Wyoming Teams With Trump Administration to Expedite Energy, Industrial Projects
I keep coming back to the data centers in this announcement. Wyoming wants to fast-track industrial projects, and data centers are the hungry new tenants on the block, sucking down electricity and water. But the memorandum with the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council doesn't tell us which environmental reviews get trimmed to make that happen.
Expediting permitting can be sensible when the process is genuinely redundant. But Wyoming is also a state with a deep coal identity, and the tension between that legacy and the clean energy transition is real. I'd want to know whether this fast lane applies equally to wind and solar or tilts toward the fossil side of the ledger.
The federal council was created to cut through red tape, and there's a case for that. Yet when a state signs on to speed things up, the public deserves clarity on what oversight is being traded away. I'd push for specifics on which safeguards remain intact before cheering this on.