DP

Daniel Palkin

Things Daniel Says on Podcasts

“Federal lands make up 21% of the lower 48. They account for 3 or 4% respectively of each of our wind, solar, and geothermal. If you look at a map of federal lands across the country overlaid with utility-scale wind and solar development, you can see the wind and solar development filling in in the negative of all the federal land. It is deliberately avoiding it.” — Daniel Palkin, Volts “Anybody who's telling you a number with two significant digits is definitely making up the second. And the first one should probably be taken as a magnitude indicator rather than a faithful prediction of the future. We don't know the future.” — Daniel Palkin, Volts “It is actually identically zero. We've built zero transmission lines as a result of that process that FERC tried to set up to do inter-regional coordination. It's not hard to understand why when you look at the process: it's incredibly toothless.” — Daniel Palkin, Volts

Where to Find Them

Daniel Palkin has been a guest on Volts .

Recently: “What’s up with the new federal permitting reform bill?” on Volts (October 2026).

What They Said

“Federal lands make up 21% of the lower 48. They account for 3 or 4% respectively of each of our wind, solar, and geothermal. If you look at a map of federal lands across the country overlaid with utility-scale wind and solar development, you can see the wind and solar development filling in in the negative of all the federal land. It is deliberately avoiding it.” — Daniel Palkin, Volts

Palkin was arguing that NEPA review falls hardest on clean energy. He went on to cite a survey of veteran developers in which 82% said they had avoided federal land because of NEPA or other federal approvals.

Volts · 2026-10-09 Permalink → Listen →
Volts Around 1:09:24 into the episode
Speaker 2

Can we dive into that for a second, though, before we go to

Speaker 1

okay, briefly? We're so far behind schedule.

Speaker 2

Yes, I mean, if you want, we can go to the next one. No, no, go ahead. If you look at federal lands, which is not the only place that NEPA attaches, but the place that it certainly attaches disproportionately and kind of, you know, often requires the most fulsome and robust analysis. On federal lands in the U.S., federal lands make up 21% of the lower 48. They account for 3 or 4% respectively of each of our wind, solar, and geothermal. If you look at a map of federal lands across the country overlaid with utility-scale wind and solar development, you can see the wind and solar development filling in in the negative of all the federal land. It is deliberately avoiding it. There have been polls of developers, veteran developers who've developed 10 to 200 solar and transmission projects. And they ask them, you know, what is the most challenging kind of permitting, federal, local, or state? And they say federal by overwhelming majorities. They've asked them, have you ever avoided federal lands as a result of anticipating, you know, NEPA or other approvals? 82% yes…

Speaker 1

Okay, there's probably lots more to say about NEPA, but for the love of God, we really got to keep moving. Let's talk about state water permits. This, I think, is one where the trade-off is most lopsided from the perspective of environmental groups. So the second versus EPA case in 2023 shrank the…

Speaker 2

I think you are correct that this is the title of the bill that is. Most asymmetrically geared towards

Speaker 1

conservatives have been after this for years. Yeah. They've been pursuing this for years.

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode
“Anybody who's telling you a number with two significant digits is definitely making up the second. And the first one should probably be taken as a magnitude indicator rather than a faithful prediction of the future. We don't know the future.” — Daniel Palkin, Volts

Asked what the permitting bill would do to emissions, Palkin said he is confident of the sign (down) but not the size. He pointed out that energy models missed the big shocks of the past decade, from data-center load growth to the collapse in wind and solar costs.

Volts · 2026-10-09 Permalink → Listen →
Volts Around 2:04:19 into the episode
Speaker 2

…digit. And meanwhile, like we don't even know about large macroscopic seismic shocks that seem to occur within the energy sector like every three to five years at this point. Like five years ago, we had no idea that data centers were going to totally change the economics of the power sector. I

Speaker 1

mean, Iran. Iran. I mean, fracking stuff happens.

Speaker 2

Yeah. The cost declines in wind and solar. Like none of these things were in the mainstream models, let alone 10, let alone 100 years, you know, before they happened. And yet they have all been the things that have determined the trajectory we are on. And so I think we should ask, like, what are the things that enable us to be successful under a number of scenarios rather than like just what is our central scenario? I do think the central scenario looks good, but I think that like whether or not the data center load growth persists, having a robustly built out transmission grid and having the ability to build at more than 3% of total deployment of wind, solar, and geothermal on federal land when that federal land is 21% of the lower 48 land mass is like a good thing if you care about the deployment of those technologies and like a number of other structural factors. It's not that I think there are no trade-offs. It's not that I think there are no individual titles of the bill that asymmetrically point in a different…

Speaker 1

I sort of feel about modeling the way I feel about issue polling, which is like, sure, go ahead and use it to make your case and get what you want, but like, don't get too high on your own supply. And I think maybe to return to your sort of original kind of six considerations, I think. We can be…

Speaker 2

I agree with you. When I'm at my best, I try to believe that everybody who is objecting is objecting in the same good faith that I am. And I think 99.9% of the time, I think that assumption is either true or you should operate as if it's true because it's very close to true. Like, I think people…

Speaker 1

Yeah, things are not going well under the status quo. We are not under a trajectory we want to lock in here. Again, like a lot of people are saying, well, we don't need to do this. We can just mess with state and local permitting and we can use executive authority. I think a lot of people are…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode
“It is actually identically zero. We've built zero transmission lines as a result of that process that FERC tried to set up to do inter-regional coordination. It's not hard to understand why when you look at the process: it's incredibly toothless.” — Daniel Palkin, Volts

Palkin, who runs energy permitting work at Arnold Ventures, had just worked out that FERC's 2011 Order 1000 has had 225 "region-pair years" to produce interregional transmission. Asked by David Roberts to guess whether the number was meaningfully above zero, this was his answer. The new federal permitting bill would replace that process with mandatory interregional planning.

Volts · 2026-10-09 Permalink → Listen →
Volts Around 14:29 into the episode
Speaker 2

…lays out as inter-regional coordination, where the regions are meant to coordinate their needs with each other and find transmission solutions that meet them. Do you want to guess how many inter-regional transmission lines have been planned and built as a result in those 225 region pair years?

Speaker 1

Is it meaningfully larger than zero?

Speaker 2

It is actually identically zero. We've built zero transmission lines as a result of that process that FERC tried to set up to do inter-regional coordination. It's not hard to understand why when you look at the process, it's incredibly toothless. What this bill does as a remedy to that is it writes a actually quite, I guess, toothsome, would be like a version with teeth of an inter-regional planning rule that requires all these regions to get together with their neighbors on a periodic basis and go through a planning exercise subject to a bunch of known best practices, which have kind of been emblematic of the regional planning processes in regions where that has worked in the last several years and identify needs that can be met with transmission, identify transmission solutions to meet them, and then select those solutions if they're meeting a set of affordability and reliability metrics that are essentially set forth in the bill, which there's very good reason to believe there's so much pent up need on the grid that we would…

Speaker 1

But what if they don't? You know what I mean? What if they don't? Is there a forcing mechanism?

Speaker 2

There is. And this is the part that carries over from the EPRA bill is kind of the one-two punch of these two priorities. The first is this, I'm not going to call it top-down because it's really middle-out. It's driven by the regions, but this middle-out policy of having the regions get together…

Speaker 1

It eases congestion in your area, thereby lowering prices in your area, which in a sane world would be a good thing, but not always from the utilities' perspective.

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

Collections They Appear In

Climate & Energy