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On GOP lockstep on renewables, a wind win, and EPA’s battery bashing

Current conditions: Hurricane Erin’s winds strengthen to 160 miles per hour as the Category 4 storm barrels toward the U.S. East Coast • Temperatures have dropped 20 degrees Fahrenheit in the U.S. Northeast as cooler air and storms sweep in • The death toll in Spain’s wildfires rises to four as the country calls in the military to deal with blazes.

President Donald Trump campaigned last year on slashing electricity rates by as much as half. His administration is now bracing for political blowback from the opposite effect — surging electricity rates as data centers drive up demand for an already limited supply, all while Congress and federal agencies curb development of the fastest-to-deploy solar and wind facilities. “The momentum of the Obama-Biden policies, for sure that destruction is going to continue in the coming years,” Wright told Politico during a visit to wind- and corn-rich Iowa. Yet, he added: “That momentum is pushing prices up right now. And who’s going to get blamed for it? We're going to get blamed because we're in office.”
Rising electricity prices are already emerging as a political issue ahead of upcoming elections, including in the New Jersey’s governor race, where rates soared by 20% in June. According to an Energy Innovation analysis of the effects of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed by Republicans and signed by Trump, wholesale electricity prices could rise by as much as 74% by 2035 as a result of the law.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has ruled that the utilities whose coal and gas-fired power stations are subject to Trump’s order to keep fossil fuel plants open could recoup the cost from ratepayers. The commission couched its decisions — which approved pathways for recovering costs from ratepayers, but did not yet greenlight rate hikes — largely on bureaucratic legal grounds, arguing that it’s “reasonable” to pass the costs along to households and businesses in the places where the electricity is used.
The ruling concerned two separate cases, and the panel’s decision diverged somewhat between them. In a case involving the PJM Interconnection, FERC gave permission to spread the costs around the nation’s largest grid system. In another involving the Midcontinent Independent Systems Operator, the regulator approved concentrating the cost recovery around Michigan, where the coal in question is located. FERC rejected questions about easing the cost to consumers with rebates as “beyond the scope” of the narrow proceedings. As a next step, the utilities that operate the plants will still need to come back to FERC for permission to hike rates on the grounds the two rulings set out.
It could have been worse. The Treasury guidance issued Friday dictating what wind and solar projects will be eligible for federal tax credits could have effectively banned developers from tapping the write-offs set to start phasing out next July. In the weeks before the Internal Revenue Service released its rules, GOP lawmakers from states with thriving wind and solar industries, including Senators John Curtis of Utah and Chuck Grassley of Iowa, publicly lobbied for laxer rules as part of what they pitched as the all-of-the-above “energy dominance” strategy on which Trump campaigned. Grassley went so far as to block two of Trump’s Treasury nominees “until I can be certain that such rules and regulations adhere to the law and congressional intent,” as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin covered earlier in August.
Since the guidance came out on Friday, both Grassley and Curtis have put out positive statements backing the plan. “I appreciate the work of Secretary [Scott] Bessent and his staff in balancing various concerns and perspectives to address the President’s executive order on wind and solar projects,” Curtis said, according to E&E News. Calling renewables “an essential part of the ‘all of the above’ energy equation,” Grassley’s statement said the guidance “seems to offer a viable path forward for the wind and solar industries to continue to meet increased energy demand” and “reflects some of the concerns Congress and industry leaders have raised.”
Danish wind turbine manufacturer Vestas secured one of its largest orders ever — 950 megawatts of turbines — despite the Trump administration’s aggressive pushback against wind projects in the U.S. The backers of the new development, described as a tech giant, haven’t yet been revealed, according to the news site The Danish Dream. But the company’s stock soared on Monday after Treasury’s guidance proved less punitive than some had anticipated. Just last week, Vestas finance chief Jakob Wegge-Larsen told the trade publication Recharge that demand from data centers would buoy the wind industry despite the political headwinds.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin returned to his native Long Island Monday to hold a press conference with opponents of battery energy storage systems who object to the clean energy technology on safety grounds. In a press release, the agency said battery fires “have raised legitimate safety concerns from communities nationwide, especially in metropolitan areas.” New York has relatively little battery capacity compared to states with more wind and solar generation, and just last month put out its first bulk order for energy storage. But Zeldin accused the state of promoting batteries as a “partisan push to fill yet another delusional ‘green goal’” and putting “the safety and well-being of New Yorkers second to their climate change agenda,” and complained that New York had “banned the safe extraction of natural gas.”
In January, a large battery fire ignited at the battery facility of the Moss Landing Power Plant in Monterrey, California, spreading to roughly 100,000 lithium-ion modules at the station. The accident and resulting pollution fallout from the fire has since spurred a nationwide backlash to batteries, as my colleague Jael Holzman has written. Zeldin on Monday also touted new EPA safety guidance for grid-scale batteries, calling on developers to put in place “clear and comprehensive incident response plans.”
The United Kingdom’s famously overcast skies aren’t keeping the country from hitting new solar power milestones. Solar power generation in Britain so far this year surpassed the total for 2024 as panel installations have continued to grow this year. The country has produced more than 14 terawatt-hours of electricity from solar this year as of August 16, about one-third higher than this point last year, according to a Financial Times analysis of University of Sheffield data. That’s enough to power 5.1 million homes for a year, or the entire London Underground for more than a decade.
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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.