Permission to build — Finally, a deal to allow for faster approval of energy projects
Months if not years in the making, a bipartisan bill in Washington seeks to speed up permitting for new energy infrastructure, which far too often today gets bogged down if not killed by exhausting regulatory processes and lawsuits. Here’s hoping the imperfect but worthy legislation isn’t bogged down or killed by the forces protecting the status quo, which far too often today carry the day in Congress.
Anyone who claims to care about giving Americans plentiful access to affordable energy, including the renewable sources of power that will are absolutely essential to slowing the rapid rise in temperatures that’s threatening people and ecosystems across the planet, should be upset about the fact that, according to the federal energy department, 70% of the nation’s transmission lines are more than 25 years old. Old transmission lines squander energy. They make power outages and cyberattacks more likely. And perhaps most importantly, they drive up costs to consumers.
It’s not just the wires that deliver the electricity; it’s the sources that produce it in the first place. To wean the country off carbon-emitting sources by 2035, the United States has to quadruple its annual deployment pace for solar and wind generation.
Yet under rules that have only gotten more complex and cumbersome over the decades, America continues to move at a snail’s pace in rolling out energy infrastructure. As a late 2023 report by the World Economic Forum put it, “At the end of 2021 in the U.S., 79% of the wind pipeline was stuck in the permitting process versus the construction phase…There are also over 2,000 gigawatts of projects in the U.S. seeking connection to the grid, of which more than 95% is clean power technology. Similarly, interconnection waiting time is rising from less than two years for projects built in 2000-2007 to nearly four years for those built in 2018-2022.”
As author Philip K. Howard has pointed out in these pages and elsewhere, infrastructure approvals can easily take decades — with costs rising and rising with each passing year of delay.
The Trump administration took a crack at fixing the problem, in one of the few policy moves this page enthusiastically supported. The Biden administration, under which both oil and renewable production are at all-time highs, has also pushed for smoother and speedier permitting of clean energy projects— an agenda Republicans and some Democrats have resisted as an unfair thumb on the scale.
The sweeping legislation co-authored by Republican John Barrasso and Democrat Joe Manchin, who’s made millions in the coal business, aims to speed up energy and infrastructure projects whether or not they emit fossil fuels. It would enable much faster modernization of the electric grid so that new sources, which are overwhelmingly renewable ones, can more easily deliver power to homes and businesses.
Oil, gas and other fossil-fuel emitting industries won’t be on the outside looking in. The legislation would set a deadline for the Energy Department to decide whether to give gas export projects a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, and would streamline the process for generating energy, whether it’s renewable or not, on public lands. It would expand both offshore oil drilling and offshore wind, and make it harder to tie up projects in endless lawsuits.
The bill could use refinement — given what a huge threat climate change, we’d strongly prefer renewable sources to be prioritized — but it should nevertheless serve as the foundation for major reform that unsticks the permitting process and lets energy and economic progress accelerate.
