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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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Q&A

An America First Strategy for Renewable Energy?

A conversation with Tim Brightbill of Wiley Rein LLP

Tim Brightbill of Wiley Rein LLP.
Heatmap Illustration

Today we’re talking with Tim Brightbill, a trade attorney at Wiley Rein LLP and lead counsel for a coalition of U.S. solar cell and module manufacturers – the American Alliance for Solar Manufacturing Trade Committee. Last week, his client won a massive victory – fresh tariffs on south Asian solar panel parts – on the premise that Chinese firms are dumping cheap products in the region to drive down prices and hurt American companies. It’s the latest in a long series of decadal trade actions against solar parts with Chinese origin.

We wanted to talk to Tim about how this move could affect developers, if an America-first strategy could help insulate solar from political opposition, and how this could play out in next year’s talks over the future of the IRA. The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.

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Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

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  • 45X is supposed to supercharge production of battery and solar components, as well as key minerals and materials for those components that are largely imported from China or what U.S. trade officials believe are Chinese pass-throughs.
  • Some U.S. companies are now quietly urging Congress to enact a “foreign entity of concern” requirement to 45X that would essentially stop battery and solar manufacturing plants with Chinese business involvement from qualifying.
  • Why? Well, doing this would definitely insulate the credit from GOP repeal by tying it not to rapid decarbonization but instead American blue collar jobs.
  • Patrick Donnelly, chief commercial officer for Anovion, told attendees of a Hill briefing I moderated earlier this week that he wants to see this happen because it would be a “game changer” for domestic manufacturing. “I’ve heard some Republicans talking about it already.”
  • But it could also undermine the effectiveness of the credit for climate purposes. Similar requirements were tacked onto the IRA’s EV consumer credit that curtailed its reach and meant many cars couldn’t access the benefit.

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Map of renewable energy conflicts.
Heatmap Illustration

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  • However, remember that even though Attentive Energy has little opposition in New York State, anti-offshore activists are aggressively challenging efforts by New Jersey state to buy power from the project.
  • We’ll have to wait and see if this decision is a domino for other offshore wind curtailments. But we’re already seeing evidence, as Shell announced hours ago it is no longer investing in new offshore wind projects.

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