A bipartisan energy permitting bill moving through the Senate would rewrite the economics of data centers nationally — and it has a specific bearing on San Diego, where a 400-megawatt facility has been floated for U.S. Navy land near Old Town. The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, or BAAJA, cleared a key procedural vote Monday, setting up final passage before the new Congress is seated following this month’s elections.
The bill’s data center provision is straightforward: developers, not utility ratepayers, would pay all of their own energy costs, including the grid upgrades needed to serve them. That matters locally because California’s new data center statutes do not apply to the NAVWAR site — the state has no jurisdiction over land owned by the U.S. Navy. San Diego Rep. Scott Peters, a Democrat, has urged his colleagues to back the package, arguing that faster transmission permitting both lowers utility costs and accelerates the clean-energy transition. “Research shows the bipartisan permitting package would do both,” Peters told Politico.
The broader bill is the country’s biggest set of permitting reforms in years. It would compress reviews for electric transmission lines — the multi-state power corridors that currently take 10 to 15 years to build — and speed construction of natural gas pipelines, largely by limiting analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act, while leaving Clean Water Act and other substantive protections in place. Modeled results from the Rhodium Group estimate the reforms could enable up to 249 gigawatts of new clean resources through 2040, roughly a 50 percent increase in average U.S. electricity demand today, alongside a projected 15 percent rise in liquefied natural gas production.
That trade is the fault line. Environmental groups, including the Center for Biological Diversity, oppose fast-tracking gas pipelines, and analysts note the bill could expand drilling on federal land. Supporters counter that neither side would get everything: renewables and gas would compete on more equal permitting footing, and bill supporters say climate gains of up to 149 million metric tons of avoided emissions by 2040 — equivalent to taking 32 million cars off the road for a year — justify the compromise.
For San Diego, the immediate relevance is the showdown over the NAVWAR parcel, where developer Manchester Financial Group has confirmed a data center is one option among several for the 70-acre redevelopment while the city council separately advances its own 45-day moratorium on new data centers. If BAAJA becomes law, any project on the federal site would face a federal cost-allocation standard that shifts grid-upgrade costs onto the developer — one of the key protections local opponents had sought. Whether that changes the political math at City Hall remains to be seen, but the region’s data center debate now has both a federal and a local track running in parallel.
