I moved to California from Florida in 2017, with the expectation that the state would provide a great quality of life. My quality of life, however, was spending years rent-burdened, unclear of where I would live from one year to the next, working multiple jobs, and in one instance splitting a two-bedroom, one-bath with five strangers.
At the Housing Action Coalition, we fight every day to close that gap between what California promises and what it actually delivers on housing. Lately I’ve been seeing the same gap open up around energy.
California has set important clean energy goals, and the technology to meet them already exists. But electricity demand is projected to grow 32 percent by 2030, and without new capacity online, working families face higher bills and shortages while the clean energy transition reaches wealthier communities first. I’ve watched that exact dynamic play out in housing. I don’t want to watch it again here.
The obstacle is the same in both cases: we can’t build fast enough. In housing it’s permitting delays, high fees, and post-entitlement bottlenecks — I’ve seen finished projects sit without power hookups for years because the connection process is too slow. Federal permitting under NEPA has the same problem at scale: major energy projects take 4.5 years on average just to clear environmental review, sometimes close to a decade start to finish. Every month lost in review is a month of cheaper power that isn’t reaching the grid, and Californians are covering that delay on their utility bills.
That’s not abstract for the people I work with. The households already stretched thin by housing costs are the same ones with the least room to absorb a spike in electricity prices. Affordability doesn’t stop at housing costs. It shows up in every bill families have to pay, including electricity.
We’ve pushed hard for legislation that clears barriers to housing production because delay has real costs. Federal permitting reform deserves the same urgency. A bipartisan deal with clear approval timelines and protection against bad-faith project terminations would speed up clean energy supply — more supply, lower prices, faster relief for families who need it.
Permitting reform also determines whether California’s clean energy future arrives equitably. Right now, the well-resourced communities can wait out a decade of permitting or insulate themselves with rooftop solar and storage. Everyone else just hopes the system catches up before their bills get worse. Permitting reform closes that gap.
Permitting reform does not mean NEPA disappears or environmental protections go away. What changes is the timeline, and the window for bad-faith legal challenges that research shows mostly add delay and cost without improving environmental outcomes. The goal is a system that keeps pace with our ambition, not one that abandons it.
Senators Padilla and Schiff have both fought for working families and for California’s clean energy future. A bipartisan permitting deal is one of the most direct things they can do right now to deliver on both. California has the goals and the technology. What it needs is the ability to build. We learned this lesson once already, in housing. Let’s not learn it again in energy.
— Ali Sapirman/Advocacy and Policy Manager, Housing Action Coalition