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The governor is trying to get the Bureau of Land Management’s solar expansion plan canceled, Heatmap has learned.
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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And more of the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.
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.
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.
3. Pima County, Arizona – Down goes another solar-powered data center, this time in Arizona.
4. San Diego County, California – A battery storage developer has withdrawn plans to build in the southern California city of La Mesa amidst a broadening post-Moss Landing backlash over fire concerns.
5. Logan and McIntosh Counties, North Dakota – These days, it’s worth noting when a wind project even gets approved.
6. Hamilton County, Indiana – This county is now denying an Aypa battery storage facility north of Indianapolis despite growing power concerns in the region.
They don’t have much to lose, Heiko Burow, an attorney at Baker & Mackenzie, tells me.
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.
So Heiko, you reached out to me after my latest scoop about how the Trump administration is now trying to create national land use restrictions on wind projects through the Department of Transportation. In your email, you said the Trump administration “cannot invent a setback requirement by executive fiat.” What does this mean?
Something you need to understand from my point of view is, there’s all these things coming out of the White House, the executive. Like the setback requirement: If the law says they have the right to do that, then okay. But the viewpoints of the administration do not replace the law.
There’s no requirement in the law that the Secretary of Transportation can require a setback. He can’t just come in and say here’s a required setback. The government can only do what the law allows a government to do.
For example, a CEO can’t come into a company and say all the contracts are null and void. The president, in the same way, can’t say everything that’s legally binding is no longer legally binding. There are two ways that creates a problem: one is that it is a breach of contract, and the courts will say there’s a different remedy for that. But there’s also a constitutional problem with that.
Why did you reach out to me about this story, in particular?
I’m just concerned about the environment, and our country, and our democracy.
As someone who works with corporations navigating the legal system under Trump, why do you think companies – like renewable developers – aren’t suing left and right in this moment?
I think they’re timid.
It’s not just companies – it’s stakeholders in general. In 2017, there was pushback on Trump. That is missing. Look at the tech industry – and a lot of investments in renewable energy come from the tech area – and how they lined up with Trump on Inauguration Day.
That is fear. I’d say other stakeholders too are now ruled by fear.
As someone who advises companies in other areas of law, what posture do you think renewable energy companies should take?
Band together. Renewable energy companies, you don’t have much to lose. He’s persecuting you.
I know people stay under the radar, like community solar entities that he could have forgotten about. But he didn’t forget about them. So they need to band together and fight.
Everybody’s just lying low and being afraid. But how much more can renewable energy companies lose? Right now they’re still surviving, because the business case for renewable energy works and states are supporting it. But they’re quiet about it on the national level.
If people start believing what Trump says is the force of law, then it’ll just be that way. And I don’t see a coordinated response to that.
Nevada's Greenlink North is hit with a short, but ominous delay.
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.
Amidst this flurry of secretarial orders, Nevada’s Republican Governor Joe Lombardo has signaled that transmission lines attached to renewable energy are also being trapped in the political thicket, even if the energy they would connect to is on private land. In a letter first reported by E&E News, Lombardo told Interior that his office has heard the recent orders have “not only stopped solar development on federal lands in Nevada, but also on private land where federal approvals such as transmission line rights of way are required.” Lombardo pleaded with Interior to “empower career staff to continue issuing approvals for projects sited on private lands where there is a federal nexus, such as transmission line rights of way.”
John Hensley, the senior vice president for markets and policy analysis for the American Clean Power Association, confirmed to me that, at a minimum, the newly anti-renewable Interior has also been hyper-focused on transmission lines connected to solar and wind. “I do believe that when considering transmission projects that are principally designed to enable wind and solar, those are certainly getting increased scrutiny and being brought into focus,” he told me this week.
As of today, I can report at least one major transmission line in Nevada that would connect to solar appears to be delayed: NV Energy’s Greenlink North, the second part of a sprawling transmission project that could, according to its permitting documents, cross areas with upwards of at least two dozen pending solar project applications, according to its environmental impact statement. The other major arm of the project, known as Greenlink West, was approved by the Biden administration but then met with litigation from environmental groups who are opposed to it over the possibility that it will harm endangered wildlife.
This spring, it looked like Greenlink North – which NV Energy has claimed is not tied to the completion of any individual solar project – would be an example of Trump embracing transmission and a neutral “all of the above” approach to power lines. The Bureau of Land Management released the environmental impact statement for the project and said it would deliver its final ruling on Sept. 12. In a press release, the agency said the line was “designed to increase transmission capacity and reliability across the state in support of American Energy Dominance.”
However, that was before far-right members of Congress asked the administration last month to attack renewable energy in exchange for passing Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill.
Quietly, as of today, the Bureau of Land Management’s updated public project timetable for Greenlink North now says its record of decision will be released by Sept. 30. An 18-day slippage might seem benign, but agencies, including BLM, often use the end of a month marker as boilerplate when they’re unsure of when they’ll actually finish something. One can easily imagine this date slipping far beyond September, unless something changes.
It is altogether unclear what led BLM to slide the timetable back for Greenlink North to an end-of-month date like this. Yesterday, the agency uploaded appendixes to the permitting documents for the project, indicating things were moving smoothly. The agency did not release a public explanation for the deadline change.
Patrick Donnelly, an organizer with Center for Biological Diversity, told me last week that he’s split on how to feel about the Trump administration’s attacks on solar and related transmission projects in Nevada. On the one hand, in his view, stopping Greenlink North “will be beneficial for the environment.” I have no doubt he’s probably celebrating the delay that I am reporting today.
But Donnelly sees the obvious downsides. “If we’re looking at killing renewable energy, that is extremely harmful and we do not support that. We’ve always said there is a right place to put renewable energy on public lands,” he said. “I don’t want my home destroyed by solar panels. But I also don’t want no solar energy.”
I asked BLM to confirm that transmission projects linked to renewable energy are also subject to the ongoing permitting freeze, as well as for an explanation of the Greenlink North delay. BLM confirmed receipt of my request but was unable to provide comment by press time. We will update our story accordingly if and when we receive a statement from them.