Renewable Energy Has a Swing Voter Problem

In Texas, the Oak Run Solar Project would have been a slam dunk.

Developers would install 800 megawatts of solar panels — enough to power 800,000 homes — across nine square miles of unused land. It would devote some of its acreage to new farming practices that incorporate solar panels. And it would sell its electricity cheaply — and profitably — because it was near the state capital and because it could take advantage of a pre-existing onsite connection to the regional power grid.

But Oak Run wasn’t proposed in Texas. It was proposed in Ohio, and that means it has faced enormous opposition. Ohio has some of the country’s strictest restrictions on solar development, and 10 counties have blocked solar development outright.

Although Madison County, where Oak Run was proposed, is not one of them, the blowback to the project cost a local Republican county commissioner his job. Oak Run was eventually approved by the state’s power siting board earlier this year, but its opponents are now appealing that decision in the state’s Supreme Court.

Madison County, Ohio, also illustrates the political transformation that has revolutionized the upper Midwest. The predominantly rural county near the state’s capital, Columbus, has favored Republicans since the 1960s. But in recent decades it has swung hard to the right. In 2008, Barack Obama won nearly 40% of the county’s vote. Eight years later, Hillary Clinton picked up just 27%.

These two facts may seem like they have little to do with each other. But they point to one of the biggest trends in clean energy development across the country: The counties that voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and then Donald Trump in 2016 are some of the worst places in the country to permit and build renewable projects.

The size of a county’s swing from 2008 to 2016 is one of the biggest predictors of whether a proposed wind or solar project will be contested or blocked, according to a new Heatmap Pro analysis of more than 8,500 projects and local policies around the country.

The magnitude of that swing is by far the most important political variable to emerge from Heatmap Pro’s analysis of more than 60 risk factors influencing community support or opposition to renewable projects. It is more strongly associated with a given project’s success than whether a county votes for Democratic or Republican candidates overall.

The only variables that are more closely correlated than the 2008-to-2016 swing are fundamental measures of a region’s population or local economy, such as its median income, racial demographics, or dominant industries. Towns and regions that heavily depend on farming, for instance, have become particularly reluctant to accept new solar projects in recent years.

Heatmap Pro’s analysis focused not only on whether a county’s residents support wind or solar projects in theory, but also on whether renewable projects proposed in the area are canceled, contested, or exposed to political turbulence. It surveyed more than 7,000 wind and solar projects proposed and built across the United States since the 1990s.

Many of the counties with the largest Obama-to-Trump swings have passed proposals meant to limit renewable development. Vermillion County in Indiana — where more than a quarter of voters swung from Obama to Trump — has an extensive set of restrictions on new solar projects. Solar projects in Elk County, Pennsylvania, which saw a similar swing, have also turned out against solar projects using up “prime farmland.”

Why 2008 to 2016?

There are a few reasons why the Obama-to-Trump swing might be associated with more opposition to renewables.

In 2008, solar and wind were still frontier technologies and were not price-competitive with fossil fuels. Although vaguely associated with Democrats, politicians on both sides of the aisles championed wind and solar so as to wean the country off foreign oil.

But in the following decade, the U.S. increased its solar capacity by roughly 100-fold, while it has more than doubled its installed wind capacity.. Today, solar and wind energy are major features of the electricity system, and many Republicans have openly embraced fossil fuels and cast doubt on the value of cleaner alternatives.

To be sure, the Obama-to-Trump swing was influenced by other social and economic factors, as well as a state’s specific political environment. Leah Stokes, a UC Santa Barbara political scientist who has studied the growing local opposition to wind farms, told me that the correlation with Obama-Trump voters may originate from Trump’s dominance of the upper Midwest in 2016. Because a small group of anti-renewable advocates can change an entire region’s policies, that could lead to more opposition to renewables in one part of the country or another.

“Is there a person, or a network of people, who are going place by place pushing these anti-solar and wind local laws? That would lead to a geographic concentration,” she said.

Even within individual counties, the electorate wasn’t the same in 2016 as it was in 2008. Throughout the 2010s, tens of millions of Americans moved around the country, with the largest net change moving from the Northeast to the South. Cities became younger on average, while rural areas and suburbs became older.

Even within counties, a different set of voters showed up to the polls in each election. One reason why the 2012 election might not be correlated with opposition to renewables is that many voters who voted for Obama in 2008 skipped the next cycle. Those same voters — many of whom were white and working class — showed back up in 2016 and backed Trump.

What is driving the opposition to renewables? Perhaps a county’s swing against renewable energy is happening precisely because voters there are persuadable. From 2008 to 2016, many voters in these counties changed their minds about which candidate or political party to support. As they shifted their stance to the right, they also adopted more seemingly Republican views about wind and solar development. Donald Trump has distinguished himself by his embrace of fossil fuels and climate change skepticism — perhaps as voters come to support him, they also adopt his positions.

What’s interesting, however, is that deep red counties that have not seen a political shift — places that backed, say, McCain and Romney by roughly the same margin as they backed Trump in 2016 — continue to build wind and solar at a good clip. Texas, for instance, is the No. 1 state for renewable deployment. A county’s partisanship, in other words, is not as good a predictor of its opposition to renewables as its swinginess.

Edgar Virguez, an energy systems engineer at the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University, has studied what drives opposition to renewables in North Carolina. He told me that some of the same factors that predict a county’s Trump support — such as its population density and education level — also predict whether that county has enacted a local restriction on renewable energy.

When he and his colleagues studied local policies in North Carolina, they found that lower density and less educated counties “had significantly higher reductions in the land available for solar development” when compared with denser or more educated counties, he said. Once a county has fewer than 35 people per square mile, or when less than 20% of the population has a bachelor’s degree, the number of restrictions on local land use shot up. That’s a problem for decarbonization, he added, because less dense counties also usually have the best and most affordable land available for solar development.

That finding may not hold true in other states. Heatmap, for instance, has found that whiter and more educated counties are more likely to oppose renewables. And to some degree, less dense counties are exactly where you’d expect to see more solar and wind projects get built — and thus more local policies restricting them pop up. But it is nonetheless not great news for advocates, given that a couple of America’s political institutions — namely, the Senate and the Electoral College — favor rural voters or Midwestern states. If the trend takes root, then it could eventually curtail renewable development across the country. That question — and many others — will partly be decided in this week’s presidential election.