In the recent negotiations involved in passing the Inflation Reduction Act, Joe Manchin (also known as ‘Nobody’s Favorite Democrat’), insisted on support for an additional bill on reforming energy permitting. This bill will be attached to the ‘Continuing Resolution’ spending bill that will need to be passed next week in order to avoid a government shutdown.
Senator Manchin is having a hard time getting the requisite support for the bill though for two opposing reasons:
It will make it easier for a natural gas pipeline project to proceed that will serve West Virginia. Opponents of making any fossil fuel project easier are not likely to support the bill. These opponents tend to be more on the Democrat side of the aisle.
It doesn’t go far enough to make fossil fuel projects easier. For example, it doesn’t remove the environmental impact assessment requirements for pipelines and tends to ‘benefit renewables more than fossil fuels’ critics claim. These opponents tend to be more on Republican side of the aisle.
Yeah.
So, it’s complicated.
But here’s the deal: We DO need permitting reform.
The clean energy transition requires us to electrify, electrify, electrify. And all that electricity flows through wires.
The main lines that carry electricity - the big ones attached to the large pylons you see dotting the landscape - those are transmission lines. They are old - more than 60 or 70 years old in some cases, for lines that are designed for a 50-year lifespan - and need replacing. They are failing at an increasingly high rate, which is a little alarming even if we weren’t trying to produce and use more electricity.
But we also need more of them. A lot more.
Projections from the Net Zero America Project say that we will need about twice as much electricity as we use now by about 2050. (Read or listen to Ezra Klein’s interview with Jesse Jenkins from the Net Zero America Project for more details and some jaw-dropping numbers).
All of those transmission lines cross property. Sometimes it’s government property, sometimes it’s private property. And oddly, it’s harder to get permission to install new transmission lines across property than it is to build a pipeline, currently.
This is because in the case of a pipeline, you only need to get permission from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) - an independent agency. (I say, ‘only’, but there are a ton of hoops to jump through, as there should be). For a new transmission line, you need to get permission from every jurisdiction (county, city, state, landowner) along its path.
It is particularly important that we figure this out for electricity because although we refer to ‘The Grid’, it’s actually three grids - an eastern grid, a western grid, and Texas.
The eastern and western grid need to be much better connected, in part so that with ‘non-continuous’ generation sources like wind and solar, we can transmit electricity from windy places and from sunny places to calm or dreary places on any given day.
Ideally, we also need to connect Texas too, but Texas is oddly unwilling to make their grid more resilient by allowing energy out or in, (which makes them vulnerable to grid failures during spikes in demand like in the big freeze last winter or the recent heatwave. This is because they can only barely generate enough energy right now for ‘normal’ use. Texas’s grid is very brittle for that reason, and the people of Texas are paying the price - quite literally in terms of electricity costs).
Anyway, right now, the process to get permission for a new transmission line is practically impossible. Manchin’s bill would pull authority for this process under FERC - just like for pipelines - so there would be a more centralized process for assessing, reviewing, and finally permitting a new line. The bill also makes it clearer who would pay for new lines.
In general, this is exciting and good. We do need more lines and we desperately need to upgrade the ones we have.
Of course, the downside is that it may make fossil fuel permitting a bit easier too, and this will be a bitter pill to swallow for environmentalists (although I’m not sure it will make it much easier….so I am cautiously supportive of the whole thing).
The other two big questions we will have to grapple with are:
How to invest in a sufficiently diverse suite of fuel sources so that we are not only relying on solar, wind, and hydro. Basically, we will have an ugly mess of panels and wind farms if we can’t also use geothermal, hydrogen, nuclear, and some fossil fuel-based sources with carbon capture and storage (CCS). Though we want to fade out fossil fuel use rapidly of course, we may need some CCS, at least in the short term, so that the renewable infrastructure isn’t just flung out onto our hills and valleys willy nilly. Sensible permitting will need to be applied to ALL of our energy infrastructure. We don’t want a clean energy future to also be a god-awful ugly future.
Equitable siting of infrastructure. In the past, we have tended to foist dangerous, stinky, and ugly infrastructure onto our lowest income neighborhoods. We must do better with our clean energy future. Benefits and costs need to be experienced equitably across socioeconomic lines, and that’s going to be a constant frame and challenge. But again, good permitting can help (and bad permitting processes can hinder).
I would like to think that we can come up with more distributed energy generation (e.g. solar panels on every new house, rather than only massive solar and wind farms you can see from space), and I’d like to think we can hide our energy distribution network better (e.g. underground in some cases). But the reality is that many things (cost, landowner rights, neighborhood objections) are often in the way of our collective best intentions.
Our clean energy future needs progress on multiple fronts, and a lot of the work ‘behind the scenes’ is neither fun nor heroic. But it is essential (so maybe this does make it heroic). And permitting is one of those sticky, largely uninteresting, but super-duper-important parts of our future that will either help us get to a better next chapter quickly, or cause us to miss the mark.
A few sources used in this write-up:
The transcript of Ezra Klein’s interview with Jesse Jenkins
The full and the summary text of Manchin’s bill: The Energy Independence and Security and Act of 2022
The September 21st ‘Weekly Planet’ newsletter from The Atlantic
This Washington Post article discussing congressional support (or otherwise) for Manchin’s bill.
P.S. Comments open to all. Would love to hear your thoughts.
I put off reading this because I thought I wasn’t interested in it. And yet it is a brilliant post, with perspectives that I haven’t considered before. So glad I read it.
Ever considered running for office? :))