Sacramento Report: Lawmakers Want to Cut Red Tape to Ramp up Battery Storage | Voice of San Diego
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PALM DESERT, CA – The Assembly Select Committee on Permitting Reform, chaired by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland), convened a hearing and tour today to address the barriers posed by California’s outdated permitting processes to clean energy infrastructure development. |
California Lawmakers Push to Overhaul "Slow and Outdated" Permitting Process
California legislature's ambitious climate and housing goals are stuck in a regulatory morass of their own making in the state's complex and time-consuming permitting process. Led by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland), the Assembly Select Committee on Permitting Reform is conducting a comprehensive review of the state's regulatory framework, aiming to streamline approvals for critical infrastructure projects while maintaining environmental protections.The urgency for reform comes as California faces multiple interconnected crises. The state aims to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2045 and desperately needs more housing, but current permitting processes are proving too slow to meet these challenges. As Wicks noted during committee hearings, "We are facing multiple, interrelated crises – if we want to actually address the housing crisis, reach our climate goals and guard against climate catastrophes, we have to change how we think about building."
The impact of permitting delays is evident across sectors. Battery storage projects crucial for renewable energy integration face lengthy approval processes, while housing developments can take years to get necessary permits. According to Tom Grable, President of TriPointe Homes, this uncertainty is driving investment away from California: "In other states, the process is consistent, reliable, and predictable... Dollars are going out of California, from builders going to other markets."
However, reforming the permitting process faces significant political challenges. Environmental justice groups worry that streamlining could reduce their ability to advocate for their communities, while labor organizations often use the permitting process to negotiate for better wages and benefits. Local residential interests are represented by NIMBYs who use the permitting process to say "build it somewhere else, not in my back yard." These stakeholders view existing regulations as essential tools for protecting community interests and workers' rights.
The committee's approach focuses on finding common ground. One potential solution involves better agency coordination, which could speed up approvals while maintaining important oversight. Another strategy, already tested in housing legislation, involves incorporating labor standards directly into streamlining measures, eliminating the need to negotiate these protections during the permitting process.
Steve Bohlen of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory highlighted a cultural challenge within regulatory agencies, noting they have established a "culture of regulation that emphasizes the need to be extra careful and extra perfect, but this takes an incredible amount of time." He argued that while environmental protection remains crucial, the perfect shouldn't be the enemy of the good, especially given the urgency of climate change.
The committee's work, conducted in collaboration with the Bay Area Council Economic Institute, includes studying the costs of inaction and impact of permitting delays across the state. As California faces increasing pressure to address its housing shortage and meet its climate goals, the success of these reform efforts could determine whether the state can build the infrastructure needed for its ambitious future while maintaining its environmental leadership role.
Sacramento Report: Lawmakers Want to Cut Red Tape to Ramp up Battery Storage | Voice of San Diego
Earlier this week I joined a group of energy experts and state lawmakers at a battery storage site in the Coachella Valley to learn how California is building out renewable energy systems and what needs to happen to speed up that process.
Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland, was holding a hearing of the Assembly Select Committee on Permitting Reform to figure out how to streamline permits for renewable energy transmission and generation. The Desert Peak battery storage project in Palm Springs, by NextEra Energy Resources, was the first stop.
It’s silhouetted against the San Bernardino Mountains, surrounded by a field of wind turbines and next to a Southern California Edison substation that draws power from the Palo Verde nuclear generating station in Arizona and renewable energy projects in the desert. Rows of sheds house hundreds of lithium-ion batteries that store power and then feed it into the grid.
You may have heard about battery storage closer to home, and probably not in a favorable light. An Escondido battery storage facility caught fire in September, our MacKenzie Elmer reported, prompting evacuations and closures of nearby schools. Lithium-ion batteries generate heat through the energy they conduct. If that builds up because the batteries are overcharged or in a hot environment, they can go up in flames.
The Escondido event was one of several such fires in San Diego County over the past year. In May a blaze at a battery storage site in Chula Vista burned for two and a half weeks, leaving San Diegans anxious about the safety of the high-powered batteries. The previous September a Valley Center energy storage facility caught fire.
Officials with Escondido Fire Department and San Diego County Air Pollution Control District said air quality monitors didn’t pick up any dangerous levels of toxic pollutants. But residents were wary of the risks, and the county Board of Supervisors adopted new rules for approving and operating the facilities, but voted against a moratorium on them.
Energy storage experts are well aware of the bad press, and point out differences between the San Diego battery storage sites and newer, mega-storage facilities like Desert Peak.
It’s much bigger, with an ultimate capacity of 700 megawatts, enough to power about 140,000 homes, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. That compares to the Escondido plant at 30 megawatts.
Nonetheless, the new facilities are safer, with better fire protections, said Scott Murtishaw, executive director of the California Energy Storage Alliance.
“The facility in Escondido was installed in 2017,” he said. “That’s ancient technology.”
Escondido fire officials were “keeping their eye on the SDG&E facility because it was considered ‘old’ by technological advancement standards in the battery industry,” Elmer reported. Failures of grid-scale batteries dropped by 97 percent between 2018 and 2023, she wrote.
But lawmakers and energy industry officials recognize that fire risk is just part of the barrier to scaling up battery storage to meet California’s climate goals. There’s concern that solar and wind projects and battery storage sites pose burdens to low-income and rural communities that already face high pollution and industrial activity. And converting traditional farms to solar farms often sparks opposition.
“Especially in rural areas some folks have a reaction to turning agricultural lands to solar energy,” said Pedro Villegas, executive director for political and regulatory affairs for NextEra.
The state aims to reach net carbon zero – the point at which the amount of greenhouse gasses that humans emit equals the amount removed from the atmosphere – by 2045. In 2022 the California Air Resources Board released a plan to get there. San Diego County created its own “decarbonization framework” to cut local carbon emissions.
But lawmakers say efforts to wean off fossil fuels aren’t moving fast enough.
“There’s a huge chasm between the things we say are our priorities and what we are actually delivering in the state” on renewable energy and climate action, said Cottie Petrie-Norris, D- Irvine. “The number one thing we need to do to accelerate the pace is permit reform.”
Select Committee on Permitting Reform Highlights Urgent Need for Housing and Transportation Solutions | Official Website
LOS ANGELES – The Assembly Select Committee on Permitting Reform, chaired by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland), convened a hearing and tour today in Los Angeles to address the barriers posed by outdated permitting processes that stall infill housing and sustainable transportation projects across California. The event brought together state legislators, local leaders, business advocates and other experts, underscoring the critical need to modernize the state's permitting system.
“California’s housing shortage and transit needs are urgent, and our current permitting processes are too slow to meet the scale of the challenge,” said Assemblymember Wicks. “We cannot afford delays that stop us from building more homes and expanding sustainable transit options. It’s time to fix our permitting flaws and create a faster, smarter path to ‘yes’ on critical projects.”
The day began with a tour of The Beehive, an Opportunity Zone Business Campus led by SoLa Impact in South Los Angeles, followed by a visit to LA Metro’s Broadway Station, part of the Regional Connector project. At The Beehive, SoLa Impact leaders emphasized the significant delays caused by permitting obstacles, noting that streamlined processes would expedite the delivery of much-needed affordable housing. LA Metro officials highlighted how prolonged CEQA-related litigation delayed the Regional Connector, stressing the need for reforms to avoid similar setbacks in future transit projects.
"California can only solve its housing crisis by adding more homes; we can achieve that quickly and affordably by fixing California's permitting flaws," said Tracy Hernandez, Founding CEO of the Los Angeles County Business Federation (BizFed). "BizFed is committed to spurring all types of housing development to meet regional needs. We applaud Assemblymember Buffy Wicks for tackling this challenge head-on with an all-of-the-above approach. Let’s not be selective about the types of homes we build as families buckle under California’s ballooning cost of living."
During the hearing, stakeholders discussed the impact of outdated permitting processes on the state’s ability to meet housing and transportation goals. “You cannot subsidize your way out of scarcity, and you cannot build your way out of poverty,” said Mike Manville, UCLA Luskin School Department Chair on Housing. “We have a serious problem that is caused by insufficient housing supply, and the solution to that problem is to make it easier to build housing of all kinds.”
The first panel focused on the complexities of infill housing, highlighting the unpredictable and lengthy timelines developers face due to permitting challenges. “In other states, the [permitting] process is consistent, reliable, and predictable. Needless to say, that’s why the capital is flowing to those states — because of that reliability. Dollars are going out of California, from builders going to other markets,” said Tom Grable, President of TriPointe Homes.
The discussion then turned to sustainable transportation where panelists underscored the detrimental effects of permitting delays on transit expansion and the importance, now more than ever, for California to lead. “With the election behind us, everything we do in California now takes on the undertones of resistance and refuge,” said Laura Tolkoff, Transportation Policy Director for SPUR. “We can resist policy attacks in the courts, but we cannot be a refuge unless we have the homes and infrastructure that we need so that more people can live here freely. Our collective responsibility here is to show the rest of this country that California can get things done.”
The hearing on housing and transportation is part of the Select Committee’s broader effort to explore permitting reform across key sectors, including climate resilience and clean energy. In collaboration with the Bay Area Council Economic Institute, the Committee is conducting a comprehensive study on the cost of inaction and impact of permitting delays on critical projects.
“The message today was clear: we need to modernize our permitting system to remove barriers and unlock the development our communities desperately need,” said Assemblymember Wicks. “This is about building a resilient, inclusive future for all Californians, and we must act swiftly to get there.”
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Select Committee on Permitting Reform Kicks Off with Inaugural Hearing | Official Website
For immediate release:
- Erin Ivie
- Director of Communications, Office of Assemblymember Buffy Wicks
- 510-619-8495
- erin.ivie@asm.ca.gov
SACRAMENTO, Calif. – The Select Committee on Permitting Reform, chaired by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland), today convened its inaugural hearing, advancing a bipartisan initiative to modernize California’s permitting system.
“There is a cost of inaction that we see in our communities every day,” said Assemblymember Wicks. “We are facing multiple, interrelated crises – if we want to actually address the housing crisis, reach our climate goals and guard against some of the climate catastrophes we know are coming, we have to change how we think about building. We have to get to yes, and we have to do so in a way that reflects our California values.”
The Committee is taking an inclusive, equitable and evidence-based approach to address systemic issues within the state’s permitting processes. Discussions at the initial hearing focused on identifying challenges within the current regulatory landscape.
California’s leaders have established a “culture of regulation that emphasizes the need to be extra careful and extra perfect, but this takes an incredible amount of time,” testified Steve Bohlen of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “We need industry to be able to function in an environmentally sound way, but they face constant roadblocks by state agencies who go slow because they want to get it just right … We’re moving into a period of rapid change and so perfect can’t be the enemy of the good, it just can’t be; it forecloses opportunities we may need in the future.”
The public hearing also featured testimony from practitioners, state and local officials, and subject matter experts, including leaders from Denmark’s Environmental Protection Agency; California Natural Resources Agency; California Department of Housing and Community Development; University of California, Irvine; Stanford University; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and Rural County Representatives of California.
“We are very focused on improving our processes in a way that preserves our values but allows us to move at the speed necessary to confront our growing challenges,” testified Christopher Calfee of the California Natural Resources Agency.
The Committee, in collaboration with the Bay Area Council Economic Institute, is studying permitting impacts on housing, climate resilience, including water and wildfire, and clean energy in the state. The study will include the effects of permitting on achieving state goals, the costs and risks of inaction, and equity and accessibility for all Californians.
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About Assemblymember Buffy Wicks
Assemblymember Buffy Wicks represents California’s 14th Assembly District, which includes all or portions of the cities of Oakland, Richmond, Berkeley, Albany, El Cerrito, San Pablo, Pinole, El Sobrante, Hercules, Rodeo, Kensington, and Piedmont. You can learn more about Assemblymember Wicks at http://a14.asmdc.org.
About the Select Committee on Permitting Reform
The Select Committee on Permitting Reform is dedicated to addressing and resolving California’s systemic permitting issues. By fostering bipartisan collaboration and engaging diverse stakeholders, the Committee aims to streamline regulatory frameworks to support the state's goals in housing, clean energy and climate resilience. Through these efforts, the Committee seeks to create a more efficient and equitable system that facilitates the development of critical projects while preserving the health of our environment and the wellbeing of California's residents.
A housing champion takes on the energy transition
With help from Wes Venteicher
PERMITTING PROWESS: Assemblymember Buffy Wicks wants California to build things faster.
For the past several months, the East Bay Democrat and chair of the Assembly’s Select Committee on Permitting Reform has been on a whirlwind tour of the state, learning just how hard it can be to put a shovel in the ground. This past week it was battery storage and transmission lines in Palm Desert. Earlier this fall it was sea walls in the Bay Area and public transportation in Los Angeles.
Permitting reform may not sound like the sexiest issue, but it has eluded lawmakers year after year as they try to speed up construction of infrastructure the state needs without taking too much power away from local governments, labor, environmentalists and other groups who want a say over what gets built and how.
We caught up with Wicks about what she’s thinking could finally break through the political gridlock when the Legislature begins its 2025 session in earnest in January.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
You’ve been on a kind of permitting reform world tour. Why?
We launched the [Select Committee on Permitting Reform] earlier this year, and we wanted to make sure we were going out to different parts of the state to get a better understanding of the challenges. I think we’ve now had about 16 hours of hearings.
I came to this originally through
housing, and what I’ve realized when we look at permitting reform more
broadly is that our inability to build the things that we need in
California to serve our constituents permeates across sectors. When you
look at the realities of climate change, which are coming faster than
any of us had anticipated, when you look at the severity of our storms
and wildfires and sea level rise, our government is not equipped to move
at the pace of climate change unless we change our regulatory
environment.
In terms of groups that oppose some of the permitting reform ideas that have been floated, what is your vision for bringing them on board?
We’ve heard from the environmental justice community multiple times that they want to take a pause on the streamlining stuff we’re talking about. They really value having these tools in the toolbox to advocate for their communities, which I totally understand. My response to them is, where are the places where we can actually align? One of the things that came up Wednesday was better agency coordination. That’s really important, and lets us build stuff more quickly, and still enables a constituency like an environmental justice community to use the levers that they need to ensure their communities are at the table.
You see labor often uses the permitting process to advocate for their wages and their benefits packages and things of that nature. We’ve done some work in the housing space around that, where we’ve done streamlining work with AB 2011 that bakes in prevailing wage so that we take that issue off the table. There are ways to do this where these types of regulatory tools don’t get weaponized to slow progress, while still allowing for various different entities to achieve what they want. I’m trying to find where those places are from a policy point of view.
In the energy space there have been some serious attempts to make relatively modest reforms in recent years that have failed. It feels like the rap on permitting reform has been that Gov. Gavin Newsom pushes through these small tweaks year after year that are promoted as a big deal but they aren’t really enough to address the problem. Do you think we’ll just keep seeing that?
It took us, I don’t know, five decades to get to where we are in this crisis in housing. And in the past five or six years, we’ve really started turning the aircraft carrier around. You talk to developers now, and what used to take years and years and years for permitting, now they can do it in six months. A lot of bills went into place to be able to do that.
I do think it takes really dedicated, in-the-weeds regulators and lawmakers deciding that they want to make change in this space first and foremost. It’s starting to bubble up more now. And if there’s one thing we’ve learned from the last two weeks with the national election, it’s that voters are pretty pissed. They want the basic stuff to work. And I think about that with regard to permitting reform. It should be easier to build more affordable housing and rapid bus transit in California. Texas shouldn’t be doing more solar than us.
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EJ SUES KERN: Eight environmental organizations led by Earthjustice, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment, sued Kern County Wednesday over its approval last month of a 9,000-acre carbon capture and storage project.
The California Resources Corporation project would capture carbon emissions from its natural gas-fired Elk Hills Power Project and store them in vast underground reservoirs.
California’s climate plans count on carbon capture and storage to neutralize emissions by 2045. Transition plans anticipate California will still be relying on natural gas plants through at least 2039 to provide steady, reliable power to keep the lights on as the state expands use of more variable renewables such as wind and solar power.
The California Environmental Quality Act lawsuit accuses Kern County of failing to account for all potential harms to air, water and residents. It says the county failed to ensure the CO2 would be kept underground permanently or to account for the possibility that the storage option could drive new construction of fossil fuel-based power plants in the area.
“The county has approved this carbon capture and storage facility, completely ignoring our concerns about increasing the lifespan of polluting infrastructure and attracting more carbon-emitting projects with their own impacts,” said Diana Mireles, president of Comité Progreso de Lamont, which is one of the plaintiffs, in a statement today.
California Resources Corporation spokesperson Richard Venn said in an email that the company is “confident in the environmental review process conducted by Kern County and look forward to implementation of this project.”
Sierra Club, Central California
Environmental Justice Network, Committee for a Better Shafter and Delano
Guardians are also plaintiffs. — WV
COUNCIL OF THE GRID: The ebullience that has surrounded a proposal to unify the Western grid flowed again today ahead of a vote to advance the proposal, but a couple power players also flagged reservations.
Go back to yesterday’s newsletter for more details, but the West-Wide Governance Pathways Initiative voted 19-0 today, with one abstention, to set up an independent organization to oversee two energy markets that are now run by California’s grid operator.
“We’ve tried this many times over the years, and I think this is the first time where we’ve been able to come together organically and come up with a solution that I think meets the goals,” Jim Shetler, who is general manager of the Balancing Authority of Northern California and a Pathways voting member, said at the meeting.
It’s a big deal because of the potential to make West-wide grid operations more efficient, saving money and improving reliability amid increasingly common heat waves and other extreme weather events that stress grids. The proposed organization could one day grow to a full-on regional transmission organization like those that coordinate grids in Eastern states.
But the proposal’s independent organization isn’t independent enough for everybody, including hydropower giant Bonneville Power Administration and Arizona’s largest electric utility.
As proposed, the regional organization would take over setting the “rules the road” for the markets, but the California Independent System Operator — the biggest grid operator in the West that runs 80 percent of California’s grid — would continue to administer and operate them.
Bonneville, the Pacific Northwest’s largest supplier of electricity with 29 dams in the Columbia River Basin, is holding out for an organization that is also independent from California when it comes to administration and operation, Rachel Dibble, Bonneville’s vice president of power bulk marketing, told the committee.
“So while we recognize that success may come incrementally, we do hold to our vision for what an independent market looks like,” Dibble said.
The agency, which has also pursued participation in a market being set up by an Arkansas-based Pathways rival,
was not a formal Pathways participant but was consulted and offered
comments on what it wants to see from the process. Arizona Public
Service, which is a voting member, abstained based on similar
independence concerns. — WV
SORRY MALDONADO: It’s looking like former California Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado is about to be passed over, for the second time, to be President-elect Donald Trump’s agriculture secretary. CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins posted on X this morning that Trump is expected to offer the role to former Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler. — BB
— The U.S. attorney’s office filed criminal charges against Phillips 66 under the Clean Water Act for alleged wastewater dumping at its Carson oil refinery.
— The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power will pay out $60 million after officials hid their knowledge of a gas leak that harmed residents in Sun Valley and Pacoima.
— The U.S. may soon renounce its role driving global climate policy but for much of the world, when it comes to renewable energy, China already calls the shots.
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