It’s not easy being green.
Yes, the country is moving steadily forward with clean energy sources to replace coal and natural gas. The Inflation Reduction Act passed last year is making billions of dollars available to green energy producers.
But there are challenges, lots of them, that frequently turn solar and wind projects into years-long bureaucratic slogs. Many of the same regulatory hurdles that have confronted traditional energy are now slowing renewables, and many communities are taking a not-in-my-backyard stance against wind and solar.
As the New York Times reported this week, “Federal state and local regulations, including often Byzantine permitting requirements, threaten to delay construction for years. So do court battles that almost inevitably follow those permitting decisions.”
I know, that sounds exactly like the story of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, only this time the obstacles are for renewables. Polls show people like the idea of renewables, but they don’t want to live next to them.
The Times cited one poll from 2021 that found that “only 24% of Americans were willing to live within a mile of a solar farm; the number dropped to 17% for wind farms.” The Times reports residents from Los Angeles to New Jersey “are suing, passing laws and taking other steps to stop or slow projects, some of which would power the nation’s largest towns and cities with renewables.”
The regulatory process can slow projects for years. “For offshore wind, it can take up to 10 years to secure approval before construction can begin,” according to the paper.
The transition to renewables has created a paradox for environmentalists. As the Times reports, “Some environmentalists say these stringent reviews are crucial for protecting fragile ecosystems or public health — and that such regulations have been useful for blocking fossil fuel projects in the past. Yet others concerned about climate change say the balance has tipped too far toward paralysis.”
The hold-ups are not just on the clean power projects themselves. The biggest wind and solar farms are built where the wind blows and the sun shines the most, but that is not usually where the power is needed. New high-voltage transmission lines need to be built, and that’s another hurdle.
For example, The Southwester Power Group announced plans in 2006 to build a 550-mile transmission line from a huge wind farm in New Mexico to Arizona and California. It has just received its final federal permit … 17 years later.
Meanwhile, the electricity transmission industry continues to warn that the uneven transition away from coal-fired electricity to renewables is threatening reliability. Four grid operators representing service to 154 million customers in 30 states, including West Virginia, warned in a recent report that the proposed EPA rules limiting coal-fired plant operations “could result in material, adverse impacts to the reliability of the power grid.”
Al Gore talked about the inconvenient truth of climate change way back in 2006. Here is another inconvenient truth: Getting to where clean power advocates want to go is a long, hard road full of its own share of inconveniences.
