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Local governments once fought the adoption of wireless communications technology. Then Congress did something.
The landmark Inflation Reduction Act invested some $370 billion toward transitioning the United States to a clean energy economy. Yet turning that spending into actual new energy facilities – getting turbines in the air, and solar arrays on the ground – is another matter.
How many facilities materialize, and how quickly, will hinge on countless permitting processes carried out in cities and towns around the country. And at the hyper-local level, renewable energy developers often meet resistance and drawn-out processes.
If left unchecked, NIMBYism could effectively veto much of the IRA, one project at a time. But fortunately, Congress has a ready-made model to defend their investment: a Clinton-era law that helped bring cellphones to more Americans by partially insulating wireless infrastructure from local resistance. We can do the same thing to ensure that the renewable energy transition is not stonewalled on the ground.
Back in the 1990s, NIMBY opposition was hampering the adoption of then-novel wireless communications technology. Local zoning boards frequently enacted moratoria on new wireless towers, and opponents spread unsubstantiated myths about health risks and complained that the towers were eyesores. This often prevented (or at least delayed) the construction of new towers, which slowed the deployment of cellphone technology. For example, in Georgia, a county commissioner said, “By and large, the towers are ugly, and people don’t want them in their backyards. If folks would stay off their cell phones there would be no need for the towers.” Medina, Washington was one of many cities that enacted multiple moratoria on new cell tower citing; a leading opponent of the cell towers there said, “People are willing to not use their cell phones for three blocks on their way to the grocery store, if that means not having the towers here.”
Rather than let NIMBYism hold back progress, Congress took action. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 passed with overwhelming bipartisan support to “encourage the rapid deployment of new telecommunications technology.” The TCA struck a balance on local permitting and siting: it preserved “the traditional authority of state and local governments to regulate the location, construction, and modification” of wireless towers, but crafted limits on that authority. Under the TCA, local governments can no longer impose regulations tantamount to bans on cell towers. They must issue decisions on proposed towers within a reasonable time, and must support those decisions with “substantial evidence” – in writing. And they cannot turn away projects on the basis of debunked health fears. If a town violates these rules, telecom companies can get an expedited hearing in court.
Congress aimed to let local communities continue to have some say over cell tower siting, but added guardrails to ensure that they couldn’t undermine national imperatives. As Republican Congressman Thomas Bliley, chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, put it at the time: “Nothing is in this bill that prevents a locality … from determining where a cellular pole should be located, but we do want to make sure that this technology is available across the country, that we do not allow a community to say we are not going to have any cellular pole in our locality.”
The TCA paved the way for greater adoption of modern telecommunications technology. Before the law, there were roughly 20,000 wireless towers in the United States and 30 million cellphone users. Six years later, there were nearly 130,000 towers and 130 million users. The TCA continues to reap dividends, such as by neutralizing some of the resistance to the 5G rollout. In 2018, the Federal Communications Commission adopted rules under the TCA to limit the power of localities to obstruct new 5G facilities, constraining the power of cities and towns to block the new sites.
Just as the TCA’s siting rules have helped support the expansion of cellphone networks in the United States, a similar policy could support the expansion of renewable energy. Local permitting has increasingly become a bottleneck for our clean-energy transition. As the Idaho Capital Sun recently observed: “Across the country — from suburban Virginia, rural Michigan, southern Tennessee and the sugar cane fields of Louisiana to the coasts of Maine and New Jersey and the deserts of Nevada — new renewable energy development has drawn heated opposition that has birthed, in many cases, bans, moratoriums and other restrictions[,]” with new wind and solar developments “igniting fierce battles over property rights, loss of farmland, climate change, aesthetics, the merits of renewable power and a host of other concerns.”
A report last year from Columbia University's Sabin Center on Climate Change Law identified 121 local policies restricting renewables development across 31 states, and more than 200 renewables projects challenged across the country – and those numbers are undercounts, according to the Center’s Matthew Eisenson. Common local tactics, the report found, “include moratoria on wind or solar energy development; outright bans on wind or solar energy development; regulations that are so restrictive that they can act as de facto bans on wind or solar energy development; and zoning amendments that are designed to block a specific proposed project.” These local restrictions have been fueled in part by misinformation spread on social media promoting unsupported health and safety concerns around wind and solar farms. Sometimes these groups are literally bankrolled by the oil industry trying to curb the transition from fossil fuels.
Congress could step in to limit localities’ power to obstruct clean energy. Patricia Salkin and Ashira Pelman Ostrow, legal scholars at Albany Law School and Hofstra University, proposed a new legal framework modeled off of the TCA that would outlaw bans and indefinite moratoria on new wind farms, require reasonably fast decisions that are issued in writing and backed by substantial evidence, and create a judicial right of action for wind developers to challenge permitting denials. This would speed up the siting process, and force localities to keep their doors open to renewable energy. And it would incentivize more localities to grant wind citing requests by imposing litigation risk on decisions denying projects.
This framework could provide the foundation for a new Renewable Energy Siting Act – one that, unlike some other permitting reform proposals, would streamline the process for approving renewables only, without sacrificing community protections against fossil fuels. It could also be strengthened. For one, it should apply to other forms of clean energy beyond wind, including solar. The timeline for issuing a decision on a project could be specified at a fixed deadline, like 90 days.
The “substantial evidence” standard could also be bolstered to exclude common NIMBY complaints. In a 2015 Supreme Court case involving the TCA, at least one Supreme Court justice – Justice Alito – said that a permitting decision rejecting a cell tower based solely on aesthetics or community compatibility would count as “substantial evidence.” In adapting the TCA model for renewable energy, Congress should require permitting decisions to be supported by evidence that is both substantial and credible. As it did for fears over radiofrequency emissions from cell towers, Congress could explicitly rule out certain disproven or baseless objections around health, safety, and aesthetics.
Congress could also crack down on extreme and prohibitive “setbacks” – the distance that a structure must be from any neighboring properties – that some states and municipalities impose on renewable facilities. In Ohio, wind turbines must be built at least 1,125 feet from the nearest property line. (Meanwhile, the state allows new oil and gas wells just 100 feet from homes.) That has made new wind development in the state a practical impossibility. Congress could let states and localities take reasonable precautions to protect nearby properties (in the unlikely event that a turbine falls over), while setting a maximum setback rule at perhaps 1.5 times the turbine’s height – a setback of around 450 feet for a typical utility-scale tower.
By design, this approach protects national goals while preserving a role for state and local governments. Though given the climate stakes and the federal dollars at risk, some might understandably want to hand more permitting authority to national agencies. But that risks provoking a backlash, and may also lead federal authorities to miss legitimate local concerns. Putting the federal government in charge of permitting and siting decisions could also trigger federal environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act and other laws, further slowing deployment.
Though without a new law from Congress reining in local permitting, the Biden administration may have little choice but to resort to targeting specific projects to speed them up. Existing authority under the Defense Production Act allows the federal government to override other laws – including permitting laws – to expedite renewable energy development. The administration has also reportedly started leveraging certain grants to reward states and localities that agree to streamline permitting for projects receiving federal funding. Similar conditions could be attached to some Inflation Reduction Act funding too.
With the House under Republican control, the odds of congressional action seem admittedly slim. But red states and conservative districts stand to benefit mightily from IRA spending given the geographic skew of wind and solar energy toward rural areas in the middle of the country. And providing more national uniformity in permitting processes is fundamentally a pro-business, deregulatory act that will provide more certainty to energy developers. Perhaps those dynamics can produce a bipartisan coalition for congressional action like the one that enacted the TCA.
As we build our way out of the climate crisis, local communities deserve a say in how and where we build, but not a veto. With the climate clock ticking, we can ill afford to run out that clock with undue delays and frivolous objections. Congress can strike the right balance here, and help clean energy proliferate just as quickly as cellphones did.
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On the reconciliation bill, power plant regulations, and Climate.gov
Current conditions: Eight to 12 inches of rain could fall in Texas and the southern Plains • Air quality alerts are in place today for the New York metro region due to wildfire smoke from Canada • Parts of Europe will see temperatures up to 50 degrees Fahrenheit above normal on Thursday and Friday, with highs approaching 100 degrees in Florence, Italy.
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee released its take on the Republican reconciliation bill on Wednesday afternoon, with boasts of “repealing billions in unspent Green New Deal handouts.” Its proposals include:
The draft also includes the details of Republican Senator Mike Lee’s latest proposal to sell off millions of acres of public lands to finance President Trump’s tax cuts. Specifically, the proposal would require the Department of the Interior and the Forest Service to make the “prudent sale” of 0.5% to 0.75% of their lands in 11 western states for “housing, increased timber sales, geothermal leasing, and compensation of states and localities for the cost of wind and solar projects on federal land.” The states named for the selloffs include Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming, with Montana — home of Republican Representative Ryan Zinke, who opposed a similar proposal in the House — notably absent from the list.
You can read a section-by-section breakdown of the rest of the ENR’s proposals here.
On Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency moved to retract Biden-era regulations on fossil fuel-fired power plant emissions on the grounds that the plants don’t cause or contribute “significantly” to air pollution. EPA’s proposed rule specifically suggests that power plant pollution makes up merely a “small and decreasing part of global emissions,” and therefore does not require regulation under the Clean Air Act.
But as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo reports, electricity usage produces 25% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions each year, and accounted for 5% of the total climate pollution worldwide over the past 30 years — making U.S. power plants the world’s sixth biggest CO2 emitter if they were their own country. The administration’s claim that power plants make up only a small portion of global emissions and thus aren’t worth addressing is akin to “a five-alarm fire that could be put out if you send out all the trucks, and you don’t send any of the trucks because no one truck could put the fire out by itself,” David Doniger, a senior attorney and strategist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Emily. “We just think that is a wacky reversal and a wacky interpretation of the Clean Air Act.”
Late last month, the Trump administration fired the entire staff of Climate.gov, the main website of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Program Office, The Guardian reports. The website had a staff of “about 10,” but it also received editorial content from NOAA scientists in other departments. Climate.gov described its mission as “climate communication, education, and engagement,” but it also took pains to be “politically neutral, and faithful to the current state of the sciences,” The Guardian writes. “It’s targeted, I think it’s clear,” said Tom Di Liberto, a former NOAA spokesperson who was fired earlier this year. “They only fired a handful of people, and it just so happened to be the entire content team for Climate.gov. I mean, that’s a clear signal.”
The World Bank announced Wednesday that it will end its longtime ban on financing nuclear energy projects. “We will support efforts to extend the life of existing reactors in countries that already have them, and help support grid upgrades and related infrastructure,” World Bank President Ajay Banga wrote in an email to staff, per the Financial Times. Though the development bank’s ban has only been formally in place since 2013, it hasn’t funded a nuclear project since 1959. “In the decades since, a few of the bank’s major funders, particularly Germany, have opposed its involvement in nuclear energy,” The New York Times notes, although both Germany and the Trump administration have recently pivoted toward more pro-nuclear positions. In his memo, Banga added that the bank’s ban on funding oil and gas projects, which has been in place since 2017, will also be reconsidered.
Amazon on Wednesday announced a deal to buy enough power from Pennsylvania nuclear plant operator Talen Energy “to sustain a midsize city for years,” Barron’s reports. The agreement will see Talen supplying Amazon with electricity “for operations that support AI and other cloud technologies at Amazon’s data center campus,” while maintaining its “ability to deliver to other sites throughout Pennsylvania,” Talen said in its own announcement, with the companies also agreeing to explore building a new small modular reactor in the state.
The news comes against the backdrop of Congress’ efforts to eliminate the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits, even as tech companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google continue to pursue ambitious net-zero energy goals. “There’s little doubt the tech companies would prefer an abundant supply of cheap, clean energy,” my colleague Katie Brigham wrote in her recent analysis. “Exactly how much they’re willing to fight for it is the real question.” Amazon’s deal with Talen for nearly 2 gigawatts of nuclear power through 2042 follows Meta signing a nuclear agreement with Constellation Energy last week and Microsoft partnering with Constellation to reopen Three Mile Island last year.
Tesla
“Tentatively, June 22.” —Elon Musk, responding on Twitter to a question about the public launch date of the self-driving Tesla Cybercab robotaxi in Austin, although he added, “We’re being super paranoid about safety, so the date could shift.”
The Environmental Protection Agency just unveiled its argument against regulating greenhouse emissions from power plants.
In federal policymaking, the weight of the law can rest on a single word. When it comes to reducing planet-warming emissions from the power sector, that word is “significantly.” The Clean Air Act requires the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate any stationary source of emissions that “causes, or contributes significantly to, air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.”
The EPA has considered power plants a significant source of dangerous greenhouse gases since 2015. But today, Trump’s EPA said, actually, never mind.
A proposed rule published in the Federal Register on Wednesday argues that U.S. fossil fuel-fired power plants make up “a small and decreasing part of global emissions” and therefore are not significant, and do not require regulation under the law. The rule would repeal all greenhouse gas emission standards for new and existing power plants — both the standards the Biden administration finalized last year, which have been tied up in court, as well as the standards that preceded them, which were enacted by Obama in 2015.
In a separate proposal, the EPA also took steps to repeal limits on mercury and hazardous air pollutants from coal plants that were enacted last year, reverting the standard back to one set in 2012.
The argument that U.S. power plants make up a small sliver of global emissions and thus aren’t worth addressing is like having “a five-alarm fire that could be put out if you send out all the trucks, and you don’t send any of the trucks because no one truck could put the fire out by itself,” David Doniger, a senior attorney and strategist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told me. “We just think that is a wacky reversal and a wacky interpretation of the Clean Air Act.”
When you add up every plug, power button, and light switch across the country, electricity usage produces 25% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions each year. Over the past 30 years, American power plants have contributed about 5% of the total climate pollution spewed into the atmosphere worldwide.
In the global context, that may sound small. But in a recent report titled “The Scale of Significance," New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity estimated that if U.S. power plants were a country, it would be the sixth biggest emitter in the world, behind China, the European Union, India, Russia, and the remainder of U.S. emissions. The report also notes that U.S. actions on emissions make other countries more likely to follow, due to technological spillovers that reduce the cost of decarbonization globally.
In addition to the significance finding, the EPA gave two other reasons for repealing the power plant rules. It argued that “cost-effective control measures are not reasonably available,” meaning there’s no economic way to reduce emissions at the source. It also said the new administration’s priority “is to promote the public health or welfare through energy dominance and independence secured by using fossil fuels to generate power.”
The first argument is an attempt to say that Biden’s standards flouted the law. In 2022, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA could not simply tell states to reduce emissions from the power sector, which is what the Obama administration had initially tried to do. Instead, the agency would have to develop standards that could be applied on a plant-by-plant basis — so long as those rules were “cost-reasonable” and “adequately demonstrated.”
To comply with that ruling, Biden’s EPA based its standards on the potential to install carbon capture technology that can reduce flue gas emissions by 90%. The regulations would have required existing coal plants to install carbon capture by 2039, or else shut down. (To the chagrin of many energy system observers, the administration chose not to apply limits to existing gas-fired power plants.) But while fossil fuel companies and utilities had, in the past, asserted that carbon capture was viable, they deemed the standards impossible to meet.
Trump’s EPA is now agreeing. “In 2024,” Zeldin said on Wednesday, “rules were enacted seeking to suffocate our economy in order to protect the environment, to make all sorts of industries including coal and more disappear, regulate them out of existence.”
When Trump moved to overturn Obama’s power plant regulations during his first term, his EPA did not contest the significance of the sector’s emissions, and simply enacted a weaker standard. A week before he left office, the agency also finalized a rule that set the threshold for “significance” at 3% of U.S. emissions — which exempted major polluters like refineries, but still applied to power plants.
This time, Trump has a new apparent game plan: Strip the Clean Air Act of its jurisdiction over greenhouse gases altogether. Today’s action was the first step; EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has said the agency will similarly “reconsider” emissions rules for cars and oil and gas drilling. But the cornerstone of the plan is to reverse what’s known as the “endangerment finding” — the 2009 conclusion that greenhouse gases present a threat to public health and welfare, and therefore are one of the pollutants EPA must address under the Clean Air Act.
“The Trump administration is trying to say, don’t worry about the Clean Air Act. It will never apply, so you can go back to your old ways,” said Doniger. But if the argument that power plant emissions are insignificant is a stretch, appraising greenhouse gas emissions as benign is inconceivable, he said. “The endangerment finding was based, in 2009, on a Denali-sized mountain of evidence. Since then, it’s grown to Everest-size, so there’s no way that they would be able to put together a rational record saying the science is wrong.”
These highly technical questions of whether emissions are “significant” or whether carbon capture is “adequately demonstrated” could soon be determined by a group of people who lack both the expertise to answer them and the inclination to wade through thousands of pages of atmospheric science and chemical engineering documents: judges.
Last year, the Supreme Court overturned a long-held precedent known as Chevron deference. That ruling means that the courts are no longer required to defer to an agency’s interpretation of statute — judges must make their own determinations of whether agencies are following the intent of the law.
When environmental groups begin challenging the EPA’s repeals in court, judges are “going to be bombarded with the need to make these highly technical, nuanced decisions,” Michael Wara, a lawyer and scholar focused on climate and energy policy at Stanford University, told me. He said the reason Chevron deference was established in the first place is that judges didn’t want to be making engineering decisions about power plants. “They felt extremely uncomfortable having to make these calls.”
The conservative Supreme Court overturned the precedent because of a sense that political decisions were being dressed up in scientific reasoning. But Wara doesn’t think the courts are going to like being put back into the role of weighing technical minutia and making engineering decisions.
“It’s a past that the courts didn’t like and they tried to engineer a way out of via the Chevron doctrine,” he said. “I would expect that we’re going to see a drift back toward a doctrine that looks a little bit more Chevron-like, maybe less deference to agencies. But it’s hard to predict in the current environment what’s going to happen.”
Look more closely at today’s inflation figures and you’ll see it.
Inflation is slowing, but electricity bills are rising. While the below-expectations inflation figure reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics Wednesday morning — the consumer price index rose by just 0.1% in May, and 2.4% on the year — has been eagerly claimed by the Trump administration as a victory over inflation, a looming increase in electricity costs could complicate that story.
Consumer electricity prices rose 0.9% in May, and are up 4.5% in the past year. And it’s quite likely price increases will accelerate through the summer, thanks to America’s largest electricity market, PJM Interconnection. Significant hikes are expected or are already happening in many PJM states, including Maryland,New Jersey,Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Ohio with some utilities having said they would raise rates as soon as this month.
This has led to scrambling by state governments, with New Jersey announcing hundreds of millions of dollars of relief to alleviate rate increases as high as 20%. Maryland convinced one utility to spread out the increase over a few months.
While the dysfunctions of PJM are distinct and well known — new capacity additions have not matched fossil fuel retirements, leading to skyrocketing payments for those generators that can promise to be on in time of need — the overall supply and demand dynamics of the electricity industry could lead to a broader price squeeze.
“Trump and JD Vance can get off tweets about how there’s no inflation, but I don’t think they’ll feel that way in a week or two,” Skanda Amarnath, executive director of Employ America, told me.
And while the consumer price index is made up of, well, almost everything people buy, electricity price increases can have a broad effect on prices in general. “Everyone relies on energy,” Amarnath said. “Businesses that have higher costs can’t just eat it.” That means higher electricity prices may be translated into higher costs throughout the economy, a phenomenon known as “cost-push inflation.”
Aside from the particular dynamics of any one electricity market, there’s likely to be pressure on electricity prices across the country from the increased demand for energy from computing and factories. “There’s a big supply adjustment that’s going to have to happen, the data center demand dynamic is coming to roost,” Amarnath said.
Jefferies Chief U.S. Economist Thomas Simons said as much in a note to clients Wednesday. “Increased stress on the electrical grid from AI data centers, electric vehicle charging, and obligations to fund infrastructure and greenification projects have forced utilities to increase prices,” he wrote.
Of course, there’s also great uncertainty about the future path of electricity policy — namely, what happens to the Inflation Reduction Act — and what that means for prices.
The research group Energy Innovation has modeled the House reconciliation bill’s impact on the economy and the energy industry. The report finds that the bill “would dramatically slow deployment of new electricity generating capacity at a time of rapidly growing electricity demand.” That would result in higher electricity and energy prices across the board, with increases in household energy spending of around $150 per year in 2030, and more than $260 per year in 2035, due in part to a 6% increase in electricity prices by 2035.
In the near term, there’s likely not much policymakers can do about electricity prices, and therefore utility bills going up. Renewables are almost certainly the fastest way to get new electrons on the grid, but the completion of even existing projects could be thrown into doubt by the House bill’s strict “foreign entity of concern” rules, which try to extricate the renewables industry from its relationship with China.
“We’re running into a set of cost-push dynamics. It’s a hairy problem that no one is really wrapping their heads around,” Amarnath said. “It’s not really mainstream yet. It’s going to be.”
In some relief to American consumers, if not the planet, while it may be more expensive for them to cool their homes, it will be less expensive to get out of them: Gasoline prices fell 2.5% in May, according to the BLS, and are down 12% on the year.