The Cutting Red Tape to Facilitate Renewable Energy Act will accelerate the development of clean, renewable energy projects on Federal lands and waters to create jobs and protect the environment.
This American Energy Initiative legislation would streamline bureaucratic impediments, while still ensuring thorough environmental reviews, in order to promote the timely and efficient production of renewable energy.
Renewable and alternative energy sources, such as wind, solar and geothermal, are an integral part of an all-of-the-above energy approach and there is tremendous potential to utilize our public lands and waters to help foster and expand renewable energy development. Unfortunately, bureaucratic delays, lawsuits and burdensome regulations frequently impede or delay our ability to harness renewable energy on public lands.
Specifically, the Cutting Red Tape to Facilitate Renewable Energy Act:
Streamlines the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) process by requiring an environmental review to be conducted for the specific location where the renewable energy project would be located and not for alternative locations.
This common sense reform focuses environmental reviews on the impacts of either completing or not completing a project at the proposed location.
This could significantly reduce the number of years it takes to development clean, renewable energy projects. For example, the Cape Wind Project was delayed for years while environmental reviews were conducted on alternative locations outside of the Nantucket Sound.
Defines a renewable energy project on Federal lands and waters to include wind, solar, geothermal, biomass and tidal.
