Let States Build More Power

April 13, 2026

PROBLEM

More than half of Americans report that electricity bills are stressing their budgets. In nominal terms, electricity rates are up by an average of 33% over the past five years nationwide, adding $420 to household bills per year. Prices in 32 states grew by more than 25% in that time, with six states experiencing increases of over 50%. Decades of deferred electric grid maintenance requires investment to keep the lights on and at the same time that electricity demand is surging faster than the system can accommodate. 

Demand growth, by itself, is good: electrification reduces exposure to fossil fuel price shocks and supports energy security. The problem is that we are building supply far too slowly, and a major culprit is state siting and permitting rules that make it nearly impossible to build and scale new power generation – distributed or centralized – or transmission infrastructure in a reasonable timeframe. Candidly, there is no silver bullet that reverses this trajectory; the realistic goal is to slow how quickly rates rise and shift who covers those costs while at the same time building more wires and power plants.

IDEA

State policymakers should take several steps to simplify permitting and siting:

• Digitize permitting: Today, applying for a permit often involves manual submission of paper documents and back-and-forth on PDFs. Digital systems eliminate delays associated with manual handoffs that account for a disproportionate share of permitting time. Virginia’s Virginia Permit Transparency (VPT) system reduced permitting times by 70% by running review steps in parallel with real-time status tracking. In many cases, permitting digitization can be done via executive action, although it can also be enacted through legislation.

• Instant rooftop solar permitting: Because most residential solar installations are structurally identical, the current practice of requiring individual manual reviews for each project adds weeks of delay without providing any meaningful safety value. Rooftop solar in the US is up to seven times more expensive to install as in Australia or Germany, largely due to permitting and other soft costs. Maryland adopted the Department of Energy (DOE) SolarAPP+, which eliminated 134,000 days of cumulative delay nationally in 2022 alone and cut inspection failures by 29%. While SolarAPP+ is an available tool that can be adopted voluntarily, state legislation that requires all jurisdictions to use it is desirable.

• Statewide siting authority: The current patchwork of local review processes forces developers to navigate multiple jurisdictions with inconsistent standards, creating opportunities to block projects on undemocratic or aesthetic grounds that have no relationship to merit or grid need. Establishing a single body with power to override local zoning for qualifying projects can fix this. New York’s Office of Renewable Energy Siting and Electric Transmission (ORES) consolidated permitting authority into a single body with statutory deadlines and an automatic approval backstop for  projects over 25MW. This fix requires legislation that grants state preemption authority.

• Energy-ready zones: Conducting environmental review at the zone level means individual projects in those areas can skip site-specific analyses, removing what is often the longest step in the permitting timeline. The idea is to conduct programmatic environmental review across designated high-resource areas so that individual projects within those regions can use a streamlined review process rather than the full site-specific process. The Bureau of Land Management’s Solar Energy Zones program did this across areas in the Mojave and Nevada to enable responsible development within shorter timeframes. Zone-level programmatic environmental review is typically an administrative tool and can be done without legislation, but it may require legislation in some states to universalize it.

• Permit by Rule: For lower-impact projects, replacing project-by-project agency judgment with a defined checklist, wherein if a project meets a set of defined criteria it gets a permit, can help remove the uncertainty that makes it difficult to finance and schedule projects. Virginia created a program like this for solar projects under 150MW and it has since become the primary pathway for solar development in the state. Typically this requires legislative action (e.g., to establish the checklist framework and determine which projects are eligible), but is then implemented administratively.

EXPECTED OUTCOME

The direct effect of these reforms is compression of the time between a developer deciding to build and a project coming online. Today, that gap can be three to ten years depending on project type and jurisdiction. This should be relatively easily reduced to one to three years for distributed resources and two to four years for utility-scale generation and transmission. New York, Virginia, and Texas have demonstrated that these timelines are achievable.

For ratepayers, the benefit is less direct but just as important. More projects reaching completion means more supply competing to serve load, which moderates wholesale electricity prices over time and reduces the cost of the transmission buildout needed to meet rising demand. These are long-term effects, so states should not expect immediate rate relief from permitting reform alone, even though it is arguably the most powerful long-term tool.

For developers and large customers, the benefit is more immediate: reduced permitting uncertainty lowers the cost of capital for new projects, since lenders price timeline risk into project financing. A project that can be permitted in 18 months rather than five years carries materially lower development costs even before construction begins.

For grid operators and utilities, standardized timelines and consolidating siting authority improve the quality of long-range capacity planning. The current permitting environment makes it difficult to forecast which projects will actually reach completion, which results in both over-procurement and unexpected reliability issues. More predictable permitting should produce more reliable capacity pipelines. 

The reforms most likely to show measurable results quickly are digitization and instant solar permitting. Statewide siting authority and energy-ready zones will likely have a larger impact but will take effect over a longer period of time.

TRADEOFFS

Benefits:

• Direct downward pressure on prices by accelerating supply build-out, reducing project development costs, and making better use of existing infrastructure.
• Strong bipartisan political appeal, as both Democrats and Republicans support energy development for cost reduction.

Costs and Risks

• Environmental and community oversight: Permitting processes exist to protect ecosystems and people, and streamlining could reduce oversight if not carefully designed. In 2025, twice as many bills were introduced to restrict renewables as to streamline them.
• Local control conflicts: Statewide siting authority that overrides local zoning will face opposition from municipalities. This reform requires either local government buy-in or supermajority legislative support.
• Technology neutrality risk: Streamlined permitting accelerates whatever gets built, including fossil gas peakers. States that want supply growth to track clean energy goals may need to pair permitting reform with resource standards or procurement requirements.

POLLING*

• Voters agree that energy costs are too high: 86% of voters are concerned about rising electricity costs in the U.S., including 57% who are very concerned.
• Voters are mixed on whether new energy energy supply is being built quickly enough, and whether or not the government is a blocker: 40% say the U.S. is building new energy infrastructure too slowly to meet rising demand, 32% say about the right pace, and 18% say too quickly. 41% say government permitting processes are about the right level of difficulty, while 34% say they are too difficult, and 10% say too easy. 15% don’t know. 
• That said, when asked about TSF’s ideas, voters are largely supportive:
  • 73% strongly or somewhat support a two-year maximum time limit for decisions on permitting major energy projects. 
  • 66% support creating a single statewide office to review and approve large energy projects, instead of requiring multiple approvers. 

And on litigation delays, 55% say when an energy project is deemed important to the state’s electricity grid, state governments should have the authority to overrule local decisions, compared to 34% who say no.

FAQ:

1. Who is likely to support this idea? 
   • Clean energy developers and industry groups facing project delays 
   • Large customers (manufacturers, technology companies) that need reliable supply
   • Ratepayer advocates focused on long-run cost reduction 
   • Those focused on deregulation and energy dominance 
   • Those focused on clean energy deployment 
   • Utilities have mixed incentives: they benefit from less permitting friction on their own projects but may resist reform that eases entry for independent generators and distributed resources.

2. Who is likely to oppose this idea? 
   • Environmental organizations are concerned that streamlining reduces meaningful review 
   • Local governments worried about loss of land-use control 
   • Some labor groups are concerned it favors non-union project development

3. Won’t utilities build more slowly if it reduces their rate-base returns? 
   • Regulated utilities earn a return on capital invested, so faster, cheaper construction may actually reduce their earnings per project. The reforms most likely to move utilities are those that also expand the total volume of rate-base investment (more projects, faster) or pair permitting reform with explicit utility obligations to deploy grid-efficiency technologies. Independent generators operating in competitive markets do not face this constraint and are the most direct beneficiaries of permitting reform.

*Polling data cited from a Data for Progress survey of 1,259 U.S. likely voters conducted March 13–15, 2026. The sample was weighted to be representative of likely voters by age, gender, education, race, geography, and recalled presidential vote. The margin of error is ±3 percentage points. For more information on methodology, visit dataforprogress.org/our-methodology.