Among the many hurdles facing renewable energy, transmission usually gets the most attention—wind farms, after all, won’t be much use if their electricity can’t make it into cities. Congress heard a spate of testimony last week on the question—everybody agreed transmission was the key to renewable-energy development; they just disagreed on the best way to tackle it.
But there might be an even more basic bottleneck choking renewable energy’s potential: Getting permission to build stuff in the first place.
Our colleague Stephen Power in today’s WSJ explores how the U.S. government is overwhelmed trying to process applications to build renewable-energy projects on federal land. Put another way, the Obama administration is torn between protecting the miniscule Devil’s Hole pupfish and jumpstarting an energy revolution:
The logjam highlights a dilemma for the Obama administration: how to speed the transition to a clean-energy economy — a shift the president has promised will create millions of jobs — without trampling the legacy of a previous generation of conservationists, who left in place federal laws and regulations designed to control exploitation of federal lands or protect the habitats of endangered species.
Simply put, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management can’t move as fast as the industry needs it to go. The paper cites the case of German company Solar Millennium, which wants to build a $1 billion solar plant in Nevada, but which has no idea if or when the BLM will get to its application. Timing matters—billions of dollars in federal money for clean-energy projects are at stake, but companies need to break ground before the end of next year.
There’s plenty of pushback against new energy sources, but one point that comes up time and again is the inertia of the status quo. Building the oil and gasoline distribution systems, for instance, took a century, and can’t be changed overnight. Everything is geared to how it was, a physical barrier to the deployment of new technologies, from electric cars to massive growth in wind power.
What’s interesting, as the paper notes, is that the same thing applies to the way the government thinks about energy. As the paper notes, the BLM’s whole permitting process was designed with oil and gas leases in mind—not applications to develop solar-power projects on federal land, for instance.
In a way, the biggest prod for clean energy could come not from exciting technological breakthroughs, but simply from finding a way to grease the wheels of bureaucracy.
The National Research Council, in a huge report on the future of renewable energy, concluded as much: “Significant increases in the deployment of renewable electricity facilities” will require an equally significant overhaul of the way the federal, state and local governments consider and approve energy projects.
Here’s a suggestion: Why doesn’t the BLM steal a page from the folks who handle U.S. passports? That agency also has a huge backlog, but will rush through the application in half the time–for an additional fee. That would help tackle the clean-energy crunch and the deficit.