The Obama administration has unveiled a plan detailing where utility-scale solar power projects can be developed in the western U.S., with 17 proposed solar energy zones in six western states given the highest priority for solar development.

The blueprint of the plan, released by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), identifies about 445 square miles of desert in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah. “That’s where the sweet spots are, so that’s where development will be driven,” said U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.

The BLM identified another 31,250 square miles where large-scale solar power projects could be potentially be sited if environmental impacts are minimal. The plan would not apply to 13 solar energy projects already being built or dozens more awaiting approval.

A coalition of environmental groups issued a joint statement supporting the effort, calling it a “a balanced package intended equally to reflect the needs of the emerging solar industry and the mandate to conserve our nation’s precious natural resources.”

Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

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US Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar likes to tout his department’s support for clean energy development on federal lands. But a decision last week to open 7,400 acres in Wyoming to increased coal mining calls into question how strong the Interior Department’s commitment to clean energy really is. If we’re serious about transforming the US economy to run on clean energy, expanding coal mining is a major step backwards. By flooding the market with dirty coal mined in Wyoming, the Interior Department risks derailing progress on renewable energy and will make it all the more difficult to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Wyoming already produces more coal than any other state in the US: in 2010 it supplied almost 40% of coal used to generate electricity. Much of this mining goes on in the Powder River Basin, which spans the border between Wyoming and Montana. Every day between seventy and eighty trains leave the Powder River Basin, transporting coal to be burned in power plants around the country. Since coal is the world’s dirtiest fossil fuel, mining in the Powder River Basin is a major contributor to climate change as well as emissions of pollutants that hurt human health.

Considering how harmful coal is to public health and the climate, why would the Interior Department open up even more land to coal mining? Construction of new coal plants is at a standstill in the United States—thanks to pressure from environmentalists, not a single new plant has broken ground since 2008. Meanwhile old coal plants are being taken offline as the health cost of keeping smokestacks running becomes evident. With clean energy sources like wind and solar power becoming cheaper all the time, the idea of expanding coal mining seems almost nonsensical—unless you understand where most new coal from the Powder River Basin will likely be headed.

With the age of coal coming to a close in the US, coal companies are looking to ship their product overseas. Companies like Ambre Energy and Arch Coal are seeking permission to build coal export terminals on the west coast of North America, to funnel Powder River Basin coal to the international market. While China and India get a cheap source of energy, mercury and other pollutants from burning coal will blow west across the Pacific Ocean and rain down on the US west coast. Carbon emissions from coal burned in these countries will of course affect the whole planet. The politically powerful coal industry has persuaded the Interior Department to come down on its side, putting our clean energy future at risk.

With enough wind energy for utility-scale production, Wyoming has potential to help transform the US electricity grid. Yet as long as coal remains at the center of Wyoming’s energy policy, it isn’t likely to get on the renewable bandwagon. Coal mining is a dangerous distraction from the clean energy solutions the US should be pursuing. By dumping more coal on the international market, the Wyoming and the Interior Department threaten to make the US an extraction-based resource colony for countries like India and China.

I can guarantee this plan to ramp up coal mining and sacrifice clean energy will run into heavy opposition in the US. New coal leases in Wyoming aren’t going to move forward unchallenged. At the same time, proposal to build coal export terminals have already run into opposition on the west coast. Those who believe in a clean energy future can’t afford to let the Interior literally auction away Wyoming’s energy. The stakes are simply too high.

Article by Nick Engelfried, appearing courtesy Justmeans.

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U.S. officials say they will spend as much as $50.5 million to promote the growth of offshore wind energy in a push to achieve 54 gigawatts of electricity from offshore turbines by 2030.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said the new initiative will seek to reduce the costs of offshore wind energy, address the technical challenges associated with installation and connection to the electric grid, and streamline the regulatory and permitting process.

While there are currently no offshore wind farms in U.S. waters, federal officials have identified areas off the East Coast that could support the emerging industry. “The United States is synchronizing new research and development initiatives with more efficient, forward-thinking planning so that we can help quickly stand up an American offshore wind industry,” Salazar said.

Meanwhile, a market survey by Bloomberg New Energy Finance indicated that the cost of onshore wind power has reached record lows — and in some regions is now competitive with coal-powered electricity.

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Congress isn’t going to regulate hydraulic fracturing any time soon. But the Department of Interior might. For starters, Interior is mulling whether it should require drilling companies to disclose the chemicals they use to frack wells drilled on public lands, and already the suggestion has earned Interior Secretary Ken Salazar an earful.

On January 5, a bipartisan group of 32 members of Congress, who belong to the Natural Gas Caucus, sent Salazar a letter imploring him to resist a hasty decision because more regulations would “increase energy costs for consumers, suppress job creation in a promising energy sector, and hinder our nation’s ability to become more energy independent.”

A week later, 46 House Democrats followed up by signing a letter to Salazar urging him to at least adopt the disclosure requirement because, as Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y., said, “communities across America have seen their water contaminated by the chemicals used in the hydraulic fracturing process.”

“The public has a right to know what toxins might be going into the ground near their communities, and what might be leaking into their drinking water,” said the letter , which was sent by the three initial sponsors of now-stalled legislation to regulate fracturing, Hinchey, Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo., and Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo.

In the context of today’s roiling political and energy debates, it’s not at all clear who will win. But if money is an indicator, the anti-regulatory group has the upper hand.

A back-of-the-envelope analysis of campaign finance dollars contributed to the members of Congress who are speaking out on the issue shows that the Natural Gas Caucus received 19 times more money from the oil and gas industry between 2009 and 2010 than the group who signed Rep. Hinchey’s letter. According to data from Open Secrets, the 32 members against disclosure received $1,742,572. The average contribution from the oil and gas sector to individuals from that group was $54,455. Oklahoma Democrat Dan Boren, who co-chairs the caucus, personally received more than $202,000, including almost $15,000 from Chesapeake Energy, one of the largest natural gas producers in the United States.

By comparison, the Hinchey-DeGette-Polis group—which has 14 more people than the Natural Gas Caucus—received $91,212 from the industry. The average contribution to those members was $1,982, 1/27th the amount donated to members of the Natural Gas Caucus.

Requiring disclosure of the chemicals used to drill on federal lands would affect only a small proportion of gas wells drilled in the country each year—roughly 11 percent, by the Department of Interior’s estimates. In 2009, 19,000 new gas wells were drilled, adding to the 493,000 gas wells already producing in the United States. According to Hinchey’s office, disclosure on federal lands would set an important precedent, because that information would become part of the public record and, when combined with state-based disclosure rules, “would provide a great deal of useful information for those concerned with the risks these chemicals may pose.”

Traditionally, the exact recipes of chemicals used in the fracturing process have been kept secret by the companies to protect their competitive advantage, and the fracturing process itself is exempt from federal regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act. The disclosure issue has become a rallying point against natural gas development in the United States because scientists have repeatedly said that they can’t thoroughly examine water contamination cases for links to drilling because they don’t know what to test for.

At least four states have already mandated some degree of disclosure of fracking chemicals: Wyoming, New York, Pennsylvania and Colorado. If federal lands are added to those states, then public disclosure of fracking chemicals would be required on roughly 40 percent of the gas wells in the United States. (It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact percentage because federal statistics don’t distinguish between oil and gas wells.)

The resistance to disclosure mandates on federal lands contradicts the public position of many of the oil and gas companies involved. Chesapeake Energy, the company that contributed so heavily to Rep. Boren, has repeatedly stated that it supports more transparency and believes the chemicals used in fracturing should be disclosed.

Campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry, 2009-2010

Source: Open Secrets

To the: Natural Gas Caucus

Campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry, 2009-2010

Source: Open Secrets

To the: Hinchey-DeGette-Polis group

 
Article by Abrahm Lustgarten, appearing courtesy Propublica.

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Nine years into a regulatory battle that has been fought in virtually every legal , political and bureaucratic venue imaginable, Secretary of State Ken Salazar said today that the stakeholders must come to a compromise by March 1 or he would intervene and make the final decision on the proposed offshore wind farm in the waters of Nantucket Sound near Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Salazar reiterated that if the timeline he laid down last week wasn’t met, he would consult with the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, an independent party, to make a final decision.

In a series of meetings with about three dozen representatives of the commonwealth of Massachusetts, Native American groups, Cape Wind and the primary opposition group, the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, Secretary Salazar said “the public, the applicants and all the stakeholders deserve resolution,” calling the nine-year process an example of government failure.

Cape Wind CEO Jim Gordon and other project supporters welcomed the direct intervention from Secretary Salazar. On a phone call today with reporters, Gordon said that he is “convinced that when Secretary Salazar has the complete record before him that the verifiable public benefits of creating jobs, greater energy independence, cleaner air and mitigating climate change will far outweigh any perception of negative impacts.”

But Native American groups expressed some disappointment in today’s meetings. “It was insulting,” Cheryl Andrews-Maltais, the council chair of the Aquinnah Wampanoag, told the Boston Globe outside the Interior Department. “I’ll be frank, it was disrespectful — there seems to be no real reason.”

The Aquinnah Wampanoags are one of two Native American tribes that say the offshore wind project would destroy spiritual sun greetings and disturb ancestral culturally significant lands on the seabed. The Aquinnahs were bolstered by a recent decision handed down from the National Park Service saying that Nantucket Sound was eligible for a listing on the National Register of Historic Places.

“Here is where we still arrive to greet the new day, watch for celestial observations in the night sky and follow the migration of the sun and stars in change with the season,” wrote Bettina Washington, historic preservation officer for the Aquinnah Wampanoag, in a letter to federal officials.

But supporters of Cape Wind have pointed out that the Aquinnah Wampanoag’s land is actually on the western side of Martha’s Vineyard, which does not face Nantucket Sound. But the National Park Service ruled that the sound was significant to both tribes.

Gordon said that Cape Wind has already taken several mitigatory steps to reduce the impacts of the wind farm including: a reduction in project size from 170 to 130 turbines; reconfiguration of turbines away from any areas considered archaeologically sensitive; eliminating daytime lighting; reducing nighttime lighting; and using off-white colors to reduce visual contrast. In addition to physical mitigation, Cape Wind has also offered a compensation package, but it is not entirely clear how much it would be, or to whom it would go.

“We’ve had this on the table, but we have had no response from the parties,” said Gordon, of Cape Wind’s efforts to engage the other stakeholder parties.

Thus far, the only proposal opponents have come up with is to move the entire project to an area that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has already examined as a possible location for a wind farm. Moving the site would certainly cost the developers millions of dollars and essentially reset the entire regulatory and permitting process back to square one, with no guarantee it would ever even go through; a fate that Cape Wind supporters–and the offshore wind energy industry as a whole –are hoping against.

Cape Wind CEO Jim Gordon thinks the nine-year battle has no reason to carry on. Said Gordon, “This is the right project in the right place at the right time.”

Article by Timothy B. Hurst, appearing courtesy of Celsias

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U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said his department will no longer be the “handmaiden” of the oil and gas industry and will conduct tougher environmental reviews of proposals to drill on public lands. Criticizing the Bush and administration for turning federal lands into a “candy store” for the petroleum industry, Salazar told reporters, “The difference is in the prior administration the oil and gas industry essentially were the kings of the world.” He said lax leasing policies “ran afoul of communities, carved up the landscape, and fueled costly conflicts that created uncertainty for investors and industry.”

Salazar said he was ordering federal land managers to get out from behind their desks and to visit proposed leasing sites to evaluate the environmental and social impacts of drilling. The stricter review process would not reduce the amount of oil and gas extracted from federal lands, Salazar said, but would ensure that drilling was done in a more responsible manner.

A more through review process will also reduce the number of costly court challenges to leasing decisions, said Salazar, noting that in 2008 roughly 40 percent of federal decisions to permit or deny drilling rights were challenged by one or more parties, compared with only 1 percent in 1998.

Article appearing courtesy of Yale Environment 360

[photo credit: Michelle Meiklejohn]

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Ken Salazar's solar array and cowboy hat combo should be more common under the plan announced yesterday for the Southwest

Yesterday’s big announcement by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar heralded what may be a new era for solar power, as thousands of acres of federal land in six Southwestern states were set aside to become a special federal solar energy zone designed to facilitate siting, construction and deployment of as much as 70,000 MW of new solar capacity.

Today, it is wind’s turn in the sun. The front page of the Boston Globe and local broadcast reports are abuzz with the news that Governor Deval Patrick’s administration has released a new plan to re-zone state coastal waters to better balance the need for marine ecological protections with the hope that Massachusetts can harvest more of its offshore wind as useful electricity.

In the absence of all of the plan’s details (a full presser was scheduled for the afternoon of July 1 at the New England Aquarium in Boston), the media has already shifted to score-keeping. There is at least one clear loser, as the plan deals a death blow to a particular Buzzards Bay proposal for 300 MW of offshore wind. The wind farm would sit in what is now a restricted area.

The plan does set aside two specific areas for large-scale wind, and Jim O’Sullivan of the State House News Service quotes Ian Bowles, the state’s energy secretary, as telling reporters that “the Commonwealth [of Massachusetts] will want to put those areas out to bid and they would be, relatively speaking, on the fast track for development.” (sorry, SHNS is a subscription site – no link). Bowles allowed that the proponents of the Buzzards Bay project could bid to shift their 90+ turbines to one of the newly-designated areas, but added that he had no idea whether they intended to do so.

Bowles’ “fast-tracking” comment is direct, but not surprising. His own March Op-Ed in the NYT made reference to the administration’s perception of major offshore wind potential; and, those comments were strengthened considerably by the testimony Paul Hibbard, a state regulatory commissioner, gave before Congress in mid-June.

All the international investment, Washington clout and technological innovation in the world is for naught in a climate where a neighbor and ten friends can still get together and tie a project into a Gordian knot of appeals and reviews.

Until the full rule-making process is complete on both of these new policies, it is unclear what the real impact on siting will be. But, it seems obvious that neither policy will address all of the potential delays in getting turbines spinning. For example, the Massachusetts plan still grants local towns and regional planning agencies the authority to approve smaller wind projects in state coastal waters.

Taken together, yesterday’s federal announcement of a new plan for Southwestern solar zones and the Massachusetts offshore wind farm rezoning plan, demonstrate some interesting trends: first, a shift that brings policy more in line with rhetoric and second, a clear bias for executive action as against legislative enactment.

The two announcements are tangible steps toward aligning policy with the increasing rhetoric about the desire for greater renewable deployment. The major problem remains siting. Even in a fantasy scenario where there is no additional public opposition (which does NOT happen), the environmental and administrative processes at the local, regional, state and federal level are cumbersome.

Streamlined siting of generation assets is less meaningful without equivalent relief for building the transmission interconnections that are required to get wind off the high seas and solar rays out of the desert, and deliver usable energy to load centers.

The siting problem is a drag on development even as aggressive renewable portfolio standards have sent utilities out on the market for new renewable capacity (in spite of a year where they saw overall demand drop). It remains true even as huge sums of public money have been made available to subsidize renewable power and to spur development of new generation capacity.

Both of these announcements should – ostensibly – make siting, permitting and constructing a project easier. Both are still subject to public comment periods and possible amendment, but however the details emerge, it seems clear that what we will be left with is a more favorable climate for developers.

Both plans face at least one big additional question: even if they allow for streamlined siting of the generation asset, do they offer equivalent relief for building the transmission interconnections that will be required to get the wind off the high seas and the sun’s rays out of the desert, and deliver usable energy to load centers? Just ask Cape Wind, who was able to site their entire proposed farm in federal waters, whether relief from zoning and local/state court appeals for transmission infrastructure is needed.

The second trend is perhaps a little more wonkish and nuanced, but what does this spate of executive action mean for the future of energy infrastructure siting? Based on the blood bath that emerged in the House trying to get Waxman-Markey through, the measured bill that emerged, and the dim hopes of getting even that kind of bill through the Senate, it seems clear that if we are going to see swift, aggressive action on game-changing energy policy matters, it is likely to come from the executive corner of the government. While we can’t say how that trend might be greeted by the legislative bodies off in the other corner, we do have some indication of how the third member of the troika – the courts – will respond.

Swift, aggressive action on game-changing energy policy matters is likely to come from the executive corner of the government.

This spring, the Fourth Circuit rejected FERC’s attempts to grab a greater share of power under Federal Power Act amendments that were a part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. The Piedmont decision interpreted FERC’s backstop authority as a sort of riding crop that allowed the executive agency to help spur movement in state siting decisions and prevent undue or bad faith delay. The court expressly rejected FERC’s claim that the EPAct 2005 amendments allowed it to overturn the decisions of state siting agencies.

We may soon have a similar indication of the expansiveness of executive agency authority in Massachusetts. After receiving a consolidated “super-permit” from the state’s Energy Facilities Siting Board, Cape Wind faces a new SJC appeal that is sure to allege that local zoning approvals should not have been preempted. Cape Wind already prevailed in a 2006 SJC decision that focused more on the question of administrative authority and practice than on the substantive issues around siting.

It will be interesting to see if the Massachusetts court follows the 4th Circuit in some sense by limiting executive authority over energy infrastructure. Either way, the fact remains that project developers will remain subject to a full panoply of potential legal remedies that opponents can use to delay construction. These policies themselves – in whatever form they ultimately take – will inevitably be tested and interpreted by the courts.

In spite of the new policies, a fundamental conflict in renewable energy generation siting remains: the resources are most often not collocated with load. In other words, the locals who are experiencing the hardships presented by the development are probably not the ones who need the increased capacity. Even if a developer can site a project in one of the Commonwealth’s new zones (say on the beaches south of Boston headed toward Cape Cod), they still face the fundamental question from locals: why should I allow 10 turbines on my beach so that you can generate more power for skyscrapers downtown? And that is to say nothing of the permits required to construct transmission lines, transformation facilities and other ancillary infrastructure needs.

It is a positive sign for developers when the leaders of our nation and our states decide to put some of their political capital where their rhetoric has been. But, none of these policies are a panacea. Developers need to focus on the whole project picture, but they must keep a wary eye at ground level. All the international investment, Washington clout and technological innovation in the world is for naught in a climate where a neighbor and ten friends can still get together and tie a project into a Gordian knot of appeals and reviews.

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