Editor's Note: Plans change quickly when you're unexpectedly out sick. Rather than letting these issues go on autopilot, I spent recovery time rebuilding search routines and improving some Ghost workflows. Time will tell if the changes stick. Back to the regularly scheduled programming.

The newsletter paused unexpectedly, but the permitting landscape kept moving. Texas froze 1,800 data center interconnection requests to evaluate project viability. Seven jurisdictions, spanning three levels of government, created seven new legal instruments to govern data center siting, none referencing the others. The Permitting Council allocated $5.85 million to merge federal species data into a single tool. CEQ held its inaugural permitting technology expo. Honolulu launched AI pre-screening for residential permits, with 20 additional cities at various stages of deployment.

Texas freezes 1,800 data center interconnection requests until it can verify the queue

Governor Greg Abbott directed the Public Utility Commission and ERCOT on August 3 to audit every data center project in the interconnection queue before approving another connection. ERCOT is tracking more than 1,800 projects representing over 474 gigawatts, more than five times the grid's record peak demand. The audit covers each project's power demand, water use, public financial assistance, community protections, and ownership. The governor's office counts 43 data center companies that have issued public statements endorsing the audit.

At the PUCT's August 14 emergency meeting, ERCOT officials clarified the scope: 250 to 300 projects in the Batch Zero study, most of them data centers, representing about 200 gigawatts. ERCOT general counsel Chad Seely described the work as "moving that verification process now to the front of the line before we begin the interconnection study process." The audit applies only to Batch Zero, not the full 1,800-project queue, and ERCOT still aims to complete the study by its original April deadline.

These are all things an applicant asserted when it entered the queue. Texas is checking those assertions by hand because intake never captured them in a form that could be validated on submission. The outstanding question for anyone building intake or screening tools is whether the audit criteria get published as a reusable standard or remain internal to the PUCT process. Whatever form ERCOT uses to verify those 250 to 300 projects becomes a de facto schema for large-load applications in ERCOT's interconnection queue, designed by a grid operator under political pressure rather than by a standards body.

Texas Tribune (Aug 3) · Texas Tribune (Aug 14) · Office of the Governor · Gibson Dunn

Seven jurisdictions, seven instruments: the data center governance cascade

In four weeks, the list of jurisdictions restricting or conditioning data center development grew from one to seven, and no two used the same legal instrument.

New York imposed a statewide moratorium by executive order at 50 megawatts (July 14; covered in this newsletter's July 27 issue). Montgomery County, Maryland approved an 18-month moratorium by council vote with a 25-megawatt zoning cap (July 28). Texas froze its interconnection queue by governor directive (August 3). Chicago's mayor signed an executive order creating enhanced regulatory review and called on the City Council to pass a temporary moratorium (August 11). Fort Worth's City Council voted unanimously to initiate a 90-day moratorium process, with the earliest effective date in February 2027 (August 11). Kalamazoo, Michigan approved a one-year moratorium by municipal resolution covering data centers, battery storage, and crypto mining (August 18). And Pennsylvania signed an executive order conditioning state permit review on binding infrastructure compliance (August 18), a different approach from all six of the above.

Pennsylvania's instrument deserves separate attention. Governor Shapiro's Executive Order 2026-05 requires data center projects above 25 megawatts to execute a legally binding Consent Order with the Department of Environmental Protection, committing to the GRID requirements: full infrastructure costs borne by the developer, environmental protections in sensitive watersheds, workforce standards, transparency, and no nondisclosure agreements. All data center projects were removed from the Permit Fast Track Program. Only GRID-certified projects may reenter. Pennsylvania looked at the same pressures as the six moratorium jurisdictions and decided the answer was conditional access rather than a pause.

Software that screens a project site for data center eligibility now has to encode all seven of these (and counting), each with a different legal instrument, a different threshold or no threshold, a different effective date, and a different determination. No authoritative feed or common schema exists, and nobody publishes a list.

PA Governor's Office · Montgomery County Council · City of Chicago · Fort Worth Report · WOODTV (Kalamazoo)

FERC gives six grid operators a deadline and gets six extension requests

FERC issued show cause orders on June 18 requiring all six jurisdictional RTOs and ISOs to demonstrate that their tariffs adequately handle large-load interconnection or to propose reforms. Responses were due August 17. FERC proposed defining a large load as a customer at a single site with peak load of at least 50 megawatts connecting at 69 kilovolts or above. The proceeding grew out of a rulemaking the Energy Secretary initiated in October 2025.

All six filed requests for 90-day extensions by August 3, asking to develop and file Section 205 reforms rather than justify their existing rules. None chose to defend its existing tariff. FERC's premise, that no grid operator's rules adequately handle large-load interconnection, went uncontested. If FERC grants the extensions, reform filings are due by mid-November.

Six operators developing six sets of reforms in parallel is how you produce six answers to the same structural question. If FERC pushes for convergence at that point, screening software that works across grid regions stays buildable. If it accepts the divergence, each region becomes its own regulatory product.

FERC docket RM26-4 · Orrick · RTO Insider

Permitting Council invests $5.85 million to merge federal species data into IPaC

The Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council announced $5.85 million in funding to the Department of the Interior on August 18 to integrate NOAA's ESA species data into IPaC, the Information for Planning and Consultation tool that screens project sites for Endangered Species Act-listed species. IPaC currently covers only USFWS-managed species. The Permitting Council estimates savings of 114,400 staff hours and more than $8 million in costs.

IPaC is one of the few federal permitting tools that project sponsors use voluntarily, because it answers a question they cannot skip. The problem is that it answers for one agency's species list and not the other's. The $5.85 million buys a merge. Whether it also buys a single consultation workflow or puts two datasets on the same screen is the implementation question that determines how much of those 114,400 hours actually come back.

Permitting Council

CEQ convenes the first Permitting Innovators Expo

CEQ held its inaugural Permitting Innovators Expo on July 31 at the Hilton Arlington Rosslyn, the first federal event dedicated to permitting technology procurement. Roughly 45 selected tools demonstrated capabilities grouped into four categories: document review, workflow coordination, data integration, and automation of routine tasks. The exhibitor list spanned systems integrators (Accenture Federal Services, Deloitte, Jacobs, Microsoft, Salesforce, ServiceNow) and specialist firms.

Two mechanisms carry the event forward. The highest-scoring teams get one-on-one meetings with agencies seeking specific solutions. And CEQ will publish a Permitting Innovators Solutions Catalog for distribution to agencies in late 2026. The catalog is the deliverable that outlasts the expo. A demo tells you what a vendor built. A request for a meeting tells you what an agency thinks it is missing, which is procurement evidence, not marketing.

White House CEQ · Permitting Innovators

Interior moves its NEPA rules into a revisable handbook

Interior's NEPA final rule removed more than 80 percent of the department's NEPA regulations from the Code of Federal Regulations. It relocated them into a Departmental NEPA Handbook revisable without notice-and-comment rulemaking. The handbook implements Section 112 of NEPA, added by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, under which a project sponsor can pay 125 percent of the estimated preparation cost in exchange for a deadline: 180 days for an environmental assessment, one year for an impact statement. Tribal organizations have objected, arguing consultation obligations are weaker as internal guidance than as regulation.

The fee provision creates two review clocks running on one staff. The handbook relocation is the harder engineering problem. A compliance tool encodes references: this trigger, that threshold, this consultation requirement. When the reference lives in the CFR, changes are dated, versioned, and announced through a channel a vendor can subscribe to. When it lives in a handbook revisable at will, there is no notification channel and no version history to build against.

Meanwhile, CEQ withdrew 18 guidance documents on June 29 covering topics from environmental justice to cooperating agency responsibilities, and the FAA on August 24 adopted a categorical exclusion from the Department of the Air Force, an early cross-agency CE transfer under CEQ's April guidance. The April guidance eliminated the requirement for public comment on CE adoptions. The federal NEPA reference framework is being rewritten, removed, and laterally expanded across agencies on parallel tracks, and the changes are not arriving through any single channel a compliance tool can subscribe to.

Interior via Tribal Business News · Allen Matkins · Federal Register (CEQ withdrawal) · Federal Register (FAA CE)

Municipal AI permitting goes from pilot to production

Honolulu's Department of Planning and Permitting launched Priority Review, routing residential applications cleared by CivCheck's AI tool into a faster prescreen lane. Average residential review time fell from 73 days to about 32.5, and average plan review cycles dropped from 3.4 to 1.4. CivCheck becomes mandatory for qualifying residential applications later this year. A Stateline investigation published August 20 found that more than 20 cities are now deploying AI tools to pre-screen building permit applications, from pilots to full implementation.

Seattle's seven-month test of CivCheck found 87% accuracy on completeness checks and 92% on compliance, with a 50% decrease in average intake review days. Seattle's recommendation: start with completeness checks, not code compliance. A Journal of Urban Economics paper published in August estimated that, in its model, reducing approval times by 25% in Los Angeles could have increased housing production rates by nearly 24%. Two new streams of federal funding, HUD automated permitting grants (awards expected September 1) and the Technology Modernization Fund (selections by September 30), target exactly this category of deployment.

AI handles the triage layer, checking for application completeness, required documents, and correct formatting, while human reviewers handle the judgment calls. Honolulu's reduction in review cycles (from 3.4 to 1.4) reflects improved submission quality. Seattle distinguished between completeness and compliance before launching its pilot, which helped the program produce usable results instead of prolonged debates about scope.

Stateline · GovTech (Honolulu) · Seattle Building Connections

Senate permitting reform slips three times and adds a second vehicle

The bipartisan Senate permitting negotiations (Lee, Heinrich, Capito, Whitehouse) missed the pre-recess target in late July, then missed August, and now aim for September. The talks paused earlier this year over the administration's offshore wind actions and resumed in March. Clean Water Act and National Historic Preservation Act reviews remain the unresolved sticking points. September also carries the government funding deadline, and the talks now run into midterm campaign season.

Meanwhile, Senator Armstrong's American Energy and Mineral Infrastructure Act (S. 4944) added 12 cosponsors in August, reaching 17, all Republican. The bill reforms NEPA and Clean Water Act permitting and directs interagency coordination for natural gas pipeline reviews, with support spanning energy, renewables, mining, manufacturing, public power, and labor. The House-passed SPEED Act is a third vehicle. Three vehicles, one bipartisan negotiation, and no language that puts them together. Agencies doing FY27 planning are planning against their current procedures.

Wicker Press Release · E&E News

Also in the last four weeks

Permitting Council MOUs. Iowa became the eighth state to sign a federal-state MOU, and this one commits the state to publishing permit actions on the Federal Permitting Dashboard. Eight agreements negotiated bilaterally with no published schema.

NRC NEPA overhaul. The NRC published a proposed rule eliminating draft environmental impact statements for nuclear licensing. Comments closed August 21. Counsel at K&L Gates argued that the streamlined rules add complexity for near-term reactor developers by moving document production to the applicant side while keeping binding deadlines.

NJDOT paper cutover. New Jersey accepted its last paper Major Access Permit application on July 29. The department led with creating the record, not with AI.

New Jersey Permitting Dashboard Pilot. Governor Sherrill announced a dashboard tracking permits in real time across three state agencies for ten selected projects. Whether it scales depends on whether the three agencies agreed on a shared schema.

Capgemini data readiness survey. 64% of government agencies are piloting or exploring AI, but fewer than 25% report high data maturity. The gap between activity and readiness has persisted at the agency level for months but is now apparent in aggregate results.

GSA/CORAS OneGov agentic AI deal. Agencies can now acquire agentic workflow automation at an 80% discount through September 2027, a purchasing vehicle that gives agencies a reason to buy before answering what an AI agent is permitted to do inside an environmental review.

Connecticut DEEP RFI. DEEP issued a request for information on AI for its permitting programs. An agency that knows what it wants issues an RFP. The question list is the revealing artifact.

Permitting Tech is an independent news site covering investment, products, and policy in permitting technology. Written by Boon Sheridan.