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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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Plus, what a Texas energy veteran thinks is behind the surprising turn against solar and wind.
I couldn’t have a single conversation with a developer this week without talking about Texas.
In case you’re unaware, the Texas Senate two days ago passed legislation — SB 819 — that would require all solar and wind projects over 10 megawatts to receive a certification from the state Public Utilities Commission — a process fossil fuel generation doesn’t have to go through. The bill, which one renewables group CEO testified would “kill” the industry in Texas, was approved by the legislature’s GOP majority despite a large number of landowners and ranchers testifying against the bill, an ongoing solar and wind boom in the state, and a need to quickly provide energy to Texas’ growing number of data centers and battery manufacturing facilities.
But that’s not all: On the same day, the Texas Senate Business and Commerce Committee approved a bill — SB 715 — that would target solar and wind by requiring generation facilities to be able to produce power whenever called upon by grid operators or otherwise pay a fine. Critics of the bill, which as written does not differentiate between new and existing facilities, say it could constrain the growth of Texas’ energy grid, not to mention impose penalties on solar and wind facilities that lack sufficient energy storage on site.
Renewable energy trades are in freak-out mode, mobilizing to try and scuttlebutt bills that could stifle what otherwise would be a perfect state for the sector. As we’ve previously explained, a big reason why Texas is so good for development is because, despite its ruby red nature, there is scant regulation letting towns or counties get in the way of energy development generally.
Seeking to best understand why anti-renewables bills are sailing through the Lone Star State, I phoned Doug Lewin, a Texas energy sector veteran, on the morning of the votes in the Texas Senate. Lewin said he believes that unlike other circumstances we’ve written about, like Oklahoma and Arizona, there really isn’t a groundswell of Texans against renewable energy development. This aligns with our data in Heatmap Pro, which shows 76% of counties being more welcoming than average to a utility-scale wind or solar farm. This is seen even in the author of the 24/7 power bill – state Senator Kevin Sparks – who represents the city of Midland, which is in a county that Heatmap Pro modeling indicates has a low risk of opposition. The Midland area is home to several wind and solar projects; German renewables giant RWE last month announced it would expand into the county to power oil and gas extraction with renewables.
But Lewin told me there’s another factor: He believes the legislation is largely motivated by legislators’ conservative voters suffering from a “misinformation” and “algorithm” problem. It’s their information diets, he believes, which are producing fears about the environmental impacts of developing renewable energy.
“He’s actively working against the interests of his district,” Lewin said of Sparks. “It’s algorithms. I don’t know what folks think is going on. People are just getting a lot of bad information.”
One prominent example came from a hailstorm during Hurricane Uri last year. Ice rocks described like golfballs rained down upon south-east Texas, striking, among other things, a utility-scale solar farm called Fighting Jays overseen by Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners. The incident went viral on Facebook and was seized upon by large conservative advocacy organizations including the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
What’s next? Honestly, the only thing standing between these bills and becoming law is a sliver of hope in the renewables world that the millions of dollars flowing into Texas House members’ districts via project investments and tax benefits outweigh the conservative cultural animus against their product. But if the past is prologue, things aren’t looking great.
And more of the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Westchester County, N.Y. – Residents in Yonkers are pressuring city officials to renew a moratorium on battery storage before it expires in July.
2. Atlantic County, New Jersey – Sorry Atlantic Shores, but you’re not getting your EPA permit back.
3. St Clair County, Michigan – We may soon have what appears to be the first-ever county health regulations targeting renewable energy.
4. Freeborn County, Minnesota – Officials in this county have rejected a Midwater Energy Storage battery storage project citing concerns about fires.
5. Little River County, Arkansas – A petition circulating in this county would put the tax abatement for a NextEra solar project up for a vote county-wide.
6. Van Zandt County, Texas – Officials in this county have reportedly succeeded in getting a court to impose a restraining order against Taaleri Energy to halt the Amador battery storage project.
7. Gillespie County, Texas – Peregrine Energy’s battery storage proposal in the rural town of Harper is also facing a mounting local outcry.
8. Churchill County, Nevada – Battery storage might be good for Nevada mining, but we have what appears to be our first sign of revolt against the technology in the state.
A conversation with Mike Barnwell of the Michigan Regional Council of Carpenters and Millwrights
Today’s conversation is with Mike Barnwell at the Michigan Regional Council of Carpenters and Millwrights, a union organization more than 14,000 members strong. I reached out to Barnwell because I’d been trying to better understand the role labor unions could play in influencing renewables policy decisions, from the labor permitting office to the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act. So I called him up on my way home from the American Clean Power Association’s permitting conference in Seattle, where I gave a talk, and we chatted about how much I love Coney Island chili in Detroit. Oh, and renewable energy, of course.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
I guess to start, we covered Michigan’s new permitting and siting law. What role did your union play in that process?
Locally, with the siting laws, we were a big part of that from the local level all the way to the state. From speaking at the Capitol down to city council and building authority meetings about projects happening in areas and cleaning out some of the red tape to make these possible.
It’s created jobs for our members current and future.
So you see labor as being helpful in getting permitting done faster?
Being labor maybe I’m biased but I think it is. I say labor collectively, we’ve got a pretty good coalition here in Michigan.
Do you think unions like yours will be similarly influential in the future of the Inflation Reduction Act back in Washington, D.C.?
Let me put it this way: the requirements of registered apprenticeships being on site come back to creating jobs for our members. Otherwise it’s just hiring anybody off the street – unskilled and unsafe workplaces. We train our folks through our apprenticeships and that legislation is ensuring safety on the jobs for one, let alone letting them build careers and pensions.
We’re a carpenter-centric union but this all falls under the work of what we do. We’ve been implementing our four-year apprenticeship program — every kind of renewable energy training you can think of, we’ve implemented it into our programs. It’s hands on. We have mockups at our training centers where [projects] get built and torn down and built and torn down. When you talk about a utility-scale solar project, it’s an average of 160-170 individuals working on that project. Without proper skills training they can’t work in coordination with each other.
How are you feeling about the future of the tax credits?
Uneasy.
The current leadership, they obviously have different views than the past leadership did. Lookit – when you talk about the IRA that has done nothing but create jobs for the blue collar working man in not just our state but around the nation. Here in Michigan, it almost went from zero to sixty in 10 seconds. It was miraculous what they did for us. We went from scratching and clawing in trying to procure these projects to now the IRA requiring skill training and prevailing wage and benefits and health care, which what as a union we’re all about.
Just in the last year, we’ve brought on over 300 new members just for solar alone. That’s all because of the federal tax credit and the language in the IRA.
Last question – what role do you see labor playing in the process of getting individual projects permitted and built?
Our role in that, I’ve been to plenty of these community meetings myself but it’s the actual working guy, the guy who is using his tools every week, who goes and speaks up to their county or town leadership about the benefits of these projects.
That big BlueOval battery plant in Marshall, Michigan – I don’t know if that would’ve been permitted without the work of our members being at those meetings, letting their voices be heard. There was obviously an opposition voice as well, but ours were a bit louder in the room. People want to hear the voices that say yes we want it and here’s why. This is how I support my family from the work on these projects. Otherwise it would’ve never gotten off the ground.