The Exchanges

Q coal producer. The organization also works with a law firm led by Jason Torchinski, a lawyer who worked for Americans for Prosperity, and the American Legislative Exchange Council. Those are conservative groups that actively lobby against renewable energy policies in states. Can you give me a story about how it plays out on the ground when Citizens for Responsible Solar actually plays a role to stop or slow a project?

A Yeah, I mean, we, we spoke to a couple landowners in Virginia who kind of faced this in two fronts. Um, I will say that one of the precursors to Citizens for Responsible Solar was a group called, um, Concerned Citizens of Spotsylvania, and this is another kind of bedroom community in Virginia. Spotsylvania had a proposed solar right come in. Um, this group that owned, actually bought land and wanted to build Solar on it to then sell back to a couple local industries in the area, including tech companies. They had to put a proposal out there. At the time, the supervisor of the county, Greg Benton, is a Republican. He actually ran for office because he was unhappy with how much people were paying in taxes, so very much a conservative in his nature. When this group applied to be able to put solar panels on the land they owned, he did a lot of due diligence. We spoke to him. He said he Visited other states. He, you know, held city council meetings. He talked to locals. He really wanted to get into the science. He listened to every negative that he got from the communities that were opposing this in his area. And he said to us, you know, he really was able to say, that's not the case here. That's not actually going to happen. But he got tremendous pushback. And he said to me, you know, he really just couldn't understand where it was coming from. At the end of the day, it was a great…

AI assessment note: “one of the precursors to Citizens for Responsible Solar was a group called, um, Concerned Citizens”

Q So if a candidate for a regulatory seat or something was critical of Alabama Power or Florida Power and Light, or if someone came out and said that these utilities need to be doing more to develop renewable energy or promote customer-owned solar, what is the kind of reporting from these websites that you would see?

A When these payments were happening, we could look and see that there were a bunch of local sites that were kind of working as echo chambers to spread kind of similar messaging questioning the legitimacy of these candidates or these initiatives or kind of these, um, even just regulations that were happening that obviously would hurt places like Alabama Power and Florida Power and Light. And we were able to see through the payments that we had in these leaked ledgers that we got, you know, internal ledgers from Matrix itself, that there was a money trail between six local news sites that either had taken direct influence from Matrix or had been directly involved with organizers, you know, at Matrix and kind of Matrix operatives. And what was really interesting is that if we looked at the timeline of what these kind of online news sites did, Were, we found a lot of them were created around the same time period. Two in Alabama were created the same week. A lot of them were kind of saying the same thing. They were sharing stories. A lot of them were actually pulling direct stories from Alabama Power has its own PR website, and they were basically pulling directly from their PR press releases and rewriting them into stories without saying that they were. So it was a very, you know, clear misuse of journalism.

AI assessment note: “spread kind of similar messaging questioning the legitimacy of these candidates or these initiatives”

Q on the left. Um, it was basically anybody who was critical of the utilities, and one story really stands out. You profile a guy named Terry Dunn, who ran as a commissioner, you know, hardcore Tea Party guy, uh, who really was questioning why Alabama power rates were so high and wanted some transparency. Around, um, Alabama Power's rates, and that made them very upset. What happened to Terry Dunn?

A Yeah, you made a really good point there. The thing to remember, the thing that I even realized in doing this reporting is this really came down to power. This really came down to making sure that the company was not going to face lots of regulation. We're not going to face a lot of questions. We're not going to have to deal with politicians who are going to kind of put them on the spot. And that's what we saw with Terry Dunn. Terry Dunn is a local guy. He's, you know, bread and butter, Alabama. He's a Trump supporter, and he decides that he's going to run as a regulator in the state of Alabama, and one of the things that he ran on was actually that he specifically wanted to open Alabama's books. Alabama Power had not had to have a rate hearing in 30 years, three decades, and Terry Dunn said, that's something I want to look into. Alabama, actually, Alabama Power has It's had some of the highest earnings out of any utility company in the country year after year, specifically in the last couple of years. And people in the state of Alabama are paying some of the highest utility bills. And so he wanted to see why that was the case. But after he won, he found out pretty quickly that there was going to be a lot of pushback to that. First, he got a lot of side comments, he said, from people in the industry saying, you could last in this job for a long time if you kind of just go along…

AI assessment note: “after he won, he found out pretty quickly that there was going to be a lot of pushback”

Q You published this stat in the story that made me do a double take, and it came from the Sabin Center at Columbia University showing that a 121 local policies were passed in twenty-twenty-two to block or restrict renewable energy development. It was nearly a 20% increase from the year before. Um, how much are these opposition groups contributing to that?

A I think largely. I think that there are locals who truly are opposed to this, but they're galvanized by messaging that they're finding online that is not necessarily accurate. And then they're supported by groups online or in their state or in their community that have ulterior motives, which we found. They're getting payments from organizations that have connections to climate denial, When a power company comes in, or when a solar developer comes in, or when a wind developer comes in, and a local community says, how do we push back against this? They look online, or they reach out to one of these groups, and they get, you know, mock ordinances that they can draft, and they start, you know, talking at their local city council meetings, and then they pass bills that limit certain things. Then those expand to, you know, from small communities to state by state, and they kind of grow from there. And so a lot of these, you know, changes we've seen in the last couple of years, these ordinances that have passed, really kind of seem to be learning from one another. They're using very similar language, as I mentioned. They're using responsible solar. They're using prime farmlands. I mean, it seems like it's really generated from the same playbook.

AI assessment note: “I think largely. I think that there are locals who truly are opposed”