of New Mexico Desert, transforming it

into the largest wind farm in the Western hemisphere.

The project, SunZia Wind, was greenlit in 2006,

but it only just received a permit

to start construction 17 years later.

- Well, we clearly have a problem

in how we're permitting projects.

- [Narrator] One of the most elusive pieces

of green energy projects

in the US isn't raw materials, labor, or even money.

It's a permit.

More than 10,000 energy projects,

the vast majority of them wind and solar,

were waiting for permission to connect

to electric grids at the end of 2022.

We'll break down how this decades-long permitting process

is becoming a major obstacle for developers

and the country's efforts to fight climate change.

To understand how the energy permitting process works

let's head back to SunZia.

Once completed, developers say it will sprawl

across three New Mexico counties and supply power

to more than three million households

in Arizona and California.

- It delivers in about 1% of the carbon goals

for the country.

It's certainly bigger than the Hoover Dam.

I wanna share our gratitude to every person

and company that's made today's achievement possible.

(audience applauding)

- [Narrator] Cary Kottler is the Chief Development Officer

for Pattern Energy, the company behind SunZia.

Developers first applied for federal approval in 2008.

Environmental reviews started in 2009.

In 2011, the project was fast tracked

by the Obama Administration.

When the project was conceived

the company thought it would receive its permits

in about five years.

- I don't think anybody goes

into a project thinking it'll take 15 years,

and so it's had some twists and turns along the way.

- [Narrator] Those twists and turns are tied

to the local, state and federal permitting systems

that can and do get delayed at any stage of the process.

- With the SunZia project we really see the complexity,

that you have the federal layer

and then you have a lot of the local issues.

- [Narrator] Sanjay Patnaik is a climate policy researcher

at the Brookings Institution think tank.

SunZia, like many other renewable energy projects,

has faced a range of roadblocks

when it comes to local permitting.

- Oftentimes delays at the local level can be traced back

to the strongest opposition

because people feel really strongly

about these projects going in their backyard, right?

People don't want to give up their land

for a transmission line, for instance,

to aesthetic reasons, right?

People don't want to wind farm right off the coast.

- [Narrator] Figuring out whether local regulations allow

for development can be tricky.

- Let's assume a solar power plant, for instance,

that covers multiple municipalities.

You will need a permit from all of them

and they have very different administrative capacities,

different laws on the books.

- [Narrator] This process plays out at the state level too.

- We also have states that require right of way permits,

for instance California, for transmission lines.

We have a state where the project is located

and then a transmission line goes through a state

to another state where the consumers are located.

And so that state that is in between

doesn't get any of the benefits,

that state only gets the costs

and oftentimes states are not happy with that.

They're trying to avoid that

and are trying to put up roadblocks.

- [Narrator] But one of the lengthiest parts of the process

happens at the federal level.

Each federal permit can take years

or sometimes as much as a decade to get approved.

- The longest is really the right of way permit

where the median length is nine years

and then we have others,

such as Environmental Impact Statement on the NEPA

that takes about 3.5 years as a median.

- [Narrator] Many of these permits

require repetitive paperwork

and generate thousands of pages of government analysis.

To understand how daunting this process can be,

consider a power line.

Transmission is crucial for renewable energy projects

because the best sites for wind and solar farms

are usually far from the cities

and industries that consume the most electricity.

For SunZia, this means building

a 550 mile high voltage power line

to transport more than 3,000 megawatts of wind power

to Arizona and California.

To construct it, developers needed permission

from a patchwork of federal, state,

local, and tribal agencies.

- Citing transmission lines is not an easy thing.

You need to take feedback from a lot of different people

and that's what we try to do.

And sometimes that takes a while.

- [Narrator] As a result of negotiations

with these stakeholders,

SunZia's transmission lines have been rerouted six times.

Building transmission lines in the US takes so long,

if they are built at all,

that it has become a major roadblock

for expanding clean energy.

(audience applauding) - The SunZia Project

is a game changer for America's clean energy economy.

- [Narrator] That's why White House officials

like Senior Climate Advisor John Podesta

are pushing for an overhaul of the permitting process.

- We have to increase transmission,

high performance interstate transmission by 60%

and we have to permit it twice as fast

as we've done over the last decade.

- [Narrator] After 17 years of regulatory hurdles,

Pattern Energy finally broke ground

on SunZia in September.

It's expected to be fully operational by 2026,

meaning the permitting process took more

than five times longer

than the project's estimated construction timeline.

Still, opponents of the SunZia project

say the years-long saga

can't be blamed on bureaucratic hurdles alone.

The project altered part of its route,

which also led to delays.

- There were a lot of land negotiation issues,

especially with the Department of Defense

because of a military installation over there

that further delayed the project.

- [Narrator] And when companies

finally get their projects approved,

they often face another hurdle.

The local grid is at capacity.

New wind and solar projects can't be added

unless parts of the grid are upgraded

and that costs developers money.

All of these delays lead some companies

to walk away entirely.

As time ticks by, rising material costs

can destroy a project's viability.

Options to buy land expire and customers can lose interest.

After years of dramatic growth, large scale solar, wind

and battery installations in the US fell 16% in 2022.

- It's now law. (audience applauding)

- [Narrator] The landmark Climate Bill

President Biden signed last year provides $370 billion

in subsidies to help make low carbon energy technologies

cheaper than fossil fuels.

But to keep up with that historic investment,

the permitting process will need to speed up.

- So the climate goals that the US has set,

which is to become Net Zero by 2050

and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2030

to half of 2005 levels,

will not be possible without permitting reform

that really speeds up the permitting process

for renewable energy projects.

- [Narrator] In May, Biden and US lawmakers made another run

at streamlining the permitting system

with the issue a central topic

in negotiations to raise the debt ceiling.

The bill includes modest steps to speed up reviews

of federal permits

under the National Environmental Policy Act,

like allowing environmental reviews

of multiple projects at a time.

- This is not just a federal problem.

At the level, there's nimbyism.

What we're responsible for

are the federal environmental reviews.

So trying to get that consolidation,

one single set of documents,

combining reviews around endangered species

with NEPA reviews is really important.

- [Narrator] This could offer some help

for both fossil fuel and clean energy projects

but falls far short of what either party had wanted.

- And at the very most senior levels,

at the cabinet secretary level, we're meeting

on a biweekly basis to look project by project,

see where there are challenges

but I think that there still needs to be work done,

particularly for interstate transmission.

- [Narrator] Consolidating

the transmission permitting process

at the federal level could be one way

to reduce these bottlenecks according to a Brookings report.

- And that means that individual states

cannot put up indefinite roadblocks

like we have seen in other projects,

and we are proposing to do on the same transmission lines

because that central authority from the federal government

could really help overcome some of these roadblocks

at the state level.

- [Narrator] Ultimately, there's no silver bullet solution

for fast tracking this permitting process.

Policy experts say it will require expansive reform

at the local, state and federal levels.

(bright music)