The Cost of Delay: Federal Permitting and America’s Energy Challenge
September 9, 2026 · Timothy M. Doyle and Robert G. Eccles · Next American Era
A Phase I Working Paper Establishing a Factual Foundation for
Permitting Reform Analysis
Delay in building energy infrastructure is, at its core, an affordability problem, and the pressure behind it is intensifying. After roughly two decades of flat electricity demand, U.S. load is rising again, pushed by data centers and artificial intelligence, manufacturing reshoring, electrification, and the need to replace retiring generation. The magnitude is genuinely uncertain and high-end forecasts warrant caution, but the direction is clear. The infrastructure to meet that demand is not being built at the pace, scale, or predictability the moment requires. The cost of that failure is ultimately borne by consumers, who pay for a system that costs more to run than it needs to, by workers whose work is deferred along with the projects, and by communities waiting on the tax base, the employment, and the decisions those projects would bring. Traditional permitting reform remains central to fixing that. Faster and more predictable federal review is necessary to getting projects built, and it has never been sufficient on its own.
The costs of that failure take three forms. Congestion charges arise when a constrained grid cannot deliver lower-cost power to where it is needed. Financing costs rise when long timelines extend the period a project carries its charges before it earns revenue. And entry costs weigh most on small and mid-size developers, who carry multi-year interconnection queues and rising study deposits before a project earns anything. These are documented, mechanism-level costs rather than a speculative national aggregate. Grid congestion cost more than $12 billion in 2024. At the end of 2025, roughly 8,200 projects representing about 2,061 GW of generation and storage were awaiting interconnection, and the median wait from request to commercial operation had grown to more than five years. Of the capacity that requested interconnection between 2000 and 2020, only about 13 percent had reached commercial operation by the end of 2025. Reducing delay works directly on each of these. It does not by itself lower retail bills, which reflect generation, transmission, distribution, capacity, policy, and weather together. The defensible claim is directional, and it is strong. A faster, more predictable system is a cheaper system at the margin. Cost is not the only consequence. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s assessments identify growing risk of resource-adequacy shortfalls over the next decade, though the degree of that risk is debated.
The central finding of this paper is that delay has no single cause, and that this is why reform keeps failing. Delay is the accumulation of many separately-defensible obstacles, each with its own logic and each requiring its own distinct remedy. Federal environmental review is one. So are interagency conflict, thin agency capacity, state and local siting, interconnection queues, litigation and its remedies, equipment supply chains, financing, and the reversals that come with each change of administration. A package calibrated to one of these does little about the rest. That finding also limits what can fairly be blamed for delay. An obstacle truly matters to the schedule only when it sits on a project’s critical path. A project that has cleared environmental review but waits on transformers, interconnection, or a state siting decision is not held up by federal permitting at that moment.
Several corrections follow. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is procedural, not a permit, and it is one part of a system that also includes substantive permits, consultations, rights-of-way, leases, and certificates. Long timelines belong to environmental impact statements (EISs) for large and contested projects. Those averaged about 4.5 years from notice of intent to record of decision across the statements the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) analyzed from 2010 to 2018, with more recent data showing improvement. The governing baseline is also moving through the courts and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) rather than Congress alone, reshaped by Supreme Court holdings in Loper Bright and Seven County, as well as FERC Orders 1920 and 2023.
Delay is not ideologically neutral. It slows clean-energy development, including transmission, renewables, storage, geothermal, nuclear, carbon capture, and critical minerals, and conventional development alike, including gas pipelines, liquefied natural gas (LNG), gas generation, crude oil pipelines, and refineries. It can set back environmental goals when delayed clean infrastructure prolongs reliance on higher-emitting alternatives, and it harms consumers, workers awaiting construction jobs, and communities awaiting a decision. That reframes permitting from a contest over which projects to favor into a shared question about whether the system works.
On that question there is real cross-ideological agreement, though narrower than the rhetoric suggests. It is deepest on procedure and capacity: coordination, lead-agency accountability, concurrent review, staffing and technical expertise, digital permitting, and better data. The fault lines are equally persistent, running through technology-neutral versus clean-targeted reform, judicial review and remedies, state authority under Clean Water Act (CWA) Section 401, transmission backstop authority, environmental justice, and tribal consultation. Those fractures explain why the Energy Permitting Reform Act (EPRA) advanced on a bipartisan committee vote in 2024 and never reached the floor, and why none of the SPEED, CERTAIN, and FREEDOM Acts has been enacted, though the SPEED Act has passed the House.
The evidence here is deliberately specific. Six case examples separate federal review from the other forces at work, and none supports a single-cause account. Several show that predictability matters as much as speed, since a permit quickly issued but later vacated or reversed gives sponsors and communities little of the certainty that drives investment. Durability failed a natural gas pipeline and an offshore wind farm alike. One held a valid federal certificate and still lost its accompanying permits to years of litigation. The other completed every stage of review, defeated every challenge through the denial of certiorari, financed and built, and was halted anyway. No quantity of completed process reaches that, which is why a distinct family of reform is now aimed at it. Neither a reliable national price tag nor a reliable count of jobs lost to delay exists, and saying so is a strength rather than an evasion. The federal government counts the workforce that builds this infrastructure. In 2024 it found 326,621 construction workers supporting electric power generation and fuels production, and separately 537,767 construction jobs contributed to transmission, distribution, and storage. The most-cited aggregates are forward projections or pipeline totals rather than measurements of what delay has cost, and no jobs figure separates work that delay destroyed from work that delay moved to another project or another year. This paper relies instead on the primary-sourced measures set out above, each tied to a specific record and each pointing at something fixable. This Phase I paper establishes a shared factual foundation and maps where agreement is deepest and where it breaks down. It does not endorse a bill or prescribe statutory language. The framing throughout is better review, not weaker review, and faster decisions, not automatic approvals. The country needs decisions that are faster, clearer, more evidence-based, and more durable, without sacrificing the legitimacy that makes them stick. What chronic delay leaves in place is a system that costs more to run than it needs to, and consumers bear that cost.