Congressional action on energy permitting remains stuck, but states, developers are finding solutions
Jonathan Marshall
Jonathan Marshall
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From Utility Dive, 2/27/2024:

Despite at least 10 permitting reform bills before Congress, two major federal regulatory initiatives and a bipartisan House caucus call for action on permitting reform, progress remains delayed.

Transmission queue backlogs, system operator capacity shortfalls and increasing outages from billion dollar extreme weather events make the need for streamlined infrastructure approvals irrefutable, analysts, developers and policymakers agree.  

“Americans are already experiencing the many devastating impacts of rising global temperatures,” 13 Republicans and 13 Democrats of the Climate Solutions Caucus wrote to House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., in November. “Permitting reform to bolster our domestic energy supply” and expand “energy transmission” should be prioritized, they said.

Outdated environmental rules and hundreds of amendments and judicial interpretations built into them are causing “a crippling delay in permitting new projects,” said Alexander Herrgott, president and CEO of The Permitting Institute, or TPI. But “truth-in-permitting” that brings transparency and accountability to the handling of project applications can address “the pinch points in the process,” he added.

The proposed legislation and regulatory initiatives, called a “veneer” by Herrgott, are moving slowly, observers said.

delays

Permission granted by LBNL

Where solutions are needed

All infrastructure projects must have permits showing compliance with local laws and zoning codes, a 2022 Brookings Institution paper reported. Most state governments require similar permits, and 20 states require environmental impact reviews, according to the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, website.

Large generation or transmission projects may require a regional system interconnection and as well as a federal multi-agency environmental impact study, or EIS, showing broader NEPA compliance, Brookings reported.

Project design, engineering, planning and financing for infrastructure projects can take up to three years and identifying needed permits and the appropriate issuing agencies can take two more years, TPI’s Herrgott told the Senate Budget Committee in July. Federal and state informal pre-applications and formal reviews can add up to six years and construction can be three years, he said.

For generation infrastructure projects that began operating in 2022, the median time from “interconnection request to commercial operations was around 5 years,” according to data from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, or LBNL. That includes local permits, equipment contracts and delivery, offtake agreements and construction, said LBNL Energy Policy Researcher Joseph Rand.

But the biggest obstacle to construction may not be federal reviews.

“Less than 5% of wind and solar projects required a comprehensive environmental review or project-specific permit,” added an August study of 2010 to 2021 federal permits and reviews for energy infrastructure by Professor David E. Adelman, holder of the Harry Reasoner Regents Chair in Law at the University of Texas School of Law. And “half of all EIS reviews take 3.5 years or less,” a September Natural Resources Defense Council paper reported.

Local opposition, and not federal review, is the real obstacle, data shows. It caused a third of wind and solar interconnection application cancelations, and half of the delays lasting six months or more in the last five years, according to an LBNL developer survey. Cancelations led to average sunk costs of more than “$2 million per project for solar, and $7.5 million for wind,” and local opposition is becoming more common and more expensive, LBNL found.

Though some reforms proposed by federal policymakers address local opposition, most focus on federal permitting processes. . . .

The entire article is worth reading.

Feb '24
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