As he takes control of a growing White House effort to make permitting more efficient, Eric Beightel is aiming to create a formal process for getting consensus from various states affected by the same project.

That effort will help project sponsors avoid the “fits and starts” that sometimes delay highways and other cross-state projects, said Beightel, who was named executive director of the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council on June 21. The office has acquired a larger budget and more responsibility as President Joe Biden works to navigate a clean energy transition.

Transmission lines are an especially thorny problem, Beightel said in an interview, because “they may span states that don’t get any real benefit from the impact of the project. So to get from a generation source to another urban area, you may have rural, less densely populated areas, and those states may say, ‘What do I get out of this?’”

In Beightel’s view, “there has to be a way for us to enter into conversations with both the receiving states as well as the pass-through states and the generation states to figure out what’s the hang-up, and how can we find mutually beneficial arrangements that will allow us to complete these projects.”

Getting different states to buy into national efforts is critical to achieving the Biden White House’s clean energy goals, according to Mario...

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