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
Q&A

How Are Renewable Energy Developers Reacting to IRA Cuts?

A conversation with Mike Hall of Anza.

The Fight's Q&A subject.
Heatmap Illustration

This week’s conversation is with Mike Hall, CEO of the solar and battery storage data company Anza. I rang him because, in my book, the more insights into the ways renewables companies are responding to the war on the Inflation Reduction Act, the better.

The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s jump in!

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Hotspots

A Solar Flare-Up in New York, Battery Aftershocks in California

And more of the week’s top news in renewable energy conflicts.

The United States.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

1. Columbia County, New York – A Hecate Energy solar project in upstate New York blessed by Governor Kathy Hochul is now getting local blowback.

  • Last week, the Hochul administration granted many solar projects their renewable energy certificates, including Hecate’s Shepherd’s Run solar project in the town of Copake. Shepherd’s Run has struggled for years with its application process and was previously rejected by state land use regulators.
  • This certificate award has now inflamed longstanding local criticism of the project, which has persisted due to its proximity to schools and concerns about fire risk.
  • We’ll find out whether this flare-up will cause more headaches when the state’s Renewable Energy Siting office completes reviewing Hecate’s application in 60 days.

2. Sussex County, Delaware – The battle between a Bethany Beach landowner and a major offshore wind project came to a head earlier this week after Delaware regulators decided to comply with a massive government records request.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Spotlight

Trump Targets Solar on Farmland

Anti-solar activists in agricultural areas get a powerful new ally.

Sheep and solar panels.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Trump administration is joining the war against solar projects on farmland, offering anti-solar activists on the ground a powerful ally against developers across the country.

In a report released last week, President Trump’s Agriculture Department took aim at solar and stated competition with “solar development on productive farmland” was creating a “considerable barrier” for farmers trying to acquire land. The USDA also stated it would disincentivize “the use of federal funding” for solar “through prioritization points and regulatory action,” which a spokesperson – Emily Cannon – later clarified in an email to me this week will include reconfiguring the agency’s Rural Energy for America loan and grant program. Cannon declined to give a time-table for the new regulation, stating that the agency “will have more information when the updates are ready to be published.”

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow