Why is grid infrastructure so much harder to build in the US than in 2005?

Permitting times for transmission lines have roughly doubled since 2005, despite (or because of) more attention from both sides of the policy aisle. We have ~$300B in interconnection queue waiting on the grid to catch up. The mechanism is environmental review proliferation crossed with state-by-state veto power. NEPA + state environmental reviews + utility commission approvals + local easement disputes = a serial process where any one node can delay the whole thing by years. This pattern looks identical to the housing-permitting story. Both have the structure of "we created procedural rights to slow things down, the rights got used." The fix isn't deregulation — it's process *parallelization* (run environmental review concurrent with utility approval) and shot-clock-style limits on how long any single review can take. The political will to do this is rising on both sides but the implementation keeps getting tangled.