Discover Top Posts Tagged with #permitting reform

Senate Democrat says no permitting reform deal without wind. (Heatmap AM)

Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, the ranking Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, threatened to withhold votes on permitting reforms he endorsed unless the Trump administration backs off what Heatmap’s Jael Holzman dubbed the “total war on wind.” At an unrelated hearing on Wednesday, Whitehouse said that “unless these illegal acts stop and unless offshore wind is included, there will be no permitting deal,” Politico reporter Josh Siegel reportedon X. The remarks came two days after Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said the administration would not halt its attempts to block construction of offshore turbines in exchange for a bipartisan bill to overhaul federal permitting. “I hadn’t thought about the idea of trading something that makes sense for everybody in America for something that makes no sense — and that’s sort of how I view offshore wind,” Burgum said at an American Petroleum Institute event.

As I wrote in yesterday’s newsletter, US Wind warned in federal court this week that, if the administration wins its court case to revoke the project’s construction and operating permits, the Baltimore-based developer will likely go bankrupt. While Secretary of Energy Chris Wright dismissed the wind assault as a “one-off exception, or one-off complication,” the oil industry doesn’t see it that way. As I wrote earlier this month, Shell’s top U.S. executive spoke forcefully against the administration’s anti-wind crusade, warning that Democrats could use the precedents being set against oil and gas companies in the future. That isn’t slowing the administration’s plans to expand offshore oil drilling, however. A document leaked to the Houston Chronicle this week shows that the White House aims to open broad swaths of both the east and west coasts to offshore drilling, months after the administration rescinded designations for millions of acres of federal waters to serve for seaborne wind turbine development.

#wind power #permitting reform #Senator Sheldon Whitehouse #department of the interior #trump

Republicans signal support for permitting reform on clean energy. (Heatmap AM)

Earlier this month, I told you that SunZia, the nation’s largest renewable energy project ever, had come online. The behemoth project, which included 3.5 gigawatts of wind turbines in New Mexico and 550 miles of transmission lines to funnel the electricity to Arizona’s fast-growing population centers, took just three years to build once construction began in 2023. But “the permitting process took nearly 17 years — almost six times as long,” in a sign of how “a broken permitting system has choked the infrastructure growth that underwrites American strength.” You’d be mistaken for thinking these words came from someone like Senator Martin Heinrich, the New Mexico Democrat and climate hawk who long championed SunZia and more transmission lines to bring renewables online, but told Heatmap’s Jael Holzman last December that he wouldn’t vote for anything that failed to boost renewables. But their author is actually Senator Tom Cotton, the right-wing firebrand Republican from Arkansas. In a Monday op-ed in The Washington Post, Cotton argued that the U.S. “needs more electricity to support data centers, modern manufacturing, defense infrastructure, and economic growth,” in addition to more “domestic access to critical minerals” and processing plants and “a stronger industrial base.” To make that happen, “the country first needs straightforward, enforceable permitting standards and fast, efficient construction,” he wrote. He called for overhauling landmark laws such as the National Environmental Policy Act and establishing “a single agency” to “oversee permitting reviews with firm deadlines and a clear, coordinated decision process.”

The push comes as Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives propose restoring tax credits for wind, solar, and other clean energy technologies that were curtailed by One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The American Energy Dominance Act, introduced Thursday, would remove the accelerated deadlines that Trump’s landmark legislation last year placed on the renewable energy production tax credit, known as 45Y, and the 48E investment tax credits. It would, according to Utility Dive, also make similar changes to the 45V clean hydrogen production credit.

#permitting reform #renewable energy #renewable energy federal income tax credits #American Energy Dominance Act

Bills meant to streamline federal permit approvals have stalled, but states are already passing their own measures. That could be key to spe

Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:

Minnesota lawmakers are holding a hearing today to debate a proposed bill that would enact a series of changes to the way the state permits wind and solar farms, as well as the transmission lines needed to deliver the electricity they produce.

Last year, Minnesota passed a sweeping package of climate laws, including one that requires the state to generate 100 percent of its electricity from carbon-free sources by 2040. “We’re going to need quite a bit more renewable energy in our system to achieve 100 percent,” said Minnesota House Majority Leader Jamie Long, a Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) party member who authored the permitting bill. “So we need transmission and we need it fast.”

The Minnesota Energy Infrastructure Permitting Act, which was introduced last week, would reduce procedural requirements, consolidate environmental review authority for energy projects to a single state agency, limit certain contested case hearings and exempt all wind and solar projects and some transmission lines from certificate of need permits. The bill’s supporters say it could shave off as much as nine months from a process that can often take more than five years—and without scuttling the public input process, a top concern for environmental justice advocates.

The proposal is the latest legislative effort to streamline the regulatory approval process for clean energy projects—what’s more commonly referred to as permitting reform. It’s also an example of why state action could be key to advancing permitting reform this year, energy experts say, as Congress remains gridlocked on the issue.

At least 10 federal permitting reform bills are unlikely to gain any traction on Capitol Hill ahead of the presidential election in November. While progressives wish to speed up approvals of renewable energy infrastructure, Republicans—and some conservative Democrats—have refused to cooperate unless fossil fuel projects are given equal, if not better, treatment.

That standstill, however, hasn’t stopped at least six states from enacting their own versions of permitting reform in recent years, said Matthew Eisenson, a senior researcher for Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.

New York, California, Florida, Illinois and Michigan have all enacted permitting reforms that make it more difficult for local governments to block wind or solar projects, Eisenson said, and Minnesota passed a law last year that exempts certain large wind and solar projects from certificate of need permits. Those permits require developers to show regulators that there’s a public need for their proposed projects and are often central to the arguments of legal challenges against them.

#Minnesota #renewable energy #permitting reform

Tucked into the measure are changes to how the government approves projects at the center of the country’s climate goals.

Excerpt from this story from the New York Times:

President Biden and Congress have wrangled a big political deal to raise the country’s debt ceiling.

Tucked into that deal are some changes to how the government approves new projects that bear on the country’s climate goals, whether pipelines or bus lanes. While these tweaks are fairly modest, they’re part of a broader push by many lawmakers for something known as permitting reform, which could affect how quickly the United States cleans up its climate pollution.

Permitting reform refers to efforts to change the rules, including those under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, that govern how, and how quickly, federal agencies authorize big projects. That could be congestion pricing on cars in Manhattan or a big solar array on federal lands, or, hardest of all, transmission lines that can go through many state and city jurisdictions.

The debt ceiling deal would surely speed up one thing.

That’s the Mountain Valley Pipeline. It’s a big win for the established oil and gas producers and their champion in the Senate, Joe Manchin III, a West Virginia Democrat. How polluting the pipeline would be is a matter of debate. But opponents say a new gas pipeline, which would operate for decades, defies the scientific consensus that the world needs to move quickly away from fossil fuels in order to slow down climate change.

So would renewable energy projects get built faster?

That’s unclear.

One section of the bill is designed to speed up energy projects of all kinds, polluting or not, by designating a lead agency to oversee environmental reviews and requiring that they are completed in one to two years. In theory, that could speed up oil and gas projects as well as renewables. But those deadlines could prove tough to enforce, and some experts say those changes would have only a modest impact.

It doesn’t resolve the most urgent question.

Most significantly, the bill leaves unsettled whether the permitting of new transmission lines will be accelerated.

#debt ceiling #permitting reform #climate change

On Tuesday's broadcast of NBC's "MTP Now," Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-MI) stated that while failing to raise the debt limit could cause a recession or | Clips

#permitting reform

A coalition of influential lobbying groups called on Congress to act on the energy permitting reforms championed by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) by the end of the summer in a letter Monday.

Excerpt from this story from The Hill:

A coalition of influential lobbying groups called on Congress to act on the energy permitting reforms championed by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) by the end of the summer in a letter Monday.

While the letter is led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the oil and renewable energy industries are also represented in the letter, with the American Petroleum Institute and the Solar Energy Industries Association among the signers.

The letter calls the current permitting system “the single biggest obstacle” to infrastructure buildouts in the U.S. It does not endorse a specific piece of legislation, but instead calls for reforms that improve transparency, predictability, efficiency and input from stakeholders.

Manchin in 2022 lent his support to the Inflation Reduction Act in exchange for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) guarantee to bring legislation to the floor streamlining the permitting process for new energy projects. Although the reforms would also apply to renewable energy projects, green groups vocally opposed the measure, citing its likely impact on fossil fuel development. Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, are wary of giving the West Virginia Democrat a policy one as he faces what is likely to be a tough re-election fight in 2024.

Last September, however, after initially attaching reform measures to a must-pass government funding bill, Manchin removed the language amid bipartisan opposition. Manchin’s Republican colleague, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.V.), introduced a separate permitting reform bill the same month.

#permitting reform #environmental regulations #energy permitting

Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:

The construction of a new interstate power line near Phoenix has become the latest symbol in the debate over federal permitting reform.

At a groundbreaking ceremony last month for the Ten West Link transmission line, Vice President Kamala Harris praised the project for what it means for the fight against climate change. “To create our clean energy future,” she said, “we must construct thousands of miles of new high-voltage transmission lines all across our country.”

But the line, which will stretch 125 miles between Arizona and California once completed, is also a reminder of how difficult it is to build big energy projects. Developers of Ten West Link filed their initial application with the federal government in 2015 for a project that won’t be fully online until 2025, and much of that time has been taken up by waiting for regulatory approvals.

“We put a man on the moon in less than that,” said U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas), speaking about Ten West Link this week in a committee hearing. “Does that seem like a healthy permitting and regulatory system to anyone?”

Crenshaw and other newly empowered Congressional Republicans say regulatory approval for new energy projects takes too long and is too easily stalled by opponents. Many Democrats agree, saying lengthy environmental reviews are also slowing the buildout of clean energy projects needed to address climate change.

In that sense, permitting reform could be a rare area in which the parties can come together.

But we’ve been here before. Previous proposals, most recently in December from Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), unraveled because of major gaps in the parties’ views of which projects should take priority, and concerns among progressive groups that the legislation would do more harm than good.

The debate underscores how the appearance of common ground is sometimes a thin layer papering over major differences.

And yet, clean energy business leaders argue that the benefits of streamlining the federal permit process would exceed the harm to the climate.

“One of my favorite issues is we’ve got to build stuff,” said Jason Grumet, the newly installed CEO of the American Clean Power Association, a clean energy business group, speaking recently at a forum held by Resources for the Future, an energy research nonprofit.

He said the fraught approval processes for building clean energy projects threaten to undermine President Joe Biden’s signature climate change law, the Inflation Reduction Act.

#permitting reform #electric utilities #fossil fuel industry #climate change #manchin #republicans