Senate Democrats ended permitting reform discussions after the Trump administration on Monday ordered work to halt on all offshore wind farms under construction, which total 7 GW.
“The illegal attacks on fully permitted renewable energy projects must be reversed if there is to be any chance that permitting talks resume,” Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., and ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, and Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., and ranking member of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said in a statement. “There is no path to permitting reform if this administration refuses to follow the law.”
The Trump administration “will own the higher electricity prices, increasingly decrepit infrastructure, and loss of competitiveness that result from its reckless policies,” the senators said.
The move to end discussions comes after the U.S. House of Representatives passed a permitting reform bill last week.
The Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development Act, called the SPEED Act, revises the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires federal agencies to assess how their actions affect the environment.
The bill includes “certainty” provisions that aim to prevent agencies from revisiting permits after they are issued. In addition to targeting offshore wind, the Trump administration has effectively stalled solar and wind development on federal land.
Even before the statement from Whitehouse and Heinrich, the outlook for permitting reform was dim, in part because of the upcoming midterm elections as well as anger over the Trump administration’s efforts to stifle renewable energy.
Whitehouse and Heinrich said Congress could have reached a deal that would make the permitting process faster and more efficient.
“But any deal would have to be administered by the Trump administration,” the senators said. “Its reckless and vindictive assault on wind energy doesn’t just undermine one of our cheapest, cleanest power sources, it wrecks the trust needed with the executive branch for bipartisan permitting reform.”
Whitehouse and Heinrich thanked Sens. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., and Mike Lee, R-Utah, chairs of the environment and public works and energy and natural resources committees, respectively, for their “good-faith efforts to negotiate a permitting reform bill that would have lowered electricity prices for all Americans.”
The Trump administration’s decision to pause leases and order work to halt for 90 days for undisclosed national security reasons affects five offshore wind projects: the 2.6-GW Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, the 2-GW Empire Wind and 924-MW Sunrise Wind off of New York, the 800-MW Vineyard Wind 1 off Massachusetts and the 700-MW Revolution Wind offshore Rhode Island.
