Showdown in the Desert

Good morning and happy Friday,

In this week’s headlines, a solar manufacturing complex in Georgia serves as the test case for new climate law boosting the domestic supply chain, Arlington County Virginia’s government is running literally everything on clean energy, and - (in spite of recent headlines) - don't expect a ban on gas stoves any time soon.

Read on for more.

Showdown in the Desert

?As the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) seeks to meet a 2020 congressional mandate “requiring them to authorize at least 25 gigawatts of renewable power by 2025,” as well as a 2021 executive climate change order signed by President Biden that “in part requires the Secretary of the Interior to ‘review siting and permitting processes on public lands’ to increase ‘renewable energy production on those lands,’” some projects sited in California are encountering pushback from local residents. Here’s an overview of where things stand:

• Federal officials are considering updating the 2012 Western Solar Plan and a related programmatic environmental impact statement (PEIS) to facilitate “a major expansion and possible modification of designated solar zones on public lands across the West. The study may also “look at amending California’s 10.8 million acre Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan” (DRECP).
• The 2012 plan “governs commercial solar development on public lands in six southwestern states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah.” An expanded plan could include “energy development zones in five more states: Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington and Wyoming, and may include wind power areas and hilly slopes left out of the original plan.”?
• Renewable energy trade representatives say modifying the plans could “align the document with current 2023 technologies,” and “actually reduce conflicts between rural residents and developers” by allowing “companies to consider more sites that could present lower potential for issues with surrounding communities.” Local residents, however,? “are not convinced” and feel that their rights are being “disregarded.”

?? The Takeaway

Communication is key. The article notes that “a 2021 Department of Energy report had found up to 10 million acres of renewable projects are needed to decarbonize the country’s electric grid by 2050. The 2012 Western Solar Plan designated about 285,000 acres as priority solar energy zones and excluded about 79 million acres from solar development. The plan also identified 19 million acres available for development under a variance process.” Updating the 2012 plan and DRECP could give developers options that are further from populated areas, but when projects are near communities, proactive outreach and communications are essential to building good relationships.?

A Shiny New GEM

This week, Argonne National Laboratory announced the release of a new tool that could play an important role in helping to site clean energy projects in the U.S. The Geospatial Energy Mapper (GEM) is in fact a “redesigned, rebranded and reengineered” version of the Energy Zones Mapping Tool (EZMT), which was launched in 2013. Here’s what this GEM of a tool has to offer:

• Argonne bills the GEM as a “comprehensive, interactive online mapping tool that can help identify areas across the country that are suitable for wind, solar and more,” and which features “an extensive catalog of mapping data” with more than 190 different layers.
• A key improvement in the revamped tool is the addition of themes, which “allow the map to be rapidly set up for a particular focus, like solar, wind or electric vehicles.” Themes pull together “multiple layers related to a particular technology or resource” so the user doesn’t have to “manually browse the mapping catalog and add individual layers to the map.”
• Users can harness the GEM’s modeling capabilities to create customized maps that show areas in the U.S. that are “favorable for the development of certain energy resources and infrastructures,” and draw on almost 100 modeling criteria, such as “population density, proximity to nearest substation, slope, wildfire risk and low-income household percentage.”

??? The Takeaway

Will this GEM prove priceless? It’s expected that GEM will “have a diverse community of users” that may include planners, regulators, “private industry, public service commissions, and regional transmission organizations,” as well as “national laboratories, educational institutions, energy and natural resource non-profit organizations, and private individuals.” Let’s hope it proves to be one of the jewels in the crown of the clean energy transition.

• Now or Never: Biden nears deadline for cementing new climate rules
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• Wild and Wonderful: Clean energy industries well positioned for growth in West Virginia
• Huffing and Puffing: The world needs more wind energy production in 2023

• South Dakota regulators approve permit for North Bend Wind Project
• Ovid Township delays approval for 150-MW Apex solar project in Michigan
• Ottawa County OH Commissioners and township restrict large-scale wind and solar?
• National Grid Renewables begins construction on South Dakota’s largest solar project

Move Fast and Break Things

As you’ll have no doubt heard by now, earlier this week the world’s leaders finally came to their senses and agreed to take meaningful collective action to curb the release of greenhouse gases and slow global warming. Ha! Nope, still waiting on that one.

Well, Luke Iseman is tired of waiting and wonders if he has a better idea: just help the planet chill out a bit by blasting sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to control the Earth’s climate. The CEO of the quaintly named two-person firm Make Sunsets is all-in on the idea of “stratospheric solar geoengineering,” which involves “injecting sulfur aerosols into the stratosphere...to reflect sunlight and cool down the Earth.”

It's worth noting that “nature does this already” every time there’s a major volcanic eruption, and the idea “is inching ahead” in the scientific community and was explored in a 2021 report from the National Academies of Science. That said, there’s consensus that caution is essential given the potential for unintended (and un-envisioned) consequences. “Some experts worry that the new company could set a dangerous precedent” and point to the Oxford Principles for Geoengineering as essential guidelines in this sort of endeavor.

Ultimately, the debate centers on “a question of which values should rule in an era of rising temperatures and frustration” – should experiments in this realm be conducted by “researchers and nations,” or by individuals with a “start-up mentality” and a “’move fast and break things’ worldview”?