Accelerating Carbon Abatement

This report follows the fight over clean energy in Bannock County, Idaho, where commissioners banned large-scale solar and wind in 2024 but are now poised to vote this fall on a new ordinance that would permit solar, wind and nuclear development. Commissioner Jeff Hough, who inadvertently set the original moratorium in motion after a conference raised alarms about a large wind project, cast the lone dissenting vote against the ban and has since become commission chair and its leading advocate for reversal, framing the issue around property rights and rural economic development. The article situates Bannock County within a national trend in which nearly one in four US counties now has some restriction on clean energy, most of them rural, even as Idaho faces sharply rising electricity demand and sits near a critical grid substation that makes it attractive for new power plants. It captures the deep community divisions, with some farmers eager to lease marginal land to solar developers for income that far exceeds wheat farming, and others, hardened by drought and worried about land use, decommissioning and battery fire risk, who strongly oppose solar while favoring nuclear. The piece weighs these competing visions of prosperity against the uncertain timeline of a nuclear revival that remains years away... Click below to read more