Interior Must Improve Permitting Process so Development Goes Ahead in the Right Places

As my colleague, Leila Monroe of NRDC’s Oceans Program has blogged, the Interior Department has been very busy recently when it comes to renewable energy – both on and offshore. Earlier this week, Secretary Ken Salazar was blogging about the solar projects and megawatts (MW) his Department had permitted on public lands in the West. This news update and the fact that Secretary Salazar was blogging inspired me to write this post.

The Department and its Bureau of Land Management (BLM) have indeed set records – both in the absolute number of MWs permitted as well as the size of the approved projects. We are moving into a new era of energy production on public lands and indeed throughout the country. This new era brings many changes for folks like me who have worked on public lands issues their whole careers. We no longer have the luxury of picking between the obvious good and unmitigated evil. We are faced with hard choices, and those choices entail trade-offs. Our challenge today is to make the choices that provide the greatest environmental benefit in addressing climate challenge and result in the least possible environmental impact. 

That said, it is clear to us that the permitting process for these renewable projects needs improvement so that we limit development to appropriate areas. The good news is that a consensus is emerging not only that improvements are needed, but what some of those improvements are at least for the short term, i.e., for projects permitted this year. 

Late last year, the California Desert and Renewable Energy Working Group (CDREWG), a unique collaboration of environmental, renewable industry and utility representatives that NRDC was a founding member of, sent the Secretary a suite of recommendations for improving the permitting process in 2011. Earlier this month, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Region 9 also submitted some recommendations. Both sets of recommendations include the following two key points: 

• That the Secretary adopt screening criteria to identify the projects for processing in 2011 that have the greatest technical and financial viability and the fewest environmental conflicts, i.e., projects that  are likely to be permitted and built with a minimum of time and controversy. 
• That the quality and consistency of environmental review documents be improved.

The CDREWG also recommended that the Secretary: 

• Ensure early and ongoing input from stakeholders, including input into screening of 2011 projects.
• Reduce speculative applications.
• Improve coordination within and between state and federal agencies.

The adoption of these recommendations will help improve the permitting of individual projects. But for the longer term, the Interior Department and BLM must stop trying to generate renewable energy on a project by project basis. This is the approach they have taken up until now and is the same approach as that taken by the BLM’s oil and gas program – an approach that has caused extensive environmental damage, extensive controversy and extensive litigation in the Intermountain West. Rather than allowing renewable energy companies to identify the sites for their projects, we need the BLM to designate appropriate areas – renewable energy development zones – and then restrict development to those zones. 

This approach will have multiple benefits: it will allow the agency to focus its resources on the low conflict places, provide certainty to developers and, last but not least, minimize the impacts of development. Directing development to zones will limit the proliferation of projects across the landscape, minimize the development footprint and reduce the need for new transmission and infrastructure. 

This very approach was included as an option in the draft programmatic solar environmental impact statement that the Interior Department and BLM released in December 2010. The bad news is that it wasn’t their preferred option – which is to open 22 million acres, including the proposed zones, to potential solar development. During the comment period which ends March 17th, NRDC and our partners will be working extremely hard to convince the Interior Department that the “zone only option” is the key to doing solar development right.