RTO Insider: Advanced Energy United Presses Call for Streamlined State Permitting

RTO Insider reports on United's August 2024 webinar, Reforming State and Local Policies to Accelerate Clean Energy Deployment, which explored core policy principles decision-makers and stakeholders should consider when reforming state policy frameworks that govern the siting and permitting processes of large-scale renewable and energy storage projects. The article quotes both United's Trish Demeter and Jim Purekal, who led the webinar discussion. 

Aligning thousands of local governments toward development of renewables remains one of the harder nuts to crack in the clean energy transition. 

Advanced Energy United this summer offered core policy considerations to speed up the process and held a webinar Aug. 27 to drill down on how state-level efforts to streamline permitting have been progressing. 

“Local opposition recently was cited in a survey of developers as one key barrier to getting projects done,” said Trish Demeter, an AEU managing director and the moderator of the discussion. “By another estimate, more than 15% of counties in the U.S. have some sort of ban or restrictive ordinance on new renewable energy projects.” 

Discussion centered on Massachusetts and Michigan, which have both declared 100% net-zero and clean energy goals. Both also delegate extensive power over clean energy projects to hundreds of local governments that are not uniformly enthusiastic about hosting sprawling new generation facilities. 

The goal is to streamline the control these local governments can exert over the approval process around a single set of principles rather than an ever-changing assortment of hundreds of rules. 

Jim Purekal, an AEU policy director, summarized the principles the trade group laid out in July as critical to large-scale development: 

• uniform siting criteria and permitting conditions, or reasonable ranges of variation. 
• predictable and consistent permitting environments with clearly defined steps. 
• the absence of explicit, or de facto, moratoria or bans.