New Mexico U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich has told Interior Secretary Doug Burgum his decision to personally review every solar and wind energy project in the nation is “troubling” because of what he described “increasingly partisan rhetoric from this Administration.”
He and three other Democratic Senators recently wrote Burgum a a letter decrying what they called the “repeated, baseless denigrating of renewable energy sources.” In it, they urged Burgum to rescind the Trump administration’s directive of wind and solar approvals going through the Secretary.
“Dear Secretary Burgum:
We are writing to express serious concern over the Department of the Interior’s most recent directive requiring your personal review and approval of every wind and solar energy project on public lands.”
Heinrich along with Sens. Ron Wyden, Jacky Rosen and Chris Van Hollen further asserted, “At a time when we should be accelerating the deployment of clean, cost-effective energy resources, this Administration is instead using the weight of the Federal government to suppress them.”
They claimed that under the new policy, it will introduce unnecessary delays, discourage private investment and create a “bottleneck seemingly designed to halt progress.”
The four Senators said renewable energy is among the cheapest forms of electricity and that utility-scale solar and wind consistently beat fossil fuels on cost per kilowatt-hour. They also pointed out that Energy Act of 2020 passed by Congress directed the Interior Department and the Bureau of Land Management to faciliate renewable energy development on public lands.
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“Instead of building on this bipartisan progress, this new directive sidelines the very policies that have delivered results. Rather than rescinding the Renewable Energy Rule—which was designed to reduce consumer energy costs, enhance permitting efficiency, and foster job creation—the Department should be focused on reforms that work across all energy sectors,” stated the Senators.
“This new policy is not effective or efficient public land management. It does not serve American energy security, nor does it strengthen our global competitiveness. And it certainly will not deliver on your stated commitment to affordability and reliability.”