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May
09, 2023
By
GERMAN TORO GHIO
‘Over Our Dead Bodies’: Backlash Builds Against $3
Trillion Clean-Energy Push
Ballooning size of wind and solar
projects draws local ire as they march closer to populated areas
LAWRENCE, Kan.—The
federal government has ignited a green-energy investment spree that’s
expected to reach as high as $3 trillion over the next decade. The
road to spending that money, though, is increasingly hitting speed
bumps from the likes of Gerry Coffman.
About an hour southwest of Kansas City, she turned down a wind lease
last year on a farm that has been in her family since 1866. Someone
knocked on her door a few months later, paperwork in hand, and offered
$6,000 to hang a wind-power transmission line across her land. If she
agreed to store construction equipment, she stood to make an
additional $4,000. Ms. Coffman said no.
Ms. Coffman rotates corn and soybeans and has cattle pasture on her
part of the family farm, which includes a wooded ribbon of water
called Eight Mile Creek. Ms. Coffman doesn’t want to see native forest
or prairie disturbed and thinks the industrial nature of towering wind
turbines would change the community for the worse if a proposed
project were built.
“A year ago we were a nice,
quiet neighborhood,” said Ms. Coffman, who has attended a series of
contentious public meetings over several months as the county
considers revising regulations for wind-energy development.
County-by-county battles are raging as wind and
solar projects balloon in size, edge closer to cities and encounter
mounting pushback in communities from Niagara Falls to the Great
Plains and beyond. Projects have slowed. Even in states with a long
history of building renewables, developers don’t know if they can get
local permits or how long it might take.
In Kansas, wind power grew rapidly for two decades and supplies around
45% of the electricity generated in-state, ranking it third in the
nation. But at least five counties in more-populous eastern Kansas
have recently placed moratoriums or bans on new wind or solar
projects, joining 18 others that already restricted wind development
to preserve the tallgrass prairie ecosystem. Kansas lagged behind
nearly every state in large project construction and new clean power
capacity last year, according to the American Clean Power Association,
an industry group for wind, solar and battery storage.
President Biden’s signature legislative accomplishment, the Inflation
Reduction Act, aims to make the nation’s electric grid and fuel
industries cleaner. Companies have already announced plans for $150
billion in investment in renewables and battery storage in the eight
months following the law’s passage, according to the American Clean
Power Association.
Potential private investment over the next decade spurred by federal
tax incentives and loans could include $900 billion in
renewable-energy projects and $100 billion in battery storage,
according to Goldman Sachs. Adding investments in such areas as carbon
capture and electric vehicles, total spending could reach $3 trillion,
the firm estimates.
Eight Mile Creek runs through Gerry Coffman’s farm in rural Douglas
County, Kansas, where opponents are rallying against wind power.
Ms. Coffman, whose farm has been in the family for 150 years, worries
that towering wind turbines would change the community for the worse.
The U.S., though, is a patchwork of state and local governments with
different rules on development, and opposition to projects has mounted
for myriad reasons. Increasingly, many communities are concerned that
the rapidly expanding size of wind and solar farms will irreparably
alter the complexion of where they live.
In a pattern familiar across the U.S., Kansas wind developers years
ago snapped up the rights to tracts of rural land in the less-populous
western part of the state. That filled capacity on large transmission
lines that deliver electricity over long distances, pushing newer
projects east into more-populous areas such as Douglas County, a place
where many people commute to jobs in Kansas City and Topeka and large
farms are interspersed with smaller plots.
Market demand and economies of scale have pushed solar and wind farm
size to hundreds or thousands of acres. They may not sit on contiguous
parcels, but instead spread throughout a community, increasing the
odds of friction.
In Michigan, a typical solar project once covered 60 acres but now
would take up 1,200, said Sarah Mills, a senior project manager at the
University of Michigan’s Graham Sustainability Institute. Ms. Mills
said they may need to get smaller—and more expensive—to be more
socially acceptable. A refrain emerging at community meetings she
attends is, “What you’re asking our rural community to host is way
more than our fair share.”
Projects aren’t evenly distributed throughout the U.S. They are placed
where the wind or sunshine is plentiful, or where state policies have
required the addition of renewables. Wind farms are concentrated in
the Great Plains, Midwest and Texas, while solar is clustering in the
West, Southeast and Northeast.
The National Renewable Energy Lab has tracked more than 2,000 local
wind ordinances and 1,000 solar ordinances that outline rules for
development such as project size. Figuring out whether regulations bar
or allow development can be tricky, as bans aren’t always
explicit—communities can create rules that amount to de facto
denials—but the landscape changes each time developers cross a county
line.
“It can be very localized,”
said Rebecca Kujawa, president and CEO of NextEra Energy Resources.
“It can be one county where a couple of stakeholders are very vocal
and literally right over the border they’re very receptive.”
In Iowa, which has the second-highest installed
wind power capacity in the country after Texas, a 2022 study of wind
ordinances found that 16 of 99 counties had prohibitive rules or a ban
against new projects, most of them approved in the previous four
years. Between moratoriums and requirements for setbacks between
turbines and things such as neighboring property lines, roads or
buildings, developers won’t even consider projects on around half to
three quarters of land with good wind resources, according to a study
by the nonprofit research firm ClearPath and consulting group
LucidCatalyst.
Despite soaring demand and available capital even before the Inflation
Reduction Act was passed, U.S. clean power installations dipped 16%
last year and 12% over 2020, according to the American Clean Power
Association. It was the worst year for land-based wind installations
since 2018.
Many projects will eventually get built, say developers and analysts,
but they could take longer and cost more than expected. At the federal
level, there is some bipartisan support for speeding up permitting for
transmission or pipeline projects, and Sen. Joe Manchin, a West
Virginia Democrat, has relaunched a legislative effort that stalled
last year. Some states are pushing back on their own against local
roadblocks.
New regulations in New York give the state project-siting authority
when conflicts arise over what it considers unreasonably burdensome
local rules, part of an effort to add more renewable energy to the
grid. Illinois has a similar effort: A new law says local rules can’t
be more stringent than those the state sets.
In Cambria, N.Y., near Niagara Falls, a proposed 900-acre solar
project across several parcels of land would neighbor around 350
residents, said town supervisor Wright Ellis. The town opposes the
project, but likely cannot halt it.
“We are not against solar,”
Mr. Ellis said. “It’s the industrial size.”
That doesn’t mean the process is swift, though.
The Cambria solar project was first proposed in 2017.
Landowner John Ohol, 44, wants to lease his property for the solar
farm but fears further delays as the developer and township wrangle in
court over the state’s draft permit. His family had a dairy farm in
Cambria for 90 years, but he believes solar would be a more secure
income stream. It is unrealistic for the community to expect that
nothing would ever be developed on the property, Mr. Ohol said.
The developer says the site is ideal for solar. “Running right through
our project site are two to three very large transmission lines,” said
Keith Silliman of Cypress Creek Renewables. “That’s the A-number one
reason that we’re there.”
New York has ambitious plans to have 70% of its electricity produced
by renewables by 2030. Around 32% of New York’s electricity in 2021
came from renewables, most of it from longtime hydropower plants that
would be difficult to impossible to build today.
Adding more renewables has been slow so far. New York added just 262
megawatts of large wind and solar projects in 2022, less than Montana
and South Dakota, according to the American Clean Power Association.
The Douglas County Board of Commissioners held a hearing in February
on a request by NextEra Energy to put up a meteorological tower and
other equipment.
Many Douglas County landowners object to renewable energy projects,
which they say will harm local businesses, wildlife and property
values.
On a cold February night in Kansas, Douglas County residents filed
into dark wooden pews in the county courthouse and waited turns at the
microphone. The meeting was focused on permits for a meteorological
tower and other weather measurement equipment that is needed for wind
projects. The applications from power company NextEra Energy drew so
much opposition that the meeting stretched four hours.
“Do you see the wounds that
are being caused?” asked Debbie Yarnell, who owns a cow and sheep
farm.
NextEra declined to comment on the meeting or its
plans in Douglas County, but Chief Executive John Ketchum said in an
interview in March that the company tries to do community outreach on
the benefits of renewable energy and has an early-state development
team that identifies places that would both welcome projects and have
a good solar or wind resource.
“The one thing we do that is
really, really hard to do in this country is create economic
development
opportunities for rural communities,” Mr. Ketchum said.
Alan Anderson, vice chair of the Polsinelli law
firm’s national energy practice, represented the company at the Kansas
meeting. He has traversed the state for such meetings for the last 15
years. The mood changed around 2015 when one of Mr. Anderson’s clients
called and said they had been turned down for a meteorological tower,
which until then had received routine approvals.
“It was the first of what
became a pretty constant onslaught of challenges to projects,” said
Mr. Anderson, who attributes the change to the conversation shifting
from renewables as an economic boost to political debates and
misinformation.
Some opponents don’t like the idea of locally
produced energy getting exported out of the state, or that the
government is singling out particular technologies for special tax
treatment. Other objections are more tangible. Communities often
complain about the rhythmic blinking red lights that flash atop
turbines at night or the whooshing noise of blades. They also raise
concerns about taking farmland out of production or the impact on
wildlife.
Plenty of Kansans do want to host projects—wind is already the biggest
source of electricity in the state, followed by coal at 35%, according
to government data. Supporters view energy exports as akin to
shipments of products like wheat or beef, and point to the amount of
the corn crop that is grown for ethanol.
The state’s residential electricity prices have generally been at or
below the national average, while low-cost wind production drives down
wholesale power prices, according to government and grid operator
reports.
Many Kansans are girding for a long fight over this and future
projects. Michael Forth helped start an opposition group which gained
1,200 petition signatures from residents who own a collective 40,000
acres. He traces his Douglas County family farm back to 1904 and moved
back seven years ago from Colorado and built a house. “I’m wondering
if I didn’t make the biggest mistake of my life,” he said.
Mr. Forth’s sister, Laurie Shuck, recently purchased a stack of “no
trespassing” signs to post around her fences to try to keep out
NextEra representatives offering wind leases or transmission
easements. One late afternoon as light faded at her farm, the moon
rose in the east and a flock of geese honked overhead. She paused to
watch. Mrs. Shuck said she and her brother would lease land for wind
projects, “over our dead bodies.”
“I was here first,” she
said, and walked to feed her horses.
Michael Forth and his family have owned land in
Douglas County since 1904. He moved back seven years ago, but with the
influx of renewable-energy projects, said, ‘I’m wondering if I didn’t
make the biggest mistake of my life.’
Green Play Ammonia™, Yielder® NFuel Energy.
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