President Joe Biden’s plans to build massive amounts of clean energy over the next decade could get caught in a web of environmental permitting requirements.
Biden has made the challenge especially tricky for himself by pledging to unwind revisions the Trump administration made in 2020 to shorten environmental reviews.
Yet, many of those changes to federal agency reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, would secure quicker approvals for clean energy projects. They would make it easier to build solar farms and wind turbines, transmission lines needed to carry clean power to homes and businesses, and mines that provide critical minerals used in electric car batteries.
For example, the Trump administration set a two-year deadline for agencies to complete environmental impact statements under NEPA, reviews that, on average, the White House Council on Environmental Quality estimated took 4.5 years between 2010 and 2018.
“There is no study, there is no expert, no expert that’s nonpolitical, that says that we can decarbonize without streamlining the process,” said Heather Reams, executive director of Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, a conservative clean energy group.
“If the Biden administration is going to drag its feet on the permitting process, it’s going to have a drag quotient when it comes to accelerating clean energy, when it comes to creating batteries, when it comes to decarbonizing the transportation sector. It goes on and on,” Reams added. “There’s such a disconnect in understanding that.”
Biden will have to usher in the construction of an enormous amount of clean energy to reach his climate goals, which include carbon-free power by 2035.
A University of California Berkeley study last year found the United States would have to build 1,100 gigawatts of new wind and solar power to achieve 90% zero-carbon power by 2035. That equates to about 70 GW of wind and solar buildout each year. By comparison, developers are planning to build roughly a combined 27 GW of solar and wind power in 2021, according to Energy Information Administration data.
Right now, it takes many years to plan, site, and earn federal approval for clean energy projects. Often, developers also face legal challenges from locals or environmental groups who raise land use, conservation, or endangered species concerns with the projects.
Many environmental groups criticized the Trump administration’s changes to NEPA, arguing they undercut agencies’ abilities to consider climate change in their reviews and shut out input from the people whose health and livelihoods would be most affected by projects.
Environmental groups want the Biden administration to bolster opportunities for those people, often minorities and low-income people, to weigh in on projects in their backyards.
The Biden administration has identified a two-step plan to revise the Trump administration’s changes to NEPA reviews. The CEQ also intends to update guidance requiring federal agencies to consider a project’s emissions and contribution to climate change.
Nonetheless, some climate change activists say Biden should maintain some of the changes the Trump administration made to streamline the environmental review process and encourage agencies to make a timely decision on a project.
“The risk that I see is that they throw everything out, and we start from scratch,” said Sasha Mackler, energy project director at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “We don’t have the time for that, really. If you look at the timelines and the ambition of the Biden administration and the timescales we have set out for ourselves to transition the energy system, speed is of the essence.”
In fact, Mackler and other clean energy proponents see room for the Biden administration to do more to accelerate approvals of clean energy projects. For example, Mackler said the Biden administration could put in place policies to take advantage of existing right-of-ways such as highways and railways to build clean energy projects such as transmission lines.
The Biden administration can also press Congress to act, including by reauthorizing FAST 41, Reams said. That 2015 law, designed to improve the timeliness and transparency of federal permitting, expires next year.
“NEPA gets a lot of attention, praise and criticism that are both legitimate, but it is only one small segment of the permitting landscape,” said Alex Herrgott, who led the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council and worked at the CEQ during the Trump administration. “Many projects experience bureaucratic gridlock and dead ends years before they engage the NEPA process.”
Herrgott, now founder and president of the nonpartisan Permitting Institute, recommends the Biden administration create a permitting pilot program to expedite “a limited list of critical projects with broad support,” such as dozens of offshore wind projects and 22 electric transmission lines that have been identified as crucial to increasing wind and solar power.
Lengthy, uncertain permitting timelines increase costs for developers and drive clean energy investment elsewhere, business groups argue.
“From a big picture standpoint, the quality of our infrastructure is what helps drive direct foreign investment in the U.S., and we have a lot of competition for that investment,” said Chad Whiteman, vice president for environment and regulatory affairs with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Energy Institute. He noted that China has now overtaken the U.S. as the top destination for new direct foreign investment.
Biden wants to draw new investment to the U.S., especially for clean energy, through his infrastructure proposal. However, thus far, permitting hasn’t been a focus of Biden’s plans nor the negotiations on Capitol Hill, which some climate activists worry is an oversight.
“You can push all the funding in the world to something. You can put deadlines on it, and you can pound the table,” said David Hill, an adjunct senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy and a former top official at NRG Energy. “But if you don’t have the administrative process to make a permitting decision that allows construction to actually happen, the work just isn’t going to happen.”
