There are currently More than 50 permits at national level 404—If of which still require pre-construction notifications, which are renewed once every five years. Many of these exemptions are for agricultural activities, such as the collection of blueberries and the construction of ponds for farms, or ecosystem and scientific services such as the detection and maintenance of the soil. The program also includes some types of coal extraction and oil and gas activities.
Buildings such as shops, restaurants, hospitals and schools currently have their permission nationally, to which some data centers fall. However, the permit requires more in -depth individual analysis if the project affects more than half of a protected water acro.
In his comment in March, the DCC recommended the creation of a permission at national level with “solid notification and coverage thresholds” and has argued that “the long timing for the approvals are not consistent with other national permits that have higher or null limits or have a threshold in which a PCN is not necessary, which allows immediate action”. Destination, which has announced the intention of building Massive data centers in several states and is currently Development A 2,250 acres data center in Louisiana also asked for a national permit in its comment and suggested that the federal government “further simplifies” the authorization process 404.
Joel Kaplan, Chief Global Affairs Officer of Meta Posted on x Last week that the Action Plan “is a bold step to create the right regulatory environment for companies like ours to invest in America” and that destination is “investing hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure for the creation of jobs in the United States, including cutting -edge data centers”. Meta refused to further comment on this article through a spokesman.
Environmental lawyers are not so sure that a national permit for data centers, regardless of their size, would follow the intent of the clean water law. “What does it do [a blanket data center exemption] A little complicated is that the impacts will differ a little depending on where they are located, “says Mcefish. While a data center can only have an impact on a” fraction of acro “, he says, reconstructing a crossing of flows or filling a wet area, other data centers in different areas of the country could have a much greater impact for local waterways during their construction.
Hannah Connor, Senior lawyer at the Center for Biological Diversity, agrees. “What we are seeing here is an attempt to expand the 404 program at national level so that they pass through this very reduced regulatory revision outside the why [the permitting] The program was created, “he says.” There is a very small regulatory review for a sort of speed literally along the flooring of the wetlands “.
Today there are some data centers projects that have encountered significant problems with federal protected waters. In Indiana, Amazon is currently galvanizing the local opposition while trying to do it fill Almost 10 acres of wetlands and over 5,000 flows to build a huge data center. In Alabama, environmentalists Attention That the water imprint of a proposed data center could have serious impacts on local watercourses and cause the possible extinction of a kind of fish.