Discover the Latest News and Initiatives for a Sustainable Future

Harris Ranch Resort isn’t close to much. Residents of California’s major cities know it mainly as a rest stop about halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco on Interstate 5’s long run through the San Joaquin Valley. The sprawling stucco building has a Western-themed gift shop and a couple of good restaurants where travelers can enjoy regional specialties like tri-tip tacos and almond-smoked prime rib — perhaps while they charge their EV at one of the Tesla stations outside.

But in the vast expanse of California’s Westlands Water District, the ranch is about the most central spot for a meeting. On a sunny afternoon in late January, Jeff Fortune, Ross Franson, and Jeremy Hughes, three of the nine directors of the country’s largest agricultural water agency, gathered there for lunch to discuss an ambitious plan to rescue some of the most productive farmland in the U.S. from a decades-long water crisis.

The Valley Clean Infrastructure Plan (VCIP) envisions converting 136,000 acres of land into 21 gigawatts of battery-backed solar power — nearly as much utility-scale solar capacity as has been installed in California to date.

“This will be not only the largest project in California, or the largest project in the United States,” said Fortune, a third-generation farmer and the district’s board president since 2022. ​“This will be the largest project in the world.”

The scale of the plan matches that of the land. Westlands Water District was formed more than 60 years ago to collectively manage water resources and irrigation infrastructure for the farmers within its 1,000-square-mile territory. The district’s 614,000 acres grow billions of dollars’ worth of crops per year — grapes, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, garlic, citrus fruits, almonds, pistachios, and many others. Those crops make up a major share of the bounty in a region that produces a quarter of the country’s food, including 40% of its fruits and nuts.

Fortune, Franson, and Hughes run family farming operations that collectively own or manage thousands of acres of a landscape transformed by industrial-scale irrigated agriculture. The water flows from reservoirs hundreds of miles north and is pumped from the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta via the Central Valley Project, one of the biggest water projects in the state. The water supply is augmented by wells that have delved ever deeper into the region’s aquifers.

But that water supply is drying up. Since the 1990s, surface-water cutbacks from the environmentally stressed delta have led to the fallowing of hundreds of thousands of acres. And under state law, Westlands farmers face increasingly strict limits on the groundwater they use.

Now, after decades of fighting state and federal agencies and lobbying Congress to increase the flow of water, Westlands farmers are shifting to a new approach. ​“Our hand is forced,” Fortune said. ​“Everyone’s in the same sinking ship together.”

VCIP could keep the ship afloat by financing a wholesale conversion of fallowed land into solar farms and battery storage systems capable of powering the equivalent of 9 million homes. To carry those clean electrons to market, the district will finance and build a transmission network that will speed interconnection to California’s congested grid and expand power flows between the state’s two biggest utilities, Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison.

None of this has happened yet, and completing it will take 10 years or more. But after years of work with developer Golden State Clean Energy, VCIP is now poised to move from concept to reality.

In December, Westlands Water District’s board approved the programmatic environmental impact report that lays out a master plan for the project. Hughes, a fifth-generation farmer who has been operating in Westlands for a quarter century, said that about 150 contracts so far have been signed by growers to make land available — including about 800 acres of his family’s land.

“The way we look at it is as a new crop,” he said. ​“We’re harvesting the sun and producing electricity.”

Critically, farmers will retain land ownership under VCIP’s lease and easement deals, and thus, access to the water allocations. And under Westlands’ agricultural-land repurposing plan and its VCIP master plan, water allocations for acres put into solar can be redirected to remaining farmland.

“You’re making the district more sustainable,” Fortune said, summing up the plan. ​“And that just helps the grower, it helps the communities, it helps the farmworkers — everybody.”

That help is desperately needed. The farms that make up Westlands Water District — many of them sprawling, multigenerational family-run organizations with substantial landholdings — have struggled for years with drainage challenges, salination, and other effects of heavy irrigation, which have polluted watersheds. The communities in and around the district have high rates of poverty and unemployment, a lack of economic opportunities, tainted groundwater, and inadequate investment in roads, schools, and public safety. State law requires VCIP to include a community benefits plan that delivers economic value to not just its growers but also the local governments and residents.

While it will be a massive and complicated undertaking, California needs four to five times as much new clean energy and storage as this project is slated to provide in the next 20 years, said Franson, president of farming at Woolf Farming & Processing, which cultivates 30,000 acres across the San Joaquin Valley, most of it in Westlands.

The master plan could provide a model for what the state must accomplish to meet that need for power on a grand scale, he said. ​“There’s so much talk in the state about the demand they’re seeing, about energy transition, about water issues … This hits all those boxes.”

Highway 33 runs south from the Mendota pool, a key water-exchange point for the San Joaquin Valley’s interlocking irrigation systems, and into Westlands Water District’s northeastern zone.

On a cold winter morning, Jose Gutierrez, the district’s assistant general manager, and I drove along the two-lane road through a thick blanket of Tule fog. Despite the limited visibility, Gutierrez had no trouble pointing out the solar farms on both sides of us. Farther down the road, pile drivers rattled away, busy planting anchor posts for yet more solar projects.

The installations there now are a fraction of what’s envisioned under VCIP. If that plan is fully realized, the trucks roaring up and down Highway 33 will pass solar fields stretching uninterrupted for roughly 30 miles, Gutierrez said. The surrounding area is slated for solar for a simple reason: It’s no longer irrigable.

Much of the land designated for solar development under the master plan is drainage-impaired — undergirded by a shallow layer of clay soil that prevents water from percolating deeper. As water accumulates above the clay layer, it becomes increasingly salty, but cannot be flushed out — and there’s no easy fix, thanks to a decades-old impasse between the federal government and the water district.

Under a 2015 settlement agreement with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Westlands was required to retire at least 100,000 acres from irrigated agriculture. In 2022, the district launched a land purchasing program to take on managing the retirement and eventual remediation of those drainage-impaired acres.

That land can still be planted with wheat or other cereal crops that tolerate being irrigated by rainfall alone, or leased to sheepherders. ​“But its value from a commodity perspective is pretty low,” Gutierrez said. As a result, it has mostly been left unused.

In fact, it’s a financial drag on the district. Idle land must still be managed to prevent pests and invasive weeds from setting in and endangering neighboring farms. Several times while on the highway, I spotted signs on utility poles advertising barn-owl boxes for rent — the birds help control gopher populations. And the debt the district took on to buy the fallowed acres must be paid off.

All this makes the land ideal for solar in a region whose clean energy potential is well understood. State agencies have designated large swaths here as the Westlands Competitive Renewable Energy Zone, meaning they are primed for solar development. Studies from universities and nonprofit groups indicate that the San Joaquin Valley can build solar while retaining sustainable levels of agriculture.

In the 13 years Gutierrez has worked for the district, eight solar projects have been launched on non-irrigable lands that the district has purchased and sold to developers. The biggest ones include the Darden Clean Energy Project, a 1.15-gigawatt solar-battery system being constructed on about 9,500 acres in the district’s central area; and Westlands Solar Park, a 2.27-gigawatt multistage development on roughly 20,000 acres in the district’s southern reaches.

Private landowners, like Fortune, Franson, and Hughes, have also been making deals with developers, and many other farmers could follow suit, Gutierrez said. In fact, VCIP expects that roughly half the 136,000 acres of solar and batteries it plans to develop will be on privately owned land.

Water shortages are the primary reason that Westlands growers are seeking alternatives to farming. But growers are facing other pressures, too, Gutierrez said. Volatile commodity prices have driven a boom and bust in certain crops, such as almonds. Rising energy and labor costs have taken their toll.

Landowners are eager to move more acres into solar to defray these costs, hedge against market risks, and bolster their bottom lines, he said. But there are roadblocks. Solar developers face long and onerous environmental reviews for each project under the California Environmental Quality Act, as well as drawn-out county permitting processes. And in California, as in many other parts of the country, limited grid capacity is forcing projects to wait for years in clogged-up interconnection queues.

Patrick Mealoy, partner and chief operating officer of Golden State Clean Energy, the VCIP developer, summarized the situation as a convergence of factors. ​“The land use planning, the water restrictions in the valley, the congestion on the transmission grid,” he said, ​“screamed for a master plan.”

Mealoy was part of the development team that put together a similar, if much smaller, master plan for Westlands Solar Park, the biggest solar-battery project in the district to date. That plan set key terms for individual developers on issues ranging from environmental mitigation and land management practices, to standard lease and contract requirements, to agreements regarding the arrays’ eventual decommissioning.

VCIP takes essentially the same approach, Mealoy said. Golden State Clean Energy itself will likely develop less than a fifth of the 21 gigawatts and will be working with independent developers for the rest, he said. But it’s far more efficient to create a master plan than to have each developer go it alone.

“When you look at the sheer magnitude of the tens of thousands of megawatts we need to build in California, the targets are getting higher. We’re doing a remarkable job, but we’re actually falling behind,” he said. ​“VCIP is enormous, but it’s a fraction of what we have to add.”

The programmatic environmental impact review approved by the district in December is the culmination of that master planning effort, Gutierrez said. It took two years, but now that it’s done, ​“it sets a standard for all VCIP solar developments of what they’re going to have to follow.”

That includes requirements for limiting construction impacts like air pollution, noise pollution, traffic safety, fire prevention, and the like, he said — an important consideration for nearby communities.

It also sets out how solar farms will be maintained once they’re built, said Allison Febbo, Westland’s general manager. That’s good not just for the neighbors but also for the developers.

Individual projects will still need conditional land use permits and construction permits from Fresno County, which encompasses the VCIP project boundaries. But with the approved guidelines in place, ​“we believe that we’ve knocked off two years in the planning process,” Gutierrez said, as opposed to ​“if a solar developer was to come in and do a one-off.”

Golden State Clean Energy has also laid out common financial terms and conditions for landowners and solar developers, Mealoy said. ​“If you’re farming near Kerman or if you’re farming near Huron, you have the exact same deal.”

The district hopes that all this planning ahead will help bring enough privately held land on board to roughly match the amount of district-owned land on the table, Gutierrez explained. That is vital to achieve the scale needed to enable the most unusual aspect of the plan, he said: building out the transmission.

“The district had enough land to make it interesting,” Gutierrez said. ​“But we knew we needed more land on the private side to justify the investments in infrastructure.”

To be reminded of how important new power lines and substations are to achieving the VCIP vision, Ross Franson need only look out his office window.

I met up with Franson at the white-painted, single-story field operations offices of Woolf Farming & Processing, which sits just east of Interstate 5, near Huron, the district’s sole incorporated city. To the south, past a field now under solar development, a spiderweb of power lines and transmission towers march southward. They converge just over the horizon, at PG&E’s Gates Substation — a critical juncture for solar power to interconnect to the larger state grid.

Of the 20,000 or so acres the company farms, roughly 1,200 have been built out in solar, Franson told me. Woolf plans to develop up to 3,000 acres in total. ​“We’re a little bit unique, in the sense that our farm is right next to the Gates Substation,” he said.

That’s not the case for much of the district’s acreage, he explained: ​“It’s far away from transmission lines and substations. And so the cost of doing that isn’t ideal.”

Enter Assembly Bill 2661, a state law passed in 2024. It allows Westlands to finance and build its own grid infrastructure. It also allows the district to use the clean energy it generates for its own purposes, and to sell the rest to utilities and other power buyers via the transmission system run by the California Independent System Operator.

In that sense, as Hughes said over lunch at Harris Ranch, VCIP is a ​“transmission play, not a solar play. The solar is doable because of the transmission.”

VCIP’s 500-kilovolt system will entail five new electrical substations and roughly 70 miles of high-voltage transmission connecting to the CAISO grid to the north, south, and west, Hughes said. In essence, it will provide an eastern parallel to the two 500-kilovolt transmission pathways already running along I-5 on the district’s western border.

Transmission is notoriously hard to build. But Westlands hopes that its master plan can forestall landowner and environmental opposition that has stymied many other projects. Much of the 70-mile line has been sited to cross district-owned lands. Where transmission will be situated on privately owned land, Westlands has crafted standard easement agreements to give landowners confidence they’re getting the same deals as their neighbors, Gutierrez said.

Westlands is taking on a significant financial commitment to unblock the grid bottleneck. Gutierrez estimated the price tag of building the project’s grid infrastructure is more than $1 billion.

The district will need to negotiate agreements with CAISO to earn back that money through transmission access charges. That’s the same way the state’s major new grid expansions are repaid over time via increases to utility customers’ bills.

But Mealoy believes those costs will be more than counterbalanced by benefits to the state at large. A study commissioned by Golden State Clean Energy found that VCIP could yield more than $9 billion in net energy cost savings over the next 25 years, both by adding more clean power and by reducing grid congestion that drives up rates and reliance on fossil gas–fired power plants in Northern California.

State agencies are loath to approve massive transmission investments to accommodate future clean energy projects. But as that buildout lags, CAISO’s grid remains congested — and clean energy developers face potentially project-killing costs for upgrades to connect to it.

That’s why VCIP relies on doing solar, batteries, and transmission together, Mealoy said. ​“To get transmission built, you needed size and scale,” he said.

Owning the power lines also gives Westlands control over some of its energy-related expenses. Several California irrigation districts operate their own utility services, including Turlock Irrigation District and Modesto Irrigation District in the Central Valley and Imperial Irrigation District in the southeast corner of the state.

Westlands, which is served by PG&E, isn’t becoming its own utility, Fortune stressed during lunch at Harris Ranch. ​“PG&E is not fighting us, and we’re not fighting PG&E.”

But running the district’s massive pumping stations requires a lot of power, as does operating well pumps and drip irrigation motors, he said. ​“The district is going to get lower power costs to supply the water, and [growers] are going to get the option of lower-cost power on their end — so the water cost is going to come down.”

The central role of water in Westlands is evident to anyone driving along I-5. Scattered among the fields and orchards are signs — posted on fences and on wheeled trailers once used to haul cotton — broadcasting slogans like ​“No Water = Lost Jobs,” ​“Stop the Politicians Created Water Crisis,” and ​“Congress-Created Dust Bowl.”

The angry sentiments stem from the decades-long conflict over California’s massive state and federally managed water distribution. Westlands secured its water allotments from the Central Valley Project in the 1960s. But since the 1990s, joint federal and state efforts to restore endangered fish species and protect the delta’s environment have increasingly restricted flows from the massive pumping stations that move water southward. And as the most recent water district to be created and served by the federal water system, Westlands is a junior holder of water rights, which makes it first in line for cuts.

Historically, San Joaquin Valley farmers and politicians have held a hard line on keeping the water flowing, with Westlands-bankrolled lobbyists often taking the lead. But as those political efforts faltered and drew public pushback during the state’s historic drought of 2011 to 2017, Westlands growers shifted their stance.

In 2022, Franson, Hughes, and two other growers won seats on the district’s board on a ​“change coalition” platform, aimed at putting an end to the adversarial water policies of Tom Birmingham. The district’s general manager for more than 20 years, Birmingham announced his retirement after the election.

To be clear, Westlands hasn’t surrendered the fight for water, said Febbo, who replaced Birmingham in 2023. ​“Our growers have shifted, from saying we don’t want to repurpose any of our agricultural lands, to a position where we have to fallow a significant portion of our area,” she said, ​“and that we should do that in a planned and thoughtful way until we determine a way to restore our water supply.”

If decades of on-again, off-again surface water allocations were the instigating incident, the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act was the hard closer. Passed in 2014, SGMA created the first statewide regulations to manage groundwater resources that provide roughly 40% of California’s water and that have sustained San Joaquin Valley agriculture for more than a century.

But overpumping has reached a crisis point in the San Joaquin Valley. Thousands of public and private wells have run dry. The land itself is sinking, as water from underground aquifers gets depleted by as much as 2 feet per year in some parts of the valley. That subsidence is threatening to undermine critical infrastructure, including the San Luis Canal, the section of the California Aqueduct serving Westlands Water District.

SGMA requires overdrafted water basins to achieve sustainability by the early 2040s, which will entail both significant cutbacks on pumping and replenishing depleted aquifers. Complying with the law will likely necessitate fallowing about 500,000 acres across the San Joaquin Valley, according to the nonprofit Public Policy Institute of California.

Under the Westlands groundwater management plan approved by the state in 2022, the district must roughly halve the amount of water it normally pulls from the ground during dry years by 2030, Gutierrez said. That reduction, along with the uncertainty around future surface water deliveries from the Central Valley Project, forces growers to face the prospect of reducing by half the amount of land they’re able to irrigate every year.

This prospect has helped convince a critical mass of Westlands growers to support VCIP, Franson, Hughes, and Fortune said over lunch.

“I really do think SGMA forced the issue,” Franson said. ​“When push comes to shove, we needed to come up with an alternative plan.”

Allowing farmers to put land into solar without losing its water allocations is essential to making that plan work, Fortune said. Typically, allocations for land repurposed or sold for nonagricultural uses revert to the district, he explained. But under VCIP, landowners with long-term leases or cash-up-front easement deals with solar developers keep both surface water and groundwater allocations, which they can apply to remaining farmland.

That’s important for Westlands growers like Rebecca Kaser, owner of Avellar-Moore Farms. Her family has been farming in Westlands for four generations. She hasn’t put land into VCIP yet, but her father has.

“We have fallowed over half our acreage,” she said. ​“We still have property taxes, we still have horticultural expenses … and they don’t return any income. And we do this just for the water allocation, so we can continue to grow, to help out our neighboring communities providing jobs and paying property taxes.”

VCIP offers ​“financial relief from the incurred expenses year over year on this fallowed acreage — and the way it was designed, we could still keep our water,” she said. ​“What I really want to emphasize is that if we can keep on farming all of it, we would. The VCIP is a tool in the tool box to at least stay farming with the little that we can.”

If VCIP develops as intended, it’s not just the growers who will benefit but all residents in Westlands Water District.

Danny Garcia, 41, has lived his entire life in Three Rocks, an unincorporated community in the middle of the district. He hopes that building the world’s biggest solar and battery project will bring prosperity to Three Rocks, which is also known as El Porvenir, which means ​“the future.” But he and his family have their doubts.

“People are struggling right now,” he told me when I stopped by his home. ​“There’s many ways that people could work on solar.” Garcia makes a living as a trucker, hauling produce and delivering fruit and nut tree seedlings from nurseries for planting in the fields. He can envision participating in the construction boom when VCIP gets underway.

Almost everyone who lives in Three Rocks is employed in agriculture in one way or another, he said — including longtime farmworkers like his mother, Rosa Ramirez. She’s worked in the fields since she moved here from Mexico about 50 years ago, she told me in Spanish as Garcia translated. She can earn up to $600 per week when jobs are steady, but less than $200 a week when it’s slow.

And work has been slower and slower, Ramirez said, sitting at her son’s dining room table. ​“Back in the ​’90s, they used to have tomato fields, lettuce, onions.” But as water has become scarcer, ​“a lot of almond trees are knocked out because of water — less and less.”

With solar panels eating up more and more farmland, ​“how is she going to pay her bills?” Garcia asked. ​“Is she going to work there with the solar system? She has no experience.”

The San Joaquin Valley includes some of the poorest counties in the state. The confluence of water stresses, environmental degradation, and rising heat and weather disruptions from climate change are only set to intensify the area’s challenges, according to a report issued as part of California’s 2021 climate change assessment.

Agriculture provides 17 percent of the San Joaquin Valley’s employment and 19 percent of its revenues. Those economic ties are even tighter in the sparsely populated Westlands, where agriculture generated $3.6 billion in economic activity and more than 27,500 jobs as of 2022, according to a 2025 study commissioned by the district.

But those figures were down from an estimated $4.7 billion in economic activity and about 35,000 jobs in 2019, driven largely by increases in fallowed land due to water restrictions. Those declines led to roughly 30% less in public tax revenues for counties, cities, and special districts, meaning millions of dollars no longer available for roads, water systems, schools, and other public services.

VCIP could help buck those trends, Mealoy of Golden State Clean Energy said. Building the solar and battery farms and grid infrastructure will require employing about 6,000 people for at least 10 years — in what he described as ​“good-paying, labor union jobs” — as well as about 1,000 full-time operations jobs once the project is complete. Some of those positions could be filled locally through apprenticeship and training programs with community colleges and workforce development agencies.

Businesses in the region could provide equipment and services to developers, and secondary spending will boost local economies, he added. The cost of building solar and battery projects ranges from $1 million to $1.5 million per megawatt, he noted.

And the towns, school districts, and county services will benefit from ​“billions of dollars that could be injected” into the tax base, once the state’s current property tax exemption for solar projects expires at the end of 2026, he said. It’s hard to predict future property tax revenues for Fresno County, but they’re certain to be significantly higher than those collected on fallowed fields, he said.

How those economic benefits will flow to communities suffering from generations of underinvestment and facing the loss of agricultural jobs has yet to be defined, however. In January, Westlands’ board voted in favor of a draft approach to meet the requirements in AB 2661, the law making VCIP possible, to ​“ensure that local communities have meaningful opportunities to participate and access benefits” from its clean energy transformation.

That plan for the community benefits agreement commits the district to work with Fresno County and seven incorporated cities to ​“commit a portion of project revenues” to workforce, energy-affordability, environmental, and quality-of-life benefits.

But Westlands doesn’t plan to start making that money available for ​“at least 60 months out, coinciding with the commercial operation of the facilities,” Russ Freeman, the district’s deputy general counsel, said at the January meeting before the vote took place.

That’s worrisome to community groups that feel they’ve been neglected by Westlands’ power players and the region’s political leaders. Rural Communities Rising, representing 36 communities across western Fresno County, was formed last year so that residents ​“are heard, respected, and prioritized,” as the clean-energy developments envisioned by VCIP move ahead.

“We believe in a big-tent concept. Everybody should participate,” Espi Sandoval, a Rural Communities Rising board member and educator, said at that January meeting. His group is advocating for a formal organization, including local governments, school and water districts, labor associations, workforce agencies, nonprofits, and local representatives, to ​“work collectively with developers to address … priorities.”

Community groups are focused first on mitigating impacts from construction, like limiting vehicle traffic that can clog narrow roads, worsen already poor air quality, and kick up dust carrying fungi that cause a pulmonary ailment known as valley fever. They’re also demanding more emergency services, including fire stations located closer to solar and battery sites that could pose fire risks.

And they’re asking for remediation of longtime problems like high energy costs and polluted water supplies. Ramirez’s electric bill from PG&E was $331.74 for the month of November — far more than she thinks she ought to be paying for a small single-story home. California has the highest electric bills in the mainland U.S. That’s a particular burden for low-income San Joaquin Valley residents during days or weeks of triple-digit summer temperatures.

Ramirez’s water bills have also risen, even as the water remains undrinkable, she said — a problem plaguing hundreds of thousands of California residents, many of them in the San Joaquin Valley. In Three Rocks and nearby Cantua Creek, the cause is disinfectant by-products from chemicals, such as chlorine, used to treat surface water delivered from Westlands to a Fresno County–managed treatment facility.

“That’s why we have the water jugs,” Garcia said, pointing to the five-gallon containers arrayed under the trampoline in his front yard. ​“Every two weeks, the water man comes in and leaves them.”

Clean energy could provide an economic lifeline for the region — but that’s not guaranteed. A 2024 report from the Sierra San Joaquin Jobs Initiative, a joint project of the Fresno-based Central Valley Community Foundation and the state-funded California Jobs First Council, found that the four counties of Fresno, Kings, Madera, and San Joaquin could host 29 gigawatts of solar and energy storage through 2045, adding up to about $10 billion in investment and an estimated 73,000 new jobs paying an average of $32 per hour.

But it also found that workers ​“feel inadequately prepared for this transition” in terms of education, training, and opportunity to break into the industries involved.

Elizabeth Cabrera, city manager of San Joaquin, a town of about 3,700 people in western Fresno County, has attended meetings held by nonprofit groups working with solar developers to offer jobs and training to locals. But less than a third of San Joaquin residents have a high school degree or equivalent, she said. Many speak only Spanish, and ​“a high percentage are undocumented. That’s already three major barriers to entry.”

Leticia Fernández, the 63-year-old owner of the Half-Way Store in Cantua Creek, is also doubtful that solar development can make up for the loss of agriculture in the area. She started working at the store when she was 16, and bought it from the previous owner in 1997. But business has declined as more land has been fallowed, and the solar projects being built haven’t reversed that, she said. ​“They’re not spending the money like they tell us at the meetings.”

That’s not to say that solar projects aren’t doing some good, Fernández said. She pointed to the new fire station being built in Cantua Creek, financed in part through a $15 million commitment from Intersect Power, the initial developer of the Darden Clean Energy Project (the project is now owned by IPX Power).

Intersect also committed to community benefits plans that will make $2 million in direct investments in the next 10 years and $5 million over the project’s lifetime. The initial $2 million has gone to support affordable housing, provide grants to small businesses, bolster school programs, plant trees, and give away about 250 window air-conditioning units, among other benefits.

“We want to build strong partnerships, and we want to bring the community into the project, whether that’s supplying concrete or getting a union job and working on-site,” said Elizabeth Knowles, head of community engagement at Intersect Power. The Darden project is expected to create more than 1,600 all-union construction jobs, generate more than $70 million in state and local sales tax revenues during its construction, and provide more than $200 million in property taxes in the first 10 years, she said.

Still, some people say the Darden project’s original community benefits agreement didn’t direct money to the most pressing needs. They want to make sure the process for VCIP, which will be more than 15 times larger than Darden, doesn’t leave them out of the loop.

“We understand the project will take at least 10 years to build out. But we want residents to be part of conversations before decisions are made,” said Mariana Alvarenga, a senior policy advocate with the nonprofit Leadership Council for Justice and Accountability.

The challenge is that most of the economic impacts of clean energy projects are tied to ​“jobs and spillover work for local businesses” during construction, said David Adelman, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law who studies local opposition to clean energy developments. Beyond that, ​“virtually all of the benefit is in increased local property taxes,” he said. ​“Most of that impact gets buried in county and school district budgets” that are ​“not very visible to the local community.”

These facts could bolster arguments for larger up-front community benefits payments, he said. But that might be hard for clean energy developers already struggling with the looming loss of federal tax credits, rising equipment and labor costs, and other economic headwinds. Nor do solar project developers want to be held responsible for repairing past harms to communities and to the environment that were caused by others.

County tax revenues from clean energy projects could be directed to helping the communities near those projects. But that requires commitments from county politicians and administrators to ensure those revenues aren’t redirected elsewhere — and like many other rural counties, Fresno County is facing major budget pressures.

Justin Diener, controller of Red Rock Ranch, understands these concerns. He grew up on his family farm in Five Points, which has won recognition for its sustainable water and soil management. After graduating from Stanford University, he was employed in agriculture finance for 12 years, then returned to work with his father in 2016. He won his seat on the Westlands board of directors in 2022 as part of the change coalition — and unlike most Westlands farmers, he lives on the land that his family farms.

“I love to be out here,” Diener said on a stroll outside the modest one-story building that houses his family’s farm operations. ​“I grew up out here, across the street. But you know, it’s not a walk in the park, either.” It’s a half-hour drive for him or his wife to take their daughter to and from school. Last fall, crops left rotting in nearby fields because they were unsuitable for market caused a fly infestation that plagued the area for months.

Diener has also seen the decline in Fresno County services over the decades. ​“When I was younger, the roads got paved more frequently,” he said. ​“The potholes were taken care of.” He’d like to see VCIP money coming into the district prioritized for critical needs. ​“Do you have shelter? Do you have food? Do you have water? Is where you live safe?”

He thinks that long-term funding from Fresno County and municipal governments, rather than one-time community-benefits dollars, is the logical source for supporting those kinds of fundamental services. ​“I’d look to ongoing community benefits dollars to be an enhancement to government dollars, rather than a replacement,” he said. It’s also important that community benefits be ongoing, rather than one-off donations.

Still, Diener says VCIP could be ​“transformational” for Westlands. ​“The district’s not going to see the benefits today or tomorrow,” he said. ​“But five to 10 years down the road, I think things are going to be very different.”

A correction was made on March 25, 2026: This story originally misstated the expiration date of California’s property tax exemption for solar projects. It expires at the end of 2026, not the end of 2027.

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Ohio regulators have blocked yet another major solar project because of local pushback, even though a significant number of public comments opposing the array appear to be fabricated. It’s the latest blow to solar in a state that defers to local governments on renewable energy, but not on fossil fuels.

The Ohio Power Siting Board decided last Thursday to deny a permit for the 94-megawatt Crossroads Solar Grazing Center, which would combine solar panels with sheep grazing in central Ohio. Although the project otherwise met all legal requirements, the board concluded that it ​“fails to serve the public interest.”

Regulators acknowledged that Crossroads Solar would have statewide benefits, create jobs, and increase local tax revenue. But they said the project’s merits are outweighed by the existence of ​“consistent and substantial opposition” from local governments and nearby residents.

Critics of the decision are troubled that the regulators basically shrugged off the fact that a substantial number of public comments filed in opposition to Crossroads Solar were duplicative, anonymous, or seemingly faked. A recent Canary Media review found that dozens of comments contained apparent lies about people’s names or residence in Morrow County, where the project site is located. The board acknowledged those concerns in its ruling but asserted that substantial public opposition existed regardless of the potentially fabricated comments.

The controversy about those false comments, along with anonymous or multiple submissions, feeds into broader criticism that the board has reduced renewable energy siting to a local popularity contest.

“When the volume of public input is prioritized over its substance, it weakens trust in the process and makes it harder to build the energy system Ohio needs,” said Nathan Rutschilling, managing director of energy policy for the Ohio Environmental Council.

Like many states, Ohio faces soaring electricity demand and rising power bills. Clean energy could help address those challenges — provided it can get built.

“If we’re going to deny solar the ability to compete in Ohio’s marketplace, I think that’s going to result in an artificially high price for Ohio consumers,” said Democratic state Sen. Kent Smith, who is a nonvoting member of the siting board. He described the board’s Crossroads Solar denial as ​“a dangerous thing for the state in terms of both affordability and reliability.”

An uphill battle for Crossroads Solar

State and local restrictions on renewable energy have proliferated across the country in recent years, and Ohio is no exception. The state’s wind and solar developers face hurdles that fossil fuel companies do not, thanks to a 2021 law that lets counties ban renewable energy developments — an authority they do not have over oil, gas, and coal projects.

Morrow County instituted such a ban across half its townships last year. But because Crossroads Solar was in the regional grid operator’s queue before the 2021 state law took effect, it is exempt from the blanket prohibition.

However, for the past few years, the Ohio Power Siting Board and its staff have denied or recommended against permits for solar farms when all nearby local governments have been against a project. The Ohio Supreme Court has not yet ruled on a legal challenge to that practice, even though oral argument was held more than a year ago.

Initially, it seemed as if Crossroads Solar might escape this fate. Although Morrow County commissioners and the boards of trustees in two townships where parts of the project would be built were against it, the board in a third township — Cardington — remained neutral. Since opposition wasn’t unanimous, the siting board’s staff recommended in early December that regulators deem the project in the public interest.

But shortly after that recommendation, meeting minutes show that one Cardington township trustee changed his position because the staff report ​“did not set well with him.” That led the Cardington trustees to pass a 2–1 resolution opposing Crossroads Solar. The switch-up ultimately resulted in the siting board staff reversing its stance, filing testimony in January that encouraged regulators to rule against the project.

The Power Siting Board relied on that reversal to declare that Crossroads Solar was not in the public interest. It also asserted that there was ​“strong, united opposition to the project” by people in the area. It’s worth noting, however, that many locals supported Crossroads Solar. Its developer, Open Road Renewables, found that nearly half the public comments from people in nearby towns approved of the project, once the duplicate, anonymous, and unverifiable submissions were removed.

Siting practices under fire

The Crossroads Solar case exposes deeper flaws in Ohio’s renewable energy siting process, some say.

It’s problematic that a single person’s vote on a town council ​“essentially derailed the whole project,” said Heidi Gorovitz Robertson, a professor at Cleveland State University’s College of Law. She argued that instead of reciting objections, regulators should evaluate whether those concerns have a factual basis and whether a developer’s plans already address them — and then decide whether any remaining issues actually justify denying a permit.

In the case of Crossroads Solar, Open Road Renewables agreed to address specific concerns about the project. In a late December settlement with the Ohio Environmental Council, the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, and various landowners, the company promised to follow best practices to keep roads clear and clean, use panels with an antireflective coating, minimize impacts to agriculture during construction, file a sheep-grazing plan to manage vegetation, work with a landscaping company to screen the panels from public view, and more.

But the Power Siting Board wasn’t swayed by the compromise, noting that the local governments and individual opponents who intervened in the case didn’t take part in the settlement negotiations, despite being invited to do so.

The board also appeared to buy into several obviously unfounded objections to Crossroads Solar, said Craig Adair, vice president of development at Open Road Renewables. For example, its ruling cited community skepticism about the company’s intention to graze sheep around the panels, since no contracts for such an arrangement had yet been signed. The board also noted opponents’ fears that the permit would later be transferred to another firm that wouldn’t make good on Open Road Renewables’ promises.

But the application’s commitment to use sheep would become part of the permit conditions, Adair noted. And, as a matter of basic contract law, any company that acquired the project would be subject to the same conditions as Open Road Renewables regarding permits, leases, easements, and other agreements.

The board also didn’t examine whether local governments’ objections to Crossroads Solar were based on misinformation, such as a laundry list of concerns about fires, contaminated drinking water, heat islands, and stray voltage.

“It’s taking fact and truth out of the equation, and it’s truly about concerns and politics,” said Doug Herling, a vice president at Open Road Renewables.

Instead, the board ​“denied a project that has no fuel requirements while we’re in the middle of an oil and gas crisis,” Herling continued, referencing the current supply disruptions caused by war in the Middle East. He also pointed out that solar can be built faster than gas plants, which face yearslong supply chain backlogs, and it doesn’t emit planet-warming and health-harming pollution.

Herling and Adair said the company plans to ask the board to reconsider its ruling.

Meanwhile, the permit denial ​“sends a dangerous signal to investors,” Adair said.

“I wish the state of Ohio luck in meeting its power needs and keeping power prices from going through the roof,” he said. For renewable energy developers, ​“it’s now a game of Russian roulette as to whether you would get a permit and what those criteria are.”

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After years of false starts and amid an acute regional energy crunch, large-scale onshore wind power could finally take off in Maine in 2026. Utility regulators in five New England states are considering developers’ proposals to build up to 1.2 gigawatts of onshore wind capacity in Maine’s far north, following a deadline for bids earlier this month.

The coordination between Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont — all of which have ambitious clean energy goals — means this procurement is more likely to succeed than those that have fizzled out in years past, said Francis Pullaro, president of clean-energy industry association RENEW Northeast.

“The states have come together, and that’s a pretty impressive accomplishment on their part,” he said. ​“We’re in a much better position now that we have the states going into the process having conferred.”

Maine’s Public Utilities Commission confirmed that at least one bid was submitted, but declined to share any further details at this time.

New England leaders have for nearly two decades discussed harnessing northern Maine’s robust winds to boost the region’s supply of renewable energy, but the idea has gained more urgency in recent years. Financial challenges and hostility from the Trump administration have dampened the prospects for the offshore wind developments that much of the region was counting on to meet their clean energy goals. At the same time, soaring utility bills and volatile oil and gas prices driven by conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East have strengthened the case for turning to power generation with no fuel costs.

“It’s becoming more apparent that there is a need for solutions to confront the cost of energy,” said Eliza Donoghue, executive director of the Maine Renewable Energy Association. ​“Certainly, this is not a silver bullet, but it is a way we can have more renewables injected into the system.”

Maine’s attempts to lean in to wind power began in 2008, with the adoption of a law that set a target of having 3 GW of wind power — some of it offshore — by 2020. Reality fell short of that goal: As of October 2025, the state had about 1.2 GW of land-based wind capacity and no offshore wind, according to the federal Energy Information Administration.
Clean energy boosters have long considered Aroostook County on the Canadian border a promising location for onshore wind development. However, the county is part of a small, local electrical network that is not connected to the New England grid. Any wind projects in the area would require new transmission lines to carry the power produced to the rest of the region.

Attempts to develop projects in remote Aroostook County floundered in 2016 and again in 2023. In both cases, the complications and cost of building transmission infrastructure were major obstacles.

Wind supporters are hoping this time will be different as the multistate collaboration supports much-needed power lines and streamlines bid assessment. All five states have set aggressive emissions-reduction targets: Maine is aiming for 100% clean energy by 2040, for example, and Massachusetts and Rhode Island both want to be carbon-neutral by 2050.

In recent years, they’ve worked together to achieve these goals across the region.

Last March, at the recommendation of the New England States Committee on Electricity, an organization representing the area’s governors on energy matters, grid operator ISO New England issued a request for proposals for transmission infrastructure connecting central Maine to the rest of the grid, shortening the distance power lines would have to travel from wind turbines in Aroostook County. ISO New England received six proposals, which it narrowed down to two after preliminary analysis. The organization will continue its assessments and may announce a preferred proposal in September, after which it will be up to the states to decide whether to proceed.

Also, the Maine Legislature passed a measure in 2023 allowing Maine to partner with other New England states on wind procurements. This move means Maine is sharing bids received in response to the most recent request for proposals with the other participating states, which will then coordinate on selecting a recommended wind farm. A winning bid is slated to be announced by the end of May.

“The fact that we’ve got five of the states signed on and committed to this is pretty important,” Pullaro said.

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As power-hungry data centers and rising fuel prices put the squeeze on anxious voters last fall, Virginia Democrats secured a governing trifecta in Richmond partly on a promise to rein in energy costs.

Now, with a 60-day legislative session in the rearview mirror as of March 14, newly elected Gov. Abigail Spanberger and lawmakers in her party look primed to deliver on that pledge in spades.

Democrats, who grew their majority in the House of Delegates last November and have controlled the Senate since 2020, still remain divided on whether and how to continue the tax breaks that have helped make Virginia the data center capital of the world; a special session is scheduled next month to resolve the standoff.

But legislators already have plenty of bragging rights. A slew of bills that would maximize use of the state’s grid, pave the way for more batteries and solar arrays of all sizes, and take other steps to lower energy bills are poised to become law with Spanberger’s signature in the coming weeks.

“I think it was a good session for affordability,” said Sen. Schuyler VanValkenburg, a Democrat who represents a suburban Richmond district. ​“I think it was a good session for supply.”

In many ways, Virginia is the poster child for the energy upheaval underway across the country. It’s ground zero for the AI boom and the massive computer warehouses needed to support it, which threaten to spike demand at rates not seen in decades. PJM Interconnection, the regional grid manager, is plagued by backlogs and barely capable of bringing new generation sources online. The cost of fossil fuels, together with the ongoing addition and upkeep of poles and wires, is contributing to skyrocketing utility bills.

Amid these pressures, the state hasn’t wavered from a law mandating 100% carbon-free electricity by midcentury — even as the Trump administration has repeatedly threatened to derail Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, the largest offshore wind farm in the country, and as congressional Republicans have slashed incentives and other inducements for solar and energy efficiency.

All that context was top of mind as lawmakers began their session this year, said Del. Phil Hernandez, a Democrat from Norfolk. ​“The assignment was crystal clear,” he said. ​“It really doesn’t matter where you are in Virginia: Electricity prices are salient. People are concerned, rightly, about the upward trajectory.”

From immense solar farms to balcony solar

Democrats’ strategy for tackling those worries was twofold, said VanValkenburg: to boost solar and storage, and to better utilize existing transmission and distribution infrastructure. ​“These are the two things we can do that are the cheapest, the fastest to get online, and the fastest way to save ratepayers money,” he said.

VanValkenburg has been on a long quest to speed the deployment of large-scale solar, promoting bills in 2024 and 2025 to ease local solar restrictions; they failed to become law. But the third time might be the charm. His latest attempt, Senate Bill 347, prohibits outright bans on large-scale solar while still leaving ultimate siting decisions up to local governments. It cleared both chambers last month and awaits Spanberger’s signature — though it’s among the few energy measures she hasn’t taken an explicit position on.

“I hope she signs it,” VanValkenburg said. ​“At the end of the day, this bill doesn’t mandate a single piece of solar. It just creates a better conversation, which I think will get us more solar.”

While that measure would pave the way for adding immense solar farms capable of powering thousands of homes, lawmakers also legalized a much smaller variant: balcony solar. Come January, Virginians should be able to buy and plug in the devices on their balcony or yard in the span of a few hours — avoiding permitting and utility red tape and shaving as much as 15% off their energy bills.

Lawmakers also sought to boost rooftop solar arrays this session, chiefly by increasing targets for these types of installations. The 2020 Virginia Clean Economy Act called on Dominion to get at least 1% of its electricity from renewable energy projects less than 1 megawatt in capacity. A bill sponsored by VanValkenburg, which now sits on the governor’s desk, would increase that number to 5%.

“Off to the races” on storage and grid use

The Virginia Clean Economy Act could also get a refresh when it comes to batteries. The law was first written to require utilities Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power Co. to deploy a little over 3 gigawatts of short-duration batteries, a mature technology that is widely available. A measure sponsored by Democrat Del. Rip Sullivan of Fairfax would raise the target to nearly 17 gigawatts by 2045, with most coming in data center–heavy Dominion territory. By that same year, the bill requires the utilities to deploy a total of 4.5 gigawatts of long-duration storage; such batteries can discharge energy for 10 hours or more but are still nascent in the commercial sector.

“Storage is really a critical affordability component, especially over the long term,” said Nate Benforado, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center. ​“If we can build storage, that is going to obviate the need for a lot of this gas, which is expensive and risky for customers.” Noting the war in the Middle East as the latest global conflict to impact fossil fuel prices, Benforado added, ​“If we continue to invest in gas infrastructure, expect your bills to go up and up.”

Lawmakers also passed bills to better utilize the state’s existing network of poles, wires, and other electricity delivery infrastructure. Because the grid is built to accommodate the maximum amount of electrons that might ever flow through it — such as on a particularly cold winter morning when people crank up heating systems — about half of it goes unused 99% of the time.

One measure would require Dominion and Appalachian Power to quantify grid utilization across their systems, a first step toward the deployment of batteries, line sensors, and other grid-enhancing technologies to increase energy generation on the system.

Another bill, dubbed the Fast Access to Surplus Transmission, or FAST, Act, would spur the same companies to identify sites where batteries or other technologies could be added to existing solar projects, taking advantage of extra room on the grid at the point of interconnection. Under a first-of-its-kind trial program, the utilities could add a total of 600 megawatts of generation using the surplus capacity.

“We’ve started to see a drastic reduction in costs around energy storage,” said Jim Purekal, a director at Advanced Energy United who heads the group’s legislative work in Virginia. ​“The more we install these, especially if we use existing grid capacity, the more we’re saving everybody money. And if we’re able to install these projects in tandem with solar and wind, which are your cheapest forms of energy generation, now we’re off to the races.”

“1,000 great ideas”

Hernandez was a sponsor of the FAST Act, and he is especially proud of its novelty. ​“Sometimes Virginia is not great at being first to move on a concept,” he said, ​“but in this case, it worked out.”

He also championed legislation requiring Dominion and Appalachian Power to invest millions in energy-efficiency upgrades for low-income, elderly, and disabled households. Another of his bills would streamline the permitting process for home rooftop solar.

“There were a whole lot more from other members,” Hernandez said. ​“This moment that we’re in is all about having 1,000 great ideas, because there’s no one thing you can do to fix every problem.”

To wit, over 50 energy and climate bills tracked and supported by the Virginia Conservation Network passed during the two-month session — including those setting the state up to rejoin the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, adopt more community solar farms, study ratemaking reforms, and many others.

Spanberger has yet to sign any of the measures, and many passed with little help from Republicans. But the vast majority of these bills are almost certain to become law, and VanValkenburg is hopeful that they’ll endure with bipartisan support. That’s because the economics of clean energy — especially solar and storage — just keep improving.

“I think these laws are going to be durable from a free-market capitalism perspective,” VanValkenburg said. ​“But I also just think that those are also the only ways that you’re gonna keep energy bills down.”

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See more from Canary Media’s ​“Chart of the Week” column.

Solar and wind developers around the world just keep getting defeated — by themselves.

Yet again, a record amount of new solar and wind capacity came online globally last year, according to the latest numbers by think tank Ember. The jump was sizable: Additions exceeded the prior year’s by 17%.

Not to pit friends against each other, but solar is the clear front-runner when it comes to renewables deployment. The world installed nearly four times more solar than wind in 2025. But wind can take solace in the fact that it grew faster last year, with installations up by 47% from 2024 — dwarfing solar’s 11% increase.

It’s also worth noting that nearly two-thirds of the added capacity came online in China, of course.

This renewables boom sounds like good news for fending off climate change, but things are more complicated than that. Lots of fossil-fueled power plants are getting built around the world, too, as energy demand skyrockets thanks to the AI boom and the electrification of cars and buildings. Still, the steady growth of renewables is chipping away at polluting fuels’ grip on the globe: Wind and solar generate an increasing share of the world’s power, hitting 15% in 2024, the most recent year Ember has data on.

Meanwhile, the argument for renewables is only getting stronger as the war in the Middle East spikes oil and gas prices worldwide, leaving countries that rely on imported fuels to pay through the nose.

Despite policy headwinds in the U.S. and elsewhere, there’s good reason to believe that wind and solar will keep notching personal bests. Photovoltaic panels and turbines, plus the batteries that store their energy for later, are fast and cheap to build, making them tough for electricity-hungry countries to say no to.

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This analysis and news roundup come from the Canary Media Weekly newsletter. Sign up to get it every Friday.

It’s been a month since the U.S. and Israel first attacked Iran, sparking a conflict that has all but shut down the critical shipping lane of the Strait of Hormuz and sent oil prices on a roller coaster. The effects have been obvious in the U.S.: Average gasoline prices are hovering at just under $4 a gallon, a threshold they haven’t hit since 2022.

Elsewhere, it’s not just petroleum products that are causing price shocks. While the U.S. produces much of its own natural gas, many countries rely on imports from the Middle East to cook, heat homes, and run power plants. Governments, especially in Asia, have had to enact retail fuel price caps and other mechanisms to stop costs from becoming unbearable.

But some countries have another shield against the price hikes: wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, and other fossil fuel–free technologies that provide power unbothered by global upheaval.

Spain’s prime minister boasted that on a recent Saturday, electricity in his country cost about seven times less than in France and Germany, thanks to its investments in clean energy. That margin typically isn’t so high, The New York Times notes: A rainy spring season has unlocked more hydropower than usual in Spain, which will have to turn back to gas in the summer. Still, the United Kingdom, too, hit a record for renewable power output this week, reducing the country’s gas usage and its exposure to the fuel’s rocky prices.

China, meanwhile, is the world’s largest importer of oil and natural gas. Much of that gas comes from Qatar, which has curbed its production amid the attacks. But China is also a renewable energy powerhouse, installing tons of wind and solar over the past decade. That clean power supply, along with some fossil fuel stockpiles, is now helping insulate China from the price spikes and supply disruptions wracking other countries.

While China still relies heavily on fossil fuels, experts say the conflict in Iran could speed its energy transition — and boost business for its cleantech manufacturers, which churn out most of the world’s wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles. Over the last month, investors have already ramped up spending on these firms.

At the same time, used EVs are seeing surging interest in both Europe and the U.S. — and rising costs are already giving some consumers the final push they need to install solar panels, heat pumps, and other appliances that get them off fossil fuels and their volatile prices for good.

More big energy stories

Trump’s latest offshore wind attack is — surprise — legally dubious

The Trump administration is trying a new route on its journey to upend offshore wind, but some critics say the scheme may not pass legal muster.

On Monday, the Interior Department said it had worked out a deal with TotalEnergies, in which it would reimburse the company nearly $1 billion to forfeit its leases, signed in 2022, for offshore wind development near the coasts of New York and North Carolina. In exchange, TotalEnergies agreed not to work on further offshore wind projects in the U.S. and to put the refund toward gas investments, Canary Media’s Maria Gallucci reports.

The deal raises a ton of questions. For starters, as is often a concern: Is the Trump administration allowed to do this, and can anyone sue to stop it? Former U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management head Elizabeth Klein told Maria that it’s legally dubious, though it’s unclear who could challenge the deal in court.

And another question: Where will that money come from? Federal officials haven’t clarified, but because TotalEnergies’ lease payment hasn’t been sitting untouched in a vault for years, taxpayer funding is its likely source.

But there’s a bit of good offshore wind news this week, too: The Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project has started sending power to the grid.

States change their tune on nuclear power

Nuclear power’s reputation is in the middle of a remarkable shift.

Just a decade ago, at least 16 states curtailed nuclear power development in some way, whether through an outright ban or other conditions. But over the past few years, five states looking to meet rising energy demand have repealed those moratoriums, and another five are considering legislation that would do the same, Alexander C. Kaufman reports for Canary Media.

All these rollbacks come as the Trump administration pushes to reopen shuttered nuclear plants and build both conventional and next-generation nuclear — though it’s not just Republican-led states that are riding the nuclear wave. Just this week, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D) announced that a $1.76 billion nuclear fuel enrichment project is coming to his state.

Clean energy news to know this week

Harvesting the sun: A plan to build the world’s largest solar and battery project on fallowed land in California’s Central Valley could provide a lifeline for farmers and supply a significant portion of the state’s clean energy needs. (Canary Media)

Critical climate impacts: A new study finds U.S. greenhouse gas emissions have led to $10 trillion in global damages by driving up temperatures and exacerbating extreme weather, with a quarter of those damages happening in the U.S. (The Guardian)

Batteries surge: Grid batteries are expected to make up nearly a third of U.S. power plant capacity built this year — and new data shows that for the first time, the country will be able to produce enough batteries to meet that growing demand on its own. (Canary Media)

Renewables acquitted: A report from European grid operators blames the massive blackout in Spain and Portugal last April on a sudden increase in voltage combined with other factors, dispelling speculation that the region’s dependence on renewables caused the outage. (BBC)

Funding finds a way: U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has reportedly overstated the extent to which the Trump administration dismantled a Biden-era clean energy loan program, which is still supporting the buildout of infrastructure across the nation. (Grist)

Wind’s Maine event: Maine tried and failed for years to build out tons of wind power production, but its latest attempt, which has backing from neighboring New England states, may have a better chance at success. (Canary Media)

New England plugs in: All six New England states are considering bills that could legalize plug-in balcony solar panels, with Maine on track to get its legislation to the governor as soon as next week. (Canary Media)

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This story was produced by Grist and co-published with The Texas Observer. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter and for the Texas Observer’s weekly newsletter.

In the far corner of the Crockett County Senior Center, 75-year-old Cynthia Flores almost always has a puzzle going. She and her friends sort colors and look for edge pieces while they gossip — ​“faster than the telephone” — in the Tex-Mex blend of Spanish and English they grew up speaking in Ozona, a tiny ranching and oil outpost in far West Texas. A couple of days before Valentine’s Day, their puzzle surface was one of the few in the center not covered in red and pink hearts; preparations were underway for the big dance the following night.

“La comida esta ready,” another senior said, calling the puzzlers to lunch. Flores placed one last piece, then took her seat at a long community table. The plate in front of her would have delighted a nutritionist with its lean protein and mountain of steamed broccoli. She pulled a tiny plastic container of teriyaki sauce out of her bag and poured the contents over the meat. ​“They feed us what we need,” Flores said, ​“but I always fix it up.” Mostly, she said, she’s just thankful not to have to cook. Like many of her friends, Flores still lives at home, but comes into the center for lunch most days. After being married at 16 and preparing food for herself and her family for almost 60 years, she said she was ready for a break.

Some might say Flores and her friends are living the retirement dream. The center is like a second home, with nutritious food and a full calendar of bingo, dominoes, and social events. Thanks to services like these, many of Crockett County’s aging residents have been able to stay in the familiar community where they, their parents, and sometimes even their grandparents grew up. Flores has been cutting hair locally for decades, working primarily out of her house. Many of her clients now are in their 90s. ​“I’ve been blessed to work in Ozona, where I can do my own thing,” she said.

Ozona is the only town in Crockett County’s 2,800 square miles, and technically, it’s not even that. ​“The Biggest Little Town in the World,” as it brands itself, is technically unincorporated, meaning that the county is the only municipal government for its 2,800 residents. One person per square mile means Crockett isn’t the most rural county in Texas, but it’s up there. Taxes and regulations are minimal. The nearest city, San Angelo (the locals just say ​“Angelo”), is 90 minutes away. The nearest metro area, San Antonio, is three hours.

In her chic, clear-frame bifocals and flowy duster, Flores makes aging gracefully in place in one of the most rural places in the United States look easy. It’s not. In many rural communities, seniors may find it hard or impossible to get the resources they need to remain in their homes and hometowns. Older Americans are already at risk of isolation, and living in a remote area can make that worse. Not to mention, resources are thin, local hospitals and other services are folding, and groceries may be pricey, far away, or both. According to the Rural Health Information Hub’s summary of U.S. Department of Agriculture data, 10.2 percent of seniors in rural areas don’t have sufficient access to healthy and nutritious food, compared with 8.5 percent in metro areas.

But in Ozona, older adults like Flores are thriving. The Crockett County government has created a strong network of senior services, and ensures that they are supported — with the help of a wonky tax arrangement and some powerful new neighbors: wind companies.

About 15 miles north of the senior center on State Highway 163, the wind turbines start cropping up, fleets of towering structures owned and operated by a company called NextEra Energy. In Texas, wind generates 29 percent of the power distributed by the state’s notoriously independent power grid — second only to natural gas. According to the state comptroller, Texas wind generation surpassed nuclear power in 2014 and overtook coal-fired generation in 2020. As of 2023, the state led the nation with 239 wind-related projects and more than 15,300 wind turbines.

In Crockett County, the turbines generate more than just electricity. Money from NextEra supports the meals that Flores and her friends enjoy at the center and helps make events like the Valentine’s Day dance possible.

It all comes down to clever utilization of a section of the Texas tax code. As a way of attracting large projects like wind farms, the state offers companies a temporary property tax break — up to 10 years — in exchange for local investment. This Texas Abatement Act (also known as Section 312) means less tax revenue in the short term, but more dollars immediately flowing to community projects and programs like the senior center in Crockett.

While some economists say the abatements are unnecessary to recruit the companies — there aren’t many places they can go where taxes would be lower — the opportunity to reduce startup costs for wind turbines or data centers or other developments gives the county a bargaining tool.

Many counties and cities use funding generated from these deals to improve roads and other infrastructure that might be strained by the new development, or to fund other public projects that don’t have a place in the regular budget. In Medina County, for instance, officials negotiated with incoming data centers to improve roads where locals were concerned about increased traffic.

In Crockett County, like many places in West Texas, roads, jobs, and public projects have long been tied to oil and natural gas revenue, with its attendant booms and busts. According to Crockett County Judge Frank Tambunga, oil and gas have kept public coffers full in Ozona, even with the ups and downs of the industry — and the steadier (though usually lower) revenues from wind farms will likely add consistency to an already healthy budget.

Ozona’s services for seniors are usually funded by a mix of federal and local funds, as well as charitable donations. As NextEra expanded its wind farms and more turbines cropped up, Tambunga saw the opportunity to offer those aging support services a boost.

Tambunga is a native of Ozona. Now in his early 60s, he’s well acquainted with the sorts of choices his slightly older peers are making. He hears their concerns about health care, groceries, and social isolation. When he considered what to ask for in the tax abatement negotiations with NextEra, those concerns were top of mind. But rather than push for a new public department or project, Tambunga looked to those already doing the work in the community.

“As we negotiate, we ask that, during the term of the abatement, that they make charitable contributions to nonprofit organizations to help the local groups,” said Tambunga. ​“It allows us to provide support for these organizations that help people within the community.”

Eligio Martinez remembers when the wind companies first arrived in Crockett County in the 2010s. He was a county commissioner back then (at times in Ozona, it feels like everyone has taken their turn in county office), and remembers talking to other counties to figure out the best terms for the tax abatement deal. Locally, he said, the wind turbines were an easy sell. ​“We welcomed them,” Martinez said. No one got caught up in the politics of green energy — something that Texas’ oil-funded politicians regularly debate — or even the aesthetic effect of adding turbines to the wide open vistas. They saw the chance to increase their tax base and gain funding for local services, Martinez said. ​“If it’s beneficial to the community, we’re going to stick together.”

For their part, the residents at the senior center didn’t understand exactly how the turbines worked — when the massive structures first arrived, they said, locals wondered if they could run electricity directly from the turbine and were skeptical when they learned that the electricity would be sent to Texas’ power grid to be used elsewhere. Energy-funded towns like theirs are used to asking: ​“How long will the royalties last?” They’re asking the same about the wind farms. They’ve lived long enough to watch booms and busts in nearly every industry — ranching, oil, and gas, banking — but donations from the tax abatement deals and the increased tax revenue for the school district are welcome while they last.

There’s a pragmatism, Martinez said, that comes from being so remote. ​“We’re very vulnerable here,” he said. When his mom got cancer in 2013, he saw just how vulnerable. He was lucky enough to have a job that allowed him the flexibility to take her to her chemotherapy appointments in San Angelo, but if he hadn’t, he wondered how she would have made the trek over and over, being as sick as she was.

Even for more able-bodied seniors, transportation is a hurdle in Ozona. The Concho Valley Transit buses make daily runs to San Angelo, and many use them for errands, but some don’t want to be out all day until the scheduled return trip. Some may have to check in for dialysis and cancer treatments at hours when the buses don’t run. And for those with more complex medical conditions or advanced cancer, San Angelo doesn’t have what they need. They have to go to San Antonio, Dallas, or even Houston — all between three and seven hours away. Whoever provides that transportation — usually a family member — is taking on substantial costs.

Martinez started looking for ways to raise funds to help others in his community pay for these travel expenses. He was a radio DJ, so his first idea was a music festival. He organized a daylong festival, and posted some student volunteers by the door to collect entry fees. Almost no one came to hear the music, he said, but when he checked with the students at the door, they had raised $5,000. People had simply dropped off donations. Even if they didn’t want to spend the day listening to music, they wanted to help. Everyone knew that this was a huge issue for rural Texans and that most likely, at some point, they too would need to make long drives to access various forms of medical treatment.

Martinez hosted a few more music festivals, but eventually realized that he didn’t need to put on an event — locals were ready to donate. He created a nonprofit, In Care of Ozona, or Coz 4 Oz, that provides gas cards and hotel funds for folks who need to travel for medical care.

This year, Martinez became a beneficiary of the very programs he helped negotiate back on the commissioners court: He received two donations from NextEra, totaling $3,000 — Coz 4 Oz’s entire budget for the moment.

It’s not just medical emergencies that create transportation woes in Ozona. Ordinary errands can be just as burdensome. As in many small towns, the local grocery store prices are high. Prices are better in San Angelo, so seniors will often carpool for the 90-minute drive, or if someone is planning to make a trip, they’ll take a list of what their neighbors need. Much of the impromptu organizing runs through the senior center, said Director Emily Marsh. ​“It’s like a huge family.”

Back at the Crockett County Senior Center, while Flores and her friends were working on their puzzles, 69-year-old Arletta Gandy loaded trays of hot meals into her small SUV. The former grocery store manager’s dangly, candy heart–inspired earrings bobbled as she heaved a box full of lunch sacks onto the back seat. She and two other volunteer drivers show up to the senior center every weekday to drive the three ​“Helping Hands” routes, delivering meals to 42 seniors around Ozona. It’s a good way to get out of the house in her retirement, said Gandy, who doesn’t consider herself ​“from Ozona” because, as she said, ​“I’ve only been here over 20 years.”

After eight years delivering meals in the community, she knows the routes by heart. She knows which recipients have dietary restrictions and which dogs will run out of the house if she opens the door too wide. At some houses, she chats briefly. Others have their own rituals. One man does little more than reach out from behind his screen door, but every day, as Gandy walks back down the plywood ramp overpassing the porch stairs, he says, ​“See you later, alligator.”

“After a while, crocodile,” Gandy responds.

“Nacho nacho,” the man calls back.

“Nacho nacho,” Gandy replies.

The Helping Hands program has been operating in Ozona for as long as Director Stacy Mendez can remember. She’s been involved since childhood. ​“I remember helping my grandmother and aunt deliver meals,” Mendez said. The program began in a local Catholic church, and when the Crockett County Senior Center opened with its commercial kitchen over 20 years ago, Helping Hands moved in.

In Texas alone, an estimated 100,000 seniors rely on meals funded through Meals on Wheels programs like this one. Across the board, federal funding for these programs has dwindled as pandemic-era appropriations expired and the Trump administration began canceling grants and slashing federal budgets. A government shutdown in the fall further disrupted an already unstable funding stream. Last September, a $20,000 donation from NextEra came just in time, Mendez said. It kept their lean operation afloat, replacing the lost federal dollars and allowing Helping Hands to continue operating through the shutdown, while other programs around the state had to cut back services.

Other Texas counties could also use the renewables boom to meet local needs. The number of Texans 65 and older is expected to more than double, from 3.9 million in 2020 to 8.3 million by 2050, making it the state’s fastest-growing population, according to AARP. That’s a concern for hunger advocates like Jeremy Everett, director of the Baylor Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty, because seniors are already one of the most food-insecure groups, after young children. But while kids can get food through their schools, such hubs don’t usually exist for seniors, especially in rural areas. In 2026, Meals on Wheels reported that nearly 14 million seniors worried about having enough food.

“Without the ability to safely and reliably access affordable food, senior adults may no longer be able to live in the rural communities they have called home,” Everett said. In Crockett County, money from the wind farms is helping to address that issue. The county is also working with the Baylor Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty to identify ongoing gaps. Especially in times of economic uncertainty, a coalition-based approach to senior hunger is vital, said Everett. No one sector can meet every need, so partnerships between local governments, industry, and nonprofits are key. ​“That’s how strong food systems are built from the ground up,” Everett said.

There’s another group of Crockett County seniors who benefit from the wind farms: ranchers. Steve Wilkins’ family has owned and operated the 6,000-acre Flying W Ranch for four generations, and he and his wife, Belinda, now breed Brahman beef cattle and lease part of their land to hunters. Belinda also sits on the board of the senior center.

As of Valentine’s Day, Wilkins reckoned he was probably a month or so away from signing a deal to lease part of his family ranch to a wind company. Most of the ranches around them have already done so. ​“I’ve kind of been dragging my feet on it,” Wilkins said. He’s not sure how he feels about wind energy, but these days ranchers have to be pragmatic. Many also lease to oil and gas companies — one of the more lucrative ways to keep a ranch intact. But in ​“mature regions” like Crockett County, many oil wells have already been producing for decades, putting them near the end of their productivity. Natural gas can have a similar lifespan, but big profits tend to drop sharply after the first six months to two years.

Wind, of course, is not a finite resource. Theoretically, the region could keep producing wind and reaping the benefits indefinitely, or as long as demand for electricity continues apace. Still, there’s skepticism about how long it will last, Belinda said. If the wind boom comes and goes, they’ll just have to keep adapting, as they always have.

In any case, the wind farms are a longer-term investment. Wind money doesn’t start flowing to the ranchers immediately, Wilkins said. The companies told him that it could be seven or eight years before they start seeing royalties. At 70, Wilkins said that this is of little use to him. But ranchers are also used to seeing land management in generational terms. ​“Maybe my kids can keep the ranch,” he said.

In the hours leading up to the Valentine’s Day dance, Jerry and Willa Perry checked in for their weekly appointment at Flores’ in-home salon. Jerry removed a red MAGA-style cap that said ​“Make Texas A Country Again” and placed his hearing aids inside while Flores trimmed his white hair. Willa, his wife of 70 years, looked on, smiling. ​“I can’t wait to get you home,” she joked, raising her eyebrows playfully. Jerry smirked — although he could not hear her, he got her meaning just fine.

Flores charges on a sliding scale from about $12 to $40 to make sure all her clients can afford to stay coiffed. She makes enough to stay in the house, which she rents. But at her age, she said, she knows that she’s just one medical emergency away from needing full-time care, which she’ll likely find at the county’s local public nursing home.

After finishing with her last clients, Flores changed into a billowy red pantsuit, pearls, and bedazzled sneakers. The dance didn’t start until 6 p.m., but she and several other regulars were there by 5 to get a good table. Emily Marsh and Belinda Wilkins enlisted their help setting out food on the long buffet. By the time the DJ fired up the first cumbia number, about 60 seniors were seated around the dance floor with plates of chips, cookies, and veggies with dip.

Things started slowly, but began to pick up when a country two-step song came on. Judge Tambunga and his wife got up to dance, and other couples immediately followed. At the next cumbia, Flores rustled up a group of single ladies to take the floor. A couple songs later, she led a conga line.

This story was supported by a grant from the Solutions Journalism Network.

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This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter.

When Krystal Steward started knocking on her neighbors’ doors in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 2021, to discuss energy efficiency and sustainability upgrades, she was met with a lot of blank stares.

She was new to the issues herself, she said. But the longtime social worker kept at her new job doing outreach for Community Action Network, a local nonprofit dedicated to serving under-resourced communities. She slowly started getting people in her neighborhood to take part first in home-energy assessments, then in a city program to swap out appliances, make structural fixes, and more.

​“In the beginning, it was kind of hard — a lot of people were reluctant. If someone is knocking on your door and telling you they can fix up your home for free, most people don’t believe that,” Steward said. But, she added, ​“Once one person tried it out, they’d tell their neighbors, and others would jump on board.”

Now, the neighborhood, Bryant, is set to pilot a first-in-the-country program that officials hope will speed the city’s transition to renewables — and offer a new model for how local governments can control their energy future.

The idea is technical, but has sparked enthusiasm across Bryant and Ann Arbor: a new city-created Sustainable Energy Utility, known colloquially as the SEU. Rather than replacing the privately owned utility that serves Ann Arbor, the plan is for this city agency to run in tandem, offering a supplemental service that residents can opt into.

If they do, they’ll stay connected to the regular grid, but will be outfitted with solar panels, battery backup systems, or other infrastructure, drawing on that power for their home use and opening up the prospect of selling any excess. The city, meanwhile, would pay for the installation and maintenance of these systems, which Ann Arbor would continue to own — a vision of energy generation and storage distributed across the city.

The plan begins in the coming months in Bryant, a 1970s-era community with about 260 homes, many of which are officially considered ​“energy burdened.” A quarter of residents pay more than a third of their incomes on utilities, in a neighborhood that is one of Ann Arbor’s only areas of unsubsidized affordable housing, according to Derrick Miller, Community Action Network’s executive director.

The SEU is a major step in a yearslong process to address Bryant’s energy affordability and sustainability concerns — and then expand the approach across the city.

“When we started having a conversation about how to decarbonize the neighborhood about four years ago, it felt outlandish. Now, it doesn’t feel like anyone can stop us,” Miller said.

Two parallel utilities

The appeal of the SEU became clear in November 2024, when a ballot measure on the proposal was approved by nearly 80 percent of Ann Arbor voters. A little over a year later, city officials are ready to implement the vision, said SEU Executive Director Shoshannah Lenski.

In late February, the city announced that it was accepting expressions of interest from residents and businesses to take part, accompanied by a flurry of community meetings, animated videos, and ads in local theater playbills.

Customers who opt in will get two utility bills — one for the power supplied by these new city-owned clean energy systems, and one for any power they’re still drawing from the regular grid — which Lenski and her colleagues say will add up to less than they currently pay.

“Just like customers don’t own a power plant, the city owns and finances the system upfront, and they pay for that electricity through a monthly bill,” Lenski said. She noted that the model could prove particularly helpful for renters, who often get left out of green energy incentives. Signing up large multifamily buildings will be important to quickly expand the SEU’s size, she said.

In addition to installing clean energy systems at participants’ homes, the SEU could build its own microgrids, something that would set it apart from other municipal clean energy programs. For instance, the agency could install solar panels on a school to supply power when students and teachers are in the building, and that power could go to other SEU customers when classes are out.

Backers say the strategy allows Ann Arbor to build out its green energy system with lower financial risk — and lower potential for political or industry pushback.

“When coupled with DTE’s planned investments in clean energy, these voluntary, fee-based programs help accelerate economy-wide decarbonization while maintaining reliability and affordability,” Ryan Lowry, a spokesperson for DTE Energy, which currently supplies energy to the city, said in an email.

It might seem surprising that DTE, Michigan’s largest electric utility, is supportive of the SEU. But industry experts noted that many investor-owned utilities are struggling under the unprecedented new demands for power. Having a local government try to help manage power needs could be seen as an asset, they suggested — though DTE will have no formal role in the SEU.

So far, more than 1,500 people across Ann Arbor have indicated that they want to sign up. The SEU plans to serve around 100 to 150 customers in Bryant this year, expand out to reach 1,000 next year, and then grow by several thousand annually after that.

A missing 40%

The approach answers a question prompted when Ann Arbor adopted an ambitious climate plan in 2020.

That framework included an electrical grid powered completely by renewable energy within a decade, but a city analysis in 2023 warned it was likely to miss that goal by more than 40 percent. In order to reach it, the city would need to push DTE to accelerate its renewable energy buildout, or lean on state officials to do so — or detach from DTE entirely and create a separate city-owned utility, an idea that does have some support in Ann Arbor.

But from the city’s perspective, these options seemed too risky or uncertain, Lenski said — until officials realized that the Michigan Constitution allows municipalities to create and run their own utility, even if there’s another present.

“That’s where the idea of the SEU was born,” she said.

When University of Michigan researchers compared the four options, they found the SEU model had the greatest potential to lower energy prices and emissions, boost reliability, and help low-income communities.

“Overall, it came down to having some benefits of local control without some of the costs,” said Mike Shriberg, a professor who led the research, noting a similar model should be possible in every state.

Still, some worry the strategy does not go far enough. Advocates who want the city to break with DTE and replace its services with a utility fully owned by Ann Arbor are seeking a November ballot measure to set that process in motion. (Organizers are currently collecting signatures.)

Brian Geiringer, executive director of the advocacy group Ann Arbor for Public Power, said the SEU plan still leaves too much responsibility for the city’s energy transition with DTE.

But if voters do approve creating a fully public utility, he said, it would not mean an end to the SEU: The two approaches could work together, with the SEU focused on generation within Ann Arbor, and a publicly owned utility able to make its own decisions on purchasing power.

“If you draw a circle around Ann Arbor, the SEU is doing stuff inside the circle. And we’re interested in having the city control what comes in from outside of the circle,” Geiringer said.

Local control

Like Ann Arbor, hundreds of cities are working to implement climate goals — and running into similar gaps between ambition and practicality, especially when it comes to control over energy sources.

“Cities have set these goals, and the utilities aren’t obligated to follow those,” said Matthew Popkin, manager for U.S. cities and communities at RMI, an energy think tank.

“So Ann Arbor’s SEU is an example of cities taking more control of their future without dismantling or acquiring existing utility systems,” said Popkin. ​“That’s a really interesting model.”

Other models also exist. In Washington, D.C., for instance, a program called the D.C. Sustainable Energy Utility has been operating for 15 years, overseeing the city’s efforts to help residents use less energy.

The initiative is far narrower than the Ann Arbor vision, functioning not as a utility but rather as an organization contracted by the city to boost energy efficiency and increase access to clean energy through subsidies and rebates.

The program is a central part of the city’s goals to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, said managing director Benjamin Burdick, and has helped cut some 10 million metric tons of emissions while saving residents more than $2 billion from reduced energy use.

Nationally, ​“the conversation that we’re hearing is around how do you continue to talk about climate with affordability,” he said. ​“Programs like the D.C. SEU are going to continue to be the way that we double down.”

The work in Ann Arbor is now receiving its own attention across the country.

“What caught my eye about Ann Arbor’s efforts were the references to citizen involvement and co-investment in their own grid,” said Jim Gilbert, a retired medical product designer in Boulder, Colorado, who is now helping that city assess the Ann Arbor model.

Boulder has dealt with recent power outages due to worsening climate impacts and aging infrastructure, and Gilbert said an SEU could offer a way forward.

Back in Ann Arbor, as the city prepares to launch the initial pilot of its SEU, the plan is to reach half of the Bryant neighborhood by the end of the year — and local residents are ​“all in,” said Krystal Steward.

Older members of the community are particularly excited, she said, noting that many are on fixed incomes and will particularly benefit from lower energy bills.

“It’s hard for me to keep up,” Steward said. ​“Now it’s not me reaching out to residents to sign up — they’re blowing up my phone.”

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Last spring, when the Second Harvest Food Bank of Northwest North Carolina installed a giant solar array on its new headquarters in Winston-Salem, leaders of the project hoped it would inspire other nonprofits to follow suit.

Sure enough, it has done just that.

A 400-kilowatt solar array is now being built at the headquarters of Goodwill Industries of Northwest North Carolina, less than two miles from Second Harvest.

“They’re our neighbor,” said Bill Haymore, a longtime Goodwill veteran who has worn many hats and today serves as its chief sustainability officer. ​“We partner closely with them. So we watched with great envy at the work that they had done, and we followed the model that they set forth.”

The installation will produce enough electricity to power about 40% of the building, Haymore said, and will save the nonprofit over $1 million in energy bills over the coming decades. Those savings will be plowed back into Goodwill’s mission of providing employment, job training, and other opportunities for the community.

What’s more, the clean energy project itself falls squarely within his organization’s sustainability ethos. ​“The work we are doing in this arena is something that we’ve been doing for 100 years,” Haymore said. ​“Every time we take a donation, we’re recycling.” But, he added, ​“we need to be bolder about it and show the community that we’re committed to this work. The solar panels were just one of the things that we have elected to do to reduce our carbon footprint and to be a better steward.”

A behemoth international network, Goodwill is made up of 150 independent organizations, each with its own board of directors and priorities. While the Goodwill serving northwest North Carolina doesn’t have any carbon reduction goals yet, Haymore says the plan is to change that.

“This past year, we purchased carbon-tracking software to help us benchmark where we’re at,” Haymore said. ​“Once we feel very, very confident with what our carbon footprint is, we’ll be able to measure success.”

As did Second Harvest, Goodwill will reap a 30% tax credit in the form of direct pay — a mechanism established by the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act that allows nonprofits to access the incentive, which was formerly available only to entities that pay income tax. The organization also hopes to get a 10% bonus credit since it, like the food bank, is located in a low-income census tract.

These levers, designed to help institutions with no tax liabilities and thin operating margins, remain intact at least through the end of next year — despite the axe that congressional Republicans took last summer to a host of clean energy inducements established or enhanced during the Biden years.

But last summer’s law did include new red tape: Beneficiaries of clean energy tax credits now must verify that no components of their new systems were produced by a ​“foreign entity of concern.” The requirement took effect at the beginning of this year, spurring Goodwill to contract for the project by Dec. 31. The installation is expected to be completed sometime this fall.

Both Goodwill and Second Harvest were recruited to go solar by the Piedmont Environmental Alliance, a local group that formed the Green Business Network to encourage businesses and nonprofits to install solar, electrify their vehicle fleets, and reduce food waste.

If there was a ​“silver lining” to last summer’s clean energy rollbacks, it was that ​“Second Harvest and others were feeling the pressure that these tax credits might not exist forever,” said Will Eley, director of the alliance’s green economy program. ​“They wanted to move as quickly as possible, and Goodwill was certainly responsive to that.”

Eley and his group have been a key force behind an array of initiatives in Winston-Salem and the surrounding region, including the newly launched ​“Electrify the Triad” campaign and a training program for clean energy jobs hosted at the Goodwill.

That’s why Eley is most excited about the fact that the solar panels will be installed by workers trained at the nonprofit.

“You can actually see the rooftop from the classroom that’s been used for that,” he said. ​“It’s the full circle of positive feedback loops. It’s been a lot of fun.”

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All five offshore wind farms being built in the U.S. are on track to hit key construction and operational milestones this month — even as the Trump administration continues its campaign to halt their development.

Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, a 2.6-gigawatt project near Virginia Beach, Virginia, is expected to begin delivering power to the state’s energy-hungry grid by the end of March, according to its developer, Dominion Energy. As the first turbines start spinning, construction will proceed on the rest of the 176-turbine wind farm, which is now more than 70% finished.

Farther up the east coast, near Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, the 800-megawatt Vineyard Wind is effectively complete.

Iberdrola, the parent company of Avangrid, which is one of Vineyard Wind’s developers, said on Feb. 25 that the final two of the 62 turbines would be installed ​“in the next days,” and that about 85% of the turbines are either operating or approved to begin exporting electricity.

Ørsted, which is developing the 704-MW Revolution Wind near Rhode Island, said the project was expected to begin generating electricity ​“within weeks” of a Feb. 6 earnings call. At that time, the Danish developer was pushing to install the last of its 65 turbines before its contract with a specialized turbine-installation vessel expired in late February. As of Tuesday, 60 of the total turbines have been installed, a spokesperson confirmed.

The vessel, called Wind Scylla, is now at the Port of New London in Connecticut, where its equipment is being recalibrated as part of ongoing construction operations at Ørsted’s Sunrise Wind project. Work on that 924-MW installation, off the coast of New York, was nearly halfway complete as of last month’s earnings call.

Meanwhile, Equinor’s Empire Wind just notched another legal victory. On Tuesday, a federal judge rejected the Trump administration’s latest effort to further delay construction on the 810-MW wind farm near New York. The project, which is more than 60% complete, is set to receive a new turbine-installation vessel this month to start putting towers and blades in the ocean.

Offshore wind companies have been charging ahead since federal judges gave them a temporary reprieve in January and early February from the Trump administration’s stop-work order. On Dec. 22, the Interior Department required all five projects to pause for 90 days, citing unspecified ​“national security” concerns. Most recently, the administration tried to pause Equinor’s lawsuit against the stoppage by 45 days, which the D.C. judge declined to do.

Interior’s sweeping suspension order threatened to derail the multibillion-dollar energy projects — which are meant to supply huge amounts of carbon-free power to a region that’s barreling toward an electricity shortfall. Developers said the forced pauses cost them millions of dollars a day and put them at risk of losing access to the specialized vessels they need to install turbines and other offshore equipment.

An attorney for Vineyard Wind said in court that the $4.5 billion project was ​“at a grave risk of failing to meet its construction schedule, and in turn, its financial obligations” if it couldn’t reach full commercial operations by the end of March, The Martha’s Vineyard Times reported in January. He noted that Vineyard Wind’s contract for a turbine installation vessel expires on March 31.

While Vineyard Wind nears completion, many of its turbines have already been supplying electricity to the New England grid — including during a major winter cold streak that forced grid operators to run expensive oil-burning power plants to avert blackouts.

The completed South Fork Wind farm, which came online in 2024 and delivers power to New York’s Long Island, was also a crucial resource. During that period, market electricity prices frequently exceeded the long-term, fixed rates that utilities pay for the offshore wind power, said Stephanie Francoeur, senior vice president of communications and external affairs for the Oceantic Network, which advocates for marine renewable energy sectors.

“We’re really encouraged by this real-world performance data,” she said. ​“It’s going to be exciting to see more of it as more projects come to completion this year.”

Yet even after offshore wind farms come online, they won’t necessarily be spared from future attacks by the Trump administration, which has indicated that it sees operating turbines as the real purported threat. In its Dec. 22 memo, the Interior Department noted that ​“the movement of massive turbine blades” creates radar interference — though experts say such potential impacts are manageable and often minor, as IEEE Spectrum reported this week.

In the meantime, offshore wind developers continue stressing the need for their large-scale energy projects to get built. Robert M. Blue, Dominion Energy’s president and CEO, recently pointed to the soaring demand from AI data centers that’s straining the grid in Virginia and the broader mid-Atlantic region.

The utility sees Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind ​“as the fastest way to get a significant amount of electricity at a low cost … for our customers who are leading the AI race, who are building ships for the Navy,” he said during a Feb. 23 earnings call. The project, which was initially expected to finish later this year, is now likely to wrap up in early 2027.

“Slowing it down, as was demonstrated with the last stop-work order, adds costs, and adding costs and delays in the data center capital of the world, we think, doesn’t make sense,” Blue said.

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