Permitting is always a topic of interest to NetZero Insider readers and reporters, and it provided some good stories this week on how federal, state and local officials are wrestling with how to speed it up while ensuring thorough reviews and community engagement.
James Downing tackled the Council on Environmental Quality’s final rule updating reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act, with provisions that set clear deadlines for completing these often complex reviews and allow for more projects to qualify for faster “categorical exclusion” reviews.
New York’s Office of Renewable Energy Siting was established to speed up state-level permitting. But our John Cropley reports that a new audit has found a conflict between the time the office takes to permit a project once its application is complete — less than a year — versus the three years, eight months it can take a project to go from first application to final approval.
The Department of Energy sees a big role for artificial intelligence in streamlining and speeding up permitting by identifying and consolidating the information developers will need across federal, state and local permitting processes, according to K Kaufmann’s rundown of DOE’s two new AI for Energy reports.
We also are tracking the efforts of state public utility regulators to find the right balance for planning and developing local systems that provide increasingly clean, reliable and affordable energy.
The Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities is on a tight deadline to decide whether to increase natural gas rates to ensure a major LNG import terminal in the state stays in operation, New England reporter Jon Lamson writes.
K also listened in on Exelon’s first-quarter earnings call, where CEO Calvin Butler said Commonwealth Edison is laser-focused on winning approval of its revised integrated grid plan after the Illinois Commerce Commission rejected its original plan last year.
Butler also said the company is seeing opportunities ahead with demand growth from data centers, but a Stateline report in our curated content finds that states — including Georgia, South Carolina and Virginia — are now looking at the impact of these kilowatt-hour guzzlers that, according to one study, could double U.S. power demand by 2030.
Microsoft is looking to power its growing fleet of data centers with 10.5 GW of new renewable power via a record-breaking contract with Canadian firm, Brookfield Asset Management, according to Renewable Energy World.
On the financial side, a number of stories this week follow the money ― or lack thereof ― in federal and state policy making, with the November election just six months away.
A coalition of more than 40 clean energy companies, trade associations and nonprofits have called on Congress to include “robust” funding for transmission in the 2025 federal budget, according to an announcement from the American Council on Renewable Energy, which is one of the group’s leaders. The group’s wish list, sent to the House and Senate appropriations committees, includes close to $5.5 billion in additional money spread across different DOE initiatives.
Inside Climate News reports on the potential impact of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ decision to turn down millions of federal dollars from the Inflation Reduction Act to develop and implement a climate action plan, despite the state’s multiple vulnerabilities to climate impacts, from extreme heat and hurricanes to sea level rise.
Finally, Capital & Main drills into oil and gas companies’ political donations ahead of the upcoming election, reporting that so far, the industry’s financial backing for Republicans has been close to seven times more than its support for Democrats: $25 million to $3.6 million.
All that and more, in this week’s Intelligence Report:
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