The United States has always been a leader in energy development.
Before we were even a country, North America’s vast timber reserves provided masts for sailing ships, logs for housing, and fuel for heating and manufacturing. Later, our mountains of coal (which are still nowhere near exhausted) and oceans of petroleum powered an industrial revolution that drove economic growth throughout the expanding U.S.
After World War II, the greatest generation built the greatest power grid in history, which drove prosperity by delivering electricity to factories, offices, and homes. We are still adding clean energy capacity while other nations are going in the wrong direction. For example: Plant Vogtle units 3 and 4 (the first newly constructed U.S. nuclear reactors in over 30 years) opened this decade in Georgia to deliver carbon-free electricity. Meanwhile, Germany is no longer producing any electricity from nuclear power plants after closing its final three nuclear reactors in 2023.
But our grid is straining to handle the needs of the modern world. And it takes too long to bring new capacity online.
“It takes 61 months to plug in a new power plant, longer than the 45 months it took the United States to win World War II,” Michael Bruce said during C3 Solutions’ second annual American Energy Leadership Summit in late September. “The grid is the original sharing community,” he noted, and it brings affordable power to everyone. But it needs to expand as the economy does.
Bruce is a partner at Emerson Collective and is investing in the companies that are building the future. He predicts it should be possible to expand the power industry by 20 times by 2050. That would go a long way toward meeting the nation’s power needs for the 21st century.
However, that won’t simply happen on its own. First, we as a nation must address the problem that Bruce mentioned: the red tape that extends the timeline of projects by years.
On Sept. 30, the Republican and Democratic leaders of two Senate committees took a sensible step when they introduced the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, which should reduce the regulatory burden that slows projects. “America still has the resources and the talent, but what too often stands in the way is a permitting system that takes too long and costs too much,” said Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), a co-sponsor of the bill. “After years of work in Congress and many months of negotiations, I’m proud we’ve reached a bipartisan agreement to fix this broken process and get America back to building.”
Researchers from the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University have built an interactive tool that highlights how much money the BAAJA could save Americans and shows how much more quickly projects could be finished.
Consider a transmission line project to move electricity from where it is generated to where it is needed. Think of wind turbines in rural Texas and Oklahoma, where there is plenty of wind but not a lot of people. To deliver electricity from turbines there to people in Dallas or Denver requires long power lines, and it takes years to get those plans through the approval process.
The researchers at Columbia write that, under certain conditions, the BAAJA could trim the time required to construct a multistate line of 345 kV or more across federal and private land by 96 months — about eight years. That is assuming everything goes according to plan, but it is an eye-popping stat in any event. It highlights how much time and money can be saved.
PUTIN GOT A DIESEL ORDER. TRUMP GOT THE CALENDAR
“Poverty and energy are linked. If you don’t have energy, you have poverty,” former Sen. Joe Manchin told the American Energy Leadership Summit. “If I could get President Trump to understand one thing, it’s that he could be the energy president.” That day, Manchin was stumping for the BAAJA, which senators introduced later that same week.
Now it’s up to Congress to finish the task. Lawmakers will return after Election Day for a lame duck session, and they could — and should — move ahead with the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act.
Drew Bond is the co-founder and executive chairman of C3 Solutions, and he previously served in technology commercialization roles at the Energy Department and Battelle.