The Tennessee Valley Authority will soon limit environmental analyses under the National Environmental Policy Act in an effort to speed up energy project construction.
The federal utility announced Tuesday that it will update its NEPA regulations, setting time limits to complete environmental assessments and environmental impact statements. The new rules also set page limits for such analyses and include provisions for creating new categorical exclusions, which allow projects to skip some NEPA permitting.
TVA began working on the changes last spring, after the White House proposed scrapping nearly 50 years of regulations that specified how agencies should comply with NEPA. The administration finalized those changes this month.
The move handed compliance responsibility to individual agencies, as part of President Donald Trump’s push to get rid of all regulations that “impose undue burdens” on fossil fuel production.
