With a narrow Democratic lead in the House and Senate control in doubt, FERC and the departments of Energy (DOE) and Interior will have central roles in advancing President-elect Joe Biden’s climate goals, speakers told the American Council on Renewable Energy’s (ACORE) Grid Forum last week.

Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.), a former clean energy entrepreneur, said the “just and reasonable” clause in the 1935 Federal Power Act that created FERC was not limited to price.

“Couple that with [EPA’s 2009 finding that CO2 emissions endanger public health] and I think there is a very strong legal argument to be made that FERC has not only the authority, but the obligation, to factor carbon prices into the way they regulate power markets,” said Casten, who serves on the House Select Committee on Climate Change and the New Democrat Coalition Climate Change Task Force.

“Pricing carbon doesn’t provide any cash flow to government. That makes it hard to pass in a democratic body when everybody wants to play Santa,” he said during a keynote speech. “But it makes it much easier to think about how to do that in the context of a FERC hearing that’s saying let’s examine all the equities here. FERC actually structurally is much better suited to deal with carbon policy. My hope is with a fully constituted FERC and a Biden White House, there’s way to really do some things even if we still have a [Mitch] McConnell-led Senate.” (See related story, ‘No Time for Unicorns’ on Climate Ill. Rep. Says)

Fixing Order 1000

The Natural Resource Defense Council’s John Moore said his top recommendation for the new administration is to have FERC advance a transmission rule that addresses the holes in Order 1000, “which everyone at this point knows has not fulfilled its promise.”

Moore, director of the NRDC’s Sustainable FERC program and Climate and Clean Energy program, cited “shortcomings in competition, in cost allocation, in siting large projects vs. small projects.”

“There’s a whole set of topics we could talk about there that I think a new FERC could really robustly address,” Moore said in a discussion moderated by ACORE CEO Gregory Wetstone. “This is the best opportunity we’ve ever seen for DOE [and] the Department of Interior — especially with offshore wind permitting issues — to come together and work cooperatively with FERC on a shared agenda. I think that’s true on a number of different issues, and it’s true in a way that we have not seen with certainly any administration at least since I started [working on] this.”

‘Climate Change Lens’

Also participating in the discussion was Ana Unruh Cohen, staff director of the House Select Committee on Climate Crisis, who said every decision by the new administration “is going to go through a climate change lens.”

“My expectation is that all the agencies that are responsible for making these long-term infrastructure siting decisions and permitting are going to put that through the climate scenarios that we know are real possibilities,” she said.

Casten said he was encouraged by reports that the Biden administration will create a central clearinghouse for climate policy to ensure cooperation among FERC, EPA and DOE. Each of the agencies “do little corners of [climate policy and we need to] have them pitch together,” Casten said. “We’ve got to prioritize climate change above all else and stop tolerating the excuses for why we can’t act.”

Legislative Options Limited

During the campaign Biden outlined a $2 trillion plan to eliminate power sector carbon emissions by 2035 and make the U.S. the leader in electric vehicle production. But a Republican-controlled Senate and a narrower Democratic edge in the House would likely prevent him from winning approval of such a plan and diminish his ability to include incentives for renewable energy in a new economic recovery package.

Democrats still have a chance at winning effective control of the upper house, with two Senate races in Georgia headed to runoff elections on Jan. 5. Winning both seats would result in a 50-50 tie that would be broken by Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. (See GOP Senate May Limit Biden Climate Ambitions.)

National Vision Needed

Moore said DOE should begin work immediately on “the HVDC moonshot” — a system of HVDC converter and inverter stations to link the interconnections and provide power for EV charging. He said the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the other DOE labs should help FERC identify “what the real needs are.”

The Eastern and Western interconnection grid studies funded by the America Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) during the 2007-2009 recession “were great collaborations among many different interest groups that developed plans for … a lower carbon future,” Moore said. “But they really didn’t go anywhere because those plans were completely divorced from existing grid planning. So, I think the next round of grid studies needs to be linked to actionable outcomes through the existing regional transmission organizations and FERC. FERC and DOE could work on portfolio analysis, looking at the areas with the best resources around the country and thinking about what could be done there.”

Biden could also ask FERC to create a new office of transmission planning and oversight “to get more cohesion and control over the planning process so we could integrate more of the Biden administration plans with the FERC-regulated entities of the RTOs,” Moore said. “We need a more coordinated national system for doing this because the worst possible outcome is to have fights over eminent domain in local and regional projects that aren’t really connected to a larger grid vision. That to me is a waste of time”

Macro Grid Studies

During the conference, Americans for a Clean Energy Grid (ACEG) released an international survey of “macro grids,” authored by two Iowa State University researchers, which shows that the U.S.’ development of interregional transmission lags far behind that of China, India and the European Union. It followed an ACEG study in October that projected a macro grid that allowed transmission of cheap renewable energy throughout the Eastern Interconnection would create 6 million jobs, cut carbon emissions and save consumers more than $100 billion. (See ‘Macro Grid’ Study Promises Cost Savings, Emission Cuts.)

The studies were part of the Macro Grid Initiative, a joint project of ACEG and ACORE funded by Microsoft founder Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a $1 billion fund whose board members and investors include Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Virgin Group founder Richard Branson and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman.

“At the heart of this effort is the reality that the 15 states between the Rockies and Mississippi River account for 88% of the nation’s [onshore] wind potential while 56% of our solar potential is located in that same area. Meanwhile, this region is home to less than a third of the projected 2050 electric demand,” Wetstone explained. “Hence the obvious necessity of moving renewable power from the renewable resource rich part of the country to where the people live. We can do that with a macro grid. We can enhance grid resilience, lower costs and reduce carbon.”

The House Climate committee endorsed the macro grid concept, although it referred to a “national super grid,” Unruh Cohen said.

“To unleash the ambitious plans that the states and utilities already have to shift to clean energy, they really needed the support of an enhanced grid of new lines in some places to bring new resources to demand centers, but also upgrades on the existing footprint in other places to just be able to deal with the dynamism that we see in the grid now, [to] bring on storage, all of those things,” Unruh Cohen said. “And of course, the very important task of resilience, both to climate impacts and other [threats].”

Moore said a larger grid will be needed to support the “tens of millions of distributed energy resources in the forms of cars, trucks and buildings that we see in our future.”

He noted the growth of renewables in the last 20 years from a “niche” to the “huge” presence it now has in SPP, which boosted its record for wind energy with a new peak of 18,442 MW on Nov. 14.

Dying on the Vine

Without substantial new transmission in MISO, Moore said, “most of the renewable energy projects are going to die on the vine. Sixty GW of solar and dozens of GW of wind projects are going to die on the vine if we don’t get the grid and the complementary detailed cost allocation — who-pays rules — ready to go. We’re really right now missing a great opportunity. I think some utilities are seeing that they’re not going to be able to connect to the grid any of their clean energy through the mid-2020s if we don’t start moving now.” (See MISO West Risks Becoming ‘Dead Zone,’ Stakeholders Warn.)

Unruh Cohen said grid improvements “will be right in the mix as we put an infrastructure package together, and I think we can hopefully have some bipartisan support going forward.”

“There are other good reasons to build a grid,” Wetstone added, citing the National Commission on Grid Resilience’s report in August that “has recommendations that are very sympatico” with those who want grid expansions to support climate efforts. Wetstone noted that the commission is co-chaired by Rep.-elect Darrell Issa, a California Republican who will return to Congress in January. (See related story, Retired General Sounds Alarm on Grid Security.)

“When you look at the maps where a lot of these projects are popping up, they don’t look like they’re all in red or blue districts. This is real in a way that we haven’t seen in the past,” said Moore. “So that, plus the COVID crisis, I think, could produce the best possible scenario for something to happen that’s big.”

In the meantime, he said, progress could be made through investment tax credits for transmission and by directing the federal power marketing agencies in the West — Bonneville Power Administration and the Western Area Power Administration — to use their authority to expand the grid.

Moore said the Senate Appropriations Committee bill for 2021 has a section on renewable energy grid integration that includes $10 million for the development of an “energyshed” model to address transmission constraints in renewable-rich areas based on Texas’ Competitive Renewable Energy Zones (CREZ) buildout. “That’s the kind of exciting thing you might see go through even while we’re waiting for the big, comprehensive legislation,” he said.

Coalitions Needed

Unruh Cohen said passing energy legislation will require the kind of broad coalitions that backed the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act and the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill that cleared the House in 2009 but stalled in the Senate.

Bringing together “clean energy, the environmental community, agriculture — for both of those bills, having the farmers and ranchers who were benefitting from hosting renewable energy — was really critical to putting together a winning strategy,” she said.