The First 100 Days: A Permitting Playbook - #3 The Permit Accelerator Program

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Written By Nikki Chiappa

Executives cannot redesign the assembly line from a conference room. The people best equipped to identify problems are the ones actually doing the work. Kaizen gives those people both the tools and the explicit permission to fix what they find. The improvements are intended to be incremental and continuous, and compound over decades.

In my first post, I shared that we’ve repeatedly heard that culture change is key to permitting reform. Implementing a kaizen approach to management isn’t exactly an actionable solution, but a little known pilot program in Pennsylvania is a tangible example of how to shift an agency’s culture towards kaizen.

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Nikki Chiappa

Nikki is an expert in decarbonization and permitting policy with a strong track record of advancing pragmatic, market-driven solutions to clean energy infrastructure challenges. As the Permitting Innovation Lead at EPIC, she works with decision makers to better understand permitting bottlenecks and harness innovative solutions to break through them.

Her past work contributed to national conversations on the role of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in decarbonization, with her research and analysis featured in The Washington Post, Politico, S&P Global and Michael Cembalest’s Eye on the Market Report (2025).

Nikki has also worked in state-level clean energy advocacy at Clean Tomorrow, Advanced Energy United and the Chesapeake Solar and Storage Association, a regional affiliate of the Solar Energy Industries Association. In these roles, she helped build strong bipartisan coalitions to support offshore wind energy transmission expansion, streamlined rooftop solar permitting and improved stormwater management practices for utility scale solar projects.

She holds a B.A. in Communications, Legal Institutions, Economics, and Government and an M.P.A. in Environmental Policy, both from American University, and helped reestablish the D.C. chapter of Young Professionals in Energy in 2024.

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The First 100 Days: A Permitting Playbook - #2 Measure Your Bottlenecks