The Fight

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Spotlight

The Anti-Renewables Movement is Coming for Your Wires

The Grain Belt Express was just the beginning.

Oklahoma.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

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Last week, Trump’s Energy Department with a brief letter rescinded a nearly $5 billion loan guarantee to Invenergy for the Grain Belt Express line that would, if completed, connect wind projects in Kansas to areas of Illinois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.

Yellow

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Q&A

How Developers Should Think of the New IRA Credit Rules

A conversation with Scott Cockerham of Latham and Watkins.

How Developers Should Think of the New IRA Credit Rules
Heatmap Illustration

This week’s conversation is with Scott Cockerham, a partner with the law firm Latham and Watkins whose expertise I sought to help me best understand the Treasury Department’s recent guidance on the federal solar and wind tax credits. We focused on something you’ve probably been thinking about a lot: how to qualify for the “start construction” part of the new tax regime, which is the primary hurdle for anyone still in the thicket of a fight with local opposition.

The following is our chat lightly edited for clarity. Enjoy.

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Hotspots

An Influential Anti-ESG Activist Targets A Wind Farm

And more of the week’s most important news around renewable energy conflicts.

Map of renewable energy fights.
Heatmap Illustration

1. Carroll County, Arkansas – The head of an influential national right-wing advocacy group is now targeting a wind project in Arkansas, seeking federal intervention to block something that looked like it would be built.

  • Will Hild, executive director of Consumers’ Research, recently called on the Trump administration to intervene against the development of Scout Clean Energy’s Nimbus wind project in Arkansas. Consumers’ Research is known as one of the leading anti-ESG advocacy organizations, playing a key role in the “anti-woke” opposition against the climate- and socially-conscious behavior of everyone from utilities to Anheuser-Busch.
  • In a lengthy rant posted to X earlier this month, Hild pointed to Carroll County’s local moratorium on wind projects and claimed Nimbus being built would be “a massive win for ESG radicals – and a slap in the face for local democracy.”
  • As I told you in April, the Nimbus project prompted Carroll County to enact the moratorium but it was grandfathered in because of contracts signed prior to the ban’s enactment.
  • However, even though Nimbus is not sited on federal land, there is a significant weak point for the project: its potential impacts on endangered birds and bats.
  • Scout Clean Energy has been working with the Fish and Wildlife Service since at least 2018 under Trump 1.0. However, the project’s habitat conservation plan was not completed before the start of the current Trump term and Scout did not submit an application for Nimbus to receive an incidental take permit from the Service until May of this year.
  • Enter the Trump administration’s bird-centric wind power crackdown and the impact of Hild’s commentary comes into fuller focus. What will happen to all the years of work that Scout and the Service did? It’s unclear how the project reckons with this heightened scrutiny and risk of undue federal attention.

2. Suffolk County, New York – EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin this week endorsed efforts by activists on Long Island to oppose energy storage in their neighborhoods.

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Spotlight

Trump’s Permit Freeze Prompts Some Solar to Eye Exits

Is there going to be a flight out of Nevada?

Solar in Nevada.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Donald Trump’s renewables permitting freeze is prompting solar companies to find an escape hatch from Nevada.

As I previously reported, the Interior Department has all but halted new approvals for solar and wind projects on federal lands. It was entirely unclear how that would affect transmission out west, including in the solar-friendly Nevada desert where major lines were in progress to help power both communities and a growing number of data centers. Shortly after the pause, I took notice of the fact that regulators quietly delayed the timetable by at least two weeks for a key line – the northern portion of NV Energy’s Greenlink project – that had been expected to connect to a litany of solar facilities. Interior told me it still planned to complete the project in September, but it also confirmed that projects specifically necessary for connecting solar onto the grid would face “enhanced” reviews.

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