind energy, in addition to the Inflation Reduction Act. On Tuesday he sent an email blast out to his listserv – which I am on – that boldly declared: “The Wind Industry’s Strategy is Failing.”
Of course after getting that email, it shouldn’t surprise readers of The Fight to hear I had to understand what he meant by that, and share it with all of you. So here goes. The following conversation has been abridged and lightly edited for clarity.
What are you referencing when you say, ‘the wind industry’s strategy is failing’?
Anyone in the climate space, in the clean energy space, the worst thing you can do is go silent and pretend that this is just going to go away. Even if it’s the president and the administration delivering the attacks, I think there’s an important strategy that’s been lacking in the wind and other sectors that I don’t think has been effective. There was a recent E&E News story that noted a couple of wind developers when asked for comment just say, “No comment.” This to me misses a really big opportunity to not get in a fight with people but talk about the benefits of wind.
Not taking advantage of milestones like ground breaking or construction starting is a missed opportunity to drive public opinion. If you lose support in public opinion, you’re going to lose support from public officials, because they largely follow public opinion.
And there’s no way that’s going to change if you don’t take the opportunities to talk about the benefits that wind can provide, in terms of good-paying local jobs or supplying more electrons to the grid. By almost any measure the strategy employed so far has not really worked.
Okay, but what is the wind industry strategy that isn’t working? What are they doing to rebut attacks on the technology, on property values, on the environment?
We’re not hearing them. We’re not hearing those arguments.
You can’t let criticisms go unanswered.It would better serve the industry and these companies to push back against criticisms. It’s not like you can’t anticipate what they are. And what do you have to lose? You’re in the worst position of any energy sector in this political moment. It would be nice to see some fight and sharp campaign skills and strategic effort in terms of communication. And there’s no strategic value from what I can tell in [being silent].
I understand not wanting to pick a fight with folks who hold your fate in their hands, but there’s a way to thread a needle that isn’t antagonizing anybody but also making sure the facts have been heard. And that’s been missing.
You’d specifically said the industry should stop ‘being paralyzed in fear and start going on offense.’ What does that look like to you?
Taking every opportunity to get your message out there. The lowest hanging fruit is when a reporter comes and asks you, What do you think about this criticism? You should definitely reply. It’s lifting up third-party voices that are benefiting from a specific project, talking about the economic impacts more broadly, talking about the benefits to the grid.
There’s a whole number of tools in the toolbox to put to use but the toolboxes remain shut thus far. Targeted paid media, elevating the different voices and communities that are going to resonate with different legislators, and certainly the facts are helpful. Also having materials prepared, like validators and frequently asked questions and answers.
You’re trying to win. You’re trying to get your project to be successful and deliver jobs and tax revenue. And I think it would be wise for companies to look at the playbooks of electoral campaigns, because there’s lots of tools that campaigns use.
How do renewable energy developers get around the problem of partisanship? How do you get outta that through a campaign approach?
These projects are decided locally. It’s deciding who the decision-makers are and not just letting opponents who are getting talking points through right-wing media show up and reiterate these talking points. Oftentimes, there’s no one on the pro side even showing up at all, and it makes it really easy for city councils to oppose projects. They’re losing by forfeit. We can’t keep doing that.
And more on this week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Chautauqua, New York – More rural New York towns are banning renewable energy.
2. Virginia Beach, Virginia – Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia offshore wind project will learn its fate under the Trump administration by this fall, after a federal judge ruled that the Justice Department must come to a decision on how it’ll handle a court challenge against its permits by September.
3. Bedford County, Pennsylvania – Arena Renewables is trying to thread a needle through development in one of the riskiest Pennsylvania counties for development, with an agriculture-fueled opposition risk score of 89.
4. Knox County, Ohio – The Ohio Power Siting Board has given the green light to Open Road Renewables’ much-watched Frasier Solar project.
5. Clay County, Missouri – We’ll find out next week if rural Missouri can still take it easy on a large solar project.
6. Clark County, Nevada – President Trump’s Bureau of Land Management has pushed back the permitting process for EDF Renewables’ Bonanza solar project by at least two months and possibly longer .
7. Klickitat County, Washington – Washington State has now formally overridden local opposition to Cypress Creek’s Carriger solar project after teeing up the decision in May.
It’s governor versus secretary of state, with the fate of the local clean energy industry hanging in the balance.
I’m seeing signs that the fight over a hydrogen project in Wyoming is fracturing the state’s Republican political leadership over wind energy, threatening to trigger a war over the future of the sector in a historically friendly state for development.
At issue is the Pronghorn Clean Energy hydrogen project, proposed in the small town of Glenrock in rural Converse County, which would receive power from one wind farm nearby and another in neighboring Niobrara County. If completed, Pronghorn is expected to produce “green” hydrogen that would be transported to airports for commercial use in jet fuel. It is backed by a consortium of U.S. and international companies including Acconia and Nordex.
One can guess why investors thought this rural Wyoming expanse would be an easier place to build: it’s an energy community situated in the middle of the Powder River Basin and the state’s Republican governor Mark Gordon has supported wind projects in the state publicly, not just with rhetoric but votes in favor of them on the State Board of Land Commissioners.
Wind is also often proposed on private land in Wyoming, which is supposed to make things easier. You may remember the Lucky Star and Twin Rivers wind farms, a pair of projects whose progress I’ve watched like a hawk because they’re tied to the future of wind permitting at the national level. As we first reported, the Trump administration is proceeding with potentially approving the transmission line for Lucky Star, a project that would be sited entirely on private land, and Twin Rivers received its final environmental review in the last days of the Biden administration, making it difficult for anti-wind advocates to curtail.
Unlike those projects, Pronghorn has created a fork in the road for wind in Wyoming. It’s because the people in its host community don’t seem to want it, the wind projects were on state land, and there’s politics at play.
Despite being considered an energy community, Converse and Niobrara are both areas with especially high opposition risk, according to Heatmap Pro, largely due to its low support for renewable energy, its demographics, and concerns about impacts to the local ranching economy. After Gordon and other members of the state land use board approved two wind facilities for the hydrogen project, a rancher living nearby sued the board with public support from the mayor of Glenrock and the area’s legislators in the statehouse. A member of the Converse County zoning board even published a “manifesto” against the project, detailing local concerns that are myriad and rooted in fears of overburden, ranging from water use and property value woes to a general resentment toward an overall rise in wind turbines across the county and state.
What’s probably most concerning to wind supporters is that this local fight is bubbling up into a statewide political fracture between Gordon and his secretary of state Chuck Gray, who is believed to be a future candidate for governor. Grey was the lone dissenting vote against the two wind projects for Pronghorn, saying he did not support the projects because they would be assisted by federal tax credits Trump is trying to gut. Gray then took to mocking the governor on social media for his stance on wind while posting photos of broken wind turbines. Gordon wound up responding to his secretary of state accusing him of being the “only member of the state land board to vote against individual property rights and Wyoming schools.”
“That is his prerogative to be sure, but it demonstrates his disregard for the duties of his office and a determination to impose his personal preferences on others, no matter the cost,” Gordon stated.
I’ve been reaching out to Pronghorn and its founder Paul Martin to try and chat about what’s happening in Wyoming. I haven’t heard back, and if I do I’ll gladly follow this story up, but there’s a sign here of an issue in Wyoming whether Pronghorn gets built or not – areas of Wyoming may be on the verge of a breaking point on wind energy.
I heard about the Pronghorn project in conversations this week with folks who work on wind permitting issues in Wyoming and learned that the Gordon-Gray feud is emblematic of how the wind industry’s growth in the state is making local officials more wary of greenlighting projects. Whether Gordon’s position on private property wins out over Gray taking up the mantle of the anti-wind conservative critic may be the touchstone for the future of local planning decisions, too.
At least, that’s the sense I got talking to Sue Jones, a commissioner in Carbon County, directly southwest of Converse County. Jones admits she personally doesn’t care for wind farms and that it’s “no secret with the county, or the developers.” But so far, she hasn’t voted that way as a commissioner.
“If they meet all our rules and regs, then I’ve voted to give them a permit,” she told me. “You can’t just say no to anything. It’s a good thing that we value private property rights.”
Jones said the problem in Carbon County and other areas of Wyoming is “saturation level.” Areas of the state where only a handful of landowners hold thousands of acres? That’s probably fine for wind projects because there’s a low likelihood of a neighbor or two having a genuine grievance. But as wind has grown into population-denser areas of the state the dissent is becoming more frequent.
My gut feeling is that, as we’ve seen in many other instances, this resentment will bubble up and manifest as sweeping reform – unless the wind industry is able to properly address these growing concerns head on.