RCRA Basics

1

• Siting Alternative Energy Facilities
• Politics
• NIMBY
• Legal regimes
• Private law
• Regulation
• Hybrids
• Solutions?

2
Politics of Siting

• If someone wanted to build any of the following
  in your town, what sorts of things would you
  worry about? What concerns might you have?
• Land-based (ridge-top) wind farm
• Offshore wind farm
• Solar (PV) generating station
• Solar (concentrated) generating station
• Small hydroelectric facility

3
Politics of Siting
Wind turbines 50 KW 5 MW (wind farm turbines
are 700KW-2.5MW)(150-300 ft tall) Wind farms a
few MW to hundreds of MW (20MW farm, approx. 100
acres) Hydro stations a few KW to 18,000MW
(Three Gorges) most in US are lt 30 MW. Niagara
Falls station is gt1000 MW. PV cells
100W-300W/sq.m. Solar concentrating stations 1MW
to 10s of MW. (5 acres per MW)
4

• Politics of Siting
• What, if anything, could alleviate your concerns
  about the proposed project?
• If you ultimately decided to oppose the
  construction of the facility,
• What sort of action would you take to try to stop
  it?
• What arguments would you advance in support of
  your position?

5
Private Law/Torts
Private plaintiff(s) vs. private defendants

• Theories of liability
• private nuisance
• public nuisance
• trespass
• negligence
• negligence per se
• strict liability

Coasean solutions? Coordination problems
6

• Do we require licensing of renewable power
  projects?
• Hydro?
• Geothermal?
• Wind?
• Biomass?
• Solar?
• Is there a good reason why some are regulated by
  federal law, others by state law, and still
  others primarily by local law only?

Local zoning Preemption federal/state Is
preemption necessary?
7
Other Approaches to Siting Regulation Informationa
l regulation Process enhancing (structure
negotiation) regulation Will these work? Or is
a preemptive law the only way to overcome the
NIMBY effect?
8

• Politics of Siting Normative questions
• Distributional issues social net benefit vs.
  local net benefit
• Pareto criterion vs. Kaldor-Hicks criterion
• Factual issues Is SNB gt 0?
• How is the previous question to be answered?
  Whose answer is controlling?
• Is it even the right question to ask? Are its
  premises debateable? Is balancing NB the right
  way to look at these issues?
• How does law figure into the answers to these
  questions?