"DIXIE VALLEY, Nev. — An Adele song blasted from a stereo. Workers put up a fence near a massive heat exchanger and other equipment awaiting assembly here in the Nevada desert. After about a decade of grinding its way through the federal permitting process, Ormat, a geothermal company, was building a new power plant in Dixie Valley to produce renewable energy.
“The millions of tons of carbon that we don’t put into the air have a positive effect,” Paul Thomsen, the firm’s vice president of business development, said in May as he shielded himself with his pickup’s door from the wind whistling through this sagebrush-speckled valley.
But soon came another legal snag. The company halted construction in August while federal agencies meet to discuss whether the project should move forward. The rugged, remote corner of Nevada’s Great Basin region found itself at the epicenter of a confrontation between some of President Biden’s, and the nation’s, most pressing priorities: renewable energy, wildlife conservation and Indigenous rights."
Dino Grandoni reports for the Washington Post November 3, 2022.
