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Spotlight

Inside Nevada’s Solar Energy Revolt

The governor is trying to get the Bureau of Land Management’s solar expansion plan canceled, Heatmap has learned.

Joe Lombardo.
Heatmap/Getty Images

Nevada, ground zero for solar development in the American West, is now seeing a different kind of renewables revolution – against development.

It might endanger the Biden administration’s crowning solar permitting achievement, and will mean developers in the Silver State will have to reckon with empowered opponents in the Trump 2.0 era.

The Bureau of Land Management’s Western solar plan would open more than 31 million acres available for utility-scale solar applications across almost a dozen states. About a third of that land would be in Nevada. Nevada is one of the top states in the U.S. for solar development and utility-scale construction spiked after passage of the Inflation Reduction Act.

Rural county governments are hopping mad over the effort. Many officials want to do what their friends in other states can do – pass moratoria and restrict development in line with local complaints. They’ve been passing their local rules. But there’s a big X factor: They have no authority over federal lands, and most of the state’s territory overall is under control of BLM.

This means their ordinances are relatively toothless, county officials say, not to mention they get less revenue from solar farms.

“There are impacts to residents, to county services, to how we deliver services from solar energy projects, that frankly aren’t being addressed,” said Vinson Guthreau, executive director of the Nevada Association of Counties, which has formally protested the BLM solar plan after backlash with members. “And there’s zero way to capture revenue from resources on federal land — we cannot collect taxes on federal land. We receive all of the impacts and none of the revenue to fund the impacts, frankly.”

Enter Nevada’s Republican Governor Joe Lombardo. In an Oct. 28 letter obtained by Heatmap, Lombardo stated “discouraging feedback” from local officials and state agencies led him to ask BLM to cancel its west-wide comprehensive solar plan. Among his complaints: many objections from local leaders and concerns raised by environmentalists about impacts on imperiled tortoises and sage grouse. (Yes, this means the GOP governor of Nevada is on the same side as the Center for Biological Diversity.)

“The vast tracts of land identified,” Lombardo wrote, “places enormous pressure on our rural counties, many of which rely on public lands for agriculture, grazing, mining, recreation, and community development, and threatens to overwhelm local land-use plans and disrupt the economic and social fabric of our communities.”

Opposition from Nevada means that if there’s a way to unravel the programmatic solar plan when Donald Trump takes office in January, there’ll be a will. That’s what happened with the Obama administration’s sage grouse habitat protection efforts. Other western states opposed Obama sage grouse protection plans, but Nevada – a key swing state – was a dissenting voice that really counted. Now ironically, instead of scrapping protections for sage grouse, the state is citing the bird to say local objections are being left out of the discourse.

“Everybody knows where the migration corridors are,” said Lander County land use planner Pam Harrington, who previously worked for conservation group Trout Unlimited. “We’re not unsupportive of [solar energy] in our county. We want to see growth. But we want to see smart growth.”

Personally, I think the mining and agriculture concerns here are scant compared to the very real tax issue. We see transmission lines or renewables projects face scrutiny when the power itself doesn’t go to the people directly impacted. The same could easily be true here with taxes. Notably, the hardrock mining industry – also blooming in Nevada – pays state royalties but no federal payments for the resources it collects in the state.

“The mining industry is super prominent and they have set the gold standard around community engagement,” Gurtheau said, adding he believes those companies are doing a much better job at engaging Nevada communities than renewables. “That’s what our [counties] are used to.”

It’s unclear if the BLM will formally implement the solar plan before Trump takes office. The final environmental review for BLM’s solar plan was released at the end of the summer, but the Bureau has not issued its official action formally opening acreage for development. The agency said it would do this “following resolution of any remaining issues identified” after releasing the final review.

BLM did not respond to a request for comment.

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Hotspots

Trump Administration to ‘Reconsider’ Approval for MarWin

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

The United States.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

1. Sussex County, Delaware – The Trump administration has confirmed it will revisit permitting decisions for the MarWin offshore wind project off the coast of Maryland, potentially putting the proposal in jeopardy unless blue states and the courts intervene.

  • Justice Department officials admitted the plans in a paragraph tucked inside a filing submitted to a federal court in Delaware this week in litigation brought by a beach house owner opposed to the offshore wind project.
  • DOJ stated in the filing that more time was “necessary as Interior intends to reconsider its [construction and operations plan] approval” for MarWin, and that it plans to “move” for “voluntary remand of that agency action” in a separate case filed by Ocean City, Maryland against the project.
  • “The outcome of Interior’s reconsideration has the potential to affect the Plaintiff’s claims in this case,” the filing stated. “Continuing to litigate this case before any decision is made in the [Ocean City case] would potentially waste considerable time and resources for both the parties and the Court.” As of today, no new filings have been made in the Ocean City case.

2. Northwest Iowa – Locals fighting a wind project spanning multiple counties in northern Iowa are opposing legislation that purports to make renewable development easier in the state.

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Q&A

Should Renewable Energy Companies Sue Trump?

They don’t have much to lose, Heiko Burow, an attorney at Baker & Mackenzie, tells me.

Heiko Burow.
Heatmap Illustration

This week, since this edition of The Fight was so heavy, I tried something a little different: I interviewed one of my readers, Heiko Burow, an attorney with Baker & Mackenzie based in Dallas, Texas. Burow doesn’t work in energy specifically – he’s an intellectual property lawyer – but he’s read many of my scoops over the past few weeks about attacks on renewable energy and had legitimate criticism! Namely, as a lawyer who is passionate about the rule of law, he wanted to send a message to any developers and energy wonks reading me to use the legal system more often as a tool against attacks on their field.

The following conversation has been abridged for clarity. Let’s dive in.

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Spotlight

Interior’s Renewables Attacks Snag Power Lines

Nevada's Greenlink North is hit with a short, but ominous delay.

Solar panels and pylons.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

I can now confirm the Trump administration’s recent attacks on renewables permitting appear to be impacting transmission projects, too.

Over the past two weeks, the Interior Department has laid forth secretarial orders implementing a new regime for renewables permitting on federal lands. This has appeared to essentially kill the odds of utility-scale solar or wind projects on federal land getting approved any time soon. Public timetables for large solar projects across the American West have suddenly slipped back by years-long intervals, and other mega-projects – like Esmeralda 7 – appear now to be trapped in limbo.

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