Permitting Reform
Building the Infrastructure America Needs
The Issue
America’s electricity demand is rising faster than the nation’s permitting system can keep pace.
Growth from data centers, artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, and electrification is increasing the need for new generation, transmission, storage, pipelines, and hydropower resources.
LPPC members are ready to build. They plan to invest more than $166 billion in electric infrastructure over the next decade, including approximately 58 GW of new generation. But outdated permitting rules, duplicative reviews, shifting agency interpretations, and prolonged litigation can delay critical projects for years.
Our Position
LPPC supports comprehensive federal permitting reform that reduces delay, improves certainty, and helps critical energy infrastructure get built on time and at reasonable cost.
Reform should accelerate needed infrastructure while protecting customers, respecting public power’s Federal Power Act protections, and preserving meaningful environmental review.
LPPC urges Congress to advance permitting reform in four key areas:
Modernize environmental review
Narrow duplicative reviews, expand appropriate categorical exclusions, enforce clear agency deadlines, and reduce litigation-driven delays under NEPA and the Clean Water Act.
Reform transmission permitting with customer protections
If Congress includes transmission permitting reforms, they must respect longstanding Federal Power Act boundaries and protect public power customers. Any new authority should require net customer benefits, tie project certification to FERC-approved regional planning, preserve Section 201(f) protections, and limit new FERC rate authority to the certified project.
Streamline hydropower relicensing
Improve interagency coordination, reduce duplicative reviews, and ensure mandatory conditions are tied to the actual effects of the hydropower project.
Create permitting certainty
Establish enforceable, technology-neutral review deadlines and protect fully permitted projects from delay or reversal caused by shifting political priorities.
What’s at Stake
When permits stall, customers pay through higher costs, delayed infrastructure, and greater reliability risks.
Public power utilities are accountable to the communities they serve. LPPC urges Congress to enact bipartisan permitting reform that gives critical infrastructure proposals a transparent, predictable, and durable path to approval.
