ACORE Statement on Introduction of Bipartisan Permitting Reform Legislation

July 31, 2025

Statement from ACORE President and CEO Ray Long on introduction of bipartisan permitting reform legislation:

“ACORE applauds House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Bruce Westerman (R-AR) and Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME) for introducing the Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development (SPEED) Act. The federal permitting process is cumbersome and outdated, creating costly delays for all energy projects—clean and conventional alike. Without permitting reform, the U.S. risks losing ground in the global race for technological and economic leadership—especially as energy demands surge in the AI era.

“The U.S. needs to add the equivalent of 133 Oklahoma Cities’ worth of electricity to the system by 2030, yet only 55 new miles of high-voltage transmission were constructed in 2023; the SPEED Act is a helpful first step toward creating the regulatory environment needed to build the transmission capacity necessary to sustain our thriving 21st century economy.”

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ABOUT ACORE

For over 20 years, the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE) has been the nation’s leading voice on the issues most essential to clean energy expansion. ACORE unites finance, policy, and technology to accelerate the transition to a clean energy economy. For more information, please visit http://www.acore.org.

Media Contacts:
Stephanie Genco
Senior Vice President, Communications
American Council on Renewable Energy
genco@acore.org

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https://acore.org/news/acore-statement-on-introduction-of-bipartisan-permitting-reform-legislation/

Renewable Energy

Renewable Energy Concepts Can’t Violate the Laws of Physics

Published

12 hours ago

February 28, 2026

Alice Rush

In the early days of 2GreenEnergy, my people and I were vigorously engaged in finding solid ideas in cleantech that needed funding in order to move forward.

I vividly remember a conversation with a guy in Maryland who was trying to explain the (ostensible) breakthrough that he and his team had made in hydrokinetics. When I was having trouble visualizing what we was talking about, he asked me to “think of it as a river in a box.”

“Oh!” I exclaimed. “You mean you take a box full of standing water, add energy to it get it moving, then extract that energy, leaving you with more energy that you added to it.”

“Exactly.”

I politely explained that the laws of physics, specifically the first and second laws of thermodynamics, make this impossible.

He wasn’t through, however, and insisted that, in his office, his people had constructed a “working model.”

Here’s where my tone descended into something less than 100% polite. I told him that he may think he has a working model, but he’s wrong; if he believes this, he’s ignorant; if he doesn’t, but is conducting this conversation anyway, he’s a fraud.

“But don’t you want to come see it?” he implored.

“No. Not only would not fly across the country to see whatever it is you claim to have built, I wouldn’t walk across the street to a “working model” of something that is theoretically impossible.”

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I tell this story because the claim made at the upper left is essentially identical. You’re pumping water up out of a stream, and then claiming to extract more energy when the water flows back into the stream.

Of course, social media today is rife with complete crap like this. We’ve devolved to a point where defrauding money out of idiots is rapidly replacing baseball as our national pastime.