In Nevada, a tribe and a toad halt a renewable power plant

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...