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Good morning and happy Friday,
Well, if nothing else, the wait is over...the GOP has a trifecta in Washington D.C., and President-elect Trump has been announcing his cabinet picks apace. Congress returned this week with a packed to-do list for the lame duck session, and unfortunately, permitting reform is unlikely to make the cut.
Permitting reform may also be on the ropes in Michigan, where a new lawsuit threatens PA 233, the state’s landmark renewable energy siting legislation, which is scheduled to go into effect on November 29.
And COP 29 is underway in Baku, Azerbaijan, where things got off to a promising start with the approval of rules for a global carbon market, something that’s been a goal for years. U.S. climate envoy John Podesta said work to fight climate change will continue in the U.S., and the CEO of Exxon cautioned against the U.S. withdrawing from the Paris Agreement.
Read on for more.
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Hospitality for Renewables
Mississippi is the Hospitality State, and lately things are looking a lot more hospitable for renewable energy developers, in large part because wind and solar offer farmers a way to diversify the income from their operations. Here are some highlights from a Mississippi Today article that ran this week:
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Abbott Myers has been farming for 55 years and predicts “the next couple of years are going to be hard in agriculture.” The 19 wind turbines he hosts on his 1,600-acre farm only take 10 acres out of production, and he’s “thrilled” by the business opportunity they present.
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Mr. Myers considered, but ultimately dismissed, concerns about aesthetics – “we got transmission lines, we got cell phone towers sticking up everywhere. I can’t see a whole lot of difference” – and risks to birds: “a lot more birds are killed by kitty cats than by wind turbines.”
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For other farmers, agrivoltaics offer interesting potential. Gaddis Farms is slated to host a planned solar project, but some nearby residents have protested, citing concerns about wildlife and impacts to the land. Gaddis’ owners say they feel “comfortable” with steps taken to mitigate these issues: “We’re not looking to devalue our property.”
⚡️ The Takeaway
Room to grow. As elsewhere, some in Mississippi have raised the alarm about losing farmland to solar development; Agriculture and Commerce Commissioner Andy Gipson has even said solar companies are using temporary federal funds to take advantage of a struggling agriculture industry. Much ado about nothing, says former PSC Commissioner Brent Bailey: “Solar farms occupy 0.056% of MS’s agricultural land…if all projects approved and under review are built, only 0.22% of agricultural land will be impacted. [Yet] these projects total $4.5 billion in private sector investments, leading to millions of dollars of local revenues to public schools and county budgets.”
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Keystone State Solar Update
Founded in 2016, LandGate bills itself as “the leading provider of data solutions for site selection, origination, development, financing, and market analysis of US renewable energy and infrastructure projects: solar, data centers, EV’s, energy storage, wind, carbon, and CCS.” Its recently released Pennsylvania Solar Development Analysis includes some interesting data points:
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The key finding is that the state has 562 MW of operating solar, 263 MW under construction – and 10.5 GW in the queue, meaning that if all the proposed projects were to come to fruition, “Pennsylvania’s total solar capacity would increase 18x.”
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LandGate says solar projects typically take about three years to move through the queue and achieve commercial operation, and that it expects most of the utility-scale solar projects currently awaiting interconnection – some 10 GW of generation – to come online by the end of 2025, making it “an unprecedented boom year.”
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Nevertheless, LandGate notes that “solar projects are frequently withdrawn from the queue” due to the complexity and length of the interconnection process, as well as changes in market conditions. A chart in the report shows a big spike in withdrawals in 2023.
⚡️ The Takeaway
Pick it up, PA! The whitepaper says that Pennsylvania’s 46 active utility-scale solar farms produce 11% of the state’s power, noting that “the average solar farm size is 218 acres, producing 12.2 MW of electricity under ideal conditions.” And while “the state tripled its solar production in the last decade, the growth rate pales in comparison to national trends, with the U.S. experiencing a 12-fold increase in solar power during the same period.” |
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Thunder Down Under
The world may seem a little upside down these days, and it’s in that spirit that we look to Australia – our jaws agape in awe at the world’s largest planned renewable energy project.
The Western Green Energy Hub, or “WGEH” for short (just rolls off the tongue, like a hairball) is slated to be a massive 70 GW. As you pause to wrap your mind around that, know that it could generate more than 200 terawatt hours (TWh) of clean energy annually.
Last year, Australia’s total energy production was 274 TWh. At full power, WGEH would
generate more electricity than many medium-sized countries. Spread across 22,700 square kilometers, it will be “bigger than nations including Slovenia and El Salvador.” OK, that’s impressive – but it’s smaller than New Hampshire, and not much bigger than New Jersey.
Anyway, we digress. The 70 GW plan is actually a substantial upgrade from the original 50 GW; the developers say the project will have up to 3,000 turbines, ranging from 7-20 MW, and up to 60 million PV panels (and hopefully a LOT of robotic panel cleaners).
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The proposed project would be on lands traditionally owned by the WA Mirning People, who are “among the world’s oldest peoples with a lineage passing through generations for over 60,000 years.” The Mirning have a 10% ownership stake in the project and are actively participating in it through their commercial subsidiary, Mirning Green Energy Limited (scroll down). Generating energy from renewable resources sounds like a great way to honor that lineage to us.
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