The Excerpt podcast: The NIMBY war against green energy
On a special episode (first released on February 4, 2024) of The Excerpt podcast: With green energy (including nuclear and hydroelectric) now powering almost 40% of America’s grid, the next few years will be critical to meet the 100% goal by 2035. But as the need for a cleaner, more resilient power grid intensifies, due in large part to climate change, there have been increasing efforts across the country to block utility-scale wind turbines and solar farms. What or who is driving this resistance? After a year of reporting about obstacles to green energy across the nation, USA TODAY National Correspondent Elizabeth Weise joins The Excerpt to share her findings.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Dana Taylor:
Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Sunday, February 4th 2024.
With green energy now powering almost 40% of America's grid, the next few years will be critical as the need for a cleaner, more resilient power grid intensifies due in large part to climate change. There have been increasing efforts across the country to block utility scale wind turbines and solar farms. What or who is driving this resistance? For a look at where green power projects are meeting resistance, we're joined now by USA Today national correspondent Elizabeth Weise. Thanks for being on The Excerpt, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Weise:
You're so welcome. Happy to be here.
Dana Taylor:
So you did a review of green energy policies nationwide. This has been more than a year long project for you. Can you give us a big picture assessment of what the green energy policy landscape looks like in America today?
Elizabeth Weise:
Yeah. So as a country, we have made a commitment to getting to 100% carbon-neutral electricity by 2035. That's 11 years away. A carbon-neutral doesn't just mean wind and solar, it also includes nuclear, it includes hydroelectric power, earning biomass, which is pretty small. So it's not just wind and solar, but we really can't build out more nuclear and more hydro is politically really difficult to do, which means that to get to that 100%, we've got to build a lot more wind and solar in the next decade or two. So we're talking utility scale, which is wind and solar projects that are big enough to replace a power plant because that's effectively what they are is a power plant. And when I started to look into this, we're seeing an increasing number of counties that are just either blocking it or making it really hard to build. And we wanted to see, well, okay, how widespread is this? Is this something that's of concern? I've gone to a lot of meetings both online and in person, a lot of county commission hearing meetings all over the country listening to how this all plays out.
Dana Taylor:
Well, Beth, what do you think is driving this wedge between what the nation needs and what local jurisdictions will allow?
Elizabeth Weise:
It's no one simple thing and it's no one entity. There's a couple of things happening. The Republican Party of some counties in Kansas, part of their plank is now to be opposed to renewable energy, to wind and solar. And either saying that, "We don't want it," or, "It's not necessary because climate change isn't real." In some places, really liberal places that you would expect would be all over wind and solar, it's because, especially in wealthier areas, people don't want their views interrupted. I mean, we saw that in Massachusetts when they blocked offshore wind years ago. It's happening in California. Vermont, which you would think of as being very green, it calls itself The Green State. Actually blocked all wind development because they didn't want it to interfere with the views. So it's coming from a lot of different places. There's very definitely a political element to it and there's very definitely a let's keep things as they are. There's 3,100 some counties in the United States and at this point, 470 of them have some sort of impediment to building either new wind or new solar or both.
Dana Taylor:
Well, you've mentioned a few states where you've seen a lot of pushback. I want to drill down on that a little bit. You wrote that Iowa has long been a leader in renewable energy, but even they have 10 counties with significant hurdles to new wind projects. How are those counties trying to stymie those projects?
Elizabeth Weise:
There are these wonderful maps that the National Renewable Energy Lab has showing the wind resource in the US and the solar resource in the US. And you look at these, blue mean better wind for wind power and there's this just lovely dark blue belt down the middle of the country and Iowa's smack dab in the middle of it. So 65% of their electricity comes from wind, but in the last couple of years they're now up to 12 counties. They've got 99 counties altogether, 12 counties that have either blocked or banned or put serious impediments in place for wind. There is one that's got two-mile setbacks. So if you think of a county, a lot of these counties in the Midwest, they're pretty square-ish and the conventional wisdom and a lot of states that are encouraging wind development have set, as a reasonable and safe distance between turbines, 1.1 to 1.5 times the turbine height.
So that's big enough that if something horrible happened and it fell over, which is really rare, but if it did, it wouldn't hit anything. So 1.5. I mean, counties that have two-mile setbacks. So you have to have two miles between a turbine and the nearest property line for someone who isn't part of that wind farm. When you do that, there's not enough space in the county to be able to really build a wind farm. And I mean ostensibly you could, but it would be so expensive because you would have to run wires so far between each other.
And then there's a couple that just to have outright moratoriums. So there are different ways that these things get blocked and sometimes it's an outright ban and sometimes it's these, we call them significant impediments. And this is USA Today, we convened a panel of experts and we said, "Okay. If a county has rules in place, what rules could a county put in place that would make it effectively impossible to build new wind or new solar?" And Iowa's a great example of how you do that with wind because they've done it in 12 cases.
Dana Taylor:
As you've written about many times in the past, climate change is having a significant impact across the country. Let's talk hard numbers regarding the impact specifically from human-driven warming, from hurricanes to wildfires to droughts. What's the tally on the amount of damage we're seeing today compared to, say, 40 years ago?
Elizabeth Weise:
So the most recent numbers that we've got are from 2022. 2023 will be coming in soon. But the US government estimates that $165 billion were lost in 18 more than disasters that were weather and climate related in 2022. And it's important to remember that we can never say that any one instance was specifically caused by climate change, but what we're seeing is this increasing ratcheting up of the number of disasters that we have. So hurricanes are more intense, droughts are longer and more intense. Anybody who's on the East Coast has seen this. We are seeing rainfall events where you might get the same amount of rain in your county that you normally would get, but it all falls in two days and then you have flooding and bridges washed out and people killed. So those 18 disasters, that's nothing compared to what's coming because this ratcheting up is going to increase and it also means that more people are going to be dying. In 2022, it was 474 deaths. 2023 is likely to be higher, but again, we haven't seen the numbers yet.
Dana Taylor:
In the 1980s, the country experienced on average a $1 billion disaster every four months, but now experiences one every three weeks. We've set a new record with $25 billion worth of disasters in one year. Where are we going here?
Elizabeth Weise:
The thing about climate change is it's very rarely just one thing. You get things layering one on top of the other and each layer makes things a little worse and then you end up with a billion dollar disaster. I mean, we saw it in Hawaii.
Dana Taylor:
There's a lot of misinformation and disinformation cited by green energy opponents regarding solar panels and wind turbines. What are some of the debunked concerns that are still being raised?
Elizabeth Weise:
I think it was North Carolina blocked all wind for a while because they said, "Well, the military won't be able to land its planes if there are wind turbines going." And no, it was fine. So that's not an issue. It's true that some birds and bats are killed by wind turbines, but actually the numbers are smaller than are often said. And fracking and other fossil fuel extraction methods are actually more dangerous to birds. Solar is growing more than wind because you can put it a lot more places and solar has just gotten so insanely efficient. It's the cheapest way to produce energy at this point in the United States, bar none. If you say we can't build solar because it's going to take away all the land and we won't have enough food. Well, perhaps we could grow a little less corn for ethanol, put in some solar there and we'd end up net positive for energy.
Dana Taylor:
Well, you spoke with a family in Kansas who thought they found a way to hold onto their land rather than selling it off by agreeing to lease land to a solar farm. They've run into some very fierce opposition to this plan. Tell me what's been happening with them.
Elizabeth Weise:
They're one of a bunch of families that were approached by a solar developer that wanted to build a pretty big utility scale solar farm. And they frankly didn't think it was going to be that big a deal, but boy was it. And now, I mean, it's going on five years of meetings and people opposing it. You and I might look at a beautiful field and go, "Oh, it's so beautiful." A farmer looks at it and that is money. The Kinokis have been on that land since the 1860s. And then have people who have come in and say, "Well, you can't do anything to destroy the view." And the farmers are like, "What are you talking about? This is my land and I can do anything I want with it because it's my livelihood." And the neighbors, many of whom have moved to the rural areas because they want to embrace the ambiance and the lifestyle of the rural areas are saying, "Well, no, you can't."
Big change is hard. I mean, if you love a place, it's hard to see it change and shift. There's a couple of university groups that are working to try and help counties figure out, well, how do we accommodate both clean energy and what people want? And really, I thought a very thoughtful thing that came up at one of those meetings was you can only move at the speed of trust. It's going to take a lot of talking with community members and building up trust. We're going to have to find a way to figure out where to build this in ways that we can all live with.
Dana Taylor:
Well, as you've reported, as of 2022, 38% of our electricity came from clean energy. You've touched on nuclear and hydropower. How much is coming from those sources and should we count on those sources going forward?
Elizabeth Weise:
What America looks like on the other side of the energy transition is actually better. Cheaper energy, cleaner. It's not going to be horrific. But as our research found over the last year and a half, people are very resistant to that change and there are forces that are eating and abetting that resistance. It's not enough at this point. I mean, it's 15% of counties. That's not enough to derail us efforts to get to 100% carbon-neutral energy. But especially for solar, the number of counties that have stopped it is increasing a lot every year since 2021. And if that trend continues, the experts I've talked to said, well, it's not worrisome yet, but boy, it could get worrisome and we need to watch this. And again, talking about that group that's convening to try and figure out how do we contend with people's concerns where they live, but also build what we need to build in the places that make sense to do it.
Dana Taylor:
Okay. And then finally, Elizabeth. The US, as you've said, has set a target to reach 100% clean energy by the year 2035. Is there reason to believe that's a realistic goal?
Elizabeth Weise:
Could we do it? Totally. Wind and solar is still cheaper. So it makes economic sense. It also is going to require political will, and that is the wild card. So will we make it? I mean, eventually yes, because businesses are going to do it because it's going to make the most sense economically. So I have no doubt that we will shift to entirely carbon-neutral energy in the coming decades because when you talk to engineers and when you talk to people at utilities, they're like, "It would be absurd not to." How quickly that happens and how much the planet warms in the interim. Those are still wildcards.
Dana Taylor:
Elizabeth, thank you so much for joining me.
Elizabeth Weise:
I'm, as always, far too deep in this and I think I'm always happy when people ask me questions and let me talk on about it.
Dana Taylor:
Thanks to our senior producer Shannon Rae Green for production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to [email protected]. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.