Climate and energy analysts in the United States are deeply divided over a bipartisan bill that would speed up permitting for grid interconnections for renewable power projects, but also mandate offshore lease sales and streamlined approvals for new liquefied natural gas projects.
The Energy Permitting Reform Act, co-sponsored by Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and John Barrasso (R-WY), was published in late July and cleared committee debate just a week later, Heatmap reports. It’s already produced sharp battle lines, with Big Green groups like the League of Conservation Voters, the Natural Resources Defense Council, EarthJustice, the U.S. Sierra Club, and Oil Change International standing against it, while “energy wonks” maintain that clean energy can compete and win if the bill delivers a more even competitive environment.
“Some of the environmental community is going to look at this and see it as a net win for climate change, and some in the environmental community are more anti-fossil fuel than they are pro-reducing emissions [via demand-side wins], and so it’s harder for them to get over the fossil fuel aspect of the bill,” Xan Fishman, senior director of the energy program at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told Heatmap.
“But to some extent, that’s how bipartisan deals come together. Not everyone is going to be happy.”
But veteran climate analyst Jeremy Symons warned the bill’s support for liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports would “lock in new greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 165 coal-fired power plants or more” and “erase the climate benefits of building 50 major renewable electricity transmission lines,” climate author and campaigner Bill McKibben reports in his The Crucial Years newsletter.
The bill is “an energy smorgasbord, and all sorts of fuels and resources are invited to the party,” Heatmap reported when it was first released. It includes:
• Siting authority for interstate lines, compulsory interregional planning, and clarity on cost allocation for new transmission;
• Faster permits for “low-impact” construction jobs and new deployment goals for renewables;
• Support for hydropower projects aiming to extend their licences;
• Mandatory offshore lease sales and streamlined permitting requirements for oil and gas;
• Support for coal and other mining projects;
• New time limits on legal challenges to all forms of energy projects.
“On the face of it, some of the new proposal makes real sense: among other things, it would ease the process of approving the badly needed transmission lines for moving solar and wind power back and forth across the continent,” McKibben writes. “But remember: Joe Manchin has taken more money from the fossil fuel industry than anyone else in DC. And so it’s not surprising that there’s a huge cost for this sane policy change: the bill will also try and force the approval of huge new LNG export terminals along the Gulf Coast,” a move he describes as “disgusting on environmental justice grounds” as well as “the single biggest greenhouse gas bomb on planet Earth.”
Heatmap says there’s been very little public analysis of the bill’s climate impacts. But its coverage cites analysis by Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM), who said the oil and gas provisions of the bill would increase emissions by about 160 million tons, while the gains for renewables would cut carbon pollution by two to three billion tonnes.
“The positive climate impacts of the pieces hastening permits crucial to the energy transition may easily outweigh the carbon dioxide and methane emissions impacts of the fossil fuel language,” Heatmap says. And ultimately, that may be the only way a bipartisan compromise on U.S. climate policy can ever take shape.
“Truth is, the U.S. is not ready to talk about seriously scaling down oil and gas production,” wrote Noah Gordon, acting co-director for sustainability, climate, and geopolitics at the Carnegie Endowment for World Peace, in an email to Heatmap’s Jael Holzman. “The only way to make that conversation possible is to massively boost clean energy and change the balance of political power.”
And “in 2024, this is feasible only through all-energy-is-welcome bills like Manchin-Barrasso,” Gordon added. “On a more level playing field, clean energy will prove its superiority.”
While the debate unfolds, other moves are afoot to clear a massive, 2.5-terawatt backlog in clean energy grid connections across the U.S., while some fossil fuel projects run into legal and regulatory hurdles.
In California, Texas, and the southwestern U.S., grid operators are looking to cut down the nearly five-year delay in connecting renewable energy and energy storage projects completed in 2022-2023, Utility Dive reports. That’s after an analysis in April by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) found that the capacity awaiting connection was about double the roughly 1,280 GW of generating capacity across the U.S. today.
The news story has details of the steps different jurisdictions are taking to reduce their interconnection backlogs, motivated in part by Order 2023, issued in July, 2023 by the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). The rule “prioritizes more viable projects that have met readiness criteria and imposes financial penalties that require both transmission providers and system operators to step up their game,” LBNL Energy Policy Researcher Joseph Rand told Utility Dive.
When it was adopted, former FERC Commissioner Allison Clements called Order 2023 “an important step forward in the effort to address interconnection backlogs,” and urged grid operators to “consider the rule’s requirements a strong baseline and not a ceiling” on system reform.
Separately, the Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, DC has struck down three recent FERC rulings covering five fossil fuel developments, all on the basis that they failed to assess the projects’ climate and environmental impacts.
In the mid-Atlantic, the court vacated FERC’s “arbitrary and capricious” approval of the billion-dollar Regional Energy Access gas pipeline expansion project without first assessing its climate impact, Utility Dive writes.
“The court recognized that FERC failed to adequately address critical market studies, ignored state laws requiring reductions in natural gas usage, relied on unsubstantiated claims, and ignored perverse financial incentives while relying on little more than precedent agreements,” Megan Gibson, chief counsel for the Niskanen Center, which represented several environmental groups and a landowner in the case.
In Texas, the court ordered FERC to redo its environmental assessments of the Rio Grande LNG and Texas LNG liquefied natural gas projects, and called for a new review of a pipeline that would connect to Rio Grande LNG, the Houston Chronicle reports.
“We appreciate the significant disruption (the decision) may cause the projects. But that does not outweigh the seriousness of the commission’s procedural defects,” a panel of three appeals court judges ruled, just a month after a similar ruling on the Commonwealth LNG project near Cameron, Louisiana.
“Today marks a win for environmental justice in South Texas—and for people across the country pushing FERC to consider environmental justice impacts,” said U.S. Sierra Club attorney Nathan Matthews. “The days of FERC acting as a rubber stamp could soon be over.”
