Key renewables official looks forward to permitting overhaul
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A top renewables industry official is looking ahead to overhauling permitting and having wind and solar meet fast-rising demand, even as the House is weighing the Senate bill that would ax incentives.
Why it matters: Absent a dramatic plot twist on Capitol Hill, the industry faces a much tougher future, with the GOP yanking unprecedented Biden-era support.
- There's no sugarcoating it: analysts now see much slower renewables growth.
- The body blow could have been even worse. But GOP moderates forced the removal of new taxes on wind and solar projects and softened some deadlines.
The intrigue: With the "polarizing" reconciliation fight in the rearview, American Clean Power Association CEO Jason Grumet hopes for a revival of permitting legislation that made progress last year. (ACP's criticism of the reconciliation bill is here.)
- He told me he sees an opening for the wider energy industry to get back to "advocating for shared interests," noting a "shared frustration we have with the inability to modernize the country."
- "The administration has expressed significant interest in permitting reform. It's going to require the good old-fashioned, 60-vote, bipartisan legislative process," Grumet said.
Friction point: The budget bill pares back tax credits just as U.S. power demand is rising quickly after roughly 15 static years.
- That means renewables will remain needed resources in a country that needs more electricity — and fast, he said.
The big picture: "We're not competing with natural gas because every single electron is needed. And we're certainly not competing with future technologies like geothermal or advanced nuclear," Grumet said of renewables.
- "The incredible economic demand and the fact that electricity is not a nice-to-have, but it's a must-have commodity, gives us confidence that we're going to continue to see clean power be the fastest to market, and in many parts of the country, the lowest-cost resource."
Threat level: The increased U.S. demand — fueled in no small part by AI — has changed the landscape, he said.
- "When we had no real growth in demand, the country could tolerate bad federal policy, because, you know, you could screw up this side of the economy, you could screw up that side of the economy, but there was enough energy going around to kind of cover the gaps," Grumet said.
- "Going forward, we do not have that luxury. Skyrocketing demand that strains reliability and increases prices focuses the mind."
- That creates an opportunity to "build upon the closure of this chapter" and begin building more durable policy.
Between the lines: I asked Grumet about a theme running through the budget fight: how IRA red state investments and jobs didn't deter major rollbacks.
- "It's true that the intense polarization actually overwhelmed the rational self-interests of the majority of the Republican members of the Senate," he said.
- But Grumet sees shared interests exerting more sway going forward — he was quick to note that senators including John Curtis and Lisa Murkowski helped strip some of the harshest provisions even as they backed the broader bill.
The bottom line: "That coalition of the pragmatic has actually just started to reassert itself," he said, "and we're going to, certainly with the permitting reform debate and others, try to now grow that ballast in the system."
