The Obama administration has this week handed a major boost to America’s renewable energy sector, announcing plans to fast-track planning and permitting decisions for a new wave of utility-scale wind and solar projects.

The Office of Management and Budget confirmed that in response to a Presidential Executive Order issued in March this year tasking officials with speeding up planning decisions for key infrastructure projects, seven major clean energy projects planned for Arizona, California, Nevada and Wyoming would be expedited through government permitting processes.

The six utility-scale solar projects and one wind farm could combined deliver nearly 5GW of renewable energy capacity, providing enough clean power for about 1.5 million homes.

“As part of President Obama’s all-of-the-above strategy to expand domestic energy production and strengthen the economy, we are working to advance smart development of renewable energy on our public lands,” said Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar in a statement. “These seven proposed solar and wind projects have great potential to grow our nation’s energy independence, drive job creation, and power economies across the west.”

The proposed projects include a number of high-profile developments, such as BP Wind’s 425MW Mohave County Wind Farm in Arizona, which is now scheduled to receive federal permit and review decisions by January next year, and NextEra’s 750MW McCoy Solar Energy Californian solar PV project, which has been promised a planning decision by the end of this year.

The Obama administration stressed that the streamlining of the planning process was part of a renewable energy strategy that had already seen more utility-scale clean energy projects on public lands approved in the past three years than had been approved in the previous 20 years.

The announcement comes in the same week as the Department of the Interior also signed a memorandum of understanding with the Department of Defense intended to identify new areas of military land that can be used for renewable energy generation.

Energy policy is fast-emerging as a key political battleground during election year. President Obama has consistently touted an “all of the above” strategy designed to diversify America’s energy mix through increased investment in alternative energy sources such as renewables, while his Republican rival Mitt Romney has been calling for an end to government support for renewable energy technologies and an increased focus on accelerating the country’s recent shale gas boom.

The latest developments came as Greenpeace this week released a briefing note detailing how the Romney campaign’s press secretary, Andrea Saul, worked on behalf of ExxonMobil during her time at lobbyist DCI on what the environmental campaign group describes as “a major multifaceted campaign to undermine climate science”.

Climate scientist Michael Mann, who was a target of DCI smear campaigns, said: “Andrea Saul and the others at DCI Group who carried out this attack on climate scientists and their work helped to delay any serious actions to combat climate change and its impacts, at great cost to society.”