Clean energy permitting reform worked in Germany

Bloomberg has a really good story on the success of permitting reform in Germany. European countries have generally been facing the same slow permitting problems as the US, slowing down the deployment of clean technologies. Germany passed some legislation a few years ago to address the problem. Bloomberg describes the reforms:

One law designated clean-energy projects an “overriding public interest” that serves national security. Another required German states to allocate about 2% of their land for wind turbines. Further amendments cut the number of environmental assessments required to just one and simplified the previous double-tracked grid-planning process by removing an entire agency’s involvement.

“We save two to three years for new [transmission] corridors,” said Werner Götz, chief executive officer of transmission grid operator TransnetBW. “It’s definitely a significant improvement.”

There are some similar provisions in the Energy Permitting Reform Act. For example, the bill would give FERC authority over the permitting of big important transmission lines that they deem are in the national interest, and cutting the Department of Energy out of the current transmission permitting process would cut the number of environmental assessments needed. The bill doesn't mandate land allocation for clean energy projects, but it does set targets for increasing the amount of clean energy on federal lands.

You can see the big difference these reforms have made in clean energy deployment rates in Germany compared to some other European countries, and they've only been in effect for a brief period of time:

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Solar power is particularly benefitting from the permitting reforms, although wind energy is starting to rebound from a pretty stagnant period due to factors like supply chain issues and high interest rates:

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This is a nice piece of real-world evidence that permitting reform works and it's really important if we want to accelerate clean energy deployment and maximize our climate pollution cuts 🤓

2 Replies

@Dana Nuccitelli Thank you. Can you gift the Bloomberg article?

It should be free to read here, @Beki Thomson:

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