Bill Opalka | Oct 11, 2010

The fast-track review of large renewable energy projects is starting to break the approval logjam. The California Energy Commission just approved the largest concentrated solar power project in the world, though a final sign-off by federal officials is pending.

The clock is ticking for federal stimulus money to jump-start renewable energy projects before key deadlines pass. But state and federal agencies have to sign off on these very same projects without short-circuiting their own processes or public involvement.

One thing is certain: The Obama Administration has made the expansion of renewable energy resources a priority and is trying to use its executive power to expedite review and approval. The first secretarial order of Department of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar in March 2009 was to make renewable energy development on federal lands a priority, in fact.

Even before Obama's election, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 established a goal of 10,000 megawatts of renewable energy on federal lands by 2015. That has been accelerated by the president of 9,000 megawatts by the end of 2011. The Bureau of Land Management is the department's custodian of public lands.

A major milestone was reached last week when the first concentrated solar power (CSP) project on federal land received approval from the California Energy Commission CEC). BLM's sign-off is pending.

Solar Millennium, LLC received unanimous approval from the CEC to build and operate its Blythe Solar Power Project in Riverside County, which at 1,000 megawatts would be the largest CSP facility in the world.

In six southwestern states the BLM has identified 23 million acres for solar potential, 20.6 million acres for wind and 111 million acres for geothermal.

"There's been a significant shift to renewable energy, especially in the last two years," said Ray Brady the team lead for the BLM's Minerals and Realty Directorate since 2005. In short order, 106 employees have been added for the additional workload and a dozen development zones have been identified in six western states.

Various renewable energy developers, along with state and federal officials, have fast-tracked 34 projects on BLM lands - 14 solar, seven wind, six geothermal and seven for transmission - that the Administration want to complete reviews by the end of 2011. Reviews for seven solar projects are expected to be completed this year.

Along with consideration of the energy, economic and environmental consequences of the projects, and the transmission needed to serve them, the simple volume of government agencies and approvals is daunting.

The tool of choice to expedite the processes is the memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the various federal agencies, essentially a streamlining of the review among the cabinet-level departments, like Energy and Interior, their sub-agencies like BLM, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and their state counterparts, along with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and other state agencies.

It's probably too soon to know if there's widespread success - the slow processes have been decades in the making - but coordination of the multiple reviews has been made a priority.

The CEC seems to be banking on the streamlined processes to help the state meet its aggressive renewable goals. At 33 percent of generation by 2020, California has the most ambitious renewable energy mandates in the country. The CEC has approved several projects [5] in the past few weeks.

The agencies generally involved in California are the CEC, which has primary permitting authority for large-scale thermal energy projects, the California Department of Fish & Game, and federal agencies in the Interior Department, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, and the BL. Together, they comprise the California renewable energy action team, or REAT.
 
"We have 22 projects that we hope to final review by the end of the year," Michael Picker, senior advisor to the governor for renewable energy facilities in California, told me a few weeks ago. "One of the goals of the REAT is to add more certainty to the process and we think we've done that."

It looks like the process is starting to work.

This story first appeared in RenewablesBiz. It was written by Bill Opalka, its editor.