If all goes as planned, construction on the second-largest wind power project on the planet will begin in the second half of 2023.
SunZia wind and transportation project Collect with ambition A 3.5 gigawatt wind farm in New Mexico with 500 miles of transmission lines to carry that power to Arizona. It’s a critical mission in the United States, a country in dire need of more renewable energy and an expanded grid.
But the construction road was arduous. The first permits for the project were submitted 14 years ago in 2009, setting an urgent issue. Part of the reason there aren’t more projects like SunZia is the time it takes to get a permit to build green energy infrastructure.
The Biden administration has proposed an impressive goal of decarbonizing the grid by 2035, which would require a fivefold increase in renewables. The government will transfer historic amounts of money to green energy, more than $400 billion By the act of reducing inflation aloneto achieve this goal. However, the glacial pace at which energy projects are moving threatens the goal. Wind and solar farms, geothermal plants and hydroelectric dams take between five and 15 years to obtain a construction permit.
At the heart of the issue is the National Environmental Protection Act, which requires companies to conduct environmental assessments of their energy projects to ensure local environmental preservation. This process is necessary, but some argue that it is bloated.
The average time period for NEPA reviews is four to six years, says Ryan Sood of the Brookings Institution’s Center for Regulation and Markets. SunZia’s 14-year agonies are at their most extreme, but Sud said it’s not unusual for environmental assessments to take 10 years. Then, and only then, can the building begin.
This may be where the real problems begin, says Hunter Armistead, CEO of Pattern Energy, the company that now runs SunZia. NEPA allows local groups to challenge the government’s decision to grant permits, which could delay the construction process further.
“It effectively keeps adding more and more requirements,” Armistead said.
Some of the challenges to clean energy projects are undertaken out of blatant self-interest—for example, objecting to wind turbines that diminish property values by destroying the ocean landscape. In other cases, groups of “concerned locals” have been detected. Supported by the fossil fuel industry. But often those who resist green energy projects are really worried about animals and plants.
On the contrary, there are two different branches of environmental protection. Green revolutionaries want to preserve the planet by mitigating global warming. This requires huge amounts of new, renewable energy, the construction of which is often opposed by people trying to protect wildlife and vulnerable ecosystems.
The Minnesota frontier, known for its wildlife and canoeing, was among the first areas saved under the National Environmental Protection Act.
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environment protection
The status quo was set by President Richard Nixon, an unlikely conservationist. Along with NEPA, his administration has signed legislation that sets air quality standards, regulates pollutants released into the ocean and protects endangered animals.
While these laws can make greenlighting new renewable energy projects difficult, they have been necessary safeguards for the environment.
Lisa Frank, chief of advocacy at Environment America, points to the example of Minnesota Boundary Waters, an invaluable land home to beavers, timber wolves, moose, and more than 240 other animal species. The Forest Service had planned to allow private logging in the early 1970s before an environmental assessment showed that such an operation would destroy the environment. It was an early example of NEPA’s work.
Forty years later, in the year 2022, same process Boundary Waters bailed out of a planned nickel mining operation. It is one of countless ecosystems saved by NEPA and its sister laws.
“Sure, it can sometimes take a long time to build projects, but that alone doesn’t indicate something is wrong with the process,” Frank said. She believes the biggest barriers to building green energy include subsidies to the fossil fuel industry and unwanted utilities’ resistance to seeing the cost of electricity fall.
Pattern Energy’s Armistead agrees that NEPA is critical and says many local objections to energy projects are justified. The issue is how slow government transition often is. It took the Bureau of Land Management six years to issue the first permit for the SunZia project. When a permit is revoked based on community response, it can take months or years for it to be re-granted, even after those concerns are alleviated.
“One of the key issues that we were hoping to gain more clarity on is what needs to be actually done [to obtain a permit]There are set turnaround times and government response times so you don’t end up with a long, drawn-out wait,” Armistead said.
Not even the NEPA rules need to be relaxed, Armistead said. It’s okay to get rejected for a project, but it’s the fruitless waiting period that hurts. “We’ve looked at a lot of our projects and decided either for genre reasons or permitting reasons, this isn’t the right place to develop,” he said. “If you are going to fail, you better fail fast.”
The Biden administration, through the Building a Better America and Lower Inflation Act, has funneled unprecedented amounts of money into green energy.
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Barriers to renewables
Environmental laws established by the Nixon administration responded to the growing environmental sentiment of the 1960s and 1970s. But that was before climate change became an urgent concern. Fifty years later, the environment is at war with itself. On the one hand, there are conservationists, whose main goal is to preserve the local environment. On the other hand, there are activists who are primarily interested in stopping man-made climate change.
“It’s a really tough question,” said Sanjay Patnaik, director of the Center for Regulation and Markets. “In macro, we know we need to process [both] Climate change and biodiversity. In the micro domain, what is the benefit to be gained in a particular place? “
This battle is currently taking place near Martha’s Vineyard, where an offshore wind farm called Vineyard Wind aims to supply electricity to 400,000 Massachusetts homes. It’s an important part of the state’s pledge to get to net zero by 2050, and the federal government’s plan to have 30 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030 (up from 42 megawatts in 2021). The Biden administration gave the green light to the project after the Trump administration previously held it up.
Since then, Vineyard Wind He was sued By a group that claims the turbines will hinder withdrawals from local fisheries, as well as by local citizens who say the project could affect endangered whales. It’s typical of offshore wind resistance, something Patnaik says is an American phenomenon. “In Europe, you don’t see much of that,” he said. As of 2021, Europe had more than 30 times more offshore wind capacity than the United States.
In the United States, many jurisdictions see local opposition by wealthy homeowners and landowners. “If you look at the East Coast, for example, a lot of these properties are owned by really rich people, and they don’t want to impede their vision,” Patnaik said. Wind farms are easy targets to challenge because they take up more space than any other type of energy source — and because they tend to “destroy” an otherwise pristine landscape.
Sud points to an additional difficulty for offshore wind projects: Many ships transporting materials from a state shore to national waters require EPA approval, something he says could take just two years.
Expanding wind power and other renewables is just one part of the equation. Renewable energy is often produced in remote locations and needs to be transported to dense population centers. At the same time, the grid needs more electricity for services that currently run on fossil fuels, such as heating and transportation. In short, we will need more transmission lines.
“You have three networks that are almost disconnected in the US,” Sood explained. “You have a western interconnection, an eastern interconnection, and then Texas. Only very, very small amounts of energy flow between those three. … If you just put one or two transmission lines connecting east and west — or Texas and east, or Texas and west — it’s going to be a bargain.” huge.”
Unfortunately, transmission lines can be more difficult to install than wind turbines. Unlike gas pipelines, which can largely be approved by a federal agency, transmission lines require approval from every jurisdiction they cross. This means not only states, but often counties as well, warrant a lengthy approval process. A 300-mile transmission project seeking to connect Oregon and Idaho remains in regulatory limbo, even though it was proposed in 2007.
In general, wind farms are more difficult to obtain approval than solar farms, and transmission lines are even more difficult.
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build the chart
Allowing reform caught the attention of lawmakers. Last year, West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin proposed Energy Independence and Security Act of 2022a bill that seeks to shrink critical infrastructure construction timelines by three years or less from the current five to 10 years (or more).
It was a polarizing bill for a polarizing cause. Patnaik said some Democrats in Congress voted against it because it weakened environmentalism, while many Republicans rejected it because Manchin, a Democrat, voted for Biden’s inflation-lowering law.
Lisa Frank of Environment America considers herself someone glad to see the bill fail, arguing that weak legislation seeking permit reform could do more harm than good.
“These proposals are written on the assumption that building more projects faster is generally in the public interest and anything that slows things down is bad,” she said. “Most of the projects currently under NEPA review are still fossil fuel projects. Weakening NEPA at least in the near term would do more for fossil fuels than for clean fuels.”
Patnaik and Sood would like the federal government to enact a “proactive licence”. They advocate creating maps that show areas of low environmental sensitivity, as sites can be pre-approved for certain types of energy production.
Pattern Energy’s Armistead hopes megaprojects like SunZia can set the blueprint for others by highlighting what problems are likely to arise, what solutions are possible and how local communities can be won.
“This is really tough stuff, but we need more big, tough stuff,” he said. “If our world is going to decarbonise, it’s going to be hard to do it in small pieces.”
The scheme is still being drawn. In January, New Mexico gave SunZia the go-ahead, with construction hopes to begin in April. But later that month, An Arizona resident filed a lawsuit arguing that the project would endanger the fish, birds and mammals of the San Pedro River.
Despite the delay, Armistead said construction should begin later this year.
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