A new bill could change how the US builds energy infrastructure

A sweeping bit of legislation designed to cut red tape could speed up the buildout of energy infrastructure in the US.

With the dust barely settled on this week’s momentous midterms, the Senate is set to vote on the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA) on November 9. It’s a plan that could finally start an overhaul of the slow, complicated process for getting energy projects approved, as part of something called permitting reform. People on both sides of the political aisle have been pushing for this type of change for some years. 

The key question is whether this will cut greenhouse-gas emissions from the US energy sector or push them higher still.  

The federal permitting system is designed to protect the environment against industrial pollution from large projects like power plants, transmission lines, and natural-gas pipelines. Today, permitting is governed by a range of laws, including the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Water Act. And if there’s one thing you might know about the current state of permitting in the US it’s that it’s slow and incredibly complicated.

So in its 417 pages, BAAJA attempts to tighten things up. The bill has provisions that narrow the sorts of projects that need to apply for federal permits and others that enact deadlines in hopes of speeding up a process that today can take years. (There are also specific provisions about transmission planning, mining, and the rest of the kitchen sink; this thing is dense.)

One thing to know about this bill is that it’s largely technology neutral: It opens the doors for the buildout of projects involving both fossil fuels and renewables. So there’s a weird mishmash of legislators and outside groups supporting it.

The bill’s four sponsors in the Senate are two Republicans and two Democrats. The White House has backed this permitting reform bill, with its Council of Economic Advisors finding that it would reduce review times and have economic benefits like boosting GDP.

Clean energy groups like the American Clean Power Association have largely come out in favor of the bill too, with the group’s analysis finding that it could unlock 350 gigawatts of new clean energy for the grid.

Some environmental groups, however, oppose the bill, or parts of it. An assessment from the Natural Resources Defense Council says the parts about transmission could have substantial benefits for the grid, but the narrowing of environmental reviews could be damaging for public and private lands.

Many in the climate world have long been calling for permitting reform, arguing that renewables stand to benefit more than fossil fuels. The thinking is that solar and wind power are some of the cheapest sources available today, so if we unlock the ability to build more energy, they are likely to win out economically.

A few early analyses have tried to quantify just what BAAJA would mean for emissions in the US. One, from the think tank Rhodium Group, found that in the best-case scenario, the bill would cut economy-wide emissions by 4%, reduce annual energy bills by $78 per household, and add 200 gigawatts of new clean energy by 2040. In the worst case, emissions would stay about the same.

Another report, from the nonprofit research group Resources for the Future, found that the bill could cut power-sector emissions 6% by 2041 and save more than $350 billion on system costs by midcentury.

But there are some concerns that this permitting bill’s real effect would be to open the floodgates for new natural-gas plants. As data centers have put more pressure on the grid, a wave of such plants have been announced.

“You get down to a trade-off between essentially growing the clean electricity industry on the one hand and then, as a compromise, growing the fossil-fuel industry on the other,” says Kevin Kircher, an energy modeler and assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue.

To quantify that trade-off, Kircher also modeled the potential emissions effects of the bill and found that if BAAJA had been in place in 2025, energy sector emissions would have been higher than the actual baseline. Health and mortality risks associated with air pollution would also have increased.

This bill is scheduled for a Senate vote on November 9, well before the next Congress takes control. It’s not clear what the dramatic victories for Democrats might mean for the legislation, which was expected to pass the Senate with largely Republican support if a few Democrats got on board. Democrats could decide to wait for next year, when they’ll have control of both chambers. But any deal would ultimately need to win Trump’s signature, limiting what a future bill might be able to change. 

In a world where permitting new projects is easier, we’ll see more clean energy, but we’ll see more natural gas, too. And while prices could get lower, that could push demand for electricity higher, leading to more emissions overall.

Simplifying the permitting system and cutting red tape is a worthy goal. But when it comes to emissions, it still really matters what, exactly, you want to build.