Can Blue States Build?
Texas has become the nation’s renewable-energy powerhouse. This didn’t happen because Texas Republicans are deeply committed to fighting climate change; it happened because, in Texas, infrastructure projects are easier to build—something that can’t be said for a lot of the country, including in states led by Democrats who claim to prioritize the climate crisis.
It raises the question: Is our clean-energy transition seriously at risk if we don’t make building renewable-energy technology and infrastructure much easier?
Texas’s largest grid operator announced last year that it had more than 18,000 megawatts of solar-power capacity installed on its grid; California’s largest grid operator had just over 17,000. Although taking California’s solar crown was new, Texas had been a leader in renewable-energy generation for several years. According to Inside Climate News, in 2022 Texas generated more than 130,000 gigawatt-hours of wind and solar electricity. The next best state was California, with less than 53,000.
On today’s episode of Good on Paper, I’m joined by Jesse Jenkins, a professor and engineer at Princeton University, where he leads the REPEAT Project, which helps guide policy makers with up-to-date predictions and reports about renewable energy.
As Jenkins explains in this episode, Texas “is the energy capital of America. And it has an all-of-the-above, all-sources-of-energy-are-good mentality to it that has left the state—both at a cultural level and also at an institutional level—with a mentality and a footing that is designed to build stuff and to extract energy and to make money, which isn’t exactly the primary footing that California is on.”
Listen to the conversation here:
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The following is a transcript of the episode:
Jerusalem Demsas: If Democrats care more about the climate than Republicans, then why is Texas—not California—the leader in renewable energy?
This is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. I’m your host, Jerusalem Demsas, and this is an episode about a topic I’ve reported on for years—why it’s so hard to build clean-energy infrastructure in Democratic-run states.
From talking with policy makers, issue groups, advocates, and experts, I’ve become convinced that our clean-energy transition is seriously at risk if we don’t make it much easier to build renewable-energy technology.
On both wind and solar, Texas is now beating California—why is that?
For a while, Texas had led on wind, but sunny California had the lead on solar. That’s no longer. ERCOT—which is the grid operator for basically all of Texas—announced at the end of last year that it had installed enough solar to power nearly 3.7 million homes during times of peak electricity. That’s about 18,000 megawatts of solar, roughly 1,000 more than California.
After the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act two years ago, renewable-energy production became much cheaper. Now, not only had we solved many of the technological barriers to a clean-energy economy, we’d helped address the financing ones, too. But even in the face of all that science and money there were questions: How much of anything would actually get built?
The reason for these questions is that building something—particularly something as big as utility-scale solar or wind—is about more than knowing how to do it and having the money for it. You also need the government’s permission by going through what’s called the permitting process. And this process—it’s broken, at least in my opinion.
[Music]
In blue states like California, policy makers say they want to build renewable energy, but they make it really hard to do so out of a fear that the development may have unwanted impacts on homeowners or the environment. But in red states like Texas, the attitude is often anything goes. The bias is toward building things—even if the policy makers aren’t particularly in love with wind or solar or whatever it is that’s being built.
Right now there’s a bill before Congress to help streamline the permitting process, and environmental groups like the Sierra Club have come out against it, claiming that it steamrolls communities and fast-tracks polluting projects. It’s an open question whether Democrats will continue to be pro-climate when it comes to spending money or investing in technology but not when it comes to actually building the necessary infrastructure.
My guest today is Jesse Jenkins. He’s a professor and engineer at Princeton University, where he leads the REPEAT Project, which helps guide policy makers with up-to-date predictions and reports about renewable energy.
Jesse, welcome to the show.
Jesse Jenkins: Hey, thanks for having me.
Demsas: Yeah. So I wanted to talk to you for a bunch of reasons, but today we’re here to talk about why it is that Texas has been better than California at building renewable energy. I think that this is something that’s been slow rolling in the background for a while, but what explains this clean-energy boom in Texas? What’s going on there?
Jenkins: Yeah. We should also add that they’ve been the longtime leader in wind-power development, as well. So they have the most installed wind capacity in the country in Texas—so number one in solar and wind now. I mean, there’s a few things going on here. It’s important, I think, first to just acknowledge the natural-resource endowment. Texas does have more land area, lower population density, and more high-quality wind and solar sites than you would find in California.
Obviously, California—known for its sunshine—has excellent solar-resource potential in a lot of the state, but it’s harder to build large-scale, utility-scale solar farms in higher-population-density areas. And there just isn’t anywhere near the kind of wind-power potential in California as there is in West Texas, where you start to get into the great open plains and really high wind speeds that you find up and down the middle of the country. So part of it is: The resource endowment is just a bit better in Texas, and that’ll give them a leg up over California and many other states.
But I think the other major difference is the attitude towards energy development in the state of Texas and for landowners and others in the state. It is the energy capital of America. And it has an all-of-the-above, all-sources-of-energy-are-good mentality to it that has left the state—both at a cultural level and also at an institutional level—with a mentality and a footing that is designed to build stuff and to extract energy and to make money, which isn’t exactly the primary footing that California is on. It’s much more focused on protecting the quality of the environment and the quality of life of residents and other concerns, which tends to lead to less development and more red tape and process, and—in many cases—legitimate constraints on development.
The other factor I would say is the grid operator in Texas. Texas is its own separated grid from the rest of the country. That makes it unique in the continental United States. It has chosen not to interconnect with the broader eastern and western grids that span most of the rest of the country, and it does so to avoid federal regulation. So the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that regulates interstate electricity and gas markets has jurisdiction via the interstate commerce clause in the Constitution. And so by not participating in interstate trade in electricity, Texas carves itself out of that jurisdiction.
Demsas: But how does that help it speed up?
Jenkins: I don’t think it’s as important that it’s its own separated grid. It’s not under federal regulation. But I do think it’s important that it means that ERCOT can pursue its own unique style of electricity market.
Demsas: So it’s a much more free-market approach.
Jenkins: Yeah, it is. And that has an indirect impact—there’s a couple things there. One is it makes it a lot easier for wind and solar to come into the market whenever they’re profitable without having to go through some of the extensive state-level regulation that we see in the Southeast or the Western states, where utilities are still vertically integrated, meaning they’re really subject to regulation from top to bottom: generation, transmission, distribution, and retail are all under one regulated monopoly.
And so they’re able to adapt to market trends faster in this market free-for-all context in Texas. And then the second thing is that because they don’t have these organized capacity markets, it’s easier to interconnect to the transmission system in Texas than it is everywhere else.
Demsas: And can you explain what transmission is first?
Jenkins: Yeah. If you’re thinking about a wind farm out in West Texas or a solar farm in South Texas, you’ve got to connect that to the bulk-transmission system—the high-voltage wires that you might see running along the highway or across town—that brings the power from those large generators to cities and other areas where people are consuming electricity. And so you can’t get to your customer unless you can connect to the grid, and the regional grid operators—in this case ERCOT—are in charge of that process.
Demsas: It can be hard to know whether we're talking about a bottleneck that is the most important problem? It's a bottleneck that is just the easiest thing to solve? Or is the politically attractive thing to poke at right then? So, when we're thinking about why it is that California has begun to lag behind Texas, what are the top issues that you think that state is facing?
Jenkins: Yeah. You really nailed it. It's very hard to tell because it's a bit like you remove one obstacle that is the current longest pole in the tent—or you hope it is, at least—and then the next constraint right behind it starts to bind.
There's just a lot of processes to go through. Environmental review, if you're on federal land or have anything to do with the federal government—you have to do the National Environmental Policy Act’s review process. So there's just all these different processes. And it's actually fairly hard for me at this stage to know which of those is the most binding.
And if you could cut it in half with that double the pace of development? Or would some other challenge just rear its ugly head immediately after that, and it would only get five percent faster? I think in order to know that—and this is a research project I've proposed a couple of times that haven't been able to do—I do think you'd have to sit down with industries, and it's different in every type of technology, every industry, and then think really carefully about where you might be able to streamline and combine processes or remove dependencies that slow things down so you move more in parallel and just speed processes up. And I think that, in general, the red states have put up less process than blue states.
Demsas: I feel like a lot of this conversation is even happening because of the IRA—the Inflation Reduction Act. I first came across your work when there were a bunch of questions around whether the clean investment following the Inflation Reduction Act was actually going to result in a bunch of things getting built on the timeline we needed in order to meet our net-zero goals.
I remember seeing your lab at Princeton—your findings that over 80 percent of the potential emissions reductions delivered by the IRA would be lost if we weren’t able to expand transmission lines at a much faster rate than we were building them. And transmission—obviously, that’s something that’s beyond just individual states. They cross state borders all the time.
But you have recently done also a report on where we stand because those findings were just right after the IRA came out, and you guys did a level set, like, Hey. Okay. The IRA has been law for a couple of years now. What is the state of clean investment in the country? And you’re really worried. You find that wind and storage are falling really short of the projections that your team made.
So what’s causing that? Are there differences between Republican and Democratic states in your findings? Were you able to disaggregate that? Or what is actually causing us to fall behind our clean-energy-investment goals after all this money’s been pumped in?
Jenkins: What we highlighted when the Inflation Reduction Act passed is that what it basically does is put clean energy on sale. It’s like Black Friday shopping. You get 10 to 50 percent off basically all of the clean-energy technologies you might want to build. And that is really—
Demsas: It’s like Black Friday every day. (Laughs.)
Jenkins: Yeah, exactly. And that’s really important because otherwise we’re not really valuing the fact that clean energy is clean, and dirty energy is dirty, and it has costs to society, right? It has air pollution, and it exacerbates climate change and has other environmental impacts. And so if we’re not going to price the dirty stuff to account for that environmental and social impact, we have to make the clean-energy stuff more valuable.
And obviously it’s a lot easier political sell to say, We’re lowering the cost of all energy by subsidizing clean energy, than, We’re raising the cost of all energy by taxing or penalizing dirty fossil fuels.
Demsas: (Laughs.)
Jenkins: And so that’s the direction that Congress is headed, right?
Demsas: That’s why it’s not called the Inflation Increasement Act.
Jenkins: Yeah, exactly. And so that’s a necessary condition. It’s just not sufficient, right? So if it didn’t make economic sense to build all these clean-energy projects, then we wouldn’t care much about whether the permitting system is designed to build stuff or whether we can interconnect projects fast enough, because no one would be trying to build them.
So what we did was we solved one really important, big problem, which is that now it is basically just good business sense to go build wind and solar, to build batteries, to retrofit your home with a heat pump, or to switch to an EV. All of that just makes good financial sense now. You don’t have to be like a greenie environmentalist to do it. You just do it because of the pocketbook issues.
Demsas: So it’s like we’ve removed the financial constraint, maybe. Now we’re moving onto the permanent constraint.
Jenkins: And now the question is, Okay, all these people want to go build stuff, and we’re electrifying our homes and increasing electricity demand on the other side. How do we do that? We’re a country that built most of its major energy infrastructure out in the 1930s through the 1970s or so. And that was the period that we were building a lot of the modern infrastructure in the country. And we have not really grown at anywhere near that pace since then.
There was another period of slightly slower growth in electricity infrastructure from the late 1970s to about 2005. And since then, demand for electricity has basically been flat across the country for nearly 20 years. And now we’re in this mode where we have to build a whole bunch of stuff and keep up with now what is likely to be steadily growing electricity demand from EVs and heating electrification and also data centers and AI and manufacturing plants that we’re building.
And we just don’t really have a national institutional framework for building at scale anymore. We did in the postwar boom era. It had a lot of legitimate downsides and problems: We built the highway system in a way that disenfranchised poor and Black and brown communities and drove right through the middle of many of their neighborhoods. We have significant environmental impacts. We had unintended impacts of pesticides on whole food chains—all that classic stuff that gave birth to a lot of the systems we have in place now to contain development to prevent it from these sorts of impacts.
But what that’s done is it’s transformed us from a footing where we were building America to a footing where our job is to go slow and find lots of reasons to say no to things. And that’s not a system that’s very well conducive to building electricity, infrastructure, transmission lines, wind, solar, nuclear power, batteries, whatever it is at a pace that we haven’t seen in a couple generations.
So I think the big question we face now is: How do we square that circle? How do we get back into a mindset where we recognize that it’s in the national interest to build again? We are building a new America again, but we don’t want to do that in the same way that we did before, because we don’t want the same kind of environmental impacts. And we don’t want the same injustices across racial and economic lines.
And I don’t have the answer for how to do that, but that’s the conversation I think we need to be having now, which, again, we didn’t need to have before the IRA passed, because it didn’t make economic sense. But now it does. And this is the next frontier in climate policy and in decarbonization and in tapping the economic opportunity that the IRA presents to the country.
Demsas: How do we know that this new permitting framework that comes about in response to all of the failures you laid out in the postwar era—how do we know that that’s constraining development of clean energy or transmission lines?
Jenkins: Yeah, that’s a really great question. And it’s not my primary area of research. I’ve read a few other people’s studies, and it seems like there’s a bit of conflicting consensus amongst the literature.
It’s just a difficult thing to isolate the causal effects of this versus some other thing that’s also present. And so I think there’s a difference of opinion about, Is this a relatively small issue or a very major one? I think it’s clear that we do have a system that has many, many different veto points. And in order to build something, you have to pass through and survive all of them. Any single one says no, and you’re done, whether that’s an environmental review or that’s a court or that’s an appeal to a previous review or that’s a local citing board or local opposition, whatever it is.
And so I think one of the challenges is: Are there ways in which we can provide the same opportunities to raise concerns and to have them legitimately heard and addressed, but to consolidate those veto points into one big decision or a couple of big decisions?
Because if we can do that, we can make the process move faster, and we can reduce the development risk for project developers because they then know what the rules are, right? They know, Okay, I have to do this thing. It’s going to take me 18 months. I’m going to get an up or down decision at the end. They may say no. But now I know that I can move onto the next project, as opposed to having projects drag out for years and years and years, which is what we tend to see in particularly linear infrastructure, like transmission lines and pipelines, but increasingly in large wind farms and even solar farms and other things as well, where you don’t have any idea how long it’s going to take to get through all of those processes.
And in the case of some transmission lines, like the SunZia line that’s just starting construction now from New Mexico to California, which my Shift Key co-host, Rob Meyer, wrote an excellent piece on for Heatmap recently, that project has been around in various stages of development for nearly 20 years.
Another project would help connect tens of gigawatts of renewable energy to the grid. It has to cross through this one small strip of a national wildlife refuge that runs up and down the Mississippi River for something like 200 miles. So you can’t go around it.
It has met all of the reviews required under NEPA. It has survived multiple court challenges at both the state level and the federal level. And just recently, there was another injunction granted, arguing from a local opposition environmental group that the project failed to meet some national wildlife refuge–related process that it had to go through.
So this is the kind of thing that we see. It’s just—you don’t know how long it’s going to take, how many different challenges you need to survive, and that raises the risk and slows down the development of projects in ways that I don’t think are necessary if the goal is just to provide an appropriate venue for everyone to raise legitimate concerns and to have the government ensure that those concerns are addressed.
Demsas: Yeah. I’ve reported on this a bunch, and—for listeners who aren’t super obsessed with local, state, and national environmental permitting—you may not be super familiar, but I agree with you. There’s a lot of debate within the academic literature about, Can we identify the causal impact of a specific environmental regulation or permitting process in determining whether or not it’s actually slowing down clean-energy development?
And I find a lot of that conversation—I mean, obviously, it’s important for academics to be able to do that over long timescales. But when I look at all of the data points that exist, I follow very much the story you’re talking about here, where you see just this behemoth of regulations sprout starting in the 1970s to now.
And some of the best evidence we have is: So Zachary Liscow (he’s at Yale) and Leah Brooks (she’s at George Washington University)—they look at what’s happened to the cost of building highways since the 1970s. And what they’re able to do is basically throw out a lot of the traditional explanations. They go, Okay, the cost of building highways has just skyrocketed, right? And highways—we know how to build highways in America. We do not suffer from a lack of highways. But the cost of building them has tripled since the 1970s.
And what they find is it’s not the traditional stuff people expect it to be: labor, or maybe it’s specific materials that have gone up in price. And they get rid of all these, and what they’re left with is this variable that they call, “citizen voice,” and I think that that’s exactly what you’re talking about here. And what that is, is that there are all of these ways in which individuals, groups at the local, state, and federal level have figured out a way to delay the process by which we can build things in America, whether it’s a highway or it’s a transmission line or it’s a house or anything. They’ve optimized. They’ve innovated. And they’ve figured out, How can we block these things?
And a lot of the research that pushes back on the idea that this is causing a lot of delays in energy and environment points to the fact that the government often wins, right? When there’s a lawsuit that comes up against a wind farm and says, Hey, I’m suing you under an environmental regulation. You didn’t consider the fact that there might be a harm to an endangered species or some other thing that we care about here. Sometimes they’re much more frivolous, like there was one lawsuit I saw in Alabama where they said they didn’t consider the impact of the glinting of the sun off the blades of a wind turbine.
And so when those lawsuits come up, very often when they work their way through the process—like the SunZia example you brought up—the government will win because it’s either frivolous, or the courts will decide, You guys did do your due diligence. You did spend four years considering alternative impacts.
You worked really, really hard on this.
But if you delay projects for that long, you both will kill a bunch of projects because their financing will get messed up, or the cost of all of that will take so long that you won’t be able to meet your goals. And then also, a lot of times, governments—if it’s a project that requires a government permit, which almost all the projects we’re talking about do—the governments are political. They may just decide, Okay, let’s pare this back significantly.
So you get a much smaller project. You get much less wind energy or much less solar, or you end up moving the transmission line again, and you’re costing the taxpayers billions and billions of more dollars. And I always find opposition to the idea that this is causing an impact to be in bad faith at some level because there’s not an alternative explanation for what’s going on here.
Jenkins: Yeah. That’s all very well said. And the other thing I’ll just say is what’s very hard to observe is all the projects that don’t happen because you have to jump through all of these hurdles.
I spent a little bit of time last week with Mike Skelly and Grid United, which is a company that is working to build very-long-distance transmission lines. And Mike, personally, has been at this for a couple of decades. And the thing that you realize is you got to be a little bit either crazy or just completely undaunted to want to go build transmission lines in America right now. And he’s doing it, God bless him, and their company is making great progress.
SunZia—they stuck with it. It looks like it’s going to go through after 15, 20 years and multiple owners, etcetera. But what we don’t see is how many people just don’t build at all because they don’t want to even try in that environment, because they know it’ll take way too long, that the risk is so high that they won’t make a reasonable return, that they should just spend their time doing something else, right—something easier to make a profit doing. And I think that’s another piece of the story that is just much harder to observe.
What we can observe is that the pace of transmission expansion in the United States—if you measure it in terms of the ability to move a gigawatt of power over a mile, which is one way to measure capacity—that was growing at about 2 percent per year in the last period when electricity demand was growing, from the 1980s through the mid-2000s. That declined to only about 1 percent per year during the period when electricity demand was flat, from 2005 on. And in just the most recent five years, it’s declined even further to something like .3 percent per year—less than half a percent.
So it’s slowing, and it’s moving in the wrong direction exactly at the time when we both have to keep up with demand growth. Again, we’re entering a new era of demand growth for electricity. And so we have to keep up with all that demand, build enough clean electricity to meet that demand without having emissions go up. But that’s just running to stay in place.
If we also want to drive down emissions, we have to be steadily retiring coal plants and displacing natural-gas generation, and that means building even more renewables. And all that requires grid connection and transmission lines to link regions, and to connect the places in the country where it’s the windiest and the best place to build renewable energy to the places where people live. So we need to be probably doubling the pace that we’ve seen—getting back to at least that 2 percent per year growth rate—and instead, we’ve been moving in the wrong direction in the last few years.
Demsas: And I want to return to this—this beginning question that I asked you about the differences we’re seeing in Texas versus California, but also just largely the permitting regimes in Democratic versus Republican states. When you looked recently at the state of clean investment following the IRA, did you see any differences on partisan lines?
Jenkins: I don’t see any clear trend there. What we did see was a difference between wind and solar power. So solar power has actually been setting new records for annual investment and capacity additions every year for the last several years. That’s exactly what we want to see under the financial environment of the Inflation Reduction Act.
And if we’re trying to decarbonize the grid and meet growing demand for electricity in America, we need to be smashing record growth rates basically every year from here on out until we decarbonize the grid. So that’s good. Solar is expected to add nearly 40 gigawatts of capacity this year, over 30 last year, up from 20 in 2022. So it’s nearly doubled in a few years.
Batteries are also growing a lot faster than we projected in our modeling. The big concern, or the red flag, that we saw in our data was for wind power, where the first quarter of this year was just atrocious. It was one of the slowest quarters of wind construction we’ve seen in probably a decade. And I think there’s probably a few different pieces of that.
The first one is that the subsidy for wind development—the production tax credit—actually fully expired before the Inflation Reduction Act passed. So if you didn’t start building a project by 2019, you were no longer going to be eligible for that subsidy. And so what that did is it can collapse the pipeline of projects in various stages of development.
Everybody rushed to complete projects or started to commence construction and lock in their eligibility for that credit before it was expired. And that meant a bunch of projects got built in the 2020, 2021 timeframe because they were being finished after starting a year or two earlier.
Solar power was different. It was starting to step down. It was phasing out in increments, but it was still at about 80 percent of its full value when the Inflation Reduction Act passed. And so solar projects were basically able to continue development with much less policy risk than the wind industry faced. So the good news is that would be a transient effect, and we would expect that hangover to wear off in a year or two.
It also—the wind industry was hit harder by inflation than the solar industry, partly because we have a much more Western supply chain—American and European supply chain—for wind than we do for solar.
The bigger concern is that it’s just a lot harder to site and build wind farms than it is solar. And that’s for a basic physics reason, which is that the wind speeds are driven basically by the sun. They’re driven by heating the planet to differing degrees at different points, so that creates a bunch of movement in the atmosphere, and that’s what we feel as wind. The wind speeds vary basically proportionate to the variation in solar resource across the country. The best wind sites have about double the wind speed as the worst sites.
And that’s also true for solar. The best solar sites have about double the incoming solar radiation or insulation than the worst sites. The big difference is that solar panels convert solar insulation to power output basically proportionately, or linearly. They convert something like 20 percent of the incoming sunlight directly into power. Wind farms convert the wind speed into electrical power at the wind speed cubed.
Demsas: Oh, wow.
Jenkins: So if you double the wind speed, you get eight times more power output.
Demsas: Oh, I didn’t realize that. Okay.
Jenkins: Yeah. And what that means is that if I have to move my solar project because the local county doesn’t like solar or because I got vetoed by one of those permitting processes, I can move it 50 miles away or a hundred miles away or even a thousand miles away, and it will have very little impact on the economics of that project.
But if it’s a wind farm and you have to move it from one valley to the next one over, that could be a five-fold difference in the resource potential. And so you really have to build wind in very specific sites, and that means you really got to get social approval, you got to get actual permitting approval, and you have to be able to connect to the grid at those locations. And, you know, humans don’t tend to like to live in places with screaming fast wind speeds on a regular basis, right? (Laughs.)
Demsas: (Laughs.)
Jenkins: We like to be in places that are more mild weather. And so the best, windiest locations are mountain passes and the great, wide open Great Plains and places where not a lot of people live. And so the grid doesn’t go there today, for the most part, or, if it does, the lines are relatively weak, and we can only connect the first few hundred megawatts before we run out of capacity or space on the wires. And so that also means that wind power is more dependent on solving transmission expansion and permitting challenges than solar is.
Demsas: Okay. We’ll have more with Jesse in a minute, but first we have a quick break.
[Break]
Demsas: I want to pick up on what you were just saying about why wind developments are so challenging, right? Because you drew out a few things that are outside the purview of just lawmakers right now.
Supply-chain issues are not entirely in our control. Financing landscape, interest rates, tax credits sunsetting—obviously, that’s a little bit more in our control—but, in general, these are just issues that are often much bigger than just, What do policymakers want to do in either Congress or in state legislatures or whatever right now?
And that’s also frustrating about permitting, right? Because it’s entirely in our control. It’s entirely a question of, What rules are we going to put forth for how developers get to build things in America?
But the place that I have the most sympathy for skeptics of this focus on resolving permitting problems is the overfocus on the federal level, right? There’s a lot of people who care about federal policy. And you mentioned NEPA—that’s the National Environmental Policy Act. That’s the big environmental law that passes in the 1970s.
And the NEPA process includes a lot of other things than just the specific bill, but that bill gets a lot of attention just because I think there’s a psychology of people who work in policy, that they want to work on federal policy. It’s the big thing to do. I mean, maybe because they live in D.C., or it’s such a slog to think about, How do I get through all of the problems that exist in each of the 50 states or all 3,000 counties or the 90,000 localities that exist in the whole country? It’s just less exciting to do that kind of work. Not that I don’t think the federal stuff is important, but if I were to say which is a bigger constraint, I do think that local and state—both permitting but also politics—is really at the core of this.
So why do you think that we don’t focus more on state and local permitting?
Jenkins: I do think that’s a big factor. I think if you can go to Congress and—with one stroke of the pen or a thousand pages of legislative text—change the law in 50 states, that has a lot of appeal, and there is a lot of legitimate leverage to those kinds of victories. But the reality is that this stuff does get built on the ground at the local level, and it intersects with all kinds of local permitting and political challenges.
What I think you highlighted there was a couple of really important things, though. One is that they changed the rules midstream. I think what you hear a lot from businesses: Just tell us the process and stick to it. And make it a finite length, and we will navigate it. But if you change the process midstream, or you allow for an innumerable number of challenges on an indefinite period, we don’t even know what game we’re playing, and we don’t know how to do it, and the risk is open-ended. And I’d rather develop something else—put my money somewhere else where that’s not the challenge.
And so the thing with NEPA—and the reason I think it draws so much attention for reform—is that it’s just so obviously been used in a way that it was not really intended. The National Environmental Policy Act basically just says you have to consider environmental impacts in basically anything the federal government does.
So that includes permitting on federal lands. That includes federal funding for certain things. So all highways that get federal funds, even if they’re not on federal lands—all of those factors, anything the federal government touches—it’s a requirement that you think about the environmental impacts of that decision.
That’s a smart thing to do, right? We should be thinking about the environment. What’s interesting about it is two things: One is it doesn’t actually require you to change your decisions.
Demsas: Yeah.
Jenkins: It just requires you to say, I thought about it. (Laughs.)
Demsas: I considered it.
Jenkins: Yeah. I considered it. Yep, I considered that this would pollute the lake.
And then I continued, anyway.
Demsas: (Laughs.)
Jenkins: Right? That is consistent with NEPA. As long as you gave it an adequate consideration, you don’t have to show that your decision changed at all. You just have to have a binder somewhere that has an environmental consultant assessing that impact and make it clear that you assessed it.
Demsas: I think people really don’t realize that most environmental lawsuits are not, Hey, I think you’re polluting this lake. It’s, Hey, I don’t think you put the comma in the right place. That’s a little bit derivative, but they’re saying, You didn’t do the process the way we expected, and that’s the lawsuit, you know?
Jenkins: Exactly. And so it’s not a Clean Water Act suit, where you could actually say, No, under the Clean Water Act, this project is illegal. It’s purely a process violation, and local opponents of projects have figured this out a long time ago. And what it basically does is open the door for a never-ending set of challenges.
You come in, and you say, All right. You didn’t consider the impact on this endangered newt or bird that we just found in the area, or something like that. And then they say, Okay. Well, I got to go back and look at that. And then when that’s done, that group or another group says, Ah, and you also didn’t consider the sun glinting off of the turbines and how that might disorient a migrating bird, or something like that.
You can raise any number of what, on the surface, look like legitimate considerations that then all have to be considered and, again, don’t have to affect the decision in any material way. But until the government has shown that they considered them, the process can’t proceed.
And so if we go back to square one, and we just say, Look, our goal is to ensure that the federal government and, really, all developers are considering environmental impacts when they’re making decisions, that’s a great goal. The process that we’ve created to do that is, first of all, not guaranteed to actually have any material impact on decision making, which doesn’t seem ideal. And, second, is just set up to allow a never-ending set of lawsuits by—we should be clear—well-connected, well-funded organizations that understand how to exploit and use the legal system, not just every citizen, and certainly not some of the least-engaged and least-empowered communities that we might be most concerned about the impacts for.
Demsas: Yeah. To me, there’s obviously no perfect system. The question is: Which way do you want to bias the system to go towards? And—because of the experience of building out the highways and also just massive energy projects, like dams and different things like that, in the mid-century—we decided to bias the system against change.
And the question is: Are you willing to get a few bad projects built in exchange for getting a bunch of good projects built? Or is the cost of a single bad project so bad that we’re just like, No. Unless you’ve passed thousands and thousands of layers of review, you’re not allowed to do anything?
Jenkins: That’s a great way to frame it.
Demsas: And so I want us to take on the big pushback I get, because a lot of our conversation has assumed that you need to have these big projects. It’s assumed we need to build these utility-scale, massive solar and wind projects in order to respond to the climate crisis and to electrify the grid and to meet our energy needs.
The response I get sometimes from people who want to see that electrification happen and want to see us respond to climate change but are really suspect about these big projects—whether because they have conservationist concerns, or they just don’t really like the idea of massive development, or whatever; they have ideological concerns with this sort of approach—is that, We can actually do this with just small-scale solar. We can do what California is doing and try to find every single rooftop possible to put rooftop solar on, and then we can also lower our demand in other ways.
What do you say to people who argue this?
Jenkins: That’s not correct. (Laughs.) It just doesn’t add up. We should do as much distributed generation as we can without breaking the bank. I think one of the big problems is that distributed solar in the U.S. is three to four times more expensive than it is everywhere else in the world.
In Australia, you can build a rooftop solar project for about a dollar Australian per watt now, so that’s 75, 80 cents U.S. per watt. It costs $3 to $4 a watt for the same-scale project in the U.S. That’s just nuts. And again, it actually probably has to do with permitting.
Demsas: Oh, yeah.
Jenkins: The biggest thing that the industry points to is the fact that—you mentioned how many thousands of municipalities and counties there are out there—every single one has a different permitting office. They have different inspectors who interpret the code in different ways. They may have adopted different code standards.
Demsas: Or historic-preservation stuff. I know someone in D.C. who tried to get a rooftop solar on his house, and it was just a minefield. He was like, I’m just trying to do something good. You said you wanted me to do this! (Laughs.)
Jenkins: Exactly. And so there’s just this thicket, again, to navigate that makes it very challenging and a process. And that makes the customer experience pretty terrible, right? When my roof sprung a leak, I called a roofer, and they were there two days later, and they fixed it. And I wrote him a check, and that was it, right? That’s how easy it should be to put solar on your roof.
Instead, it takes six months before you can get a project interconnected, and there’s all these different steps. And, as a result, it’s not a very competitive market, either, because the customer experience sucks, so you have to sell really hard rather than have people go and just get online and buy it at a low cost of customer acquisition, and because you’ve got to be really good at navigating all of this bureaucracy. And that’s just a barrier to entry for many smaller firms. So, you know, permitting reform at a local level and streamlining and standardization seems to be one of the solutions to do more with distributed energy, as well.
Putting that aside, if we could do that and could drop the cost to a dollar a watt—which is comparable to the cost of utility-scale solar projects today, but without having to build the transmission and without having to build out greenfield sites in the desert or the farmland or something like that—we should max that out. That should be a great way to develop lots of solar.
We just don’t have enough rooftops, enough land area in developed areas to do that. And we can’t only power the grid with solar power. We need solar and wind, and there’s no real viable way to do distributed wind at any scale. And we don’t just need wind and solar; we need all kinds of other stuff, too, to complement them and make a balanced energy diet of technologies that can be there when you need them for as long as you need them, so they can fill in for the weather-dependent resources. And those, largely—they all exhibit big economies of scale, as well, and so you need to build at large scale or in certain locations. Like geothermal plants have to be where the earth is hot, and nuclear plants have to be large, and they have to be where the permitting can get agreement and where there’s coolant water and things like that.
And second, it has to all be clean. So we need to basically rebuild the entirety of our current grid twice—all with clean electricity. And you can’t do all of that with rooftop solar. You maybe can do 15 or 20 percent of it, but nowhere near all of it.
Demsas: Yeah. There’s a 2016 study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and they said that if the U.S. put rooftop solar on every single building where it was technically feasible, that would only generate about 1,400 terawatt hours of energy annually. To put that into context, we need to generate nearly 11,000 terawatt hours of electricity a year in order to get to net-zero emissions in 2050.
Jenkins: That’s right.
Demsas: So you’re getting overall, like, a tenth, you know?
Jenkins: Yeah, exactly. We use about 4,000 terawatt hours today, so it isn’t even enough to meet today’s electricity demand, let alone the double or triple that we need to decarbonize the country. That’s right.
Demsas: That’s one of those things where people treat that like it’s an ideological disagreement. I’m like, This is just an empirical one. Do we have the ability to actually meet our energy diet here? It doesn’t seem possible.
Jenkins: I mean, these are the technologies that are available. Anytime you need them, they’re reliable, clean energy. And that includes nuclear power and geothermal and maybe natural gas with carbon capture, if we can do that in a clean manner. There’s some designs that do that without any air pollution by burning in a pure oxygen environment, oxy combustion.
So, you know, different ways to do this. You need technologies that are going to produce a lot of energy and be there when you need them if you want to reduce the amount of wind and solar you have to build. So that mostly means, you know, nuclear, geothermal, and fossil with carbon capture. You know, maybe fusion someday.
So if we really want to land spare and reduce the amount of greenfield solar and wind, it’s not distributed solar that’s the solution. It’s nuclear power, right? And geothermal energy and these kinds of things.
Demsas: I also think that one of the things that becomes really complicated about these conversations is that often people with very similar end-state desires—like they want a clean-energy economy—have very different intuitions about the small-D democratic ways to get there.
So Leah Stokes—she’s a UC Santa Barbara professor, and she looked at wind-energy opposition in North America from 2000 to 2016. And she finds that 17 percent of wind projects are facing opposition, often by a small number of people. The median figure is 23 people. So on average, 23 people are the ones who are responsible for this opposition.
When I would present these findings to people who are skeptical about doing all this permitting reform, they would say, Well, if these developers would just work with the community—if they would get these community-benefit agreements—then you actually would get better projects in the end. There are a lot of people who believe, Yes, maybe the NEPA process or these permitting processes are onerous, but they make better projects in the end.
I’m really skeptical about this because it really depends what your definition of “better project” is. Often it means a smaller project, which means you’re making it harder to meet our clean-energy goals. But, in addition to that, I also just think that it’s not really clear that even if you were getting slightly better projects, that that outweighs the problems of delay.
Jenkins: Yeah.
Demsas: I don’t know how you think about this issue. I know it’s a very, very difficult and thorny one, but how do you respond to people who’ll bring that up to you?
Jenkins: No, again, like we talked about earlier with NEPA, NEPA isn’t a process by which we hear these concerns and then address them. It’s a process by which we hear these concerns and then write a study and stick it in a binder and move on with the day, right, and then allow for unending legal suits to raise some future issues to empower a small group of five or 10 or 15 or 20 people who are able to hire a lawyer to indefinitely delay projects.
I would just much rather we have a process by which we hear those voices, we study the evidence for the decision making, and then we have a process to weigh the costs and benefits—including the cost of not building the project—which will have real public impacts in a variety of different ways. And so I think that’s just an important thing.
You mentioned something earlier, which is that the kind of the regime we’ve built is meant to protect the status quo. That is the definition of conservatism.
Demsas: Yeah.
Jenkins: The environmental regime we have is not a progressive regime. It is a conservative regime. That’s not a value statement; that’s just a descriptive statement. It is there to stop things from changing, to keep it the way it is now.
We know we have to change, right? We have to change the system that we’ve built. We have to build a cleaner energy system. That means basically rebuilding and remaking how we produce and consume all of the energy products in the country in a matter of 25 years or so.
We have to change. That’s a fundamentally progressive project. And so what we need are institutions that can reflect legitimate environmental concerns in a progressive way. And that’s just not what we built. That’s not what we have today.
Demsas: And that raises—I think a big part of this, underlying this conversation, is how does ideology actually make its way into material reality? Because when I think about how Republicans talk about clean energy or the environment—even Republicans in Texas, who I think are very well aware of the benefits of renewable energy, when the blackouts were happening, there were people who would blame wind and solar, renewable energy for the problems. You have anti-EV laws coming out as being proposed or just a bunch of things that try to classify natural gas as renewable, as clean energy.
And then you have Democrats, who I think care very sincerely, many times, about transitioning to a clean-energy economy. And they pass all these laws. They put all this money in. I mean, they’re the force behind the IRA getting to passage. But, at the end of the day, it seems like there’s also this question of: Is your ideology for or against building things? And that’s going to dominate, a lot of the times, whether or not you actually like the things that are built.
In Texas, I don’t think that they care more about renewables than the people in California do. It feels like in Texas, they just let things happen. And I don’t know how you think about that.
Jenkins: No, I think that’s very true. It’s that in Texas, the culture and regulatory footing of the state is, We build and develop energy resources, whatever it is, right? Whether it’s natural gas or oil or wind or solar—these are the resources that Texas is endowed with, and our economy is built around developing those resources.
I don’t think that’s what you would put in the mission statement of the state of California. But you probably would in the state of Texas. So yeah, I do think that that is a big difference. And it’s probably true that people in California care more about wind and solar than they do in Texas. It’s just that the state infrastructure and culture are not oriented around the idea that we need to build that.
Now that’s starting to change. This struggle around climate is causing all kinds of rifts and all kinds of productive discourse, like this podcast, right, where we’re trying to think about how we can address all of the priorities of environmentalism and environmental justice and participatory democracy—all these legitimate values—in ways that are fundamentally progressive and designed to build and change things, not to keep things the way they are today.
Demsas: Well, Jesse, always our final question: What is something that you felt was a great idea, but it didn’t end up panning out in the end?
Jenkins: I guess I would say hydrogen.
Demsas: Okay. (Laughs.)
Jenkins: For my entire career of studying energy issues, from way back into the 2000s, we’ve always had this dream that hydrogen would be another carbon-free energy carrier, like electricity, that we could use in lieu of fuels. And that promise is still there, and we now have actually a set of policies in place to support the growth of cleaner hydrogen production.
But one of the metaphors for hydrogen is that it’s like a Swiss Army knife for fuels, right? It can do all these different things. It can power cars. It can be used to make electricity. It can decarbonize steel. It can produce high-temperature process heat for industry. It can heat our homes, etcetera, etcetera.
All of that is true; it can do those things. But like a Swiss Army knife—if you have a real tool for that job, why would you use a Swiss Army knife?
Demsas: (Laughs.)
Jenkins: (Laughs.) Right? So the more we’ve studied hydrogen over the years, over the decades, the more real tools for the job we’ve identified, and the number of things that it seems like a good idea to use hydrogen for, is just steadily shrinking. And so—
Demsas: Do you own a Swiss Army knife, Jesse?
Jenkins: I do have a Swiss Army knife. I use it when we go camping, and we might need one of these tools we don’t have around. But I never use it in my house. Do you? I use the scissors when I need the scissors. I don’t use the scissors on the Swiss Army knife.
Demsas: I feel like Swiss Army knives are the kind of thing that you want when you’re 13 years old, and then you kind of find it every time you move. You know what I mean?
Jenkins: (Laughs.) Yeah. So I think that hydrogen, on paper—it sounds really great. It can do all these great things. What we’re realizing is that anywhere you can do something better—mostly anywhere you can use electricity directly, rather than use electricity to produce hydrogen to do something else, which just carries a lot of unnecessary efficiency losses and new infrastructure you have to build—you ought to do that better thing first.
Demsas: Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Jesse. If you guys enjoyed this conversation, you should definitely check out his podcast, Shift Key. It’s a great climate, wonky podcast. But thanks for coming on.
Jenkins: Thanks for having me. This was fun.
Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
And hey, thanks to everyone who has already reviewed the show. It really helps us reach new listeners. If you haven’t yet, and you like what you’re hearing, please head over to Apple Podcasts to leave us a review. I’d really appreciate it.
I’m Jerusalem Demsas. We’ll see you next week.