Panel says renewable energy facing long war on red tape
The clean, green future of electricity in the United States is at hand, but the three-headed monster of bureaucracy, regulation and litigation continues to bog down the expansion of the nation’s power grids that will accommodate the boom, participants in a panel discussion on the topic said this week.
Running new high-voltage power lines from sparsely populated wind and sun regions into urban areas is a key step in bringing solar and wind power to the masses and also spurring an expected surge in electric vehicles (EVs). Moreover, with the threat of climate change nipping at their heels, regulators, lawyers and politicians just aren’t moving quickly enough to remove the barriers to these vital projects and get them to the groundbreaking stage.
“In the case of transmission expansion, there is private investment waiting to move; however, the struggle to get projects built is excessive regulatory red tape,” said Amy Ferrell, senior vice president for Government & Public Affairs at the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA). “We just need to remove the roadblocks.”
The panel discussion coincided with the release of an AWEA report urging continued improvements to the permitting process as well as determining rates for cost recovery and getting a jump on planning for new transmission that could be required several years in the future. “Federal and state legislators and regulators all have a role to play in advocating for and implementing these policies to promote cost-effective transmission expansion,” Ferrell said. “It starts with the Department of Energy designating corridors, with FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) providing the critical role of using its backstop-siting authority in such areas if transmission siting is becoming an impediment.”
Ferrell will likely find few objections to the idea of government getting out of the way and unleashing the private sector to bring about a new age in energy. Energy projects are always included in calls from Washington for the creation of the elusive infrastructure packages, and presidents since George W. Bush have urged the fast-tracking of important transmission lines and pipelines through the regulatory process.
But the going is still too slow, at least for the energy industry. An example is the TransWest Express (TWE), a 730-mile long line that will carry 3,000 megawatts of electricity from major wind farms in Wyoming to Hoover Dam where it will be sent on to markets in California, Las Vegas and Arizona. The $3 billion TWE project just this month received the final regulatory approval in Wyoming it needed to commence construction – after eight years of regulatory work – and that was after it had been given “special status” by the Rapid Response Team for Transmission formed by the Obama administration to hurry projects along back in 2011.
The panelists at this week’s event in Washington, sponsored by the AWEA and the online news site Politico, were all well aware of the many potential regulatory snags, not to mention opposition from landowners who might decide to fight it out in court rather than acquiesce to a line of giant transmission towers crossing their farms.
“It can be difficult when there are so many different landowners to contend with,” said U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM), a member of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources who is well versed in the topic of energy infrastructure. “And FERC does not have the same authority over power lines as it does over natural gas pipelines.”
Heinrich and his fellow panelists – Sue Kelly, president of the American Public Power Association, and PJM Interconnection President and CEO Andrew Ott – said the expansion of renewable electricity faced thorny issues involving a myriad of details, including taxes and rate-making for everything from the expanded use of battery storage to integrating EVs into the supply mix. The first step, they agreed, was getting a modern and responsive grid in place that would provide the flexibility needed for the climate-driven changes now on the table. And the best place to begin was at the federal level.
“We need to have a more thoughtful and streamlined permitting process,” Kelly said. “That does not mean that we don’t care about endangered species or things like that because we do.”
Heinrich added, “You want one person or agency that is going to shepherd a project from beginning to end who will do the analysis to determine whether it is a good project.”
A key to speeding up the approval process, the panelists said, could be sweetening the pot for landowners and local governments along the proposed transmission-line route. Residents of those areas have no incentive to make way for a major power line that will only benefit consumers hundreds of miles away. Heinrich and Ott recommended consideration of giving communities along a route access to some of the electricity the lines will carry, particularly low-cost renewable power that may also contribute to local green-energy initiatives.
Heinrich pointed out that renewable power being carried along high-voltage lines is entering a golden age in which it is not only cleaner, but also cheaper than electrons from fossil-fuel power plants, which could be the most effective incentive to get infrastructure expansion truly on the fast track.
“Making sure that people can economically benefit along the line is a huge way to incentivize and spread those benefits along the line rather than just at the beginning and the end,” Heinrich said.
