Two Words That Just Unleashed PA's Economy: 'Deemed Approved'

If historians ever mark the moment when Pennsylvania broke free from a decade of self-inflicted economic drag, it may be found not at a ribbon-cutting, but in a state budget bill.

The “Streamlining Permits for Economic Expansion and Development,” or SPEED program, ensures that state government permitting can no longer operate without transparency or deadlines.

Critical to the bureaucratic reform is a “deemed approved” trigger should regulators miss their newly codified deadlines.

Meeting deadlines is now the law. It is difficult to overstate how radical that is in a state that spent the past decade perfecting the art of delay and scaring away businesses.

SPEED may prove to be the single most pro-growth piece of legislation Pennsylvania has enacted in a generation.

Developers can plan. Manufacturers can invest. Energy producers can build. Capital can move.

Passed in bipartisan fashion, the proposal had strange bedfellows.

Hailing from arguably the most conservative region of Pennsylvania, York County’s Republican state Sen. Kristin Phillips-Hill championed the proposal. It also earned the support of House Majority Leader Matt Bradford and Gov. Josh Shapiro, both Democrats from Montgomery County where Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump by more than 20 points.

If the United States cannot reliably and affordably generate, transmit, and deliver electricity at scale, the entire AI revolution, manufacturing reshoring boom, and electrification agenda collapses into theory.

Pennsylvania sits at the center of that contradiction.

The Commonwealth is one of the largest natural-gas producers on Earth. It sits inside the footprint of PJM, which is the largest power market in the United States.

And yet, our grid is tightening, prices are rising, and capacity is rationed through a regulatory maze few outside the industry even understand.

This is where the ARC framework and Pennsylvania’s SPEED reforms intersect.

ARC is a national acknowledgement that the old way of regulating infrastructure cannot coexist with an energy-hungry economy: serial reviews, overlapping jurisdictions, and endless litigation.

SPEED is the proof of concept that something can be done about it.

ARC can and should go further to confront three structural failures that are now distorting energy markets.

First, demand forecasting is broken. Across Pennsylvania, speculative data center projects and industrial load are being booked years before construction begins. Those phantom megawatts inflate capacity requirements today, driving up prices for households and businesses that may never see the benefit. Pennsylvania has passed legislation to fix this in a way that can serve as a national model.

Second, interconnection is becoming the new permitting choke point. Even when generation is approved, getting it physically connected to the grid can take half a decade. Backlogs are now measured in years, not months. SPEED-style accountability must extend to transmission and interconnection approvals.

Third, America must abandon the fantasy that reliability and decarbonization are mutually exclusive. Modern natural gas, advanced nuclear, fuel cells, carbon capture, and other technologies are not obstacles to clean energy. Instead, they are prerequisites for scaling it.

This is why ARC’s emphasis on “capacity first” is so critical. Without firm baseload power, everything layered on top of it – AI, EVs, reshoring, electrification – can’t happen.

This is the moment when Pennsylvania should recognize its strategic leverage. We are not merely a consumer of power.

Pennsylvania is a global supplier of the AI revolution’s most precious resource: energy. With the right permitting, interconnection, and investment climate, the Commonwealth should anchor the entire next phase of America’s industrial revival.

SPEED shows we can finally understand that delay is not the way things have to be. ARC recognizes the same thing on a national scale.

America does not lose competitiveness because it lacks ingenuity. It loses because it buries ingenuity under bureaucracy.

Pennsylvania proved that it doesn’t have to be permanent.

Washington should have no excuse.

Athan Koutsiouroumbas is a managing director at Long Nyquist and Associates and a former congressional chief of staff. Follow him on X at @Athan_K.