![Joe Biden Gonna Turn It [Grid Expansion] On, Gonna Bring You The [Renewable] Power!](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_fill,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F85148143-b508-4c43-8d3a-e09d2f418a04_1100x823.jpeg "Joe Biden Gonna Turn It [Grid Expansion] On, Gonna Bring You The [Renewable] Power!")
As we covered over the weekend, the Biden administration celebrated Earth Week by rolling out a whole bunch of new energy regulations last week, including a set of new rules on power plant emissions that will force coal plants to reduce carbon emissions by 90 percent by 2039 or close down altogether, as well as requiring that new fossil gas plants meet similar carbon reductions, too. The rules were carefully written to comply with regulatory limits the Supreme Court imposed when it threw out Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan in 2022, so at the very least the Supremes will need to come up with a new excuse if they want to overturn these limits.
As we mentioned in that Sunday post, the new regulations on power plants were paired with an additional rulemaking goodie bag that’s aimed at getting more clean energy on the power grid, to meet the demands of electrifying everything and to make sure clean power gets from where it’s being generated to where it’s needed. We said we’d get right on it, like probably on Tuesday, which would explain why we’re finally doing it today. You know us all too well. So let’s all nerd out again, ready-set-geek!
The biggest bottleneck in the energy transition isn’t necessarily building enough renewable energy sources, though Crom knows we have to do that. Instead, an even thornier problem is getting that new clean power connected to the grid and transmitting it through power lines to where it’s needed. It can take years for new transmission lines to be built, mostly because the permitting process is slow and unwieldy. Our central environmental law, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), provides vital protections for ecosystems, but transmission projects are often slowed by a permitting process that results in needless, redundant legal fights.
When you start talking about reforms to NEPA, Republicans get excited and say, yes, let’s not worry about environmental review and build some pipelines! Instead, we need a streamlined process that ensures environmental protection while also getting renewables in place, so to that end, last week the Energy Department rolled out several reforms aimed at getting clean electricity moving sooner, using money already approved in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act. Let’s take a look!
The infrastructure law includes a nice $2.5 billion pot of money called the Transmission Facilitation Program, to fund transmission projects across energy regions. DOE announced one such project last week, with the exciting name “the Southwest Intertie Project-North,” which is only missing one compass point for a bingo, and will invest $331 million in a nearly 300-mile transmission line to move power from wind farms in Idaho to a connection point in Nevada, where the electricity will then go to lines feeding Las Vegas and then California. And it’ll create 300 union jobs, too.
Also, a brand-new line from solar farms in Arizona to users in California came online the day of the announcement, so that’s another 3,200 megawatts of capacity already flowing.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm announced a new office in the DOE that will streamline the permitting process for new transmission lines in a new “Coordinated Interagency Transmission Authorization and Permits program,” which will serve as the main agency handling permits for new projects, and watch out, here comes some jargon: The new body will “create efficiencies, and establish a standard two-year timeline for federal transmission authorizations and permits.” Basically, the DOE will coordinate the permitting process and allow projects to do a single environmental review for several agencies at once, which Granholm called “a huge improvement from the status quo,” eliminating the need for clean energy developers to “navigate several independent permitting processes throughout the federal government.”
While the energy transition is going to require lots of new transmission lines, we can also dramatically improve our existing grid by making it work more efficiently, through far better, computerized grid controls (a lot of grid operations still rely on people in control centers flipping switches to move power around) and by my favorite new word, “reconductoring,” which means replacing existing power lines with new wires that can carry a lot more electricity. No need for new transmission towers and rights of way, and you can get the existing grid to carry as much as double the electricity. How’s that for a kick in the family Joules?
The DOE announced last week it’s created a “categorical exclusion” for permitting reconductoring projects, basically exempting them from having to do a completely new environmental review since, well, the towers and lines and routes are already in place, having gone through the permitting process when they were built.
Along with the regulatory change, the DOE released another $2.7 billion in new funding to accomplish those upgrades with the goal of upgrading 100,000 miles of existing lines.
There’s a lot more good stuff in the goodie bag that we just don’t have room to talk up, so go look at the White House fact sheet, ‘kay?
On top of the regulations-and-spending goodie bag we just discussed, on Tuesday, the White House rolled out a sweeping rule on permitting reform that will get directly at permitting for new energy projects, making environmental reviews under NEPA more efficient while also protecting the environment and allowing for public input on new transmission lines.
When Congress finally passed a bill to approve raising the debt ceiling last year, the legislation included a provision requiring streamlined permitting for all sorts of infrastructure projects, from highways and pipelines to power lines for renewable energy plants. As the New York Times explains (gift link), the new rules from the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) require that going forward, NEPA reviews must take into consideration not only the local environmental effects on the places where new projects are built — is your project going to pollute a stream people need for drinking water? — but for the first time must consider the climate impacts of the project, as well as requiring early public engagement with the process.
That’s a hella big change, and will have the effect of prioritizing and speeding up review of projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, while adding more review of projects that cause climate change or pollute nearby communities.
As the Times points out, the slow pace of the permitting process is just about the only thing that clean energy advocates and fossil fuel greedheads can agree on, because it’s very easy for communities and NIMBYs and even competing business interests to sue to bog down energy projects.
During the debt-ceiling negotiations last year, Biden promised that if Republicans got on board with the deal, environmental reviews would be finished within two years, a hell of a lot faster than the four and a half years they currently take.
The new rules keep that timeline and add the additional requirements for consideration of climate impacts, allowing expedited approval of projects that have long-term environmental benefits.
Not surprisingly, the fossil fuel greedheads are howling that Biden cheated by promising faster environmental reviews for all energy projects, dirty or clean, and how dare the rules actually speed up approval for greener projects, plus adding that thing about considering climate impacts, NO FAIR.
Look, guys, you’ll still get your faster, two-year reviews. Nobody promised two-year approval for dirty energy, though.
The Wall Street Journal (gift link) huffed that if the Biden administration was going to create rules that give clean energy a boost and disadvantage polluters, then why even bother passing laws, huh? The American Petroleum Institute, the oil and gas bidniss’s lobbying group, griped that the rule was “the opposite of what is needed to create a durable and predictable permitting review process to unleash energy investment in America,” because shouldn’t that investment be in oil and gas?
And Joe Manchin (D?), the Senator from Fossil Fuels, who helped negotiate the NEPA review changes in the debt ceiling bill, grumped that including climate impacts as part of environmental review was a betrayal of what should have been a completely equal process that was agnostic to the kind of energy project being proposed, damn you Biden, DAMN YOU TO HELL.
In other words, there will be lawsuits, but we’re encouraged to see that Biden is pissing off all the right people.
[Heatmap News / White House / E&E News / NYT (gift link) / WSJ (gift link)]
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