Solar developers just got some bad news. The Supreme Court’s recent decision to limit federal agencies’ authority is threatening a solar project in Montana, along with the industry more broadly — dealing a blow to President Joe Biden’s goal of greening the grid by decade’s end. The justices on Tuesday ordered a lower court to rethink a greenlight it gave to the Broadview solar array and battery storage facility in Billings, Montana, now that the Chevron doctrine is dead, writes Niina H. Farah. The 40-year-old legal standard had directed courts to defer to federal agencies’ reasonable readings of unclear statutes, until the conservative-dominated Supreme Court gave it the boot last week. In Chevron’s wake, the justices have ordered a review of at least nine recent rulings that relied on the legal doctrine. In the case of the Montana solar project, the D.C. Circuit court had deferred to the nation’s top energy regulator’s interpretation of a law governing utilities and required the utility NorthWestern Energy to buy power from the Broadview project. The law in question — the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act — required utilities to buy power from small energy projects under certain circumstances. Qualifying projects cannot produce more than 80 megawatts of power. While the Broadview solar project is capable of producing more, it sent no more than 80 megawatts to the electric grid. So the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said that counts, and the D.C. Circuit relied on the Chevron doctrine to defer to FERC’s interpretation. The ruling was heralded as a major victory for the solar industry and an important legal precedent to help clean energy developers sell more power to the grid — a major Biden administration climate goal. But with Chevron gone, the D.C. Circuit must now rethink its ruling. It could reverse course and rule that utilities do not have to buy power from the Broadview project. Joel Eisen, a law professor at the University of Richmond, told Niina another option would be for the court to greenlight the project using a different legal rationale, such as something called Skidmore deference. Under Skidmore, a court can defer to an agency’s long-standing interpretation of statutes.
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