Permitting

The Pasadena City Council approved a $512 million, 20-year contract to purchase solar photovoltaic energy and battery storage from the Bonanza Solar project, a 300mw solar project proposed on BLM lands near Indian Springs. The BLM is processing the applications amid some objections from Basin and Range Watch and others.

In order to build enough renewable energy to avoid climate disaster, the U.S. and countries around the world will need to build an enormous amount of transmission capacity to get power from remote solar and wind farms to city centers. The current outlook is daunting. There are more than 8,000 energy projects waiting to connect to the grid. But in 2023 multiple important transmission projects moved forward.

For the past two decades, demand for electricity across the United States has hardly increased. But those dynamics have dramatically reversed — and U.S. electric utilities, regulators and power grid planners aren’t prepared to deal with this new, surging electricity demand, especially the need for new transmission infrastructure.

Editor’s Note: CCL’s Research Coordinator, Dana Nuccitelli, posted CCL’s take on this legislation in this blog post, which I recommend you read.  He links to a) his outline the key elements of the 210-page bill and b) the Bill’s co-sponsors’ section-by-section description of what’s in the bill.  Dana’s post on Community also addesses the politics involved, as well as CCL’s position..

Wind and solar build is set to surge but long grid connection queues and a lack of urgency create major bottlenecks. Interregional grid projects typically take over a decade to be completed due to a complex patchwork of state and federal approval processes. Lawmakers are seeking to pass a bill that sets a minimum requirement for grid capacity between regions within a set timeframe. Here is a summary of the Act … and the politics around it.

Another hurdle to getting HVDC or other major transmission needed is the current permitting process, said Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.), Congress’ chief FERC booster. Also, it “is too damn cheap,” Casten said.
“You’ve generated this problematic resource that is super cheap: effectively zero marginal cost,” Casten said. “And on the other end is an entity — an RTO or utility — who depends on earning $50, $60, $70/MWh. And you are putting $30 power into that market.”

Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.) and Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) today will introduce long-awaited legislation to spur the nation’s buildout of interregional transmission lines. The Building Integrated Grids with Interregional Energy Supply Act (“Big Wires Act”)aims to accelerate America’s transition to cleaner energy while strengthening its strained electric grid.

A world-beating deposit of lithium along the Nevada–Oregon border could meet surging demand for this metal. An estimated 20 to 40 million tonnes of lithium metal is notably larger than the lithium deposits found beneath a Bolivian salt flat, previously considered the largest deposit in the world. Mining at the site is, however, contested by Native Americans for whom the area is sacred, and is believed to be where a massacre took place in 1865.