OPINION:
America’s energy demands are rapidly increasing. Some estimates say the U.S. will need to double the capacity of our grid by 2050 if there is any chance of meeting net-zero goals.
Financing and building enough clean energy infrastructure projects to keep up will not be easy. But under the current regulatory environment, it’s procedurally impossible. Delays that can last over a decade are making projects more expensive, impeding America’s ability to deploy billions of dollars of capital that would create American jobs, enhance U.S. energy security, and reduce emissions.
The current system benefits those who seek to delay as opposed to those who seek to build. That dynamic may have made sense four decades ago when policymakers enacted laws focused on stopping bad outcomes. Today, this system is outdated. The pace and scale necessary to build clean energy infrastructure projects to reliably meet our energy demand and lower emissions is not something the authors of the 1970s environmental laws could have imagined.
Fortunately, fixing this outdated, broken system is at the top of the agenda for Republicans and many Democratic policymakers this Congress. House Republicans have rightly put permitting reform front and center this year, passing with bipartisan support their signature energy package, the Lower Energy Costs Act, as H.R.1.
This bill addresses many bottlenecks that make our current system a quagmire: unnecessary duplication, clear timelines throughout the process that enhance predictability, and a limit to superfluous legal action. Solving those problems could reduce emissions, increase production and boost global energy security, all while protecting the safety and balancing the environmental concerns of our communities.
However, enacting H.R. 1 or any meaningful permitting reform package remains a challenge. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has declared the bill “dead on arrival” in the Senate, and the Biden Administration has already issued a veto threat to House Republicans’ permitting plans.
The ironic part of this posture is the Inflation Reduction Act they celebrate at every turn will have very little impact without permitting reform. In fact, the top adviser to the President for clean energy innovation and implementation, John Podesta, recently talked about how we’ll only get 20% of the benefits of the IRA if we don’t improve permitting.
Project developers and innovators are not amused with partisan politics; they are ready to build. There is real opportunity for the Senate to now work on a bipartisan basis to modernize the permitting process. The important thing is policymakers keep an eye on the prize. Senate action cannot simply water down H.R.1 into something milquetoast that fails to fundamentally change the current regulatory regime.
Right now, it can take six years to permit storage sites needed to store billions of tons of captured CO2 from industrial sites, 13 years to permit an offshore wind farm in Massachusetts, or up to 15 years for a new transmission line from Wyoming to Utah.
The California Public Utility Commission (CPUC) issued an order to procure 1000 MW of renewable geothermal power by 2026, but Idaho National Laboratory’s permitting analysis shows that it would be difficult to add any new renewable geothermal power, even if the permitting process started today. This system is clearly broken.
Given the recent passage of the overwhelmingly bipartisan Energy Act of 2020, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), and other federal funding over the past five years, American private sector entrepreneurs have the wind at their backs to deploy more clean energy projects now.
But simply throwing money at new technologies will not necessarily make them a reality. Without meaningful permitting reform, there is a real risk that these major investments for clean energy technologies like carbon capture, energy storage, and geothermal, will go unrealized.
The same is true for the major investments in the CHIPS and Science Act, a new law supporting the U.S. semiconductor industry, putting American manufacturing on a more competitive path than China, and recently enacted energy tax incentives.
Squandering this momentum with needless bureaucracy would be malpractice. It is essential that a final deal on permitting includes three principles.
First, projects that do not have an environmental impact should be granted immediate approval. Replacing a retiring power plant with a zero-emissions advanced nuclear generator at an existing site or building a solar project on a brownfield site should not require a yearslong permitting process. Congress should establish approval criteria that pre-qualify and approve these types of “win-win” projects without delay.
Second, streamline the approval process for projects where there are unique environmental impacts. In these cases, the review process should focus specifically on those factors that complicate their review, driving scant federal resources towards issues of the highest impact, resulting in more efficient timelines that still ensure compliance with existing environmental laws.
Third, resolve any legal disputes in less than one year. Once a project is approved, any further adjudications must include a final decision timeline to ensure that protracted litigation does not undermine project viability.
Republican and Democratic policymakers have never been closer-aligned on the need for significant permitting reform. Whether the motivation is climate, economic growth, more production, and/or energy security, we need to fix what’s broken. Neither side is going to get 100% what they want, but our country’s energy and environmental future depends on sweeping reform.
• Jeremy Harrell is the Chief Strategy Officer of ClearPath Action, Washington, D.C.based organizations that develop and advance policies that accelerate innovations to reduce and remove global energy emissions.
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