The Politics of Speed: Who Decides, and Who Pays
There is a haste that builds and a haste that merely breaks ground. The first asks the valley’s leave; the second learns, too late, that a valley withholds it. The wise reckoned the cost of speed before the first stone was cut — for the stones do not send the bill. The country does.
Speed Became the Only Priority
Something unusual has happened in infrastructure policy: the two halves of the political spectrum have converged on the same objective from opposite premises. The deregulatory right wants to build faster by removing rules; the “abundance” left wants to build faster by fixing a government it believes has become better at blocking than building. They disagree about almost everything except the verb. The result is that speed — not cost, not returns, not even reliability — has quietly become the organising priority of the entire buildout.
The evidence is not rhetorical. In May 2025 the Supreme Court decided Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County by a unanimous 8-0 margin, holding that environmental review under NEPA is a procedural cross-check, not a substantive roadblock, narrowing the required scope of review and instructing courts to give agencies substantial deference. Lower courts have since extended it and litigants now face materially higher hurdles. Alongside it, the Council on Environmental Quality’s NEPA regulations were rescinded outright (interim rule in early 2025, final rule January 2026); a bipartisan Build America Caucus — nicknamed the “abundance caucus” — formed to push permitting reform; the House advanced a SPEED Act to rewrite NEPA further; and a Democratic governor signed a rollback of California’s signature environmental statute to accelerate housing. The direction of travel is not contested. Only its price is.
When an 8-0 Supreme Court, a bipartisan caucus, and a Democratic governor rolling back his own state’s landmark environmental law all point the same way, the tailwind is real and durable — this is a structural regime shift, not a cyclical mood. But a regime that agrees on speed has not agreed on who absorbs its costs, and that unresolved question is where the risk lives. Speed is being purchased on terms nobody has fully priced.
Speed Is a Transfer, Not a Technology
Here is the reframe underneath the whole piece. Making a project faster does not, by itself, make it cheaper or better. It reallocates two things — who decides and who bears the residual risk — and those two things are exactly what the project’s financial model does not contain.
Every mechanism that buys speed pays for it by moving a cost off the developer’s balance sheet and onto someone who was not at the table.
Narrowing environmental review moves risk from the developer to the affected community and ecosystem, and removes a channel of legal recourse. Fast-tracking a large load onto the grid moves the cost of the capacity it triggers onto every other ratepayer. The speed is genuine. So is the transfer — and the transfer is invisible in an internal rate of return.
| Acceleration mechanism | Speed it buys | Who bears the residual |
|---|---|---|
| NEPA narrowing (Seven County; CEQ rescission) | Faster, narrower federal review; fewer indirect-effect challenges | Host community and ecosystem (unstudied indirect effects); opponents lose a recourse channel |
| Interconnection reform (FERC Order 2023) | Higher throughput for “ready” projects; fewer speculative filings | Smaller and earlier-stage developers priced out by higher deposits and readiness bars |
| Large-load fast-track (grid-operator programmes) | Quicker connection for hyperscale demand | All other ratepayers, via socialised capacity and network cost |
| State-law rollback (CEQA reform) | Faster housing and energy approvals | Local review and the constituencies those statutes were built to protect |
None of this is an argument that the transfers are wrong. Several are plainly worth making — a review process captured by opponents to stop projects on their merits is its own failure. The point is analytical, not moral: a faster project is a differently-distributed project, and whoever ends up holding the residual has both a grievance and, increasingly, a vote. That is the mechanism by which speed generates its own opposition.
The Bottleneck Is Governance, and Governance Doesn’t Scale With Capital
The reason speed is so hard to buy is that the binding constraint is not money or technology. It is process. The clearest case is the interconnection queue — the line a power project must wait in to connect to the grid. At the end of 2023 the active queue peaked near 2,600 GW, roughly twice the entire installed US generating fleet. It has since eased to about 2,061 GW in 2025, but the decline is the tell: it came largely from project withdrawals and from two grid operators pausing new intake, not from faster processing.
Follow the completion rate and the queue stops looking like a pipeline at all. Of the projects that entered US queues between 2000 and 2019, only about 19% reached commercial operation; for solar the figure is closer to 14%. More than 90% of applications arrive with deficiencies requiring rework. FERC’s Order 2023 — the largest interconnection overhaul in decades, moving to cluster studies and “first-ready, first-served” with higher deposits — is a real improvement, but it buys speed the same way everything else does: by raising the bar to enter, which screens out the speculative and the under-capitalised alike.
The lesson generalises past the queue. A governance bottleneck — a study process, a permit, a cost-allocation fight — cannot be relieved by pouring capital into it. More money in the queue just makes the line longer. This is why the buildout’s pace is set by institutions, not balance sheets, and why the scarce input in the entire supercycle is administrative and political capacity, not investable dollars.
The Bill Lands on Whoever Didn’t Choose
When speed’s cost is socialised, it lands on people who never voted for the project and capture none of its upside. The starkest example is the collision between data-center demand and the grid. In two years, PJM’s capacity auction — the price paid to keep enough generation available for 67 million people — went from $28.92 to $329.17 per MW-day, an escalation of more than 800%, hitting the FERC price cap and staying there for three consecutive auctions while still falling short of the reliability requirement.
The independent market monitor attributed 63% of that increase to data-center load — roughly $9.3bn in a single year, recovered from ordinary customers who did not build the data centers. The average PJM household faces an estimated $70 per month in higher bills by 2028. Nationally, utilities requested a record ~$31bn in rate increases in 2025, double the prior year, and residential electricity prices rose 7% in a single year. The cost of building fast for one customer is being paid, quietly and at scale, by everyone else on the wire.
| Delivery year | PJM capacity clear ($/MW-day) | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 / 25 | $28.92 | Baseline — the world before the surge |
| 2025 / 26 | $269.92 | +833% in one year; data centers ~63% of the rise |
| 2026 / 27 | $329.17 | Cleared at the FERC-approved cap |
| 2027 / 28 | $333.44 | At the updated cap; short of reliability target |
| 2028 / 29 | ~$325 | Near cap; ~6.8 GW short for a third straight auction |
Legitimacy Is a Depleting Reserve
Here is why the socialised bill is not just an equity problem but a risk problem. Speed is bought by spending public consent, and consent is finite. Each acceleration — a narrowed review, a fast-tracked load, a rate rider nobody voted for — draws down a reserve of trust. When it runs low, the response is not a strongly-worded letter; it is a moratorium, a rate-class carve-out, a ballot measure, a revived lawsuit. The backlash is the mechanism by which fast projects become slow ones, retroactively.
That reserve is visibly draining. At least 23 states have already legislated on who pays for the data-center buildout. Virginia is creating a separate data-center rate class; Pennsylvania is running a precedent-setting rate case; Ohio has enacted an 85% minimum-bill ratchet; Oregon, Virginia and Pennsylvania have built frameworks with long contract terms, take-or-pay minimums and full collateral, precisely so that speculative load cannot strand ratepayers. In November 2025 PJM stakeholders voted down every major proposal to make data centers carry more of their own cost, pushing the decision to the board — which chose an incentive route: an expedited connection track for large loads that bring their own generation, and curtailment for those that do not.
A project approved fast under a narrowed process, financed against a socialised cost, sits on a legitimacy it has borrowed rather than earned. That debt is callable. The reversal does not usually kill the asset outright; it re-prices it — a new rate class, a curtailment obligation, a required community-benefit payment, a permit re-opened on a technicality. Underwriting the base case without pricing the callable-legitimacy tail is the most common error in this cycle.
What the Market Doesn’t Price
An internal rate of return captures the cost of the build and the value of the offtake. It does not capture the durability of the permission to build — and in a regime organised around speed, that permission is the volatile variable. The projects that will actually get built fast are not the ones with the best headline economics. They are the ones that have already paid the political price of speed up front.
Underwrite the projects that have already paid for their speed — aligned cost-bearers, pre-cleared process, secured local consent — not the ones with the cheapest capital cost.
A large load that brings its own generation has internalised the transfer and earned the fast track. A brownfield repower inside an existing fence has bought its way past both the queue and the siting fight. A project whose speed depends on a socialised cost or a narrowed review it did not secure is carrying an unpriced reversal option that the counterparty holds. Price the permission, not just the plant.
Reading It Through the Frameworks
Where does policy become the cash flow? Directly, and on both sides of the ledger. Permitting reform and interconnection reform are pro-speed policy converting into shorter timelines and higher project throughput. Rate-allocation rules, moratoria and rate-class carve-outs are anti-socialisation policy converting into re-priced cash flows for whoever was carrying the transfer. The same regime that accelerates a project can, twelve months later, re-open its economics — and the trigger is political salience, not project performance.
What kind of risk is it? Speed-driven assets carry a distinctive profile: strong structural tailwind, genuine timeline benefit, and a reversal risk tied to legitimacy rather than technology. The failure mode is not that the plant breaks; it is that the permission is withdrawn or re-priced after the capital is committed. That argues for underwriting on the durability of the consent — the alignment of who pays with who benefits — and treating the fastest-looking deal with the thinnest political cover as the most fragile, not the most attractive.
Speed has become the organising priority of the infrastructure buildout, endorsed across the political spectrum and written into law by an 8-0 Supreme Court, a bipartisan caucus and a Democratic governor dismantling his own state’s environmental statute. That tailwind is real and durable. But speed is not an engineering variable an allocator can simply favour. It is a political choice that reallocates who decides and who pays, and the project model captures neither transfer.
The fast project is not the cheap one or the best one — it is the one that has already paid the political price of speed. The bottleneck is governance, which no amount of capital can scale; the bill for acceleration lands on whoever was not at the table; and the legitimacy that fast approvals borrow is callable, one moratorium or rate-class carve-out at a time. Price the permission, not just the plant. Read who bears the transfer, and treat the fastest deal with the thinnest political cover as the most fragile position in the book — not the most attractive.
The swift road and the lasting road are seldom the same road. The one is measured in seasons saved, the other in quarrels settled before the digging began. Men praise the swift road until the day the lasting one is needed — and then curse that it was never built.
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