What made it interesting to me was the idea that you don't know what all the hurdles are until you start knocking down what you think are the prime hurdles.
According to the podcast, the previous hurdle towards consumer acceptance of renewables was the financial cost to the consumer for initial installation. Once various subsidies such as the IRA came into place (and I'm not here to discuss the politics of that), it exposed the other hurdles as (a) transmission/distribution and (b) the regulatory systems in place that are intended to maximize public benefit but have been weaponized by NIMBYsim.
More specifically, they discuss the environmental approval process of consisting of a thousand opportunities to veto the project, or at least delay it so long that from a business standpoint it functions as a veto/ project killer. Their proposal for reform is not to limit the environmental impact discussion, but rather to consolidate the quantity of veto opportunities into fewer veto points where all issues can be reviewed in batches, rather than dragging in our with sequential inquiries ("...have you considered...").
Here in CA we have CEQA as well as NEPA so the process is even more strict.
The paragraphs that rang true for my own development projects, many of which are affordable housing:
"When I would present these findings [about the small groups that can stymie big projects] to people who are skeptical about doing all this permitting reform, they would say, Well, if these developers would just work with the community—if they would get these community-benefit agreements—then you actually would get better projects in the end. There are a lot of people who believe, Yes, maybe the NEPA process or these permitting processes are onerous, but they make better projects in the end.
I’m really skeptical about this because it really depends what your definition of “better project” is. Often it means a smaller project, which means you’re making it harder to meet our clean-energy goals. But, in addition to that, I also just think that it’s not really clear that even if you were getting slightly better projects, that that outweighs the problems of delay."
