Firm: Trump Must Act to Enable Nuclear, Data Center Development
Believes FERC currently poses too many regulatory hurdles
Blake Ledbetter
WASHINGTON, Feb. 20, 2025 – Legal analysts suggest that current legislation may need to be streamlined to ensure a more efficient energy supply for data centers.
Mark Perlis and Eva Dorrough, two environmental attorneys at multinational law firm Covington & Burling LLP., released a two-part article detailing the Trump Administration's path to achieving rapid energy development, specifically through nuclear generation.
The lawyers said that current nuclear regulations are too complex and slow, and cannot sustain the rapid growth of data centers that Trump hopes for in plans like Project Stargate, an up to $500 billion investment in AI infrastructure signed by Trump in January.
“If the Trump Administration intends to break through these barriers to enable rapid and large-scale deployment of co-located data centers, it may well need to do so through a new set of more detailed executive orders, agency regulations, and perhaps legislation,” Perlis and Dorrough said.
Co-located data centers involve the strategic placement of data centers alongside nuclear power plants, providing a direct energy source while reducing strain on the national electric grid.
Several Big Tech companies are beginning to explore co-location centers as well, often with small modular reactors that take less time and money to build.
“Co-location is attractive to hyperscalers because of its potential to provide those data centers with contractually committed energy supplies, delivered over dedicated wires, thereby minimizing impacts on both the regional transmission grid and the local utility electric distribution system,” Perlis and Dorrough said.
Trump has also supported this idea of co-located data centers, saying that co-locating generation and data centers “was largely my idea.”
However, according to the Covington post, "There are currently no FERC [Federal Energy Regulatory Commission] recognized or State-approved regulatory pathways for co-location,” creating massive barriers to its implementation.
Perlis and Dorrough said that Trump Executive Orders or other federal legislation could help craft regulatory pathways to co-location.
They are also optimistic that Trump-appointed FERC Chairman Mark Christie will help direct FERC in the right direction. Christie has addressed co-location as “a huge issue that we need to get in front of… there is a strong consensus that we need to move forward.”
