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Local governments once fought the adoption of wireless communications technology. Then Congress did something.
The landmark Inflation Reduction Act invested some $370 billion toward transitioning the United States to a clean energy economy. Yet turning that spending into actual new energy facilities – getting turbines in the air, and solar arrays on the ground – is another matter.
How many facilities materialize, and how quickly, will hinge on countless permitting processes carried out in cities and towns around the country. And at the hyper-local level, renewable energy developers often meet resistance and drawn-out processes.
If left unchecked, NIMBYism could effectively veto much of the IRA, one project at a time. But fortunately, Congress has a ready-made model to defend their investment: a Clinton-era law that helped bring cellphones to more Americans by partially insulating wireless infrastructure from local resistance. We can do the same thing to ensure that the renewable energy transition is not stonewalled on the ground.
Back in the 1990s, NIMBY opposition was hampering the adoption of then-novel wireless communications technology. Local zoning boards frequently enacted moratoria on new wireless towers, and opponents spread unsubstantiated myths about health risks and complained that the towers were eyesores. This often prevented (or at least delayed) the construction of new towers, which slowed the deployment of cellphone technology. For example, in Georgia, a county commissioner said, “By and large, the towers are ugly, and people don’t want them in their backyards. If folks would stay off their cell phones there would be no need for the towers.” Medina, Washington was one of many cities that enacted multiple moratoria on new cell tower citing; a leading opponent of the cell towers there said, “People are willing to not use their cell phones for three blocks on their way to the grocery store, if that means not having the towers here.”
Rather than let NIMBYism hold back progress, Congress took action. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 passed with overwhelming bipartisan support to “encourage the rapid deployment of new telecommunications technology.” The TCA struck a balance on local permitting and siting: it preserved “the traditional authority of state and local governments to regulate the location, construction, and modification” of wireless towers, but crafted limits on that authority. Under the TCA, local governments can no longer impose regulations tantamount to bans on cell towers. They must issue decisions on proposed towers within a reasonable time, and must support those decisions with “substantial evidence” – in writing. And they cannot turn away projects on the basis of debunked health fears. If a town violates these rules, telecom companies can get an expedited hearing in court.
Congress aimed to let local communities continue to have some say over cell tower siting, but added guardrails to ensure that they couldn’t undermine national imperatives. As Republican Congressman Thomas Bliley, chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, put it at the time: “Nothing is in this bill that prevents a locality … from determining where a cellular pole should be located, but we do want to make sure that this technology is available across the country, that we do not allow a community to say we are not going to have any cellular pole in our locality.”
The TCA paved the way for greater adoption of modern telecommunications technology. Before the law, there were roughly 20,000 wireless towers in the United States and 30 million cellphone users. Six years later, there were nearly 130,000 towers and 130 million users. The TCA continues to reap dividends, such as by neutralizing some of the resistance to the 5G rollout. In 2018, the Federal Communications Commission adopted rules under the TCA to limit the power of localities to obstruct new 5G facilities, constraining the power of cities and towns to block the new sites.
Just as the TCA’s siting rules have helped support the expansion of cellphone networks in the United States, a similar policy could support the expansion of renewable energy. Local permitting has increasingly become a bottleneck for our clean-energy transition. As the Idaho Capital Sun recently observed: “Across the country — from suburban Virginia, rural Michigan, southern Tennessee and the sugar cane fields of Louisiana to the coasts of Maine and New Jersey and the deserts of Nevada — new renewable energy development has drawn heated opposition that has birthed, in many cases, bans, moratoriums and other restrictions[,]” with new wind and solar developments “igniting fierce battles over property rights, loss of farmland, climate change, aesthetics, the merits of renewable power and a host of other concerns.”
A report last year from Columbia University's Sabin Center on Climate Change Law identified 121 local policies restricting renewables development across 31 states, and more than 200 renewables projects challenged across the country – and those numbers are undercounts, according to the Center’s Matthew Eisenson. Common local tactics, the report found, “include moratoria on wind or solar energy development; outright bans on wind or solar energy development; regulations that are so restrictive that they can act as de facto bans on wind or solar energy development; and zoning amendments that are designed to block a specific proposed project.” These local restrictions have been fueled in part by misinformation spread on social media promoting unsupported health and safety concerns around wind and solar farms. Sometimes these groups are literally bankrolled by the oil industry trying to curb the transition from fossil fuels.
Congress could step in to limit localities’ power to obstruct clean energy. Patricia Salkin and Ashira Pelman Ostrow, legal scholars at Albany Law School and Hofstra University, proposed a new legal framework modeled off of the TCA that would outlaw bans and indefinite moratoria on new wind farms, require reasonably fast decisions that are issued in writing and backed by substantial evidence, and create a judicial right of action for wind developers to challenge permitting denials. This would speed up the siting process, and force localities to keep their doors open to renewable energy. And it would incentivize more localities to grant wind citing requests by imposing litigation risk on decisions denying projects.
This framework could provide the foundation for a new Renewable Energy Siting Act – one that, unlike some other permitting reform proposals, would streamline the process for approving renewables only, without sacrificing community protections against fossil fuels. It could also be strengthened. For one, it should apply to other forms of clean energy beyond wind, including solar. The timeline for issuing a decision on a project could be specified at a fixed deadline, like 90 days.
The “substantial evidence” standard could also be bolstered to exclude common NIMBY complaints. In a 2015 Supreme Court case involving the TCA, at least one Supreme Court justice – Justice Alito – said that a permitting decision rejecting a cell tower based solely on aesthetics or community compatibility would count as “substantial evidence.” In adapting the TCA model for renewable energy, Congress should require permitting decisions to be supported by evidence that is both substantial and credible. As it did for fears over radiofrequency emissions from cell towers, Congress could explicitly rule out certain disproven or baseless objections around health, safety, and aesthetics.
Congress could also crack down on extreme and prohibitive “setbacks” – the distance that a structure must be from any neighboring properties – that some states and municipalities impose on renewable facilities. In Ohio, wind turbines must be built at least 1,125 feet from the nearest property line. (Meanwhile, the state allows new oil and gas wells just 100 feet from homes.) That has made new wind development in the state a practical impossibility. Congress could let states and localities take reasonable precautions to protect nearby properties (in the unlikely event that a turbine falls over), while setting a maximum setback rule at perhaps 1.5 times the turbine’s height – a setback of around 450 feet for a typical utility-scale tower.
By design, this approach protects national goals while preserving a role for state and local governments. Though given the climate stakes and the federal dollars at risk, some might understandably want to hand more permitting authority to national agencies. But that risks provoking a backlash, and may also lead federal authorities to miss legitimate local concerns. Putting the federal government in charge of permitting and siting decisions could also trigger federal environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act and other laws, further slowing deployment.
Though without a new law from Congress reining in local permitting, the Biden administration may have little choice but to resort to targeting specific projects to speed them up. Existing authority under the Defense Production Act allows the federal government to override other laws – including permitting laws – to expedite renewable energy development. The administration has also reportedly started leveraging certain grants to reward states and localities that agree to streamline permitting for projects receiving federal funding. Similar conditions could be attached to some Inflation Reduction Act funding too.
With the House under Republican control, the odds of congressional action seem admittedly slim. But red states and conservative districts stand to benefit mightily from IRA spending given the geographic skew of wind and solar energy toward rural areas in the middle of the country. And providing more national uniformity in permitting processes is fundamentally a pro-business, deregulatory act that will provide more certainty to energy developers. Perhaps those dynamics can produce a bipartisan coalition for congressional action like the one that enacted the TCA.
As we build our way out of the climate crisis, local communities deserve a say in how and where we build, but not a veto. With the climate clock ticking, we can ill afford to run out that clock with undue delays and frivolous objections. Congress can strike the right balance here, and help clean energy proliferate just as quickly as cellphones did.
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The Loan Programs Office is good for more than just nuclear funding.
That China has a whip hand over the rare earths mining and refining industry is one of the few things Washington can agree on.
That’s why Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, found it “astounding”when he read in the Washington Post this week that the White House was trying to figure out on the fly what to do about China restricting exports of rare earth metals in response to President Trump’s massive tariffs on the country’s imports.
Rare earth metals have a wide variety of applications, including for magnets in medical technology, defense, and energy productssuch as wind turbines and electric motors.
Jacquez told me there has been “years of work, including by the first Trump administration, that has pointed to this exact case as the worst-case scenario that could happen in an escalation with China.” It stands to reason, then, that experienced policymakers in the Trump administration might have been mindful of forestalling this when developing their tariff plan. But apparently not.
“The lines of attack here are numerous,” Jacquez said. “The fact that the National Economic Council and others are apparently just thinking about this for the first time is pretty shocking.”
And that’s not the only thing the Trump administration is doing that could hamper American access to rare earths and critical minerals.
Though China still effectively controls the global pipeline for most critical minerals (a broader category that includes rare earths as well as more commonly known metals and minerals such as lithium and cobalt), the U.S. has been at work for at least the past five years developing its own domestic supply chain. Much of that work has fallen to the Department of Energy, whose Loan Programs Office has funded mining and processing facilities, and whose Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains hasfunded and overseen demonstration projects for rare earths and critical minerals mining and refining.
The LPO is in line for dramatic cuts, as Heatmap has reported. So, too, are other departments working on rare earths, including the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. In its zeal to slash the federal government, the Trump administration may have to start from scratch in its efforts to build up a rare earths supply chain.
The Department of Energy did not reply to a request for comment.
This vulnerability to China has been well known in Washington for years, including by the first Trump administration.
“Our dependence on one country, the People's Republic of China (China), for multiple critical minerals is particularly concerning,” then-President Trump said in a 2020 executive order declaring a “national emergency” to deal with “our Nation's undue reliance on critical minerals.” At around the same time, the Loan Programs Office issued guidance “stating a preference for projects related to critical mineral” for applicants for the office’s funding, noting that “80 percent of its rare earth elements directly from China.” Using the Defense Production Act, the Trump administration also issued a grant to the company operating America's sole rare earth mine, MP Materials, to help fund a processing facility at the site of its California mine.
The Biden administration’s work on rare earths and critical minerals was almost entirely consistent with its predecessor’s, just at a greater scale and more focused on energy. About a month after taking office, President Bidenissued an executive order calling for, among other things, a Defense Department report “identifying risks in the supply chain for critical minerals and other identified strategic materials, including rare earth elements.”
Then as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the Biden administration increased funding for LPO, which supported a number of critical minerals projects. It also funneled more money into MP Materials — including a $35 million contract from the Department of Defense in 2022 for the California project. In 2024, it awarded the company a competitive tax credit worth $58.5 million to help finance construction of its neodymium-iron-boron magnet factory in Texas. That facilitybegan commercial operation earlier this year.
The finished magnets will be bought by General Motors for its electric vehicles. But even operating at full capacity, it won’t be able to do much to replace China’s production. The MP Metals facility is projected to produce 1,000 tons of the magnets per year.China produced 138,000 tons of NdFeB magnets in 2018.
The Trump administration is not averse to direct financial support for mining and minerals projects, but they seem to want to do it a different way. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has proposed using a sovereign wealth fund to invest in critical mineral mines. There is one big problem with that plan, however: the U.S. doesn’t have one (for the moment, at least).
“LPO can invest in mining projects now,” Jacquez told me. “Cutting 60% of their staff and the experts who work on this is not going to give certainty to the business community if they’re looking to invest in a mine that needs some government backstop.”
And while the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act remains very much in doubt, the subsidies it provided for electric vehicles, solar, and wind, along with domestic content requirements have been a major source of demand for critical minerals mining and refining projects in the United States.
“It’s not something we’re going to solve overnight,” Jacquez said. “But in the midst of a maximalist trade with China, it is something we will have to deal with on an overnight basis, unless and until there’s some kind of de-escalation or agreement.”
A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.