FERC passed big transmission reforms; now the hard part begins

That’s the argument brought to FERC last year by a consortium of utility customer advocates and free-market think tank R Street. As Devin Hartman, director of R Street’s energy and environmental team, wrote in a blog post last week, the preponderance of small-scale and locally oriented investments has ​“eroded billions of dollars in net benefits to consumers and suppressed lower-cost generation and transmission development.”

“It’s critical for people to recognize that the status quo of not doing regional planning better is doing more local and uneconomic transmission development into perpetuity,” Hartman said in an interview with Canary Media. ​“That’s untenable from a consumer perspective, and it also does not give you the level of reliability you need.”