AnushreeArticle Summary
The Brookings report provides an overview of the permitting processes required for clean energy infrastructure at the local, state, federal and regional levels. It notes that most projects require approval across these levels of governance. Most of this is helpful review:
- At the local level, renewable projects typically need land use permits from city and county governments. Local opposition is common due to concerns over appearance, noise and other localized impacts. Rooftop solar also requires local permits, which can cause delays.
- At the state level, environmental permits are often required, such as under the California Environmental Quality Act. Other state agencies like transportation departments may require permits if projects affect highway rights-of-way. States generally control permitting for in-state transmission lines.
- Regionally, projects need approval to interconnect to the electric grid through Regional Transmission Organizations or Independent System Operators. These entities use "queues" to consider interconnection requests sequentially, causing delays.
- Federally, large projects require wildlife, air, water and land-use permits from agencies like EPA, Army Corps, and Interior Department. The report details the extensive federal permitting required under laws like NEPA, Endangered Species Act and others.
At the local level, the report finds that uncoordinated, disjointed municipal zoning rules and public engagement processes often obstruct clean energy projects. Opponents cite concerns like aesthetics, property values, and wildlife impacts to block proposals through protests, lawsuits, and lobbying for moratoriums. Decentralized local control enables a small minority of vocal opponents to derail projects.
My Takeaways
I’ve been meaning to go through this report for a while now, as it’s one of the more recent overviews of clean energy permitting and gives an outline of the many statutes and acronyms relevant to the process. The report reinforced two issues with permitting that I haven’t seen well-explored in the literature.
First, for federal permitting, a key challenge is the length and complexity of environmental impact statements (EIS) required under NEPA (and similar state requirements, such as under CEQA). Some experts, including an America 50 panel, have suggested that the complexity of EIS statements reflect a desire to “ensure that they [the federal government] have covered all effects and alternatives and are thereby less vulnerable to litigation.” This argument is also backed up by evidence showing that the federal government prevails in most NEPA litigation. In fact, the bipartisan infrastructure law limits new federal EIS to 200 pages (the average report is more than 661 pages long). However, shortening NEPA word limits seems counterproductive. Though longer reviews can cause delays in producing the report, they help ensure all impacts are considered and prevent future litigation. With shorter reviews, litigation and inefficiencies may increase in the long-term even if the short-term process of preparing the assessment is more efficient. More research is needed on optimizing NEPA EIS length.
Second, current approaches to permitting reform (the report mentions provisions in the IIJA, IRA, FAST-41, and efforts under the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations) consistently seem to lack performance metrics. Perhaps this is hard to implement with how decentralized the permitting process is—but more thought should be given to tracking progress to see if we can improve community engagement and efficiency at the same time.
Citation
Sud, Rayan, and Sanjay Patnaik. 2022. “How Does Permitting for Clean Energy Infrastructure Work?” Research. Brookings.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-does-permitting-for-clean-energy-infrastructure-work/
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