Columbus, OH – On Tuesday, The Buckeye Institute replied to a request for information from the U.S. Department of Energy outlining how the United States can accelerate the development of large-scale energy infrastructure projects to meet the nation’s growing energy needs. 

In its comments, The Buckeye Institute urged the Trump administration to remove “[r]egulatory barriers imped[ing] the U.S. electric grid from meeting new energy demands,” and allow private capital and market-driven innovation to address growing electricity demand. 

Aswin Prabhakar, an economic research analyst at The Buckeye Institute and author of The Buckeye Institute’s response, outlined three obstacles that prevent the U.S. from solving its energy capacity challenge. 

• First, federal regulations have incentivized applications for highly speculative projects, which has delayed viable projects and clogged the queue to get connected to the grid. By treating all applications as equivalent, regardless of their contribution to grid reliability or likelihood of completion, legitimate generation projects are drowning “in a sea of speculative applications.”
• Second, anti-competitive transmission policies inflate energy costs by 25 to 40 percent. The root cause are policies that grant powerful and entrenched utility companies a monopoly on transmission development. 
• Third, fragmented federal oversight creates overlapping regulatory barriers to bringing new energy projects online. For example, environmental reviews under one agency average 4.5 years, and interconnection studies under another agency take more than 36 months, which creates delays that inflate project costs. 

The Buckeye Institute urged the U.S. Department of Energy to 1) petition the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for interconnection reforms, 2) require competitive procurement for federally supported transmission projects, and 3) coordinate with other agencies to streamline regulatory timelines. These reforms will remove barriers to private investment, enabling new energy projects to come online more quickly and at lower costs for consumers.

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