Speed to Power or Policy Paralysis? The OBBBA and America’s Clean Energy Future

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) is now law, marking a major shift in U.S. energy policy and the beginning of a broader effort to rewire America’s energy future. With its passage, the OBBBA rolls back many key clean energy tax incentives and reestablishes a focus on fossil fuel development. This seismic shift comes just as the stakes for U.S. leadership in climate and technology continue to rise. 

How can policymakers and businesses keep pace with an evolving energy landscape? As AI drives unprecedented demand for reliable power, could current policies send investment abroad? And can the U.S. lead on both decarbonization and innovation? 

In the seventh episode of Accelerating Energy, host and Sidley partner Ken Irvin speaks with Mark James, interim director of the Institute for Energy and the Environment and associate professor at Vermont Law and Graduate School. Together, they unpack what made it into the OBBBA, assess its impact on U.S. competitiveness in the global AI race, and explore the federal government’s role in meeting the demands of new and emerging energy-intensive technologies.

 Executive Producer: John Metaxas, WallStreetNorth Communications, Inc.

Transcript

Speed to Power or Policy Paralysis? The OBBBA and America’s Clean Energy Future

Ken Irvin and Mark James

August 2025

Ken Irvin:

After weeks of political maneuvering, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is now a law, signed on July 4, and signaling the start of a broader effort to rewire America’s energy future. With its passage, the Trump Administration has begun reshaping U.S. energy priorities, rolling back many of the key clean energy tax incentives and placing renewed emphasis on fossil fuel development. This seismic shift comes as the stakes for America’s leadership in both climate and technology have never been higher.

Mark James:

We’ve been on this trajectory of where the winners were getting clearer and clearer to see, and it was wind and solar and battery storage making up 90-plus percent of proposed new generation capacity getting added onto the grid. We are going to see that flip around.

Ken Irvin:

That’s Mark James, interim director of the Institute for Energy and the Environment and associate professor at Vermont Law and Graduate School. How should policymakers and businesses keep pace with the shifting energy landscape as AI’s demand for reliable power accelerates, and will bad policy send investments overseas? And how and can the United States secure its position at the forefront of both decarbonization and innovation? We’re thrilled to have Mark on the podcast today to share his insights on energy law and regulation.

From the international law firm Sidley Austin, this is Accelerating Energy. We drill down on critical and late-breaking topics in energy transition and policy. We help businesses look over the horizon for what lies ahead. I’m your host, Ken Irvin.

Hello, and welcome to Sidley’s Accelerating Energy podcast, episode No. 7. Mark, great to have you with us today. Thanks for joining the conversation as we dig into what the One Big Beautiful Bill Act means for the future of energy policy, or One BBB, as I like to call it.

Mark James:

Thank you, Ken.

Ken Irvin:
So, you’re an associate professor at Vermont Law and Graduate School, you’ve been recognized by U.S. News & World Report for over three decades as a leading institution in environmental law. Before we dive in today, could you share a little bit about yourself and the courses you teach, especially given your focus on inclusive democratic approaches to the clean energy transition?

Mark James:

Yes, I can. So, I am the interim director of the Institute for Energy and the Environment, which is the home to all of Vermont Law energy programs, and with that, I have been associated with the school for a decade. The institute is now about to hit its 20th anniversary. Starting this September, the school will celebrate its 50th anniversary, and in each of those time periods, we have been at the forefront of environmental law and in energy law. 

We are a progressive, looking-forward institution, trying to identify what tomorrow’s problems are to teach our students today. So, I teach a variety of different classes, including energy law and policy in a carbon-constrained world, energy regulation markets and the environment, and our oil and gas class, as well. 

So, I am covering the full spectrum of our energy sphere, looking at what our current resource mix is, as well as thinking about how we prepare ourselves to move to a more electrified world, what does that look like? So, we have an amazing group of students who come and get their education with us, earning master’s degrees. 

We have a master’s program in energy regulation and law, doing an LLM in energy law, as well as our regular cohort of law students who join us every year. So, it has been my privilege to teach and work with them, too, and my research has been focused on thinking about the energy transition and what elements need to be put in place to both accelerate it and ensure that it is successful. 

So, that is thinking about how do we structure our institutions to adapt to new changes and new challenges? How do we empower our constituents to be able to participate in the transition and benefit from it? And our institute is home to our energy clinic, which is now just celebrating its 10th anniversary of being a pro-bono transactional law clinic. 

We have our research program, which I head up, which has done work for national, regional, and global clients, and we also have our courses, which span year-round, and we just wrapped up our summer program, which is a deep dive into various forms of energy law and policy, starting with how the grid works, to what energy economics are, to a final class on what the EU is doing with its energy policy directive.

Ken Irvin:
Holy cow. That is quite the array of focus and study about all these issues. Sounds like you’re the perfect guest for us, today, as we talk about the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Like I said, I call that OBBB, because that’s a mouthful. Let’s start with looking at what is in the act? After making headlines for all its potential to reshape U.S. energy policy, Mark, what actually made it into the act, especially when it comes to renewable and electric vehicles? Based on what you’ve seen, would you call this a pivot point or something even broader? How do you see the act, the OBBB, reconfiguring America’s energy future?

Mark James:

It’s a pivot point. It’s a decision point. The act, itself, is really targeting a lot of changes that were put into place by the Inflation Reduction Act that was passed in 2022, to sort of set forward a path for America’s transition to lower emissions as well as expanding its manufacturing capacity for clean energy technologies, ensuring that individual households had the opportunity to participate in it.

And because they’re both reconciliation bills, that they are focused on the financial side of things and looking at the tax credits that were available that were put in place or even extended in the Inflation Reduction Act, and subsequently, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is rolling back some of those. It’s keeping some of them in place. 

So, a lot of the individual tax credits that are available, for example, if you wanted to buy an electric vehicle, you need to do that by September 30th of this year in order to qualify for the tax credit. If you were looking to build or invest into solar or wind, then, you know, you have until the end of 2026 in order to get construction commenced. Other tax credits that were in place, those tax credits were going to extend out to 2032, 2033, some of them stayed in place for specific technologies, geothermal, nuclear, and hydropower. 

Those tax credits will continue on and continue to be available. We see other things, the residential-ones, ones that were for investments in energy efficiency, we’re going to see that tailor away too. The clean manufacturing tax credits weren’t touched in this particular bill, in this act, and that was something that the Inflation Reduction Act had put into place to try and onshore manufacturing for battery technology, solar panels, other key components of our energy transition, of the new technologies that are taking a larger and larger share of our energy generation capacity.

Ken Irvin:

It’s interesting to hear about all those changes. It appears that energy policy is no longer just about the climate or consumers but instead rapidly becoming a matter of national competitiveness, especially as the United States accelerates its investment in advanced technologies, such as AI and the race to be the dominant AI supplier. 

At the same time, the Department of Energy recently published a report on resource adequacy and found that without changes to current plans, most regions of the United States will face serious reliability problems within the next five years, leaving the grid unable to meet rising demand from AI data centers, manufacturing, and just electrification, generally.

And at the same time, it’s going to put pricing pressure on consumers. So, let me ask you this. Does the act, the OBBB, strengthen the U.S. position on the global stage? Does it help win the AI race? Or does it introduce a whole new set of risks?

Mark James:
New risks, new headaches, and definitely new concerns about where we’re going to be getting our electricity from and our energy from in the next half a decade. I think we have to look at the act itself … we shouldn’t look in the act just in isolation, by itself. We have to look at sort of everything that the White House has done that has been moving forward on its energy policing, starting back with executive orders that were issued in the first day, January 20, of the new Trump Administration, to things that continue to roll out post the act, itself, too.

And now, in totality, they are reshaping our energy future, I think would be the best term to be able to use for that, too. They are a pivot towards a … less so, you know, allowing all technologies to be able to participate, and we will let the market conditions figure it out, and now, we are moving towards this picking of winning and losers.

But we’ve been on this trajectory of where the winners were getting clearer and clearer to see, and it was wind and solar and battery storage making up 90-plus percent of proposed new generation capacity getting added onto the grid. We are going to see that flip around. It is going to have an impact on what energy will be available and also what the cost of that energy will be, and that comes back to affecting what competitiveness would be. 

To think about everything in its totality, we have to look at all the different pieces that are coming together in this, too, and it’s not that the act takes away tax credits, and because it’s a reconciliation bill, has to focus on those credits, the financial parts of it, too, but you know, immediately after that, there are efforts to restrict how long those credits might be available through the Safe Harbor Provision that companies are able to avail themselves of it. 

They’ve started a project, and you know, you’ve put 5 percent in, you’ve begun construction. Well, the IRS is currently undergoing a review on that, and we’ll see that later in the month of August. We’ll see that in August 2025, what that new Safe Harbor Provision will look like. We see efforts underway to restrict access on federal lands, by requiring a more onerous permitting process to be approved by the secretary of interior, 68 or 69 different actions that have to get a sign-off from the secretary’s office.

So, we are seeing this constriction around all these resources that were in the pipeline, things that could get built that are going to get put into the pipeline, and now, we’re seeing a restriction on those, estimates of, you know, you’re going to lose hundreds of gigawatts’ worth of generation capacity, you’re going to see hundreds of billions of dollars pull back from being invested, you’re going to create a situation of potential energy scarcity because the resources that preserve their tax credits, or the fossil fuel resources that are getting preferred treatment, they’re not going to show up in the next 2, 3, 4, 5 years. 

So, if we think about competitiveness, it starts moving things, right now, that we need to go forward with, and renewables are your bridge fuel. I know that we’re thrown back to, you know, natural gas is the bridge fuel. Well, let’s be honest. Renewables are your bridge fuel, renewables and battery storage, but they’re a bridge to what? 

More renewables and more battery storage and perhaps the low-carbon firm dispatchable resources, hydro power, geothermal, nuclear, that those are the ones that were going to be coming online. So, we will see an impact on competitiveness as we shrink our energy growth, and I’m going to use the example of Texas. Next year, Texas expects to add 14 percent to its electricity load. 

That’s what’s being forecast, but they’re going to meet that. The plans are to meet that, and why are they meeting that? Because they are building so much solar, so much wind, and so much battery storage that they will meet that. They’ve already added enough, this past year, where their regulators said, you know, we used to have a 15 percent chance of a major outage or grid shortage, and that’s shrunk to like 1 percent because of solar, wind, and battery storage. 

So, if you want to think about market conditions and true competition, Texas is the example of what we have, and we are now putting conditions into place that we won’t be able to spread that around. We won’t be able to spread that ability around. We won’t be able to do it. Natural gas is not going to come to meet that challenge, and for a couple of simple reasons. 

One, you can’t order a natural gas turbine and get it delivered before 2030, if you’re lucky, 2032, probably closer to what it should be. So, there’s a gap. New nuclear is going to show up 7 years at the earliest, most likely, mid-2030s or 2040 would be more optimistic. There’s not a lot of hydro-power generation going to happen. 

No one’s building new coal. We are removing the bridge that was going to help us carry through with this expanded generation capacity, and that will have an impact on competitiveness because without an electricity supply, you’re not going to be able to continue to see investments into advanced manufacturing, AI data centers, electrification of thermal and heating, and transportation services. So, yeah. It’s going to have an impact on that.

Ken Irvin:
Let me challenge you, a little bit, on that, because I hear you and we’ve talked before about the availability, near-term, of turbines and deploying new thermal units versus using solar and wind, which are maybe accessible a lot quicker, but the demand for electricity is pretty robust. 

You mentioned Texas, but it’s basically everywhere because of AI, because of data centers, because of electrification, and isn’t that demand going to call forward all kinds of supply and sort of be technology agnostic? I appreciate that people might like tax credits, and maybe that helps underwrite something, but this thirst for electricity seems presently unquenchable, and I would submit where there is such robust demand, supply, one resource technology or another is going to meet the challenge, is it not?

Mark James:

Yes, that is the market principle, if we increase demand that someone will come to supply that, and we will see perhaps resources that had planned retirements, generation resources that had planned retirements, staying online longer. You’re seeing that in Georgia, already, with Georgia Power seeking to extend the life of some coal-powered plants. 

So, certainly, there will be resources that will stay around, but it’s the new capacity, the new growth, that will be constrained, the ability to meet the marginal load growth that’s happening. I think that there are constraints in the natural gas supply chain, which will make that harder to do. You can build solar and wind and battery storage in an 18-to-24 month period. Natural gas, to build it in on a greenfield, 2 to 3 years. 

So, even if you're getting a turbine delivered in 2030, you’re still in 2032, 2033. So, there is a bit of a crunch. I’m fearful that there is a crunch coming in availability for what it is now, and that’s just supply stuff. I have had people tell me that companies are looking for turbines in Mexico, in Canada, and disassembling them and importing them into the U.S. to put them back together so that they can kind of bypass that supply chain.

Ken Irvin:
See, that’s the marketplace responding to the price signal, right? Like, so …

Mark James:

Absolutely, and there are AI firms buying natural gas plants in Europe and bringing them back here to the U.S. because that’s their solution is that they will find a way to get their power.

Ken Irvin:

Well, let’s tease that out a little bit more, because I hear you about OBBB, for all the criticisms of the IRA picking winners and losers technology, OBBB sort of does the same but for a thermal-based electric generation as opposed to a renewable solar/wind kind of thing.

But if we’re going to be advising a hypothetical customer, hypothetical company, energy-intensive, food, data center, AI, a lot of electricity needs, what would you tell them to do in the near term, 3-to-5-year horizon, and beyond? If they’re expected to be in business for 20 to 30 years, they got to feed their thirst for electricity today, tomorrow. What are you thinking is the best course for somebody like that, and how does the tax credit situation factor in?

Mark James:
Those companies, those sectors, might have less price sensitivity. So, perhaps the tax credits, themselves, are not critical to them procuring that. If they want to move to a behind-the-meter relationship, where they’re the off-taker, they will build their own resources and use those resources to power their facility. So, we might see that move to that. 

I know that we’re also seeing, within the energy sector, a move to sign more power purchase agreements with existing resources, so they’re able to secure their access to power. Now, that does have trade-on effects for what it does to overall availability of that capacity and potential market prices, but again, if your goal is to secure your power, then there are ways to either build your own or contract for your own. 

For example, to be able to supply power from existing hydro powerplants, that’s the type of thing where I think we will see these facilities explore more of that potential as they try and make sure that the power is there when they want it, and if it does become enough of a pressing issue, we will see them go behind the meter and develop their own resources.

Ken Irvin:

I learned a new acronym, BYOS, so, Bring Your Own Supply. If you’re a data center, you’re going to be an AI, sure, we’d love to have you in our distribution franchise territory, but you got to bring your own supply, and it’s awesome if it’s emissions-free supply, but chances are everybody is looking for whatever kind of technology, and in fact, there’s a little bit of competition amongst the states. 

You mentioned about the regulations that are forthcoming from the IRS and treasury, and I’m aware that certain members of the Senate have placed hold on Trump nominees for confirmation because they’re looking to get clarity on what’s going to happen as the regulations, the rules effectuating OBBB, are rolled out. 

That, to me, shows a state competition, one state’s trying to outfox another to attract these new retail customers for electricity, and is that going to lead to a race to the bottom on what generation technology they take, or are people going to sort of let slide their emissions hopes and aspirations on emissions-free power?

Mark James:

The states are already in a competition, and there are reasons why data centers concentrate in certain areas. It’s access to power, availability of land, proximity to high-speed data networks. So, it is why we have Northern Virginia, why we have the Dallas-Fort Worth area, why there are data centers in Georgia, in the Atlanta metropolitan region, is because they’re able to put those elements together. 

So, the states are already competing with themselves, and you see states developing specific targeted plans and policies to put in place. So, they will definitely continue to do that, seeing it as a growth opportunity to try and fit it into their systems, but I think the access to power, I do believe that the adherence to emissions-free goals, we have to understand that the large companies, the large data centers, are also some of the largest investors in carbon offsets, right? 

So, we are pairing that up with you might see a large data center that is investing in 2 to 5 gigawatts of natural gas generation capacity, but they are also one of the largest investors in carbon offset. So, this is how the emissions pledges can be met at the same point in time as the energy is procured. It is not always we are taking solar, wind, battery storage. 

We’re taking what resources are available, and then we are thinking about it from a market perspective, and we can go and secure carbon offsets and use that to legally make our claim that we are at or progressing towards a 100 percent carbon-free system. 

So, we see the announcement that President Trump made in Pennsylvania, 90 billion dollars’ worth of investment, primarily powered by natural gas. What we are not seeing at that point in time, or the discussion at that point in time, is that are there offsets involved in that, too, because the large companies have carbon pledges. They’re going to meet them, and they’re going to meet them in a way that matches up with both their desire to grow their business, at the same point in time, meet their emissions targets and their sustainability goals.

Ken Irvin:
You’re listening to Sidley Austin’s Accelerating Energy podcast. We’re speaking with Mark James, associate professor at Vermont Law and Graduate School, about how the One Big Beautiful Bill Act has overhauled U.S. energy policy and what it could mean for the future of AI and infrastructure development. 

Mark, coming back to you on some of what you were saying. OBBB prioritizes near-term grid reliability and fuel production, while perhaps ignoring longer-term energy demands that you’ve identified. We’ve talked about the demands of innovation, technology, and you clearly have concerns about resource adequacy. 

It was recently announced at a summit in Pennsylvania that several of the nation’s largest tech and energy companies are investing 90 billion dollars in energy infrastructure and data centers across the state. Pennsylvania obviously has a lot of natural gas. It has a lot of coal. It has some very large formerly coal-fired power plants that are being repurposed. How do you view all this, and how do you see what’s being announced for Pennsylvania versus clean energy incentives? Can we see them all the same way? Can we see them the way we’ve viewed other infrastructure law, like the CHIPS Act, for example?

Mark James:
Within Pennsylvania, obviously, you can view that as sort of shortening the distance between where natural gas is being produced, and the Marcellus shale has always been somewhat … it’s had a pipeline issue of being constrained and trying to get the gas out. So, now, we’ve been talking about how do you go about finding the power? Well, you move yourself closer to it. 

So, this is part of moving into Pennsylvania, and with an intrastate pipeline, you don’t need to go through FERC. You can build that. That’s something that Texas has taken advantage for a long time, but with an intrastate pipeline running throughout the gas production area in Pennsylvania to turbines there or a plant there that can serve to be an accelerant for getting that built, so, that is part of the thinking of like if I can’t get the power delivered to me, how do I move to where the power is? 

And that’s what those entities are going to seek to do. Because their business model, it is 18 to 24 months, we can build facilities, get them online, obviously, there’s a little more lead time with that in securing land and permits. They have an immediacy to what they need to be doing. So, they will figure out where they might need to be located that they can quickly access existing generation or perhaps have stuff that is already planned to come online, which they can then target specifically to procure that energy through a negotiated contract, like a power purchase agreement.

Ken Irvin: 

Speed to power. That’s what I heard it called, speed to power. If you’re a data center, how quickly can I get to being fully energized, and can I do a behind the meter arrangement, so that I’m basically sitting on top of a wellhead, burning natural gas, coming out of the ground, and making it into electricity, awaiting my grid interconnection? So, I can be up and running as a data center, now, and eventually get connected to the grid and the reliability the grid offers.

Mark James:

Yeah, and that is the let’s connect it, right now, and we’ll manage it, and then we’ll develop a firmer connection, later on, too. We also see, at the state level and even FERC, they’re trying to understand the impacts of these large load connections and how these resources are going to come on and how they perform. There are reliability concerns attached to that, too. 

If they suddenly drop off their very sensitive equipment, they’re going to be protective of that, too, but if you, all of a sudden, have a large drop-off that can destabilize the grid, and the grid has to be ready to respond that. All of the automated things have to be able to kick into it, and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation has already put out some reports about things that have happened in Northern Virginia, when facilities have dropped off, and it has significantly changed voltage, and you don’t want to get into a cascade situation, too. 

So, moving behind the meter, having less connection to the grid, is a way of trying to negate having to answer those questions, right now, and then allowing regulators as well as technology innovation to catch up. So, that’s their immediacy of we can start to do this, right now, and as everybody else catches up, we’ll get that stability, we’ll connect into the grid, we will pay a premium for being first, and hopefully, we’ll be able to reduce our future costs as everything else catches up and we have more certainty in our regulatory environment.

Ken Irvin:

Pay a premium. So, we’re America, and like anytime there’s a new technology, it’s a bust and boom kind of thing, right? We have the boom rolling out railroads, then we have all the bankruptcies. We have the boom rolling out fiberoptic and network. How do we protect ourselves, here, that we’re not going to have that same problem? There’s AI out there that may need all this electricity, or maybe it doesn't. 

There’s the demand and the sudden loss of demand, impact on the grid, like you’re talking about. NERC certainly is worried about that, but perhaps AI will be more flexible in its demand, going forward, less electricity, maybe not … maybe they’ll be more efficient and require less. So, looking ahead from your vantage point, what would you advise Congress? What would you advise our policymakers, our federal agencies, to be looking at and tuning the dials about how the future is going to unfold and where we should be heading?
 
 

Mark James:

Two points on this. One is thinking about how much energy we actually might need, so, how much generation we might need, too, and then when we do have that load connecting in, how do we manage it so we’re making the most efficient use of our existing grid systems? 

So, at the state level, there are efforts ongoing to reduce the speculation that happens within data center construction applications, that because, a lot of times, information’s only available until you … but once you file your application, you really begin to know about how long it might take you to connect, what your potential costs are. 

So, companies will adopt a speculative behavior in which they’re like I’ll try in four different places and see what it is, and I think that’s inflating our demand forecast, which then can lead to overbuilding, when we’re thinking about what’s the most efficient use of resources, because once those resources are built, someone’s going to pay for them, most likely going to be existing ratepayers.

Although there are efforts underway to have a larger commitment from data centers to ensure that they are going to be paying EC in Ohio 80, 85 percent, you know, a commitment for 10 years to be able to take that, too, so trying to address that speculative nature of what’s happening there. There are other transparency places where regulators are requiring disclosure of have you applied in other jurisdictions for a similar facility and you only really plan to build one of them? 

So, we’re seeing that at the state level. At the federal level, I think that there can be more of an emphasis on the large load connection. This is something that FERC has been working on, too, but to ensure that they are taking full advantage of demand management and having flexibility in their operations, and they are being incentivized to do that and being encouraged or even required to do that. 

So, there are studies that show a small amount of demand flexibility, a couple of percent of operating hours, per year, is sufficient to bring down the overall grid needs. So, we need to be implementing that now and making sure that that’s in place so that as these facilities connect on that they have the ability to reduce their demand in times of grid stress.

And that’s the significant demand reduction, based upon the size of the facilities they have. I always tell people when they try and imagine how big a hyper-scaler might be, you think a 1-gigawatt facility, which is small, honestly. It’s big, but it’s going to be small in the overall scheme of that. That is the state of Vermont’s peak demand.

Ken Irvin:
Wow.

Mark James:
650 thousand people in the state of Vermont.

Ken Irvin:
So, each one of those data centers in Northern Virginia is one state of Vermont?

Mark James:

That’s what it is, and that’s why the Northern Virginia data center, you know, within Virginia, data centers are consuming 25 to 30 percent of all the electricity within the state. They are a massive amount of electricity, and we have to treat them specially in the way that we both manage them for their reliability but also to encourage their flexibility.

Because we build the system, we build the pipeline as big as it needs to be on the hottest day or the coldest day of the year, and if we manage how much energy we need on that day, we can make the pipeline smaller, and that translates into lower costs for everybody, for the data center, itself, as well as all of the other ratepayers who are paying for that.

And I think that’s an important thing to think about with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. I’ve seen studies talking about ratepayer increases of between 180 and 300 dollars per year, on average, so as supply gets constrained, we will see impacts not just on new customers seeking to connect but also the existing customers that are in place, and we have to be able to manage across all of that, too, and we can do that through using known techniques for the large loads that are on the grid and those that are seeking to connect to the grid.

Ken Irvin:
That’s very interesting, and the threat of constrained supply, increasing demand, rising prices, follows basic economic principles. You talked about maybe data centers having some flexibility, some, perhaps, ability to turn down or sell back power. That brings me to one of my favorite topics here, which is a good way to torture first-year law students studying constitutional law, which is the role of the federal government, the role of state governments, the Dormant Commerce Clause. 

If data centers are just consumers of electricity, just retail consumption, can the feds do something? Do they have authority to act, or does the data center have to be price responsive demand, some ability to sell back some participation on the wholesale market?

Mark James:
Well, where’s the federal government hook going to be? And the Federal Power Act, which is what FERC operates under, it is the implementing agency for that, are we in interstate commerce? And that’s the hook, and anywhere you’re going to connect in the continental United States, with the exception of Texas, is going to be within FERC’s jurisdiction and its regional transmission organization. 

So, as FERC works its way through these challenges in dealing with large loads and dealing with interconnection requests for generation resources, and it has an opportunity to address the new and emerging types of loads that are going to be put into place, too. So, it can be more precise and specific about how should they be treated, and what do they need? 

What minimum capabilities do they need to have in order to be able to connect to the grid? And that could come through … FERC operates through its just and reasonable rates and making sure that we have fairness within that, too. It can also operate through NERC and reliability, ensuring that large loads have sufficient capacity to not be able to disrupt grid operations, should they need to withdraw or shut themselves off. 

So, there are a couple of points of what’s fair and reasonable with just and reasonable rates and then what is reliability that the federal government can act through, and obviously, the Department of Energy and its research capabilities and sort of coordinating around energy policy has significant ability to identify where there are gaps and try and work through solutions. Perhaps it’s more FERC and state collaboration through NARUC … the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners. We’ve seen joint efforts on transmission. 

It would not surprise me if you saw something around large load connection, too, to try and create an equal playing field, or at least a standardized set of rules so that everybody knows what’s going to be happening, no matter where those resources are connecting across the country.

Ken Irvin:

Before we wrap up, Mark, is there anything more you’d like to add here, today?

Mark James:
Yeah. I guess the only final part would be … and this is kind of a framing thing. We think about energy policy as a specific thing, you know? It’s not the tax credits. It’s everything that comes together with it. It’s the permitting rules that get put into place. It’s the availability of workers to be able to do the work. It’s our education system that’s there. 

It’s high-speed fiberoptic networks that if we are thinking about having a policy for competitiveness, we need a policy that works across all areas of that. So, it has to help us manufacture the elements that we need. It has to help us build the generation resources that we want, and it has to help us have the people that we need to do all of those specific tasks.

And that was what the Inflation Reduction Act was helping move that forward, too, with its focus on workforce development, project labor agreements, apprenticeships that we will need, not in all of the above, but an everybody in the pool effort where like we have to coordinate everything, federal, state. We have to think about what are the core components that get built into finished pieces, thinking about where we can install them, how quickly we can connect them, and all of that together.

Ken Irvin:

That’s definitely energy policy today, all of the above plus everything more. We’ve been speaking with Mark James, interim director of the Institute for Energy and the Environment and associate professor at Vermont Law and Graduate School. Mark, it’s been a pleasure speaking with you today. Thank you for your time.

Mark James: 

Thank you, Ken. It’s a lot of fun.

Ken Irvin:

You’ve been listening to Accelerating Energy. I’m Ken Irvin. Our executive producer is John Metaxas, our managing editor is Karen Tucker, and our associate editor is Darren Schabdach, and special thanks goes out to Emily Dwight for her assistance with this episode. Please subscribe on Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts, and if you like what you hear, please give us a referral to your friends and family.

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