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Spotlight

The Trump Solar Farm Slowdown

Permitting delays and missed deadlines are bedeviling solar developers and activist groups alike. What’s going on?

Donald Trump and solar panels.
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It’s no longer possible to say the Trump administration is moving solar projects along as one of the nation’s largest solar farms is being quietly delayed and even observers fighting the project aren’t sure why.

Months ago, it looked like Trump was going to start greenlighting large-scale solar with an emphasis out West. Agency spokespeople told me Trump’s 60-day pause on permitting solar projects had been lifted and then the Bureau of Land Management formally approved its first utility-scale project under this administration, Leeward Renewable Energy’s Elisabeth solar project in Arizona, and BLM also unveiled other solar projects it “reasonably” expected would be developed in the area surrounding Elisabeth.

But the biggest indicator of Trump’s thinking on solar out west was Esmeralda 7, a compilation of solar project proposals in western Nevada from NextEra, Invenergy, Arevia, ConnectGen, and other developers that would, if constructed, produce at least 6 gigawatts of power. My colleague Matthew Zeitlin was first to report that BLM officials updated the timetable for fully permitting the expansive project to say it would complete its environmental review by late April and be completely finished with the federal bureaucratic process by mid-July. BLM told Matthew that the final environmental impact statement – the official study completing the environmental review – would be published “in the coming days or week or so.”

More than two months later, it’s crickets from BLM on Esmeralda 7. BLM never released the study that its website as of today still says should’ve come out in late April. I asked BLM for comment on this and a spokesperson simply told me the agency “does not have any updates to share on this project at this time.”

This state of quiet stasis is not unique to Esmeralda; for example, Leeward has yet to receive a final environmental impact statement for its 700 mega-watt Copper Rays solar project in Nevada’s Pahrump Valley that BLM records state was to be published in early May. Earlier this month, BLM updated the project timeline for another Nevada solar project – EDF’s Bonanza – to say it would come out imminently, too, but nothing’s been released.

Delays happen in the federal government and timelines aren’t always met. But on its face, it is hard for stakeholders I speak with out in Nevada to take these months-long stutters as simply good faith bureaucratic hold-ups. And it’s even making work fighting solar for activists out in the desert much more confusing.

For Shaaron Netherton, executive director of the conservation group Friends of the Nevada Wilderness, these solar project permitting delays mean an uncertain future. Friends of the Nevada Wilderness is a volunteer group of ecology protection activists that is opposing Esmeralda 7 and filed its first lawsuit against Greenlink West, a transmission project that will connect the massive solar constellation to the energy grid. Netherton told me her group may sue against the approval of Esmeralda 7… but that the next phase of their battle against the project is a hazy unknown.

“It’s just kind of a black hole,” she told me of the Esmeralda 7 permitting process. “We will litigate Esmeralda 7 if we have to, and we were hoping that with this administration there would be a little bit of a pause. There may be. That’s still up in the air.”

I’d like to note that Netherton’s organization has different reasons for opposition than I normally write about in The Fight. Instead of concerns about property values or conspiracies about battery fires, her organization and a multitude of other desert ecosystem advocates are trying to avoid a future where large industries of any type harm or damage one of the nation’s most biodiverse and undeveloped areas.

This concern for nature has historically motivated environmental activism. But it’s also precisely the sort of advocacy that Trump officials have opposed tooth-and-nail, dating back to the president’s previous term, when advocates successfully opposed his rewrite of Endangered Species Act regulations. This reason – a motivation to hippie-punch, so to speak – is a reason why I hardly expect species protection to be enough of a concern to stop solar projects in their tracks under Trump, at least for now. There’s also the whole “energy dominance” thing, though Trump has been wishy-washy on adhering to that goal.

Patrick Donnelly, great basin director at the Center for Biological Diversity, agrees that this is a period of confusion but not necessarily an end to solar permitting on BLM land.

“[Solar] is moving a lot slower than it was six months ago, when it was coming at a breakneck pace,” said Patrick Donnelly of the Center for Biological Diversity. “How much of that is ideological versus 15-20% of the agencies taking early retirement and utter chaos inside the agencies? I’m not sure. But my feeling is it’s less ideological. I really don’t think Trump’s going to just start saying no to these energy projects.”

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Spotlight

Data Centers Are the New NIMBY Battleground

Packed hearings. Facebook organizing. Complaints about prime farmland and a disappearing way of life. Sound familiar?

A data center and houses.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Solar and wind companies cite the rise of artificial intelligence to make their business cases after the United States government slashed massive tax incentives for their projects.

But the data centers supposed to power the AI boom are now facing the sort of swift wave of rejections from local governments across the country eerily similar to what renewables developers have been dealing with on the ground over the last decade. The only difference is, this land use techlash feels even more sudden, intense, and culturally diffuse.

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Hotspots

Arkansas Attorney General Reassures Wind Energy Opponents

And more of the week’s most important news around renewable energy conflicts.

The United States.
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1. Pulaski County, Arkansas – The attorney general of Arkansas is reassuring residents that yes, they can still ban wind farms if they want to.

  • As I chronicled earlier this month, the backlash to wind energy in this state is fierce, motivated by a convergence of environmental frustrations and conservative cultural splashback. It bears repeating: there really isn’t much renewable energy in operation here right now.
  • The state passed legislation putting restrictions on wind development that was intended to assuage local concerns. But it seems frustrations have boiled to a point where the state attorney general has had to clarify this new law will not get in the way of towns or counties going further, and that the law was merely to create a minimum set of guardrails on wind development.
  • “In my opinion, [the law] broadly delegates authority to municipalities and counties, enabling them to enact local laws that address their specific needs, including the possibility of moratoriums on wind development,” Arkansas attorney general Tim Griffin wrote in a letter released this week. “No state or federal law prohibits or preempts a local unit of government from passing moratoriums on the construction and installation of wind turbines.”

2. Des Moines County, Iowa – This county facing intense pressure to lock out renewables is trying to find a sweet spot that doesn’t involve capitulation. Whether that’s possible remains to be seen.

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Q&A

Solar Out West Is ‘Relatively Difficult’ Under Trump

A conversation with Wil Gehl at the Solar Energy Industries Association

Wil Gehl.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

This week I chatted with Wil Gehl, the InterMountain West senior manager at the Solar Energy Industries Association. I reached out in the hopes we could chat candidly about the impacts of the current national policy regime on solar development in the American West, where a pause on federal permits risks jeopardizing immense development in Nevada. To my delight, Wil was (pun intended) willing to get into the hot seat with me and get into the mix.

The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.

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