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Want to build a subway or a power line to green energy? Get ready to pay and wait. Freeway blown up? It’s fixed already.
The partial Second Avenue subway line in New York City was, at the time of its completion in 2017, the most expensive piece of subway ever built in the world, at $2.5 billion per mile — or more than the Grand Coulee Dam, adjusted for inflation. Not coincidentally, it also took an entire decade to finish. The next phase of the same line might cost even more: estimated at $6.4 billion, which is highly likely to increase, by a lot, once construction actually gets going.
Compare that stupendous waste of money and time to the I-95 overpass in Philadelphia that was damaged by a gasoline tanker truck that caught fire underneath. In less than two weeks, a temporary fix reopening half the lanes was in place, and it’s expected that the rest of the repair will be completed ahead of schedule.
Now, it’s a lot easier to fix a busted highway overpass than dig a subway (though I should note a few of the tunnels were already dug back in the 1970s). But it’s still the case that the Second Avenue subway construction was roughly an order of magnitude slower and more expensive than what peer nations like Spain can manage for similar work, while the I-95 repair is more in line with international standards.
It reflects the fact there are plenty of trained engineers in this country who really can design projects quickly when asked, along with plenty of skilled construction workers who can work quickly if conditions are right. All it takes is sheer political panic about inconvenienced suburbanites.
Only that kind of thinking can break through the strangling kudzu of bureaucracy and lawsuits that makes it nearly impossible to build anything in this country.
For instance, this type of panicked efficiency doesn’t apply to new roads. The new interstate 69 has been under construction for many years, and has seen the same kind of delays and skyrocketing cost overruns as in the New York City subway system. It’s only when existing roads get blown up, thus threatening the driving access for existing suburbanites, that the government kicks into gear.
It also doesn’t apply to inner city road repairs, particularly when those repairs might include a loss of driving lanes or parking. In Philadelphia, a proposal to resurface dangerous Washington Avenue, while cutting the number of lanes from five to three or four, was tied up in community meetings and outreach for nearly 10 years, only for the local city council member to abruptly veto the entire redesign at the last minute and return to five lanes.
Delays and attendant cost overruns are also seen with California’s epically mismanaged high-speed rail system, now ten years behind schedule and substantially over budget despite the length of the project being cut by about two-thirds.
Long-distance electricity transmission lines might be worst of all. As Josh Saul, Cailley LaPara and Jennifer A Dlouhy report at Bloomberg, it takes a bare minimum of 10 years for a new line to make it through the gauntlet of regulatory approval from the Department of Energy and Federal Energy Regulatory Agency, as well as state authorities. One line from New Mexico to Las Vegas took 17 years to get final approval.
This is a disaster for America’s climate goals. We need to put a lot more renewable energy on the electric grid, and we need to be able to transmit that energy over longer distances to account for renewable variability between regions. If it takes nearly two decades to simply start constructing new long-distance transmission, we’re not going to make it.
There are many reasons why America has this problem, but a central key one is the growth of judicial power — and liberals are partly to blame. As Paul Erlich explains in his book Public Citizens, in the 1970s a new movement of liberal legal activists led by Ralph Nader, motivated by the Vietnam War and the numerous environmental disasters caused by federal government projects like dams and highways, mounted an activist campaign to force the government to undertake legal reviews before building things, make it easier for people to sue the government, and so on.
Their reasons for doing this were understandable at the time. But the overall result was calamitous, playing directly into the neoliberal turn under Presidents Reagan and Clinton. Nader and his allies made it dramatically more difficult for the federal government to do anything, especially build infrastructure, and conversely dramatically easier for any interested party to gum up the process of government with lawsuits. After Nader’s initial successes, the conservative movement seized on his legal tactics themselves — and with much greater success given how the very nature of the court system biases it towards rich elites who can afford to hire the most well-connected law firms, or stuff luxurious gifts into the pockets of Supreme Court justices.
Another reason is the American fetish for community input. On the face of it, it’s not clear why holding a meeting where random people can show up and talk represents “the community” instead of a small and highly unrepresentative group of retired busybodies, cranks, and, not uncommonly, paid sockpuppets for some vested interest. In any case, even if we grant the value of community meetings, they are often cynically abused — in the Philadelphia story above, every single meeting and every survey found a large majority in favor of cutting down the number lanes. They were just held over and over to buy time while elites maneuvered behind closed doors to get what they wanted.
A third reason is the American addiction to consultants and contractors. During the neoliberal turn, it became axiomatic to assume that the private sector could do absolutely everything better and cheaper than government. Just fire most of the state employees, it was thought, replace them with private firms, and everything will be great. This created stupendous corruption, as tick-like companies ballooned enormously on government contracts without the former expert oversight. And the resulting cost bloat made it harder to build, as 10 projects’ worth of money disappeared into the gullet of one project’s contractors.
With all these barriers to government action, only the incredible political dominance of suburban commuters can break through them. Instead of 10 years of meetings, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro immediately declared a state of emergency. Workers began demolishing the wrecked bridge on the same day it collapsed. Police escorted deliveries of asphalt and other construction material. When rain threatened to slow down the scheduled reopening, the state dragooned a NASCAR track drying machine from Pocono Raceway, blasting the road surface with air at jet engine velocity so it could be dry enough to paint on the same day it was paved.
This type of inventive, dynamic agility is all but unimaginable in any other American governance context. It reflects the political importance of suburban voters, particularly in swing states like Pennsylvania, and perhaps more to the point, the hegemonic assumption that suburban commuter interests are basically the entire point of government. When they are threatened, ordinarily sluggish and timid politicians spring into action, trampling over precedent as necessary, and digging into every possible corner for available resources.
It might take a decade to build three subway stops, or two decades to build a moderately long transmission line. But whenever a critical freeway overpass goes down, all levels of government will spring into action.
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The Loan Programs Office is good for more than just nuclear funding.
That China has a whip hand over the rare earths mining and refining industry is one of the few things Washington can agree on.
That’s why Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, found it “astounding”when he read in the Washington Post this week that the White House was trying to figure out on the fly what to do about China restricting exports of rare earth metals in response to President Trump’s massive tariffs on the country’s imports.
Rare earth metals have a wide variety of applications, including for magnets in medical technology, defense, and energy productssuch as wind turbines and electric motors.
Jacquez told me there has been “years of work, including by the first Trump administration, that has pointed to this exact case as the worst-case scenario that could happen in an escalation with China.” It stands to reason, then, that experienced policymakers in the Trump administration might have been mindful of forestalling this when developing their tariff plan. But apparently not.
“The lines of attack here are numerous,” Jacquez said. “The fact that the National Economic Council and others are apparently just thinking about this for the first time is pretty shocking.”
And that’s not the only thing the Trump administration is doing that could hamper American access to rare earths and critical minerals.
Though China still effectively controls the global pipeline for most critical minerals (a broader category that includes rare earths as well as more commonly known metals and minerals such as lithium and cobalt), the U.S. has been at work for at least the past five years developing its own domestic supply chain. Much of that work has fallen to the Department of Energy, whose Loan Programs Office has funded mining and processing facilities, and whose Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains hasfunded and overseen demonstration projects for rare earths and critical minerals mining and refining.
The LPO is in line for dramatic cuts, as Heatmap has reported. So, too, are other departments working on rare earths, including the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. In its zeal to slash the federal government, the Trump administration may have to start from scratch in its efforts to build up a rare earths supply chain.
The Department of Energy did not reply to a request for comment.
This vulnerability to China has been well known in Washington for years, including by the first Trump administration.
“Our dependence on one country, the People's Republic of China (China), for multiple critical minerals is particularly concerning,” then-President Trump said in a 2020 executive order declaring a “national emergency” to deal with “our Nation's undue reliance on critical minerals.” At around the same time, the Loan Programs Office issued guidance “stating a preference for projects related to critical mineral” for applicants for the office’s funding, noting that “80 percent of its rare earth elements directly from China.” Using the Defense Production Act, the Trump administration also issued a grant to the company operating America's sole rare earth mine, MP Materials, to help fund a processing facility at the site of its California mine.
The Biden administration’s work on rare earths and critical minerals was almost entirely consistent with its predecessor’s, just at a greater scale and more focused on energy. About a month after taking office, President Bidenissued an executive order calling for, among other things, a Defense Department report “identifying risks in the supply chain for critical minerals and other identified strategic materials, including rare earth elements.”
Then as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the Biden administration increased funding for LPO, which supported a number of critical minerals projects. It also funneled more money into MP Materials — including a $35 million contract from the Department of Defense in 2022 for the California project. In 2024, it awarded the company a competitive tax credit worth $58.5 million to help finance construction of its neodymium-iron-boron magnet factory in Texas. That facilitybegan commercial operation earlier this year.
The finished magnets will be bought by General Motors for its electric vehicles. But even operating at full capacity, it won’t be able to do much to replace China’s production. The MP Metals facility is projected to produce 1,000 tons of the magnets per year.China produced 138,000 tons of NdFeB magnets in 2018.
The Trump administration is not averse to direct financial support for mining and minerals projects, but they seem to want to do it a different way. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has proposed using a sovereign wealth fund to invest in critical mineral mines. There is one big problem with that plan, however: the U.S. doesn’t have one (for the moment, at least).
“LPO can invest in mining projects now,” Jacquez told me. “Cutting 60% of their staff and the experts who work on this is not going to give certainty to the business community if they’re looking to invest in a mine that needs some government backstop.”
And while the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act remains very much in doubt, the subsidies it provided for electric vehicles, solar, and wind, along with domestic content requirements have been a major source of demand for critical minerals mining and refining projects in the United States.
“It’s not something we’re going to solve overnight,” Jacquez said. “But in the midst of a maximalist trade with China, it is something we will have to deal with on an overnight basis, unless and until there’s some kind of de-escalation or agreement.”
A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.