For Democrats, Compromise on Permitting is a Moral Imperative
But first, they have to believe in their own landmark climate law
by Gabrielle Jorgensen, Advocacy Director & Co-founder, Climate Changemakers
It’s no secret that the U.S. used to build stuff, and now we don’t. The degree to which we need to scale clean energy infrastructure to approach anything resembling carbon drawdown has been a cause for alarm in the climate movement. Last year, the DOE’s Transmission Needs Study found that we need to at least double and probably quadruple interregional transmission capacity by 2035 to support the anticipated electricity load. It’s impossible to overstate how high the stakes are here: Princeton’s REPEAT project has warned that unless the pace of transmission expansion more than doubles the 10-year average growth rate of ~1% per year, we risk losing 80% of the Inflation Reduction Act’s emissions reduction potential.
And that’s just transmission. We need to build more wind and solar generation, and developers want to build it. But there’s more clean energy waiting to connect to the grid than the existing capacity of the entire grid, with over 100 more proposed renewables projects facing recent court challenges and often losing them. Although factors like FERC rulemaking and understaffed agencies contribute to the bottleneck, arguably the biggest culprit hindering transmission expansion is the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)’s daunting environmental review requirements and generous opportunities for litigation.
Congressional Democrats and the Biden administration have already squandered two serious opportunities to negotiate with NEPA critics. Many Democrats argue that nearly unconstrained community input is vital to a just transition, even though the status quo favors input from privileged groups who have the time and resources to raise a stink about a half-mile of transmission line. In failing to compromise, they’re betraying the very communities that will be hit hardest by climate change. Others claim that any compromise threatens the integrity of environmental review as if the trade-off here is not the suffocation of our environment with planet-warming pollution.
Make no mistake: letting perfect be the enemy of the good on this issue is a moral abdication.
It’s time for Democrats to uniformly support bipartisan efforts to negotiate on this issue. There’s enormous opportunity for a compromise that doesn’t “gut” NEPA, with modest reforms like one- or two-year time limits on environmental review coupled with more deliberate, inclusive community engagement efforts during that period. They can also consider financial incentives for states to expedite their environmental reviews and measures that would increase process transparency. They should insist on expanding federal siting authority for interstate transmission and work with their opponents on an electricity cost allocation scheme that feels fair to everyone. And yes, they should consider these reform options even though they could equally benefit both fossil fuel and clean energy construction in the short term.
Democrats can afford to make such a deal because they’ve already passed the largest clean energy incentive package in world history. The U.S. Treasury is now pressing its thumb hard on the clean energy side of the scale, with direct subsidies for renewables and other clean tech finally overtaking those for oil, gas, and coal. But on permitting and transmission, Democrats are behaving with pre-IRA reticence.
The irony is that they’ve set up a self-fulfilling prophecy: a failure to enable rapid clean energy siting and permitting will weaken the IRA’s effectiveness, whereas having confidence in its power of incentive will help ensure its long-term success.
As we enter a presidential election year, it’s more important than ever to lock in the economic benefits of the IRA. We need an explosion of infrastructure buildout so lucrative that it makes repealing the IRA politically impossible. If the U.S. fails to meet its climate goals, it shouldn’t be because climate champions fumbled the ball directly ahead of the end zone.
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I have done numerous environmental reviews for proposed transmission lines. Our nations power grid is not a matter that should be partisan. There are financial considerations that may prevent investor owned utilities from pursing expensive new grid facilities. Perhaps there is a need to create a longer term federal loan program to help stimulate grid expansion, something along the lines of the Rural Electrification Act of the 1930’s. Creating incentives that enable more environmental approval certainty would also be useful.
Many of the transmission lines I evaluated and obtained approvals for have been built and the environmental impacts have not been long-term nor irreversible. One policy that I would favor is granting fast trap approvals for transmission line rebuilds to higher voltages and increased capacity. Utilities have long advocated for physically separating transmission lines to avoid simultaneous outages. This policy while seemingly reasonable on its face, new transmission lines and new rights-of-way have often posed what often seems to be insurmountable public opposition. I expect a new transmission line that consumes scarce financial and Human Resources only to be abandoned due to opposition causes much higher power reliability harm that pursuing a series of line upgrades.