POLITICO Pro: House Problem Solvers Caucus pushes permitting plan to boost renewables and fossil fuels

A key bipartisan group of House moderates is proposing a comprehensive overhaul of permitting rules to speed the construction of new energy infrastructure to head off electricity price hikes and meet the rising power demand from AI data centers.

The House Problem Solvers Caucus is releasing a framework Thursday — shared first with POLITICO — that aims to bridge divides in Congress over a long-elusive deal sought by both parties that would benefit both clean energy and fossil fuel projects.

The proposal from the Problem Solvers' permitting, energy, and environment working group led by Reps. Scott Peters (D-Calif.) and Gabe Evans (R-Colo.), as well as caucus co-chairs Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) and Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.), is notable in that it includes measures to facilitate the development of interstate transmission lines needed to help bring clean energy onto the nation’s power grid — a top priority of Democrats that House Republicans have resisted in the past.

The new framework — which has been endorsed by the full caucus of nearly 50 members divided between parties — also includes Republican priorities such as limiting states' ability to reject pipeline projects under the Clean Water Act, along with measures to boost forest management, geothermal, and mining projects.

And it contains provisions that would limit the scope of environmental reviews and impose restrictions on lawsuits under the National Environmental Policy Act, a top demand of industry groups across the economy.

“We want to make things in America again. And if we don't have the power to be able to do that, if we don't have the permitting reform to be able to get the power where we need it, we're going to continue to bleed jobs, bleed manufacturing to China,” said Evans, a freshman whose Colorado swing district is home to significant renewable energy production, in a joint interview alongside Peters.

Peters, who has long been active in permitting talks, acknowledged the danger that President Donald Trump’s moves to revoke wind and solar permits while imposing new regulatory roadblocks on those energy sources, could “blow this whole thing up.”

But he argued passing legislation would protect against the type of policy whiplash from successive administrations favoring or blocking specific energy sources through executive power.

“All we can do in this building is create a law that makes sense for the country and make sure that it'll work no matter who's president,” Peters said. “Clearly, we're going to have a hard time getting consensus and votes if we don't have an understanding that this is executed the way we wrote it.”

Evans and Peters, who are both members of the Energy and Commerce Committee, said they hope to translate the framework into legislation, especially for the power grid components that the committee oversees.

And both said they hoped to build a compromise along the lines of the bill proposed last Congress by now retired-Senate Energy Committee Chair Joe Manchin and Sen. John Barrasso, the panel’s top Republican at the time.

That bill easily cleared the Senate Energy Committee, but House Republicans rejected it, in part because of their resistance to provisions that would make it easier to build new large power lines to accommodate renewable energy.

Peters and Evans’ proposal contains similar language to the Manchin-Barrasso bill, requiring FERC to take action on improving connections between regional power networks, as well as tasking the energy regulator with creating a cost allocation model that would require customers to pay only if they benefit from a given transmission line.

Peters said he’s been talking about the transmission issue with Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.), who Peters said “understands that transmission needs to be a part" of any deal.

Evans said they’ve consulted on merging their plan with bipartisan legislation to overhaul NEPA that Natural Resources Committee Chairman Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.) is looking to mark up in that committee soon.

"My goal is to have a big permitting bill sitting over at the Senate for them to consider with some bipartisan support," Westerman told POLITICO.