# “The Savings Sit in the Worst Cases”: Would the Senate Permitting Bill Actually Work? Source: Realpha Blog (blog.getrealpha.com) Original article and charts: https://blog.getrealpha.com/en/blog/columbiaenergy-2026-10-27-senate-permitting-reform-bill-if-it-passes-will-it/ > Notes from the October 27, 2026 Columbia Energy Exchange with three Center on Global Energy Policy scholars on the bipartisan Senate permitting bill: why federal approvals would get faster to obtain and harder to reverse, what 144 past projects say about where the time savings come from, and why households pay for new infrastructure before any bill goes down. Educational notes, not investment advice; no price targets or stock recommendations. Published: 2026-10-28 Locale: en Tags: energy policy, us power, grid investment, infrastructure, policy risk ![A transmission corridor under construction at dusk, an engineer in a hard hat spreading a thick stack of permit documents across a truck hood in the foreground, half-finished lattice towers shrinking one after another toward the far horizon](/covers/columbiaenergy-2026-10-27-senate-permitting-reform-bill-if-it-passes-will-it-cover.png) > I liken fortune to one of those violent rivers: when it rages it floods the plains, tears away houses, and everyone flees before it. Yet when the water is quiet, people can still raise banks and dikes, so that when it rises again the water runs down a channel and does as it pleases less freely. > > —— Machiavelli, The Prince, chapter 25 (1532, my own translation) In the October 27, 2026 episode of Columbia Energy Exchange, host Bill Loveless brought in three Center on Global Energy Policy scholars at once — Robin Millican, Noah Kaufman and Jack Andreasen Kavanagh — to ask whether the Senate's bipartisan permitting bill would work if it passed. The analysis their center released this week puts the bill squarely on speed and certainty: federal approvals would become faster to obtain and harder to reverse, with leverage moving from states, wildlife agencies and tribes toward the companies applying to build. Jack's run across 144 projects found the time savings concentrated in the worst cases, and Robin called lower bills plausible but conditional, with the money for new equipment hitting rate bases first. All of it assumes the bill reaches 60 votes in a short lame duck session and then an agreement with the House. ## What does the bill change, and whose leverage goes away? It changes speed and certainty, leaving what gets built to markets and to the substantive statutes; the price is less veto leverage for states, wildlife agencies and tribes inside any single review. Robin Millican laid out the background. The National Environmental Policy Act, enacted in 1970, is a process statute: it mandates no environmental outcome and exists to organize agency reviews and put the impacts on the public record. The paperwork then grew — the fullest environmental impact statement can run 10,000 pages, once took four to five years, and has come down to about two. The bill puts firm deadlines on the front end and widens categorical exclusions; on the back end it cuts the statute of limitations from the six years available under the Administrative Procedure Act to 150 days, and removes vacatur as a remedy. A court that finds a review deficient could tell the agency to fix it while construction continues, though projects violating the Endangered Species Act or Clean Water Act can still be halted. Robin's summary: this moves from "prove you will comply before you break ground" to "we presume you will, and if you don't, you get sued." ![Two rows of horizontal bars are compared: the top row shows today's long bars review of about two years, a six-year window for lawsuits, while the bottom row shows markedly shorter bars after the bill hard deadlines, 150 days, so both the front-end and the back-end clocks are squeezed.](/figures/permitting-clock-compressed-en.svg) On states, Jack Andreasen Kavanagh pointed to Clean Water Act Section 401 as the last gate. Once the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission holds backstop siting authority for transmission, 401 becomes a state's final way to block an interstate pipeline or power line, and the bill narrows it: a denial requires clear and convincing evidence that no condition would work, and any condition attached must be the least burdensome one. State power has always lived in the conditions, and conditions are what the bill touches — of roughly 7,500 state decisions from 2023 to 2025, only 0.8% were denials and 67% were approvals with conditions. ![One long horizontal bar stands for about seven thousand five hundred state decisions, cut into a very thin sliver of denials, a dominant segment of conditional approvals, and the remainder as clean approvals, with an arrow pointing at the largest segment to show that this is exactly what the bill changes.](/figures/state-401-where-the-leverage-is-en.svg) On tribes he used a phrase worth keeping: a firmer floor and a lower ceiling. The bill names tribes in Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act for the first time and authorizes $20 million a year for tribal-controlled databases; at the same time, consultation on identifying historic properties becomes optional, any party that misses a 30-day window can be bypassed, and that consultation had no statutory deadline to begin with. Jack's worry is that the shortened clock lands on offices that have no staff. ![Two panels sit side by side: on the left the floor is low and the ceiling is high with wide space between them, while on the right the floor has been raised and the ceiling pushed down, so the space left to move in is clearly narrower.](/figures/tribal-floor-up-ceiling-down-en.svg) ## Where exactly do the savings come from? From the worst cases. Jack built an interactive tool covering 144 projects — gas pipelines, geothermal, wind, solar and transmission, 141 of them finished and three still in process — comparing their actual timelines against a rerun under the bill's rules. Projects where deadlines slipped and where post-permit litigation followed save a great deal of time; projects where agencies already hit their dates save much less. He used the Endangered Species Act as the example: formal consultation drops from 90 days to 60, which sounds like a third off, except the median he found already sits near 60 days. ![A row of bars rises from left to right, with the many cases on the left showing almost no height and the few cases at the right end showing very tall bars, while the median marker sits low in the left half.](/figures/time-saved-sits-in-the-tail-en.svg) So what the bill really does is turn deadlines on paper into deadlines that bind. The two-year requirement for an environmental impact statement has been on the books for years, and a Bipartisan Policy Center analysis found only 39% finished on time between 2023 and 2025. Transmission gains the most, because FERC can site a line when a state does not act. Another bucket of time appears in no statistic at all. Robin cited a Crux survey of about 50 developers in which 80% said they deliberately site projects to avoid federal review. She calls that bucket the dark matter of the statute; others call it its silent graveyard. She also gave the other side its say: defenders of the status quo point out that 99% of projects end up with a categorical exclusion or the lighter environmental assessment, so how large can the problem be? Her answer is that the denominator is packed with routine federal actions, which hides how heavy the remaining 1% is. ![Two small circles on the chart stand for the number of approvals and the number of denials, and outside both circles lies a large grey field standing for the projects that eighty percent of developers deliberately route around review so that they never enter any count.](/figures/the-silent-graveyard-outside-the-data-en.svg) ## When would bills actually come down? Robin's answer is plausible but conditional, and probably years after households start paying. In the research she worked on in June, national electricity prices rose at more than twice the rate of inflation over the past year, driven by several things: aging infrastructure being replaced, wildfire and storm recovery costs, and data centers in the mix. Data centers are about 4% to 5% of grid consumption now and forecasts put them at triple or quadruple that within five years; NERC projects 224 gigawatts of summer peak demand growth between 2025 and 2035, while supply chain inflation and tariffs keep pushing equipment costs up. Her line on this stayed with me: you have to spend money to make money, you have to invest in more poles and wires to reach that better situation at the end of the rainbow, and that takes years. New investment enters the rate base and then flows to households through whatever cost allocation applies. ![A power-bill curve climbs to a peak and then eases down, with the rising stretch labelled as equipment and tariffs entering the rate base and the falling stretch landing several years out on the time axis.](/figures/bill-goes-up-before-it-goes-down-en.svg) Two things in the bill work against that lag. One is grid-enhancing technology — dynamic line ratings, advanced conductors — squeezing more out of existing lines; one estimate in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences puts the savings from widely deployed advanced conductors at roughly $180 billion by 2050. The other is data center cost allocation: loads above 20 megawatts are defined as covered computational loads, and utilities could not pass the incremental cost of serving them to other customers. That allocation reaches the utility's direct costs only; in markets like PJM, data centers also lift household bills through wholesale energy and capacity prices, which the bill leaves untouched. ## Is this a plus or a minus for climate? Noah Kaufman said the bill is not about climate, but it is major energy legislation. The question he suggests policymakers ask: what does this bill add to, and subtract from, the climate policy portfolio you want. He compared it to Thanksgiving dinner. The turkey and the stuffing are policies that address emissions directly, because markets do not reflect the harm from greenhouse gases and some government action has to handle that externality — and there are no such policies at the federal level now, with or without this bill. What the bill handles are barriers to building and deploying: long-distance transmission, geothermal, and the ability to scale wind, solar, batteries, nuclear and carbon capture. Those are the mashed potatoes, the cornbread and the pumpkin pie. He also steelmanned the other side: the world has committed to decarbonizing fast, and this bill sketches a US energy system with a perpetual fossil build-out — "they were invited to the Thanksgiving meal and they're asking where the turkey is." He finds the objection reasonable, then gives his answer: efforts to block fossil projects do little to global production or emissions while imposing real costs on local people and workers. His conclusion was one line: if your choice is between the mashed potatoes and going hungry, you eat the mashed potatoes. ![Three side dishes are laid out full on a round plate, while the spot in the middle where the turkey should sit is an empty dashed circle, annotated to say the turkey stands for policy that regulates emissions directly.](/figures/thanksgiving-plate-missing-turkey-en.svg) Loveless raised the endorsement letter signed by Janet Yellen, Steven Mnuchin and other economists and national security figures from across both parties. What Noah reads in it is that a group which argues endlessly about economic policy agrees the pendulum on these process questions has swung too far. He was honest about the benefits: the direction is sayable — more supply, lower prices over time — but on magnitudes he does not know, and the only way to learn is to run the experiment. Asked what he would change, he said: could I add a carbon tax? ## If it fails now, would the next Congress do better? Jack turned that into a chain of things you would have to believe, and it was the reasoning I most wanted to copy down. The argument for waiting comes mostly from Democrats. You would have to believe Democrats win the House and the Senate; then that 60 votes are there, which they would not be on Democratic seats alone, so Republicans vote too and you are back to a bipartisan deal; then that Trump signs that deal. Push it to a 2028 trifecta and you still need those 60 votes. And waiting costs something: two years of waiting plus at least a year of agencies implementing the rules is three years gone. He added that Democrats have held a trifecta before and did not pass permitting reform then. He is not predicting which path is likelier — he is listing what you have to believe. ![Four rings running from wide to narrow are strung into a chain that thins at every gate, and the end of the chain is attached to a block labelled with the cost of waiting three years.](/figures/what-you-must-believe-to-wait-en.svg) The bill is a compromise at heart, and Democrats have already pointed to the administration's continued moves against offshore wind as something other than good faith at the table. Senator Capito, who chairs Environment and Public Works, wants it to be the Senate's first vote when it returns after the November 3 elections. Asked what each would change before a vote, all three landed on the permit certainty sections. Robin thinks the "forever permits" label overstates what the bill does, but the drafting problem is real: Section 1401 restricts revoking, suspending or interfering with covered permits, and the phrasing about not interfering with a project operating at full capacity could be read to cover methane, air pollution, noise and worker safety rules — an inadvertent regulatory immunity. Another provision lets developers claim damages for disparate treatment, at 50% to 100% of construction costs and not subject to appropriation; she notes it never defines an improper denial, so a policy that shifts on safety or economics becomes hard to distinguish from targeting, and tying damages to demonstrated losses would deter just as well. Noah said alarm bells went off when he read those sections: creative presidents will find ways to veto projects they don't like. ## So how do I use any of this myself? What stayed with me are two lags, and both travel well into reading news and reading companies. The first is the gap between a policy win and a visible benefit. Plenty of people have lived this: the news says a bill is a big positive for an industry, you buy, and nothing arrives. The episode spells out the mechanism — what happens first is the rate base growing and equipment and tariff costs landing on bills, while the savings wait until the lines are built and cheap power is flowing, and that wait runs years. So when I hear "faster" now, I ask one more question: faster for which cash flow, landing in which year. The second is the gap between the average and the tail. Jack's tool says the savings concentrate in the worst projects while median projects were already on time. That transfers to companies: when a developer says looser rules help it, ask whether its projects look like the median or like the tail — the one that has never been sued and always hit its dates gets certainty rather than much time, while the one sitting on a big project tangled in litigation is the one whose schedule moves. ## Further reading - Columbia Energy Exchange, October 27, 2026, Bill Loveless with Robin Millican, Noah Kaufman and Jack Andreasen Kavanagh on whether the bill would work (the source for these notes) - The Center on Global Energy Policy's analysis released this week, plus the interactive tool launched alongside it (permitting timelines for 144 projects), at energypolicy.columbia.edu - The Crux survey of about 50 developers on avoiding federal review, and the Bipartisan Policy Center analysis of two-year environmental impact statement completion rates - The text of the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, and the public endorsement letter from economists and national security figures ## The one thing to take away One idea: whatever a process blocks leaves no record. That 80% figure is developers deliberately siting projects to avoid federal review, and those projects appear in neither the approval counts nor the denial counts. Whenever we argue about whether a system works, the data in hand is tilted toward whoever entered it, and the largest cost sits with those who never did. Here is something I have tried that needs no investing: take a sheet of paper and write down three things you wanted to do and never applied for, never asked about, never signed up for, because the paperwork looked like too much — a grant, a course, a medical check, a record you are entitled to from some agency. Next to each, write two numbers: how long you guess it takes, and what it would be worth to you if it came through. Then go look up the actual process for one of them. When I did it, two of my three turned out to be far shorter than the version in my head, and I had been making decisions off that imagined version for years.