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Why an attorney for Dominion Voting Systems is now defending renewables companies.
My biggest takeaway of this year? Bad information is breaking the energy transition – and the fake news is only getting more powerful.
Across the country, we’re seeing solar, wind, and battery storage projects grind to a halt thanks to activism powered by fears of health and safety risks, many of which are unfounded, unproven, exaggerated, or conspiratorial in nature. There are some prominent examples, like worries about offshore wind and whales, but I’ve spent a large chunk of The Fight’s lifespan so far investigating a few crucial case studies, from wildfire fears confronting battery developers in California to cancer concerns curtailing a crucial transmission line in New Jersey. To tell you the honest truth, it is difficult to quantify just how troubling this issue is for the industry.
False information is something Mark Thomson, a D.C.-based attorney with the law firm Meier Watkins Phillips Pusch LLP, thinks about a lot these days. Thomson was one of the lawyers who won a record $787 million settlement for Dominion Voting Systems from Fox News Network after it broadcast incorrect claims about how the company’s ballot machines were used in the 2020 election. Today his attention is elsewhere – conspiracy-powered defamation against renewables developers and their projects. .
“This is a sizable and growing part of what we do here,” Thomson told me. “I think it’s because the developer sector writ large increasingly understands the severity and the pervasiveness of falsehoods in that space, and also just as importantly how quickly groups and communities can latch onto these falsehoods in ways that critically interrupt and even endanger some of these projects.”
Why are we talking about conspiracy theorists as an opposition powerhouse? Well, studies show that like working in agriculture or owning large tracts of land, scientific skepticism can be a big signal that someone will oppose a renewables project. A 2022 study published in the journal Nature Energy found “moderate-to-large” relationships between indices of conspiracy beliefs and the likelihood that someone would oppose a wind farm, and that the relationship between wind farm opposition and conspiracy beliefs was “many times greater than its relationship with age, gender, education, and political orientation.”
Conspiracies or misinformation can also be weaponized by hostile local, state, or federal regulators if they have other reasons to try and curtail development.
Take St. Clair County, Michigan, where a leading local public health official is leveraging theories about the impact of solar energy to try and limit development. St. Clair County is home to its own fun blend of renewables consternation. The most acerbic fight is in the town of Fort Gratiot, where Ranger Power subsidiary Portside Solar has proposed to construct a 100 MW solar facility. The project is in a rural, largely agricultural region and has faced incredible resentment. (If you want a primer on the conflict, watch this interview segment – in between featured ads for Ivermectin.)
Last Thursday evening, St. Clair County medical director Remington Nevin testified before the county’s board of commission that “very clear health threats” caused by solar energy required “extraordinary actions” under the state public health code. Nevin specifically addressed noise, claiming that the sound produced by hypothetical solar facilities could “presumably be an unreasonable threat to public health” if not kept below certain decibel thresholds.
“This should not be controversial,” Nevin told the audience, which erupted into rapturous applause after his testimony.
This testimony, prompted by public comments from disgruntled residents, came after Nevin issued a report detailing his desires for quick action under the public health code that circulated widely on anti-renewables Facebook groups.
Nevin is definitely a qualified medical professional. “Occupational medicine is the successor to the field of industrial medicine,” Nevin told me when I emailed him about his qualifications, “and is the medical speciality most applicable to the health effects of industrial activities such as these.” He noted that he has a doctoral public health degree in mental health and psychiatric epidemiology, and has done fellowship training in occupation and environmental medicine.
But he is not a specialist in the health effects of solar panels. He’s actually an expert in quinism, a brain and brainstem disease caused by a toxic exposure to anti-malaria drugs. This position made him relevant during the COVID-19 lockdowns, when he spoke out about the risks of taking hydroxychloroquine, an unproven COVID-19 treatment that Trump and other socially conservative figures began recommending at the height of the pandemic lockdowns. Nevin took a more contrarian view of the scientific debate around COVID-19 during those lockdowns, signing a declaration to open society up before a vaccine was widely available. He still feels passionately about this topic today, celebrating Trump’s pick to run the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who coauthored that declaration.
When I asked Nevin about his lack of expertise in the health risks of technology like solar panels, he responded by saying he believes a court would consider him expert enough for his views to hold legal weight.
“In matters such as these, a court ultimately determines the validity of an expert's qualifications,” he said. “I am confident that my background is particularly germane and well-suited to this topic, and that my qualifications and recommendations will withstand judicial review should these matters become subject to litigation in due course.”
For what it is worth, it’s incredibly hard to find evidence that the noise emitted from solar farms creates a risk to public health. Industry says such data is infinitesimal.
There is also at least some apparent temptation of the courts at work in all this, too. Nevin, local leaders, and activists have in public comments about the health risks repeatedly referenced Act 233, a new state law that allows an independent agency to adjudicate conflicts between developers and towns with restrictions on renewable energy projects. As we previously scooped, municipalities and counties are challenging the legality of how that law is being implemented. It is entirely possible that part of Nevin’s crusade against the health impacts of solar on county residents is an attempt to stop the state from usurping the county’s local control.
As opponents of renewable energy look to use the court system in this way, it may be worthwhile for developers to do the same to combat misinformation. Courts can decide when a company is being defamed or unjustly maligned, and the legal system can be an avenue for resolving the vexing issue of conspiracies and misinformation about the health and safety of a renewables project.
Hence why as renewables deployment rises in the U.S., and opposition does too, attorneys like Thomson are going to see a lot more business from developers.
“The law provides some remedies in some circumstances,” Thomson told me. “It’s not a silver bullet. But for specific types of falsehoods, the law can provide an important source of accountability and just as importantly, invoking the law can help people realize that there is a price to be paid for just blatantly and often willfully misleading groups of citizens about this stuff.”
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A conversation with Heather O’Neill of Advanced Energy United.
This week’s conversation is with Heather O’Neill, CEO of renewables advocacy group Advanced Energy United. I wanted to chat with O’Neill in light of the recent effective repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean electricity tax credits and the action at the Interior Department clamping down on development. I’m quite glad she was game to talk hot topics, including the future of wind energy and whether we’ll see blue states step into the vacuum left by the federal government.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
During Trump 1.0 we saw blue states really step into the climate role in light of the federal government. Do you see anything similar taking place now?
I think this moment we’re in – it is a different moment.
How are we handling load growth? How are we making sure consumers are not paying for expensive stranded assets? Thinking about energy affordability? All of those challenges absolutely present a different moment and will result in a different response from state leaders.
But that’s where some of the changes our industry has gone through mean we’re able to meet that moment and provide solutions to those challenges. I think we need aggressive action from state leaders and I think we’ll see that from them, because of the challenges in front of them.
What does that look like?
Every state is different. Take Virginia for example. Five years after we passed the Virginia Clean Economy Act – a big, bold promise of action – we’re not on track. So what are the things we need to do to keep the foot on the accelerator there? This last legislative session we passed the virtual power plant legislation that’ll help tremendously in terms of grid flexibility. We made a big push around siting and permitting reform, and we didn’t quite get it over the finish line but that’s the kind of thing where we made a good foundation.
Or Texas. There’s so much advanced energy powering Texas right now. You had catastrophic grid failure in Hurricane Uri and look at what they’ve been able to build out in response to that: wind, solar, and in the last few years, battery storage, and they just passed the energy waste reduction [bill].
We need to build things and make it easier to build – siting and permitting reform – but it’s also states depending on their environment looking at and engaging with their regional transmission organization.
You saw that last week, a robust set of governors across the PJM region called on them to improve their interconnection queue. It’s about pushing and finding reforms at the market level, to get these assets online and get on the grid deployed.
I think the point about forward momentum, I definitely see what you’re saying there about the need for action. Do you see state primacy laws or pre-emption laws? Like what Michigan, New York, and California have done…
I’m not a siting expert, but the reform packages that work the best include engagement from communities in meaningful ways. But they also make sure you’re not having a vocal minority drowning out the benefits and dragging out the process forever. There are timelines and certainty attached to it while still having meaningful local engagement.
Our industry absolutely has to continue to lean into more local engagement and community engagement around the benefits of a project and what they can deliver for a community. I also think there’s a fair amount of making sure the state is creating that pathway, providing that certainty, so we can actually move forward to build out these projects.
From the federal government’s perspective, they’re cracking down on wind and solar projects while changing the tax credits. Do you see states presenting their own incentives for renewables in lieu of federal incentives? I’ve wondered if that’ll happen given inflation and affordability concerns.
No, I think we have to be really creative as an industry, and state leaders have to be creative too. If I’m a governor, affordability concerns were already front and center for me, and now given what just happened, they’re grappling with incredibly tight state budgets that are about to get tighter, including health care. They’re going to see state budgets hit really hard. And there’s energy impacts – we’re cutting off supply, so we’re going to see prices go up.
This is where governors and state leaders can act but I think in this context of tight state budgets I don’t think we can expect to see states replacing incentive packages.
It’ll be: how do we take advantage of all the flexible tools that we have to help shape and reduce demand in meaningful ways that’ll save consumers money, as well as push on building out projects and getting existing juice out of the transmission system we have today.
Is there a future for wind in the United States?
It is an incredibly challenging environment – no question – for all of our technologies, wind included. I don’t want to sugar-coat that at all.
But I look at the whole picture, and I include wind in this: the technologies have improved dramatically in the past couple of decades and the costs have come down. When you look around at what resources are around to deploy, it’s advanced energy. We’re seeing it continue to grow. There’ll be headwinds, and it’ll be more expensive for all of us. But I look at what our industry and our technologies are able to offer and deliver, and I am confident we’ll continue to see growth.
The Grain Belt Express was just the beginning.
The anti-renewables movement is now coming for transmission lines as the Trump administration signals a willingness to cut off support for wires that connect to renewable energy sources.
Last week, Trump’s Energy Department with a brief letter rescinded a nearly $5 billion loan guarantee to Invenergy for the Grain Belt Express line that would, if completed, connect wind projects in Kansas to areas of Illinois and Indiana. This decision followed a groundswell of public opposition over concerns about land use and agricultural impacts – factors that ring familiar to readers of The Fight – which culminated in Republican Senator Josh Hawley reportedly asking Donald Trump in a meeting to order the loan’s cancellation. It’s unclear whether questions around the legality of this loan cancellation will be resolved in the courts, meaning Invenergy may just try to trudge ahead and not pick a fight with the Trump administration.
But the Grain Belt Express is not an anomaly. Across the country, transmission lines tied to both renewable sources and more conventional fuels – both fossil and nuclear – are facing a growing chorus of angst and anguish from the same crowds that are fighting renewable energy. In some ways, it’s a tale as old as widespread transmission itself. But I am also talking about farmers, ranchers, and rural towns who all now mention transmission lines in the same exasperated breaths they use to bemoan solar, wind, and battery storage. Many of the same communities fighting zero-carbon energy sources see those conflicts as part of a broader stand against a new age of tech industrial build-out – meaning that after a solar or wind farm is defeated, that activism energy is likely to go elsewhere, including expanding the grid.
I’ve been trying to figure out if there are other situations like Grain Belt, where a project facing local headwinds could potentially be considered no longer investable from a renewables-skeptic federal perspective. And that’s why since Invenergy lost its cash for that project, I have been digging into the Cimarron Link transmission line, another Invenergy facility proposed to carry wind energy from eastern Oklahoma to the western part of the state, according to a map on the developer’s website.
Do you remember the campaign to ban wind energy in Oklahoma that I profiled at the start of this year? Well, one of the most prominent scalps that this activism movement has claimed was bagged in late 2024, when they successfully pressured Governor Kevin Stitt into opposing a priority transmission corridor proposed by the Biden administration. Then another one of the activists’ biggest accomplishments came through an anti-wind law enacted this year that would, among other things, require transmission projects to go through a new certification program before the state’s Corporation Commission. Many of the figures fighting Cimarron and another transmission line project – NextEra’s Heartland Spirit Connector – are also involved in fighting wind and solar across the state, and see the struggles as part and parcel with each other.
Invenergy appears to want to soldier on through this increasingly difficult process, or at least that’s according to a letter some landowners received that was posted to Facebook. But these hurdles will seriously impact the plausibility that Cimarron Link can be completed any time soon.
Now, on top of these hurdles, critics want Cimarron Link to get the Grain Belt treatment. Cimarron Link was told last fall it was awarded north of $300 million from the Energy Department as a part of DOE’s Transmission Facilitation Program.
Enter Darren Blanchard, a farmer who says his property is in the path of Cimarron Link and has been one of the main public faces of opposition against the project. Blanchard has recently been pleading with the DOE to nix the disposition of that money if it hasn’t been given already. Blanchard wrote the agency a lengthy request that Cimarron get similar treatment to Grain Belt which was made public in the appendix of the agency’s decision documents related to the loan cancellation (see page 23 of this document).
To Blanchard’s surprise, he got a reply from the Transmission Facilitation Program office “responding on behalf of” Energy Secretary Chris Wright. The note, to him, read like they wanted him to know they saw his comment: “We appreciate you taking the time to share your views on the project,” it read.
Now, this might’ve been innocuous. I haven’t heard back from the Energy Department about Cimarron Link and I am personally skeptical of the chances a grant is canceled easily. There is no high-level politician calling for the cancellation of this money right now, like there was in Sen. Josh Hawley and the Grain Belt Express.
But I do believe that if there is a will, there is a way with the Trump administration. And as anti-renewables sentiments abound further, there’ll be more ways to create woe for transmission projects like Cimarron that connect to renewable resources. Should voices like Blanchard aim their sights at replicating what happened with Grain Belt, well… bets may be off.
Over the next few weeks, I will be chronicling more fights over individual transmission projects connected to zero-carbon sources. Unique but with implications for a host of proposed wires across the country, they’re trend-setters, so to speak. Next week I’ll be tackling some power lines out West, so stay tuned.
And more of the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Nantucket County, Massachusetts – The fight over Vineyard Wind is back with a vengeance. But can an aggrieved vacation town team up with conservative legal activists to take down an operating offshore wind project?
2. Henry County, Virginia – A fresh fiasco around a solar farm is renewing animus against solar projects in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
3. Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana – Solar developer Aypa is now suing this parish on the grounds it allegedly used zoning rules in an unfair and biased manner against one of its projects.
4. Outagamie County, Wisconsin – If at first you don’t kill the solar farm, try and go after the substation.
5. La Paz County, Arizona – Republicans in Congress are helping at least one area open up for more solar development.
6. Idaho – The federal government will officially re-do its review of the LS Energy Lava Ridge wind farm.
7. Monterey County, California – The EPA is finally getting more involved in the Moss Landing battery plant cleanup, after the agency declared this week it approved a new comprehensive remediation plan under CERCLA, a law that also governs the Superfund program.