The American Public Power Association welcomes renewed bipartisan negotiations in the Senate on permitting reform. America’s demand for electricity is rising at a pace few anticipated just a few years ago. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s (NERC’s) recent Long-Term Reliability Assessment warns that 10-year summer peak demand is projected to grow by 224 GW, which represents an almost 70% increase from previous forecasts. Why? Communities are growing, manufacturing is reshoring, and the digital economy is expanding rapidly. At the same time, utilities face mounting reliability and affordability challenges driven by aging infrastructure, extreme weather, and complex supply chains. Meeting this moment will require significant investment in new grid infrastructure. Yet one major obstacle continues to slow progress: an outdated and burdensome federal permitting system.
COMMENTARY
This is not a theoretical policy debate. For the 2,000 public power utilities that serve 55 million Americans in 49 states, permitting delays translate directly into higher costs, lower reliability, and missed opportunities to bring new resources online when and where they are needed most.
Utilities need the flexibility to deploy a diverse mix of resources—both dispatchable and intermittent—to maintain reliability and keep power affordable for families and businesses. They also need the ability to get the infrastructure built to deliver power to their customers. But today’s permitting processes are often fragmented, duplicative, and unpredictable, turning essential infrastructure projects into years-long ordeals.
Congress has already demonstrated that a better permitting process is achievable. Bipartisan, infrastructure-neutral legislation passed by the House creates a strong foundation for reform. This includes the SPEED (Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development) and PERMIT (Promoting Efficient Review for Modern Infrastructure Today) Acts, which focus on improving coordination among agencies, setting clearer timelines, and reducing unnecessary delays while maintaining environmental safeguards, and the Fix Our Forests Act, which helps mitigate wildfire risk to existing infrastructure. These proposals do not favor one type of energy resource or infrastructure over another. Instead, they recognize a fundamental truth: no infrastructure—whether generation, transmission, or distribution—can serve customers if it cannot be permitted and built efficiently and safely.
Permitting reform is not about blasting past rules and regulations. It is about improving processes to ensure electric utilities can build energy infrastructure faster to meet rising demand and ensure 24/7 reliability. Streamlined, predictable permitting benefits everyone. It allows utilities to plan responsibly, communities to understand timelines and impacts, and policymakers to ensure that environmental reviews are both appropriately rigorous and efficient.
For community-owned, not-for-profit public power utilities who answer directly to their customers, these improvements are especially critical. Every delay increases costs borne by local communities, limits the ability to respond quickly to reliability threats, and slows growth.
Getting permitting reform right is a foundational step in building America’s energy future. Without it, even the best energy policies will fall short in practice. With it, the nation can unlock investment, strengthen reliability, and support economic growth across regions.
The Senate now has an opportunity to build on proven, bipartisan legislation from the House and deliver a lasting solution. The stakes are high, but the path forward is clear. It is time to modernize America’s permitting system so public power utilities—and the communities they serve—can meet growing demand with reliable, affordable electricity.
—Scott Corwin is president and CEO of the American Public Power Association, representing more than 2,000 community-owned electric utilities.
