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Spotlight

Why County Commissioners Matter for the Climate

Inside a wild race sparked by a solar farm in Knox County, Ohio.

Drenda Keesee.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images, Screenshot/Vimeo

The most important climate election you’ve never heard of? Your local county commissioner.

County commissioners are usually the most powerful governing individuals in a county government. As officials closer to community-level planning than, say a sitting senator, commissioners wind up on the frontlines of grassroots opposition to renewables. And increasingly, property owners that may be personally impacted by solar or wind farms in their backyards are gunning for county commissioner positions on explicitly anti-development platforms.

Take the case of newly-elected Ohio county commissioner – and Christian social media lifestyle influencer – Drenda Keesee.

In March, Keesee beat fellow Republican Thom Collier in a primary to become a GOP nominee for a commissioner seat in Knox County, Ohio. Knox, a ruby red area with very few Democratic voters, is one of the hottest battlegrounds in the war over solar energy on prime farmland and one of the riskiest counties in the country for developers, according to Heatmap Pro’s database. But Collier had expressed openness to allowing new solar to be built on a case-by-case basis, while Keesee ran on a platform focused almost exclusively on blocking solar development. Collier ultimately placed third in the primary, behind Keesee and another anti-solar candidate placing second.

Fighting solar is a personal issue for Keesee (pronounced keh-see, like “messy”). She has aggressively fought Frasier Solar – a 120 megawatt solar project in the country proposed by Open Road Renewables – getting involved in organizing against the project and regularly attending state regulator hearings. Filings she submitted to the Ohio Power Siting Board state she owns a property at least somewhat adjacent to the proposed solar farm. Based on the sheer volume of those filings this is clearly her passion project – alongside preaching and comparing gay people to Hitler.

Yesterday I spoke to Collier who told me the Frasier Solar project motivated Keesee’s candidacy. He remembered first encountering her at a community meeting – “she verbally accosted me” – and that she “decided she’d run against me because [the solar farm] was going to be next to her house.” In his view, he lost the race because excitement and money combined to produce high anti-solar turnout in a kind of local government primary that ordinarily has low campaign spending and is quite quiet. Some of that funding and activity has been well documented.

“She did it right: tons of ground troops, people from her church, people she’s close with went door-to-door, and they put out lots of propaganda. She got them stirred up that we were going to take all the farmland and turn it into solar,” he said.

Collier’s takeaway from the race was that local commissioner races are particularly vulnerable to the sorts of disinformation, campaign spending and political attacks we’re used to seeing more often in races for higher offices at the state and federal level.

“Unfortunately it has become this,” he bemoaned, “fueled by people who have little to no knowledge of what we do or how we do it. If you stir up enough stuff and you cry out loud enough and put up enough misinformation, people will start to believe it.”

Races like these are happening elsewhere in Ohio and in other states like Georgia, where opposition to a battery plant mobilized Republican primaries. As the climate world digests the federal election results and tries to work backwards from there, perhaps at least some attention will refocus on local campaigns like these.

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Q&A

Senator John Hickenlooper on Renewable Energy in a Trump 2.0 Era

A conversation with Colorado's junior senator on the 2024 election, permitting reform, and what might happen with the IRA.

Hickenlooper.
Heatmap Illustration

This week we’re talking to Senator John Hickenlooper of Colorado who joined me yesterday at Heatmap’s Election Post-Game event in Washington, D.C., for a spirited chat about the 2024 election, permitting, and support for renewable energy in a Trump 2.0 era. We also talked about beer and The Fray, but we’ll spare you those details. The following is an abridged version of our conversation.

So you’ve said in your time in the Senate there needs to be a “business plan” for climate change. What’s the business plan now that Trump is going to be president again?

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Policy Watch

Nothing Is Safe from Trump

The week’s top news around renewable energy policy.

Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

1. Forget about the IRA – As the dust has settled post-election, it’s becoming clearer far more than the IRA is at stake in the coming Trump 2.0 administration – namely, whether what people expect in the normal course of governing will resume at all.

  • Case in point: Massachusetts electeds just learned they will not be able to complete talks on new offshore wind procurement contracts until after Trump takes office. Will any of these projects even be able to pursue federal permits?
  • Or take statutes and agencies once considered sacrosanct. Overnight, The Washington Post reported Trump may seek to unilaterally cut programs with expired authorizations. That includes the Energy Policy Act of 2005 – and the statute creating NOAA.
  • I covered Trump from the day he was sworn in, with most of my time spent in Congress. And I’ve kept tabs with some in his braintrust over the years. So I can tell you confidently: expect the unexpected, and don’t count on your permits.

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And more news on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects.

Map.
Heatmap Illustration

1. Magic Valley, Idaho – Sen. Jim Risch, one of the state’s loudest opponents of the Lava Ridge wind farm, said he believes Donald Trump will stop the project on Day 1.

  • In a newly-aired interview with TV outlet KTVB, Risch said the matter has been presented to the incoming president and that the proposal from LS Energy would be targeted by an order similar to Biden’s stopping the Keystone XL oil pipeline.
  • “When Biden took office, he walked in there [and] signed an executive order and that was the end of the Keystone pipeline. When Donald Trump walks into that president’s room, waiting for him is going to be a keystone pipeline-like executive order that says Lava Ridge ain’t no more.”
  • Lava Ridge has faced fierce backlash for a long time, for cultural and environmental reasons. That’s why we at Heatmap put it at the very top of our list of 10 at-risk projects to watch in the energy transition.
  • The Bureau of Land Management released a federal environmental review for Lava Ridge in June and it sliced the project’s scope in half, from 400 turbines to a little north of 200. The next and final step would be a record of decision formally approving it but it’s unclear when – or if – the record of decision for the wind project may be released before Trump leaves office.
  • Keep an eye out for more reporting on this potential move.

2. Hardin County, Kentucky – Lightsource, a subsidiary of bp, is going to the mat against a chapter of prominent anti-renewables network Citizens for Responsible Solar over a project in the small Kentucky city of Elizabethtown.

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