Congress must pass permitting reform legislation to give electric cooperatives the certainty they need to invest in new transmission lines and power plants to meet growing demand for power, House Energy and Commerce Chairman Brett Guthrie said Wednesday.
“We absolutely have to make sure we have dispatchable, reliable and affordable power,” the Kentucky Republican told Punchbowl News founder Jake Sherman at a newsmaker event sponsored by NRECA. “People want to have the lights come on when they turn the lights on.”
NRECA CEO Jim Matheson said artificial intelligence and other technology is rapidly increasing demand for electricity. More transmission and generation infrastructure must be built as quickly as possible to meet that demand and ensure reliable power, he said.
“These are capital-intensive investments with long lead times for assets with 30- to 50- to 80-year lives,” Matheson said. “We see this huge demand coming over the next five to 10 years and we’ve got to start building now.”
Guthrie said his committee is looking at ways to expedite the cumbersome federal permitting process that co-ops and other businesses must go through to comply with clean air and clean water regulations. He said litigation challenging federal permitting decisions should have reasonable time limits so that it doesn’t delay crucial infrastructure projects for years.
“We don’t want to change the standards, we just want to speed the process,” Guthrie said.
Matheson said co-ops need the kind of regulatory certainty that permitting reform would bring.
“We need to put this in statute,” Matheson said. “We can’t have a policy environment where every time we have a new person come to the White House, we boomerang back and forth.
“Congress has failed to do its job in terms of setting policy where we have greater certainty. And in an industry like ours, we need that long-term certainty.”
Since solar and wind energy are intermittent sources of power, utilities need to be able to build nuclear, hydropower or fossil fuel plants to ensure the power stays on no matter what the weather is like, Guthrie said.
“It’s difficult to build a nuclear plant or a natural gas plant,” he said. “Permitting reform speeds that process up.”