DOE publishes in-depth inventory of state permitting and siting regulations for wind and solar
While many states and cities have set ambitious policy goals to increase renewable energy, achieving a sustainable energy landscape in the United States has been made difficult by a variety of roadblocks, such as navigating state and local permitting authorities.
To help address the layers of regulation found in various states, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency (EERE) published a report tracking state regulations on siting new wind and solar.
Published in collaboration with the Regulatory Assistance Project, the Clean Air Task Force, and the Consensus Building Institute, the project will contribute to further research to identify successful formats that will enable wider deployment of onshore wind and solar, according to the webinar on June 20.
“The real motivation for this report was to help provide a census of the policy landscape for policymakers, developers and advocates that are considering different ways to meet the renewable energy goals,” said Raphael Tisch, a senior advisor on siting and permitting for EERE, and a contributor to the research.
The research comes as renewable developers are sharing increasing frustrations with the permitting and siting of their projects. A survey of developers conducted by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory earlier this year shows local ordinances and zoning processes rise to the top of the list of barriers to project development and are responsible for most project cancellations and delays over six months.
“The sociopolitical challenges, which have always been present, are now some of the most significant barriers to deploying new renewable projects,” Nelson Falkenburg, clean energy siting associate with Clean Air Task Force, said in the webinar.
In the last few years, several states adopted renewable energy siting policy reforms, with New York establishing its new Office of Renewable Energy Siting in 2020. But while some states, like New York, established authority over project siting with state agencies, “other reforms, like in Ohio, vested more authorities with local governments,” Falkenburg said.
“As states were adopting these reforms, we increasingly heard from developers, advocates and policy makers a desire to better understand the existing landscape of states’ siting policies,” Falkenburg said.
Developers will face further complexity when they must file with a mix of state and local authorities, or the authority changes depending on the size of the projects, as it does in 27 states, according to the report.
“It’s very frequently the case that both the state and the local authorities are involved,” said Shawn Enterline, senior associate at the Regulatory Assistance Project and co-author of the report.
Through a variety of interactive maps, also hosted by EERE, the report highlights significant variability in state-level policies governing wind and solar energy siting and development.
The states with the most solar are California, Texas and Florida, and the states with the most installed wind are Texas, Iowa and Oklahoma, according to the Energy Information Administration. Per the recent NREL report, their permitting landscapes vary widely: Texas vests local governments through broad zoning authority, Oklahoma allows local governments to set permit criteria, and for many other states, the deciding authority will depend on the size of the project.
“At least to my eyes, there weren’t any interregional trends to be discerned, so it’s really reflective of each state having its own approach to siting and permitting,” Enterline said. However, he pointed out that adjacent states do take cues from their neighbors with respect to their policy, so some similar structures are seen.
State-level decision-making bodies, the entities that provide oversight of project siting and permitting, are most often public utility commissions, state siting boards and natural resources agencies.
States, and in some cases, third-parties such as nonprofits, academic institutions or working groups convened within the states, have also published guidebooks on the siting process. Some states leading in renewable energy, like Texas, Georgia and Oklahoma, don’t offer published guidance, while some states, like Florida and Kentucky, offer wind siting guidance even though no wind resources have been developed in the state.
The report also looked at which states set timelines for responding. While 31 states set a timeline on the permitting process, they range from 30 days to more than a year, and almost all of them have different procedural moments that start the clock, from the application date, to receiving a completeness determination on a project.
“When we as a team saw timelines in the statute, at the same time we frequently ran into a public engagement requirement as well,” Enterline said.
According to the report, 34 states include a public requirement in the siting process, with a variety of public involvement specified, such as announcing the project at a public meeting or hearing.
The report is a snapshot of the permitting landscape for developers and policymakers to consider going forward, not a means of deciding the most efficient or supportive permitting landscape for adding more renewables. During the webinar, the participants were unified on welcoming further research using the report.
“We’re also hopeful that this report will enable novel research relating to how different policy configurations influence siting outcomes,” Tisch said.
