DOE moves to streamline transmission permitting

Today, the Biden administration is unveiling two final rules to reform the federal permitting process — and taking aim at the country’s intractable transmission backlog, even though it has limited tools to do so without Congress.

• The top line: The new Coordinated Interagency Authorizations and Permits program, or CITAP, will streamline coordination across agencies, including by singling out the Department of Energy as the main point of contact between developers and the federal government. The program also places a two-year time limit for agencies issuing authorizations and permits, and will require developers to preemptively develop a public participation plan. Meanwhile, a second final rule will streamline environmental reviews for projects that use existing transmission rights of way, and for solar and energy storage projects on brownfields sites.
• The market grounding: In a report published last October, the International Energy Agency estimated that achieving global climate goals would require adding or replacing 80 million kilometers of power lines by 2040, essentially doubling the size of the current grid. In the U.S., however, transmission capacity has increased by just 3% in the last decade. Today, there is an estimated 2,600 GW of generation and storage capacity in the interconnection queue, more than twice the country’s total installed capacity.

The Biden administration has set a goal of upgrading 100,000 miles of transmission lines in the next five years, a task Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said they are “approaching from the local, regional, and national level.”

Currently, it takes an average of four years to permit a transmission project, though “in extreme cases it can take over a decade,” Granholm said. Speaking last week at a summit, Pedro Pizarro, president and CEO of Edison International, reported even more dire delays: of the 10-12 years most transmission projects take to get built, he explained, most of that timeline is devoted to siting and permitting. 

The two newly final rules from DOE aim to combat these delays via streamlining federal permitting.

At present, Granholm said, “developers routinely have to navigate several independent permitting processes throughout the federal government,” so making DOE the single coordinator between agencies is designed to lessen the time and energy demanded by that process. 

The proposal to funnel multiple agency permitting processes through DOE is an old one, stretching at least back to the early-aughts. In the wake of the Western energy crisis in 2000 and 2001, states and utilities said the biggest barrier to building transmission was interagency coordination, said Rob Gramlich, founder and president of Grid Strategies, who was working for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission chairman at the time. That conversation yielded the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which authorized DOE to take the lead.

However, Gramlich said that “the difficulty of getting nine agencies to agree on anything” meant that it took decades to actually commit to coordination. “DOE couldn't very well force all these other agencies to go along with its assertion of leadership,” he added, noting that once the Biden administration managed to get everyone on board with the memorandum of understanding issued in May 2023, “the rest was relatively easy.” 

Meanwhile, by capping the federal permitting process at two years, Granholm said, CITAP will cut the average wait time for permit approvals in half. And by requiring developers to prepare public participation plans in advance, the agency is expecting “a great amount of success in the permitting process and the acceptance of the transmission,” she added.

Permitting reform has long been the administration’s white whale, especially given that some important elements — the laws governing environmental reviews, for instance — are the purview of Congress. Just last week, in fact, DOE Undersecretary for Infrastructure David Crane said that permitting reform should be the legislature’s top priority to facilitate the energy transition. And Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) said last month that it is the Senate energy committee’s top issue, and “will get done.” 

However, Gramlich said passing a law like one Manchin proposed last year — which would, among other things, allow developers of interstate electric transmission lines to apply to FERC for “national interest designation” to even further speed approvals — in the near future is “very ambitious” but “still doable at this point.” Manchin, who said he will not seek reelection, will leave office in January 2025. 

Nevertheless, the reforms announced today represent the most dramatic action that the Biden administration has the power to take without Congress yet onboard. 

In addition to speeding up the permitting process for new transmission lines, DOE is also looking to fast-track upgrades to existing lines by creating a categorical exclusion under the National Environmental Policy Act for projects that use existing rights of way, such as reconductoring, and for brownfield renewables projects.

The rules, DOE officials confirmed, will not affect state permitting authority.

Alongside the permitting regulation updates on the federal level, DOE announced up to $331 million in funding for a new, 285-mile transmission line to bring wind power from Idaho to southern Nevada and California. Funding for that 2,000-megawatt build will come from the infrastructure law, which created the $2.6 billion Transmission Facilitation Program. 

That line, Granholm said, “will increase grid resiliency, especially during wildfires, and create over 300 high-quality and union construction jobs.”

(Meanwhile, federal investments in local-level upgrades are largely coming through DOE’s Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships program, through which it doled out $3.46 billion to 58 projects in October. Applications for the second, $3.9 billion round of funding closed just last week.)

The DOE's rules were released in tandem with the Environmental Protection Agency's long-awaited set of final rules to mitigate pollution from fossil fuel-fired power plants. Now, though, the federal mandate to cut carbon dioxide emissions from power plants will have to weather the political and legal challenges that are sure to come.

Editor's note: This story was updated on April 26 to add comments from Rob Gramlich, both on the history of interagency coordination on transmission permitting, and on legislative approaches to permitting reform.