Ben Carson vs. the Anti-Solar Movement
1. Dukes County, Massachusetts – The Supreme Court for the second time declined to take up a legal challenge to the Vineyard Wind offshore project, indicating that anti-wind activists' efforts to go directly to the high court have run aground.
- The more worthwhile case to follow now is the Democratic state-led challenge to Trump’s executive order against offshore wind, which was filed earlier this week.
- That lawsuit argues, among other things, that the order violated the Administrative Procedures Act and was “contrary to and in excess of” existing environmental and coastal energy leasing laws. One can easily assume the administration and Democratic states may take this case all the way to the high court depending how the federal district court judge rules in the case.
2. Brooklyn/Staten Island, New York – The battery backlash in the NYC boroughs is getting louder – and stranger – by the day.
- A Soltage battery storage facility is now the target of community ire, including by Protect Our Children New York, a volunteer organization that purports to fight human trafficking, child abuse… and now also battery storage. Peter DiMiceli, a founder of the organization, handcuffed himself to a different battery storage facility site a few weeks ago.
- One of the complaints with Soltage’s project, and others in Brooklyn like this NineDot proposal, appears to be a lack of prior notice before the project entered the formal approval process. But fire safety concerns also permeate this discussion, as they tend to do a lot nowadays.
3. Baltimore County, Maryland – It’s Ben Carson vs. the farmer near Baltimore, as a solar project proposed on the former Housing and Urban Development secretary’s land is coming under fire from his neighbors.
- Carson and his wife have reportedly signed a contract with Nexamp to allow a 33-acre solar project to be built on property they own in Upperco, Maryland, a largely rural part of Baltimore County. According to news reports, Carson no longer lives at the home situated in Upperco and records indicate he lives in Palm Beach, Florida.
- This situation has upset neighbors – as it tends to do in Maryland farming communities. Carson’s property reportedly is covered by an agricultural easement that forbids construction of solar projects, and representatives for Carson have tried – so far unsuccessfully – to get a special permit from local regulators to get permission to build.
4. Mecklenburg County, Virginia – Landowners in this part of Virginia have reportedly received fake “good neighbor agreement” letters claiming to be from solar developer Longroad Energy, offering large sums of cash to people neighboring the potential project.
- Longroad’s 80-megawatt 7 Bridges solar farm has been backed by local planning regulators and while it is currently unclear who the culprit was, this effort may have been an attempt by hostile actors to paint the developer as trying to offer cash to residents to quell potential dissent.
5. York County, South Carolina – Silfab Solar is now in a bitter public brawl with researchers at the University of South Carolina after they released a report claiming that a proposed solar manufacturing plant poses a significant public risk in the event of a chemical emissions release.
- The report, which was directed to activists that oppose the proposed Silfab plant in York County, focused heavily on a “worst case” situation where different toxic chemicals used in the solar manufacturing process were somehow released into the air.
- Silfab has accused the researchers of bias against the plant. “I was alarmed and more importantly I was disappointed [by the report],” Silfab director of operations Greg Basden told local news outlet WRHI. “What they described as worst-case would never happen.”
6. Jefferson Davis County, Mississippi – Apex Clean Energy’s Bluestone Solar project was just approved by the Mississippi Public Service Commission with no objections against the project.
- But it’s not all fun and games in Mississippi. A Lightsource BP solar farm in Lamar County was withdrawn from the permitting process on Monday after local opposition delayed approval before the local planning committee for more than a year.
- Pro data predicted Lamar County, which is whiter, wealthier, Trumpier, and over-indexed for hospitality jobs, would be much riskier to build in than Jefferson Davis County, which has a larger Black population, doesn’t have any workforce sensitivities, and could use more economic development.
7. Plaquemine Parish, Louisiana – NextEra’s Coastal Prairie solar project got an earful from locals in this parish that sits within the Baton Rouge metro area, indicating little has changed since the project was first proposed two years ago.
8. Huntington County, Indiana – Well it turns out Heatmap’s Most At-Risk Projects of the Energy Transition has been right again: the Paddlefish solar project has now been indefinitely blocked by this county under a new moratorium on the project area in tandem with a new restrictive land use ordinance on solar development overall.
- The county has now banned all solar from being built on “prime farmland” and will have to be screened for all sorts of new requirements, including the avoidance of glare.
9. Albany County, Wyoming – The Rail Tie wind farm is back in the news again, as county regulators say landowners feel misled by Repsol, the project’s developer.
- Rail Tie, which is mostly sited on private lands but has a fifth of its project footprint on state property, has been fully permitted. But legal representatives for landowners in the construction zone are pressing for transparency in Rail Tie’s compliance with its permits and say landowners did not see a site plan with precise turbine locations available.
10. Klickitat County, Washington – Cypress Creek Renewables is on a lucky streak with a solar project near Goldendale, Washington, getting to bypass local opposition from the nearby Yakama Nation.
- Yakama officials reportedly submitted a report to state officials on the Cypress Creek project’s impacts to “tribal cultural properties” and requested an environmental impact statement. Instead of doing that, the state Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council voted Monday to qualify the project for a fast-track permitting process that would eschew local regulators.
11. Pinal County, Arizona – A large utility-scale NextEra solar farm has been rejected by this county’s Board of Supervisors.
- The Valley Farms Energy Center would provide 200 megawatts to Salt River Project, a major Arizona utility, which testified in support of the project and said it would be needed to meet the state’s energy needs.
- But despite the SRP and landowners testifying in support, supervisors said their constituents were against the project and ultimately sided against the project.
