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Conservationists won the last round, but this time the stakes involve new renewables technology.
The future of floating offshore wind in America rests on a feud between YIMBY state officials and a government whistleblower over a bucolic island off the coast of Maine. I have no clue who will win.
Floating offshore wind is Maine’s best bet for wind power in deeper stretches of ocean, far away from beach views, coastal properties, and valuable fishing grounds. The tech — which other countries have tried to deploy but is still unproven at large commercial scale — offers a hypothetical panacea for the sorts of conflicts that often stymie offshore wind, and other states are looking to it as a solution for these thorny issues, including California.
But Maine has chosen to construct its floating offshore wind turbine assembly site at Sears Island, a naturalist tourist destination in Penobscot Bay. Conservationists in New England have fought for a long time to preserve the island, an incredibly biodiverse ecosystem rich with wetlands, from the Maine Department of Transportation, which over decades has attempted to use a section of the island for various forms of infrastructure, including an industrial port.
Now that this longstanding conflict has become intertwined with the cause of carbon reduction, it is pitting an older generation of eco-warriors against a younger breed of climate activists, as well as local unions eager to get in on energy transition jobs. Unfortunately for Maine regulators, one of the old heads opposing this project is Kyla Bennett, a former wetlands permitting staffer at the Environmental Protection Agency who stopped a previous effort by the Maine Department of Transportation to build a port at Sears Island in the 1990s.
At EPA, Bennett determined that constructing the port would’ve been illegal under the Clean Water Act because of the sheer proliferation of obvious wetlands. When political officials interceded and reassigned her to a different job, she blew the whistle on them — and won, winning back her post. The port permits were also denied.
Bennett is now a key organizer for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, an organization that represents whistleblowers doing environmental protection work in government. And she’s making it a hobby horse to, again, stop Sears Island from becoming a port — even if it’s in the name of developing technology that could stem the tide of climate change.
“It’s déjà vu. It’s really disturbing to me that it’s back and we have to do this all over again,” she told me.
The facility has to go somewhere because, well, the technicians and researchers need a place to build these turbines, and Maine has claimed that no port existing today on the East Coast fits the precise spacing and resource needs. Habib Dagher, a University of Maine professor who leads the consortium plotting a U.S. offshore wind industry, told me constructing a port for assembly is “critical” to near-term success.
Yet there is another option. Moffat and Nichols, the engineering firm that studied port locations for Maine regulators, did conclude Mack Point, an existing import terminal on the coast of the Penobscot owned by Sprague Energy, would also fit the bill. Sprague is proposing to pay for a large expansion of Mack Point to take this floating offshore wind business off of Sears Island. Not only does it already have existing rail infrastructure and a long history of working in energy and construction but crucially, the engineering firm also found that siting the assembly facility there would shave years off the permitting and construction timetable for making floating offshore wind a reality.
Legally, this alternative matters, and federal regulators will decide who wins this fight. Maine regulators are expected to submit paperwork to begin the permitting process under the National Environmental Policy Act for building the assembly site at Sears Island in the coming weeks. As they do so, they will be required to explain how this plan offers the “least environmentally damaging practicable alternative” under environmental law. And Bennett is confident their claims will not pass muster in court, if not with career EPA staff.
“It cannot be legally permitted,” she confessed. “We will sue them.”
So I sought out to answer this pesky question: Why is Maine trying to build this crucial infrastructure for the energy transition in a place with activist resistance, and where even its own consultants have said the process would take longer?
State regulators, politicians, and supporters of the Sears Island plan have a few reasons. First off, Maine Governor Janet Mills has bemoaned that to use Mack Point would require leasing the property from Sprague, which would mean a recurring cost to taxpayers. There are also size issues — the Maine Department of Transportation claims there simply wouldn’t be enough space at Mack Point for researchers and, eventually, industry to do their work.
“We know there would be environmental impacts at both the Mack Point and Sears Island sites,” Paul Merrill, director of communications for the Maine Department of Transportation, told me in an email Monday evening. “The bottom line is that the port Maine needs simply doesn’t fit at Mack Point. Sprague has a financial interest in development on Mack Point. Our goal is to develop a port that is in the best interest of the public.”
Merrill did acknowledge the new proposal for Sears Island would be located on “the same part of the island that was discussed for development in the 1990s.”
Sprague denies the logistical issues with building the port at Mack Point and told me issues Maine regulators are easily resolved. The company has begun campaigning to win key stakeholders to its side, publishing op-eds and meeting with environmental advocates. On September 12, Sierra Club’s Maine chapter hosted a virtual event with a Sprague executive, Jim Theriault, about how the port selection “needs to be considered carefully.” When I spoke to Theriault this week, he told me that Sierra Club members were asking the same question I was.
“At the end of the day, we’d be reusing an industrial site, and we’d relocate what we do to other parts of the terminal,” he said. “I’ll make myself available to anybody that wants to talk.”
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And more of the week’s biggest conflicts around renewable energy development.
1. Cass County, Nebraska — Local permits for a 260+ megawatt NextEra solar project have been stalled for at least two months, we can exclusively report.
Battery opinion modeling in Cass County, Nebraska.Heatmap Pro Screenshot
2. Westchester County, N.Y. — Speaking of battery blues, a New York state senate race has become imbued with the politics surrounding energy storage, demonstrating how politicians are trying to take advantage of fire fears.
3. Georgetown County, S.C. — Sunrise Renewables is reportedly delaying a request for zoning approval to build two solar farms in the county amidst blossoming local opposition to development.
4. Carroll County, Maryland — Carroll County Commissioners are poised today to oppose a solar farm in the town of Sykesville before the state Public Service Commission on the grounds it conflicts with a county ban on farmland development.
5. Stark County, Ohio — The Ohio Power Siting Board last week held two days of testimony-laden hearings in its case over Stark Solar, a 150-megawatt solar farm with battery storage being developed by a subsidiary of Samsung.
Here’s what else I’m watching…
1. Global minerals mania – The U.S. government and allies this week announced the Minerals Security Partnership Finance Network, a global minerals investment operation focused on battery metals and other resources key to the energy transition.
2. Mining at home – Meanwhile, the Energy Department on Friday announced $3 billion (!) for 25 battery minerals and manufacturing projects in the United States.
3. Buckwheat bucked – Domestic lithium extraction got another major boost from the government late last week when the Bureau of Land Management published the final environmental review for the Rhyolite Ridge mine in Nevada, one of the few U.S. lithium mining projects close to completing its permitting.
4. Semiconductors souped – Congress passed legislation on Monday to provide for federal regulators to fund semiconductor projects under the CHIPS Act without environmental reviews, sending it to the president’s desk where it’ll likely be enacted into law.
5. Content standards – The Solar Energy Industries Association published a new draft standard for compliance with U.S. customs requirements against the use of inputs from the Xinjiang region of China, where the U.S. government suspects forced labor is involved with solar materials manufacturing.
Here’s what else I’m watching…
A conversation with Matilda Krieder of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory
This week I spoke with Matilda Krieder, a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, about a database she and her colleagues released this week showing how onshore and offshore wind developers use community benefit agreements – a form of compact aimed at improving local benefits from projects. We talked about whether communities really see the agreements as helpful or if there’s a better way.
The following is an abridged version of our conversation edited for clarity and space:
How much have you heard from people concerned that community benefit agreements are a form of financial influence or a false promise where they don’t receive real benefits?
I haven’t heard very much about the not-receiving end of things — and the reason I’ll say that is at least on the land-based wind side, an actual community benefit agreement is pretty uncommon. The vast majority of the time it’s just donations. And that, I think, is less likely to have the false promise thing because developers are handing over a one-time check, so there’s not really a perception that it won’t come to fruition.
So walk me through what your research shows with respect to how effective community benefit agreements are in assuaging local opposition to a project?
Unfortunately my research is not super helpful there. Because we didn’t look at failed projects, I don’t think I can say anything about whether [community benefit agreements] help or not.
But the existing literature that other people have done is not really positive on the connection between community benefits and improving community perception of projects, which is really interesting to me because I think people in the U.S. are really buying into it. Especially for offshore wind. So much pressure is being put on community benefits agreements as the thing that’ll change everything. And I support developers giving them, even if it doesn’t change anything, because it’s a net good. But I do wonder if developers or anybody setting regulations are reading what’s been studied. If so, I don’t know if they’d be putting all their eggs in this basket.
Okay then what if you walked me through the benefits you’ve found, at least in wind?
So it’s very different from offshore wind to land-based wind. In offshore wind, we’re seeing huge amounts of money, especially in the communities that host cable landings for the projects, because that’s the only point in offshore wind where the local government has any way to stop or change the way the project is developed. The cable landing is where you’re seeing $150 million [contributions]. And that hasn’t been happening long enough to measure the impacts of school funding or taxes over time.
The agreements that are more likely to be impactful are the ones that are more specific. I point to the Salem offshore wind terminal as a positive example because it’s such specific funding. You can tell they did the work to understand what the community’s priorities were and they directed funding to those areas.
In terms of land-based wind, it would be up to who you talk to. I’ve talked to county commissioners who’ve spoken really positively about the things that would be considered small potatoes. Not millions of dollars but directed funding in a specific way that met the community’s priorities and that changed people’s perception of the project. That’s a very small sample size, so you can’t identify a trend there, but I think it has potential.
I’m starting to view the donation side more positively than a lot of people too because a community benefit agreement most of the time is going to the local government, [and] a lot of people distrust their local government.
So instead, donations directly to services instead of county or local governments?
Yeah. That’s just a function of how in agreements, 95% of the funding goes to a local government. And people may not ever know what happens to it after that. It’s less visible.
What are you hearing from communities about community benefit agreements then?
I hear, how do we get one? The problem is, it’s still entirely in the developers’ hands so sometimes I feel a bit limited in the advice I can give to get one. It kind of comes down to what leverage you have with a developer.