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Jon Micah Goeller

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Jon Micah brings together in-house experience with a multinational power generation development and operations company with his background as local regional counsel for the Environmental Protection Agency to guide clients with utility-scale energy projects through a diverse set of permitting, compliance, product safety, remediation, liability management, litigation, and transactional challenges.

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Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which went into effect in January, it can pay to be a brownfield – a term used to refer to a property that is affected by potential or confirmed contamination. Specifically, the IRA offers incentives to renewable energy development that takes place on a brownfield site, which is included as an “energy community” under the IRA. On April 4, 2023, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Department of Treasury published limited guidance (Notice 2023-29, Energy Community Bonus Credit Amounts under the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022) on the bonuses available for production and investment of energy facilities in energy communities. Unfortunately, even with the guidance, the eligibility of certain sites as brownfields remains uncertain.

On January 18, 2023, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) and the Department of the Army published a new final rule to re-define “waters of the United States” (“WOTUS”) under the Federal Clean Water Act (“CWA”). Although the rule is set to take effect March 20, 2023, the looming U.S. Supreme Court decision in Michael Sackett, et ux v. EPA, et al., Docket No. 21-454(2022) could establish additional legal precedent as to what constitutes WOTUS and could enable further legal challenges to the rule. If the rule goes into effect, it would broaden the types of water bodies subject to CWA regulation, while providing some clarity with regard to some newly excluded water features.