More evidence for what we already knew. Above, local TV reporting from Iowa.
Below, new reporting from Midwest Energy News.
Shadowy tentacles of the oil/gas industry reaching into local communities to slow the development of solar energy.
An anonymously funded group is spreading misinformation about a rural Ohio solar project, according to project backers and others who reviewed claims made at a recent event.
Knox Smart Development was incorporated last month by Jared Yost, a Mount Vernon resident and opponent of the planned 120 megawatt Frasier Solar project. Three weeks later, on Nov. 30, the group hosted a catered “town hall meeting” at a Mount Vernon theater that included speakers with ties to fossil fuel and climate denial groups.
A company official with the solar developer, Open Road Renewables, was denied entry to the event, which was attended by approximately 500 people and featured complimentary food and drinks following the program.
It’s unclear who funded Knox Smart Development so it could pay for the event.
“There are people with concerns who are helping us, and they’ve all asked to remain anonymous,” Yost said when asked about its funding sources as people left the theater. “So we have local concerned citizens who are helping to fund this, including myself.”
A Dec. 7 filing advised developer Open Road Renewables and others that the Ohio Power Siting Board was ready to start review of the application for the Frasier Solar Project, which was filed in October. The project would be located in Clinton and Miller townships, both in Knox County. Yost and Knox Smart Development filed to participate in the case as parties on Dec. 8.
An early version of Knox Smart Development’s website included the text, “Our mission: Empowering America,” with a hyperlink to a page for an organization called The Empowerment Alliance. Research by the Energy and Policy Institute, an energy and utility watchdog group, has linked the Empowerment Alliance to the natural gas industry.
Dave Anderson, the institute’s policy and communications director, found a National Review Ideas Summit program guide that characterized The Empowerment Alliance as a project of Karen Buchwald Wright and her husband, Tom Rastin. Wright is the board chair of Ariel Corporation, which makes compressors for the natural gas industry. Its headquarters is in Mount Vernon.
The Empowerment Alliance’s highest paid contractor for the past four years, according to Internal Revenue Service filings, has been a group called Majority Strategies. Its chief strategist, Tom Whatman, emceed the Nov. 30 event for Knox Smart Development. Whatman is also the former executive director of the Ohio Republican Party.
Another speaker at the Nov. 30 event, Mitch Given, has appeared on behalf of The Empowerment Alliance to promote natural gas issues to county commissioners in Ashland, Madison and Logan counties. In Ashland County, Given said the alliance takes a hard line against renewables, and that Rastin, a director of Ariel Corporation, has been a major supporter.
Misinformation spreads easily online. It bounces around in echo chambers where dubious articles, videos and memes are posted and shared repeatedly. Longtime critics of the wind industry like John Droz cultivated opposition strategies that are now being used in the fight against solar, says Anderson, the renewable energy lawyer in Kansas.
“The geometric growth of misinformation by the same people posting to 50 different places, that method and that impact flows through to solar, just as it did to wind. The gathering of groups and creating a social unit so that people become emotionally and socially tied to the group is the same for solar as it was for wind,” Anderson says. “Then it is just new talking points for the different technology.”
It’s a lucky thing burning coal doesn’t release toxic chemicals…