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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.”

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Spotlight

The Fate of Wind Energy in Arkansas Is on Eagles’ Wings

The Nimbus wind project in the Ozark Mountains is moving forward even without species permits, while locals pray Trump will shut it down.

An eagle, wind power, and Arkansas.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The state of Arkansas is quickly becoming an important bellwether for the future of renewable energy deployment in the U.S., and a single project in the state’s famed Ozark Mountains might be the big fight that decides which way the state’s winds blow.

Arkansas has not historically been a renewables-heavy state, and very little power there is generated from solar or wind today. But after passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the state saw a surge in project development, with more than 1.5 gigawatts of mostly utility-scale solar proposed in 2024, according to industry data. The state also welcomed its first large wind farm that year.

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Hotspots

Offshore Wind Bluster Hits New England


And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy projects.

The United States.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

1. Newport County, Rhode Island – The Trump administration escalated its onslaught against the offshore wind sector in the past week … coincidentally (or not) right after a New England-based anti-wind organization requested that it do so.

  • Over the Labor Day weekend, the Trump administration stated in a court filing that it planned to potentially redo the record of decision for Orsted’s SouthCoast wind project off the coast of Massachusetts, and yesterday, Justice Department officials said they would vacate the approval of Avangrid’s construction and operations plan for its New England 1 offshore project.
  • These announcements got a lot of media attention. Less focus was bestowed on what preceded these moves: Last week, the anti-wind organization Green Oceans partnered with four tribes native to the Northeast and together sent petitions to the Interior and Transportation Departments, as well as the Defense Department, calling for the “immediate suspension” of offshore wind in the region.
  • According to a press release, the petitions asked for projects under construction to stop work as well as called for an end to the operation of South Fork, a completed and operating wind farm off the coast of New York. The petitions rely largely on a national security rationale that mirrors the administration’s reasoning for halting work on Orsted’s Revolution Wind offshore project. (Orsted sued over that move today, by the way.)
  • We cannot say at the moment how much this specific maneuver mattered to an administration already hostile to offshore wind. But there’s reason to believe Green Oceans is an influential organization within Trump administration circles. Early this year I reported on a roadmap created by a constellation of opposition groups, including the head of Green Oceans, and submitted to the Trump transition team showing how the incoming administration could block offshore wind development. Several of the turns in that roadmap have ultimately come to pass.
  • We also now know that Green Oceans has been in direct contact with Trump officials about individual offshore wind projects. Last week, E&E News published internal emails that showed the organization obtained a meeting in May with senior Interior Department officials to discuss cancelling all current offshore wind leases held by developers.
  • At this juncture, it’s genuinely impossible to know how far Trump will go. But now we know the opposition to offshore wind is going for the Full Monty: shutting down operating projects on a national security justification.

2. Madison County, New York – Officials in this county are using a novel method to target a wind project: They’re claiming it’ll disrupt 911 calls.

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Q&A

How Renewable Projects Can Be a Political Win-Win

Chatting party polarization with League of Conservation Voters CEO Pete Maysmith.

The CEO of the League of Conservation Voters.
Heatmap Illustration

For this week’s conversation I chatted with Pete Maysmith, CEO of the League of Conservation Voters. There’s no one I’d rather talk to at a moment when any conflict over a solar farm can turn into the equivalent of a heated political campaign. I wanted to know how LCV is approaching the way renewables are becoming more partisan and the insurgent rise of local opposition to project development. Thankfully, Maysmith was willing to take some time right before the Labor Day weekend to sit in my hot seat.

The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

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