December 07, 2022

By Neil Chatterjee, former Commissioner and Chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)

The Inflation Reduction Act is a massive $369 billion taxpayer investment to facilitate and accelerate the clean energy transition. But this investment will all be for naught — and the projected emissions reductions won’t be realized — if we don’t get transmission built in this country at a dramatically faster pace than we’ve been doing.

The building needs to ramp up to get renewables to demand centers.

Of course, tackling any kind of infrastructure project will include hurdles. There are real challenges ahead. Incredibly complicated issues, like siting, cost allocation, planning, and interconnection queue reform are going to take time to resolve. If it was easy, it would have been done already.

Let’s Make a Deal

It's interesting that one time opponents of building energy infrastructure because it was largely fossil based have become the proponents of building transmission to get clean energy onto the grid.

During my waning days at (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) FERC, I felt like I was screaming from the rooftops that you could not tie up natural gas pipeline infrastructure development in bureaucratic red tape and not expect those same obstacles to apply when it comes to transmission. The playbook that has been used to frustrate the buildout of natural gas pipelines could very well be used to frustrate the buildout of transmission.

Despite that conundrum, I believe there is a deal to be had here. Conservatives should call for some real teeth and real deadlines in permitting reform. They should also push to tackle some of the state and local objections to building out infrastructure. Perfect should not be the enemy of the good.

On the political left, there must be a willingness to recognize that if you want something built in this country, we must revisit the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and other statutes that frustrate building infrastructure. A longer-term deal that can better facilitate transmission construction to get cleaner energy onto the grid, but, in the short term makes it easier to site some natural gas infrastructure is a fair bargain.

It’s a legitimate trade off when focusing on reliability and affordability in the clean energy transition, but we are at such a place in Washington, D.C., that such a compromise doesn’t seem to be coming together legislatively. That inaction may put the ball in FERC’s court.

Finding Balance

Nimbyism (not in my back yard-ism) is not ideological or political. People don’t want transmission lines coming through their property any more than they want other energy infrastructure coming through their property, regardless of if it’s for clean energy or for fossil energy.  And we have to determine who pays for all this infrastructure. Is it the state where the power is being generated, or is it the state where it’s being consumed? What about the states in the middle? What if they don’t benefit from the generation or the consumption of the power? These are not easy questions to answer.

Obviously there are many challenges ahead but FERC and Congress have the tools to make progress in permitting infrastructure. I hope we can all work collectively to get it done.