The Senate’s permitting bill is out. Senators Martin Heinrich, Sheldon Whitehouse, Shelley Moore Capito and Mike Lee introduced the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act on Wednesday. It is the most ambitious permitting bill I have seen: a federal backstop for interstate transmission with teeth, a clock on every environmental review, data centers paying their own grid costs, and penalties for an administration that singles out one industry. Heinrich sat down with me the afternoon before. So instead of reading a summary, you can hear one of the senators who wrote it explain it in his own words.
Heinrich has spent his career on transmission, and he says this bill goes further on it than anything he has seen, including the 2024 deal that made it out of committee and died. A state gets a year to come up with a route for an interstate line, and then the decision goes to FERC. Reconductoring an existing line in an existing right-of-way no longer restarts the federal review. At the Loan Programs Office we tried to use Section 1706 to finance reconductoring; this bill makes that tool a lot more effective.
The clocks are in the text: a year for an environmental assessment, two for an impact statement, 150 days to sue, and you only get to sue if you commented while the review was open. On data centers, he says the bill makes it law that the incremental cost of connecting a large load stays with that load. That is why he was against the Husted bill two weeks ago, which he describes on the episode as sending a sternly worded letter to the data center companies. And if an agency singles out one industry, the way solar and wind permits went off a cliff in 2025, the sponsor can recover costs. He calls those “real fines.”
Republicans got Clean Water Act certainty for gas pipelines. He expects to lose some votes on the hard right and some on the left, and he said that is okay. I agree; that is what 60 votes costs.
This is the second episode of Energy on the Ballot, our series on energy and the midterms. Next Monday: Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, the other Democrat whose name is on this bill.
Once the backstop is triggered, how hard will states battle FERC? Worth looking at what’s happening in MA with 69T.