President Obama is expected to make commitments for streamlining the permitting process for renewable energy projects on federal land during his talk at Georgetown University today.
Per the President’s Climate Action Plan:
In 2012, the President set a goal to issue permits for 10 gigawatts of renewables on public lands by the end of the year. The Department of the Interior achieved this goal ahead of schedule and the President has directed it to permit an additional 10 gigawatts by 2020. Since 2009, the Department of Interior has approved 25 utility-scale solar facilities, nine wind farms, and 11 geothermal plants . . . Also, the Department of Defense – the single largest consumer of energy in the United States – is committed to deploying 3 gigawatts of renewable energy on military installations, including solar, wind, biomass, and geothermal, by 2025. In addition, federal agencies are setting a new goal of reaching 100 megawatts of installed renewable capacity across the federally subsidized housing stock by 2020.
Federal permitting is a very, very big issue for utility-scale renewable energy projects, especially solar power projects sited West of the Mississippi River. The maps below illustrate why. Continue...[Forbs]
1 comment:
All the insider expert analysis of the president's speech agrees on the following points:
1) There was very little mention of wind power and no mention of the need to continue subsidizing it.
2) What little mention of renewables there was in the speech was really mostly about solar.
3) The mention of renewables was only about putting more renewables (solar) on federal land.
Take a look at the maps that are in the Forbes article. By far most federal land is in the West. Of all the states, New York ranks among those with the least federal land.
The president's speech was almost all an attack on coal. There was nothing in the speech that could give any reason for the wind lobby in New York or other northeastern states to be doing any high-fiving yesterday. In fact, for such a highly touted speech, the wind lobby must have felt largely ignored in yesterday's speech.
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