Renewable energy advocates suspicious of leasing legislation
15th May 2023 · 0 Comments
By Wesley Muller
Contributing Writer
(lailluminator.com) — A legislative proposal to lock into Louisiana law the rights of landowners who lease their property to solar and wind farm operators has renewable energy advocates uncomfortable.
Senate Bill 154, sponsored by Sen. Bret Allain, R-Franklin, would tuck protections for individual property owners into Louisiana’s mineral code, a massive section of statutes related mostly to oil and gas exploration.
Allain’s bill cleared the Senate Committee on Natural Resources last week without objection from other lawmakers, but some in the renewable energy industry and other policy experts expressed their opposition.
Several lobbyists who spoke against the bill did so only in vague terms and failed to explain exactly how placement in the mineral code would hinder the renewable energy industry. Only one offered some specificity.
Camille Manning-Broome is president of the Center for Planning Excellence, a Louisiana nonprofit that provides best-practice guidance on policy related to infrastructure and community design. She told lawmakers the bill would make Louisiana an outlier among other states that have approved laws on wind and solar leasing.
The state’s mineral code is designed for industries that extract resources from below the earth’s surface, where land use rights carry a unique array of obligations and liabilities, she said.
“For wind and solar, leasing is properly viewed through the lens of surface rights,” Manning-Broome said. “They are more akin to agriculture or hunting.”
Allain said everything in his bill came from current law pertaining to oil and gas, but he did acknowledge his legislation is not an official product of the state’s Emerging Energy Codification Task Force.
Allain established the task force last year in an effort to develop legislation like SB 154, but the panel’s final report isn’t due until Feb. 9, 2024 — after Allain’s term in office ends.
“As you know, I will not be here next year because of term limits, and I thought it was important that I get a leasing bill for emerging energy on the books here,” he told the committee last week.
In a phone interview, Manning-Broome explained that folding wind and solar leasing into the mineral code unnecessarily complicates the law and can make it less accessible to the public.
“We shouldn’t rush into laws like this,” she said. “It’s really critical that we’re very smart, intentional and deliberate, and we want to ensure a transparent process in creating this law. Let the task force do its work.”
Ownership of mineral rights can be very complicated, and Louisiana is home to an entire industry of lawyers who specialize in the subject, though Allain sees that as a benefit to using the mineral code for solar and wind. He even appointed the director of the Louisiana Mineral Law Institute, Keith Hall, to the Emerging Energy Codification Task Force.
The bill is now pending on the Senate floor.
This article originally published in the May 15, 2023 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
