The onslaught of demand growth related to data centers, manufacturing and electrification continues to be the overwhelming obsession of the U.S. electric power industry, regulators and lawmakers, and NetZero Insider reporters are swarming the story.
At a March 5 hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, James Downing found bipartisan sniping over which party’s policies are to blame for current bottlenecks in expanding the grid to accommodate new generation.
Downing was also at the Winter Policy Summit of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, where Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said she still hopes to forge bipartisan compromise on a permitting reform bill that will help accelerate transmission buildout.
Also on the conference beat, K Kaufmann sent in two stories from the American Council on Renewable Energy’s Policy Forum.
In an on-stage conversation at the event, former Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz argued that the solar, wind and storage projects already in interconnection queues could provide the short-term answer to demand growth. But former EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler warned that President Donald Trump could upend the current queues to get more baseload power — that is, natural gas — online as soon as possible, Kaufmann writes.
Another panel of legal and policy experts tackled the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Chevron deference and suggested that a close reading of the Loper Bright ruling provided significant wiggle room for courts to give due consideration ― if not blanket deference ― to federal agencies’ interpretation of vague of ambiguous statutes.
New Jersey correspondent Hugh Morley reported on how the Garden State is approaching demand growth, trying to move ahead with its ambitious clean energy goals, while also keeping power reliable and affordable, amid PJM’s spiking capacity auction prices and PSEG’s plans for distribution and transmission buildout.
The Trump freeze on clean energy funding remains a hot topic in our curated content.
Pv magazine has the story on EPA’s release of $7 billion in federal dollars for the Solar for All program, which largely funds solar projects benefiting low-income, disadvantaged and rural communities.
But EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin continues his efforts to claw back $20 billion in Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund grants already obligated to nonprofit community development “green banks” for a range of clean energy projects.
The FBI has launched an investigation of the funding, triggering at least one resignation of a federal prosecutor who refused to pursue the case, The Washington Post reports. Efforts by interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin to seize the funds were rejected by a D.C. magistrate, who found no reasonable evidence that a crime had occurred.
E+E Leader digs into Trump’s rollback of clean energy funding and policies, showing how they align point-for-point with the energy policy blueprint laid out in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.
In an interview with Yale Environment 360, climate activist Bill McKibben says that a bit of despair is justified over Trump’s attack on climate science and clean energy. But McKibben cautions that as the U.S. abdicates global leadership on climate, China will rise to fill the gap, and he says that while Trump can slow the clean energy transition, he can’t stop it.
Read on for this week’s Intelligence Report:
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