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And what renewables can learn from it.
A sprawling multi-state carbon pipeline appears easier to permit and build than wind and solar farms in red states, despite comments the president-elect or his team may have said on the campaign trail. And the answer has to do with more than just the potential benefits for oil and gas.
The Summit Carbon Solutions CO2 pipeline network would criss-cross five states – Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, and the Dakotas – connecting dozens of ethanol “biorefinery” plants to carbon sequestration sites for storing CO2 captured while producing the agri-fuel. On paper Summit has its work cut out for it in ways not dissimilar to the troubles facing solar and wind. Land use issues, ecological concerns, the whole lot. And its work has become controversial amongst a myriad of opposition groups I often write about like rural farmers and, of course, conspiratorial NIMBYs – chief among them Vivek Ramaswamy and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., two members of the incoming Trump administration.
But Ramaswamy and RFK Jr.’s presence is providing cold comfort compared to the selection of North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum – a vocal supporter of the project – to be Interior Secretary.
“We’re screwed,” wrote Dawn Shepard, a North Dakotan opposed to the project, on Facebook after the selection was announced. “He will get all Carbon Capture projects approved. I thought Republicans and Trump, included, didn’t believe in climate change. Trump’s not keeping his word.”
It’s not exactly that simple, and its debatable whether Summit’ll actually help address climate change, but the premise is true: Trump’s election may just assure the pipeline’s completion, if all things go its way.
“Those appointments are definitely a big thumb on the scale of the pipeline going through,” said Mark Hefflinger of Bold Alliance, one of the activist networks fighting the pipeline project.
In my conversations with activists and the company, it doesn’t appear there’s any easy way for the Interior Department – which oversees all federal land use – to grease all of the skids for Summit, so to speak. But there are a number of factors in its favor now: the pipeline will still require Army Corps of Engineers permits for water body crossings and those tend to require environmental reviews that heavily involve Interior. At the same time, all sides expect the Interior Secretary and likely Energy Secretary Chris Wright (an oil magnate) to champion beneficial Inflation Reduction Act tax credits for carbon capture, sequestration, and utilization in tax talks early next year.
All the while, most state-level regulators have finished or are completing approvals of the pipeline, with the exception of South Dakota where Summit on Tuesday resubmitted its permitting application to the state’s Public Utilities Commission. While I’ve been told the company didn’t substantially adjust its routing in response to the failed ballot initiative, executives certainly did change plans to elide a repeat rejection from the commission after it said no to pipeline plans last year.
“Our efforts involved spending more than a year driving county roads, knocking on doors, and having meaningful, face-to-face conversations with landowners,” Sabrina Zenor, Summit’s director of stakeholder engagement and corporate communications, told me. “These conversations guided our approach.”
There’s a lot that could still go awry for Summit. They could lose legal battles in Iowa that send them back to the drawing board in a crucial hub for corn and ethanol and where public opinion may be souring on the developer. South Dakota could be its own ball of wax, given how passionate the opposition in the state is.
Trump’s comments on the matter have been vague, indicating he’s … well, being very Trump about this. “Well, you know, we’re working on that,” Trump said when asked about the pipeline at an Iowa primary event last year. “And you know, we had a plan to totally — it’s such a ridiculous situation, isn’t it? But we had a plan, and we would have instituted that plan, and it was all ready, but we will get it — if we win, that’s going to be taken care of. That will be one of the easy things we do.”
Ultimately it may be with many issues: whoever’s in the room last with Trump could decide the pipeline’s fate.
But regardless, developers of renewables and battery storage could take away a few lessons from the pipeline network.
Walt Bones, the former head of South Dakota’s Agriculture Department, is one of the landowners currently negotiating a financial agreement for land use with Summit. He’s a farmer, and like many farmers we write about here at The Fight, he doesn’t support building stuff on or near his land if there’s going to be an impact on his crop yields. He told me that he believes the opposition in the state is largely the product of a rush to build by an over-zealous company seeking the maximum benefit from federal tax credits. And they spooked people, producing widespread skepticism of the pipeline.
“Summit did not help themselves any,” he said.
Now of course, there’s lots of concerns about CO2 pipelines’ environmental impacts and the risk of them going, well, kablooey. But unlike how some farmers skeptically view agri-voltaics (e.g. dual use solar), the thought of a pipeline beneath the earth gives Bones – a former farm regulator – no qualms. And the reasoning is simple: He doesn’t believe the pipeline, which will be buried, will impact his farming at all. And ethanol – unlike solar or wind – will feed demand for more farming.
“Basically zero impact to our land. We’ll still be able to farm over it. We’ll still be able to graze over it with our cows,” he said. “I know what the value is … [it’ll] guarantee the future viability of corn.”
So where does this leave us? It’s likely Bones doesn’t represent every farmer. But maybe there’d be a benefit in renewable developers focusing on finding ever-more ways to create a fly-wheel where solar and wind energy generation creates more business for farmers. Clearly, the sheer footprint of a utility scale solar or wind project can be more impactful than a thin pipeline crossing a property.
And I guess they should also make more politically powerful friends in the Dakotas.
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Moss Landing is turning into a growing problem for the energy storage industry.
The Moss Landing battery fire now may be the storage industry’s East Palestine moment – at least in California.
In the weeks since Vistra’s battery plant south of San Francisco caught fire on January 16, at least two lawsuits have been filed against Vistra, PG&E, and battery manufacturer LG Chem by people and business owners claiming damages from the blaze. I have learned at least one more will be filed by individuals who’ve conducted headline-grabbing soil samples that found toxic metals.
Meanwhile, towns and counties up and down the California coastline have banned new battery storage projects and requested more control from the state over permitting and operating them.
At the granular level, circumstances look even more tense. Santa Barbara County this week voted to proactively plan for the potential enactment of legislation before the California state assembly that would let localities be the decider on battery storage, instead of state authorities. The bill is scheduled for its first hearing in the assembly’s utility committee in early April. County officials voted to act essentially like it will become the law of the land, despite testimony from local community services staff noting how unique the Moss Landing event was.
What was especially stark to me: Robert Shaw – CEO of local utility Central Coast Community Energy – spoke before the supervisors and made it clear lots of additional storage would be required for the company to meet its 2030 climate commitments. He explained that storage has to be close to where the energy load is in order to avoid costly transmission lines, telling the board that “in order to operate, they’ve got to add reliability to the grid – but they’ve also got to be affordable.”
Now, today, we’re expecting new regulations arising from California’s battery fire fears: the Public Utilities Commission will vote to adopt proposed recommendations for battery storage siting requirements. This will include requirements for emergency response and action plans after battery fires and new standards for safe operation. A vote to adopt these recommendations is scheduled later this afternoon and advocates in California tell me they anticipate no hiccups.
So why such a profound local revolt? How did California rapidly deploy battery storage only to veer into possibly emboldening local control, which certainly may make residents feel better but would also stall the pace of the energy transition?
I’ve spent the last week looking into it and the simplest explanation is this: Moss Landing still feels like a disaster zone. Residents miles away from where the blaze occurred are suffering mysterious illnesses, like random bloody noses and headaches, and medical issues they suspect is related to the fire, such as a random metallic taste. I’ve seen the pictures of skin that looks burned and heard the voices of people who say they no longer have most of their voice after inhaling airborne substances after the event. Locals are routinely posting online about how they’re extremely disappointed with the government’s response, especially state and federal officials, and at the end of the day, no matter the cause, word of such profound and lasting suffering can spread across the internet like, well, a wildfire.
The industry also clearly believes opposition is growing because of misunderstandings about how Moss Landing was a singular incident – most battery storage sites are outdoors and use battery chemistries that offer less risk of a “thermal runaway” event, which is the term of art used to describe the uncontrolled fire spread that can occur at a battery storage site.
Renewables trade group American Clean Power gathered media last week for a virtual briefing to discuss battery safety, during which the group’s vice president of energy storage Noah Roberts sought to reassure the public and said the organization is “working to ensure that an event like this doesn’t happen in the future and do not anticipate an event like this will happen in the future.”
“This battery storage project was located within a retrofitted power plant from the 1950s and very much represents a global anomaly,” Roberts said, adding that “this incident and its impact is not something we have previously seen.”
None of this is stopping Moss Landing from becoming a galvanizing event. I’ve learned that activists on the ground and their attorneys are receiving a flood of inquiries from individuals fighting battery projects elsewhere in the United States.
“You’re going to feel absolutely like guinea pigs — and, unfortunately, you are because protocols weren’t in place,” environmental activist Erin Brockovich told affected residents at a public virtual town hall I attended late Tuesday night. Brockovich encouraged anyone who believes they were impacted by the battery fire to work publicly and behind the scenes to get the local control legislation in the state assembly passed. “Your input, hundreds and hundreds of you, on this legislation can help change the course for many communities in California in the future, on where [BESS] is built, how far away. Are they not going to be built?”
Knut Johnson, an attorney who is representing victims in one of the lawsuits, told me he believes this story should ultimately go national with seismic ramifications for the storage industry. He also told me he’s “curious to see how the Trump administration responds to this.” Johnson put the webinar on with Brockovich, who, he told me, is acting as a paralegal assisting with the case.
“This was so sudden and unexpected and following several years of magical thinking where they weren’t preparing for this possibility,” he said of the developers and state officials.
And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Nantucket County, Massachusetts – Welcome to the Vineyard Wind lawsuit 2.0.
2. Carroll County, Maryland – Carroll County commissioners are intervening in the state permitting fight over two relatively small solar projects, in what has become a wider proxy battle between the county and the state over solar on farmland.
3. Barren County, Kentucky – Somehow this large-scale 100-megawatt solar farm proposed by Geenex is having an easier time in Kentucky than in Maryland. Why?
4. Osage County, Oklahoma – A federal judge paused the removal of the Enel wind farm that was ordered last year to be removed over opposition from Native tribes.
5. Albany County, Wyoming – It seems the conservative anti-renewables advocates working against offshore wind are quietly involved in fighting Repsol’s Rail Tie wind project in Wyoming.
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Today’s conversation is with Samantha Levy, senior policy manager for conservation and energy at American Farmland Trust, an agriculture and energy advocacy organization I became familiar with through covering the conflict over solar on farmland. I reached out to Levy after the organization released new recommendations for agrivoltaics policy last week – just before a large agrivoltaics project was canceled in Ohio over local opposition. I wanted to ask: are there any bright spots for the future of solar and farms commingling?
Today’s conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
So let’s start with the news – what are your recommendations on agrivoltaics?
A few years ago we came up with Smart Solar principles, modeled off of this idea of “smart growth” rather than this idea of sprawled development that makes it harder for farms to operate. It’s “smart solar.”
The four principles are: One, to prioritize siting on the built-in environment, contaminated land, and marginal farmland, because there’s this natural funneling that happens towards really good, flat, open sunny farmland – the best land for growing crops sometimes.
The second principle is to safeguard soils and water. If you are siting solar on your farmland, make sure you’re retaining the ability to farm that land ideally during the life of the project but certainly in the future. That covers stuff like design, installation practices, decommissioning plans. Making sure that if you have water rights they’re not extinguished by not using them.
The third principle is to expand the development of agrivoltaics projects, integrating production into a solar array so you’re not converting the land and are still contributing to the rural farm economy.
Finally, [fourth] is advancing farm viability and equity.
Where are you seeing positive developments? Success stories?
In terms of policy, it’s important to look at the state level. We’re not really sure how this is going to play out at the federal level just yet. But there’s quite a lot of hope: a lot of states have climate laws on the books with renewable energy targets they need to meet. At the same time, this conflict is real. It stops projects. It’s not the only issue that comes up with communities but it is one of them. [We want to] make sure that we don’t stop projects and get good projects built because we know there are benefits that come about because of them.
In Massachusetts, you have a fairly significant energy adder – an increase to the price paid to the developer for the energy they produce – from an agrivoltaics project when they meet state specifications. Or take the state of Colorado, for instance, funding research into agrivoltaics and is now moving forward with property tax credits for agrivoltaics projects. And they’re designing that policy in a very thoughtful way to incentivize innovative designs for agrivoltaics projects.
In New York we’ve worked on a lot of policy to advance this idea. NYSERDA last year put out an RFP to advance research and collect data on different agrivoltaics projects. New York also has a small mitigation fee that they impose on projects of a certain size that convert prime farmland, but there’s fee forgiveness if you’re going to integrate production into that solar array.
I’m thinking about the agrivoltaics project in Ohio, Grange Solar, that was canceled last week. Do we know yet the extent to which agrivoltaics is actually accepted by agricultural communities where solar on farmland is a concern?
No community is a monolith but we do have some data on this. SEIA [Solar Energy Industries Association] and the National Farmers Union teamed up on a survey we helped do outreach on and there were some really promising results from the farmers who responded to the survey. There could’ve been self selection, but it was promising.
Look, this is a newer idea. It takes time for these kinds of innovations to penetrate and for folks to accept them, especially in farm communities. But this survey showed two-thirds of farmers who responded were open to agrivoltaics production and solar developers who used to be quite risk adverse, used to being more cautious when it comes to agrivoltaics, are starting to be more open to the idea. Especially if this is the kind of thing communities are going to like more than a conventional ground-mounted array.
There are a lot of questions still to answer. The policymaking still really does matter.