Permitting key to carbon reduction

Permitting reform is crucial to ensure the clean energy transition happens fast enough to get projects up and running and ward off the extreme weather, fire, and smoke events that affect all of us in Montana. 

We need to build transmission lines, improve early community involvement, and quickly build and deploy new clean energy projects. 

Big energy projects need written approval from local, state and/or federal agencies to begin construction. But it takes about five years on average for these agencies to complete environmental assessments and impact statements. Electrical, safety, construction, and building permits are also required.

Streamlining the project permitting process while protecting the lives and health of people living near them — as well as the birds, bats, wildlife, federally endangered or threatened species, aquatic species, and ecosystems — is required.

Unless we quickly build the necessary infrastructure, we’ll only achieve about 20% of the potential carbon pollution reductions from existing climate policy. It takes 10 years on average to build new long distance transmission lines required for these projects. Most new infrastructure proposed in the U.S. is now for clean energy, so making permitting easier will benefit these projects.

Building wind and solar farms with battery storage will bring economic and health benefits and jobs.

Clean energy will help improve our air quality. Wildfire smoke is a particularly dangerous form of air pollution that damages human health. As the fourth leading risk factor for early death, it’s responsible for more than 6 million premature deaths each year from heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, and respiratory diseases. Children are especially at risk from dirty air including wildfire smoke because they breathe more air relative to their size, are more active than adults, and are still growing and developing.

Permitting reform will help keep the supply chain in the U.S. Right now, over 80% of supply chains for materials (such as critical minerals like copper, lithium and cobalt) aren’t all controlled by the U.S. or are within the U.S. Keeping the supply chain at home means lower costs and more jobs, and lets us follow the highest environmental standards. 

Recently, at a hearing before the Energy, Climate, and Grid Security Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives, representatives from all seven of the U.S.’s grid operators said power grids will need to adapt to rapid electrification.

The Fiscal Responsibility Act, passed in May 2023, is an example of legislation that will help streamline clean energy permitting because it made the NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) permitting process more efficient.

But this is just the start. We need bipartisan action to pass a standalone legislative package. Fortunately, momentum is building across the aisle in Congress.

The BIG WIRES Act (Building Integrated Grids with Interregional Energy Supply) was recently introduced in Congress. It will help ensure that the U.S. has a resilient grid that can provide abundant, affordable, and reliable clean electricity. It would require utilities to allow more power to flow between regions of the country, helping protect against major, long‑term outages due to extreme weather events. Additional transmission would lower energy costs for Americans overall — areas producing cheap energy can sell it to regions where it’s more expensive, and regions can connect new, low-cost resources to the grid.

We call on Senators Steve Daines and Jon Tester and Representatives Matt Rosendale and Ryan Zinke to support the BIG WIRES Act.

You can make a quick phone call to urge them to support BIG WIRES and enact legislation that will help boost transmission projects, improve early community involvement, and quickly build and deploy new clean energy projects. Go to cclusa.org/action and follow the prompts!

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Mary Mulcaire-Jones, Dr. Sandra Welgreen and Alexandra Amonette are volunteers with Citizens’ Climate Lobby