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The Grain Belt Express was just the beginning.

The anti-renewables movement is now coming for transmission lines as the Trump administration signals a willingness to cut off support for wires that connect to renewable energy sources.
Last week, Trump’s Energy Department with a brief letter rescinded a nearly $5 billion loan guarantee to Invenergy for the Grain Belt Express line that would, if completed, connect wind projects in Kansas to areas of Illinois and Indiana. This decision followed a groundswell of public opposition over concerns about land use and agricultural impacts – factors that ring familiar to readers of The Fight – which culminated in Republican Senator Josh Hawley reportedly asking Donald Trump in a meeting to order the loan’s cancellation. It’s unclear whether questions around the legality of this loan cancellation will be resolved in the courts, meaning Invenergy may just try to trudge ahead and not pick a fight with the Trump administration.
But the Grain Belt Express is not an anomaly. Across the country, transmission lines tied to both renewable sources and more conventional fuels – both fossil and nuclear – are facing a growing chorus of angst and anguish from the same crowds that are fighting renewable energy. In some ways, it’s a tale as old as widespread transmission itself. But I am also talking about farmers, ranchers, and rural towns who all now mention transmission lines in the same exasperated breaths they use to bemoan solar, wind, and battery storage. Many of the same communities fighting zero-carbon energy sources see those conflicts as part of a broader stand against a new age of tech industrial build-out – meaning that after a solar or wind farm is defeated, that activism energy is likely to go elsewhere, including expanding the grid.
I’ve been trying to figure out if there are other situations like Grain Belt, where a project facing local headwinds could potentially be considered no longer investable from a renewables-skeptic federal perspective. And that’s why since Invenergy lost its cash for that project, I have been digging into the Cimarron Link transmission line, another Invenergy facility proposed to carry wind energy from eastern Oklahoma to the western part of the state, according to a map on the developer’s website.
Do you remember the campaign to ban wind energy in Oklahoma that I profiled at the start of this year? Well, one of the most prominent scalps that this activism movement has claimed was bagged in late 2024, when they successfully pressured Governor Kevin Stitt into opposing a priority transmission corridor proposed by the Biden administration. Then another one of the activists’ biggest accomplishments came through an anti-wind law enacted this year that would, among other things, require transmission projects to go through a new certification program before the state’s Corporation Commission. Many of the figures fighting Cimarron and another transmission line project – NextEra’s Heartland Spirit Connector – are also involved in fighting wind and solar across the state, and see the struggles as part and parcel with each other.
Invenergy appears to want to soldier on through this increasingly difficult process, or at least that’s according to a letter some landowners received that was posted to Facebook. But these hurdles will seriously impact the plausibility that Cimarron Link can be completed any time soon.
Now, on top of these hurdles, critics want Cimarron Link to get the Grain Belt treatment. Cimarron Link was told last fall it was awarded north of $300 million from the Energy Department as a part of DOE’s Transmission Facilitation Program.
Enter Darren Blanchard, a farmer who says his property is in the path of Cimarron Link and has been one of the main public faces of opposition against the project. Blanchard has recently been pleading with the DOE to nix the disposition of that money if it hasn’t been given already. Blanchard wrote the agency a lengthy request that Cimarron get similar treatment to Grain Belt which was made public in the appendix of the agency’s decision documents related to the loan cancellation (see page 23 of this document).
To Blanchard’s surprise, he got a reply from the Transmission Facilitation Program office “responding on behalf of” Energy Secretary Chris Wright. The note, to him, read like they wanted him to know they saw his comment: “We appreciate you taking the time to share your views on the project,” it read.
Now, this might’ve been innocuous. I haven’t heard back from the Energy Department about Cimarron Link and I am personally skeptical of the chances a grant is canceled easily. There is no high-level politician calling for the cancellation of this money right now, like there was in Sen. Josh Hawley and the Grain Belt Express.
But I do believe that if there is a will, there is a way with the Trump administration. And as anti-renewables sentiments abound further, there’ll be more ways to create woe for transmission projects like Cimarron that connect to renewable resources. Should voices like Blanchard aim their sights at replicating what happened with Grain Belt, well… bets may be off.
Over the next few weeks, I will be chronicling more fights over individual transmission projects connected to zero-carbon sources. Unique but with implications for a host of proposed wires across the country, they’re trend-setters, so to speak. Next week I’ll be tackling some power lines out West, so stay tuned.
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Much of California’s biggest county is now off limits to energy storage.
Residents of a tiny unincorporated community outside of Los Angeles have trounced a giant battery project in court — and in the process seem to have blocked energy storage projects in more than half of L.A. County, the biggest county in California.
A band of frustrated homeowners and businesses have for years aggressively fought a Hecate battery storage project proposed in Acton, California, a rural unincorporated community of about 7,000 residents, miles east of the L.A. metro area. As I wrote in my first feature for The Fight over a year ago, this effort was largely motivated by concerns about Acton as a high wildfire risk area. Residents worried that in the event of a large fire, a major battery installation would make an already difficult emergency response situation more dangerous. Acton leaders expressly opposed the project in deliberations before L.A. County planning officials, arguing that BESS facilities in general were not allowed under the existing zoning code in unincorporated areas.
On the other side, county officials maintained that the code was silent on battery storage as such, but said that in their view, these projects were comparable to distribution infrastructure from a land use perspective, and therefore would be allowable under the code.
Last week, the residents of Acton won, getting the courts to toss out the county’s 2021 memorandum allowing battery storage facilities in unincorporated areas – which make up more than 65% of L.A. County.
Judge Curtis Kin wrote in his October 14 ruling that “such expansive use of the interpretation runs contrary to the Zoning Code itself,” and that the “exclusion” of permission for battery storage in the code means it isn’t allowed, plain and simple.
“Consequently, respondents and real parties’ reliance on the existence of other interpretive memos and guidance by the [Planning] Director is beside the point,” Kin stated. “There is no dispute the Director has the authority to issue memos and interpretations for Zoning code provisions subject to interpretation, but, as discussed above, such authority cannot be used in such a way as to violate the provisions of the Zoning Code.”
The court also declared the Hecate project approval void and ordered the company to seek permits under the California Environmental Quality Act if it still wants to build. This will halt the project’s development for the foreseeable future. Alene Taber, the attorney representing Acton residents, told me she has received no indication from Hecate’s legal team about whether they will appeal the ruling.
Hecate declined to comment on the outcome.
Taber’s perspective is unique as a self-described “rural rights” attorney who largely represents unincorporated communities with various legal disputes. She told me this ruling demonstrates a serious risk regulators face in moving too fast for a host community, especially given rising opposition to battery storage in California. Since the Moss Landing fire, opposition to storage projects has escalated rapidly across the state – despite profound tech differences between more modern designs proposed today and the antiquated system that burned up in that incident.
I asked Taber if she thought California enacting a new law last week to beef up battery fire safety oversight could stem the tide of concerns about battery storage. In response, she railed against a separate statute giving energy companies – including battery developers – the ability to work around town ordinances and moratoria targeting their industry.
“Even though the county didn’t consider the community input — which it should’ve — the county process at least still allowed for communities to appeal the project. And they’re also at least supposed to consider what the local zoning code said,” Taber told me. “Local communities are now sidelined all together. They’re saying they don’t care what the concerns are. Where’s the consideration for how these projects are now being sited in high fire zones?”
I was unable to reach Los Angeles County officials before press time for The Fight, but it’s worth noting that, amid the battle over Hecate’s approval, L.A. County planning officials began preparing to update their renewable energy ordinance to include battery storage development regulation – an indication they may need new methods to site and build more battery storage. There’s no timeline for when those changes will take place.
And more of the week’s top news about renewable energy conflicts.
1. Benton County, Washington – A state permitting board has overridden Governor Bob Ferguson to limit the size of what would’ve been Washington’s largest wind project over concerns about hawks.
2. Adams County, Colorado – This is a new one: Solar project opponents here are making calls to residents impersonating the developer to collect payments.
3. Lander County, Nevada – Trump’s move to kill the Esmeralda 7 solar mega-project has prompted incredible backlash in Congress, as almost all of Nevada’s congressional delegation claims that not a single renewables project in the U.S. has gotten a federal permit since July.
A conversation with David Gahl of SI2
This week I spoke with David Gahl, executive director of the Solar and Storage Industries Institute, or SI2, which is the Solar Energy Industries Association’s independent industry research arm. Usually I’d chat with Gahl about the many different studies and social science efforts they undertake to try and better understand siting conflicts in the U.S.. But SI2 reached out first this time, hoping to talk about how all of that work could be undermined by the Trump administration’s grant funding cuts tied to the government shutdown. (The Energy Department did not immediately get back to me with a request for comment for this story, citing the shutdown.)
The following conversation was edited lightly for clarity.
So what SI2 funding could be cut because of the federal shutdown, and what has it been put toward?
On October 1, the Energy Department put out a list of about $7.5 billion in grants they were terminating. Approximately a week later, another larger list of grants that were slated for termination found its way into the press. There’s an outstanding question about what this other list floating around means, and only DOE can verify the document’s accuracy, but we have two projects that were on that bigger list.
The first was $2.5 million supporting research into how power companies engage communities. We were coming up with a list of community engagement innovations — the idea was to actually test, through rigorous social science research at project sites, which of these innovations produces the best outcomes. We were going to have empirical data that said, If you approach communities in this way you’re more likely to get support, and if you approach communities this other way you wouldn’t.
The second was $3 million to bring diverse stakeholders together to talk about siting and permitting reform, best practices, guidance to make development smoother. The concept there was to bring traditionally warring parties to come up with a framework and tools to help the siting process. If you can get people together to come up with best practices, you can typically move things faster.
This was an “uncommon dialogue” – there was “uncommon dialogue” before on hydropower resources – and this was related to large-scale solar facilities and conservation. It’s not location-specific, more bringing the groups together to talk about a higher level set of issues, not specific projects. Keep in mind, this is relatively small potatoes.
What was the status of that work?
It started earlier in the year and it’s been rolling along. There’s been a lot of progress made so far. People have developed work plans and are working through the issues.
If the funding is canceled, there’s also opportunity for private money to potentially step in, but it puts both initiatives in a precarious place. But to the broader point, the administration has talked about how it wants energy “abundance” and more electrons on the grid to meet growing demand. And these projects funded by the department are addressing key problems to putting electrons onto the grid. Cancellation of these grants is just a complete reversal of what they’re talking about in other forums.
How so? Help me understand how this work actually trickles down to individual project decisions.
One of the challenges with siting any kind of large-scale energy project is getting community buy-in and ensuring the permitting process moves smoothly, that parties aren’t going to be litigating against each other. So if you can come up with ways to make sure the communities feel heard and are designed according to what communities want, you can probably avoid some litigation down the road.
Do you have any indication this government supports the work you’re describing?
What they’ve made clear is they want more electrons to come onto the grid to support data centers and the advancement of artificial intelligence. Canceling grants like these … I mean, we’re talking about potentially canceling projects that make it harder to meet the goal of putting more electricity onto the grid.