Energy permitting is broken: New analytics can fix it

The energy permitting reforms included in the recent bipartisan budget agreement represented modest progress — but they didn’t fix the problem. The main challenge, and the huge economic opportunity, is the sheer number of energy projects that must be permitted rapidly to save consumers money and limit emissions.

Thousands of these projects — wind power, solar, geothermal, powerlines, pipelines, carbon capture and many more — are pending reviews by federal agencies, electricity grid operators and state and local jurisdictions in every region. These permits cannot possibly be processed rapidly on a one-by-one basis, as the current system demands.

Fortunately, analytic and scoping technologies developed in the half-century since the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) can help expedite the process. These advances include a far better understanding of geological, ecological and other scientific conditions as well as the capacity to process and display information through technologies like computationally intensive modeling and Geographical Information Systems programs. These technologies can provide regulators the capacity they need to more comprehensively approve large batches of similar projects together. Only such basic reforms will upgrade our national energy infrastructure quickly and cost-effectively.

Agencies can increasingly use these technologies to conduct programmatic reviews that study groups of projects across wide geographic or technological areas. These systematic reviews can proactively identify, study and map places with significant clean energy potential and recognize issues that may require mitigation measures.

These analytic tools can produce publicly available and up-to-date maps that will enable faster reviews for all parties and create greater transparency for stakeholders by identifying known habitats for vulnerable wildlife, climate resilience risk, low-income energy communities and other statutory requirements. Agencies can combine these programmatic reviews with stringent mitigation standards for existing statutory obligations that rightly impose substantive protections for clean air and water, endangered species, historic preservation and other permits.

But, equally, automatic, by-right approvals for low-impact technologies such as utility-scale solar panel facilities, wind turbines and geothermal test wells in qualifying areas should be applied very rapidly. And the development of more general permits and categorical exclusions under NEPA with clear, objective criteria for approving projects with known low-impact characteristics should become routine. In many ways, this effort would simply be an extension of the current process of granting categorical exclusions but bunching them together in large groups of like technologies, landscapes and habitats.

Developers of these similar, well-understood, and environmentally critical projects like solar panels or wind turbines should be able to pull up a map, identify a suitable site and have a transparent list of the responsible agency’s requirements for development at that site ready off the shelf. Likewise, a private citizen should be able to pull up a more powerful version of the Permitting Dashboard or a similar newly created mapping program and identify any proposed projects in their area and immediately access digestible summaries and in-depth analysis of their environmental impacts along with the opportunity to provide comment or flag missed issues.    

While the analytic and mapping technologies exist, federal agencies and states will need more funding and expertise to execute these large-scale analytic operations quickly. The need for greater analytic capabilities exists across all federal agencies but is most acute in places like the Interior Department, Energy Department,  Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers, agencies that do the lion’s share of federal energy permitting. The cost-benefit ratio, however, will be enormous in money saved for consumers and emissions reductions that will limit domestic emissions and set a standard for global clean infrastructure deployment.

Congress should provide money contingent on agencies, states and grid operators regionally documenting that they are, in fact, rapidly issuing appropriate permits and that key technologies are being deployed on the ground.

Some opponents of reforms argue that existing land, water and wildlife laws should be inviolable, never subject to updates or technologically-based reforms. But even stalwart environmentalists like Bill McKibben have come out in favor of shaking up the permitting system at least for the cleanest and most urgent climate projects. 

Meanwhile, recent climate impacts from devastating heat waves throughout most of the country and massive wildfires choking major cities with smoke are merely the first of many catastrophic impacts we will face unless urgent action is taken. This is why Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has made further energy reforms a priority for this year. Republicans, including Speaker Kevin McCarthy, (R-Calif.) equally recognize the economic and consumer benefits.

America needs to build cleaner energy much faster. We can no longer accept the burden of a regulatory framework designed for the conventional pollution problems in the 1960s or offer solutions created over a half-century ago that now penalize cleaner projects, ironically in the false name of environmental protection.

It’s time to build out America’s energy revolution. We have the technology; we now need the political and good governing sense.

Paul Bledsoe is a strategic advisor at the Progressive Policy Institute; he served as a staff member in Congress, the Interior Department and the Clinton White House.

Elan Sykes is an energy policy analyst at the PPI.