The Department of Energy is investing nearly $20 million in a project that seeks to develop and test artificial intelligence-based tools designed to help government employees expedite the permitting process and accelerate the construction of clean energy infrastructure, Nextgov/FCW reported Tuesday.
The DOE-backed Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is working on a project, PolicyAI, to build AI-powered software to improve federal assessments of proposed projects under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA.
Under NEPA, agencies are required to review the environmental impacts of major projects and other actions, including the issuance of permits.
Sai Munikoti, PNNL data scientist and co-principal investigator for the PolicyAI project, said DOE is testing prototypes and has developed a data lakehouse of historical NEPA documents, which contain information on a project’s potential environmental impact.
Federal environmental impact assessments between 2012 and 2023 are now stored in the lakehouse, which is expected to add more environmental reviews and categorical exclusions.
According to Munikoti, the project team has equipped the data lakehouse with a generative AI-based semantic search capability that can find relevant environmental documents and create summaries of search results.