It shouldn’t take 25 years to build a power line
Conn Carroll
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A baby born the same year that the Arizona Public Service company began working on a 732-mile, 3,000-megawatt line connecting a wind farm near Rawlins, Wyoming, with the power grid of Las Vegas, Nevada, would be old enough to vote today.
Construction on the project still has not yet begun, but if there are no further delays, the project should be completed in just five years — almost 25 years after it was started.
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The project was not held up due to supply disruptions or engineering problems. Blame for the delay falls entirely on our federal government’s permitting process.
The Bureau of Land Management alone took 15 years to approve the project, including a six-year environmental impact statement mandated by the National Environmental Policy Act, a favorite tool used by environmental activists to shut down infrastructure projects. Similar approvals were also needed by the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Energy.
Obtaining approval from four state governments (Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada) also made the process difficult, although the federal government was the biggest barrier.
One would think that the Democratic Party would be on board with reforming NEPA so that it was easier to build the energy infrastructure this country desperately needs. As Reason’s Eric Boehm points out, “a recent Princeton study found that 80% of the potential emissions reductions from green energy projects funded by the Inflation Reduction Act would be lost without an expansion of transmission lines.”
Unfortunately, Democrats don’t seem to care that almost all the investments they made in the Inflation Reduction Act will be for naught if the federal permitting process isn’t reformed. When House Republicans passed an energy bill reforming the federal permitting process last month, only four House Democrats out of 213 voted for it.
California has recently resorted to exempting specific projects from its draconian state environmental review act instead of actually reforming a regime that is making the state a prohibitively expensive place to live.
Unlike California, the U.S. is not under the complete control of the Democratic Party. So it still has a chance to reform our permitting laws and make America a country that builds things again.