Permitting Possee

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Good morning and happy Friday,

This week, California achieved a major milestone, with wind, solar, and hydro exceeding 100% of demand for 30 of the past 38 days. Meanwhile, the Global Wind Energy Council announced a record 117 GW of new capacity added in 2023, surpassing 2022 installations by 50%, while cautioning that by the end of the decade the annual figure will need to reach 320 GW – triple the 2023 amount – if climate targets are to be met.

This news presumably fell on deaf ears at Mar-a-Lago, where last week former president Trump railed against wind energy in a fundraising pitch to oil executives. It remains to be seen if this will aid and abet RFK Jr.’s election bid, in which the independent candidate is seeking to poach climate voters from Biden, and skeptics from Trump.

And, on the heels of last week’s report from LBNL warning that 2.6 TW of clean energy projects are languishing in interconnection queues across the country, DOE released its first-ever Transmission Interconnection Roadmap, which seeks to clear the nation’s backlog of nearly 12,000 wind, solar, and energy storage projects.

Read on for more.

Permitting Possee

Three NGOs – the Clean Air Task Force, NRDC, and The Nature Conservancy – teamed up to commission a report from consulting firm E3 that evaluates barriers to renewable energy development in eight states, with a specific focus on siting and permitting policies. Here are some key findings:

The eight states of focus – IN, VA, ME, OH, WA, CA, IL and NY – were selected for study to reflect a diversity of permitting policy structures, renewable resource availability, and renewable deployment to date.
The report’s key recommendations for policy frameworks include the use of centralized permitting authorities, limiting permitting uncertainty, community engagement, state preemption of local ordinances or restrictions, as well as minimized and transparent timelines.
Best practices identified by E3 include developers engaging with permitting authorities early on, involving third-party organizations, implementing practices around land stewardship that are conducive to site restoration post-decommissioning, and reporting on a project’s benefits – not only during development, but also throughout its operational lifetime.

⚡️ The Takeaway

Uphill, both ways. The report notes that several significant challenges to renewable energy development persist, acknowledging that “some communities may be unwavering in their opposition to renewables for aesthetic or ideological reasons, regardless of the economic benefits or environmental mitigants proposed by developers.” In such cases, although “positive messaging and information may help, particularly with opposition fueled by political discourse and misinformation,” it is not guaranteed to prevail.

Culture Clash

Building long-distance transmission lines to connect renewables is essential to the clean energy transition but can present a daunting undertaking. The SunZia project intends to deliver some 3,000 MW of wind from New Mexico to utilities in California but has been “mired in controversy and delays” for years. This week, a federal judge denied a request by two Arizona tribes to block work on the line. Here’s what’s happening:

While most of the line’s 550 miles follow multiple interstates in New Mexico and Arizona, nearly 50 miles cut through the middle of AZ’s San Pedro Valley, “one of the last ecologically intact landscapes left in the country.”
The valley is sparsely populated but home to many who are passionate about preserving the unfragmented landscape, including tribes with ancestral ties to the area. This has “sparked one of the nation’s most consequential fights over developing green spaces for green energy.”
Initially proposed in 2008, SunZia was fast-tracked by the Obama administration in 2011. In 2015, it received a final record of decision for its route from the BLM. Earlier this year, the tribes teamed up with two environmental groups to sue the BLM over its approval of the project, “alleging the federal agency failed to properly review how the project would impact cultural heritage resources in the area as required by the National Historic Preservation Act.”

⚡️ The Takeaway

Splitting decision. The judge ruled that because the project’s route was approved in 2015, the tribe’s injunction was “time-barred” from raising concerns under the National Environmental Policy Act but said the tribes can still challenge the failure to consult under the Preservation Act. A representative from the Center for Biological Diversity, which participated in the suit, said the parties will appeal the decision. Stay tuned.

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Petal to the Metal

Overachievers can sometimes be annoying, but plants that could be worthy of this designation may hold a key to a clean energy future. Known as “hyperaccumulators,” these types of plants readily absorb high levels of metals and incorporate them into their tissues.

This in turn creates an opportunity for recovering the metals from the plants, a process known as phytomining. For instance, although most plants won’t grow in soils with excessive levels of nickel, some can – and in doing so, they bioaccumulate the nickel, which can be “mined” by harvesting the plant, burning it, and extracting nickel from the ash.

Hyperaccumulators are relatively rare – of the 350,000 known plant species, just 750 qualify – but they’re very efficient. Grown in soil with nickel levels around 5% – “pretty contaminated” – they can yield ash that’s 25-50% nickel. This is vastly superior to the results of mining nickel from rock, which might be around 0.02% nickel.

A few weeks ago, the U.S. government’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, aka ARPA-E, announced up to $10 million in funding to encourage partnerships between scientists, farmers, and the battery and mining industries, with the goal of identifying a hyperaccumulator – ideally a fast-growing species native to North American species – that can concentrate large quantities of nickel, “an essential ingredient in the batteries that are themselves essential to the renewable revolution.”

In the future ARPA-E may also explore ways for plants to extract cobalt, copper, or lithium. “That’s green technology, in the truest sense of the word.”