Posted on 04/18/2023 11:50:00 AM PDT by Twotone
In November 2007, the original iPhone was barely four months old, Barack Obama was considered a long shot to win the Democratic nomination for president, and Steph Curry was a sophomore playing basketball for little-known Davidson College.
That same month, the TransWest Express Transmission Project filed its first request with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), seeking permission to build a 732-mile electric transmission line to connect a wind farm in southern Wyoming with a power grid serving the rapidly growing area around Las Vegas.
Last week, the BLM granted permission for the line to be built.
We've blown through 14 versions of iPhones, seen two terms of Obama's presidency (plus another term-and-a-half since he left office), and witnessed Curry score over 21,000 points and win four championships as a professional in the time that it took federal bureaucrats to review and approve an application for a transmission line carrying completely carbon-free, renewable energy across a mostly empty portion of the American West. That's a perfect illustration of the fact that the biggest obstacle to the government's renewable energy goals is often, in fact, the government itself.
Or governments, in this case. While the BLM took longer than anyone else to approve the project, the TransWest Express line suffered from "a 'spider web of jurisdiction' across multiple levels of government," according to Roxane Perruso, the company's COO. Perruso told EnergyWire, a trade publication, that the project required approvals from state, local, and federal entities—and getting those permits required surveys of over 40,000 acres of land for environmental impacts and 60,000 acres of land for cultural impacts.
All that to get permission to build a power line, which is less invasive than other forms of infrastructure can be. In addition to the BLM and state governments of Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada, the project needed approval from the U.S. Forest Service, part of the federal Department of Agriculture, and the Western Area Power Administration, which is part of the federal Department of Energy. (In fairness, EnergyWire notes that the project also got snagged by disputes with some private property owners along the planned route.)
With all the permission slips finally locked down, construction on the line will begin later this year, and the 3,000-megawatt line could be operational by 2028, EnergyWire reports. By then, it'll be 23 years since the project was first proposed in 2005.
To put it simply: It should not take nearly a quarter century to build a supply line connecting renewable electric supply with an area where there is growing demand. But this is a recurring problem in America. A recent Princeton study found that 80 percent of the potential emissions reductions from green energy projects funded by the Inflation Reduction Act would be lost without an expansion of transmission lines.
The time and expense of permitting have slowed or prevented some major renewable energy projects in recent years. "Windmills off Cape Cod, a geothermal facility in Nevada, and what could have been the largest solar farm in America have all been blocked by an endless series of environmental reviews and lawsuits," Alec Stapp, a co-founder of the Institute for Progress, which advocates for policies that accelerate technological and industrial progress, wrote last year in The Atlantic. "U.S. climate spending could exceed more than half a trillion dollars by the end of this decade—but without permitting reform, those investments won't translate into much physical infrastructure."
Some of the most serious permitting obstacles are the environmental impact statements required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which take 4.5 years on average and run over 650 pages. Sure enough, the environmental impact statement associated with the TransWest Express Line took nearly six years—from January 2011 through December 2016—to be completed. In the statement issued this week by the BLM announcing its final approval of the project, the agency notes that the project will include "mitigation requirements" to offset disruptions "to lands with wilderness characteristics" and impacts to the habitat of the greater sage-grouse, a chicken-sized bird that nests on the ground in the western U.S.
But if reducing carbon emissions and developing green energy are going to be major national objectives, the sage-grouse might just have to get out of the way—or at least be less of a concern. Permitting reforms proposed last year by Sen. Joe Manchin (D–W.Va.) would have capped NEPA environmental reviews at no more than two years in length, but that proposal was decried by prominent progressives as a giveaway to money-grubbing capitalists who want to turn a profit by, well, building the very green energy infrastructure that progressives say America desperately needs.
In March, the Republican-led U.S. House passed a huge energy permitting reform bill that was declared "dead on arrival" by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.), though some parts of the bill might be included in an upcoming congressional deal to lift the debt ceiling.
Until there are significant reforms, however, expect future projects like the TransWest Express line to take decades, if not longer. Building big infrastructure projects will never be as simple as turning on a light switch, but there's no reason for the government to force utility companies to operate at the speed of a first-generation iPhone in a 5G world.
That quick, eh?.........................
Wind panels and solar mills? Wham bam thank ya ma’am. Slap ‘em up.
Laws should be written along the lines of, if XYZ is applied for and no response has been made in say, ninety days, then the application is approved.
When low level people don’t want something to happen, they sit on the paperwork and there’s generally nothing that can be done about it from either inside the organization, or outside the organization*. By putting a time limit the lower-level people are forced to do their job. Without a forcing function NOTHING happens in most government organizations. In my experience you sometimes get someone in a position to sit on something and the only power they have in their puny lives is the power to say NO. Like a two-year-old, they’ll use that power until the cows come home.
If a government wants to disapprove something, then they are forced to take action and that action becomes the record of who they are.
* Trueman said of Eisenhower, approximatly, “I feel pity for the man. He’s a general. He’s used to giving an order and having it carried out. But as president he’ll give an order and then find out months later it was never carried out and nobody can tell him why.”
A primary reason electric cars will fail in the USA.
No new mines, no smelters, no power... Everything from China.
Draw a 732 mile line in the West and you’re going to count the jurisdictions in the dozens. 15 years for this approval is probably impressive.
Years ago I worked as a contractor for an Air Force base. They needed a replacement for a refrigeration gas leak detector. Normally, I would contact a few instrumentation distributors and select the best fit from their submissions. A task that would take no more than a couple of work days. But since it was the government that was buying it, I worked on the submission for weeks before it was approved. And it was an off-the-shelf item. The leak detector was probably $3000-$4000, but I had three to four times as much labor in it.
What is renewable about a wind farm.......Putting more in when they wear out? Isn’t the earth still producing oil?
"[...] in the time that it took federal bureaucrats [??? emphasis added] to review and approve an application for a transmission line carrying completely carbon-free, renewable energy across a mostly empty portion of the American West. That's a perfect illustration of the fact that the biggest obstacle to the government's renewable energy goals is often, in fact, the government itself."
The key reference to the government problem above is non-popularly elected government bureaucrats that career lawmakers regularly hide behind to so that lawmakers don't have to take responsibility for the legislative powers that voters trusted them with.
Career state and federal lawmakers wrongly weaken the constitutionally enumerated voting power of ordinary citizens when lawmakers establish constitutionally undefined so-called state and federal regulatory agencies and then let government bureaucrats running the agencies get away with stealing state powers to dictate edicts that citizens must comply with.
The definition of insanity is reelecting your state's Constitution-ignoring career state and federal lawmakers and executives over and over again, expecting different results every time.
The remedy for this scandalous situation begins when patriots primary ALL career state and federal lawmakers in 2024 elections After all, career lawmakers have never made a significant difference in unpopular state and federal government policy imo.
In other words, career lawmakers and executives are the problem.
In fact, regular readers of Free Republic can probably pick better MAGA patriots to run for office than Trump can, Trump arguably not getting the best advice about who to put in office from his institutionally indoctrinated, corrupt political party aligned advisors.
HOW MANY EV’S WILL BE STRANDED BY THEN????
I used to work at a university. The professors learned very early to beat the purchasing department’s rules. They would go to the vendor they wanted & get a detailed quote, & type that into their requisition form. Hey, presto! Only ONE vendor could meet the very specific details. They always got what they wanted.
It is all political. BLM involvement means the line crosses reservations, plural. Each one making their own demands and contracts. Then there is cut bono, who benefits, to consider. Everyone wants their cut and no one wants their property and views negatively impacted.
Some dull functionary happened to notice the prefix "Trans" in the file name, and bingo! Done!
“count the jurisdictions in the dozens”
But we’re only talking about federal approval. It wasn’t 15 jurisdictions holding this up, just one federal department.
The Pentagon and the Empire State build were built in eighteen months.
“That quick, eh?...”
I’ll go out on a limb here and speculate that The Big Guy’s check cleared.
I thought about this & the length of time it takes for approval. What about the source of power going through these lines? Then I see that source ice is renewable energy in another state. What could possibly go wrong here? By the time this line is built, will there actually be any electricity going through those lines or will the source for it even be available anymore? Maybe by that time, the wind generators & solar banks will no longer be producing. Unless there is a conventional power plant able to produce enough electricity to supply the needs here, the whole project seems pointless to me.
Yep, I’ve seen those types of RFQ’s before.
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