A New Tool to Help Solve State Permitting Problems

This week’s conversation is with Cayla Calderwood, U.S. program manager for the clean energy think tank RMI. Calderwood and I chatted about a new web program the group calls the State Permitting Power Tool, which is a giant interactive decision tree matrix of permitting reform solutions. I took a spin and found the tool to be quite intuitive, so I asked if we could talk to preview how our readers could make the most of it. Given how often permitting reform comes up in conversations around project siting, this feels like an especially relevant time to give folks supplies for parsing this wonky topic.

The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.

So for starters, what do you see as the main use case for this tool?

The primary value hopefully is that it’ll help you quickly identify the reforms that’ll be most relevant to the specific challenges you’re facing. When we went through this literature we identified roughly 100 reforms, but only a fraction of those might matter for your specific situation.

If you’re looking to extract useful information from this tool, I would suggest using it precisely as designed – go through the questions, narrow in on a specific permitting challenge, and then navigate the reforms. And the other thing I would recommend is checking out the underlying tables, which show all of the barriers we identified across all of the literature we reviewed. It’ll give you a sense of this full landscape and how we categorized the reforms and the scope of what permitting reform ideas currently exist.

I understand this is probably going to be useful for policy researchers. But what about industry? How could this be used by someone working at an energy development company, for example?

We attempted to understand the different types of challenges the industry was facing. From that, we broke out the field into four buckets. First, there’s situations that are complex and unclear where you’re unsure how to proceed with permitting a project because the landscape is difficult to understand. The next was delayed timelines, where it’s clear what you’re supposed to do but the process takes a very long time. The third bucket we identified was political hurdles and biases, where the process is highly politicized for whatever reason. And then the fourth bucket was financial burdens. Obviously the previous three can have a financial impact on a project but this one we reserved explicitly for when the permits are expensive: fees, costs, and other things financial in nature.

If you are in industry and you want to explore one of the pathways, you can click through and explore what types of reforms might apply to that challenge.

When it comes to acting on these ideas, is this something where the proposals are floating in the ether? Have states pursued them?

This is why I recommended folks click the underlying tables. For every single reform, we didn’t just gather underlying sources discussing them. We also flagged example applications on our radar.

I think there has been some really impressive work done, but we are definitely still seeing a need for additional movement, especially at the state and local level. It is hard to speak too abstractly. Certain states probably made more progress than others.

Is this tool geared explicitly towards solar and wind or is it tech-neutral?

We evaluated policies geared toward permitting reform that authors identified as helping clean energy deployment. But within the literature, we captured everything. Many of the reforms we captured would be tech neutral. We’ll see one reform discussed across multiple primary sources and we would have to come up with our own definition of it, and in that we attempted to be tech neutral unless promoting clean energy was a core component of the reform itself.

Do you think we’ll be having conversations about the same solutions you identified five years from now?

That’s a great question. I am trying to answer that as much as the next person. It’s been a particularly difficult few years to make predictions about the state of the policy world but what I would say is there’s a lot of great ideas in the ecosystem and I am hopeful we’re going to see some interesting progress over the next five years.