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THE FRONTIER LINE
Hosts Wayne Aston and David Murray explore the critical global pillars of infrastructure development and energy production, from traditional methods to future-forward advancements. The Frontier Line covers the latest industry news, energy innovations, and sustainability trends that are shaping the future. Through expert interviews with industry leaders in renewable energy, utility-scale battery storage, and waste-to-energy technologies, the podcast provides insights into the evolving landscape of energy efficiency and sustainable infrastructure. By focusing on the intersection of innovation and the politics of energy, The Frontier Line highlights transformative ideas and technologies poised to deliver cost-efficient, resilient, and sustainable solutions for global industries.
THE FRONTIER LINE
July 25' Trump Executive Orders Supporting AI Development, Reindustrialize 25', Why American Dominance Depends on Power
Welcome back to the show. Friends, dave and I are so excited to bring another amazing episode Today. We're going to be talking headlines. It's one of our favorite things to do covering the news, keeping our finger on the pulse of things globally and mostly here in Utah, but every now and then, and more often every week, federally, nationally, right, and so maybe, dave, how are you? I'm great.
Speaker 2:Good to be back, Wayne, and yes, we love talking headlines Coming in hot just feeling my excitement here, Hot off the presses right, as they say, that's right, that's right.
Speaker 1:So we are coming into the last week of July now and there was an executive order that came out that was pretty darn exciting for all of us, and this executive order was on July 23rd. President Trump signed actually three orders that day, but he released the Winning the AI Race, america's AI Action Plan, and that plan was to bolster US dominance in AI, and it's quite exciting when you dig in, right, dave it is.
Speaker 2:It has a lot of implications for what we're doing and for what a lot of groups are trying to do around the US and for what a lot of groups are trying to do around the US. Obviously, you know, the premise of all of this is that there is a quote-unquote arms race in AI.
Speaker 1:Yep and we covered that, we covered that maybe a few months ago on the China-US energy race. That might have been season one. Actually, I think it was season one yeah.
Speaker 2:How quickly these things are progressing and that there is a need for us to stay ahead of that. Obviously, there's a lot of debate in that area on both sides, but most I think most people agree that they're you know, we're you know we're in a we're in a race with China, primarily, and and so in order to do this I mean things you and I have now talked about probably since day one on this platform was well, in order to solve this, you have to solve power, solve power, you have to. I mean, at the heart of this is is solving power and solving infrastructure, because you can't, you can't build what we're going to need and what we're going to continue to need without doing that. And so you know this order uh, it was intended to be kind of an umbrella of like okay, here's all the things that this industry needs to stay ahead.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's right. And it's interesting because the timing of it was right in the same day or two around when back in Pennsylvania, they were having the reindustrialization summit and that was a very impactful couple days event there. And what I'm seeing in this executive order and I'm kind of comparing all that there's a coordinated effort, obviously, and it's a coordination of the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense, which is necessary. We've talked about the implications of the US-China energy race and how that is a matter of national security, so it makes sense that the DOD would be jumping into this conversation and so both of those, those big agencies, are named in this, this new order.
Speaker 1:And you can actually go read these executive orders. I don't know if you guys have done this, but you can go to white housegov slash presidential dash actions and you can look this up. And if you and I'm sitting on the white house website and the actual title of this order is accelerating federal permitting of data center infrastructure, okay, so now we're setting the table. This is this is an executive order, not specifically about energy, not specifically about energy, not specifically about defense, but very specifically about the US government supporting data center infrastructure, and it just so happens to involve energy in a big way and happens to involve DOD in a big way, right? So it's really cool to see all of those things kind of intertwining here yeah, one of the first, and so I mean I'll just jump into it.
Speaker 2:One of the first things, if you, you know, I think it's 22, 23 pages if I remember correctly, reading it, long all of these orders, so it's it's. It'll be easy to get you know through it if you want to go, just take it all in, but we'll try and do our best to distill it. So the first first thing that one of this is trying to do is streamline permitting for data centers and energy infrastructure. So the plan calls for new NEPA categorical exclusions for data centers and associated generation facilities, plus expanded FAST-41 coverage and a potential nationwide Clean Water Act Section 404 permit tailored to AI scale sites. This, would you know? What does that mean? It would mean it would probably shave months or even years off entitlement and permitting timelines. And in this sector, if you heard us talk about any of this, you realize that we're kind of in a race, you know, and it's to get get a power and infrastructure stood up as as quickly as possible and as effectively as possible.
Speaker 2:And so this is you know, this is that this first part of this has helped. You know was is intended to help do that.
Speaker 1:And Dave, you mentioned, uh, one of the one of the components of this is fast 41. And for the listeners who don't know what FAST-41 is, that is Fixing America's Surface Transportation Act and that goes back to like 2009. That's not a new thing, but there's new enhancements around transportation and infrastructure that play into this guys. That play into this guys. So we're trying to paint a picture here of this quilt that involves all of these pieces and they all have this symbiosis that support each other, and transportation infrastructure happened to be part of what has to be improved in order that we can effectively advance the AI initiatives.
Speaker 1:Now, when I'm looking at the actual order here, there's a few key points to drill home. Number one there's a designator called a data center project. That means a facility that requires greater than 100 megawatts of new load dedicated to AI inference, training, simulation and synthetic data generation. Also talks about covered components, and that means materials, products, infrastructure that are required to build the data center projects, such as transmission lines, natural gas pipelines or laterals, substations, switch yards, transformers, switch gear and system protective facilities. No-transcript no-transcript.
Speaker 3:No-transcript.
