NEPA Ninja

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Problem

Currently it takes 5+ years on average for a project to complete the permitting process. As presented during kickoff on Friday, there's a large pile of challenges that cause these delays. Local ordinances, difficulties obtaining interconnections to transmission lines, and community opposition are the main causes of delays. Reaching clean energy deployment goals will require significantly increasing the pace of permitting. Additionally, there is no centralized database of permitting requirements across thousands of local authorities, making it difficult for developers to navigate the process. Access to original source documents was also limited. The large volume of public comments on projects is challenging to review manually as well.

Given the limited time, we decided to focus on one core user challenge: how can future applicants set themselves up to succeed, have insight into the process, and know about upcoming challenges?

Our Solution

We built a tool that helps applicants foresee potential challenges with their project, based on the feedback that previous applicants have received. The interface is a web app with a map that displays past projects.

Users input their location and project description, and we share relevant feedback based on projects in a similar region and project type.