Adding Impacts and Mitigation Measures to OpenEI's RAPID Toolkit
The Open Energy Information platform hosts the Regulatory and Permitting Information Desktop (RAPID) Toolkit to provide renewable energy permitting information on federal and state regulatory processes. One of the RAPID Toolkit's functions is to help streamline the geothermal permitting processes outlined in the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). This is particularly important in the geothermal energy sector since each development phase requires separate land analysis to acquire exploration, well field drilling, and power plant construction permits. Using the Environmental Assessment documents included in RAPID's NEPA Database, the RAPID team identified 37 resource categories that a geothermal project may impact. Examples include impacts to geology and minerals, nearby endangered species, or water quality standards. To provide federal regulators, project developers, consultants, and the public with typical impacts and mitigation measures for geothermal projects, the RAPID team has provided overview webpages of each of these 37 resource categories with a sidebar query to reference related NEPA documents in the NEPA Database. This project is an expansion of a previous project that analyzed the time to complete NEPA environmental review for various geothermal activities. The NEPA review not only focused on geothermal projects within the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service managed lands, but also projects funded by the Department of Energy. Timeline barriers found were: extensive public comments and involvement; content overlap in NEPA documents, and discovery of impacted resources such as endangered species or cultural sites.
- Research Organization:
- National Renewable Energy Lab. (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC36-08GO28308
- OSTI ID:
- 1358340
- Report Number(s):
- NREL/CP-6A20-68546
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Presented at the Geothermal Resources Council Annual Meeting (GRC 2016), 23-26 October 2016, Sacramento, California
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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