“The game in the 1970s was to stop things, but if you’re a climate activist now, the game is to build things,” said Peters, who worked as an environmental lawyer for many years. “My proposal is, get out of the way of everything and we win. Renewables win. And NEPA is a big delay.”
NEPA requires that the federal government review the environmental implications of its actions before finalizing them, permitting decisions included. The 50-year-old environmental law has already undergone several rounds of reform, including efforts under both Presidents Biden and Trump to remove redundancies and reduce the size and scope of environmental analyses conducted under the law. But bottlenecks remain — completing the highest level of review under the law still takes four-and-a-half years, on average. Just before Thanksgiving, the House Committee on Natural Resources advanced the SPEED Act, which aims to ease that congestion by creating shortcuts for environmental reviews, limiting judicial review of the final assessments, and preventing current and future presidents from arbitrarily rescinding permits, subject to certain exceptions.
Evans framed the problem in terms of keeping up with countries like China on building energy infrastructure. “I’ve seen how other parts of the world produce energy, produce other things,” said Evans. “We build things cleaner and more responsibly here than really anywhere else on the planet.”
Both representatives agreed that the SPEED Act on its own wouldn’t solve all the United States’ energy issues. Peters hinted at other permitting legislation in the works.
“We want to take that SPEED Act on the NEPA reform and marry it with specific energy reforms, including transmission,” said Peters.
Next, Neil Chatterjee, a former Commissioner of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, explained to Rob another regulatory change that could affect the pace of energy infrastructure buildout: a directive from the Department of Energy to FERC to come up with better ways of connecting large new sources of electricity demand — i.e. data centers — to the grid.
“This issue is all about data centers and AI, but it goes beyond data centers and AI,” said Chatterjee. “It deals with all of the pressures that we are seeing in terms of demand from the grid from cloud computing and quantum computing, streaming services, crypto and Bitcoin mining, reshoring of manufacturing, vehicle electrification, building electrification, semiconductor manufacturing.”
Chatterjee argued that navigating load growth to support AI data centers should be a bipartisan issue. He expressed hope that AI could help bridge the partisan divide.
“We have become mired in this politics of, if you’re for fossil fuels, you are of the political right. If you’re for clean energy and climate solutions, you’re the political left,” he said. “I think AI is going to be the thing that busts us out of it.”
Updating and upgrading the grid to accommodate data centers has grown more urgent in the face of drastically rising electricity demand projections.
Marsden Hanna, Google’s head of energy and dust policy, told Heatmap’s Jillian Goodman that the company is eyeing transmission technology to connect its own data centers to the grid faster.
“We looked at advanced transition technologies, high performance conductors,” said Hanna. “We see that really as just an incredibly rapid, no-brainer opportunity.”
Advanced transmission technologies, otherwise known as ATTs, could help expand the existing grid’s capacity, freeing up space for some of the load growth that economy-wide electrification and data centers would require. Building new transmission lines, however, requires permits — the central issue that panelists kept returning to throughout the event.
Devin Hartman, director of energy and environmental policy at the R Street Institute, told Jillian that investors are nervous that already-approved permits could be revoked — something the solar industry has struggled with under the Trump administration.
“Half the battle now is not just getting the permits on time and getting projects to break ground,” said Hartman. “It’s also permitting permanence.”
This event was made possible by the American Council on Renewable Energy’s Macro Grid Initiative.
