Can artificial intelligence tools and techniques be used to speed up the arduous federal environmental permitting process for proposed energy-related projects?   

The U.S. Department of Energy was tasked to make it happen in a 2023 White House executive order. By April 2024, DOE had announced a $13 million VoltAIc initiative to streamline siting and permitting of critical clean energy infrastructure. 

DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory data scientists and subject matter experts received $300,000 to fund a pilot “PolicyAI” prototype to assist federal regulators in speeding the environmental review process.  

PNNL data scientists collected and extracted 28,212 documents across 2,917 different National Environmental Policy Act reviews into an AI-ready searchable database. The current version contains 4.8 million pages and over 3.6 billion bits of information related to federal environmental impact statements. Until now, these records were not available or searchable in one location. The entire database is now publicly available.