The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) recently finalized two rules for the country’s electricity grids that represent the most significant paradigm shift towards expansion in over a decade. Marking a renewed focus on long-neglected transmission policy, the rules fundamentally alter and begin to standardize the thicket of existing approaches to regional transmission planning by codifying principles of longevity, transparency, and engagement. FERC, the independent agency responsible for regulating interstate energy transmission and wholesale electricity markets, issued Orders 1920 and 1977 at a time of growing policymaker and consumer concern over the state of U.S. electricity infrastructure, which is managing a complex transition through the rise of more frequent extreme weather events, a shifting generation mix, and growing demand from end-use electrification, new manufacturing facilities, and data centers. Although more will be needed on the legislative front — particularly on permitting reform, something PPI has adamantly pushed for — FERC has made commendable progress on the planning side of transmission with these new rules.

The orders underscore the need for increased transmission capacity in our nation’s grid. As demand for electricity balloons, there is growing concern that the country’s transmission networks are hard-pressed to meet household and industry needs, and woefully underdeveloped to reach Biden’s electrification and clean generation goals in the next decade. Growing investment in clean energy generation across the United States faces a bottlenecked grid system caused in no small part by a convoluted set of planning processes. More broadly, the regulatory regime governing the electricity sector comprises an antiquated patchwork of utilities, commissions, and state and federal agencies, ill-suited to accommodate the rapid integration of new technologies or a coordinated, long-term approach to transmission planning.

The rules attempt to address these concerns by providing frameworks for a more collaborative and transparent regional approach to planning that encourages forward thinking and clears unnecessary siting holdups. Order 1920, which was approved 2-1 on a partisan basis with Democrat-appointed commissioners in the majority, contains a number of planning requirements, notably for transmission operators to produce scenario-based regional transmission plans with outlooks of at least 20 years, and to conduct this planning every five years using the best available data. The order also requires that operators determine how projects might achieve seven outlined economic and reliability benefits in the evaluation and selection of long-term regional transmission facilities, further ensuring that long-term transmission needs are considered and addressed cost-effectively. To encourage innovative approaches to transmission planning, Order 1920 obliges operators to consider grid-enhancing technologies (GETs) such as dynamic line ratings and advanced conductors, though without directly mandating their use — likely to avoid overreach, constitutional challenge, and to ensure these technologies are only deployed where doing so has explicit operational and financial advantages.

Another significant new policy included in the order is a requirement to identify opportunities for in-kind replacements of existing facilities to be “right-sized” and thus increase their capacity in a cost-effective manner. Incumbent utilities will be offered federal rights of first refusal (ROFRs) to develop these “right-sized” facilities to avoid the construction of redundant transmission projects. The cost allocation provisions of Order 1920 mandate six-month engagement periods with predefined Relevant State Entities along with plans for a default cost allocation method for selected long-term transmission facilities. They also encourage loosely defined state agreements between providers and Relevant State Entities for selected participants to determine how project costs will be shared among stakeholders. These provisions, in tandem with a mandated process inviting states and consumers to fund some or all of facilities that would otherwise not meet operators’ selection criteria, enable consumers to only pay for projects that benefit them and highlight a renewed emphasis on transparency and state involvement in transmission planning.

Order 1977, which was approved with unanimous consent, complements the new planning framework by adding a backstop measure to prevent proposed projects from fading into obscurity when states fail to act. Specifically, it establishes a process for FERC to exercise its limited authority over siting transmission lines in accordance with amendments to Sec. 216 of the Federal Power Act enacted via the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The amendments clarified FERC’s authority to issue permits when state commissions have (i) not made siting determinations by one year following application submission or National Corridor designation, (ii) conditioned approval such that projects are no longer feasible or inadequately reduce capacity constraints, or (iii) denied an application. While affirming states’ primary role in the siting of transmission lines, the rule promotes timely review of siting applications and leaves room for FERC to preclude individual states from inhibiting projects that would be beneficial at the regional or national level.

The rule also introduces a Landowner Bill of Rights which ensures that landowners are notified of potential transmission line projects and permitted to intervene in open Commission proceedings, and codifies an Applicant Code of Conduct to facilitate good-faith engagement between applicants and landowners during the permitting process. To drive home the engagement imperative, transmission line applicants are further required to conduct outreach to environmental justice and Tribal communities. Mandated Environmental Justice Public Engagement Plans will be used to create Environmental Justice Resource Reports to identify impacted communities and detail the effects of projects, and similarly, Tribal Engagement Plans will feed into Tribal Engagement Resource Reports for the same purpose. These stakeholder engagement requirements will hopefully break the cycle of inadequate notification and litigation by residents and quicken project approval through a more proactive and transparent input process. But they must take into account a project’s broader dispersed benefits and avoid granting landowners and local communities an undue veto when entire regions stand to gain.

Taken together, the new rules lay down a much-needed groundwork for the future of transmission in the United States. They provide for a set of processes that bring together state, federal, and private entities to assess and develop long-term transmission projects to meet the needs of Americans in a more holistic and cost-sensitive way. Yet to a certain extent, these changes seem so obvious that many Americans might be surprised that such planning practices were not already in place. In reality, they represent only a fraction of the reforms needed to boost transmission development to the pace needed in order to restore reliability, meet growing demand, and enable the clean energy transition. These new planning mechanisms for enhanced project longevity and regional engagement are crucial in their own right, but as FERC Commissioner Allison Clements notes, more is needed than just the “raw ingredients” for states and transmission providers to build out the grid at a scale consistent with demand.

To keep this momentum, Congress needs to step in. There have been promising attempts at using legislation to speed up the environmental review and permitting process, but outside of the small changes included in the Fiscal Responsibility Act, Congress has not yet been able to hammer out an agreement on comprehensive permitting reform. With existing proposals such as the 2022 Manchin-Schumer deal and a range of transmission-specific bills including the SITE Act, FASTER Act, and SPEED and Reliability Act, there is ample opportunity to do so. And despite recent disagreements over a comprehensive permitting deal, the issue itself remains a bipartisan concern.

Without comprehensive permitting reform and steps to improve interregional planning on top of these regional transmission changes, these new FERC rules alone will not solve the transmission gridlock. Facilities connecting transmission regions are the most difficult type to plan, pay for, and permit under the current regime, despite their crucial role in limiting the impact of local extreme weather events and serving as the most important type of transmission line for connecting remote wind and solar resources to large cities and manufacturing hubs. Further executive and legislative action will be necessary to expedite energy projects like these, and while FERC has undoubtedly taken important steps toward optimizing the U.S. transmission infrastructure, building out a sufficient network will take leaps and bounds.

Today, the White House announced a temporary pause on future Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) export terminal projects to include consideration of their climate impact. PPI is concerned that the pause announced today overstates and oversimplifies the serious climate, energy, and foreign policy considerations involved in assessing America’s stance on future LNG export expansion. Europe has still not fully recovered from the energy crisis caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, during which U.S. exports were crucial in providing stability to the European Union.

As PPI has previously noted, we do not oppose a well reasoned climate test for LNG export facilities. But the threat of curtailing LNG exports to our allies will put the markets, the EU, and Asia in turmoil, threatening the energy security of our allies with no climate benefit. Since the invasion of Ukraine, LNG shipments to Europe came at the expense of exports to other U.S. allies and developing-world trading partners that were forced to cut back or burn more coal instead; in the longer run, trading partners with manufacturing and chemicals industries that rely on natural gas cannot simply swap in coal, and so will lose out to countries that rely on older and dirtier production methods fed by coal.

As the U.S. works with importing allies like the EU, Japan, and South Korea to develop standards that ensure low-methane LNG purchases, a transparent and rigorous test could help all exports track the progress made through President Biden’s signature IRA methane policies and fairly stack gas emissions against the climate cost of mining and burning more coal or dirtier Russian gas.

But the tenor of today’s announcement belies the real hopes of most test supporters — in their misguided crusade to keep U.S. natural gas “in the ground,” the activists pushing the test could lead to a world of greater global greenhouse gas emissions as countries that import our gas find dirtier sources, or even revert to coal while killing U.S. jobs and increasing Putin’s leverage in Europe. Speeding up zero-carbon clean energy deployment at home and abroad is a much higher priority for the global fight against climate change, and one that doesn’t pit Democratic constituencies or U.S. allies against each other. The urgency of the energy transition cannot excuse counterproductive purity tests: We need to reduce emissions as fast as possible, not stop producing energy and hoping working people around the world stop needing it.

Under pressure from green activists, the Biden administration is considering adopting a climate test in permits for new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export facilities. Coming out of the pandemic-driven supply shocks and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, American LNG exports were the largest of any single country in 2023 and served crucial roles in the U.S. economy, the environment and geopolitical support for European allies.

The activists hope to stop LNG infrastructure projects in spite of these benefits apparently out of misguided trust for a single study and seemingly without concern for the political backlash among working-class and swing-state voters at home and allies abroad. The form of policy demand these left-wing activists have adopted is to require the inclusion of climate impacts in the federal government’s calculation of public interest in permits for LNG export facilities. Based on an unreviewed paper with what we view as overly narrow calculations and sorely outdated evidence, it seems the activists assume that the inclusion of climate criteria in the permit decision would end the export of LNG — which they believe would constitute climate progress. But gas is cleaner than coal, and because U.S. gas is relatively clean and getting even cleaner due to signature Biden policies, the climate calculus of growing liquefied gas exports does not mean that a comprehensive test of their impact would bear out the anti-export position of some environmental activists.

The economic and political risk for Democrats is enormous. President Biden knows that his political future is tied directly to issues like inflation and to winning back working-class voters in swing states like Pennsylvania. Remember that Biden made a late 2020 campaign stop in Pennsylvania for the explicit purpose of letting voters know that he was not against fracking. To allow the far left to derail the natural gas successes of this administration would be electorally disastrous.

Furthermore, world energy markets and our allies in Europe and East Asia are relying on the U.S. to serve as a clean backstop supplier of LNG exports to avoid market shocks like COVID-19 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Because American natural gas exports provide such significant geopolitical and economic benefits, and because they provide world markets that lack other coal substitutes with a key source of lower-polluting LNG, a well-constructed test for the climate impact of LNG exports would not be the death knell of the export industry supposed by both sides of this debate. If the groups pushing for a test were to write it themselves, the simplistic result could cause significant damage to the global environment and world energy markets.

By contrast, a well-designed calculation could serve as a rigorous and transparent benchmark for assessing the relative climate benefits of U.S. natural gas and the development of differentiated markets for lower-methane gas with like-minded green importing allies. An honest approach to evaluating the climate and geopolitical impacts of LNG facilities would take into account the climate costs of mining more coal, burning more coal and using coal as a chemical feedstock. A fair test would acknowledge air pollution differences and coal mine methane leaks that exceed natural gas methane emissions by likely underestimated official measurements. It would account for the boon to Putin if U.S. LNG shipments to Europe and Asia declined, sending those markets back into the fold of the Russian petrostate.

The U.S. reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 2% in 2023, largely as a result of lower coal use. The U.S. was instrumental in averting an energy catastrophe in Europe following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. There is finally a path forward to help Asia reduce its dependence on coal by switching to cleaner U.S. LNG. The synergies of natural gas electricity production with intermittent wind and solar are paying huge climate benefits. And future technology deployments in carbon capture and hydrogen may require infrastructure innovations developed in gas transport.

Some far-left environmentalists seem willing to throw all of that away in a misguided attempt to just keep all of the oil and gas in the ground. Who benefits from this new push to stymie the U.S. LNG infrastructure buildout? Ultimately, it would be the coal industry and Putin. Out of a misguided fear of stranded assets and infrastructure lock-in, some greens believe that turning off U.S. exports will reduce emissions, simple as that. However, America exports LNG to meet real global energy demand, and simply cutting off supplies of gas does not mean that demand disappears; instead, energy importers will be forced to buy dirtier fuels and are likely to reward autocratic suppliers like Russia.

The energy transition is a global and gradual process that cannot be implemented immediately with only good intentions to power it. We have no choice but to build our way through the energy transition with the energy system we have.

There are credible environmental organizations working on pragmatic greenhouse gas reductions from energy supply chains in concert with industry, such as the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), and ambitious policies in the Inflation Reduction Act will allow the Biden administration to push already declining emissions down even further. The real absurdity here lies in an unreviewed working paper using 30-year-old numbers that, in a matter of months, has ascended to seemingly steer national policy at the highest levels of the Biden administration. Our geopolitical allies, the climate, the U.S. economy and the electoral future of the Democrats depend on better policy.

This op-ed was originally published in The Messenger.