An enormous solar project planned for the Nevada desert was canceled last week while awaiting final federal approvals, an ominous sign for renewables development on public lands under the Trump administration.
Esmeralda 7 was unique for its size: It would have installed 6.2 gigawatts of solar generation and 5.2 gigawatts of battery capacity across 62,300 acres of Nevada desert. No other solar project in the U.S. comes close to that scale. It was also a test case for a new, more efficient approach to federal permitting, one that promised to get clean energy infrastructure built more quickly.
The solar colossus incorporated seven distinct solar-and-battery projects from different developers on adjacent parcels of land overseen by the federal Bureau of Land Management. Instead of each going through an exhaustive process to attain federal permits, the projects banded together to undergo a joint analysis by the BLM. The bureau completed a draft environmental review of the megaproject under the Biden administration, but didn’t release a final version. Instead, as first reported by Heatmap, the BLM website switched the project status to “cancelled” on Thursday.
It’s not yet clear if the decision to cancel was made by the BLM or Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, or if the Esmeralda 7 developers pulled out, perhaps based on conversations with the government. An automated email reply from Scott Distel, the BLM contact for the project, said he is not authorized to work during the government shutdown and thus was unable to respond.
The BLM circulated a statement to media on Friday saying that “applicants will now have the option to submit individual project proposals to the BLM to more effectively analyze potential impacts.” Such a move would entail repeating the already-conducted environmental analysis for each project individually, after which the administration could simply move to cancel the projects again.
“While we await further clarity from BLM on its apparent decision to abruptly cancel these solar projects in the late stages of the review process, we remain deeply concerned that this administration continues to flout the law to the detriment of consumers, the grid, and America’s economic competitiveness,” Ben Norris, vice president of regulatory affairs at the Solar Energy Industries Association, wrote in a statement Friday.
President Donald Trump swept into office declaring an “energy emergency” and pledging to unleash more American energy and bring down prices. Since then, though, his administration has intervened to obstruct several major power projects that would deliver renewable electricity to the grid at a time of swiftly rising power demand.
The White House attempted to halt two fully permitted offshore wind farms, the 810-megawatt Empire Wind 1 and the 704-megawatt Revolution Wind. Offshore wind requires permissions from the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, giving the administration leverage over this type of private enterprise. Those efforts to stop construction did not hold up, but they incurred millions of dollars of unanticipated costs for the developers, and damaged the country’s reputation as a safe place to invest in billion-dollar infrastructure projects.
Currently, only 4% of terrestrial, utility-scale renewable capacity sits on federal land, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. But in the U.S. West, many federal parcels are well-suited for renewable energy; if these sites were successfully developed, they could greatly increase clean energy production.
Esmeralda 7 appears to be the first large renewable development on public lands to be officially cancelled during the Trump administration, said Ted Kelly, director and lead counsel for U.S. clean energy at the Environmental Defense Fund.
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