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How Biden can enlist the armed forces to build power lines and fix America’s electric grid
After a summer of extreme heat, deadly wildfires, flash floods, and other foreboding harbingers of a warming planet, President Biden is once again facing pressure to (officially) declare a climate emergency. Activists have pressed him to unlock emergency powers to reinstate a ban on crude oil exports and suspend offshore drilling leases, among other measures.
But there’s another, less remarked emergency lever Biden could pull that may prove even more consequential for our clean energy transition: empowering the military to help expedite the construction of electrical grid infrastructure we need to rapidly decarbonize.
The grid is the foundation of our strategy to take on climate change. The plan is to “electrify everything” — from cars, to homes, to factories — and to run everything on electricity generated from clean energy sources like wind and solar instead of fossil fuels. But that means we’ll need to upgrade the grid to meet increased demand for electricity, and build more transmission lines to carry clean energy from the windiest and sunniest parts of the country to major population centers.
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We’re in trouble on both fronts. Our antiquated grid has too little capacity to accommodate all of the wind and solar energy facilities we need. That has left many proposed renewable projects in a lurch waiting years to come online, while those that can connect contend with “congestion” from an overloaded system. Plus, a gauntlet of permits and multistate regulatory approvals means that building new large transmission lines can take a decade or more. A new transmission line to carry primarily renewable energy from New Mexico to California and Arizona just got the okay to start building from the Bureau of Land Management this spring, seventeen years after it was first proposed.
We need to build out the grid — and do so quickly — if we have any hope of meeting our climate goals. The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law invested billions to modernize the grid, but Congress has done little to address the regulatory roadblocks that make building so arduous. Meanwhile, the Biden administration is pursuing regulatory action to help.
However, a surprising source of emergency power could bolster the administration’s tools to ready the electrical grid for the new green energy era. A 1982 law called the Military Construction Codification Act states that when the president declares a national emergency “that requires use of the armed forces, the Secretary of Defense, without regard to any other provision of law, may undertake military construction projects … not otherwise authorized by law that are necessary to support such use of the armed forces.”
This authority could be used to improve and expand the electrical grid, according to a law review article by Professor (and former Navy commander) Mark Nevitt at Emory University School of Law. Climate-related natural disasters have increasingly required the use of the military for rescue and relief operations: in 2022 alone, half of all National Guard members were involved in lifesaving responses in the wake of wildfires, storms, and floods. And extreme weather and grid instability are a threat to military operations: military bases don’t have their own power plants, and draw energy from the grid like everyone else. Bases have gone dark and been damaged by floods and wildfires in recent years, and many have been running drills to prepare for extended power outages from climate disasters. A stronger, climate-resilient grid is necessary for a military summoned to respond to the ravages of climate change.
This gives the administration “credible but untested authority,” Nevitt told me, to invoke a military need to enhance our electrical grid under a climate emergency. That authority could be used, for example, to upgrade sections of the grid directly adjacent to the country’s 450 domestic military installations.
Because each state has at least one military installation, the Biden administration would have ample flexibility in picking strategic locations to make grid upgrades. While building far-flung power lines with little connection to a military site may stretch the bounds of the law, the interconnected nature of the grid should give the administration some leeway — for instance, to help build a transmission line that feeds into a military-adjacent portion of the grid to provide that base with more secure and abundant access to power. By way of example, the Continental Connector — a proposed 500-mile transmission line that aims to unite two grid systems by linking Kansas with New Mexico by the 2030s — could help shore up energy reliability for nearby military sites like Kirtland Air Force Base, and thereby could warrant emergency military construction assistance.
While the primary purpose would be to improve grid reliability for the military, those upgrades would of course also benefit the surrounding communities. That in turn would help strengthen our overall capacity for clean energy deployment.
This emergency construction authority was most notoriously invoked by President Trump in an attempt to build his border wall. In 2019, Trump declared a national emergency on the southern border, and instructed the Defense Department to use emergency military construction authority to begin building several sections of a border wall. This order was ultimately rejected in court on the grounds that the border wall — which was to be located hundreds of miles away from the closest military base — was not necessary to support the use of the armed forces, and was not truly a military-related project.
It’s possible that Biden’s green grid may too run into a buzzsaw in the federal courts. But building energy infrastructure that will be used by the military seems much more tethered to the spirit of the law than constructing a distant anti-immigrant barricade. Moreover, military prerogatives to address a legitimate need for a reliable energy supply ought to get deference from the courts. Biden could also opt for a narrower emergency declaration less sweeping than climate change but more likely to survive in the courts, like grid resilience — an emergency that is particularly salient in the wake of the devastating Maui fires.
Biden also could turbocharge emergency grid construction by bypassing normal regulatory requirements. The Military Construction Codification Act empowers the Defense Department to act “without regard to any other provision of law,” giving it authority to overcome other impediments in federal, state, and local law (much like similar preemptive language in the Defense Production Act that I’ve written about). After Trump’s border wall order, the Defense Department issued a memorandum initiating construction “without regard to any other provision of law that could impede such expeditious construction in response to the national emergency,” including “the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, ... [and] the Clean Water Act.” Taking the same tack could expedite grid construction, but Biden would face major pressure from political allies to forgo this power. Yet at minimum, an emergency declaration would streamline the NEPA process and trigger waivers and exemptions under other environmental laws.
We can’t electrify our way to net-zero emissions without a grid up to the task. So building that grid is one of the most pressing tasks we face. If Biden does take the step of formally declaring a climate emergency, putting the might of the U.S. military toward that critical mission would be an awfully good response.
Read more about the electric grid:
An Eye-Opening Projection About America’s Clean Energy Future
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Did a battery plant disaster in California spark a PR crisis on the East Coast?
Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.
Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs where development is actually happening, capturing rapt attention from other residents as well as members of the media. In Staten Island, a petition against a NineDot Energy battery project has received more than 1,300 signatures in a little over two months. Two weeks ago, advocates – backed by representatives of local politicians including Rep. Nicole Mallitokis – swarmed a public meeting on the project, getting a local community board to vote unanimously against the project.
According to Heatmap Pro’s proprietary modeling of local opinion around battery storage, there are likely twice as many strong opponents than strong supporters in the area:
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Yesterday, leaders in the Queens community of Hempstead enacted a year-long ban on BESS for at least a year after GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, other local politicians, and a slew of aggrieved residents testified in favor of a moratorium. The day before, officials in the Long Island town of Southampton said at a public meeting they were ready to extend their battery storage ban until they enshrined a more restrictive development code – even as many energy companies testified against doing so, including NineDot and solar plus storage developer Key Capture Energy. Yonkers also recently extended its own battery moratorium.
This flurry of activity follows the Moss Landing battery plant fire in California, a rather exceptional event caused by tech that was extremely old and a battery chemistry that is no longer popular in the sector. But opponents of battery storage don’t care – they’re telling their friends to stop the community from becoming the next Moss Landing. The longer this goes on without a fulsome, strident response from the industry, the more communities may rally against them. Making matters even worse, as I explained in The Fight earlier this year, we’re seeing battery fire concerns impact solar projects too.
“This is a huge problem for solar. If [fires] start regularly happening, communities are going to say hey, you can’t put that there,” Derek Chase, CEO of battery fire smoke detection tech company OnSight Technologies, told me at Intersolar this week. “It’s going to be really detrimental.”
I’ve long worried New York City in particular may be a powder keg for the battery storage sector given its omnipresence as a popular media environment. If it happens in New York, the rest of the world learns about it.
I feel like the power of the New York media environment is not lost on Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella, a de facto leader of the anti-BESS movement in the boroughs. Last fall I interviewed Fossella, whose rhetorical strategy often leans on painting Staten Island as an overburdened community. (At least 13 battery storage projects have been in the works in Staten Island according to recent reporting. Fossella claims that is far more than any amount proposed elsewhere in the city.) He often points to battery blazes that happen elsewhere in the country, as well as fears about lithium-ion scooters that have caught fire. His goal is to enact very large setback distance requirements for battery storage, at a minimum.
“You can still put them throughout the city but you can’t put them next to people’s homes – what happens if one of these goes on fire next to a gas station,” he told me at the time, chalking the wider city government’s reluctance to capitulate on batteries to a “political problem.”
Well, I’m going to hold my breath for the real political problem in waiting – the inevitable backlash that happens when Mallitokis, D’Esposito, and others take this fight to Congress and the national stage. I bet that’s probably why American Clean Power just sent me a notice for a press briefing on battery safety next week …
And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state.
2. Logan County, Ohio – Staff for the Ohio Power Siting Board have recommended it reject Open Road Renewables’ Grange Solar agrivoltaics project.
3. Bandera County, Texas – On a slightly brighter note for solar, it appears that Pine Gate Renewables’ Rio Lago solar project might just be safe from county restrictions.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, Armoracia Solar is struggling to get necessary permits from Madison County.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington is getting into a public spat with East Kentucky Power Cooperative over solar.
In Michigan, Livingston County is now backing the legal challenge to Michigan’s state permitting primacy law.
On the week’s top news around renewable energy policy.
1. IRA funding freeze update – Money is starting to get out the door, finally: the EPA unfroze most of its climate grant funding it had paused after Trump entered office.
2. Scalpel vs. sledgehammer – House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled Republicans in Congress may take a broader approach to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act than previously expected in tax talks.
3. Endangerment in danger – The EPA is reportedly urging the White House to back reversing its 2009 “endangerment” finding on air pollutants and climate change, a linchpin in the agency’s overall CO2 and climate regulatory scheme.