Want green energy? Then just cut red tape

No one can doubt President Joe Biden’s commitment to clean energy. Unfortunately, his agenda faces a challenge rarely mentioned by climate activists: excessive regulation.
A report from the National Academies of Sciences found that if the US wants to reach net-zero emissions by midcentury, it will need to roughly double the share of electricity it produces from non-carbon sources by 2030. Reaching even that goal — which could well prove insufficient to the challenge — would require building wind and solar installations at a historically unprecedented pace.
As things stand, that’s unlikely. There’s simply too much red tape.
Take the National Environmental Policy Act. Enacted in 1970, NEPA requires federal agencies to conduct environmental reviews for nearly every project that the government touches.
Completing an impact statement under this process now takes four and a half years on average and can cost millions of dollars. Reviews can run for hundreds of pages. Lawsuits, often brought by activist groups, can extend the process interminably. Green projects aren’t immune from this burden: An analysis last year found that of the projects undergoing NEPA review at the Department of Energy, 42% concerned clean energy, transmission or environmental protection, while just 15% were related to
fossil fuels.
Across the renewables industry, such regulation — state and federal — is impeding progress. Wind power advocates complain of “unreasonable and unnecessary costs and long project delays.” Geothermal projects routinely face permitting hassles for seven to 10 years. Relicensing a hydropower plant can cost $50 million and take more than a decade. Solar projects often contend with a maze of permitting and certification requirements. Want to build a nuclear reactor? Compliance costs alone might exceed your profit margin.
A similar story prevails with power transmission. Efficiently moving clean energy between regions is an essential component of the renewable economy; to reach net zero, that capacity needs to roughly triple by 2050. But thanks to an unholy patchwork of rules and regulations nationwide, transmission projects can easily require a decade to get off the ground.
Such holdups are more than a nuisance. They waste tax dollars, raise construction costs, delay capital productivity, impede private investment and all too often discourage ambitious new ideas. Worse, by delaying the switch to cleaner alternatives, they only add to total greenhouse-gas emissions. A government that views climate change as an “existential threat” — in the president’s words — can hardly tolerate such gridlock. Yet earlier this week, the Biden administration was busy adding to the morass of needless rules.
Easy answers to this dilemma are elusive. Simply capping page counts or imposing time limits on environmental reviews, for instance, can actually lengthen the process — a review that’s incomplete or fails to anticipate potential objections is far more likely to draw lawsuits, and hence incur further delays. Congress should think bigger. As a start, it should try to reduce the number of lawsuits brought under NEPA by shortening the statute of limitations for such cases to (say) 120 days, down from two years. Next, it should assert the power of the federal government.

—Bloomberg