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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 Trump administration appears to be advancing solar projects through the permitting process now.
After a temporary halt to permitting for solar projects, the Bureau of Land Management told me a few weeks ago that it had lifted the pause, but I had told you I would wait for confirmation to see whether projects could actually move through government permitting. On Friday, the Bureau of Land Management publicly confirmed that federal solar permitting can happen again, formally approving the Leeward Renewable’s Elisabeth solar project in Yuma County, Arizona – what appears to be the first utility-scale solar facility on federal acreage approved by the Trump administration.
The Elisabeth project is located in a remote part of southwestern Arizona in the Agua Caliente Solar Energy Zone, an area designated for solar energy leasing that has existed for more than a decade, and is adjacent to other large solar projects that have been previously approved according to BLM.
On the same day, BLM released a draft environmental review of a separate solar project in Arizona that the agency segregated land for late last year at the same time as Elisabeth: the Avantus’ Pinyon solar-plus-storage project, which is open for public comment through late May. Tucked on page 37 of that draft document was a list of other solar projects in the nearby vicinity on federal lands that have yet to enter the federal permitting process under the National Environmental Policy Act, which BLM dubbed as “reasonably foreseeable” impacts to the cumulative environment.
The fact BLM is willing to admit other solar projects could advance later on is significant after the sputtering seen in the earliest days of the Trump administration. We’d seen hints of progress seeping through updates to BLM webpages. In mid April, we reported the agency quietly updated the timetable for the Esmerelda 7 mega-solar project in Nevada to say the agency would issue a final decision on the project this summer. I took a peek through the BLM data and found other examples of the same thing, including the Bonanza solar farm, which is now expected to receive its final environmental impact statement in June according to the project website.
BLM has also moved forward with transmission lines on federal lands that would go to solar projects off federal lands, indicating a level of agnosticism about connecting solar farms to the grid if the energy is generated on private property.
It’s still not clear whether solar permits will be a steady trickle for the foreseeable future or if this form of renewable energy could benefit from the Trump administration’s desires to maximize energy generation. Take all of this with a grain of salt because at any moment, a news cycle or disgruntled legislator could steal the president’s ear and make him angry at solar power.
But in times as chaotic as these for U.S. renewables developers, we’ll take this ray of sunshine.
And more of the week’s top news in renewable energy conflicts.
1. Hampden County, Massachusetts – Disgruntled residents in the small city of Westfield have won their fight against a Jupiter Power battery storage project.
2. Staten Island, New York – Speaking of people booing battery storage, the battle over BESS on Staten Island is potentially turning into major litigation.
3. Montgomery County, Maryland – County planners have approved a small solar farm on agricultural lands in the small D.C. exurb of Rockville surprising even the project’s developer Chaberton Energy.
4. Mecklenburg County, Virginia – A 90-acre RWE solar project has been rejected for the second time by county officials despite the developer slimming down the project size in response to local complaints.
5. Licking County, Ohio – The Ohio Supreme Court is allowing Open Road Renewables’ utility-scale Harvey Solar project to proceed over objections from angry neighbors.
6. Adams County, Illinois – It’s not all sunshine and roses in the Midwest though, as even a relatively tiny solar farm is struggling to get approval in rural Illinois.
7. Pierce County, Wisconsin – An AES utility-scale solar farm is getting significant pushback from surrounding residents over farmland impacts.
8. Dickinson County, Iowa – Invenergy has removed some turbines from its Red Rock Wind Energy Center in a bid to try and overcome a vocal contingent of opposition in the county.
9. Cedar County, Iowa – Elsewhere in the Hawkeye State, an Iowa farmer is suing Nordex claiming that a wind turbine fire damaged his wheat crop.
10. Lincoln County, Oklahoma – A battery storage facility proposed by Black Mountain is the subject of an investigative news article about opposition to BESS in Oklahoma.
11. Santa Barbara County, California – The backlash to the Moss Landing battery fire has now led the central coast city of Santa Maria to ban new battery storage facilities.
A conversation with Jason Marshall of Massachusetts’ Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs
This week’s conversation is about transmission. It may have been lost in the shuffle but earlier this week, the state of Massachusetts led a coalition of Northeast states in releasing a joint strategic action plan on transmission planning. We haven’t covered transmission fights too much yet in The Fight (that’ll change soon, stay tuned). So I wanted to learn more about how and why this plan came together, especially given how crucial wires will be to connecting renewables to the grid there. So I got on the horn with Jason Marshall, deputy secretary and special counsel for federal and regional energy affairs in Massachusetts’ Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs. We wound up chatting about how significant this plan is – and a little bit about folk music too.
The following transcript is a slightly abridged version for clarity.
To start – why does this strategic action plan exist?
The strategic action plan has actually been about two years in the making and it’s something that the Healy-Driscoll administration has actually led from our office, knowing there’s a gap in transmission planning.
How transmission planning works today is it focuses on facilities developed within a specific planning region but Massachusetts – and all states – don’t exist as energy islands and we should be collaborating more closely across all regions. We saw a gap in identifying needs in the system, where we were only looking at needs within our singular region, and not looking at whether there are more cost effective ways to solve a reliability issue by enhancing ties with neighbors. That was basically it. There’s not a routine process that exists right now to do interregional planning.
Help me understand how transmission planning helps mitigate conflicts in developing transmission?
Planning in general helps mitigate conflict. You’re being proactive and have transparent procedures developed and put in place for how the process works.
This goes back to what the gap is. Because we don’t have formalized rules to do transmission planning, to the extent there are interregional transmission lines that our state develops, it’s happening on an ad hoc basis. It’s a project-by-project type of a process.
What are the conflicts most crucial to manage in transmission siting?
So taking a step back, this strategic action plan is not focused on siting and permitting. Massachusetts passed a landmark law last year that significantly reformed the siting and permitting process in [the state]. But that being said, this goes back to one of your earlier questions: if you have formalized procedures in place, in a set of rules filed with regulators, that’s a way to make sure there’s an efficient process with transparency at the earliest possible stage.
Walk me through how the plan does that.
There’s several components. In our view, the plan is really anchored by a request for information we hope to issue as early as this summer inviting project developers to submit design concepts to this group of states involved in the effort. I don’t think anything like that has ever been done before. The other part of that [request] is work the states plan to do, inviting stakeholders and market participants, to participate in a discussion on cost allocation and how the states may divide the costs of any interregional project that might come to fruition through this process. These are two really important steps that create formality around this.
Briefly, on that point, and I think this is important: typically the way transmission planning is done, you come up with a set of rules and then you implement those rules. But because those rules don’t exist, this group of states is collaborative and doing this in reverse, using potential real projects as a catalyst to explore broader reforms.
The last question is just a broader one about transmission and the power mix. A pretty crucial aspect of Massachusetts’ expected renewable energy portfolio is supposed to be offshore wind. We’re dealing with hurdles in that space right now. How does that impact your transmission planning and the power grid?
If you look through the plan, what will come across is that the effort is broader than any one specific resource. That’s purposeful. This group of states recognizes the many benefits that transmission provides, from increasing access to markets for lower price energy to reliability and resiliency. And it can include connecting new resources, and it’s not specific to any resource type.
That being said, like all resources, offshore wind could potentially be enabled through the work we’re doing. A number of resources could potentially be facilitated through this work. One of the components of the plan is trying to standardize equipment design used for transmission which is a real technical issue but it has real consequences in terms of facilitating a network transmission grid, making sure the equipment is interoperable and we can talk to each other.
To conclude, a fun question: what was the last song you listened to?
The last song? It was “Automatic” by The Lumineers. I love the new album, they’re coming to Fenway Park in July and I’m taking my daughter to the show.