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“On a more level playing field, clean energy will prove its superiority.”
Many climate advocates are revolting against Senator Joe Manchin’s permitting deal over its oil and gas industry giveaways. But not all of them. Among the climate wonk set, there’s a growing chorus that supports the bill and says the fossil fuel language is a pill worth swallowing.
The almost-retired West Virginia senator’s bill — which was voted out of committee yesterday with a bipartisan 15-4 vote — would grease the skids for approving new transmission and renewables projects in plenty of ways. It would also strengthen fossil fuel leasing mandates and, in the activists’ view, hinder efforts to wind down permitting for liquified natural gas export terminals.
Little analysis of this specific bill’s climate impacts has been made public, and any modeling would be highly variable. Yet clearly lawmakers have seen at least some research: During the hearing on the permitting bill, Democratic Senator Martin Heinrich claimed the oil and gas provisions would “likely increase emissions on a scale of less than” 160 million tons of CO2, while other parts of the bill would reduce emissions by 2 to 3 billion tons of CO2, he said.
Academics and consultants I spoke with agree with Heinrich’s take: The positive climate impacts of the pieces hastening permits crucial to the energy transition may easily outweigh the carbon dioxide and methane emissions impacts of the fossil fuel language. As I began to unpack the various points of view and the disparity between climate wonks and the many activists opposed to the bill, it became clear to me that the fissures between these two camps speak to a broad challenge facing the energy transition. Bipartisan compromise on climate change through the U.S. government’s system almost by necessity requires capitulation to fossil fuels, which violates the principles of many grassroots activists.
“Truth is, the U.S. is not ready to talk about seriously scaling down oil and gas production,” Noah Gordon, acting co-director for sustainability, climate, and geopolitics at the Carnegie Endowment for World Peace, told me via email. (Gordon said he “supports the bill despite reservations.”)
“The only way to make that conversation possible is to massively boost clean energy and change the balance of political power,” Gordon said. “In 2024, this is feasible only through all-energy-is-welcome bills like Manchin-Barrasso. On a more level playing field, clean energy will prove its superiority.”
Take the language on LNG. Yes, it would alter the course of an effort led by youth climate campaigners under the Biden administration to curtail approvals for pending LNG export terminals, which could have clear downsides for the communities surrounding these projects. But on a global scale, as my colleague Matthew Zeitlin has written, the climate impacts of American LNG really depend on where it’s going and what it’s used for. To make matters slightly more opaque, some environmentalists who claim the climate impacts of LNG exports would be catastrophic are referencing science that has yet to be peer-reviewed and is still disputed, as Zeitlin noted.
Or take the bill’s language on coal. If enacted, the legislation would require the government to adhere to strict deadlines on processing applications to lease coal — but it wouldn’t force the government to decide one way or the other on those applications. According to Jenny Harbine, an attorney for Earthjustice (which is opposed to the permitting bill), this language would not impact the Biden administration’s efforts to wind down coal leasing in the Powder River Basin, the nation’s most active coal mining region.
“This bill doesn’t appear to change that decision,” Harbine told me yesterday. “It appears to leave largely discretion in the hands of the Secretary to not lease.”
All of this is not to say that the climate wonks who support the bill enjoy the fossil fuel language — they’re quite sympathetic to the opposition’s rationale. But they also don’t think it’ll be the end of the world; meanwhile, the current permitting regime is just not cutting it. Sources pointed me to a study from the consultancy Evolved Energy Research, which found that about half the potential emissions reductions from the Inflation Reduction Act are essentially dependent on faster deployment and siting of renewables and interregional transmission.
“In terms of overall leverage on climate, the growth of domestic clean sources enabled by transmission really outweighs everything else,” Rob Gramlich, president of Grid Strategies LLC, told me. “All of it is additional, whereas the fossil supply here is displacing fossil supply elsewhere, so a one-for-one deal … is a net carbon benefit because of that dynamic.”
Princeton professor and energy systems expert Jesse Jenkins (who is also a co-host of Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast) told me the same. Curbing oil and gas leasing on federal land would also not necessarily lower supply, as such drilling may just move to non-federal lands or other countries. Without addressing demand, there’s always the risk that leasing restrictions fail to substantially lower CO2 emissions. Jenkins nodded to a Resources for the Future study that quantified emissions from oil and gas leasing and found even a ban on new oil and gas leasing “would not on its own achieve net-zero emissions from oil and gas on federal lands by 2040,” stating much more action would be necessary — such as carbon sequestration, modifications to existing leases, and other measures.
“We can’t choke off the world’s supply for fossil fuels, but we can beat it with cheaper, better clean energy technologies,” he said.
Ultimately, the Manchin permitting deal — which may or may not become law any time soon — could reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions over time, if the studies and charts are to be believed. That would be a great thing for the planet. But that’s not really why so many climate activists are against the bill. These people see the end of the petroleum sector as the paramount goal and refuse to settle for legislation that enshrines future fossil fuel production into law, even if the benefits to renewable energy deployment may be greater.
There are key differences between the kind of deal renewable energy developers and decarbonization-focused academics would enjoy and legislation that activists will accept, Tony Dutzik, associate director and senior policy analyst with the think tank Frontier Group, explained to me. Dutzik told me he works with environmental non-profits who are against the bill. “I’ve known so many people over the years, and the thing they wanted to do is to be on the front end of the clean energy transition, and dedicate their lives to that for very good reasons … But if you are a trade group or developer that is working on clean energy, that piece of the puzzle is your focus.”
Dutzik compared the IRA and the permitting legislation to longstanding environmental statutes like the Clean Air Act, which acted as a boundary on the market to reduce pollution. “Capitalism mobilizes an incredible amount of resources and can move incredibly quickly when it is given the incentives to do so,” he said, “but the thing that it hasn’t done is to set that boundary or that standard.”
It’s clear to me from my conversations with climate activists that there’s a lingering frustration about the American pro-market approach to climate. The IRA, for example, did very little to penalize fossil fuel production or greenhouse gas emissions at all — it took an all-carrot, no-stick approach to industrial policy. Something resembling a carbon tax is nowhere close to happening, unless you count the nascent bid to enact a carbon border adjustment mechanism. And regulatory efforts to clamp down on greenhouse gasses are getting stymied by courts.
“Essentially, what you wind up with — and this will be the core of the disagreement,” Dutzik said, “is you wind up with more of everything. And if you wind up with more of everything, that may get you more clean energy, but it doesn’t necessarily solve the climate problem, and it certainly doesn’t solve the problems that are experienced by people who live near fossil fuel production, transportation and consumption. And it doesn’t necessarily get at the relationship between fossil fuels and the natural world.”
Jenkins noted similar divisions occurred with the IRA, which had its own capitulations to fossil fuel.
“There’s a chunk of the climate campaigning groups [who believes] we win by raising the cost of permitting and transactions, and legal suits, and choking off supplies of fossil fuels. There’s another group of people — the people who helped get the IRA passed — who believe we win by displacing fossil fuels.”
In Jenkins’ view, the old way of curtailing fossil energy by choking off supplies may not really apply to a post-IRA world. Before the IRA, it made more sense to invest in “dirty energy” than clean energy, when now “the opposite is true.” This “tips the calculus of how you view this process from a climate perspective.” And it may be better to compromise and quicken new renewable energy deployment in the hopes it further diminishes interest in fossil fuel leasing.
“This is at the heart of it. I don’t think there’s any way we can create a legal regime that doesn’t apply something like parity across [all] different kinds of energy infrastructure,” Jenkins said. “You’re not going to get that in a bipartisan bill.”
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A conversation with Mary King, a vice president handling venture strategy at Aligned Capital
Today’s conversation is with Mary King, a vice president handling venture strategy at Aligned Capital, which has invested in developers like Summit Ridge and Brightnight. I reached out to Mary as a part of the broader range of conversations I’ve had with industry professionals since it has become clear Republicans in Congress will be taking a chainsaw to the Inflation Reduction Act. I wanted to ask her about investment philosophies in this trying time and how the landscape for putting capital into renewable energy has shifted. But Mary’s quite open with her view: these technologies aren’t going anywhere.
The following conversation has been lightly edited and abridged for clarity.
How do you approach working in this field given all the macro uncertainties?
It’s a really fair question. One, macro uncertainties aside, when you look at the levelized cost of energy report Lazard releases it is clear that there are forms of clean energy that are by far the cheapest to deploy. There are all kinds of reasons to do decarbonizing projects that aren’t clean energy generation: storage, resiliency, energy efficiency – this is massively cost saving. Like, a lot of the methane industry [exists] because there’s value in not leaking methane. There’s all sorts of stuff you can do that you don’t need policy incentives for.
That said, the policy questions are unavoidable. You can’t really ignore them and I don’t want to say they don’t matter to the industry – they do. It’s just, my belief in this being an investable asset class and incredibly important from a humanity perspective is unwavering. That’s the perspective I’ve been taking. This maybe isn’t going to be the most fun market, investing in decarbonizing things, but the sense of purpose and the belief in the underlying drivers of the industry outweigh that.
With respect to clean energy development, and the investment class working in development, how have things changed since January and the introduction of these bills that would pare back the IRA?
Both investors and companies are worried. There’s a lot more political and policy engagement. We’re seeing a lot of firms and organizations getting involved. I think companies are really trying to find ways to structure around the incentives. Companies and developers, I think everybody is trying to – for lack of a better term – future-proof themselves against the worst eventuality.
One of the things I’ve been personally thinking about is that the way developers generally make money is, you have a financier that’s going to buy a project from them, and the financier is going to have a certain investment rate of return, or IRR. So ITC [investment tax credit] or no ITC, that IRR is going to be the same. And the developer captures the difference.
My guess – and I’m not incredibly confident yet – but I think the industry just focuses on being less ITC dependent. Finding the projects that are juicier regardless of the ITC.
The other thing is that as drafts come out for what we’re expecting to see, it’s gone from bad to terrible to a little bit better. We’ll see what else happens as we see other iterations.
How are you evaluating companies and projects differently today, compared to how you were maybe before it was clear the IRA would be targeted?
Let’s say that we’re looking at a project developer and they have a series of projects. Right now we’re thinking about a few things. First, what assets are these? It’s not all ITC and PTC. A lot of it is other credits. Going through and asking, how at risk are these credits? And then, once we know how at risk those credits are we apply it at a project level.
This also raises a question of whether you’re going to be able to find as many projects. Is there going to be as much demand if you’re not able to get to an IRR? Is the industry going to pay that?
What gives you optimism in this moment?
I’ll just look at the levelized cost of energy and looking at the unsubsidized tables say these are the projects that make sense and will still get built. Utility-scale solar? Really attractive. Some of these next-gen geothermal projects, I think those are going to be cost effective.
The other thing is that the cost of battery storage is just declining so rapidly and it’s continuing to decline. We are as a country expected to compare the current price of these technologies in perpetuity to the current price of oil and gas, which is challenging and where the technologies have not changed materially. So we’re not going to see the cost decline we’re going to see in renewables.
And more news around renewable energy conflicts.
1. Nantucket County, Massachusetts – The SouthCoast offshore wind project will be forced to abandon its existing power purchase agreements with Massachusetts and Rhode Island if the Trump administration’s wind permitting freeze continues, according to court filings submitted last week.
2. Tippacanoe County, Indiana – This county has now passed a full solar moratorium but is looking at grandfathering one large utility-scale project: RWE and Geenex’s Rainbow Trout solar farm.
3. Columbia County, Wisconsin – An Alliant wind farm named after this county is facing its own pushback as the developer begins the state permitting process and is seeking community buy-in through public info hearings.
4. Washington County, Arkansas – It turns out even mere exploration for a wind project out in this stretch of northwest Arkansas can get you in trouble with locals.
5. Wagoner County, Oklahoma – A large NextEra solar project has been blocked by county officials despite support from some Republican politicians in the Sooner state.
6. Skagit County, Washington – If you’re looking for a ray of developer sunshine on a cloudy day, look no further than this Washington State county that’s bucking opposition to a BESS facility.
7. Orange County, California – A progressive Democratic congressman is now opposing a large battery storage project in his district and talking about battery fire risks, the latest sign of a populist revolt in California against BESS facilities.
Permitting delays and missed deadlines are bedeviling solar developers and activist groups alike. What’s going on?
It’s no longer possible to say the Trump administration is moving solar projects along as one of the nation’s largest solar farms is being quietly delayed and even observers fighting the project aren’t sure why.
Months ago, it looked like Trump was going to start greenlighting large-scale solar with an emphasis out West. Agency spokespeople told me Trump’s 60-day pause on permitting solar projects had been lifted and then the Bureau of Land Management formally approved its first utility-scale project under this administration, Leeward Renewable Energy’s Elisabeth solar project in Arizona, and BLM also unveiled other solar projects it “reasonably” expected would be developed in the area surrounding Elisabeth.
But the biggest indicator of Trump’s thinking on solar out west was Esmeralda 7, a compilation of solar project proposals in western Nevada from NextEra, Invenergy, Arevia, ConnectGen, and other developers that would, if constructed, produce at least 6 gigawatts of power. My colleague Matthew Zeitlin was first to report that BLM officials updated the timetable for fully permitting the expansive project to say it would complete its environmental review by late April and be completely finished with the federal bureaucratic process by mid-July. BLM told Matthew that the final environmental impact statement – the official study completing the environmental review – would be published “in the coming days or week or so.”
More than two months later, it’s crickets from BLM on Esmeralda 7. BLM never released the study that its website as of today still says should’ve come out in late April. I asked BLM for comment on this and a spokesperson simply told me the agency “does not have any updates to share on this project at this time.”
This state of quiet stasis is not unique to Esmeralda; for example, Leeward has yet to receive a final environmental impact statement for its 700 mega-watt Copper Rays solar project in Nevada’s Pahrump Valley that BLM records state was to be published in early May. Earlier this month, BLM updated the project timeline for another Nevada solar project – EDF’s Bonanza – to say it would come out imminently, too, but nothing’s been released.
Delays happen in the federal government and timelines aren’t always met. But on its face, it is hard for stakeholders I speak with out in Nevada to take these months-long stutters as simply good faith bureaucratic hold-ups. And it’s even making work fighting solar for activists out in the desert much more confusing.
For Shaaron Netherton, executive director of the conservation group Friends of the Nevada Wilderness, these solar project permitting delays mean an uncertain future. Friends of the Nevada Wilderness is a volunteer group of ecology protection activists that is opposing Esmeralda 7 and filed its first lawsuit against Greenlink West, a transmission project that will connect the massive solar constellation to the energy grid. Netherton told me her group may sue against the approval of Esmeralda 7… but that the next phase of their battle against the project is a hazy unknown.
“It’s just kind of a black hole,” she told me of the Esmeralda 7 permitting process. “We will litigate Esmeralda 7 if we have to, and we were hoping that with this administration there would be a little bit of a pause. There may be. That’s still up in the air.”
I’d like to note that Netherton’s organization has different reasons for opposition than I normally write about in The Fight. Instead of concerns about property values or conspiracies about battery fires, her organization and a multitude of other desert ecosystem advocates are trying to avoid a future where large industries of any type harm or damage one of the nation’s most biodiverse and undeveloped areas.
This concern for nature has historically motivated environmental activism. But it’s also precisely the sort of advocacy that Trump officials have opposed tooth-and-nail, dating back to the president’s previous term, when advocates successfully opposed his rewrite of Endangered Species Act regulations. This reason – a motivation to hippie-punch, so to speak – is a reason why I hardly expect species protection to be enough of a concern to stop solar projects in their tracks under Trump, at least for now. There’s also the whole “energy dominance” thing, though Trump has been wishy-washy on adhering to that goal.
Patrick Donnelly, great basin director at the Center for Biological Diversity, agrees that this is a period of confusion but not necessarily an end to solar permitting on BLM land.
“[Solar] is moving a lot slower than it was six months ago, when it was coming at a breakneck pace,” said Patrick Donnelly of the Center for Biological Diversity. “How much of that is ideological versus 15-20% of the agencies taking early retirement and utter chaos inside the agencies? I’m not sure. But my feeling is it’s less ideological. I really don’t think Trump’s going to just start saying no to these energy projects.”