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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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Did a battery plant disaster in California spark a PR crisis on the East Coast?
Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.
Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs where development is actually happening, capturing rapt attention from other residents as well as members of the media. In Staten Island, a petition against a NineDot Energy battery project has received more than 1,300 signatures in a little over two months. Two weeks ago, advocates – backed by representatives of local politicians including Rep. Nicole Mallitokis – swarmed a public meeting on the project, getting a local community board to vote unanimously against the project.
According to Heatmap Pro’s proprietary modeling of local opinion around battery storage, there are likely twice as many strong opponents than strong supporters in the area:
Heatmap Pro
Yesterday, leaders in the Queens community of Hempstead enacted a year-long ban on BESS for at least a year after GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, other local politicians, and a slew of aggrieved residents testified in favor of a moratorium. The day before, officials in the Long Island town of Southampton said at a public meeting they were ready to extend their battery storage ban until they enshrined a more restrictive development code – even as many energy companies testified against doing so, including NineDot and storage developer Key Capture Energy. Yonkers also recently extended its own battery moratorium.
This flurry of activity follows the Moss Landing battery plant fire in California, a rather exceptional event caused by tech that was extremely old and a battery chemistry that is no longer popular in the sector. But opponents of battery storage don’t care – they’re telling their friends to stop the community from becoming the next Moss Landing. The longer this goes on without a fulsome, strident response from the industry, the more communities may rally against them. Making matters even worse, as I explained in The Fight earlier this year, we’re seeing battery fire concerns impact solar projects too.
“This is a huge problem for solar. If [fires] start regularly happening, communities are going to say hey, you can’t put that there,” Derek Chase, CEO of battery fire smoke detection tech company OnSight Technologies, told me at Intersolar this week. “It’s going to be really detrimental.”
I’ve long worried New York City in particular may be a powder keg for the battery storage sector given its omnipresence as a popular media environment. If it happens in New York, the rest of the world learns about it.
I feel like the power of the New York media environment is not lost on Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella, a de facto leader of the anti-BESS movement in the boroughs. Last fall I interviewed Fossella, whose rhetorical strategy often leans on painting Staten Island as an overburdened community. (At least 13 battery storage projects have been in the works in Staten Island according to recent reporting. Fossella claims that is far more than any amount proposed elsewhere in the city.) He often points to battery blazes that happen elsewhere in the country, as well as fears about lithium-ion scooters that have caught fire. His goal is to enact very large setback distance requirements for battery storage, at a minimum.
“You can still put them throughout the city but you can’t put them next to people’s homes – what happens if one of these goes on fire next to a gas station,” he told me at the time, chalking the wider city government’s reluctance to capitulate on batteries to a “political problem.”
Well, I’m going to hold my breath for the real political problem in waiting – the inevitable backlash that happens when Mallitokis, D’Esposito, and others take this fight to Congress and the national stage. I bet that’s probably why American Clean Power just sent me a notice for a press briefing on battery safety next week …
And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state.
2. Logan County, Ohio – Staff for the Ohio Power Siting Board have recommended it reject Open Road Renewables’ Grange Solar agrivoltaics project.
3. Bandera County, Texas – On a slightly brighter note for solar, it appears that Pine Gate Renewables’ Rio Lago solar project might just be safe from county restrictions.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, Armoracia Solar is struggling to get necessary permits from Madison County.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington is getting into a public spat with East Kentucky Power Cooperative over solar.
In Michigan, Livingston County is now backing the legal challenge to Michigan’s state permitting primacy law.
On the week’s top news around renewable energy policy.
1. IRA funding freeze update – Money is starting to get out the door, finally: the EPA unfroze most of its climate grant funding it had paused after Trump entered office.
2. Scalpel vs. sledgehammer – House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled Republicans in Congress may take a broader approach to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act than previously expected in tax talks.
3. Endangerment in danger – The EPA is reportedly urging the White House to back reversing its 2009 “endangerment” finding on air pollutants and climate change, a linchpin in the agency’s overall CO2 and climate regulatory scheme.