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The average anti-wind farm protest is made up of just 23 people.
All across North America, more and more wind farm projects are meeting local opposition.
That’s the conclusion of a new study, published earlier this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that looked at more than 1,400 wind farms proposed in the United States and Canada. The authors found that from 2000 to 2016, local opposition to proposed wind farms got successively worse in both countries.
“In the early 2000s, only around 1 in 10 wind projects was opposed. In 2016, it was closer to one in four,” Leah Stokes, an author of the study and a political-science professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, wrote on the social network X.
The opposition has probably only gotten worse since then, she added.
The study found that opposition to wind farms has increased over time in the United States and Canada.Stokes, et al. PNAS.
Although the study stopped in 2016, a few things stand out about its findings that remain useful to climate debates today.
First, the mechanism of the protests differed between the countries. While Canadians tended to oppose projects by holding physical protests, Americans sought recourse in the courts, using local and federal permitting and environmental rules to block the wind proposals. “In the United States, courts were the dominant mode of opposition, followed by legislation, then physical protest, then letters to the editor,” the authors write.
Second, few of the protests were very large. In the United States, the median anti-wind-farm protest was made up of just 23 people — barely enough to fill a kindergarten classroom. Only about 30 people made up the average Canadian protests. Many of these protests happened in richer, whiter areas, including in the Northeastern United States.
Stokes and her colleagues conclude that reveals what they call “energy privilege,” the ability of rich, largely white communities to stymie the energy transition. By slowing down or blocking wind farms, these protests keep fossil-fuel infrastructure operating for longer, they write. And since that old, dirty infrastructure is often located in poorer or marginalized communities, these protests essentially subject low-income and nonwhite people to more pollution for longer. (That’s the “privilege” part of “energy privilege.”)
I think that’s an important idea, but I would take it one step further. In her X thread, Stokes compared the tiny number of people who make up the anti-wind protests to the more than 50,000 climate activists who filled the streets of New York earlier this month. The anti-renewable movement is small, in other words, while the pro-climate movement is big.
But that mismatch reveals a more profound question about our environmental laws than progressives are always eager to address: How can fewer than two dozen people block a wind farm in the first place? Recent economic research and reporting has shown that the community input process — that is, the meeting-based process at the center of national and local permitting decisions — inherently benefits whiter and wealthier people. And that injustice only gets worse when the threat of a lawsuit is involved.
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That’s because the community-input process exists to serve only those who have the time, money, and expertise to stage a rebellion. You can see that in Washington, D.C., where whiter and wealthier neighborhoods have been able to slow down the construction of affordable housing at a much higher pace than majority Black neighborhoods. Or you can see it in California, where residents have been able to use a state environmental law to block solar farms, public transit, and denser housing. Nevermind “energy privilege” — this is just “permitting privilege.”
Even worse, the longer that a given permitting fight lasts, the more the public seems to grow skeptical of the project in question. In New Jersey, for instance, most people supported the creation of an offshore wind industry for years. But as local fights over the industry grew in salience, and as outside money poured in, the public has soured on the proposal. Today, four in 10 New Jersey residents oppose building new offshore wind farms, according to a recent Monmouth University poll.
There may even be something about the community input that favors opponents of new infrastructure. In 2017, three Boston University economists found that the community-input process may attract people who want to block projects; on average, only 14.6% of people who show up to community meetings tend to favor a given project. That systematic privilege of the status quo is an existential problem for the climate movement. Remember: If the world is to stave off 1.5 degrees Celsius of climate change, it must build new infrastructure at an unprecedented scale.
This amounts to a profound crisis. Right now, America’s legal system gives wealthier, whiter communities — and a very persuasive fossil-fuel industry — a veto to block the clean-energy transition. It’s well past time for climate advocates to ask: Is that democratic? And if it isn’t, what should we do about it?
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The department creates a seemingly impossible new permitting criteria for renewable energy.
The Interior Department released a new secretarial order Friday saying it may no longer issue any permits to a solar or wind project on federal lands unless the agency believes it will generate as much energy per acre as a coal, gas, or nuclear power plant.
Hypothetically, this could kill off any solar or wind project going through permitting that is sited on federal lands, because these facilities would technically be less energy dense than coal, gas, and nuclear plants. This is irrespective of the potential benefits solar and wind may have for the environment or reducing carbon emissions – none of which are mentioned in the order.
“Gargantuan, unreliable, intermittent energy projects hold America back from achieving U.S. Energy Dominance while weighing heavily on the American taxpayer and environment,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement included in a press release announcing the move. “By considering energy generation optimization, the Department will be able to better manage our federal lands, minimize environmental impact, and maximize energy development to further President Donald Trump’s energy goals.”
Here’s how this new regime, which I and many in the energy sector are now suddenly trying to wrap their heads around, is apparently going to work: solar and wind facilities will now be evaluated based on their “capacity density,” which is calculated based on the ratio of acres used for a project compared to its power generation capacity. If a project has a lower “capacity density” than what the department considers to be a “reasonable alternative,” then it may no longer be able to get a permit.
“On a technology-neutral basis,” the order states, “wind and solar projects use disproportionate Federal lands relative to their energy generation when compared to other energy sources, like nuclear, gas, and coal.” The document going on to give an example, claiming that data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration shows an advanced nuclear plant uses less federal acreage than an offshore wind farm and “thus, when there are reasonable alternatives that can generate the same amount of or more energy on far less Federal land, wind and solar projects may unnecessarily and unduly degrade Federal lands.” The order also includes a chart comparing the capacity density of wind and solar facilities to conventional nuclear, gas, and coal, as well as geothermal, and claims that these sources are superior as well. The document does not reference hydropower.
There’s also a whole host of other implications in this order. Crucially, does the Interior expect that by choking off the flow of permits, cities and companies will just pony up to build what the Trump administration considers “reasonable alternatives” instead? Is the federal government going to tell communities in Nevada, for example, that they must suddenly build gas plants in the desert instead of solar farms to meet their increasing energy needs?
In any case, much more is coming, as this order simply built off of a separate secretarial order earlier this week commanding staff to prepare a litany of recommendations on ending alleged “preferential treatment” for solar and wind facilities. In other words hold my beer – and hold onto yours, too.
The U.S. central bank left its interest rate target unchanged for the fifth time in a row.
Interest rate relief isn’t coming anytime soon for renewables. As widely expected, the Federal Reserve chose to keep rates unchanged on Wednesday, despite intense pressure from President Trump and two Republican Fed governors to lower rates.
The Fed maintained the benchmark short term rate at a range of 4.25% to 4.5%. During the press conference that followed the rate announcement, Fed Chair Jerome Powell gave no indication that the board will lower rates at the Fed’s next meeting in September, either. That’s contrary to Trump’s claims to reporters after the meeting. “We have made no decisions about September,” Powell said. “We don’t do that in advance. We’ll be taking that information into consideration and all the other information we get as we make our decision.”
High interest rates are particularly detrimental to renewable energy projects, as my colleague Matthew Zeitlin has noted many times over. The long-term benefit of renewables, of course, is that the wind and the sun are free (and effectively inexhaustible) fuel sources. The short-term tradeoff, however, is that renewables are capital-intensive, requiring high upfront costs to get up and running. The highest proportion of the lifetime cost of a renewable energy generator, such as a wind turbine or a solar farm, is in building it. Elevated interest rates make it that much more difficult to lure investors and borrow the significant capital necessary to build out renewable infrastructure.
“The lack of interest rate relief means that construction loans, which are floating-rate loans tied to market conditions, will command higher interest rates and raise the total project costs for energy developers,” Advait Arun, senior associate of energy finance at the Center for Public Enterprise and a Heatmap contributor, told me over email. “Developers rushing to build solar and wind energy between now and next summer to take advantage of tax credits will have to pay out these higher interest costs as they build.”
Though the Fed’s decision was unsurprising, the circumstances surrounding Wednesday’s meeting were out of the ordinary. For the first time since 1993, multiple Fed governors cast no votes on a rate decision. Christopher Waller and Michelle Bowman, both Republicans appointed by Trump, have voiced their preference for the Fed to lower rates by a quarter of a percentage point.
Additionally, Trump himself has been vocal about his views on chopping interest rates,— even going so far as to publicly threaten to fire Powell and appoint himself as head of the central bank, though he is legally unable to make good on his promise. Trump also recently criticized the Fed’s $2.5 billion building renovation project, singling out Powell for cost overruns. At the press conference on Wednesday, Powell emphasized the importance of the Fed’s independence from outside influence. “If you were not to have that, there’d be a great temptation of course to use interest rates to affect elections, for example,” he said.
While it may appease Trump, cutting interest rates won’t hold back the major energy price shocks that are very likely on their way. “Cutting rates sooner rather than later might make it easier for market actors to weather the coming shocks, but — crucially — they will not address the fiscal policy issues that created the shocks,” Arun noted. “However helpful rate cuts might be, they are not a solution to tariffs, tax credit uncertainty, and, soon, sharp spikes in electricity prices.”
The Department of Energy announced Wednesday that it was scrapping the loan guarantee.
The Department of Energy canceled a nearly $5 billion loan guarantee for the Grain Belt Express, a transmission project intended to connect wind power in Kansas with demand in Illinois that would eventually stretch all the way to Indiana.
“After a thorough review of the project’s financials, DOE found that the conditions necessary to issue the guarantee are unlikely to be met and it is not critical for the federal government to have a role in supporting this project. To ensure more responsible stewardship of taxpayer resources, DOE has terminated its conditional commitment,” the Department of Energy said in a statement Wednesday.
The $11 billion project had been in the works for more than a decade and had won bipartisan approval from state governments and regulators across the Midwest. The conditional loan guarantee announced in November 2024 would have secured up to $4.9 billion in financing to fund phase one of the project, which would run from Ford County in Kansas to Callaway County in Missouri.
In response to a request for comment, an Invenergy spokesperson said, “While we are disappointed about the LPO loan guarantee, a privately financed Grain Belt Express transmission superhighway will advance President Trump’s agenda of American energy and technology dominance while delivering billions of dollars in energy cost savings, strengthening grid reliability and resiliency, and creating thousands of American jobs.”
The project had long been the object of ire from Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, who recently stepped up his attacks in the hopes that a more friendly administration could help scrap the project. Two weeks ago, Hawley posted on X that he’d had “a great conversation today with @realDonaldTrump and Energy Secretary Chris Wright. Wright said he will be putting a stop to the Grain Belt Express green scam. It’s costing taxpayers BILLIONS! Thank you, President Trump.” The New York Times later reported that Trump had made a call to Wright on the issue with Hawley in the Oval Office.
Hawley celebrated the Grain Belt Express decision, writing on X, “It’s done. Thank you, President Trump,” and exulting in a separate post that “Department of Energy officially TERMINATES taxpayer funding for Green New Deal ‘grain belt express.’”
The senator had claimed that the plan would hurt Missouri farmers due to the use of eminent domain to acquire land for the project. In 2023, Hawley wrote a letter to Invenergy chief executive Michael Polsky claiming that “your company’s Grain Belt Express construction campaign has hurt Missouri’s farmers,” and that “they have lost the use of arable land, seen their property values decline, and been forced to operate under a cloud of uncertainty.”
Controversy over eminent domain and the use of agricultural land by transmission lines illustrates the difficulties in building the long-distance energy infrastructure necessary to decarbonize the grid.
Opposition to the project had been gestating for years but picked up steam in recent weeks. Earlier this month, Andrew Bailey, the Republican attorney general of Missouri, announced an investigation into the project. “This is a HUGE win for Missouri landowners and taxpayers who should not have to fund these green energy scams,” he wrote on X Wednesday following the DOE’s announcement.
As the project appeared to be more imminently imperiled, Invenergy scrambled to preserve its future, including making plans to connect gas to the transmission line. In a letter to Secretary of Energy Chris Wright written earlier this month, the Invenergy vice president overseeing the project wrote that the Grain Belt Express “has been the target of egregious politically motivated lawfare,” echoing language President Trump has used to describe his own travails.
If the author’s intent was to generate sympathy from the administration, it didn’t work. The end of the loan guarantee could be a death blow to the project, and will at the very least force Invenergy into a mad dash to try to match the lost capital.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include a comment from Invenergy.