An “Abundance” of Questions: Is Permitting Reform Really the Key to the Energy Transition?

As the need to transition away from fossil fuels accelerates, a key debate has gained renewed political traction: are environmental reviews slowing the deployment of renewable energy projects?  

After the Federal Permitting Improvement Act of 2015, Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, and numerous proposals for permitting reform since, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s thought-provoking policy-critique, Abundance, has seemed to inspire a bipartisan renewal of the permitting reform debate centered on the energy transition.  

In Abundance, Klein and Thompson take aim at the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and paint it as a once-useful, now-inconvenient, barrier to rapidly building out affordable housing and clean energy. The “abundance agenda” suggests reforming the environmental review process by curtailing such reviews to achieve faster approval of projects needed for the energy transition, like high-voltage transmission lines and wind and solar facilities.  

Bipartisan groups in Congress have taken the authors’ call for a “liberalism that builds” out more of the country’s infrastructure for housing, transit, and energy. This includes the Build America Caucus, nicknamed the “abundance caucus” for its championing of the abundance agenda and continuing the latest push for permitting reform. The caucus has focused on the Fix Our Forests Act, a pending bill that would reform forestry-related permitting. Similarly, in late November 2025, the House Committee on Natural Resources advanced the Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development (SPEED) Act, a bill that would significantly change the NEPA process.  

Despite the increased congressional attention, empirical evidence suggests that the focus of their attention is misplaced. The following questions (and answers) untangle some common misconceptions in the debate over “permitting reform.”  

To what extent are environmental reviews delaying permits? 
Abundance advocates suggest that an overhaul of NEPA’s review process would alleviate the long wait times for permits. But that ignores three important points.  

First, Environmental Impact Statements (EISs), the most rigorous level of review, make up only about 1% of all NEPA documents.  

Second, according to a January 2025 Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) report, timelines in NEPA reviews are getting shorter. CEQ data showed that the median time to complete an EIS decreased from 3.6 years to 2.2 years between 2019 and 2024, respectively. In that same timeframe, CEQ also noted that agencies are producing a greater percentage of final EISs issued within 2 years, from 24% to 41% in just 5 years. (In 2023, the Fiscal Responsibility Act limited EISs to a 2-year timeline, and while it is difficult to determine whether the FRA caused these changes, they do indicate a clear trend.)  

Third, and despite what abundance advocates suggest, permitting delays stemming from lengthy environmental reviews play a relatively small role in opposing renewable energy projects. According to an evaluation of solar and wind projects between 2010 and 2021, only 5% of wind and solar projects required an EIS and only 1.5% of renewable projects during that time were challenged through litigation (leading to more delays); furthermore, a survey of wind and solar project developers found that respondents identified environmental regulations as the cause of delay for less than 15% of projects.  

Some projects, however, do take longer than expected.  

What’s causing delays for those projects? 
The short answer: resource capacity and coordination. Research examining different sectors, among different federal agencies, and across multiple decades, has revealed that delays result primarily from limited agency budgets leading to insufficient staffing, lack of staff expertise, inconsistent application of policies across different offices and regions, and antiquated technology and data management. Additional problems include a lack of coordination between different levels of government, inefficient or lacking coordination between relevant federal agencies, and litigation risks often stemming from the failure to elicit meaningful participation from the public at every stage of the process.  

So, what is delaying the energy transition? The myopic focus on NEPA and other environmental permitting regimes obscures more salient challenges to the energy transition, namely local opposition to the siting of projects and the patchwork of state and local regulations involved.  

1. Siting challenges. Local opposition can impede the siting and deployment of projects, like solar, wind, battery storage, and high-voltage transmission lines that are needed to connect intermittent renewable energy sources like wind and solar to the grid. Opposition to such projects is most often found at the local level, through zoning restrictions or other county ordinances, though some state-level zoning restrictions exist. In a June 2025 report, the Sabin Center identified 49 states with local restrictions to renewable projects; 16 of those states had significant state-level restrictions (e.g., a ban on renewable energy facility construction, like Pennsylvania’s protection of farmland from solar development). A similar study in February 2024 found that 15% of counties in the U.S. ban wind and/or solar. And a 2023 survey of renewables developers by Berkeley Lab found that 30% of respondents cited local ordinances and community opposition as the key reasons why their wind or solar project had been canceled.  
2. The interconnection queue. Even if a wind or solar project can overcome siting challenges, there’s still the issue of connecting to the grid. A proposed project files an interconnection request with the grid operator and gets on the waitlist, or queue. Before starting the project though, the owner of the project must conduct a series of interconnection studies to determine the necessary system upgrades and costs required to accommodate the new project on the grid. This interconnection queue has a significant backlog— the median wait time to get that electricity on that grid is now around 5 years. A 2023 report from Berkeley National Labs found that only 19% of all projects requesting interconnection from 2000-2018 were ultimately built, with over 70% withdrawing their request due to associated wait costs. Of the current queue’s capacity—the amount of electricity waiting to be added to the grid—an overwhelming majority (95%) comes from proposed solar, wind, and battery storage projects. The delays highlight the fragmented approach to updating the transmission infrastructure needed for expanding renewable energy across the grid. Such upgrades require navigating a complex patchwork of regulators, including federal agencies, regional transmission operators, and state public utility commissions, to name a few.  

What’s the downside to focusing on NEPA or permitting reform? Doesn’t it at least solve part of the problem?
Some reforms, like the ePermit Act’s call for digitizing the NEPA process, attempt to address some of the administrative problems described above. Yet, while addressing inefficiencies in permitting is likely helpful, it obfuscates the more specific, and especially localized, challenges to the deployment of renewable energy.  

Furthermore, taking aim at NEPA could have serious political consequences. Part of what makes NEPA essential is more than just detailing adverse environmental impacts; rather, it upholds and advances important democratic governance principles. It has also been a key tool used by environmental justice communities to spread awareness about environmental harm in their communities. For example, the Ten West Link Transmission in Arizona and California selected an alternative transmission line route after public outcry over potential harm to sacred Indigenous lands and a wildlife refuge, leading to the use of existing infrastructure and thus minimizing construction times and costs. The Ten West Link outcome demonstrated that public participation in every stage of the permitting process leads to better results for all. Thus, a strengthening of permitting regimes would not only hasten the energy transition but make it a just one.