By Paul Bledsoe and Elan Sykes
The energy permitting reforms included in the recent bipartisan budget agreement represented modest progress — but they didn’t fix the problem. The main challenge, and the huge economic opportunity, is the sheer number of energy projects that must be permitted rapidly to save consumers money and limit emissions.
Thousands of these projects — wind power, solar, geothermal, powerlines, pipelines, carbon capture and many more — are pending reviews by federal agencies, electricity grid operators and state and local jurisdictions in every region. These permits cannot possibly be processed rapidly on a one-by-one basis, as the current system demands.
Fortunately, analytic and scoping technologies developed in the half-century since the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) can help expedite the process. These advances include a far better understanding of geological, ecological and other scientific conditions as well as the capacity to process and display information through technologies like computationally intensive modeling and Geographical Information Systems programs. These technologies can provide regulators the capacity they need to more comprehensively approve large batches of similar projects together. Only such basic reforms will upgrade our national energy infrastructure quickly and cost-effectively.
Agencies can increasingly use these technologies to conduct programmatic reviews that study groups of projects across wide geographic or technological areas. These systematic reviews can proactively identify, study and map places with significant clean energy potential and recognize issues that may require mitigation measures.
