Streamlining Permitting
In the August 27 Bloomberg Green Newsletter, Marilen Martin and Akshat Rathi reported that Germany has streamlined its permitting process with the result that in “just over two years the country is now deploying more renewables than any other European peer. ‘We are experiencing a significant increase in renewable electricity generation,’ said Fiete Wulff, a spokesperson for Germany’s Federal Network Agency, which is responsible for regulating electricity and other markets.”
This was done by legislative efforts. For example, they legally designated “clean-energy projects as an ‘overriding public interest’ that serves natural security.” They also mandated that 2% of land will be used for wind turbines. They did cut the environmental assessments, cutting duplicated efforts. Yes, there is always some concern, but hopefully one agency is enough to make rational environmental assessments. It is not as if these projects are unprecedented and the impacts are not will described; it is more a matter of looking at local needs and concerns. In Germany this saves as much as three years on a project.
It isn’t just wind. Solar projects benefit as well. This isn’t just large projects. “Plug-and-go” panels that can be placed on balconies are popular, with almost 10,000 applications in April alone.
In the United States, the Biden-Harris administration has also taken steps in that direction. From the White House release:
“…the Biden-Harris Administration has taken aggressive action to accelerate project permitting and environmental reviews. The Administration has developed and is currently executing a Permitting Action Plan; secured $1 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act to improve permitting; passed important reforms in the 2023 Fiscal Responsibility Act that made commonsense changes to the environmental review process, including setting deadlines for completion of reviews and making documents more readable by limiting their length; and took a number of administrative actions to simplify and accelerate the permitting process.”
There are still challenges and of course we don’t want new problems from cutting back on environmental assessments. But the largest environmental assessment of all looms large: we must phase out fossil fuels, not only for combatting climate change but for the effects on the environment and planetary health of fossil fuel pollution.