Minnesota’s Red-Tape-Cutting Experiment
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Climate Forward
Minnesota’s Red-Tape-Cutting Experiment
Last year, the state passed a law to tackle a major barrier to cleaner energy: the long bureaucratic delays to get basic permits.
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One of the biggest hurdles to bringing clean energy sources online in the U.S. often isn’t a lack of money, necessity or even willpower. It’s red tape.
In some states, simply getting government approvals to build solar or wind projects can take more than a year, and that can come on top of local opposition or federal environmental reviews. Legislation to overhaul the process of issuing permits has been stalled in Congress for years, even as electricity demand is projected to rise and thousands of energy projects are stuck waiting to be connected to the grid.
But Minnesota is trying to fix its own part of this cumbersome process.
Last year, Gov. Tim Walz signed a bill that aims to simplify the state’s permitting process, in large part to help Minnesota reach its goal of having a carbon-free electric grid by 2040.
It has typically taken energy projects in Minnesota 12 to 13 months to be granted site permits, according to Jeremy Duehr, an attorney at Fredrikson & Byron, a law firm that works with companies on the permitting process.