According to POWER Magazine, a major overhaul of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is underway, driven by the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 and the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). These laws set page limits and deadlines for environmental reviews, with the OBBBA letting developers pay 125% of costs for a guaranteed 180-day or one-year review. In May 2025, the Supreme Court’s Seven County ruling told agencies to ignore “geographically separate” impacts and gave them “substantial deference” in court. Furthermore, the Trump administration rescinded old NEPA rules via Executive Order 14154, and agencies like the DOE and Army Corps have since rewritten their procedures to expedite permits, especially for energy projects tied to data centers and AI infrastructure.
NEPA Gets a Speed Upgrade
Look, NEPA reviews have been the bane of infrastructure developers for decades. They could drag on for years, get sued over speculative “downstream” impacts, and just generally gum up the works. The changes here are basically a multi-pronged attack on that inertia. Congress set hard deadlines. The Supreme Court narrowed what counts as a relevant environmental effect. And the executive branch is pushing agencies to cut red tape. It’s a full-court press. The OBBBA’s “pay-to-play” option is particularly wild—it essentially creates a fast lane for well-funded projects. Is that fair? That’s a whole other debate. But it’s a clear signal that speed is now a top priority.
The AI Electricity Crunch Is The Driver
Here’s the thing: none of this happens in a vacuum. This regulatory blitz is a direct response to panic over the grid. A recent study projects a 35% to 50% jump in power demand by 2040, and the near-term culprit is no secret. The Department of Energy says data center load has tripled in a decade and could double or triple again by 2028. When you need gigawatts of new power yesterday, you can’t wait a decade for a permit. So the government declared a national energy emergency and started tearing down procedural walls. This is industrial policy, real-time, for the digital age.
Who Benefits And What Gets Built
The administration’s focus, per EOs like “Unleashing American Energy” and the AI Action Plan, is unmistakably on “dispatchable” power—that’s code for fossil fuels and nuclear. The July 2025 EO on “Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure” explicitly names natural gas turbines and coal power equipment. It also pushes for new categorical exclusions and a special “transparency project” dashboard status to fast-track things. The beneficiaries are clear: data center developers, fossil fuel generators, and the transmission companies connecting them. The recent DOE directive to FERC to ease interconnection for “large loads” is the final piece of the puzzle. It’s all about getting power from source to server, fast.
A New Era of Permitting, With Trade-Offs
So what does this mean? For project developers, it’s a potential gold rush. The legal risk from NEPA challenges has been drastically lowered by the Seven County deference. They can fund their own reviews and get them done on a predictable schedule. But let’s be skeptical for a second. Streamlining isn’t the same as thoroughness. Fewer public comment requirements and narrower impact analyses mean communities and environmental groups have less formal input. The push for applicant-prepared documents also raises questions about objectivity. This new landscape, detailed by experts at firms like Hunton Andrews Kurth, creates opportunity but also conflict. We’re trading deliberation for velocity, betting that powering the AI boom can’t wait. It’s a huge, real-world experiment in regulatory efficiency. And we’re all about to see how it works.
