The permitting reform conversation is heating up.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob talks to Senator Martin Heinrich about whether Republicans and Democrats will reach a permitting reform deal this year. They chat about what Democrats would need to see in such a deal, how it could help transmission projects, and why such a deal will ultimately need to constrain President Trump in some way.
They also discuss the future of Democratic energy and climate policy — what Heinrich learned from the Biden administration, what the Inflation Reduction Act got right (and wrong), and why data centers are becoming a new kind of energy villain.
Heinrich is the senior senator from New Mexico (and a well-known transmission policy nerd). He’s also a trained mechanical engineer and the son of a utility lineman. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University. Jesse is off this week.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: There’s one bill we reported on yesterday at Heatmap called the FREEDOM Act. It just came out of the House. It has a bipartisan group behind it, including [Republican] Mike Lawler from New York and [Democrat] Adam Gray in California. It tries to prevent federal agencies from terminating work on a fully permitted project or affecting ongoing construction on a fully permitted project. And it would establish this fund that a company that has seen its permits get yanked could pull from in the Treasury Department, up to $5 million.
Does this bill meet your concerns? Have you looked at it? Is this the kind of text that you would need to see to say, okay, we could put a deal together?
Senator Martin Heinrich: We’re very intrigued in digging into that legislation right now, and I do think that anything we can do to create more certainty in the market — and that’s true for both renewables and for traditional energy. Because the truth is, we can’t have a system where, when one party controls the White House, they attack this set of energy, and then when it changes hands, that group attacks this other set of energy. We just need to set policy and then have predictable flows of capital into the market. And so I think this is a positive step forward. And we should look at all the things the House does and evaluate them on their merits.
I will say that if the figure is $5 billion for this fund, you could exhaust that on one wind project. And thank goodness the court stepped in as quickly as they did because those offshore wind projects were on the scale of tens of billions of dollars. And effectively, if you’re going shut those off, that’s a takings, in my view. That’s like actually stealing someone’s capital, stealing someone’s money.
And we can’t — that’s third world stuff. We can’t have that in the United States of America. But I give credit to the House for coming forward with this kind of thing because we do need to constrain it.
You can find the full transcript of this episode here.
Mentioned:
SunZia: The Untold Saga of America's Biggest Power Line, by Robinson Meyer
The FREEDOM Act: New Bipartisan House Bill Would Keep President From Yanking Permits
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by ...
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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
