Red Tape Is Short-Circuiting Needed Energy Projects

America used to be able to build things quickly. In 1942 the United States built 1700 miles of military highway connecting Fairbanks, Alaska to British Columbia in under a year. These days it takes an average of ten years to build a single electric transmission line. 

The sluggardly pace at which infrastructure is built these days poses a looming threat to America’s continued dominance in the world economy. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Most of the time involved in modern infrastructure projects is taken up not with actual construction but with planning and permitting. Any significant infrastructure project is at risk of getting caught up in endless environmental reviews, falling prey to the arbitrary decisions of permitting bodies, or otherwise being delayed until the project becomes unviable. 

This has real world consequences for consumers. In 2022 Americans paid $20.8 billion more for electricity due to “transmission congestion.” This means that the inability to deliver power to where it is needed drives up prices. A lack of pipeline capacity for natural gas in the Northeast has also forced a turn to higher-cost generation such as oil-fired power plants. 

This should come as no surprise. For some years now, there has been growing opposition to a wide variety of energy infrastructure projects. At the state and local levels in particular, this has caused serious impediments to meeting the nation’s energy infrastructure needs.

Wind and solar, especially, have faced increasing opposition at the local level, with the number of restrictive ordinances proliferating at an increasing rate. During the early 2000s, few counties were passing anti-wind ordinances. In the year 2021 alone, over 350 new local wind ordinances were passed. Wind ordinances have also been getting more restrictive. The average setback distance for wind turbines rose from 100 to 200 meters twenty years ago to 500 to 1000 meters now.  

Permitting problems have also beset natural gas pipelines, at least in certain parts of the country. While gas pipeline capacity has increased at a healthy rate in the nation as a whole, certain states–such as California and New York–have seen little to no growth for a decade. A similar story can be told when it comes to electric transmission, where an increasingly onerous approval process has helped lead to a 50% decline in investment in new regional transmission. This is not only bad for electric consumers but can increase the risk of blackouts or other reliability problems. 

On a local level, infrastructure projects have long provoked a degree of opposition due to factors like noise or traffic. But energy infrastructure is increasingly facing challenges due to the politicization of different energy sources. 

Many on the left dislike fossil fuels because of pollution and the role greenhouse gas emissions play in climate change. Similarly, they have long been skeptical of nuclear power as well. On the right, opposition to renewable energy has been growing, based on rationales that range from the reasonable to the absurd. Even new energy technologies that don’t have a popular political coloring, such as geothermal, can get caught up in the fray when the companies involved in their production also deal in other politically hated forms of energy. 

As a result, almost any proposed new energy infrastructure project starts with a constituency that is opposed to it, regardless of the specifics. That, along with the natural tendency of bureaucracy to grow, has made it harder and harder for America to build projects the way it used to. 

There are things states can do to reduce the time it takes to complete needed energy projects. States should tighten up the rules for who has standing to challenge a project to ensure that only affected individuals, rather than those with an ideological ax to grind, have the right to object. And states should consider creating an appeals process for when local governments deny permits for arbitrary and baseless reasons. But more than anything what’s needed is a change of mindset. 

Americans need to recognize that while we might have different views on the best source of energy, we all need energy, and blocking energy development is bad for everyone.