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Spotlight

Solar’s Got a Better Shot Under Trump – For Now

Here’s where the real risks lie for the solar industry.

Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Solar energy so far is avoiding the Trump-era challenge posed to wind energy. But it’s unclear the good times will continue, as chaos reigns in Washington and threats loom on the horizon.

Last week, Trump issued a 60-day pause on all permits for solar projects on federal lands. Many solar projects are not sited on federal lands, so there’s little Trump could do in the short term to stop those projects. But some utility scale projects definitely are on federal lands in the Southwest, most often in Nevada, where considerable opposition exists in rural, untouched pockets of the state. Several sit in various stages of the permitting process. In fact, there are over 12 gigawatts worth of challenged projects currently planned for the state, according to Heatmap Pro’s database.

Heatmap Pro data on Nevada\u2019s contested projects.

Developers and industry representatives I spoke with believe Trump will lift this pause on permits and let the solar projects flow through the pipeline. EDF Renewables, whose Bonanza solar farm was approaching the end of the permitting process when Trump came into office, told me they “have no reason to believe that the project should not be approved.” Balanced Rock Power, the developer of the Samantha solar project in Nevada which is in the early stages of permitting, told me the company is “continuing to work closely with” agencies “to complete all the major milestones on schedule.”

“President Trump has specifically said that he loves solar – and as energy demand soars, we know that solar is the most efficient and affordable way to add a lot of energy to the grid, fast,” Abigail Ross Hopper, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, told me in a statement.

But there’s a quiet unease amongst some in the sector about whether recent actions around permits and federal funding mean the next shoe to drop is going to hit them.

Trump’s got complaints about solar and land use, including those he made in that presidential debate immediately after the “big fan” comment. There was also an interview with Fox News last week where he came out against utility-scale solar projects. “You know what else people don’t like,” Trump told host Sean Hannity. “Those massive solar fields built over land that covers 10 miles by 10 miles. I mean, they’re ridiculous, the whole thing.”

Brendan Bell, a top executive at asset manager Aligned Capital and a former senior official in DOE’s loan programs office, told me the biggest question in solar right now is “whether they can do anything to stop it.”

“If you’re developing a project on BLM land, you’re probably putting that on the backburner,” said Brendan Bell, a top executive at asset manager Aligned Capital. Bell served as director of strategic initiatives for the Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office under the Obama administration. “But that’s not the only place we build solar projects.”

Indeed, from a permitting perspective, it may prove quite tricky to undermine solar projects. Even on BLM land. That’s because permitting decisions and even indecision can be litigated. Rarely does the Bureau of Land Management actually deny projects – of any fuel type – so a step change against solar would require a wholescale change to how permitting staff ordinarily operate.

The most serious threat, in my view, is actually whether the Trump administration will take on the “protect farmland” mantle that activists in some states have used to derail large-scale solar projects. Under the Farmlands Protection Policy Act, the Agriculture Department is tasked with minimizing how federal programs impact the conversion of farmland to non-agricultural uses, attorney Bob Greenslade told me in an email. Farmland impacts “may be relevant” now to renewable energy development in any area with a federal nexus, including land use.

And there’s a nascent effort to strip tax credits from renewables projects sited on farmland. On Tuesday, Republican congressman Tom Tiffany of Wisconsin announced he would reintroduce legislation to disqualify renewables projects from receiving tax benefits under the Inflation Reduction Act if their project is on “prime farmland,” a term of art defined by the Agriculture Department.

Mark Fowler, director of government affairs for Ameresco, told me that he believes tax credits and access to federal funds will be a bigger issue for solar than permitting in the immediate term, especially in light of the (now lifted) Trump freeze on discretionary funds. Ameresco is an integrator and developer of renewable energy projects. “The biggest thing right now is uncertainty around the tax credits. The discussion right now is they’re going to change in some form the IRA tax credits. We don’t know what the changes are going to look like.”

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Hotspots

Judge, Siding With Trump, Saves Solar From NEPA

And more on the week’s biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects.

The United States.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

1. Jackson County, Kansas – A judge has rejected a Hail Mary lawsuit to kill a single solar farm over it benefiting from the Inflation Reduction Act, siding with arguments from a somewhat unexpected source — the Trump administration’s Justice Department — which argued that projects qualifying for tax credits do not require federal environmental reviews.

  • We previously reported that this lawsuit filed by frustrated Kansans targeted implementation of the IRA when it first was filed in February. That was true then, but afterwards an amended complaint was filed that focused entirely on the solar farm at the heart of the case: NextEra’s Jeffrey Solar. The case focuses now on whether Jeffrey benefiting from IRA credits means it should’ve gotten reviewed under the National Environmental Policy Act.
  • Perhaps surprisingly to some, the Trump Justice Department argued against these NEPA reviews – a posture that jibes with the administration’s approach to streamlining the overall environmental analysis process but works in favor of companies using IRA credits.
  • In a ruling that came down on Tuesday, District Judge Holly Teeter ruled the landowners lacked standing to sue because “there is a mismatch between their environmental concerns tied to construction of the Jeffrey Solar Project and the tax credits and regulations,” and they did not “plausibly allege the substantial federal control and responsibility necessary to trigger NEPA review.”
  • “Plaintiffs’ claims, arguments, and requested relief have been difficult to analyze,” Teeter wrote in her opinion. “They are trying to use the procedural requirements of NEPA as a roadblock because they do not like what Congress has chosen to incentivize and what regulations Jackson County is considering. But those challenges must be made to the legislative branch, not to the judiciary.”

2. Portage County, Wisconsin – The largest solar project in the Badger State is now one step closer to construction after settling with environmentalists concerned about impacts to the Greater Prairie Chicken, an imperiled bird species beloved in wildlife conservation circles.

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Spotlight

Renewables Swept Up in Data Center Backlash

Just look at Virginia.

A data center.
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Solar and wind projects are getting swept up in the blowback to data center construction, presenting a risk to renewable energy companies who are hoping to ride the rise of AI in an otherwise difficult moment for the industry.

The American data center boom is going to demand an enormous amount of electricity and renewables developers believe much of it will come from solar and wind. But while these types of energy generation may be more easily constructed than, say, a fossil power plant, it doesn’t necessarily mean a connection to a data center will make a renewable project more popular. Not to mention data centers in rural areas face complaints that overlap with prominent arguments against solar and wind – like noise and impacts to water and farmland – which is leading to unfavorable outcomes for renewable energy developers more broadly when a community turns against a data center.

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Q&A

How the Wind Industry Can Fight Back

A conversation with Chris Moyer of Echo Communications

The Q&A subject.
Heatmap Illustration

Today’s conversation is with Chris Moyer of Echo Communications, a D.C.-based communications firm that focuses on defending zero- and low-carbon energy and federal investments in climate action. Moyer, a veteran communications adviser who previously worked on Capitol Hill, has some hot takes as of late about how he believes industry and political leaders have in his view failed to properly rebut attacks on solar and wind energy, in addition to the Inflation Reduction Act. On Tuesday he sent an email blast out to his listserv – which I am on – that boldly declared: “The Wind Industry’s Strategy is Failing.”

Of course after getting that email, it shouldn’t surprise readers of The Fight to hear I had to understand what he meant by that, and share it with all of you. So here goes. The following conversation has been abridged and lightly edited for clarity.

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