Renewable Energy Permitting Challenges & Potential Solutions

Clean energy permitting reform remains stalled in Congress. Developers face delays in grid interconnection, restrictive local siting laws, organized opposition, and project-stalling litigation. Experts recommend streamlining approval processes, adopting permitting-by-rule, engaging communities early, and expanding grid capacity to speed clean energy deployment. Silverline is locked in on helping your clean energy business grow and thrive. We’re engaging with energy permitting policy experts to understand the reasons behind why siting policy is stalled. Can Congress and the states address the development and interconnection hurdles faced by the energy sector.  Here are the problems and potential solutions facing permitting today.

State of Play

Congress failed to enact meaningful and bipartisan energy permitting reform legislation in 2024, and it’s nowhere near certain that it will do so in this period of heightened polarization. Sure, House majority leadership and the business community are eager to move a permitting bill this fall, and there were two committee hearings on the topic in July with more on the way this fall. But, as those of you in clean energy know, there is no clear path forward for permitting at present.

 A new bipartisan bill designed to reform the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and other permitting laws already has drawn opposition from a key House Democrat. And no bipartisan permitting legislation negotiations are underway on the Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over transmission lines, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the U.S. Department of Energy, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

TheTrump Administrationis already reshaping federal permitting to favor oil and gas-centric energy policy, rescindingagency permitting guidance, streamlining data center construction, and reconsidering wind energy permitting on federal lands. (These actions will only impact the sliver of projects siting on federal lands, because most energy developers are working to site projects on private land.) The resulting bottom line is that permitting policy is a state and local issue, as much as a Legislative and Executive one.

 Being a nimble, specialized group of cleantech PR agency veterans enables us to access meeting conversations with policymakers in Washington, DC, to stay abreast of this important element of the energy sector. We also recently tuned in to a webinar by Resources for the Future on Obstacles to Energy Infrastructure. Here are the panelists’ take on today’s top permitting problems and potential solutions.

Barriers to Entry

The panelists identified key renewable energy siting challenges facing  developers  and the nation’s grid operators as they work to ensurie a reliable and resilient electricity supply:

• Slowness to Interconnect: Rich Powell, CEO of the Clean Energy Buyers Association (CEBA), said that Connecting new load to the grid happens far too slowly, according to Rich Powell, CEO of the Clean Energy Buyers Association (CEBA). And it’s hard to speed it up, given bifurcation of regulatory authority for interconnection. Panelist Allison Clements, a former FERC commissioner and current partner at ASG and principal at 804 Advisory, explained that supply is regulated at the Federal level while load is regulated at the State level.  

• Local Siting Restrictions: Local governments are imposing numerous barriers to new renewable projects because developers increasingly go to the same sites to add capacity, according to Dahvi Wilson, founder and president of Siting Clean. That puts a great deal of pressure not only on the local governments (who, as we mentioned, have regulatory authority over load) in those locations but also on transmission lines with limited capacity.

• Anti-Renewable Advocacy: In the wake of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), wind and solar skeptics know that their organizing must shift to states and local governments, according to Robinson Meyer, founding executive editor of Heatmap News. And with OBBBA’s changes to wind and solar tax credit eligibility, opponents only need to delay projects for about one year to make them ineligible for credits, Wilson said.

• Formal Litigation: Lawsuits challenging energy projects can greatly delay or lead to the cancellation of projects.

Handling the Hurdles

To address these and other barriers to siting the new and clean capacity we need on the grid. Here are some of the panelists’ recommendations:

• Permitting Reform: Powell pointed to the Aspen Institute’s 2021 Building Cleaner, Faster report, a consensus document of the energy policy community that recommends changes to project approvals and litigation timelines, as well as state and local conformity. Permitting-by-rule approaches, in which developers affirm to state permitting agencies that they’re in compliance with environmental laws rather than spending significant time and money analyzing and proving their compliance, are also growing in popularity, Powell said.

• Community Engagement: Wilson’s organization, Siting Clean, focuses on interventions to help clean energy projects move forward. They ensure that locally trusted validators share success stories and that project advocates show up at township meetings to provide local lawmakers with accurate project information.

• Increasing Room on the Existing Grid: Requiring utilities to provide secondary service until the necessary network is available could be important, said Clements.

The permitting policy discourse is as lively as its problems are urgent. Silverline is excited to roll out more ways for you to engage with us and with Washington on permitting and siting in the coming weeks.