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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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The Nimbus wind project in the Ozark Mountains is moving forward even without species permits, while locals pray Trump will shut it down.
The state of Arkansas is quickly becoming an important bellwether for the future of renewable energy deployment in the U.S., and a single project in the state’s famed Ozark Mountains might be the big fight that decides which way the state’s winds blow.
Arkansas has not historically been a renewables-heavy state, and very little power there is generated from solar or wind today. But after passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the state saw a surge in project development, with more than 1.5 gigawatts of mostly utility-scale solar proposed in 2024, according to industry data. The state also welcomed its first large wind farm that year.
As in other states – Oklahoma and Arizona, for example – this spike in development led to a fresh wave of opposition and grassroots organizing against development. At least six Arkansas counties currently have active moratoria on solar or wind development, according to Heatmap Pro data. Unlike other states, Arkansas has actually gone there this year by passing a law restricting wind development and requiring all projects to have minimum setbacks on wind turbines from neighboring property owners of at least 3.5-times the height of the wind turbine itself, which can be as far as a quarter of a mile.
But activists on the ground still want more. Specifically, they want to stop Scout Clean Energy’s Nimbus wind project, which appears to have evaded significant barriers from either the new state law or a local ordinance blocking future wind development in Carroll County, the project’s future home. This facility is genuinely disliked by many on the ground in Carroll County; for weeks now, I have been monitoring residents posting to Facebook with updates on the movements of wind turbine components and their impacts to traffic. I’ve also seen the grumbling about it travel from the mouths of residents living near the project site to conservative social media influencers and influential figures in conservative energy policy circles.
The Nimbus project is also at considerable risk of federal intervention in some fashion. As I wrote about a few weeks ago, Nimbus applied to the Fish and Wildlife Service for incidental take approval covering golden eagles and endangered bats throughout the course of its operation. This turned into a multi-year effort to craft a conservation plan in tandem with permitting applications that are all pending approval from federal officials.
Scout Clean Energy still had not received permission by the time FWS changed hands to Trump 2.0, though – putting not only its permit but the project itself in potential legal risk. In addition, activists have recently seized upon risks floated by the Defense Department during development around the potential for the turbines to negatively impact radar capabilities, which previously resulted in the developer planning towers of varying heights for the blades.
These risks aren’t unique to Nimbus. Some of this is a reflection of how wind projects are generally so large and impactful that they wind up eventually landing in a federal nexus. But in this particular case, the fact that it seemed nothing could halt this project made me wonder if Trump was on the minds of people in Carroll County, too.
That’s how I wound up on the phone with Caroline Rogers, a woman living on Bradshaw Mountain near the Nimbus project site, who told me she has been fighting it since she first learned about it in 2023. Rogers and I chatted for almost an hour and, candidly, I found her to be an incredibly nice individual. When I asked her why she’s against the wind farm, she brought up a bunch of reasons I couldn’t necessarily fault her for, like concerns about property values and a lack of local civil services to support the community if there were a turbine failure or fire at the site.
“I still pray every day,” she told me when I asked her about whether she wants an outside force – à la Trump – to come in and do something to stop the facility. “There have been projects that have been stopped for various reasons, and there have been turbines that have been taken down.”
One of the things Rogers hopes happens is that the Fish and Wildlife Service’s bird crackdown comes for the Nimbus project, which is under construction even as it’s unclear whether it’ll ever get the take permits under the Trump administration. “Maybe it can be more of an enforcement [action],” she told me. “I hope it happens.”
This is where Trump’s unprecedented approach to energy development – and the curtailment of it – would have to cross a new rubicon. The Fish and Wildlife Service has rarely exercised its bird protection enforcement abilities against wind projects because of a significant and recent backlog in the permitting process related to applications from the sector. Bill Eubanks, an environmental attorney who works on renewables conflicts, told me earlier this week that if a developer is told by the agency it needs a permit, then “they’re on notice if they kill an eagle.” But while enforcement powers have been used before, it is “not that common.”
Even Rogers knows intervention from federal species regulators would be a potentially unprecedented step. “It can never stop a project that I’ve seen,” she told me.
Yet if Trump were to empower FWS to go after wind projects for violating species statutes, it is precisely this backlog that would make projects like Nimbus a potential target.
“They got so many applications from developers, and each one takes so much staff time to finalize,” Eubanks told me. “Even before January 20, there was already a significant backlog.”
Scout Clean Energy did not respond to requests for comment. If I hear from them or the Fish and Wildlife Service, I will let you know.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy projects.
1. Newport County, Rhode Island – The Trump administration escalated its onslaught against the offshore wind sector in the past week … coincidentally (or not) right after a New England-based anti-wind organization requested that it do so.
2. Madison County, New York – Officials in this county are using a novel method to target a wind project: They’re claiming it’ll disrupt 911 calls.
3. Wells County, Indiana – A pro-solar organization is apparently sending mass texts to people in this county asking them to sign a petition opposing a county-wide moratorium on new projects.
4. Henderson County, Kentucky – Planning officials in this county have recommended a two-year moratorium on wind power, sending the matter to a final vote before the county fiscal court.
5. Monterey County, California – Uh oh, another battery fire in central California.
Chatting party polarization with League of Conservation Voters CEO Pete Maysmith.
For this week’s conversation I chatted with Pete Maysmith, CEO of the League of Conservation Voters. There’s no one I’d rather talk to at a moment when any conflict over a solar farm can turn into the equivalent of a heated political campaign. I wanted to know how LCV is approaching the way renewables are becoming more partisan and the insurgent rise of local opposition to project development. Thankfully, Maysmith was willing to take some time right before the Labor Day weekend to sit in my hot seat.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
How is your organization attempting to counter the way support for renewable energy projects on the local level is becoming increasingly partisan?
I’m actually not as convinced that’s the case. There’s certainly some markers around it being partisan at times, but I also know there’s lots of polling that shows by far the most popular form of energy is solar. Wind is No. 2. Below that you start to get the fossil fuel forms of energy. I actually think there’s broad support.
That doesn’t mean it is always uncontroversial, but I think there’s a couple things that are really interesting about that. One, a lot of the anti-renewables sentiment falls into a follow-the-money category, in that there is funded opposition intentionally designed to foment opposition to things like offshore wind or sometimes solar facilities. It’s funded by fossil fuel interests — so yes, there’s opposition, but understanding where that springs from. And I think the second thing is that there is, I think, a real lack of full understanding among the public about the fact that renewable energy is the fastest and the cheapest form of energy to bring onto the grid right now. There’s probably a belief or an association that fossil fuels are cheaper. That’s simply not true.
I think that’s a reason to do effective public education — that as we deal with spiking electricity bills across the country, the most effective thing we can do to address it is to bring the fastest and the cheapest form of energy online.
But that doesn’t account for the fights I follow across the country. Those projects are tagged as being “Green New Deal” projects or satisfying some sort of “woke left” agenda. That sentiment very much exists. What do you do about that?
I think you just have to make the case that it’s the cheapest and the fastest form of energy. 93% of all energy brought onto the grid was wind, solar, and battery capacity because it’s the cheapest and the fastest to bring on. You can’t get gas turbines. Meanwhile, energy bills are spiking. Data centers are going in. Extreme storms … all of these things and more are causing demand to spike. What this means is you need more supply.
How we address this is to not say renewables are better than fossil fuels. We obviously think that from a climate perspective, but let’s not have that conversation first. Let’s start with a conversation about what is the cheapest and the fastest form of energy. We need people to understand that if you want to address rising energy prices, let’s use the cheapest and the fastest form of energy in terms of what to bring onto the grid.
For me, the next place I go is to these other concerns around renewable energy. What are you working on to address rising concerns around renewables and farmland, for instance?
I think that there’s lots of opportunity for renewable energy projects to be win-win in all sorts of ways. Look at the projects started under the Inflation Reduction Act. 80% of those were in Republican congressional districts. We had a running list for a while of Republican House members who voted against the IRA – a partisan bill, right? – who then went to ground-breakings and ribbon-cuttings and dirt-shovel events to celebrate battery plants opening and wind or solar facilities.
That doesn’t mean they’re all free of conflict. I’m not saying that. But there are a lot of places where Republicans were celebrating those very projects.
In terms of project by project, take offshore wind. A lot of our affiliates have done a lot of work in New England in localities to talk about the benefits of an offshore wind project. Does that mean 100% of the people always support it? No, of course not. But in lots of instances, we’ve developed a good broad base of support for offshore wind projects because of the jobs, because it creates revenue, and because solar and wind are the cheapest and fastest forms of energy to bring onto the grid.
I often hear about the need for more organizing at the grassroots and local level to get more support into county hearings and planning commission meetings. What are you doing about that?
One of the things I love the most about LCV is the work we do about our 33 affiliates. It’s the affiliates in many of the states with these projects happening that are deeply engaged. Sometimes that’s at the state legislative level to oppose bills that would stop renewables. Sometimes it’s at that level to help speed approval of renewables projects, which we fought for in Illinois. And sometimes it’s at the local level, including to stop efforts to block renewables siting. Our folks in New England have been organizing regionally for offshore wind, for example.